Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan). I did appreciate the privilege to travel with you. And there is some extra value in that, and that is you see what it is that people notice and you understand what their priorities are and you begin to understand how people rearrange their priorities and the basic values that come together. And you have heard some of these basic values flow out from Mr. Jordan here this evening, Madam Speaker. And I look forward to a lot more of these kinds of events in helping to shape policy for the American people. I look at this overall immigration policy that we have, and I think there are some great big blanks out there and questions that are asked and not answered, seldom asked and never answered. The first question that one should ask is, Is there such a thing as too much illegal immigration? Or let me put it this way: Is there such a thing as too much immigration? And if the answer to that is ``yes,'' then you need to divide that between legal and illegal. And for me illegal immigration, any of it, is too much. All immigration should be legal. We shouldn't tolerate illegal immigration, and we surely should not reward it with an amnesty plan, which I believe is being worked on right now in the offices over in the Senate and perhaps on the House side, preparing to reach that kind of an agreement between the House and the Senate and the White House to quickly bring a bill that we don't have time to scrutinize and time to debate thoroughly. If you look at what happened last year, there was mistake after mistake after mistake made in the Senate's version of the bill. And first they had a bill on the floor that would have legalized between 100 and 200 million people. And then there was, I believe, a Bingaman amendment that reduced it and put a cap on one or two of those categories that took that number down under 100 million. Different numbers came back and forth. The Senators voting on that didn't know how many numbers they were talking about. You could ask them point blank, and they would not answer. But the best numbers, the most reliable numbers came from Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, and the numbers that I saw there near the end of that debate were 66 million people that would be brought into the United States under the policies that exist and the ones that the Senate would have added in their reform bill that they passed last year. A lot of that same sentiment; 66 million people, Madam Speaker. And so I went back and looked, and I wondered how many people were naturalized into the United States legally in all of our history. And it turns out that we began keeping records in 1820. Not at the beginning, but in the 1820s. The numbers were small prior to that. They were small in 1820. And we tracked this thing up until the census of the year 2000. So between 1820 and the year 2000, the complete totals that we have, the number is 66.1 million people have been naturalized into the United States in all of our history. And this Senate version of the bill last year would have matched the pot all in one fell swoop. And they did this all with a straight face, Madam Speaker. I recall the amnesty in 1986 that Reagan signed, and it was supposed to be 1 million people. I was appalled that 1 million people would get a pass on the rule of law. Well, I was triplely appalled when I realized how bad it was because that 1 million turned into more than 3 million by most accounts because, first of all, they underestimated how many people would apply. Secondly, they underestimated how persuasive the fraud would be with people that raced across the border and jumped in line so they could get their amnesty. I have met some of the people that received amnesty in 1986, and they are almost universally in favor of amnesty in 2007. And the reason is because they were a beneficiary of amnesty. When they had amnesty, it was good for them; so, of course, they advocate that for anyone else. Certainly their children were taught: amnesty was the best thing that ever happened to you, sons and daughters of mine, and we need to make sure that everyone else can take advantage of this same thing. But amnesty comes with a price, and the price is you sacrifice the rule of law if you grant amnesty. So the 3 million that received amnesty in 1986 became great advocates for more amnesty. And then each generation after that, more people have come into the country, that 3 million, and today the most conservative number of illegal immigrants in the United States is about 12 million. Many of us believe that number exceeds 20 million. Some believe it exceeds 30 million. I am in that above-20 million category, and it is anybody's guess up in that territory. But if there is an amnesty bill that comes out of the Senate and through the House and to the White House, then you are going to see tens of millions of people that take advantage of this, and we will be sacrificing, Madam Speaker, the rule of law. And I have talked about why would we do this, what would be the purpose for this kind of a policy. Well, first of all, the Federal Government has failed to enforce adequately our immigration laws. And as we got more and more illegal immigrants into the United States, it became a magnet for more and more to follow. They began to recruit in their communities. We had companies that put up billboards in Mexico encouraging people there to illegally come to the United States and apply for a job. Some of them recruited them down there and brought them across the border to go to work in their factories and in their plants. And this is commonly known in the communities that utilize this kind of labor. So what kind of a Nation would do that and why would we? First of all, the Federal Government didn't enforce the law. Secondly, employers took advantage of that because they could hire illegal labor cheaper than they could local labor. And capital is always rational. Capital is going to do the smart thing. Capital is going to follow the path of least resistance like electricity. So there wasn't a resistance on the law enforcement side; so capital then hired illegal labor, brought them into the United States or hired them when they came here. Regardless, that was the magnet. They understood that they could pay illegal labor less and there were far fewer contingent liabilities that went along with the illegal labor. So if you have to pay $15 an hour as a going rate for an American citizen or someone who is lawfully present in the United States to do a job, but you can hire someone who is here illegally because they are in the shadows and have to scurry around and hide away from the law, if you can hire them for, let's say, $8 an hour, and then if you have to provide health insurance, retirement benefits and take on the contingent liabilities of legal employees, the $15 an hour, plus the health insurance package, plus the retirement package, plus the worker's comp piece, which is going to be higher because they are more likely to file the claims, plus the litigation risk of filing a suit against an employer, and then the unemployment claims that would come if you lay people off, none of that exists in any significant quantity when you are hiring someone who is illegal. So you hire them cheaper, maybe at $8 an hour, compared to a $15 an hour legal person, but then that is all you are really ending up with, was 8 bucks an hour. But if you hire somebody at $15 an hour and they are legal, then you have to add on to that so much for health insurance, so much for retirement benefits, so much for worker's comp, so much for unemployment, so much for contingent liabilities. What if this employee turns around and sues me for something? You add that all up, it is far cheaper to hire the illegal laborer than the legal. Then that magnetized and brought more and more into this country. Americans have allowed it to happen under their nose. The administration hasn't sounded the alarm. They could seal the border more quickly than they are, and they are accelerating their efforts here, and I want to compliment them for that effort. But I am also watching closely to see if this effort is a real, sincere committed effort, or if it is an effort that is designed to help clear the political groundwork so that Members of Congress will be lulled to sleep, so-to-speak, and adopt a comprehensive plan, which again the word ``comprehensive'' is the substitute word for amnesty plan. So do we do this because we need the labor, is one of those questions. The statement is made over and over again, well, we have to have the labor. After all, we have willing employers and willing employees. That should be the standard. Madam Speaker, if you can give me cheap enough labor, I want to hire them all. If you can get me reliable workers, I want the first 100 at a buck an hour I can get. I probably want the first hundred at $2 or $3 an hour, or in fact $5 an hour. We will find a way to make some money. I want them legal. They have to be for me. My point is though the cheaper labor gets, the more demand there is. Kind of like if gas goes down to 50 cents, people are going to drive more, or if porterhouse steaks go down to 50 cents a pound, a lot more people are going to eat the fancy steak instead of eating the hamburger. Cheap labor, the same thing; the lower the price, the more consumption there is. So it isn't an equation of willing employer-willing employee, because the employer is always going to be willing if he can make money off of a willing employee who will work cheaper than the going rate. It is an advantage for the employer to do that. I hear from Member after Member, think tank head after think tank head, they get on the media airwaves every day, Madam Speaker, and they say a willing employer, a willing employee. We have people that need this labor. There is a demand for it. Therefore, we have to find a way to provide it. Otherwise, what happens in America if we don't flood the cheap labor market? Well, one thing that has happened from flooding it is we have seen the unskilled purchasing power drop by 12 percent over the last 10 years, that is because there is a flood of cheap labor on the market. And it should go the other way. We want a broad middle-class. We want an ever more prosperous middle-class. Instead, the pressure that is coming here is those that are making money off of the cheap labor are becoming an aristocracy. They are part of nouveau rich in the United States of America. And our upper-middle class, or upper class, for that matter, is growing, and so is our lower class growing, because we are importing it, and that is putting a squeeze on middle America. One of the principles of a free society is you need to have a broad and prosperous middle-class. We have been growing and broadening that middle-class for generations and becoming a stronger Nation because of it. But this last generation it is going the other way, Madam Speaker. This last generation, we are growing the aristocracy and we are growing the lower class, importing a lower class, all at the expense of the middle class, which is being squeezed in between the two. But in the middle is the real America. In the middle is the real America that understands truth, justice, the American way, the merits of hard work, the American dream. They have a tremendous work ethic, a sense of family and community. They are being squeezed, Madam Speaker, by the interests on the upper levels of our society and by the thunderous herds that are coming across particularly our southern border, on the lower end of our society, at the expense of our middle- class. I would point out that if you envision this society like a barbell, and the middle-class would be the bar, and the weights on each end would be the bells, on one side you have the weight on the right side of that barbell, that is the business interests in America. A lot of them are Republican interests, but certainly not all of them. There are a lot of liberal elitists that sit in that category too. And they are clamoring for more cheap labor because they make money doing it, and they are not threatened, nor do they believe their children will ever be threatened by the competition in the labor market that takes place down in the lower end of the spectrum. The people on the right side of that, the business side of that barbell, that interest, they will send their children to Ivy League schools, upper crust universities, they will get an education. They won't ever have to compete, probably, with the lower income people that don't have that kind of education, that kind of culture, that gives them a path to professionalism. So they will end up living in their ivory towers and end up living in their gated communities and getting rich off the cheaper labor, and their children will be wired into that same kind of thing. And that is how you grow an aristocracy. That is how you grow a ruling class. That is how you grow an arrogance, that they have a birthright to a servant class, which they are creating. That servant class that they are creating is the other end of this barbell, and that is this massive number of people who give especially the left a lot of political power. Even those who are in this country illegally give political power to many Members here in this Congress because we count people rather than citizens when he with redistrict in America. As we count people, that means we count illegal immigrant in these districts. So illegal immigrants give political power to the Members of Congress who are here because they don't have to get their vote. They only have to compete. There will be a couple of seats here in the House of Representatives, where it will take about 110,000 votes for me to get reelected to my seat, there are a couple of seats that take around 30,000, 35,000 votes for the same thing, and the reason is because the illegal population is counted in the census, and the larger that number is, the fewer citizens are left to actually cast a ballot. And that is the circumstance. So think of this barbell. On the one side is the ruling class, on the other side of the barbell, the political power of the lower class, the new servant class that is being created, and in the middle, the bar itself is the middle-class that holds it altogether that is being squeezed by the two. That is what we are up against, Madam Speaker. So, do we need this labor? I would point out that if it is 12 million in the United States illegally, according to I believe it was a Pew Foundation study, that the illegal labor amounted out of that 12 million, 6.9 million workers are actually working. They don't all work, of course. Some are homemakers, some are too young. But 6.9 million working illegals in America. Of that 6.9 million, that represents 4.7 percent of the overall workforce, and 2.2 percent of the actual production, because they are unskilled, they don't produce like a more highly trained worker does. So they are only doing 2.2 percent of the work. Well, if you opened up your factory doors in the morning and you found out that 2.2 percent of your production, your work force, wasn't going to show up that day, in order to make up for the difference, I would send a memo out to my staff that said, you know, your 15-minute coffee break this morning and your 15-minute coffee break this afternoon, I am going to shorten that to 10 minutes. If you do that, if you cut your two coffee breaks, morning and afternoon, by 5 minutes each, you will have picked up 2.1 percent of the production, almost the same thing that the illegal labor represents. Ten minutes a day out of an 8 hour shift of America, that is how much we would be missing. Yet I hear Chicken Little, oh, we can't get along without this labor. We must have it. If we don't have it, the economy will collapse. It will not collapse, Madam Speaker. We can adapt to it easily. We have taken years to get here, at least 20 years to evolve into this circumstance that we are today, and we can evolve away from that, away from the dependency, away from this addiction, away from this methadone of illegal labor that we have in America, and it will not be that hard to do. Also there are 6.9 million working illegals in America, but then the argument is, well, but we have unemployment at essentially record low rates of 4.6 percent. Well, that is nice. That is effectively a very low unemployment rate. It is not the lowest. It is not record low unemployment. In World War II, we had a 1.3 percent unemployment rate then. But it is about 4.6, and they will say you can't get enough workers out of the unemployment rolls to fill the gap we need for this labor. Well, maybe you can't, and probably in fact I will say certainly you can't. I will say also going into the welfare rolls, we couldn't hire all of them. Many of them would not be employable. If we could hire half of them and if we could hire half of those on unemployment, we still wouldn't put a very significant dent in that 6.9 million labor force. But I can tell you, Madam Speaker, that going to look at the Department of Labor statistics, it shows an entirely different story. If you were going to place a factory in a location, you wouldn't simply look at the unemployment rate in that location and determine how many people there were to hire. You would hire a consulting company, and that company would go in and survey the area and determine the available labor force that was in the area. This is a standard known practice in all business and industry. The consulting firm would identify the available labor. I went into the Department of Labor Statistics to determine the available labor supply in America, and I began to add up the different categories of age groups. 16 to 19 year olds, we have 9.3 million non- working 16 to 19 year olds in America. Now, not even part-time. Some of these are part-time jobs. And so I start there, because that is where young people learn their work ethic. As I add up these age categories from 16 on up to 19, and then from 20 to 24 and the list goes on up the line, and I got to 65 and I had to make a decision, and I looked around and concluded that Wal-Mart hires up to 74 years old, so I added them all up to that. One of the reasons I am going to confess, Madam Speaker, is because it was a convenient number I could memorize. It is not substantially changed if you lower the number down to 65. But it works like this: 6.9 million working illegal laborers in America could be replaced by hiring one out of ten of the 69 million workers in America who are simply not in the workforce. What Nation would ignore 69 million people not in the workforce and go and bring people in from another country? That would be like having a lifeboat with that percentage of people on it, and deciding you needed some more people to pull on the oars, and having all of those people up there in steerage riding along, and no, it wouldn't occur to us to go up and say come on down here and grab ahold of that oar. Why don't we pull off on an island and see if we can't recruit some more people, load them in the lifeboat, and maybe 7 out of 12 of them will row. That is what it amounts to, Madam Speaker. So we have not been very objective in this. There is also a tremendous amount of crime, and the victims of that crime, it has been a tremendous price paid here in the United States. We talk about it very little, but every day there are American citizens that die violently at the hands of criminal aliens who are in this country and who, if we had enforced the laws, with not be here. I had a gentleman say to me today, there isn't a shred of evidence that illegal immigrants commit crimes at any greater rate than average Americans do. But the truth is, Madam Speaker, there is a tremendous amount of evidence that they do. In fact, the numbers work out to be that in the United States, the violent death rate is 4.28 per 100,000 annually. In Mexico, it is 13.2 per 100,000. That is a solid three-plus times greater violent death rate in Mexico. And Mexico is the most peaceful nation south of our border that I can identify. Honduras has nine times the violent death rate. El Salvador's is not published, but we know it is very high. If you go to Colombia, their violent death rate compared to the United States is 15.4 times higher. So if you bring people from that society, of course they are going to commit more crimes. They are committed in their home country. They bring that culture with them. Also, $65 billion worth of illegal drugs pour across that southern border every year, brought in by these elements. I am not here to say that they are all bad people. No, the vast majority of them are very good people looking for a better life for their families. But they have a higher percentage of violence among them, even as good people, than the average American that is here, and we are paying a price of about 12 Americans a day who lose their life as victims of murder to criminal aliens, about 13 a day who die at the hands of negligent homicide, mostly the victims of drunk drivers, not the drunks themselves. That is the magnitude of this, Madam Speaker. And I recognize by the clock I am in a position where I need to say thank you for the privilege of addressing you on the floor of the House of Representatives

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia for a clear message. The American people appreciate straight-talking, clear messages. There have been far too many of these messages that are muddled and confusing, and those muddled and confusing messages cause more problems with more people coming across the border. And I am not hearing people stand up and say it would be wonderful if everybody could wake up in their own country one day in a legal fashion and not have to look over their shoulder and rebuild their own nation, rebuild their own society, rebuild their own economy. I had this conversation with the ambassador to the United States from Mexico. And I say, If you encourage your people, the vitality of your nation, to come here to the United States, who is going to be there to reform Mexico? Who is going to be there to rebuild Mexico? And he had to concede that is no way to run a country. At this point, Madam Speaker, I would be very happy to yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan).

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. And I know that there are some people in this Congress and across the country that will say, well, what about two sticks and no carrots. We may hear about that from the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Goode, who I would be happy to yield as much time as he may consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. As I listen to you talk about this, Judge, and you live down in that territory where it has been part of your life and the flow of our life, from my background in the work that I have done, there have been some times in my life when there was something that was so complicated, so convoluted and so unpredictable in its elements and so many hypotheticals that came out of each of those elements that no matter how hard I tried to chart a course through that and lay out contingency plans on, I call them if-then formulas which you can put on a spreadsheet, if then, we will do that; if that happens, then we will do this. And it threads through the whole equation. This immigration issue is so complicated, so unpredictable and has so many hypotheticals that I contend that it is impossible for a body of 100 Senators or 435 House Members or a President to chart a course through that and be able to put law in place that deals with all of the contingencies and ends up with the kind of product that if we can even agree on what that is, we could not get there. It is beyond human ability to put that into a law and make that work; too many hypotheticals. So what I will submit is that we need to take this, as you suggested, one step at a time. I am for let's go ahead and get things under control at the border. Stop the bleeding. As Dr. Gingrey has often said from Georgia, we have got to stop the bleeding before we can decide how we are going to stabilize the patient and give him rehab. That is step one. And we started on that, as you said. I have been down to look at that. In fact, a couple weeks ago I went down there and helped build some wall with Secretary Chertoff down south of Yuma on the border. It occurred to me that probably the only person in America that actually has gone down on the southern border and put border fence up with Chris Simcox or the Minute Men, and then turned around and welded steel wall on the border was Secretary Chertoff. I don't think those two guys are going to get together and do this together. I had the privilege of doing it on different occasions with each of them. But we can control this at the border; in fact, we must. And if we can't do that, then all the rest of the policy we talk about goes for naught. And another fundamental principle that I stand on is that of all the discussions that come out of the House and the Senate and the ideas about guest worker, or temporary worker, how we will give them a card, how that all might work; how you do background checks on people and then legalize them here, I don't hear anyone address what you do with those that don't come forward. Because those that come forward with a clean background record, they would then get their pass to either guest worker card or a path to citizenship, depending, they might feel pretty comfortable if all they did is come into the country illegally and that this government should write up a law, which I would oppose, that would be amnesty, too. But those that have a criminal record beyond that, those that have run afoul of the law for whatever reason, they are not coming out of the shadows because they don't want the hook of the law in them, they don't want to go off to prison and they don't want to be deported. So we will not be uncovering the bad elements of society by trying to do background checks on people. And those elements of society, those slackers that don't want to come forward for whatever reason, those that have reasons not to come forward, they still remain in the shadows an illegal core in this civilization, and the only way you get them out is to actually send people back home again. So I submit that we should use all of our local law enforcement. We should end all sanctuary policies. The local police force, county sheriffs, the highway patrol, the Texas Rangers, all those folks that are involved in law enforcement at all levels, and have them cooperating at all levels. I grew up in a law enforcement family. And it was not something that we could have conceived of, but there would be a city police officer that would be prohibited from cooperating with a Federal officer on a law in this Nation because it happened to be Federal law as opposed to a city ordinance. So by that rationale, city police would only enforce city ordinances and State highway patrol and State officers, DCI or whatever, could only enforce State laws and then Federal officers could only enforce Federal laws. And I don't know what the county sheriffs are going to do except maybe they are just going to serve warrants and papers. So we need to cooperate on all levels and we need to reestablish the rule of law.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege and the honor to be recognized here on the floor of the United States Congress this evening and the chance to pick up where some of my colleagues left off here. But I pretty much had my say about Walter Reed, and I support and endorse the remarks that were made over the last 60 minutes, and I intend to move on to another subject matter here. I do just simply want to restate that the care that they are provided is good and it is solid. And as I talked to patients at Walter Reed, Bethesda, Landstuhl, continually, they are very, very grateful for the quality of the care. We have some of the best experts in the world treating some of these kinds of injuries; and to look them in the eye and see the level of their commitment, you just know that they are giving it everything that they have. I am not hearing patient complaints about the care, but about sometimes the timeliness of the recordkeeping and the timeliness of the treatment that is there. There will be always be things that fall through the bureaucratic cracks, and it is our job to try to seal those cracks up and do the best job that we can. I think we are going to get that done. Certainly, though, I want to make sure that America, Madam Speaker, understands the commitment that is made on the part of the medical care providers for our military men and women, and that is what we must do in order to support their effort and support their sacrifice. Madam Speaker, I came to the floor tonight to talk about an issue that I have been here before to raise, and hopefully I will be back again to raise, and that is this broad, overall immigration issue that has captured the debate field in the United States for the last 3 years or more. And what brings me to the floor tonight is a sense that there is a growing effort on the part of the White House, on the part of the Senate and on the part of some here in the House, to build a kind of a critical mass coalition that would bring what they would call a comprehensive immigration reform bill through the Senate and then quickly over here to the House, which I would consider to be a steamrolled or a stampeded bill, something that we don't know what is going on behind the scenes, or there has been hardly anything leaked. And I believe it is their effort to try to get enough Members, a majority, and that would be something or a filibuster proof majority in the Senate and a significant majority here in the House to buy on to a policy that they have never seen, one that is not in print yet, or at least not filed, not dropped, in the fundamental sense, but only get people, people, and I mean Members and Senators, to sign off conceptually, and say I conceptually endorse a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Well, first, Madam Speaker, the American people need to understand that when the word ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' when that phrase is used, that means we don't like to admit amnesty. But comprehensive is a substitution for the word ``amnesty.'' It has been that way for 3 years. It will be that way until this debate is maybe over for this cycle. But I recall when the President gave his first immigration reform speech was January 6 of 2004, 3 years and a couple of months ago. There he brought out a lot of the same things that he is standing for now. And the President says that he is opposed to amnesty. But I will say that Ronald Reagan signed a bill that Ronald Reagan called amnesty that is very much the kind of policy that is being advocated by the White House. I am greatly concerned about this moving so quickly with so little information that the American people would not have an opportunity to weigh in, would not have an opportunity to call and write and e-mail and fax their Senators and their House Members to be able to try to move the center, I guess, of the Republican and Democrat House of Representatives and the Senate. And so it is important that I call upon Members, don't sign off on something till you read the fine print. The devil is in the details. The devils were in the details last year when the Senate moved their immigration reform bill and the details turned out to be tens of millions of people. Just a small detail, Madam Speaker, of tens of millions of people that would be legalized and granted amnesty in about a couple of decades period of time. That is the backdrop. That is the foundation of this. I have a lot to say about this, but I also recognize the gentleman from Texas who has been on this floor for a while has some things he would like to say about it, and I would be very happy to yield to Judge Carter as much time as he may consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas for organizing this Special Order hour and for gathering together a lot of patriotic Americans and shedding some objective light on the health care situation with our men and women; and like many of the Members who have spoken earlier in this hour, I am one who has also made consistent trips over to Iraq, Afghanistan, the hospital, Landstuhl in Germany, and, also, I make it a point to be one place or another to visit our wounded, at either Walter Reed or Bethesda or Landstuhl. So I have been to Walter Reed a number of times, and saw nothing like I saw described here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and make no excuses for that. In fact, like everyone else, I believe we needed to fix it and we did fix it as quickly as possible. The people that come down here to the floor night after night after night with the same poster that had the words cockroach, mold and mice on it have been repeating the same mantra, but they have not seen anything like we are describing here night after night after night. This was, as I understand it, two rooms out of 300 and some altogether in a place where no one goes. The people that were there were ambulatory patients that liked it there because they were a little off campus, they had a little more freedom. So those were the circumstances. They have been fixed. But I will say what this needs to be: this needs to be a message to us, a kind of reminder, a wake-up call, because what I saw here demonstrated by Mr. Burgess, which is that there are patients there whose care is too bureaucratic, we can use this as a launching pad to bring software into place and to put into place a patient tracking system that will compare the tracking of these patients and the timeliness of their care with that in the private sector and have red flags come up on those files if there is a time they are not being dealt with in a fashion they should be. We can get this set up. It needs to be managed in that fashion. I will also say that the VA hospitals have taken a fair amount of criticism on this. The ones that I go visit have modern health care and a modern tracking system and a bar code that goes on the wrist of the patient. When they go in there, they read that bar code and within seconds their full medical record is there; any pharmaceuticals that have been prescribed by them are all right there. It reduces and almost eliminates mistakes for prescriptions, for example. There are a lot of modern pieces that have been put together. Most of our VA hospitals, and the ones I know, do a good job. They shouldn't be dragged into this, and the Walter Reed piece of this, we can do a better job. More of it has to do with patient management and timeliness of care and modernizing the recordkeeping system. Little of it has to do with putting plaster up on the wall and putting carpet into place. Let's use the need to do this to get this place, put Walter Reed back into the 21st century and give these men and women the very best top- notch care that is possible. We can do that. The people doing the work, we need to applaud them, not criticize them. They give their hearts and their minds and their energy to our brave men and women who have given their life and limb for our freedom and for our liberty. The only thing that they are short of is they suffer from compassion fatigue, and they get burned out on these jobs. But what I see, selfless Americans are doing the best job they can. We can give them some better tools to work with, which has to do with tracking the patients and being more timely in the service we provide.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Mississippi.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I also recognize you are a fair-minded Mississippian, and I appreciate that and the tone and the history that you have added. And perhaps on your walk across here, you might not have heard my remarks with regard to the Vietnam era and the constraints that were put on the appropriations bill then. And so I don't think that we are in disagreement on the precedence or the history. We may or may not be in disagreement on the constitutional aspects. And what I have done is taken a position that Congress does not have the authority to micromanage. And I was not here to put up a vote on that, but you can expect, Madam Speaker, how I would have voted had that been the case. But these micromanaging efforts, and this is a newspaper publishing information, would appear to require that the Iraqi government meet key security, political, and economic benchmarks that were established by the President in the State of the Union Address on January 10. Now, those were goals at that time. I don't speak for the commander in chief on that, but I know now that we are well passed January 10. On January 10, there wasn't a plan that had been unfolded like the plan we are working on today. And you have to be flexible in a time of war. And to go back and pull things out of his speech and say, and we are going to tie you to that on appropriations, I think that does two things: I don't think that is prudent, and I don't think it is constitutional. Another one would be the Iraqi failure to meet these benchmarks would mean the beginning of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and will restrict economic aid to the Iraqis. Another case, Madam Speaker, of setting up a standard here in Congress, and the slow wheels of this Congress can creep along. And then we put something in place that would prohibit us, prohibit the commander in chief from being flexible in time of war. It goes on. Another standard would be, if progress toward meeting any key benchmark is not met by July 1, 2007; we will hardly get any legislation passed before then; a redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq begins immediately and must be completed within 180 days. Madam Speaker, progress towards meeting benchmarks, that is a gray line, not a bright line but a grey one. Well, we are making progress every single day, but I don't think the people that are drafting this legislation would agree that we are making progress every single day. So, therefore, by their judgment of this standard, that would mean that we begin pulling out July 1, 2007, just a few months from now, and may be even retroactive, because I don't think this bill can get out of this Congress by then. Another one says, if key benchmarks are not met October 1, 2007, a redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq begins immediately and must be completed within 180 days. It goes on and on. And, again, this is a huge, huge reach for Congress to get involved in the micromanagement of a war. There have always been consequences. And, by the way, the gentleman from Mississippi that raised the issue of the appropriations bill in the early 1990s Congress that said, get out of Somalia, if you look at the aftermath of that, I think it would have been far better for the United States had we stayed and had we completed the mission there; it would be perhaps done by now and not a place where there are terrorists pulling into that. There has been a long, drawn out war in that area since that period of time that has washed back and forth across that countryside. And part of it is because we lacked resolve. And part of that is shown right here in the words of Muqtada al-Sadr. So, Madam Speaker, I would bring up one more point, and that would be, we have made progress there. And the progress that we have made, some of it is measured by construction projects that are completed. There has been a lot that has been said about things not getting done in Iraq, and I would submit that I have been over there a number of times but twice specifically to review the construction projects that have been initiated and in progress and completed. And this shows in green the projects that are completed. Along that map, it is easy to see that we have got most of our work done. We are nearing the end really of all of them. The green are completed. The yellow is under construction, and the red are those that are planned but not started. Tiny little numbers under the red here. Big numbers under the green. Significantly smaller numbers than those that are under construction. We have gotten a lot of projects completed, Madam Speaker, and we are almost to that point where we can wrap up this work that started here in Iraq, that started out with $18.4 billion. We put supplemental funding in there. And then a final number, I can't speak to factually here on the floor, although it is significantly larger than $18.4 billion. There has been a lot of infrastructure that has been picked up to speed. If you look around here on the edge, these are all border forts along the edge on the border between Iran and Iraq. That is also the case down along here with Jordan and Syria. We have fortified the border and put people there on the outposts. That has done a lot to slow things down, but it has not done enough to keep it from coming out of Iran. I have been to a good number of these projects. Some would be sewer projects in Sadr City, Baghdad, itself that began about 3 years ago. And under the first armored division controlling that, General Carelli, who is now the Corps commander there. I have been up here to the Kirkuk area where the mother of all generators sits there producing electricity 24 hours a day, every day, a gas-fired generator plant. There is work done all over this area. We have gone back and reflooded the swamps where the swamp Arabs lived that were dried up and drained by Saddam Hussein. They have moved back into that area. About 8,000 square miles were drained; we got about 4,000 square miles put back in. We have done a tremendous amount to improve the environment there in Iraq, and 80 percent of the violence is confined to Baghdad and 30 miles within Baghdad. So why would we be concerned that we can't control this or we can't manage this? I would point out that, in 1944, on December 22 of 1944, the 101st airborne was surrounded at Bastogne, and the Nazis demanded that the 101st surrender. And General McCollum's response was a retort, it was ``Nuts.'' The Germans didn't know how to understand that, Madam Speaker. But what it meant was: We are staying here. We have got you right where we want you. You are all around us. We can hit you. We can fire and hit you in any direction. And the Americans underwent a relentless artillery barrage, but the response, the rhetoric, ``Nuts'' prevailed. And General Patton's Army was able to relieve the 101st Airborne. The 101st today contends they didn't need the help; they would have liked to just whip the Germans themselves. That was the spirit we had in this country and our fighting personnel in December of 1944. When they were surrounded, and it was hopeless, they said, ``Nuts.'' Now we have Baghdad surrounded and we have Baghdad penetrated, and all we have to do is maintain stability there, and we have people talking about surrender. And I think they are nuts, Madam Speaker, to talk about surrender with all of this investment in blood and treasure, to be so close to success and victory here, and to be waffling and go wobbly at a time when you need a spine and you need courage. To bring this supplemental appropriations bill with all of these strings attached that are designed to appease the 75 or 76 members of the Out of Iraq Caucus and the left-winged liberals here in this Congress, not because of their leadership on war but because of their position on other issues, I think, is a disservice to the American people. The American people know how important this is. And the fathers and mothers, the widows and widowers, and sons and daughters of those who have given their lives for Iraqi freedom and a safer future for Americans must be respected and honored. As the father of a son who was killed over there, a Gold Star father from California said to me, and his name was John, he said, ``It is different now. You can't pull out of there now, because that soil is sanctified by the blood of our children. You must stick with this battle and succeed and not lose your will.'' As a major from Kentucky said to me the last time I was there, ``We appreciate your prayers. We have everything we need to do what we have to do. We have all of the weapons we need and the clothing and the food and the training that we need, and all of the support that we need. So when you pray for us, pray for the American people. Pray that the American people understand this enemy that we are up against. Pray that the American people don't lose their resolve. We will not lose ours.''

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, we have had I think a very eventful week here this week and accomplished a significant amount and had some intense debates here on the floor of this Congress. In my time here and in anybody's memory here, I don't think anyone remembers a time that there have been three motions to recommit that have actually succeeded and attached that new policy on to the bill that was prepared for final passage here on the floor. That makes it an eventful week. Madam Speaker, I reflect here that at the beginning of the 110th Congress there were a lot of objections to a scoreboard vote board that was kept open when Republicans were in charge for the sake of being able to allow people to change their votes until everyone was satisfied. There were strong and loud and vociferous complaints to keeping that board open when it was the Republicans in charge. I am not here to make a loud, vociferous objection to the Democrats keeping the board open, but I am here to point out that the shoe is on the other foot today, and today this motion to recommit went up on the board, and it had 147 Democrats that voted ``no'' on the motion to recommit. The motion to recommit, what it did was said that no individual who has been issued a transportation worker identification card may board a maritime vessel if the individual has been convicted of or found not guilty by reason of insanity in a civilian or military jurisdiction of any of the following felonies. In other words, nobody is going to be boarding a maritime vessel if they are guilty of these crimes: espionage or conspiracy, sedition or conspiracy to commit sedition, treason, and a number of other crimes along through the list one can imagine, distribution, manufacture, purchase receipt, dealing with explosives. In other words, terrorists, people who have been identified as terrorists, convicted as terrorists. The motion to recommit said no one will be boarding a maritime vessel that has those things on their record. Upon the first vote that was up there, the peak came out to be 247 Democrats voting against a motion that would block those who have committed those violent crimes, those crimes against this country. Then the board was left open, and as minutes went by, and I didn't watch my watch, but I am going to suspect it was 20 to 25 minutes, I watched Democrats vote their convictions and then began to adjust to their convictions, and 111 Members changed their vote here, getting down from 147 that voted ``no'' to 56 that voted ``no,'' and final passage became 359 to 56 on the passage of the motion to recommit. So I point out that sometimes that criticism that comes when you are in the minority doesn't seem like when the shoe is on the other foot that the rules you claim should apply are the ones that actually apply when you find yourself in a position of making the rules. I would point also out that the circumstance before the Rules Committee, since that word came out of my mouth, Madam Speaker, and in the Rules Committee, we brought rules before, there were rules that were brought before this full Congress and approved for the 110th Congress. This was going to be a 110th Congress with a new majority and a new Speaker and there was going to be sunshine on everything we did. There was going to be a level of integrity in the process that was here. There were great objections to the process we had, and there was going to be a change, a new era in government, which means more openness, more honesty, more reporting. But written into the rule was an exemption for the Rules Committee, so they are not required to report the recorded votes within the Rules Committee. Now, how is it that here we are a more open government, but we are writing in provisions that allow for more secrecy? And that is the fact, Madam Speaker. That is the fact that came before this Congress. That is the fact that many of us voted against on the rules package. That is the amendment that I brought before the Rules Committee a couple of days ago. What is ironic about that is that I have to go and appeal to the same people that want the secrecy and ask them if they will let me have a vote here on the floor about taking away the secrecy they have assigned themselves. Of course, the people that sat in judgment, that assigned themselves the secrecy, said, no, we won't allow a debate on it; we won't allow a vote on it. We are going to maintain the secrecy. And, by the way, it was offensive to them to have anyone raise the issue that they should be required to report the votes of the Rules Committee when there is a recorded vote. So that amendment was denied. The American people were denied a debate. They were denied a vote and denied an opportunity to even judge whether this is a more open process or whether it has become a more closed process. But I think these two instances that I brought up just this week, Madam Speaker, illustrate that the process is not more open, it is not cleaner, it is not with more sunshine on it, and it is not more reflective of the representation here in this Congress. There are other instances as well as I could go on, but I think that suffices to make my point. Madam Speaker, I came here to talk about another issue that has been rolled out in the media yesterday and today, this issue of the supplemental appropriations bill that the President has asked for in order to fund our troops in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The President has made a request so that we can provide adequate materials, supplies, training and equipment and munitions to our military that are on the front lines who put their lives on the line for our freedom. I am pledged to uphold that support for them. But what I see come out, at least with the report of the news with regard to the supplemental, has so many strings attached. This is an unprecedented attempt on the part of Congress to micromanage a shooting war. Our Founding Fathers understood this, and they declared in the Constitution that the President is the Commander in Chief. They didn't write in the Constitution that the President will be presiding over a committee of 435 Members of Congress on the House side and 100 Senators on the Senate side and they shall be a committee that will micromanage the nuances of a war. The Founding Fathers knew that you could not fight a war on consensus, that you can't fight it on majority vote. You have to have a Commander in Chief who is in charge. That was a clear understanding of history and human nature. It was reflected by our Founding Fathers into our Constitution, Madam Speaker. And yet to this day, I don't know how many Members of this Congress even understand how the Constitution controls the things that they do, even though every single one of us takes an oath to this Constitution at the beginning of every Congress. Every 2 years we stand up and we say: ``I pledge to uphold the Constitution of the United States.'' I do so here on the floor. I make that oath on a Bible. Most don't because it is hard to remember to bring the Bible with you on that day, but most do go over and have their picture taken ceremonially with their hand on the Bible. Well, I do both if I've got the time, but the one I don't miss is I bring the Bible to the floor and I take that oath, ``so help me God,'' to uphold this Constitution. And if it is inconvenient to have a provision in the Constitution, we have to live with it until it becomes so inconvenient that we are willing to amend it. But we do not have the authority here in this Congress to amend the Constitution, neither does the Supreme Court and neither does the commander in chief. The people of America have to ratify an amendment to the Constitution. And that is how the Founders saw it because they understood they were not creating a democracy, Madam Speaker. And if anybody is teaching out there in the classes of civics and government that go on all over America in nearly every school in America that we are blessed to be born and live in a democracy, I have to say, Madam Speaker, that is an erroneous lesson to be teaching our young people and to be perpetuating through the adults. And, in fact, a lot of the people in this Congress still believe this is a democracy. Well, when Benjamin Franklin stepped out of the Constitutional Congress he was asked by a lady on the streets, ``What have you produced?'' And his answer was, ``A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.'' And that is what we have. We have a constitutional republic because our Founders understood that if you went to the pure democracy form, and they studied the democracies of the city-states in Greece; in fact, I have been there to see the displays at the National Archives of the pottery that the Greeks had and their method of voting demagogues out of the city and banishing them for 7 years. And some of that system is still within our Greek system on our universities today. The Greeks identified a demagogue as someone who was so skilled with their rhetoric, so moving and passionate in their delivery of their oratorical speeches, that they could move the masses by emotion rather than rationale. So they banished the demagogues from their city-states because it sent them down the path of emotion rather than deductive reasoning. So the Founders understood that we didn't need to have the masses moving by emotion; they understood that the definition of a democracy was two wolves and a sheep taking a vote on what's for dinner. Majority rules; guess who's for dinner? They wrote rights into our Constitution and into the Bill of Rights because they understood human nature, and they knew there had to be protections in place higher than a majority vote, higher than being in the majority. There had to be guaranteed constitutional rights for all citizens in this country on equal standing, drafted in, plugged into the Bill of Rights and ratified by the several States, and now ratified by all of the States, the 50 States in the Union. Those guarantees must be in place. This Constitution, Madam Speaker, means something. And the language in this Constitution means what it says. The text of this language means what it meant, means what it was understood to be when it was ratified. And if it is inconvenient or if we disagree with the fundamentals, we should amend it. We shouldn't ignore it. This Constitution grants Congress, this body in particular I am speaking to, but also the Senate as well, only two authorities when it comes to war; number one is, first, I will state it again, the President is the commander in chief of all Armed Services. We didn't have an Air Force then, but that is implied. So that is the standard, Madam Speaker. And then the Constitution grants Congress two different authorities when it comes to war: Number one, the authority to declare war. That has happened several times in our history, but the last time it happened was in the beginning of World War II. The second constitutional authority Congress has is to fund the war. But what we are seeing come out of the Democrat side of this is to micromanage the war in such a way that they can squeeze down and constrict the commander in chief's authority and responsibility to conduct war. And that can only end in disaster for our troops and disaster for the destiny of our country. But we do not have that authority to micromanage. We can appropriate to the Department of Defense. We can appropriate to the Department of Homeland Security and some other lesser departments within the fringes. But we don't have the authority to micromanage. I am going to go further, Madam Speaker, and take this position, that if this Congress should decide that building a bunch of ICBM missiles and placing them in places, say, across the polar ice cap are a high priority and they appropriated the money for that and we found out that we were in a shooting war that flared up maybe in six different places in the world and we needed to spend that money for armored Humvees and bullet-proof vests and more M-4 machine guns or more surveillance equipment, whatever it might be; if this Congress refused to change that appropriation, I am taking the position that the President has the authority, because he is commander in chief at a time of war, to do an interdepartmental transfer and prioritize those dollars within the Department of Defense in the place that he sees fit because he is the commander in chief. Anything less than that, Madam Speaker, is something that ties the hands of the commander in chief and the feet and puts our military at risk. That is the effort that is coming from the other side of the aisle here. And it is one that will eventually debilitate this country. This debate has encouraged our enemies and has diminished our ability to succeed. And so if we look back at history, I don't believe there has been any time in history that this constitutional principle that I have laid out here has been challenged and been taken to court. And even then, I wonder how the Supreme Court would come down on this. But there were times back in 1973, 1974 and 1975, at least 2 of those 3 years, if not 3 of those 3 years, when Congress put strings on Department of Defense appropriations. And those strings said this, that none of these funds and any funds heretofore having been appropriated, meaning any money that is out there in the pipeline now, none of these funds can be spent in either North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia. And it shall not be used in the skies over those four countries or offshore from those four countries. So none of our appropriations money could be used there by the restrictions that were put on by this Congress, the micromanagement of this Congress. But the fact was that we pulled our troops out of Vietnam at that point. It wasn't the President's intent to go back into Vietnam, but it was his intent to provide air cover. So when that message went, North Vietnam probably didn't have C-SPAN then, but they watch what goes on in this Congress, just like our enemies do in Iraq and the Middle East today; they understood that Congress had lost its will to conduct war in Vietnam. And they began to marshal their forces and provide the munitions and the armament necessary to mount the invasion, which they did in the spring of 1975. And in the aftermath of Congress micromanaging a nonshooting war, 3 million people died in the South China Sea, in South Vietnam and in the countries of Laos and Cambodia, 3 million people, because Congress injected themselves into a decision that was made by the commander in chief. But the commander in chief didn't challenge that. The commander in chief at the time, the initial one was President Nixon, who was very weak politically. And then, of course, the appointed, not elected, President Ford, whom I revere, neither challenged that restriction put on by Congress. So I don't believe we have a constitutional challenge that has taken place because President Ford and President Nixon did not challenge the Congress when they began to tie the strings in Vietnam. This Congress is preparing to tie the strings. And I am saying to the public, Madam Speaker, and to the President, my position is I am going to uphold this Constitution. I'm going to defend the President's right to do interdepartmental transfers of funds if they think they are going to tie strings to this. I think the President can ignore any conditions that this House puts on him if the money is appropriated at DOD because that is his responsibility as commander in chief, not the responsibility of this Congress, not the Pelosi Congress, not the Murtha Congress, but the President of the United States is the commander in chief. In fact, I believe the last gentleman I mentioned would like to be the commander in chief. And given some of the legislation that he has drafted and introduced in this Congress, I think he would probably squeal had he been the commander in chief and someone tried to put the strings on him that he has tried to put on the White House. And I would add that, in the Department of Defense appropriations bill last year, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) was able to slip language into that appropriations bill that would prohibit any basing agreements from being negotiated in Iraq. He stated that it was for permanent bases, but the language said any bases. And there was misinformation that was brought to this floor. And my amendment that tried to strip that out of the appropriations bill failed here on this floor, which compelled me to go to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ask for a letter to support my amendment, which we put to the conference committee. And that letter then was enough to get that stripped out of the language. That is the kind of thing that is going on; that would have us already moving out of Iraq if General Pace hadn't agreed with me and made that request of the conference committee. And so the conference report came without that language, and we were able to keep our operations going in Iraq. It was that close in a Republican majority. And now you see what's coming, Madam Speaker, under this new majority. And here are some of the bullet points that come up on this subject that would come from the majority side of the aisle. This new appropriations, the strings that would be tied, the strings that I contend are unconstitutional, one would be, the legislation prohibits the deployment of troops who are not fully mission capable. Now, who would decide that? A definition apparently that is identified by the majority here in this Congress. There are a list of other conditions in this, but I also recognize that the gentleman from Arizona, who has a heart full of appreciation for our troops and the Constitution, is on the floor. I would be very happy to yield so much time as he may consume, Mr. Shadegg.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg), and I pick up a point that Mr. Shadegg made, and that is about what the enemy thinks and what happens if we should pull out of the central battlefield in this war on terror called Iraq. So I am going to just make this transitional point here, Madam Speaker, and that is, I have a date written down here. July 11, 2004, I was sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City waiting to go into Iraq the next day, and I turned on al Jazeera TV, and I saw the face of this rather notorious person right here, Moqtada al Sadr, and he was speaking in Arabic with the English crawler going on underneath, and as I read what he said, and I heard it sparingly in Arabic, he said, If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. Moqtada al Sadr who has now absconded to Iran to be with his cronies who have been funding him, supporting him, sending him munitions and training him. But the philosophy that he has voiced here is a philosophy that echoes back in the ghosts of Vietnam and through Lebanon and Mogadishu, and that is, do our enemies take great heart in believing that we do not have the will to complete a military task if it gets difficult or if it gets long? So the voice of Moqtada al Sadr saying Americans will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, Lebanon and Mogadishu will be replaced should we not succeed in Iraq, and I will point out that Prime Minister Maliki stood right back here at this microphone some months ago, and he said, if this war against terrorism cannot be won in Iraq, it cannot be won anywhere. Our enemy will know that. We must succeed there on that battleground. The al Qaeda is in Iraq. They have come there to fight us. They have generated a few more out of the Sunnis there in particular; but if we pulled out of Iraq the way the other side would like to see that happen, then the battlefield does transfer to Afghanistan, and that battlefield in Afghanistan will be inspired by a failure to achieve victory in Iraq. I would point out that the next poster you will see on this floor after such a time, if this Congress acts in a disgraceful fashion, then the next poster you will see will not be the face of Moqtada al Sadr, Mr. Speaker, but it will be the face of Osama bin Laden himself and the quote will not be quite like this. It will be close, though. It will read like this: If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Afghanistan the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu and the same way they left Iraq. That is what is coming if this side of the aisle does not suck it up and understand that far more American lives are at risk if we do not have the will and the resolve to succeed. Playing politics with the lives of American soldiers and playing politics with the destiny of America just simply cannot be tolerated. This supplemental appropriations bill, as it is announced to be written, and we do not have a draft to work with yet, is, I believe, an unconstitutional micromanaging of the powers of the Commander in Chief of the United States. I wish to support and reiterate the statements made by the gentleman from Arizona when he said with the tick of a clock, the fight is over. Can you imagine, Madam Speaker, that a war would be like a prize fight and you would go for 10 rounds, or if it is a championship battle, maybe 15 rounds, could be 12, and when the round is over, the bell rings and the fight stops, and we come home on a date certain, at a time certain, without succeeding in a victory? That is an amazing and astonishing thing, and anyone who is involved in a guerrilla warfare of an insurgency against the United States will know all they have got to do is go underground, hole up and wait; when American soldiers are finally gone, whether lifted off of the U.S. embassy or whether they happen to be deployed out of their troop ships or flown out in jet airliners, they would know that then the enemy would have that battlefield to themselves. The point made also by Mr. Shadegg, we came in uninvited, we cannot leave uninvited. That is a profound statement that should be in the conscience of all of us, and we have made progress. We have made significant progress. The attitude of the Iraqi people I thought was good 3 years ago or even 4 years ago, and I do understand that their attitude is betting better and better, but they are also nervous that we are not going to stick it out. But if we should leave, there is no doubt things will get worse; and the worse that I would describe, Madam Speaker, is I do not think this is necessarily the worst-case scenario, but I will describe this as a likely-case scenario, and that is, right now Iran is fighting a proxy war against the United States. They are doing so in Iraq. They have been funding and supporting two large Shia militia. One of them would be Sadr's militia and the other one is the Badr Brigade. They have been supporting anyone who will increase the chaos and the disorder in Iraq. They have not only been funding them and supporting them and they have been putting munitions into Iraq that are used against American service personnel and against Iraqi military security personnel. That has gone on for at least 2 years that I know of and it has gone on intensively and finally came out in the press a little over a month ago. Iran is fighting a proxy war against the United States, and those who attack the United States and provide munitions and funding and training have a sovereign sanctuary to retreat to and hide in, and that is Iran. I know of no example in history where you have had an insurgency that was funded by a sovereign sanctuary nation that has been protected from the assault of the troops that have been attacked out of that nation, and that prevailing side has always been the side that had the sanctuary, not the side that gave sanctuary. I am opposed to giving sanctuary in Iran to them so they can fight their proxy war against the United States. If we have enemies, they cannot be hiding behind national boundaries. We must regard them as enemies wherever they are. But if we do not prevail in Iraq, and the pervasive influence that has taken place there by the Shi'a from Iran is imposed in the southern part of Iraq and also in Baghdad as well, which it surely could be controlled by the Shi'as, that would allow Iran in the aftermath with their hegemony to control 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil. If Ahmadinejad has control of 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil, and about two-thirds of the real estate in Iraq and ultimately maybe more than that, his coffers get flushed full of cash. As the cash flows out of his treasure chest, he starts putting more and more money into his war chest, and that war chest becomes more and more nuclear capable, accelerating their development of nuclear weapons, weapons, in the plural, multiple plural, and means to deliver them, which means more and more missiles to put nuclear warheads on them, not just to threaten Israel, which Ahmadinejad has sworn to annihilate. He has also sworn to defeat and annihilate the United States. Those missiles would not be constrained to just having the range to drop into Tel Aviv, but they would have soon the range to get into Western Europe and, not much later than that, the range to reach the United States. This is a nation that has a suicidal tendency and a belief that they are called upon by Allah to annihilate the infidels. Infidels happen to be anyone who doesn't agree with them on their religion. So think, Madam Speaker, in terms of a Middle East that is controlled by Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Iran. They set on the Strait of Hormuz. If they have that valve, they will have the valve at the Strait of Hormuz to control what goes in and what goes out, which amounts to 42.6 percent of the world's exportable oil supply. That is easily enough to make them filthy rich and easily enough to affect the world's economy if they crank that valve down and shut down just a valve, it is a figurative valve, shutting down the oil exports going out of the Strait of Hormuz. They would control all of the Middle East if this happens. Then this Nation would go into a recession, probably a depression. If that happens, that reflects back to China, because China also is out there on the world market doing all that they can for the oil that they need, and they are dependent on the U.S. economy. The United States and China would be the big losers. Russia and Iran would be the big winners. Iran for obvious reasons; Russia because they have a lot of oil. That explains why Putin has taken a hostile position against the United States. He wants things to go that direction in Iraq. He wants us out of there. He wants the Iranians to take over in Iraq because that helps his world dominance and that helps his power base. That is an equation that I don't believe is considered by the retreatniks that are writing these line items of micromanagement into this supplemental appropriations bill, this, I believe, it will come out to be an unconstitutional supplemental appropriations bill. I would be happy to recognize the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Arizona. I reflect upon the last time we fought this enemy, and the first time that I know that we fought this enemy goes clear back into the early part of the 1500s, and I pick it up in a book called, ``Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters,'' when the Corsairs, Barbary pirates, would set upon the merchant marines that were sailing around the Mediterranean; they also raided the coastlines from Greece all the way up along the coast, Italy, France, Spain, up to England and as far north as Iceland. Iceland itself was the furthest, most northerly venture on the part of the Barbary pirates, who pressed 400 Icelanders into slavery, took them back to the Barbary Coast on the north shore of Africa and put them into slavery, where they died faster than any of the other slaves. But all together the history totals up about 1.25 million Christian slaves pressed into slavery by the Barbary pirates. This was just in the 1500s. Now, the first shooting war we got into in the United States began right after the end of the violence in the Revolutionary War. We finished, the battle was over, and 1783, here in this country, we had the protection of the French flag for our merchant marine at that time on the high seas; 1784, we lost the protection of the French flag when we had won our independence. Between that period of time and our Constitution being ratified in 1789, the protection of the French flag left us. So, from 1783 was when hostilities ended with Great Britain; 1784, the Barbary pirates fell upon our merchant marine ships, pressed our soldiers into slavery, and we had to build a Marine Corps and a Navy to go on and take on the Barbary pirates who were negotiated with in 1786 by Thomas Jefferson and by Ben Franklin and by John Adams. Jefferson brought a report back to this Congress, and that report is clearly a document within the history of this Congress. It can be found in a report that is delivered over here in the Library of Congress, where he said that he had tried to negotiate with the Muslim leader at the time, and he asked: Why do you attack us? Why do you kill us? We have no quarrel with you. We have had a peaceful posture with regard to you, and yet your whole regime sets upon us in the high seas. The answer he got back was, Allah commands that we do this. He commands that we attack and kill you, or press you into slavery until you either pay homage or adopt and convert to our religion. That report comes back from Thomas Jefferson. Those are the same circumstances that we are in today, just a few, couple 300-plus years down the line. Jefferson's analysis was, how do you negotiate with people who have a religious belief that they need to kill you in order to be saved? In fact, in Jefferson's report, the world of Islam over there, the Barbary pirates at the time said that anyone who was killed attacking the infidels would surely go to paradise. He understood them. That is why he bought a Koran, was to do his oppositional research. That is what we are up against today, the same thing. If we don't understand our enemy, if we don't understand nosce hostem, which is a Latin term for, ``know my enemy,'' came out of Romans, then we have the kind of appropriations bill that would have all these strings tied in such a way as the President can only deploy unprepared troops, and then it sets up some standards for that. If we need to defend ourselves, we couldn't do so unless we met this standard that is created by the other side of the aisle.

Mr. KING of Iowa. This bill presumably also requires the Iraqi government to meet the key security, political and economic benchmarks established by the President in his State of the Union address. That was January 10.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for yielding, and for his leadership and his hard and diligent work in committee. I also compliment the chairman from Minnesota who has a gracious approach to this and generally a reasonable approach to this issue. But this Davis-Bacon issue is something where I meet a philosophical divide. I don't know if there is another Member of this Congress who has live lived under Davis-Bacon, earned Davis-Bacon wages and paid Davis-Bacon wages, but I can tell you I am one who has done both. And it goes back through 28 years of the construction business; 1,400 and some consecutive weeks of tracking wages and paying the thing called ``prevailing wage'' and knowing prevailing wage is not prevailing wage. It is always union scale. And the reason for that is because no one reports the prevailing wage for fear they will be organized to be become a union and they will have to pay a union scale. I have difficulty with this because I hire my people year round. We make sure that they get a good living wage for the full year. We provide health insurance. We provide retirement benefits. And when you pay people a union scale, then you can only plug them on a machine for the hours of running that machine. You can't afford to have them grease it or haul it or fix it. So I know employers that will work 16 hours a day in order to keep the machines supported so their union scale man can climb in the seat of it. This is a distortion of the free enterprise system. I will argue also that this bill has an earmark in it, and this earmark is the mark called Davis-Bacon wages. Now, earmarks go back to when a pig is born you notch his ear so you can track his genetics through the marketing system. Well, this is an earmark into the first generation of money that goes into the revolving fund. Then once that money is in there, it comes back around again and again with a Davis- Bacon earmark in it, and I know Midwesterners really appreciate this argument, but the next generation of pigs, you at least got to earmark him when he is born. This one automatically earmarks every generation of money that rolls through this revolving fund now until the end of perpetuity, and that, Madam Chairman, is a bridge too far. We are not just labeling this Davis-Bacon wage scale. It is Davis-Bacon wage scale in perpetuity.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for working so well together on this amendment. Madam Chairman, really all this amendment does is it just stops the expansion of the Davis-Bacon, and it says we are not going to move this Davis-Bacon into a revolving fund. That is what the language that is in the underlying bill does, and this amendment simply strikes out the insertion that applies Davis-Bacon. So what does that really mean is a question that Members need to evaluate when they are thinking about what kinds of services and what kind of work can we get done out there across America. I understand the intensity of the Louisianans here today. They have a lot at stake. That is why we brought this legislation. In the $14 billion cumulative total that is part of this overall bill, I know, from hands-on experience being a contractor who has bid projects both ways, Davis-Bacon and merit shop, and my average number is a 20 percent increase; there are numbers out there higher and lower, but 20 percent, this bill wastes at least $2.8 billion. That could be projects. That could be projects that are going to help the people in this country. That money is at least wasted, but then it goes into the revolving fund, and it pollutes the rest of those dollars that are in there. So if I do the calculation on this, we come up with a number, it will be about $280 billion over time; 20 percent of that is $56 billion. So we are not putting just $2.8 billion here into the waste bin; we are putting $56 billion perhaps into the waste bin, Madam Chair, and it keeps us from being able to get these taxpayers' resources into projects that can really help people, especially the people that so desperately need them. I will tell you from my experience as a contractor who has worked and bid Davis-Bacon projects, I have gone into communities to bid these types of projects and had to do the bid according to the costs that are inflated into them, and had the community look at the overall bid, low bid. And I have been low bid, have had them reject my bid because it was too high; they couldn't afford it. They would pull the bid back, repackage the package without Davis-Bacon, and I could come in there cheaper, as did my competition, the community went without Federal dollars, as this inflated too much. These communities went without Federal dollars because it was too expensive to use the Federal funding. That ought to tell us something. As they went back and they funded it out, they bonded it out themselves. They pulled it out of taxes. Sometimes they go back and raise private dollars because of the overall inflation that is imposed by this kind of policy. This is the one that goes in perpetuity. You mark this revolving fund with this bill. And it isn't just these dollars, it is every single dollar that touches it from this day forward on into the future of the United States until some time comes that this Congress gets a grip, gets a hold of itself and decides we can't afford to be putting this on. I would add also that as you have an employer and an employee, they agree what to work on. I listen to the gentleman, Mr. George Miller, say it will keep them from making enough money to pay their health care. No, it is the other way around. It keeps us from hiring employees in year-round jobs where we provide, as the employer, the health care and retirement benefits because we can only afford to use them under these scales just for the job they have. It is inflationary. It is inefficient. I would ask for a ``yes'' vote on the Baker-King amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I am compelled to come to the floor and stand up and speak in opposition to this rule. The rules package that came before the floor of the House, an unamendable rules package, was amended before it came to the 109th, to the 110th Congress, eliminating the requirement that the Rules Committee and other committee votes be published when there is a recorded vote. Yesterday, before the Rules Committee, I brought an amendment that would require the Rules Committee to print recorded votes if they were to receive any of the funding that is authorized. I got about a third of the way through my presentation when I was interrupted by the chair, and the point was made that they have printed their votes to this date. The argument was made that since they have complied with my amendment, then there is no reason for my amendment, in fact, no latitude for me to continue my debate with regard to that and my presentation. So I rise in opposition to this rule because, first of all, we need to have sunlight on everything we do, and a requirement to provide to the public access to recorded votes is something that ought to be in the rule. It ought not to be an option. If it is the practice of the Rules Committee, then this amendment codifies the practice of the Rules Committee, and it should not receive objection, especially the vociferous interruption objection. I also object to the way I was treated before the Rules Committee. I will keep coming back regardless. I will not be intimidated, and I intend to raise the sunlight on everything we do in this Congress. I want to see all of our work become available on the Internet, in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format. I want all the sunlight possible, so the bloggers can see, and I would love to see television cameras up before the Rules Committee as well, Mr. Speaker. I think that will help the decorum of the Rules Committee. But I intend to come back. Like the Governor from California, I will be back.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for organizing this Special Order here this evening, and I also thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Deal) for making his presentation and making a compelling case for why we have to end this thing we call birthright citizenship, anchor babies, or more appropriately, more accurately, as automatic citizenship. It was never part of the concept constitutionally that we should grant that kind of a thing, for all the reasons that Mr. Deal said and all the reasons that Mr. Bilbray said, and a lot of other reasons besides. But, Mr. Speaker, I would submit this, that I am going to roll out some facts and figures here, and I would ask that you maybe could pay attention and take some notes on this because it is important for us in this country not to be establishing an immigration policy based upon anecdotes or based upon emotions or based upon somebody's feelings, but base it upon some empirical data. We need to base our policy on some facts. I would point out that I wrote a letter to the White House last year. It was off of a request of that White House liaison that took place last April, and by June 23, I was finally frustrated with my e-mails and phone calls to the liaison who promised to get me some answers. So I put it in letter form, hard copy, sent it to the White House, sent it as an e-mail also, and instructed my staff to call the White House every week to get answers to the questions. Because it occurs to me that facts don't work for the people that are for open borders, but facts absolutely support the people that stand up for the rule of law and that stand up for national sovereignty and stand up for national border protection and enforcement in our workplace to shut off the jobs magnet. I think we should start with a simple basis. If you go back to the beginning of Western Civilization and the Greeks, they would ask. They would look at things. They were proud. They lived in the age of reason. They said, I think, therefore I am. We are going to do deductive reasoning. We will start with the most logical, obvious questions, and we are going to reduce it down. If we can narrow ourselves down to a conclusion, we will come to a conclusion. If we can't, we will need more data. They were proud of the way they could think and reason. That's the foundation for Western Civilization. Had they not developed that age of reason, we would never have had the Age of Enlightenment. Without the Age of Enlightenment, we would never have had the United States of America. So we are founded upon reason. Questions start from the beginning. Is there such a thing as too much immigration, legal or illegal? That is one of the questions I asked the President. Then I asked, would you separate that into, is there such a thing as too much illegal immigration? And then, is there too much legal immigration? Then, the question that follows is, within those two categories, illegal in one category and legal immigration in the other category, if there is such a thing as too much, how much is too much? I will submit in the category of the illegal, one is too many. I don't think the White House can take that position, neither can most of the Democrats and many of the Senators, Democrats and Republicans; one is too many. Is there such a thing as too much legal immigration? Yes, there has to be. Otherwise, you have to be willing to accept everybody on the planet that wants to come to America, and that might actually be everybody. I would argue that this million or so that come in legally in a year is kind of an acceptable number, but is probably twice as many as the American people like to have. American people don't only want to eliminate all the illegal immigration, they want to reduce legal immigration, and they want to go back to an immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social and the cultural well- being of the United States of America. Call it a selfish policy, if you like, but any Nation that subordinates their immigration policy to the people who will illegally cross the border from other countries doesn't have much of a policy and doesn't have much of a destiny if they don't have control of their own destiny. We have got to be in control. We have got to set that policy. So I went on down this list of things, and if there is such a thing as too much legal or illegal immigration, then how much is too much? And how many do you believe would be legalized by the Senate version of the bill that passed last year? Of course, before, I believe it was the Bingaman amendment, it was between 100 and 200 million would be legalized with a path to citizenship into the United States. Under the Senate version of the bill that probably would have had enough votes to pass with the majority of the Senate. Well, there were some caps that were put on because of that amendment that I just referenced, and then the number came down to, and this is the number I would ask of the White House, how many do you believe would be legalized by the Senate-passed version of the bill? I can tell you at this point that, according to the Heritage Foundation, according to Robert Rector and according to some real good solid statistical analysis done by Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, it comes to about 61.1 million people. The lowest number we could come up with about 53 or 54 million people; 66.1 million is the most reliable number over the next 20 years that would be legalized. By the Senate version, it has got to be nothing but amnesty. I looked back, and how do you quantify that? In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty bill. He called it an amnesty bill. He was straight up honest about it. It was one of the two or three times he failed me, but at least he was straight up honest. Some will say that was to legalize 300,000, some will say it was 1 million, but not many will say that it actually brought in 3 million, some 3.1 million people who became citizens through this amnesty that was passed in 1986. I have met some of those people. I have looked them in the eye, and I can tell you, they do not respect the rule of law like the rest of the Americans do. Therefore, they want amnesty for the rest of the illegals that are in this country, because they see it was good for them. Well, if something is good for someone, that is not a measure that it is a good policy for America. It is only a measure that it is good for someone. But regardless, that was a series of questions that I asked of the President. In addition to that, I asked, would you be willing to agree to a hard annual cap that would control the aggregate of all of the different immigration policies that are out there and say that, from an annual basis, it never exceeds a certain number? Now, I would start with 1 million and ratchet it down for the American people if I could. We could probably assimilate 1 million people in this country a year if we had good assimilation policies. That letter, with those questions, and those five questions as I recall that went to the President on June 23, and the White House got a call every single week until September. Finally, I got an answer back, not from the White House, not from Secretary Chertoff, but a subordinate of Secretary Chertoff. The answer that came back was a cut and paste to somebody's constituent response letter and didn't answer a single question that I had asked. So I wrote a letter back that said, Dear Mr. President, thanks for the letter that was in response to my letter full of questions, but you really didn't answer any of my questions. Would you like to try again? I would really appreciate it. I am the ranking member of the Immigration Subcommittee, and we have to set an immigration policy here. Finally, I got a letter back, and it said, immigration is too complicated and too serious a policy to reduce it to numbers. What a shocking thing. That is a single piece of all of this. So when you add to this, you can add that we have a major problem on our borders. We are seeing $60 billion out of our U.S. economy that are wired into the Western Hemispheric countries other than the United States. Those are transmittals from the wages in America; $30 billion goes to Mexico; $65 billion worth of illegal drugs come across that southern border into the United States. We are watching 11,000 people a night pour across the southern border. In fact, just yesterday was the anniversary of the battle of the Alamo when Colonel Travis and those brave Texan Americans were slaughtered at the Alamo. Santa Ana's Army was only half the size of a nightly number of illegals that come across our southern border. Those are simply some of the pieces. There are many other statistics out there that are empirical data, and I pray that this Nation will look at numbers, look at reality and not be stampeded by hyperbole or anecdotes and establish a policy that is good for the economic, the social and the cultural well-being of the United States of America.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for yielding. I feel compelled to respond to many of the remarks that have been made here on the floor about the condition of the health care treatment for our veterans. I won't deny that there were unacceptable conditions in Building 18. I don't believe there has been any empirical data or quantifiable information that says it has gone beyond some of the rooms within Building 18. But I know when I go out to Walter Reed and when I go to Bethesda and when I go to Landstuhl and I look those people in the eye that are there every day with compassion fatigue that are giving their heart and soul and everything they have for the health care interests of our brave soldiers who have been wounded defending our freedom, a lot of that freedom and a lot of that mission have been opposed by the people on this side of the aisle, there is a strong commitment in all of those hospitals by the personnel that are there. They work long hours, and they give the best service with everything that they have. And I will agree that there is a bureaucratic problem and we ought to find a way to put some software in place and put a system there so we can track patients and they don't get dropped from the system and they can be expedited through with the most efficient and high-quality care possible. But this being an issue that is being stampeded and run up the flagpole goes beyond trying to fix the problem. It is an effort to try to undermine the mission of our soldiers overseas, and I think that is deplorable, Mr. Speaker. So I stand with the people that serve America, those that put their lives on the line, those that have lost life and limb. I stand with the people who stand there and help them. And we need to be supportive and encouraging and fix the problems we have and remove the politics from this debate. I yield back to the gentleman from California.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, my amendment is a simple amendment. What it does is it recognizes that this authorization was authorized by Congress in 2002. It was authorized for $1.5 billion. This authorization takes us on up well over that. What I have done with my amendment is I do a 5-percent reduction in the authorization by the individual line items, and they all are on page four, so it amounts to a 5-percent reduction and takes us down to a number just a little bit above the inflation-adjusted 2002 number. So the $1.5 billion that was 2002 after adjusted for inflation comes to $1.69 billion. My amendment takes it up to just about $1.7 billion. This overall is not in the President's budget and we don't have this in any other budget, in Republicans or Democrats here, so this is an extra authorization. Federal spending in the 110th Congress is out of control. The first five bills of the 110th Congress wasted about $14 billion of taxpayer money. If American taxpayers are going to be forced to foot the bill for projects that cities and States should be paying for, then they should only have to be forced to pay a reasonable amount. And if Members cannot vote for a reasonable reduction as done by this amendment, it proves that the majority in this Congress carries with it a tax-and-spend attitude. The restraint is what is in my amendment. The funding authorized under this bill is $1.8 billion. My amendment will bring spending in line to about the inflation-adjusted portion, as I mentioned earlier. We need to make sure that our adjustments do so without wasteful government spending. We should not sit back and allow the majority to force their expansive jumbo jets or their poorly masked, earmark-ridden continuing resolutions on the American taxpayers. Mr. Chairman, we all have to learn to tighten our belts. We have to learn how to do more with less. We have to draw the line somewhere. And we actually should draw it everywhere where we can to squeeze this down. The checks that this Congress have already written in a closed and rigid process are simply too large. In last year's elections, the new majority party promised the American people that they would rein in Federal spending and return fiscal restraint to Washington, DC. So far, that has not been what I have seen here in this Congress. I offer this opportunity to the minority and the majority to bring us back to a level of fiscal restraint. We can and must do something about the deficit. We must do it right now. We have our opportunity right here. By voting for this amendment, you are stating that American taxpayers should not have to pay higher taxes in the future because we couldn't control our spending today. I think it is clear. This is a carefully drafted and a reasonable spending restraint amendment. It is a 5-percent reduction and it takes us down to an inflation-adjusted number from the 2002 authorization. I haven't heard a lot of discussion here about the expansion in needs. I did hear some significant requests that I think are relatively legitimate. But it is important for us to be responsible in our request. It is important that we tighten our belt a little bit. If we can take it up one notch here, we can take it up another notch on another authorization and another appropriation, Perhaps we can get through this process. Having met PAYGO, for example, maybe we can get through this process and actually have a budget that is closer to balance than some we have seen in the past. Maybe we can get to the point of the promises that were made that we are going to have a balanced budget this year. I am looking forward to seeing that. I am trying to be helpful in offering this amendment, and I would ask my colleagues to support this fiscal restraint, fiscally responsible, reasonable amendment that preserves the authorization of 2002, makes adjustments for inflation so real dollars will buy the same amount of projects that would have been brought subsequent to the 2002 authorization, which, of course, was not appropriated to. Mr. Chairman, I urge passage of this amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate the gentleman's remarks, and I am very much in agreement with you that this is a responsible thing for us to do. And I again thank you, and I would be very happy to accept the recommendation and your support, and I would be willing to do the same.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment that is filed and should be in order at the desk.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for picking up on that. There is a reason why there is a strong affinity between this Western Iowan and this Texan and lot of the Texas delegations. I know that today is the anniversary of the final battle of the Alamo, and I am very much aware of what that means in Texas and across this country. In fact, if you walk into my office, this Iowan's office, framed there is a letter from Colonel Travis. That level of freedom, the Texans reached out for freedom and they had to fight for it a number of times, number of different ways. I like that flag that hangs in Mr. Hensarling's office that shows a picture of the cannon and says, ``Come and take it.'' That is the right kind of attitude. We have this freedom here in America, and there are people here that do not want our freedom, they detest our freedom. They just want to take our lives, and to understand an enemy like that goes beyond the scope of our religious foundation and our beliefs. So I think it is important for us to understand this enemy. I would reflect upon a major from Kentucky whom I spent some time with in the Middle East in the early part of December who said: Thank you for all your prayers. Thank you for the support for our military. We have everything we need. We have the training, the technology. We have the weapons. For men that have to do this job, we have everything we need, but when you pray for us, pray for the American people. Pray that the American people will understand the threat that we are up against, and pray that they will not lose their resolve. We will not lose ours. I think that might be an appropriate time, unless the gentleman from Texas has another remark to make in watching the clock, Mr. Speaker, I would like to close with that thought, that our military is not going to lose their resolve. They understand this enemy that we are against. This Congress needs to understand this enemy we are against. A majority of the American people understand the enemy we are against, and we have a historical time here. We can close the door on the legacy of Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu, and we can build upon the success in Afghanistan, and we can close the situation in Iraq and build upon that success. If we do that, we have a bright and free future. If we fail to do that, every enemy that wants to come after us will come after us. I appreciate again Mr. Gohmert coming down here, the way you engage with your constituents and the way that you bring these values, these American values out of the heartland to flow all the way through the middle part of the United States here. I am proud to serve with the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Speaker, and I am glad to have had the privilege to address you in this chamber.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized and the privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States Congress this evening. And I appreciate the previous speaker, who has brought up the issue of renewable fuels and the overall energy situation that America is addressing here. And this dialogue has got to be expanded and continued, and so this input that comes from the gentleman from Maryland is an essential part of our discussion and our debate. I know that when Professor Bartlett digs up some scientific information and lays it out here for us, we know that it is well researched and it is well founded and well grounded, and that it becomes a significant part of the overall debate. And I would add some more things to this overall debate as we talk about energy and then, perhaps, Mr. Speaker, I will move into some other issues as well that are of important concern to the American people. On this energy that we are dealing with, I have continually heard from the other side of the aisle, well, we can't drill in ANWR. I haven't heard why. We can't drill in the outer continental shelf. I haven't heard why. I have heard that we have to conserve energy. I think that is good, but it is hard to do that without having the proper financial incentives in place. And one thing we haven't done is reward the companies for doing the exploration, particularly, the exploration for American oil, Mr. Speaker. And so, as I look at this overall picture, I will submit this scenario that we need to do, and that is, we must grow the size of the energy pie, this overall circle pie chart that we use that is the 100 percent model. And in there are the components we have today called gasoline, diesel fuel, coal, natural gas, nuclear power, hydroelectric, solar, wind; the list goes on of those components, some hydrogen. But it is a smaller size of supply than we need, and that is why our energy prices are high. And that is linked with the rest of the world, certainly. But here in the United States, we need to be looking at this from the perspective of reducing and eventually eliminating our dependence upon Middle Eastern oil. That is essential that we do that because the funds that are going into Middle Eastern oil, when we are buying oil on the market, those funds, some of them, end up in the hands of our enemies, in the hands of the terrorists, in the hands of the Islamic jihadists. And that is the strongest incentive to becoming more dependent upon domestic energy and less dependent on Middle Eastern energy. But additionally, our balance of trade goes the wrong way for us. When we are importing energy from overseas in places like the Middle East, that transfers the wealth of the United States over to and puts it into the countries of the Middle East. And so our approach here needs to be the expansion and the continued promotion of these energy supplies that we have that we can develop here in the United States. The most obvious of those are the biodiesel components, which have been expanding rapidly here in the United States, and particularly in Iowa and particularly in Iowa's Fifth Congressional District, the western third of the State. We are now and have been for some time the number one congressional district out of all 435 in biodiesel production. And that biodiesel production comes from animal fats and soybeans, and the extraction of that processed into diesel fuel, that has proven to be a very effective and reliable, and much of it a biodegradable type of a fuel, much more environmentally friendly than the diesel fuel that is on the market that comes out of the sands of Saudi Arabia, for example. And so our leadership there in the biodiesel production needs to be expanded, and we are on a track to do that. We are also, in the district that I represent, ranking number two of the 435 Congressional districts in ethanol production. By some time this year, in 2007, we will be number one in ethanol production. That will rank us first in the Nation in ethanol production of the 435 congressional districts, and also first in the Nation in biodiesel production. We rank currently today about fourth or at least tied for fourth in wind generation of electricity. That will go up to at least second time this year, and perhaps it will be first. But some of the things that we are creating here is an intellectual property, Mr. Speaker, a knowledge base that, of the billions of dollars of capital that we have poured into renewable energy, primarily in the ethanol and the biodiesel, but also in the wind generation of electricity, that capital investment produces the energy out of our crops and out of our wind. But additionally, we are building a knowledge base, an understanding of what enzymes work best, what practices work best. We are squeezing more ethanol out of a bushel of corn than we have ever squeezed out of there before, and we will soon be up to that 3 gallons a bushel of ethanol production. And as the enzymes get better and the process gets better, we will also be able to extract ethanol out of the cellulosic, which is about any kind of plant product that is made out of cellulose and other products as well. But that would be the primary ones. And as we develop our skills, I run into people around the country, especially in our hearings for agriculture, and they will come up to me and say, really, the future for our energy is in ethanol. We need to learn how to do that. We need to go to Brazil and see how they make ethanol in Brazil. And my response to that is, why don't you come to Iowa, see how we make ethanol in Iowa? I have been to Brazil to see their operations down there. They need to come to Iowa to see how we make ethanol in Iowa. And, in fact, the United States has surpassed Brazil in ethanol production. They make most of theirs out of sugar cane. We make most of ours out of corn. But we passed up Brazil a couple of years ago in overall gallon production of ethanol. And Iowa produces 26 percent of the ethanol that is produced in the entire country. And our plants are far more modern than those that you see in Brazil. Technology a little different because there they will some days make sugar out of the sugar cane when the market is right, and other days they make ethanol out of the sugar cane. But ours are still far more modern. We conserve energy. We have got efficiencies there. We have software packages that manage and control the flow of all the operations within the plant. We have one or two people sitting there monitoring that 24/7. But an impressive combination of technology and people and know-how pulled together. And I often, Mr. Speaker, use the model of how Texas was the place where they discovered oil. And among the places, and Texas produced a lot of the oil back starting in the teens to some degree, but more like the 1920s and the 1930s. And as they, the boom State of Texas hit oil, and they began to develop and produce oil and distribute and refine it and distribute it around the country, they also developed the skills, the skills and the expertise of deeper drilling and other ways to extract oil out of the formations, fishing skills to fish broken bits out of wells, Red Adair's oil well firefighters, some of those examples, and then of course the seismic technology and all of the things that go along to making an oil industry profitable. Well, as the oil began to play out in Texas, the expertise kept growing, and there is a tremendous amount of wealth in Texas that comes from the intellectual property that has been created, the common knowledge or the knowledge base that has been built. We are doing the same thing in the Midwest in the renewable fuels category, Mr. Speaker. And as that knowledge base grows, there will be people that are brought up, educated in, work in and nurtured within this epicenter of renewable fuels that we are today in the neighborhood that I have the privilege to represent. And as they look around, they will move outside the area, and they will begin to add their skills to ethanol biodiesel production plants that move out to the limits of the corn belt and the soybean belt. And as that happens, there will be, of course a center of knowledge, a center of technology and people, can-do people with know-how, that emanate from the epicenter of renewable fuels. That is a big future, I believe, for us. And that is one component in this overall energy pie that we need to grow. So as we grow our ethanol production from corn and grow our biodiesel production from mostly animal fats or mostly soybeans, but also animal fats, that would be a processing product that comes from our plants. As that grows, we also are looking at developing the cellulosic ethanol, and that can come from any kind of plant. And we are 5 to 6 years away from being able to produce the cellulosic ethanol in the kind of volume where we can see how we might be able to add a lot more gallons to the overall supply of gasoline type products that are consumed on our vehicles on the roads. And yet where we are, that cellulose comes in the form of corn stalks and cane products and switch grass and the list goes on, wood chips. Anything that has plant and fiber in it is cellulose that can be converted into ethanol. So we don't know to the extent that that will be built out across the country, but I believe this: I think you can draw circles on the map in the corn belt where there will be ethanol plants and they will draw corn from those areas. And then there will be other circles where the biodiesel plants draw soybeans particularly or else extracted oil from soybeans into that area. And the gaps, I think, get filled with cellulosic. And there will also be dual crops that come out at least for some time that convert the shell corn into ethanol and the corn stalks into cellulosic ethanol. That kind of thing will happen too to the extent that the economics will drive this. Capital makes good decisions on where it goes. It will always being attracted to where there is profit. It will always shy away from places where there isn't profit. And right now the capital is being attracted to the renewable fuels. That is a piece of this overall energy pie, and the size of the piece that is ethanol today and renewable fuels needs to get bigger. Also, we look out on the Outer Continental Shelf. There are 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we know of offshore, a lot of that offshore in Florida. We opened up a tiny little sliver of that, I think it was Lease 181, to allow for a little more drilling way offshore in Florida, but we are wasting or ignoring a tremendous resource where we should be down there tapping into that massive supply of natural gas, pumping it into our markets here because of the foundation for a lot of our production in our plants, particularly plastic production, is in natural gas, is in feedstock, as well as natural gas is a feedstock for commercial fertilizer, and the control of that fertilizer will also be part of the control for the overall food production in the United States. So it is essential that we keep at an economic and I will even say a cheap supply of natural gas on the markets. And it is foolish for us to ignore the supply that we have and not be out here extracting that natural gas out from underneath the seabed. There has never been a spilled natural gas that had any environmental damage. It has always been one of the safest things that we can do and certainly one of the cleanest things that we can do. Natural gas is a wonderful product, and that natural gas needs to be put into our markets to keep our fertilizer costs down, to keep our production costs down, and to be used more sparingly in the production of electricity because that is a higher cost type of an item, and that can be done more with coal or with clean burning coal. And we need to also be expanding our energy use beyond the natural gas. We should look at our domestic supplies of crude oil, and offshore there is also a significant amount of domestic supplies of crude oil. One of the largest fields discovered is southwest of New Orleans, offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. And that supply down there, that find that is discovered by Chevron, can be something that will rival and perhaps exceed one of the large finds up on the North Slope. But the North Slope needs to be opened up too, and I mean specifically ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That is an area up there that if God was going to put oil somewhere that we ought to go get that is not going to impact on very many species or on human population, that, Mr. Speaker, is the place. I have traveled up there, and I have looked at the fields in ANWR. I looked at the oil that is developed on the North Slope of Alaska. And I can see, and I don't think there is a disagreement, that it has been a very environmentally friendly development that took place up there in the 1970s, and we can do better yet just a little ways to the east in a similar type of a terrain, because we have the technology to allow us to do directional drilling. So we can sit in one spot and we can drill in an area out in multiple directions and extract that oil in a single location with a very minimal footprint on the area up there in ANWR. There is no justifiable reason not to tap into that. Whatever the promise happened to be back in the 1970s that some people here on the floor of the House have said, well, there was a promise that we would never drill in ANWR or we would never let you drill in the North Slope, well, I don't know who made that promise. I don't see that that promise is in law. I know it is not in the Constitution. But even if it is in law, and I don't believe it is, Mr. Speaker, one legislature, one Congress can't bind a succeeding Congress. They can't make a decision in 1970 that keeps us from doing the right thing in 2007. And our Founding Fathers would have never taken a position like that. So whoever thinks that they have been disenfranchised by a promise shouldn't have been willing to accept that kind of promise back in the 1970s, if it was ever made. But what would we get out of that, foolishly hanging on to somebody's idea that because it is called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that somehow we can't have a little spot there that is equivalent of a postage stamp on a football field to go set a rig there, drill some holes in the ground, and pull that back out and only have a little rock pad about 50 feet wide by 100 feet long that even Dennis Kucinich wouldn't recognize as an oil field except you would have to take him up there and show him. And that is the case for many people that oppose drilling up there. The oil is there. It is there for a reason. We need to dump it on our market and do it now. A million barrels a day could be coming back down into this market here in the United States, and that is a million barrels a day that we wouldn't be drawing out from Middle Eastern oil, and the profit from that million barrels a day would not be going into the hands of jihadists or potential jihadists or neighbors to jihadists. It would be going into American companies, and it would be saving money in the pockets of the American people, Mr. Speaker. And those are two logical things that we need to do: drill the Outer Continental Shelf for oil and gas everywhere that we can find it, go up to ANWR and drill up there because we have already found it. We know it is there. And so those two are simple commonsense inarguable points that can only be addressed in opposition by emotionalism and hyperbole, not by rational logic or empirical data. And as we look across at the rest of the energy that we need to produce, we are doing a great job with the wind energy. We have got the wind chargers pumping out electricity. One thing about it, the air really never gets where it wants to go. It keeps traveling around this globe. And we can harness that tremendous amount of energy, and we do so, and turn it into generated electricity, a very clean, a very safe supply of energy. I am glad to see those tall surrealistic windmills churning out all at an identical speed, pumping electricity down through the cables into the ground and on off to our customers. That is a very gratifying thing. And we would have difficulty, with the political climate that we face today, in expanding our hydro- electricity capability. Whether we can do that or not, I would like for any opportunities and be supportive of the rational ones, but we must keep alive the hydroelectric generation of electricity that is taking place across this country. That is some of the cheapest electricity that we have and some of the safest electricity that we have and some of the most environmentally friendly electricity that we have. We will have flood control projects on these rivers, or we will have bottoms flooded out continually and, since we built those, particularly Pick-Sloan on the Missouri River when you take advantage of the gravity situation of the water dropping down off of the dams down through the generation plants. Another place that we need to expand is going to be our nuclear capability. I don't believe we built a new nuclear plant, nuclear electrical generating plant, in the United States since the mid-1970s. And yet statistically nuclear power is by far the safest form of electricity that we have that we can generate. If you want to count the accidents, the fatalities, all the records about the safety of nuclear stand up to support that nuclear is safer than any other. And when you look across the world in places like France, we make a little fun of the French, but they made a good decision on their electricity. They have a different kind of demand than we have, different levels of resources. But their prudent decision sets up nuclear plants in France, and 78 percent of their electricity is generated by nuclear plants. To the extent that we can generate more electricity with nuclear, that would take the load off the natural gas that is being used in particularly these new plants where they are burning natural gas to generate electricity. That, I believe, is an imprudent path to go down, to build generating plants that plan to burn natural gas, especially if you are doing so in States like Florida that oppose drilling off their own shores where there is gas sitting there in massive quantities but still are building gas-fired generating plants across the State of Florida. Those things add to the negative and make it harder for us. And I know that there are States that have an ability and a confidence that they can produce cleaner burning coal, and coal-fired generators have been a very effective and efficient way to generate electricity, the base plants in particular, and there is coal that is hauled all across this country by rail from Wyoming all the way to Georgia, if I remember right, 16 million tons going into Georgia out of Wyoming coal because that is the most economical way they can generate electricity in those areas in Georgia that receive that coal from up in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. But the point is to continually grow the size of this energy pie, put more Btus on the market. One of those pieces of the pie needs to be conservation, to save the part that we are wasting, and then expand the size of the pie for the renewable so that there is more ethanol, more biodiesel, more wind-generated electricity, nuclear-generated power, more base plants for coal-fired generating plants and other means that we can use more coal; and in the process of doing that, we have taken the pressure off. There will be less pressure on gasoline, on diesel fuel, on the places we are most vulnerable, from the Middle Eastern oil and Middle Eastern energy. That is the path we need to follow, Mr. Speaker, and I believe that is the path that is mostly going to be consistent with that that was presented by the gentleman from Maryland who spoke just ahead of me. But I wanted to talk about the energy issue in the beginning because I intend to, in what is left of this presentation this evening, Mr. Speaker, talk about how we fix our problems here in the United States, how we address our global problems. And I have addressed the energy issue. And when we have cheap energy, we are going to have at least a foundation for a strong economy. That is why energy is important. We can't be hostage to other countries. We can't have someone else draining the profit and the lifeblood off of the workers of Americans by pocketing high profits because they happen to be sitting in a place where there is a lot of energy supply themselves with low input costs. That is the case today with Middle Eastern oil. That is why I raise the energy issue. The second thing that matters is how we deal with our foreign relations. We are vulnerable to Middle Eastern oil today. Some 60 percent or more of our oil is imported from overseas. And whether you take that directly from places like Saudi Arabia or Iran or Iraq, other countries there in the Middle East, Kuwait, for example, or whether you buy it from the Canadians, and we don't have much access to markets from the Russians, but from the western shore of Africa, wherever that oil comes from, you are taking it from the world market, the overall supply of oil in the world market. And if you do that, it is essentially the equivalent of purchasing the Middle Eastern oil. And when that happens, of course, as I said two or three times, that money gets into the hands of Islamic jihadists. And so today we are in a global war against terror and these terrorists are Islamic jihadists. They live scattered across most continents, if not all continents. There are enclaves there, cells where they are training and planning to attack us. They believe they are called by Allah to kill us because they label us as infidels. It says so in their Koran. Thomas Jefferson bought a Koran or acquired a Koran, and in there he studied it so he that he could begin to understand the Islamic enemy called the Barbary pirates. And the language is the same. It says the same thing today, and the extremists believe that directs them to kill the people that they define as infidels and infidels being described as nonbelievers in their religion. So, that is the root of this belief. They believe they are commanded to fall upon us and attack us with every stratagem of war and to continue doing so until such time as the infidels either convert or pay tribute. That was their demand at the beginning of the wars with the Barbary pirates that began in 1784. That war, the long-lasting war with the Barbary pirates, with the same kind of philosophical enemy and nearly same location, that lasted over 30 years, by my calculation 32 years before it was wrapped up. In fact, it may have been a little longer than that. The resistance finally stopped in 1830 when the French went in and occupied Algiers. We did our part up to that period of time. It is my recollection the United States was in combat about 32 years, or through a drawn-out war for 32 years, about 6 years of intense combat through that period of time, beginning in 1784, the year after hostilities with the British ceased. So this is not anything new for us. We just need to go back and read our history and understand that they believe they have to kill us, that that is their religious belief to do so. And Thomas Jefferson said so. All we had to do was read Jefferson. He studied. It reflects today about the enemy we are up against. Now, this even my needs to have some bases to operate from. They had a base to operate from in Afghanistan. The Taliban and the al Qaeda working with the Taliban, they need anarchy. They need a failed state, a state that doesn't have the rule of law, that doesn't have security, that has a collapsed economy, a place where they can operate freely. They had done so with the Taliban, working with al Qaeda in Afghanistan. When September 11 came, we went to Afghanistan and put an end to their terrorist camp. When it came time to liberate Iraq, it was a similar motive. And we know that al Qaeda has always seen Iraq since the victorious liberation in Afghanistan, they have always seen Iraq as the central battlefield in this global war on terror, Mr. Speaker. So, this is the nature of our enemy. And wherever we fight them, they populate most of the continents all around the globe. We have seen the second generation Pakistanis rise up in Great Britain and turn around and plot to and ultimately attack the British people, their hosts in Great Britain. Those kind of cells exist in the United States, they exist in many countries of the world, and that is some of the nature of the enemy we are up against. So, how do we deal with this kind of enemy? We have addressed it to the extent that we brought a measure of freedom to Afghanistan. We are surely not done there. There is more violence there in the last year, not less. That is a bad sign. We are more aggressive than we have been in the past, not less. That is a good sign. And we have NATO in there now working directly with us, and that is also a very good sign. They have started a spring offensive, and that is going to keep al Qaeda back on their heels. But we may not for a long, long time put this enemy a way to where they quit attacking us. They don't really have a head leader. They don't have a capital city. They don't have a definable military that we can attack and destroy. But they do attack us with whatever they have, with the resources that they have, and we know that they are in Iraq in significant numbers and we have been fighting there, along with somewhere between five and eight different factions that are engaged in the violence there in Iraq. But the most pervasive concern that I have, Mr. Speaker, is that Iran has been fighting a proxy war against the United States in Iraq. I have known for approximately 2 years that the Iranians were funding the insurgency there, that they were making munitions, that they were shipping those munitions into Iraq, that they were training and supporting the insurgency in Iraq and committing and fighting a proxy war against the United States within Iraq, from Iran. Yet the information that we had at the time wasn't quite solid enough to go public, not quite solid enough to accuse the Iranians of what I have known for 2 years they were doing. But today we know. We know they have infiltrated people, military personnel and trainers into Iraq. We know that they are making sophisticated devices to knock out our armored personnel carriers and our tanks and armored Humvees. And we have had at least 170 Americans who have been killed because of these devices, these sophisticated improvised explosive devices. That is an act of war against the United States troops that is taking place in Iraq at the hands of the Iranians. Now, the downside, the worst case scenario of this is, as I listened over on this side of the aisle a couple of weeks ago, 2\1/2\ weeks ago when we had our debate about the resolution that did this contradictory thing, respected the troops and opposed their mission, a disgraceful debate that we had on the floor, but many Members on that side of the aisle said it is a civil war, that we should get out, we should not be engaged in a civil war. First of all, Mr. Speaker, it is not a civil war in Iraq. There is not a force in Iraq that is seeking to unseat and depose and replace the duly elected democratic government of Iraq. You have not heard that out of the mouths of the leaders of the insurgencies that are there. They are not there to destroy the government in Iraq. So, that is rule number one. If they are not trying to depose the government, probably it is a pretty good sign it is not a civil war. Rule number two is there are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in uniform today that are defending and fighting for Iraqis. These uniformed Iraqi military and security personnel are not choosing up sides to shoot at each other. If they did that, we would maybe have a definition of a civil war. So, since the Iraq military and the Iraq security personnel are not fighting against each other, but they are fighting to provide security in Iraq, that says there is not a civil war. Because no one is trying to depose the legitimate government of Iraq, that says it is not a civil war. So that puts the argument I think away on that. You can argue there is unrest, and there is, and there are fighting factions that are competing against each other for power in a relative vacuum in some of the areas, but that doesn't constitute a civil war. But even if it were, Mr. Speaker, I would point out the United States has engaged in a number of civil wars to try to put down the kind of unrest and been successful to some degree. One of those places would be in Kosovo. We have been in there now for more than 10 years. We have suppressed a civil war there and saved a lot of lives and had a measure of safety because of that. So, it is not a civil war, but if it were, that is not a reason not to be there, Mr. Speaker. There is a very good reason to be there, and I will point out that very good reason, and that is the Iranian hegemony is pervasive in Iraq. They are bonded with and are a powerful, strong influence with the two largest Shia organizations in Baghdad and the areas outside and south of Baghdad, all the way to the southern border. The Shia region of Iraq would be taken over by the influence of the Iranians. If we pulled out of there, the Iranians would fill that vacuum. Yes, there would be some fighting amongst the other factions, but I believe the Iranians fill that vacuum. If the Iranians fill the vacuum through their relationships with the Shia leaders that they have already been nurturing and funding and supporting, one of them would be Moqtada al-Sadr, who has absconded to Iran with his leaders, with the commanding officers of his militia, if that happened, those people get propped up. Sadr gets propped up, Hakeem gets propped up, and the Iranian influence gets ahold of the 70 to 80 percent of the oil in Iraq that is in the area of the Shias today. Maybe eventually all of it, but almost immediately they get their hands on 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil. Mr. Speaker, if that happens, then you have the Iranians sitting there where their cash boxes will be flushed, their war chest be full. They will be overflowing with cash. They will be able to will buy any kind of nuclear power that they want to buy, any kind of nuclear material they want to buy. They will be able to accelerate and buy more centrifuges and process fuel and develop nuclear weapons at a faster pace, and they aren't far from having that accomplished now. They will be able to develop a means to delivery that nuclear capability in the form of missiles, and if they aren't able to develop that technology there in Iran, they can pay for it and accelerate their research to get that done. If they aren't, they can turn around and buy that on the open market somewhere, the means to deliver, from places like North Korea, which has demonstrated a propensity for marketing off their nuclear capability. But I think we are not many years away from Iran having a nuclear capability. And a cash flush Iran with a nuclear capability and a means to deliver it doesn't mean it just threatens Tel Aviv, Mr. Speaker. It isn't just that Ahmadinejad has declared that he wants to annihilate Israel. That is a big deal. They are the only democracy in the Middle East, aside from Iraq today. But Ahmadinejad has vowed to destroy Israel and the United States. But those missiles and that nuclear capability that they would acquire if we withdraw from that area would give them also the ability to reach Western Europe, the ability one day not very far down the line to reach the United States, and it becomes a far more difficult equation for us to deal with. This time, this place, right now, is the opportune time to resolve the issue of the conflict in the Middle East. We have invested blood and treasure, precious blood and valuable treasure, and we owe it to the memories of those who have committed their lives and given their lives to this cause to get the issue resolved in Iraq. We are far from not being able to win there, and anyone who thinks that this is a difficult military situation hasn't read back through American history to see some of the circumstances that we have come out of in the past, Mr. Speaker. But thinking of the concept of a cash-flush Iran with their hands on the valve that controls 42.6 percent of the exportable world's oil supply, control of Straits of Hormuz, to be able to fill their coffers up with cash until they overflow, buy their nuclear capability and buy their missiles as a means to deliver it, and then look around the world and say, well, I am called upon by Allah to annihilate you infidels, and I want to start with the Israelis over here, so what I am going to do is maybe not fire off the missile right away, because it might start off a kind of a nuclear firestorm. I will just turn down the valve on the oil and starve the Americans out. Think what happens Mr. Speaker, if as vulnerable as we are to imported Middle Eastern oil, if we let Ahmadinejad crank down that valve at the Straits of Hormuz and shut down or shut off 42.6 percent of the world's marketable oil supply. It wouldn't take anywhere near that amount to bring this economy in the United States to its knees, because we are too dependent. If they did that, and our economy would shrink down into at least a recession, most likely a severe depression, and us going into a recession or depression immediately impacts China, China is dependent upon our economy because we are buying a lot of their goods, and China is also dependent upon foreign oil to provide energy for their growing demand that they have. They have a voracious appetite for oil and they are reaching out across the world to purchase more and more oil reserves and find ways to keep that oil flowing into their country. But if Ahmadinejad gets his hands on that oil, that 70 to 80 percent of the Iraqi oil, and flush with cash cranks that valve down on the world's exportable oil supplies, the United States economy could be pushed into a collapse, Mr. Speaker. The Chinese economy could be pushed into a collapse, Mr. Speaker. And the winner would be Iran, who into have free sailing all over the Middle East, and the winner would also be Russia, who has a tremendous supply of oil. They would become more and more cash flush, more and more rich, more and more able to buy the things that strengthen them militarily. This equation that I have described, Mr. Speaker, describes why Putin in Russia has been taking a more and more belligerent posture as the weeks and months unfold. He sees this chess game folding out on the world's chess board. I don't know why we can't see it here in the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker. But that is the reality we are faced with in that scenario. So, we must put our cross hairs on the Iranian nuclear capability today. We must say to them, you will never be a nuclear powered country, you will never have a military means to have nuclear power and a means to deliver it, and we have made a decision that that won't happen here in the United States and we are going to go through every diplomatic channel possible, try every kind of sanction, every kind of blockade, every kind of diplomacy that we can, to convince Iran they should stop, back off, dismantle their nuclear effort. But that would be the only option for them. The other option would be to eliminate their endeavor to become a military nuclear power. That is where the negotiations need to start in Iraq. Iran has to back off. They need to understand that their involvement in the proxy war against the United States and Iraq accelerates the day when they will, with a thunderous response, lose their nuclear capability should they persist down this path they are heading down. That is where the crisis is today. But the people in Iran have something to say about what kind of a country they are. And they have something to say about what kind of country they will become. I am hopeful that the people in Iran will look at their leader, who appears to be an unstable and very much a vindictive, violent man, and come to the streets of Iran and find a way to replace him with someone who can bring Iran back into the 21st century so they can become a moderate, Islamic state that can deal with science and technology and education and use their oil wealth to help support the people in the country rather than the kind of violence being planned by Ahmadinejad. That will help a lot, if Iran should become a free country. For example, Afghanistan today is a free country. Iraq today is a free country. Iran sits in the middle. They are a geographical link between the two. If Iran can be flipped over and become a regime-change free country, we will have the core of the Middle East, the center for the kind of Islamic jihadists that are coming after us from around the world, after Western civilization itself. The center would become a free territory where there are far less odds that they would be raising the jihadists that they are in the environment that they have today. There would still need to be some things done in the mountains of Pakistan and within Saudi Arabia. There needs to be things done in Great Britain, for that matter; but that would take us a long way towards a final victory in the global war on terror. And being able to eliminate real estate and places where they could train and foster terrorism would be an essential key in a final victory against these Islamic jihadists. Mr. Speaker, I have spoken to the issue of energy and why we have to do something about energy, and that is take the money out of the hands of our enemies and put it into the hands and the control of the American people. But at the same time, we must succeed in the Middle East. We have come this far. We are very, very close to being able to see an Iraq that can be an ally, a trading ally, a military ally, a partner that will see us as a friend to them in the Middle East. It has been a precarious path that we have followed. I believe it has been the right path when you look back and ask the question: What did you know and when did you know it? You can argue each side of everything, but where we are today is where we are. We must move forward and succeed. The military situation there is not a crisis. It is not precarious, but we do have a situation where there is far too much violence there; and a strategy which has been driven by our President, what is commonly called ``the surge,'' has reduced the casualties in Baghdad and divided Baghdad into nine different sections to where it is far easier to control the smuggling of arms and devices between regions in the city. If we can resolve that in Iraq, and I believe we will get there if we don't lose our resolve here, then we have taken a giant step forward. As we become less dependent on Middle East oil, the United States gets back on stable footing again. Now, we have a situation also, though, where it is not just that we are purchasing foreign oil, and that is working against us in our balance of trade. In addition to that, we are importing more and more goods from foreign countries and our trade deficit has gone up from 2 years ago, $617.7 billion in our trade deficit. Last year it was $725 billion. This year, the number usually comes out in February, but the trend has been for our trade deficit to increase about 20 percent a year. I think we can look to expect that is going to happen, and we will see a trade deficit in the $800 billion or more category, Mr. Speaker. Now, there are those who are not concerned about the trade deficit. They say as long as we can buy cheap products built by cheap labor, we should not be concerned. And they will say because we are deficit spending, we shouldn't be concerned about borrowing money from the Chinese bank, for example. Well, I would ask those people who are so confident as money shifts in this direction, what would be your ideal kind of economy? Why wouldn't you start with an ideal, lay out the metric for the ideal economy, and then try to achieve the ideal? I would submit it this way. I would like to have a balance of trade. I would like to not be buying more than we are selling. Any business can think of it in those terms. If you are in business and you are producing $100,000 worth of product a year and are selling that out on the open market, and you turn around and you are buying back $110,000 worth of product, it is easy to see you are going in the red. That is how the trade deficit works. There are currencies that change that equation some, and there is credit that changes that, and the credit on our capital; but I would want to ideally start with a balance in trade, and then work to have an export surplus because the wealth comes back to the United States and we would hold their collateral. That would be one thing. I would want to have a balanced budget here in the United States. I would want to spend no more than I take in. I am different than the PAYGO argument that comes here because I think we have to keep taxes low so we have a vibrant economy that has an incentive. We did that. In 2001 and 2003, we did two rounds of tax cuts. That saved our economy from an inevitable recession and perhaps a depression that came from the bursting of the dot-com bubble about the time President Bush took office, and it also came from the September 11 attacks, which we know about, the money we had to spend to set up homeland security and the billions of dollars to protect ourselves, and also the billions of dollars we had to spend militarily to take our fight to the enemy. But this economy needs to be a strong economy. It needs to be healthy and vibrant. I am for balanced trade, perhaps with an export surplus; and I am for a balanced budget, and I am for paying off the national debt. I think we need to do all of that in the form of reducing the demand on discretionary spending in the United States, by setting up the long-term reform of Social Security and Medicare so that growing entitlement funds can be shrunk down, because as it grows, there is going to be nothing left in the budget except Medicare and Medicaid and the interest on our national debt. It is always easier to fix the problem earlier than later before it becomes a crisis. We didn't have the political will to do that a couple of years ago when President Bush went across the country and gave speech after speech promoting the reform of Social Security. That needs to be done some time. It will happen when the young people start to come forward and start to have their voice heard, along with the senior citizens in America. But this budget needs to be balanced. We need to end up with a surplus and collect more than we spend and use that to pay down our national debt. Some of that happened. It happened up until the September 11 attacks. That took us out of the balanced budget that was there. Mr. Speaker, it is time to get back to it. One of the ways we can do that is not with a gimmick; it is with a total tax reform. The most aggressive organization we have for an agency in America, the one that goes out and really does their job is the Internal Revenue Service. They collect that money that they have due. They are effective and efficient at it. We have a Tax Code that is more pages than I can remember, and more complicated than anybody can comprehend. And that Tax Code is the best Tax Code that money can buy. K Street here in Washington, D.C. and the lobby that is here has created this Tax Code by getting their little exemption and their little tax deduction. As this adds up, it gets more complicated and convoluted, and it suppresses the growth in our economy, Mr. Speaker. So what we need to do is look at this Tax Code that we have and say we can't fix this Tax Code. It is beyond anybody's comprehension how to do it, and it is beyond our ability to get it solved politically. The only thing you can do is take the Tax Code and throw it over the side. I would be happy to pitch it into the bay in Boston Harbor and eliminate the Tax Code and never let it grow back again. Also, eliminate the IRS because there is where it would grow, another type of a tax policy that we have today, and go to a national sales tax, a national consumption tax, a fair tax, Mr. Speaker. If we do that, we have changed the entire dynamic of our taxation in America. It works like this: Ronald Reagan once said what you tax you get less of. If we stick with the tax side, what you tax you get less of. What we do here, in our lack of infinite wisdom, is Uncle Sam has a first lien on all productivity in America. If you punch the time clock at 8 in the morning, Uncle Sam wants his money first. You will work there until April 14 or April 15 before he gets his due, and then you can start giving your money to the State and on down the line. After a while, you get to keep some of the fruits of your own labor. But the Federal Government has the first lien on your labor starting the second you go to work anytime. If you pick up the phone and make those extra sales calls for that commission, he has the first lien on that commission. If you invest your money and you collect the interest, maybe passbook savings, Uncle Sam has the first lien on the productivity of your investment. If it is a pension income, if it is Social Security income, if it is capital gains, if it is any kind of productivity at all, your labor, your investment, Uncle Sam has the first lien on all of that productivity. So people make decisions like, I don't think I want to work that extra overtime this week. It is not really worth it because too big of a piece comes out of my check and goes to the Federal Government. I think I'll take the day off. I am going to enjoy life a little bit. After all, I don't get to keep enough of the money I earn. Or, I am not going to expand that extra line in my factory because, after all, I am in a tax bracket that says I can maintain a level of comfort here, so I am not going to take that risk because the reward is not great enough. That is part of the vision that is going on also. I am not going to make the extra phone calls for the extra sales because I don't want to pay the tax. I want to be able to keep the money I earn. That is the mind-set of anyone. The psychology has always been the reason a controlled economy, a managed society, like, for example, flat out pure communism or European-style socialism, the reason the Soviet Union collapsed was because they did not let people have an incentive to be productive and let them earn and keep the money they made. They took that away from them, and human beings being not as rational as capital is, but human beings being rational, they make those decisions that I talked about, those decisions like, I am not going to put out this effort. You have heard this: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. That was the belief of Karl Marx and that was the belief of Lenin and that was the belief of Mao Tse-Tung. But the equation that they miss is if you are going to take from a producer according to their ability, and maybe they have the ability to produce five or six times as much as somebody who has the need, why in world would they put out five or six times the productivity of the person who is going to be receiving the fruits of their labor? The answer to that is of course they won't, and of course they don't, and that is why the economies in managed societies like the Soviet Union will collapse because they don't tap into the best instincts of human nature, which is we want to work hard, we want to produce, we want the fruits of our labor. And by the way, if we are allowed to keep the fruits of our labor, we will also contribute and donate and tithe better than any other people on Earth. We do all of that, we need to go to a national sales tax, a consumption tax, so you decide when you pay your taxes. I think there is a Texan here with something boiling up inside him, and I would be very happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I have had the privilege to be seated here in this Chamber and listen to the presentation over the last probably hour and a half or so. It is quite interesting as I listened to the presentation made by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the concern about the imbalance in trade, which I am concerned about, and the argument that we need not necessarily free trade, but fair trade. As I carefully listened to the 60-minute presentation, I hear some things that are wrong, and I agree with some of them, as a matter of fact, most of them, but I heard no suggestions on how we are going to fix this, except ask the administration to do it better and get it right. I think it is important for us, Mr. Speaker, if we are going to identify these issues that we are going to call problems that we should also step forward and have the will and the foresight to present some solutions. So in the time I have had here to listen now, I will just present some solutions that I would have liked to have heard from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, because I think we ought to be here to fix the problems we have. First, I don't have quite the same number of trade deficit that the gentlelady from Ohio presented in the poster here just a little bit ago. I recall that 2 years ago, actually now 3 years ago, our trade deficit was a minus $617.7 billion. Last year it was a minus $725 billion. Her number was slightly higher than that. We should by now have the records for the 2006 trade deficit. I have not had access to that number, and I note the gentlelady from Ohio didn't present a number for the 2006 trade deficit, but it had been increasing about 20 percent a year for several years. I heard no evidence that convinces me that NAFTA is the only reason. In fact, I will submit that there are a number of other reasons that we have a trade deficit. I would challenge my colleagues, join with me in some of these solutions that I will present here. But before I do so, I am just going to go back and review some of the remarks that were made and then respond to them with solutions rather than lamentations, Mr. Speaker. The gentleman from Wisconsin called for fair trade. He showed a poster that has a minus $233 billion trade deficit with China. I don't dispute that number. I expect that is as very close, if not as accurate, a number as there is out there. But that is a portion of and not even a majority of our trade deficit that we have from a global imbalance. Then the gentleman from Illinois made the statement ``We need fair trade.'' Fair trade in fact was called for by I believe every one of the speakers, and at least no one disagreed with that. Well, Mr. Speaker, I refuse to allow my staff to use the word ``fair.'' In fact, I refused to let my children use the word ``fair'' as they were growing up, because I know something that most Americans know, and that is anyone who has raised two or more children knows there is no such thing as fair. If you are going to use ``fair'' and be able to define the word ``fair,'' you have to be talking about a county fair or a State fair or some other type of gathering where people display their wares, because the term ``fair'' is not definable; it isn't universally understood. So one person's idea of fair is another person's idea of a injustice, and it will be ever thus. We can talk about justice and equity, and we can talk about using the equal enforcement of trade agreements and laws, and I think we should do that; but to even try to define what we would like to do with a term like ``fair,'' we have chosen the vaguest term that there is in the dictionary and the one that submits itself to anyone's redefinition of it. Also the statement was made that we have no options, we have to vote these fast track trade agreements up or down. That is not true. Yes, they come to the floor as unamendable, but a couple of years ago, maybe 3 years ago, I amended two unamendable trade agreement, and I did so in committee. These were trade agreements that had to do with Singapore and Chile. Ambassador Zoellick had negotiated immigration agreements into those trade agreements. And so with the wisdom and tenaciousness of the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), we brought those trade agreements before the Judiciary Committee, and although they were unamendable trade agreements, up-or- down, to be voted on, we had a mock markup in committee. And in that mock markup, I was successful in getting two mock amendments put on the mock bill. And when we finished with our analysis of the trade agreements that had been negotiated by the U.S. Trade Representative and had perfected the trade agreements in the process of going through the mock markup, the U.S. Trade Representative then, even though it was supposedly impossible to go back and reopen those negotiations, reopened those negotiations and adapted those two amendments into the trade agreement, and we struck out the immigration language out of the trade agreement. It had no business. It had no place there, and that is one way you can effect a change if you disagree with the trade agreements. But it sounds to me like the people that are speaking here are against all trade agreements no matter what they might be. They will always be able to oppose any agreement no matter how it is defined because they will always reserve the right to redefine their own term called fair. It will be, it isn't fair. We can't do it because it is not fair. Well, you have to be more specific than that. As I listened to my colleague from Iowa talk about the Maytag issue at Newton, and that has left a big hole in the central part of Iowa, and I look back on the 34\1/2\ years of my marriage, and there has never been anything but a Maytag washer and dryer in my home washing clothes for our family. That is deep in our heritage, and we are loyal to the brand. But part of the equation also was that, when it came time to resolve the labor disagreements and to settle the salary and benefit and pension plans, the burden of that was just too high to be able to hold the jobs in Iowa. It is too bad, but those were some of the circumstances that no one over here uttered, when you get collective bargaining and it drives the package up so high; when you overplay your hand, you lose the company. You don't have the option to back down, and the union doesn't come forward and say, I will be happy to take a $2 or $5 pay cut, or maybe we will negotiate the health care plan or do a package that has to do with our contribution versus our benefits, defined contributions versus defined benefits plan, that stuff is hard to get when you have a lucrative labor agreement, collectively bargained agreement, those types of agreements could not be resolved favorably to Maytag. That is one of the reasons why we no longer have Maytag centered up in Newton, Iowa. I think we need to talk about that. Yes, these jobs are going overseas. But, also, Maytag made an investment overseas to go over there and make washing machines to sell to the Chinese. They invested initially $70 million in that plant. And, finally, after some years of trying, they couldn't make it work and pulled out of that investment. There are many, many different components to these transactions. It isn't just simply American corporations, that they are simply greedy capitalists and that they quickly move our industries overseas. They are reluctant to go. But we set up the burden of taxation and regulation. And then you have the compensation packages of the collective bargaining agreements; and that being the environment here in the United States, having then to compete against the cheaper labor overseas. All of those things work against us, not just the corporations deciding to make a decision that is simply based on greed. That is not so, Mr. Speaker. Also, the argument, the gentlelady from Iowa said our trade deficits soar, we need a new trade model. I heard no proposal of what that new trade model is. It is criticism, but it is not a solution. We need to provide solutions. The other gentlewoman from Iowa talked about Hershey is moving out and going to Mexico. I am saddened to see that go. But some of my colleagues who have been here a number of years have had an opportunity to put a fix in place so we could sustain, could have sustained some of these businesses that we are losing, and we could still sustain many of these businesses today if we could get to work and roll up our sleeves and do the right thing for real tax reform. That would be to simply bring forward H.R. 25, the FAIR Tax. And that eliminates the IRS and the Income Tax Code, so it eliminates personal and corporate income tax. It eliminates the tax on your interest income, your dividend income and your capital gains. And it eliminates the AMT. It takes the tax off your savings and investment, and your pension and Social Security. It does all of those things. One of the things I would think my colleagues would want to do if they are concerned about the trade deficit, I would think that they would want to border adjust the taxes so we weren't operating here in the United States at a disadvantage, having to put taxes on the cost of our goods and be competing against imported goods from overseas that do not have that tax component in there. That is part of what they are talking about, is unfair trade, subsidized goods was the term used by the gentleman from Pennsylvania, the onslaught of foreign subsidized goods. Well, they may be subsidized goods, and I am sure there is a definition that can be applied to that, but we do the opposite. We put the tax burden on everything that we manufacture in this country, on materials and labor, and it has to be built in and embedded in the cost of the things that we sell, because corporations, companies that are in business to sell a good or a service or any combination of the two, do not pay income tax. They can't pay income tax. They collect it from people. The end user, the last stop on the retail chain, are the ones that pay the taxes, but it is collected through the companies that sell the goods and the services, and then they transfer it to the IRS in the form of corporate income tax, business income tax and sometimes the personal income tax of the executives and the shareholders as well. Corporations and businesses don't pay taxes; they collect it from real people. The consumer is the last stop on the retail dollar. Once we can get our minds around that absolute truth, then we can begin to talk about how we can work together to border adjust our taxes and become a more competitive Nation again. The studies that we have had done indicate that the components boil down to this: On average, 22 percent of a product that is on the shelf for sale here in the United States, 22 percent is the embedded cost of the tax structure that the company that is producing that product has to build into the price. So that says, if you are selling a widget and that widget is a dollar, 78 cents is the cost of the widget and 22 cents is the cost of the tax. If you put that on some more expensive items, go from the $1 widget to the $30,000 vehicle, and we have millions of dollars worth of vehicles coming into the United States every year. Some of our trade deficit, I can tell you, would be $800 million worth of Mazdas that come over from Japan every year, made in Japan, put on ships, brought here, off-loaded into the United States and marketed on our dealers' lots, $800 million. As that price goes up, and that is a couple-of- year-old number, we could be into a billion dollars, and that would be one-700th of our entire trade deficit because we are buying Mazdas but we are not exporting Chevys or Fords back to Japan. If we sent a billion dollars worth of Chevys or Fords to Japan instead of them sending a billion dollars of Mazdas to us, then we pick up a two-for, and we reduce that trade deficit by $2 billion, not $1 billion. But if you put a Chevy and a Mazda on a dealer's lot and each has a sticker price of $30,000 and they are comparable vehicles, comparable quality and accessories that are built into that price so the competition will establish that price and they are selling against each other at $30,000; if we pass H.R. 25, the FAIR Tax and we cease taxing all productivity in America and we put the tax on sales instead of income, a national sales tax, that $30,000 Chevy, the price of it goes down. If you take the tax component out, you take 22 percent out of that $30,000 Chevy, and it takes us into that area of $23,400. The Mazda stays at $30,000. When we put our tax back in, we have to build it back in, the sales tax on the price, now the Mazda goes up by 23 percent, and it ends up as a $39,000 Mazda. That is the amount you would write the check for to drive it off the lot. But you would write the check for the Chevy or the Ford at $30,400. That is an $8,600 marketing advantage that we would gain simply by getting rid of the IRS and the Income Tax Code and put our tax back on sales and allowing these companies and competition to drive the embedded tax component out of everything that we are producing here in America. That gives us a 28 percent marketing advantage here in the United States. So when foreign companies are competing against American manufacturers, they would have to look at that huge 28 percent advantage that we would have. I can tell you, there would be a lot more products produced in the United States. I will take you back to the $800 million worth of Mazdas coming over from Japan by ship every year. Those cars are made in Japan. A lot of the components are put together in Japan, and wherever you make something, that is where the labor and jobs are. When we are purchasing from a foreign country, we are transporting and exporting our job market there. Now, that is true for everything that we are purchasing that is a good from a foreign country. Those jobs, whenever we send money overseas and purchase a good from a foreign country, we are also transferring jobs there. We pass the FAIR Tax, those jobs come back home, many of them, and we hold most jobs here. We end up with a 28 percent marketing advantage, and it does a number of other things. That is, it doubles our economy in 10 to 15 years. It fixes our balance of trade, that minus-$725 billion, probably a larger number now, because we can compete not only here better, and we will be pulling jobs back here and creating more jobs here in the United States, but also our export markets. Many times the export markets turn on a 1 or 2 percent margin. We pick up instantaneously a 28 percent advantage from where we are right now if we can take the tax component out of the products that we are selling. So we do a number of good things. We hold our manufacturing base here. We hold our jobs here, especially our blue collar jobs, the jobs like Hershey and Maytag, that are leaving America. These are manufacturing jobs after manufacturing jobs. Those kinds of jobs stay here. We create more jobs here. These are American- made products, and the dollars will stay here. As those dollars stay here, they turn over seven times in a community, as the economists tell us they do. They create more and more and more jobs. Pretty soon we would have that trade deficit gone. We would end up with a trade surplus. We would end up with a healthy, robust industrial base in America and a strong economy that would be doubled in 10-15 years. If we do that, the rest of the world would have to stand up and take notice. We are already the most dynamic economy the world has ever seen. But we have a problem, a series of them. But, Mr. Speaker, the problem I am speaking of is the problem of going back and indexing Alexander Tyler's statement, that when a democracy realizes it can vote itself benefits from the public treasury, on that day the democracy ceases to exist. We are at least 44 percent of Americans not paying income tax. If we go to a national sales tax, a FAIR Tax, that does a number of things, but it untaxes the poor, and I will get to that in a moment. But it also makes taxpayers out of every consumer in America. And we are all consumers. Each time we step up, and I think of little Johnny stepping up to the counter, and he is going to buy his baseball cards, and he is going to put a couple of dimes up there for Uncle Sam. Those children from little on up will understand that the Federal Government is expensive, and they will know that they are funding the Federal Government, and they will be buying into the Federal Government. And they will also be advocating for let me have a few less services and let me keep a few more of my dimes. That penetrates into young people. I remember a story told by a candidate for Congress in last summer's primary election. He had a little son; I believe his name was Michael. Little Michael had saved up his money. Little Michael, he picked up his box of Skittles, and he had counted out 89 cents for the box of Skittles. So he put his money up on the counter with the box of Skittles, carefully counted out 89 cents, and the lady at the check-out register rang it up and said that will be 96 cents. He did not have anymore money. He got that look on his face of what am I going to do; they are 89 cents; I have 89 cents. The lady said, well, with the tax. Little Michael turned to his dad and said, Dad, I have to pay tax on Skittles? Yes, that is what you have to do if we eliminate the IRS and the Federal income tax code. You could be a consumer who chooses when to pay your taxes, and like little Michael, pay taxes on Skittles at age seven or eight or less, and realize how expensive the Federal Government actually is. That changes the psyche of an entire culture. People that are always looking to the Federal Government for a solution begin to realize they are funding the Federal Government and they are part of the solution. They are bought into this. Going for a national sales tax, a consumption tax, a fair tax, Mr. Speaker, does everything good that everyone else's tax policy does and more besides, and that is not just my words. Those are also the words of one famed chairman who has been the lead guru on economics here in America for a lot of years. It fixes everything that you can fix with a tax policy. It fixes everybody, all the pieces that come along here, puts them all together and does more besides. It border adjust taxes and it provides incentive for savings and investment. It doubles our economy in 10 to 15 years. It repairs our balance of trade and puts it on a surplus of balance of trade, and this growing economy then, on top of that, Mr. Speaker, it solves our deficit, our deficit in our revenue that we have here, our deficit spending because, when the economy doubles, we are going to have a lot more dollars that come flowing in here. We replace the payroll tax, the Social Security, the Medicare and the Medicaid, with a consumption tax portion. I advocate for a 23 percent embedded tax that is made of these components. I said I would get back to this. Three percent of that 23 percent provides a rebate into everybody's household to untax everyone in America up to the poverty level. So let us say the poverty level is $20,000 for a family of four, and I think the number is actually $18,500 for a family of four. They would pay about $458 in a month in taxes if they were going to consume to the level of their income. So this 3 percent goes into a fund, and immediately at the beginning of every month, it would do an automatic transfer into each household as registered by the Health and Human Services for the level of sales tax that that family would pay just up to the poverty level. So anybody that is living at the poverty level or below pays no tax, pays no national sales tax, but those that start spending above that, above that $18,500, they start then paying the sales tax on that until you get to someone like I presume Bill Gates would be a rather robust consumer, I do not know that, but if I were he, I would be a robust consumer. People of that kind of income will be the ones who will pay the highest percentage of tax off their income. This is progressive, but also, it untaxes the poor. The first 3 percent collected is the portion that goes in to untax everyone up to the poverty level, and then those of us who spend more than the poverty level will pay our fair share of taxes going on up. That is 3 percent. Eight percent goes to replace the payroll tax, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, so that we no longer have to have that most regressive kind of a tax. That is a very regressive tax on especially the lower income people. There is no exemption for you if you are only making $10,000 a year. You are going to take the .0765 percent times two, and that is 15.3 percent, multiply that by your $10,000, and you are going to give up $1,530 to the payroll tax even if you only make $10,000 a year. So you can see, Mr. Speaker, that is a 15 percent tax on some of the poorest people in America. We eliminate that tax and put it back on consumption. And by the way, when people max out on Social Security, the most wealthy people are paying at a lower rate on the payroll tax than the poor are among us. So payroll tax is a very regressive tax. We replace it with 8 percent. We untax everyone up to the poverty level with 3 percent, that is 11, and then to replace the income tax itself and be revenue neutral that takes a 12 percent embedded tax. That is how we get to 23. This plan works. Every time I turn this rubrics cube around and look at it another way, it looks better and better and better, but my colleagues over here are content to stand here night after night, give us a list of lamentations on what is wrong with the President, the administration, the previous majority, the decisions that have been made here in this Congress over the last 15 years on trade. They argue that free trade is fine as long as it is fair trade, but I did not hear anyone advocate for any trade agreement that they ever agreed with. So that makes us trade isolationists unless they can come forward with some real changes. Well, I will submit that I can support trade agreements. I can support them, Mr. Speaker, if we can have smart trade, but also, we need to have a more competitive environment for America's producers. That means pass the fair tax. Also, a couple of years ago, I was sitting over in China. As I watched the negotiations go on and engaged in them, I saw the eyes of the negotiators on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, and I watched their smiles and I watched their heads nod. We were talking to them about the billions of dollars of intellectual property that is pirated by the Chinese, and it is essentially a national standard. At least there is so much of it that goes on, there is not a punishment going on for it, this standard of stepping in and stealing our intellectual property as quick as it comes on the market. We might have a Hollywood movie that comes out and before the premier, the DVD has been pirated by the Chinese and it is on the streets in its black market version, undercutting the intellectual property and the creativity of Hollywood. Those things happen. The copyrights and also the patents and the trademarks, those 3 pieces of intellectual property are consistently and persistently and strategically pirated by the Chinese. The Russians, too, only the Russians just are not as good as it yet, and they are getting better. As I listened to those negotiations and as we put pressure on them over there to bring criminal charges against those who are stealing U.S. intellectual property rights and selling Rolex watches, fake Rolex watches would be another example that brings to that mind's eye, Mr. Speaker. As we put pressure on them to bring criminal charges and civil charges, they said to us, well, we are fining people for stealing U.S. intellectual property and we are moving forward more aggressively to enforce. So I asked them for a report on those fines, and they gave me 150 pages. It was all in Chinese, Mr. Speaker, so I did not really have the ability to determine that except that, by their witness and their verbal presentation to me, they had levied some fines for X number of yuan, Chinese dollars, but we also know that a government-owned company, that if it is owned by the government and if the government fines that company, it is like me deciding I am going to fine myself and I will take a couple of dollars out of this pocket and put it over here in this pocket. Makes no difference to a Communist State and State-owned businesses if the State fines the company. The State is the company, and so those statements did not move me very much, Mr. Speaker. Then I asked about criminal charges, and they said, yes, we have brought some criminal charges and we are getting more rugged with our enforcement. So I asked the point blank question: Who have you locked up in jail? Who is in jail today because you are stealing our intellectual property? And of course, the answer was, Mr. Speaker, well, we have not locked anybody up just yet, but we are moving forward to enforce. Well, I came to the conclusion that the Chinese saw it as a price of doing business. The cost of doing business was to smile and nod and speak nice and make nice to Americans that are over there that want to alleviate the burden of the pirating of the U.S. intellectual property rights and that they will continue smiling and nodding and hosting Americans as long as we are willing to come over there to complain, but nothing is going to happen. Nothing is ever going to happen unless we bring some leverage against them. So I will submit a second solution for the folks over here and ask them: Do you care to weigh in on this? I would be happy to yield to you, and I hope you come to the floor at a later time, too, or we can get together and you can sign on to some of this legislation that actually provides solutions to the problems that you so articulately laid out here tonight. But one of these solutions is this. Direct the U.S. Trade Representative to conduct a study to determine and evaluate the loss to American intellectual property rights holders to the Chinese for the pirating of those intellectual property rights. Once that amount is quantified, and Mr. Speaker, I can tell you it is in the billions, then direct the U.S. Trade Representative to levy a duty on all goods that come from China in an amount equivalent to be able to recover the complete loss that American property rights holders have sustained because of the piracy of their property rights and to distribute those proceeds back into the hands of the people that hold the copyrights, the trademarks and the other intellectual property rights. That is another concrete solution that I would lay out here for the folks that come to the floor and talk about what is wrong but do not provide a solution and do not provide a way to fix things and turn them around and make them right, Mr. Speaker. I did not necessarily come here tonight, though, to talk about the shortfalls of the presentation that was made by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I came here tonight, Mr. Speaker, to talk about a great big issue that we have to face in this country. As I stand here, this being the week beginning the 5th of March, it has been my understanding for some two to three weeks that the senator from Massachusetts, Senator Kennedy, was preparing to introduce a, I will put it in quotes, a ``comprehensive'' immigration bill sometime the week of the 5th of March. I am hopeful that that does not happen, at least coming out of him, the subcommittee chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee of the Judiciary on the Senate side. We saw what they did last year over in the Senate and actually passed, and it was an abysmal piece of policy, Mr. Speaker. Now they are winding up to try it again, same person or persons, same face, same philosophy. That same philosophy is amnesty first, enforcement maybe never. I remember Senator Kennedy standing out here on the Mall just on the West side of our West portico when we had demonstrators by the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands last spring. He said to them, and these demonstrators, many were not lawfully present in the United States, one can presume I think accurately, and he said to them, some say report to be deported; I say to you, report to become an American citizen. That was the clarion call of the left wing liberals and the voice of Senator Kennedy calling for people, come to America, come here illegally and when you are here, we are going to pave the way for a path to citizenship for you and hand over to you all the benefits of American citizenship. Well, I say to Senator Kennedy, if your mantra is amnesty, those of you who stand on amnesty, you deserve to be branded with the scarlet letter A for amnesty and treated as such because amnesty undermines the rule of law in this country. These are some pillars of America that are essential for us in order to be able to sustain ourselves and sustain ourselves into the future. In order to identify those pillars of American civilization, we need to look back and identify what has been some of the roots of American exceptionalism. Why are we an exceptional Nation with such a dynamic economy? Why have we been so robust as a people? There are a number of reasons, but one I would point out is that because we have brought in immigrants from all over the globe, because it was difficult to get here, because many of them had to sell themselves for seven years to pay off their passage to the United States, to work off the cost of that ride aboard ship across from Western Europe, for example, the people that had that sense of a dream, the sense of wanting to come here to realize their American dream, to raise their families here, they also had that sense of adventuresomeness. Within all of that, the dream, the industriousness, the creativity, the sense of adventure, that desire to join with us in our manifest destiny as we settled a continent in lightening speed, all of that was the vitality that came in with our immigration. We were able to skim the cream off of the crop in Nation after Nation after Nation. Donor Nations gave up a measure of their most vital population because they came here so they could spread their wings and they could excel. That is one of the pillars of American exceptionalism. Without belaboring that point very much any more, another pillar of American exceptionalism has been the foundation of our Constitution, which is drafted based upon the principles that you will find in the Declaration. And in the Constitution are our basic rights, freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, and the second amendment rights, the right to keep and bear arms, and what used to be in our fifth amendment, the right to property, which says, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' But now after the Keloe decision, it says, ``nor shall private property be taken without just compensation,'' the for public use words have been eliminated from the fifth amendment by the Supreme Court in the Keloe decision. But up until that time, the sanctity of property rights rode right along with the sanctity of our first amendment rights, and we have done a good job of defending our second amendment rights. Throughout this is the vitality of America, because we have individual rights that are guaranteed, and they are passed down from God to each one of us. Then the individuals, we the people, then hand that responsibility over to our elected representatives to represent us in places like this House of Representatives. But we have guaranteed rights, and those guaranteed rights and the rights of due process and to be protected from discrimination in a court of law have given us a sense of justice and a sense of the rule of law that gives every American, every American citizen and those who aspire to be American citizens, solid ground on which to stand, confidence that it is predictable into their future so that they can invest capital, borrow money against their property, be able to pay off the mortgage, be able to reach for the stars and dream, create and become an entrepreneur, be one of those people that really makes a big difference and realize their fortune and their dreams. These are some of the foundations of American exceptionalism, but the rule of law is a foundation for it. If we grant amnesty to people who broke the law to come here, then we have undermined the rule of law. If we undermine the rule of law, we don't have the culture for a strong America any longer. We have lost a pillar for what makes us great. So to reward law breakers does exactly that. As I listen to people that come in and testify in the immigration subcommittee meeting, I will often hear people; there will be those that come in and say, well, I was a beneficiary of the amnesty in 1986. I came in illegally when Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty bill; there was supposed to be some say as low as 300,000 that would get amnesty. I recall about 1 million, but we know that went over 3 million who received amnesty because the fraud was so rampant. The document forgers kicked into high gear. For everyone that got a designed amnesty in a legal fashion, there were others who by hook and crook got their amnesty. But all of them are for amnesty today if they happen to be alive and still in this country, and so are their families and their friends for amnesty. They say, well, it is not a hard thing to figure out. It was good for my dad or my mother or my brother or my uncle. Look, they are here in America, and they are doing well. Why shouldn't we give amnesty to other people, because it has been good to us. Now that is a very simple equation and not a very rational thought process but, for every one we grant amnesty to, there will be several who will say, I think that is a good idea because my friend or my relation thought amnesty was a good idea. If this becomes amnesty for 12 million or 15 million or for 20 million or more, and they bring in their extended families at the tune of maybe as many as 273 for every anchor baby that comes into the United States, we won't just have 12 or 15 or 20 or more million who have no respect and, in fact, contempt for the rule of law; we will have 100 or more million that will have contempt for the rule of law. That then would utterly destroy the rule of law in America. We would go back to a third world kind of country where the rule of law doesn't work down south in places like Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia. It is the rule of who has the power and who has the guns. I see that my friend and colleague from Texas, the wonderful doctor, whom I seek his counsel quite often, especially on these technical issues, has arrived on the floor. I would be happy to yield as much time as the doctor from Texas (Mr. Burgess), would consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa. In reclaiming my time, I thank the tenacious Texan for coming to the floor. He knows how much I revere Steve Forbes and Steve Forbes' financial acumen, as well as Alan Greenspan's. Perhaps on this subject matter it is one versus the other. I also notice the gentleman from Texas, however compelling the argument, didn't present a list of things that his tax policy does better than the tax policy I advocate. But I think we both recognize that either is far better than what we are dealing with today. There is nothing coming out of the other side of the aisle, particularly from the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel, except, well, we are going to figure out some ways to raise some of these existing taxes and maintain the convolutions that are within them. That is what we have to look forward to. The stock market last week had its worst single week in 4 years. I don't think its coincidental that the tax increases that this have come out of this Congress, the Pelosi Congress, and the noises coming out of the Ways and Means Committee, particularly the Chair, have added instability to our New York stock exchange and all of our financial markets. Once the inertia of this continues, we might find ourselves in a significantly poorer situation and not very far from now. I, also, on the immigration issue, there were some statistics that I had made a promise that I would unfold here and send this message out, and that is that we are faced with a tremendous amount of loss here in America in the lives of Americans because we are not enforcing at our border. As the gentleman from Texas said, we need to first stop the bleeding at the border and get that under control. We need to push all traffic, both, all products, all contraband, all human traffic, through the ports of entry. We need to beef up our ports of entry. You know, as I was sitting in an immigration hearing a couple or 3 years ago, I began to listen to the testimony about how many people died in the Arizona desert in a year. It is a significant number then; it was about 250. Now, I think it is 400. That is sad, and it is tragic, but I, again, wonder, the 11,000 a night that sneak into the United States across our southern border, I sat down there by the fence in the dark and had the infiltration going around on either side of me, and that 11,000 a night is calculated by this Border Patrol agent who testified they stop between a fourth and a third. And they stop 1,188,000 last year. If you do the math on that, that shows about 4 million a year get into the United States, and out of that 4 million, that works out to be about 11,000 a night. I would expect there is someone around here that knows the size of Santa Ana's Army when he came across the river. But me being a Yankee, I have to guess at it. I think it was about 6,000 strong. It was then that when they attacked the Alamo at San Antonio. But if it was 6,000 strong or less than that when they attacked the Alamo, I would just suggest that twice the size of Santa Ana's army comes across the border every single night. They may not be in uniforms, and they may not be marching in orderly ranks, and they may not be all of them armed, but they are carrying with them $65 billion worth of illegal drugs coming into the United States, $65 billion. And we are spending $8 billion a year on our southern border. And out of that $8 billion, that is $4 million a mile, and we are getting some kind of efficiency rating of our dollars of maybe 25 percent of enforcement, and often I hear a 10 percent number from the Border Patrol people that are down there. So what is the price to America? $65 billion worth of illegal drugs that comes out of the pockets of Americans. And the price in lives? The question that I ask and commissioned the GAO study for was, How many Americans die at the hands of those who do get across the border? And that number came out, not quite apples to apples and I had to do a calculation or two off of other government studies to match up with the GAO study from April of 2005, and it works out to be this: of the inmates in our Federal and State penitentiaries, 28 percent are criminal aliens. And I am going to presume that if we had enforced our laws, none of them would have been in the United States. So if you take 28 percent and you calculate that across the murders that we have in America, and that is about 16,000, a little over that, you will end up with a number 28 percent of that is 4,518 murder victims in the United States at the hands of those who are criminal aliens in the United States. You add to that the victims of negligent homicide, most of them drunk driving victims, and that is going to run 28 percent of those, that comes out to 4,746, Mr. Speaker. So you add those two together, that is 9,264 lives in America die violently every year at the hands of criminal aliens, presumably who would not be in the United States had we aggressively enforced our laws. That is a shocking and astonishing number. It is three times the amount of victims that we had on September 11, and that is an annual number every single year. Now, what does it cost us in dollars? Incarceration costs alone of the 267,000 illegal aliens that we have locked up in our prisons that we can count, and many of them we don't know, but we know we can count 267,000 and they will cost us in incarceration costs $6.7 billion just to lock them up. So we are spending $8 billion on the border on our Border Patrol for maybe 25 percent efficiency; we are spending $6.7 billion to lock up the criminal aliens and hold them in our prisons. And then, on top of that, the cost to murder victims, and that number has been calculated by government numbers at $3.9 million per murder victim. That comes out to be $17.05 billion in the cost of murder victims in dollars. And those victims of negligent homicide, I have measured that a little bit smaller at two-thirds of that overall cost of the murder victim because the investigations don't go so far. That comes to $11.37 billion. So I add these numbers up: Incarceration costs, $6.7 billion; the value of lost productivity in lives of murder victims, $17.05 billion; the value in lost productivity in lives at negligent homicide victims, $11.37 billion. It comes up to $35.12 billion out-of-pocket costs out of the United States just for those who were killed and to lock up those who kill. That does not include rape victims, assault victims, grand larceny and theft victims. That list goes on and on and on. Sex victims is another one. We have identified about 240,000 sex criminals who are criminal aliens. And of those, they have at least four identifiable victims. So you do the math on that. It is just a few short of 1 million victims of sex crimes, and many of those are sex crimes where there is a murder involved as well. The price to this society is unbelievable. It has only begun to be quantified. But to put it in a context, it works like this: $65 billion worth of illegal drugs is costing our economy $35 billion-plus a year, just the victims of murder, negligent homicide, and to lock up those who do the same, $35 billion. The value of the entire oil industry of Mexico is $28 billion. We pay more for murder victims and negligent homicide victims here in the United States and plus locking them up than all of the oil revenue of a pretty good oil-producing country the size of Mexico. And then, additionally, another $8 billion a year just to guard our southern border. And on top of that, there will be a report coming out very soon, if it is not out already, that shows that remittances is a term they use. This is a transfer of wages from mostly immigrants here in the United States, some illegal, some legal, out of the United States. That number has been going up incrementally year by year, and last year it was $45 billion a year that was transferred out of the United States in remittances, or usually wire transfers, back to home countries. This report that is due to come out if it is not out now will show $60 billion transferred in the last year, $30 billion of it going to Mexico, $30 billion of it going to other places in the western hemisphere, but usually the lion's share of that goes into Central America and the Caribbean. So when you look at the dollars transferred out of our society, $60 billion being sent out by labor, $65 billion paying for illegal drugs, $35 billion to pay for the cost of violent death, and $8 billion to guard the border, you can see, I think, Mr. Speaker, how massive this burden is here for the taxpayers and the victims of crime here in the United States. And one thing that I have always wondered about crime victims is that if society really paid that whole cost, if we had to write the check for the $35 billion or so that it costs for victims, the violent death in America at the hands of criminal aliens, if we had to write the check for that, the taxpayers would be outraged if it were a line item on an appropriations bill here in the United States Congress. But, instead, it isn't quite like that. There are costs picked up by the taxpayers, investigations, prosecutions, incarcerations. We pick those up. But the real costs comes out of the lives of the people who are their victims in great huge whopping chunks of their lives, their future, for their families, their productivity, and leaves a hole that can never be healed again. That is the burden that is all of this, and the injustice of it comes from the psychology that the State is the one that is wronged and the crime victim is made whole when the State believes that they are whole. And the crime victim in this country by our process is seldom made whole, and as a matter of fact, maybe is never made whole. So we have a big problem here in America. But sometimes there are faces that need to be identified, too, Mr. Speaker, and so I have gathered up some of the faces of these perpetrators. When I stand here and say 9,264 violent deaths in America, that is kind of faceless. I would point out, too, though, that maybe people were skeptical of my numbers. Maybe they think that those numbers are too high. I would ask, what are your numbers? Produce those. But here is another way of looking at it. Violent death in America is 4.28 out of every 100,000 people. Violent death in Mexico is 13.2 out of every 100,000. That is a good, solid three times the violent death rate in Mexico as it is the United States. Now, Mexico happens to be one of the more peaceful countries south of us. If you go to Honduras, their violent death rate is nine times that of the United States. And I don't know what El Salvador's is, they don't publish that. But when you get to Colombia, their violent death rate is 15.4 times the violent death rate of the United States. And, on top of that, the people that are coming in from those countries are young men. Young men will commit more than twice as many violent crimes as any other demographic group, in fact, significantly more than that. And they are coming from countries that are more violent, and they are bringing drugs from those countries to the tune of $65 billion. So there is crime and violence associated with the drugs; there is crime and violence associated with young men. There are young men coming from countries that are far more violent than in the United States. And when you sit down and do the math and calculate out, if you were going to predict the crime results here in America, you would find, Mr. Speaker, that the 28 percent that are incarcerated in our prisons today that are criminal aliens probably don't represent the overall crime impact on the United States society. But to personalize this a little bit, I have brought a few of the faces of these evil perpetrators down here to the floor. This, being one of the more evil. This is the face of Santos Cabrera Borjas. He is a 22-year-old, was a 22-year-old illegal alien from Honduras, that country that has got nine times the violent death rate of the United States. They can live with a lot higher level of violence. Here is the kind of violence you get with one of these people. On June 4, 2006, Borjas murdered an innocent 9-year-old boy named Jordin Paudler of Georgia by hacking him to death with a hatchet. Borjas was in a car that was driving through the neighborhood, it had a wobbly wheel, and this young 9-year-old boy Jordin Paudler called out to the car and said, You have got a bad wheel on your car, being helpful, like young boys will do, like a lot of good Americans are. And Santos Cabrera Borjas got out of the car and attacked this young 9-year-old boy with a hatchet and twice split his forehead with a hatchet and left it in, as I understand it, all because he tried to help. This is an example, and I will bring many of these examples to the floor as time unfolds, Mr. Speaker, and this is one of the faces of evil. There are many, many faces of evil. We have a big debate in front of us. I thank you.