Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. And so here we are today with a Congress that wants to micromanage a war, and a resolution or two or three over in the Senate that undermine our troops, and a resolution promise to come to the floor of this House next week that undermines our troops. As I have submitted, you cannot win a war by committee. You cannot fight a war by committee, but you can undermine the mission and you can put your troops at risk by doing so. We have top-notch commanders in the field, Madam Speaker. They have demonstrated their ability. We have the best military ever put into the field. Their morale is strong, their technology is there, their training is high. Their sense of mission and duty and sacrifice is strong and is profound. They want to complete their mission. I traveled over there with a lieutenant colonel who said to me, Don't pull us out of this. Don't save me. Don't save me. I volunteered. I am willing to take this risk. I want to take this burden off of my children. That is my duty to my country and to my family. I want to take this burden off my children. Don't try to save me. I had some Gold Star families in my office a couple of months ago, shortly before I went to Iraq, Gold Star families who have lost a son or a daughter in combat over in either Afghanistan or Iraq. As I listened to them, they just intensely pleaded with me, Do everything you can to promote a successful mission. We have heard much of the dialogue, but to look them in the eye and understand that intensity. And then, one of the bereaved fathers from California, his first name was John, said to me, It's different now. Our children have gone over there and fought and died on that soil. The soil in Iraq is sanctified by their blood. They paid their price for the freedom of the Iraqi people. You cannot walk away and leave that now. That is the vision of the Gold Star families. That is the commitment of our military. I can't find people in uniform in Iraq that don't support the mission, that aren't committed to the cause. But they ask me, why do we have to fight the enemy over here, the news media over in the United States, and the people that are undermining us in the United States Congress? It is an undermining. And I will make this prediction, Madam Speaker, that before this 110th Congress is adjourned, there will be an amendment or a bill that comes to this floor that seeks to unfund our military, one that is written off the pattern of the one at the end of Vietnam. And if that amendment comes and it is successful and it shuts off funding and our troops are forced by a defeatist attitude in Congress to pull out of Iraq, you will see a human suffering like this world has not seen since World War II. The price for failing to succeed will be cataclysmic. I don't have enough minutes to go into the description of all of that. But I will submit that we either succeed victoriously and leave Iraq a free democratic Iraq that can stand on its own two feet and defend itself and be represented by its people, we either do that, or the last battle in Iraq won't be fought over there, Madam Speaker. It will be fought here on the floor of this Congress through an appropriations bill that will seek to jerk the rug out from underneath our sacrificing military. And it would put this country in utter disgrace if that were to happen. So I have introduced a resolution, a resolution that supports and endorses our troops, one that recognizes the circumstances that we are in, the constitutional power and authority of our Commander in Chief, and stands up and defends our troops and our military all the way down the line. It says, in fact, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group says on page 73 that it could support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad or to speed up the training and equipping mission if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective. General Petraeus has written the plan. He has determined it would be effective; it is consistent with the Iraq Study Group, page 73. Look it up. General Petraeus has endorsed the plan, as I said. And on top of that, the cochair of the Iraq Study Group, former Secretary of State James Baker III, came back to this Congress and said: The President's plan ought to be given a chance. He wants us to support the Iraq Study Group, and that is the President's plan. That means a free and liberated Iraq, not a cut and run. Honor the troops for their service and honor their mission, and in fact honor their sacrifice. And I will fight this battle here where it is at greatest risk, Madam Speaker. And I urge my colleagues to do the same. I look forward to the debate next week and the open dialogue, and I hope that there is a rule that is offered here under the promise of this new and open Congress that would allow for amendments to be brought to the floor so that resolutions of this type actually have an opportunity to be debated in this Congress.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I hope the gentleman from Missouri would just suspend a moment before he leaves the floor. I would like to have the privilege to address the subject matter that he raised and the issue of the Iraq Study Group. And it is somewhat of a long book to read through, but I had a conversation this afternoon with the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), and I have lifted some things out of the Iraq Study Group's report that are clearly part of the President's agenda in Iraq, ``The New Way Forward,'' and Mr. Wolf assures me that the entire strategy in Iraq is right from the Iraq Study Group. So I point out to the gentleman from Missouri, and I would be happy to yield to him if he had a response, that the plan and the strategy of the President's for a new way forward in Iraq is not flying in the face of the Iraq Study Group. In fact, it follows directly down the path of the Iraq Study Group. If the gentleman from Missouri would care to engage, I would certainly be willing to yield. I came here to talk about that subject matter, in fact, Madam Speaker. And as I listened to my colleagues in preparation for this 60- minute Special Order, I will just take from the top some of the notes that come to mind. And one is, from the beginning, the gentleman from New Jersey spoke about ExxonMobil's highest corporate profits, the highest corporate profits, perhaps, ever in the history of the country, and the promise by this Pelosi Congress to provide energy independence. And then the gentlewoman from Ohio also spoke about ExxonMobil's profits, and the details of that were such that they have $40 billion in profits. Did they lower prices at the pump? Well, yes. Prices at the pump are a dollar a gallon cheaper than they were when oil prices were up to $75 a barrel. In fact, the prices at the pump almost directly reflect the lowering of the prices and the cost of the barrels of crude oil. And then, of course, the argument that there was a class action lawsuit against them for $3.5 billion. And one might take that as a concern until one sees that that, Madam Speaker, is Alabama. Well, Alabama is a venue shoppers' State of choice. Someone who has a lawsuit, and the attorneys across this country know this, when they want to bring a class action lawsuit, they look around and they say what State has favorable laws; what State produces favorable juries. Where is the class envy so focused and where they have a belief that you can put 12 men and women on a jury and they would lay out a punitive case against a company because they see a company as somehow or another an evil Big Brother. That is how you end up with these $3.5 billion or maybe $9 billion punitive damages in a class action lawsuit. We have dealt with this, Madam Speaker, in the Judiciary Committee in the years that I have been in this Congress, and we passed legislation out of the House, and not successful in the Senate, that would allow a company that operates in multiple States, in fact, maybe internationally, to be able to ask that a case that has been venue shopped and taken to a State where there is a minimal amount of economic activity but a maximum amount of punitive damages offered by the juries there, a State that has that kind of reputation, we have passed legislation here in the House that would allow that to be changed to a Federal venue rather than a State venue so that we can eliminate some of this ghastly profiteering that is taking place and the punishment of some of our best corporate citizens that we have in America. And I sat here tonight and listened to a handful of speakers, and two of them turned their focus on ExxonMobil, and they can't seem to understand that because we have large and successful oil companies in America that they are continuing to invest those profits into research and development and exploration. The gentlewoman from Ohio lamented that they bought back $10 billion worth of their stock. Can she speculate that perhaps that gives them enough control now that they can invest more of their profits in exploration? And if they invest more in exploration, that means there will be more oil on the market, which means then, of course, this law of supply and demand, which I believe in, which everyone on the Republican side of the aisle believes in, which some of the people on the other side of the aisle believe in, that supply and demand will drive down our prices. And that is exactly what has been happening, Madam Speaker. So I have to rise in defense of the companies that have provided cheap gas in this country, cheap oil in this country, and even still, whatever the price of gas is, milk is still more expensive. But not only that, the product that has been free all of my life, that product called ``drinking water'' and, in fact, now bottled water, is more expensive in the machine at the gas station per gallon than a gallon of gas is coming out of the pump right next to it by far. In fact, the last time I calculated that, it was a little over $9 a gallon to get your bottled water out of the machine at the gas station where gas was selling for about $2.15. So we need to keep this in perspective. We cannot be punishing those companies that are out there exploring and putting this oil on the market so that we have the convenience of relatively cheap fuel and the mobile society that we have. If we did not have these companies and you pulled their expertise and their capital and their reserves off the market, we would be far, far more dependent upon Middle Eastern oil and much, much more of America's economy and the profits that we have would be skimmed off to go to the Middle East to fund the people who are lined up against us militarily and philosophically. We are trying to get to energy independence. The Pelosi plan doesn't take us to energy independence. In the first 100 hours, one of those first six pieces of legislation, H.R. 1 through 6, pick your number, the one that addressed energy, went out and punished oil companies. It said, if you have leases, and particularly some leases that were perhaps profitable in the gulf coast, if you have leases that are deemed by the government to be profitable, we are going to require you, as a company, to renegotiate those leases. If you don't renegotiate, then we are going to forbid you, ban you, blackball you, black list you from a company that can negotiate future leases offshore, like, actually, I believe, domestically in shore on land and in the United States. Now, what kind of a deal is it when you have a deal, and the Congress comes here and passes legislation that says a deal is not a deal. Yes, you had a deal. We signed it all in good faith, but we found out it was a good deal. So now we are going to take some of that profit ourselves. I have spent my life in the contracting business, and I have invested a little bit of capital, and I was able to add a little more to it and roll a little back in and work hard and take some chances and work smart. Over a period of time, I was able to build a little capital up and get to the point where we could bid some projects that had some significant value. I have seen this kind of envy rise up when someone looks over and sees the industrious nature of their neighbor and decides they want some of that hard-earned profit. I have had it happen to me when I had a contract that I had significant profit in. I can think of one in particular where I was able to purchase some materials because I negotiated. I played my cards right, I went and built those relationships with all the people that were involved. It was a string of people through bankruptcy and banks. In the process of doing that, everything had to come together just right. The timing had to be just right. I was at great risk if I was not successful in putting that all together so that I could buy a large quantity of dirt for a reasonable price and it was handy. In fact, when I first talked to the banker about that piece of land, he said it would take $25,000 just to retain an attorney to represent me in negotiating the purchase of that. That gives you a measure of how difficult it was. But, in fact, I was successful purchasing that earth on that farm for the purposes of taking it into a project we were building, and, of course, I made some money. If I had been wrong, if I hadn't been able to complete that purchase, then it would have cost me a lot of money. But when the time came, the owners sat me down, and the engineers sat me down, and they said, well, we see that you are making money here, and now we would like you to discount the work you are doing because we think you can afford to do that. I looked them in the face, and I thought, well, why are you asking me to give some of my profit over to the owners? Isn't it all justly earned? And isn't it ethical, and didn't I bid this for a price, and was not it low bid? Not a no bid, but a low-bid contract? They said, well, yes, but we think that you have some to give, and so we are asking you to discount your work, do it more cleanly, because we think you can afford to. Well, what principle are you basing that judgment on because someone can't afford to discount something? How can you ask them to do that in a free enterprise society? I asked that question of the engineers, and they said, well, again, we they think that you can afford to do that. So let me ask you a question. If I had lost my shirt on this job, which I likely could have done, and maybe even lost my business, would you have stepped up and said things didn't go so well for you, here is some extra? They just smiled and snickered a little bit because they knew it was ludicrous to think that when things go bad that there is going to be anybody in there holding my hand or ExxonMobil's hands or Shell's or Chevron's or anybody else's. They suffer all of their losses, and they have to have a margin in the work that they do. We must have successful companies here operating out of the United States, and especially developing our domestic supplies of energy. If we fail to do that, then we are absolutely dependent upon middle eastern oil. If we are up to that 60 percent or so of our oil that is imported now, think what it would be like, Madam Speaker, if it was 100 percent. So this effort to go down here and argue that we will see energy dependence under Pelosi's term here in Congress, I would submit that they have done anything but. They have changed the deal and said the Federal Government's word is not good, we want a tax, windfall profits. If we can find a way where we are jealous of your profit, we will find a way where we can take it and put it into the government coffers. A company that will look at that is going to take their profits and decide why do I want to invest my profits in further exploration if the Federal Government is going to come in and cancel the deal, which they have done. I will submit that, perhaps, $40 million that may be available, and it is probably a lot more than that is available for exploration, that will continue to put oil supply on the market. I would submit that it is more likely that exploration investment will go overseas to foreign countries, and perhaps even into the Middle East and places where we don't have such a stable environment, while we sit on massive supplies and energy here in the United States, not because the oil is not there, not because the natural gas isn't there, but because this Congress has become a jealous Congress. This Congress has become a vindictive Congress. This Congress has become a Congress that has decided that they are going to play legislative corporate class envy against companies that are providing an economic supply of energy to this country. I have always had the view that if I didn't like the way someone was doing business, if I thought they were making too much profit, then that should say to the whole world, well, there is opportunity there. If Exxon is making all of this profit, and it has made so many people irate that out of six or eight speakers two of them come to the floor to speak about that very thing, then I would submit, go out and start your own oil company. That is the American way. You have a chance to do whatever you want to do in this country. Go ahead and get an investor's group together, or go buy up a group of oil companies, put them together and go out there, and invest your capital, see how you do. In fact, I welcome that. I think we need a lot of competition, and we need a lot of exploration, and we need to be developing our oil supplies more now than we ever have before. This is the time to push, because perhaps a generation from now we will have transitioned into a lot of other kinds of fuel and gas and oil will not be so important and will not be so relevant any longer. It isn't just the gas and the oil and the fuel that comes from our crude oil, but it is all the other energy supplies out there. Now, I understand that the other side of the aisle and the Pelosi plan is going to include some things like conservation, and I suspect reasonable conservation measures. I think it is awfully hard to legislate. I think the markets do more for that than we could probably do with legislation. Conservation is a component. But I would ask to put in your mind's eye the idea that I call the energy pie. The energy pie, shaped like a clock, for example, but slices of that pie, pieces of the pie, or the components of it would come from all of the areas where we get energy. So I would submit that a certain percentage of our overall BTU consumption in America is gasoline. Some is diesel fuel. Some is fuel oil. Then those hydrocarbons that come from crude oil, and then, in addition to that, we have a lot of our electricity, significant amount comes from hydroelectric and nuclear and coal fired, especially clean coal fired, and we also, then, out of that energy, then, in addition to that, we have our ethanol, our biodiesel. We have hydrogen. There is a whole list of sources for energy in America, and we need to look at that, like all the BTUs consumed in America, a big energy pie, and then reprioritize that. Let us change the size of the pieces and grow the size of the energy pie. I want more BTUs on the market. I want a lot more energy on the market. I want to go everywhere we can to get that energy and pour it into the marketplace and do it so that we can supply more BTUs than we are using. If we can do that, we can drive down the cost of all energy. We need to do that by adding it by component by component. The ethanol, the biodiesel, more coal, more wind, I left that out, the hydrogen, on the horizon, the cellulosic ethanol that is coming, piece after piece of this energy pie needs to be added together. Then we change the proportion of the pieces so that gasoline from middle eastern oil becomes a smaller piece, and diesel fuel from middle eastern oil becomes a smaller piece. Ethanol becomes a larger piece. Biodiesel becomes a larger piece. Cellulosic down the line a half a decade from now can really start to take hold, and we can replace some of the electricity that is being generated by the natural gas with wind energy, and that is an environmentally friendly and conservation approach that is good for our environment. All of these tools are at our disposal, but one of the tools we seem to use is we want to punish the corporations that are busily contributing to growing the size of the energy pie, and also diversifying some of their investments so they aren't just locked into the petroleum but adding the diversification out there, so that they can contribute also to adjusting the size of the pieces in this larger growing energy pie. That is how this needs to be done. We need to be doing it by complimenting the companies that are competing in the open market, not by punishing them, not by defying the rules of free enterprise with Congressional action, not by changing the deal, not by jerking the rug out from underneath. I would suggest that there is a Chevron find in the Gulf of Mexico, I understand it is about 265 miles southwest of New Orleans, that may add as much as a 50 percent more to the overall reserves or the overall production of oil in the United States. With that field opening up, and the necessity to open up in ANWR, we can, if we are aggressive, we can reduce dramatically our dependency on foreign oil, and then, of course, we add to that the renewable energies that I have talked about. We can get there. We will not get there if we scare our companies off, if we punish them for doing good and doing the right thing. So I will move from that energy discussion and move to the discussion by the gentleman, Mr. Andrews, on Iran. I want to compliment him for the tone and the thoughtfulness and the constitutional discussion that he brought here to the floor. I have no doubt that he understands the Constitution, and he is correct when he says the power to declare a war is with this Congress constitutionally. But, also, the commander in chief of our military is the President of the United States, and that is clear, and that is a constitutional principle that should not be challenged by this Congress. He is the commander in chief. There is nothing in the Constitution that says Congress shall have the authority to declare a war and then micromanage every little operation of that war. Simply when Congress declares war, they say we send a message to all sovereign nations in the world that we are at war with whichever sovereign nations may be the subject of that declaration. That declaration shows the commitment of Congress to support our troops and their mission. I will say that again, to support our troops and their mission, and the lead troop is the commander in chief, the President of the United States, George W. Bush, who does call these shots. Our founding fathers understood you cannot fight a war by committee, and you can't put your finger into the wind and ask the public to poll and ask how you should go about fighting a war. If we are going to sit here and say, well, the public polls say that the support for the operations in Iraq, the battleground of Iraq, which is a battleground in the broader global war on terror, if we are going to take the position that this Congress can steal the polls and make military recommendations or pass edicts here or take the budget and squeeze down our support for our troops or shut it off like they did at the end of the Vietnam War, that we can micromanage a war from the floor of the Congress? It is a ridiculous concept, and it was a ridiculous concept for the President of the United States during the Vietnam War, to micromanage that war. President Johnson should have turned that over to his military personnel at the joint chiefs of staffs, who would have relied upon their commanders in the field. If they were not satisfied with those results, they would have changed them. It is the prerogative of the President to remove generals and appoint new generals. Of course, the Senate confirms those higher appointments, as we saw happen a little over a week ago, with the confirmation of General David Petraeus. Now, we find ourselves in this odd dichotomy here, this odd contradiction, where Congress has, and I am speaking, I should say specifically, the Senate has unanimously endorsed the President's choice to be the commander of all operations in Iraq, General David Petraeus. Personally, I would put into the Record that he is the singular most impressive individual that I have met in a military uniform in my lifetime. I do not believe that there could be another choice. I do not believe that there could be a better choice to head up these operations in this new way forward in Iraq than General David Petraeus. Not only does he understand the overall strategy, he has written the book on counterinsurgencies. He spent years in Iraq. I first met him over there in October of 2003 where he commanded the 101st Airborne that had gone in and liberated the region about three provinces and in the region of Mosul. And there, as I sat and received a briefing from him, I will tell this little anecdote about General Petraeus, that is, he started to give a briefing. And it was in a way, a classical Powerpoint slide show, but a slide show of pictures, the reality of what had taken place there. And he had a cordless microphone. Now I do not get very many briefings that last an hour and a half, unless I happen to be the one that is delivering them. But General Petraeus spoke for about an hour or a little more, and the battery went dead on his microphone. The moment before the battery went dead, he had picked up another microphone that was laying there, and without even breaking stride, laid the one down, picked the microphone up with the fresh battery in it, and proceeded to complete that briefing that lasted about 90 minutes. He had the solution sitting there waiting for the problem. He used every single minute of the 90 minutes extraordinarily effectively. Not only did he talk about politics and tactics and the military deployment that they had there, the difficulties that they had faced, he talked about how he had called for elections in Mosul. Mosul was liberated in late March 2003. They had elections there in May of 2003. And at the table later on the next day, I met with the new governor of Mosul and the vice-governor of Moss, one a Shiia, one a Kurd. One might have been a Sunni and the other was a Kurd. But regardless, he had representatives from two different sectarian factions there, and then a business leader at the table who was proficient in English. You could tell by the eye contact of those three men, they were a team that was working together. General Petraeus understood the military and the tactics, understands them better today than he did then, and he understood them very well then. He understands the politics. He understands the economics. And he studied this. It has been his focus, it has been his life. He loves his soldiers. I am looking forward to a completion of this mission in Iraq that will be I believe a successful mission. Mr. Andrews spoke about Iran. I digressed a bit before I get to that point. I support his constitutional conclusion that Congress alone declares war. But I would submit, in addition to that statement, that the Commander in Chief calls the shots. We declare war, if that is what the situation calls for. And then Congress shall not get in the way and micromanage the operations. No war by committee, Madam Speaker, and no interference here on the part of these Members of Congress, except if they have an issue then they can do, behind-the-doors oversight. They can have those conversations. The President's door is open to the leadership of this Congress. We know that. If they have those kind of issues, they want to discuss, we have classified briefings here. There are plenty of opportunities for oversight. If not, you can ask for opportunities for oversight. But to set up this Congress and to use the committees and use the committee chairs and the ranking members to somehow configure a away to bring in motions and micromanage a war is a guaranteed military debacle. There has never been a successful committee operation fighting a war in history, and there is no way that you can set a precedent here out of this Congress, especially as divided and as defeatist as it is on the majority side of the aisle. It seems to me that the will to win this war runs a successful clear distinct victory that would be written by the historians as a distant victory, is not really something that is loved and anticipated by the people on the other side of the aisle. And this is not a stretch that comes out of my imagination, Madam Speaker. But it is simply an observation from in this Chamber, when the Commander in Chief gave his State of the Union Address last month, now when he spoke about committing to victory in Iraq, one-half of this Chamber stood in a thunderous standing ovation, and the other half of the Chamber, Madam Speaker, sat on their hands in silence, disgraceful silence. Could they not know that our troops in the field have televisions in real time over there in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in other parts where our troops are today, supporting our troops that are in the front lines? Could they not know that our commanders all the way down the line to the privates are watching this disgraceful lack of support? Their lives are on the line, and they will hear Members from this side of the aisle to a man and to a woman say, I support the troops. I support the troops. I support the troops. And the question to follow is, what about their mission? Do you support their mission? And that is when you cannot get a question answer from hardly anybody on the Democratic side of the aisle. In fact, the Speaker herself declined to say yes to that point blank question sometime in December of last year. She said it was not a matter of victory, it was a matter of managing. Well, they want to manage their way out of there, and I will submit that the rule of warfare is, victory goes to the side that is occupying the territory at the end of the war. You cannot lift people off with helicopters off a U.S. embassy in places like Saigon, and say, well, we really won the war, we tactically won the war, we did not lose a battle, we won, we left because we wanted to, it was kind of an asterisk that those things happened down there. We tactically did win every battle. And our U.S. military performed courageously, heroically, and gloriously. And they need to be honored by every generation from here on out. But we did not win the battle of who stood on the terrain at the end. And these enemies that we have in the Middle East are a philosophical enemy that goes deep back into history. And before I go deep back into history, I will speak again to the Iranian issue of Mr. Andrews, which is, he criticized the regime of Iran. I agree with him. It is an unstable leader that they have. And they have some mullahs that seem to be directing the action of that unstable leader. So that cabal in the middle appears to me to be, from our view, from our Western civilization view, an irrational group of leaders. He said the regime must never have a nuclear weapon. I agree, Mr. Andrews, 100 percent, they must never have a nuclear weapon. And yet we cannot go forward. He said we cannot go for a reckless premature action against Iran. I agree with that as well. It cannot be reckless, it cannot be premature. But does anybody really think that we can make nice enough, talk nice enough, be reasonable enough and take our case to the Iranians and say somehow can we just put out an olive branch here, and have an open discussion and find out what our disagreements. Does anybody really think that Ahmadinejad or the mullahs would just then peacefully come to the table, and they could be reasoned into a position of giving up their nuclear weapons? I mean, they came out yesterday, and their announcement was that they will continue to develop their nuclear weapons, and they say they have a right to do so. But does anybody believe that they can be talked out of them? I am wondering what it is about human nature that I see this so clearly that they have gone down this path, they will not let go, they will not give up. Why does anybody on that side of the aisle, Madam Speaker, think that they can debate Ahmadinejad into giving up his nuclear missiles and his nuclear technology and ability, when I would ask them, how long has it been since you have seen anybody in this Congress change their mind because of the shear force of a debate? I mean, these are not so momentous a decision that we make, but we come down here on the floor. And how often can anyone point to a single time that they have said something that was so profound, so honest, so insightful that another Member said, I did not know that. I am on your side, I will switch my position, change my vote, I will be with you because you made sense. It is so utterly rare in this Congress, why would the gentleman believe that we could send negotiators over to Iran, and they would say, well, it makes sense to me. We will just demolish all of that nuclear capability. We want to sign a peace treaty with you all. We will start trading and it will be a wonderful world again. The reason that we have a problem there is because we have a fundamental philosophical disagreement and misunderstanding. This began in Iran when President Jimmy Carter's belief in supporting religious fundamentalists caused him to support the return of the Ayatollah and the demise of the Shaw in Iran. And when that happened in 1979, that was the beginning of the hostile Iran. And it did not take very long before we saw 444 days, 52 American hostages paraded regularly in front of our television trying to humiliate the United States. And some believe that Ahmadinejad was part of that group, they think they have pictures that show him there, a kidnapper of American diplomats. I do not know. I do not know if that is true or if it is not true. But he certainly was not opposed to that that we know. He is for the annihilation of Israel, the annihilation of the United States, these dictators tell us what they think, and often they follow through on the those actions. And so, no, I do not trust the Iranian leadership, I do trust a lot of the Iranian people. And I would trust the Iranian people to capture their freedom if given the chance. I would paint this image in the mind's eye, Mr. Speaker, of all who might be contemplating this. In the map you will see Iraq to the west and Afghanistan to the east. And right in the middle, linked together bordering the two countries is Iran. Now, I will argue that Afghanistan today is a free country. And our troops were on the ground guarding the polling places. The first time ever in the history of the world that since Adam that there had been any votes that took place on that soil. Today it is a fledgling democracy. It has its problems. Certainly it will. We had our problems in the early years. We have our problems today. It is never pretty. It is always difficult. But it is always worth the effort. But Afghanistan is a free country. Iraq is technically a free country today. The part that diminishes that freedom is the 80 percent of the violence that takes place in Baghdad and within 30 miles of Baghdad. But Iraq, much of Iraq is peaceful, it is pacified and it is becoming prosperous. I went over there the last time, over the last Thanksgiving, I actually spent my Thanksgiving Day eating dinner with a good number of wounded troops in Landstuhl, Germany, at the hospital, and encouraged by their courage. That was the most monumental and profound Thanksgiving that I have ever had or ever hope or expect to have. And from there, I traveled over to Iraq where I did spend a couple of days in the Baghdad area, and then I went to a camp, a forward operating base just out of Baghdad, and then on up into Erbil in the north, in the Kurdish area in the north. I have been to most corners of Iraq over the last few years. I try to get there as often as I can to get a feel for what is going on. I do not think it is possible to understand that operation over there without going there. I was encouraged by the level of peace and the growing prosperity, especially that that I saw in Erbil and up in the Kurdish area. You get out of the plane there, take off your flack jacket, toss your helmet in the back, and walk across to the parliament. I sat down with some members of parliament there. And then they cooked also a turkey Thanksgiving dinner that was something that I have not seen done as well in this country. Gregarious hosts and wonderful people. That is how I find most of the Iraqi people. I do not accept a 60-percent number that was delivered here by the gentleman from Georgia, that 60 percent of the Iraqis believe it is good or okay to be attacking Americans. I do not know where that poll would come from. Maybe if you polled the terrorists you would get a number like that. But I do not believe, Madam Speaker, that that is the sentiment of the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people are grateful that the United States has stepped in to liberate them. There is a bit of a power vacuum, especially in Baghdad. The President's plan is to go in and fill that power vacuum. Muqtada al-Sadr has done a job in filling that power vacuum. And he has been supported and funded and armed by Ahmadinejad's people in Iran. Iran is fighting a proxy war against the United States within Iraq. You also have Syria fighting a lesser effective but to a lesser degree a proxy war against the United States in Iraq. When the President came out shortly after September 11, he said if you harbor terrorists, fund terrorists, train terrorists, you are a terrorist and we will treat you as a terrorist state. Iran is one of those countries. Syria is one of those countries. I know of no example in the history of the world where an insurgency that could go back and hide and have sanctuary in a sovereign state has ever been defeated. You have to take your battle where the insurgency is. And if they have got a sanctuary you have to go to their sanctuary. That doesn't mean that we need to take on Iran. It means that we have got to eliminate sanctuaries. And we cannot delude ourselves into believing that we can negotiate a nuclear capability away from Iran. It would be just utterly ineffective because they have a goal and they have a vision. And from that point I would submit that the background here of United States history, American history, instructs us on what has been historically, and is relevant to today. Madam Speaker, I would submit that back in 1783 would be the period of time when the new United States made peace with Great Britain. And at that time, we had an American Merchant Marine that was sailing the world and trading. We have always been a very effective seafaring nation. And as our American Merchant Marine sailed and traded to the world and they went into the Mediterranean, up until 1783 they had the protection of the British Navy because we were, up until 1776, at least a colony of the British, and so we are now rectified of their Navy. But when we were recognized by Britain and began to fly the American flag, and were not under the protection of the Union Jack, 1783, America made peace with Britain; and then, 1784, the first American ship was captured by pirates from Morocco. Thus began the Barbary wars where we took on the Barbary pirates. From 1784 and on up until about 1815, the United States was engaged sporadically and periodically, but actually almost continually in a war again the Barbary pirates along the Barbary Coast. And before I go into that, Madam Speaker, I need to give a little bit more of the history of that region. Barbary pirates in that region had been raiding the Mediterranean shoreline, especially the European side of that, for years. And I will submit that they had been raiding the shoreline for almost 300 years at that point in 1784 when they captured the first American vessel. Beginning about 1500, 1502, 1503 is when the Barbary pirates began an active and aggressive pirating of merchant marines that were sailing into the Mediterranean. And their goal was, capture the ship and the cargo and the crew. And the most valuable portion of that was all too often the crew, because they were pressed into slavery, Madam Speaker. And they brought back European slaves to the Barbary Coast where they pressed them into slavery. And they built many of the edifices that you see there today, the old architecture from the 1500 era and on, clear on into the early 1800s, about 1830; much of that work was done by Christian slaves that were pressed into slavery by Muslim masters. And, in fact, there is a book written by a professor at Ohio State University called Christian Slaves and Muslim Masters. And he has gone back and studied the coastline, the European coastline of the Mediterranean and old church records and other family records and old family Bibles and put together a credible history of the slave trade by the Barbary pirates as they moved in with their corsairs and took over the merchant marine, the merchant ships from Europe. The Barbary pirates raided the shoreline all around Greece and Italy and France and Spain and all the way up the coastline of France and the Atlantic into England and on over as far north as Iceland. In fact, there is a fairly detailed commentary about 400 Icelanders who were pulled from their beds at night just near the shore of Iceland, pressed into slavery and sailed back down to the Barbary Coast on the north shore of Africa. And of all of the slaves that were captured along all of that coastline, from Greece all the way up to Iceland, these Icelanders survived the least, and they perished the most. They got the least amount of work out of them and they died the most quickly. And that happens to be some remarks that are written into the historical documents. Some say it had to do with the climate change. Some say it had to do with the work they pressed them in. Some say it had to do with their hearts being utterly broken that they were pressed into slavery, and they just lost their will to live. But there is very little, if any, genetic remnant of those slaves today because the men that were pressed into slavery, and it was almost all men, they were never allowed an opportunity to do anything but walk in their chains and row the corsairs, or else do their slave labor, building the buildings and doing the kind of construction work that built those cities. They didn't have an opportunity to procreate, so you don't see their genetics in the faces of the people that live on that part of the continent today. Occasionally, I am told that there are some blue eyes that pop up that look like they might be the descendants of the women who were captured aboard ship or offshore, who were pressed into, I will say concubinery. And so there are some descendants from that, but it is very little, from remnants. But all together, Professor Davis documents about 1.25 million Christian slaves that were pressed into slavery by the Barbary pirates, and this period of time would be from about 1500 on to about 1583. Well, it continued from that point forward, and Europe built a practice of paying tribute to the pirates and seeking to purchase back their most valuable citizens. And it would be those men and women of substance. If they had a wealthy family, then they would try to go and pay tribute to get that member of the family back. That went on for hundreds of years. There was a pattern there. It was a business that was being run. And when the United States found themselves sucked into that in 1784 when our first ship was captured by the pirates from Morocco, that began the long conflict that lasted until at least 1815. And one will remember that the United States took a posture eventually; we paid tribute here, Madam Speaker, out of this Congress to the Barbary pirates. And some of those line items that I have seen were as high as $250,000 to pay tribute to the Barbary pirates, but that would be just one line item. And, in fact, that was a line item that was refused. But we paid more than that on an annual basis, and that tribute, that bribery got so high that it became as high as 20 percent of the entire Federal budget to pay off the pirates in the Barbary Coast. And so we decided that we couldn't afford this any longer, and we had two alternatives. One was to outfit a Navy and a Marine Corps and send them over there to punish the Barbary pirates and get them to back off of any vessel that flew the Stars and Stripes. So we sent our best diplomats over there to negotiate with the Barbary pirates; and I don't know that we have diplomats of that standing today, but historically they will stand very high in the mind's eye of Americans, Madam Speaker. And so in 1786 Thomas Jefferson, who was then the ambassador to France, and John Adams, who was the ambassador to Britain, met in London with, and I don't have this name memorized, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the ambassador to Britain from Tripoli. Our American ambassadors, Jefferson and Adams, ambassadors to France and Britain respectively, asked Adja why his government was hostile to American ships, that even though there had been no provocation, his government was hostile to American ships. The ambassador's response was reported to the Continental Congress, and is a part of the permanent record today that can be reviewed over in the Library of Congress. The response from Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the ambassador to Britain from Tripoli, I will repeat, was this, and I quote, ``It was founded on the laws of their prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman,'' and that is the term for a Muslim today, ``who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.'' Sound familiar, Madam Speaker, to some of the things that we hear today? And Jefferson's analysis, his comments upon that valiant effort at diplomacy, an effort that has been suggested by Mr. Andrews here this evening, Jefferson's analysis was this, and I will paraphrase and summarize and not quote, but it is hard to reach common ground, it is hard to negotiate with people whose profound religious belief is that their salvation is from killing you. 1786; 2006-2007. We think we have come a long way; we may have not gained a single inch in this disagreement, just had some interim conflicts and relative periods of peace. I think the American people need to understand this. And so out of the failure of that diplomatic effort, that valiant diplomatic effort, the United States Navy was born, March 1794. The Marine Corps joined with the Navy and they went to the shores of Tripoli. And that is today in the Marine Corps anthem, ``From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.'' And our Navy was fitted, and they designed frigates for Americans, and these frigates had superior speed and superior maneuverability, very much an American thing. That was the first time that Americans went to war after the ratification of their Constitution, and they went to war with the most modern frigates that had a tactical advantage because the technology that was developed by the innovative nature and the inventiveness of American shipbuilders. And today we are off in space with that same kind of innovation. The Marines, when they went to the shores of Tripoli, they knew what they were up against to some degree. And Madam Speaker, we have all heard Marines called Leathernecks. Most don't recall, Marines got the nickname Leathernecks because they put leather collars around their neck, thick leather collars when they went into battle to reduce the chance that they would be beheaded by the enemy. That is how Marines got the nickname Leathernecks. They got that nickname over 200 years ago, and it is part of their history and part of their lore. And the shores of Tripoli are engraved on their Iwo Jima monument over across the Potomac River. And so we need to go back and revisit history, Madam Speaker, and understand that this enemy is driven by the same philosophy. They still believe their path to salvation is in killing us. There are passages in the Koran that support this almost verbatim that I have happened to have read. Thomas Jefferson had a Koran. I understand that Koran came to this Congress to be used in a swearing-in ceremony. Some say that he leaned towards Islam because he owned a Koran. I will submit that Thomas Jefferson also studied Greek, and he had a Greek Bible; he wanted to be able to understand the passages in the Bible from the perspective of the Greek, rather than relying on the translations from Greek into an English version. Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the preeminent scholar of his time, maybe the preeminent scholar in our history. He took his work seriously. Of course he needed to understand ``nosce hostem,'' which is Latin for ``know thy enemy.'' And that would absolutely be the reason why Thomas Jefferson acquired a Koran, so he could understand that enemy that said that it is written in their Koran that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise. What a promise to make. And when that is a profound religion, it is impossible to negotiate with. So what we did, we went to war against them, and over time put them in a position where they needed to sue for peace. And I will submit also that Algiers came under attack from the British twice and the French once. And they didn't cease their attacks on Western Europe--I will say Western civilization and the shipping industry within the Mediterranean as a piracy approach, as a government policy. They didn't cease those attacks until 1830 when the French went in and occupied Algiers. And so here we are today with an enemy, globally, in the world, which is a segment of Islam. And I certainly respect and appreciate moderate Islam. I ask them to step forward and be our allies. I believe they are a peaceful people and a good-hearted people. And the more I travel and the more people I meet, the greater my respect and admiration for the goodness of humanity is. But there is an element within Islam that is radical Islam, the jihadists, the Islamists, as Daniel Pipes has named them. That element is a significantly large element and there are maybe 1.2 to 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. And according to Daniel Pipes, our Benazir Bhutto, 10 percent, and according to Pipes, perhaps as many as 15 percent, are inclined to be supportive of al Qaeda. Now, if it is 10 percent you are looking at 130 million. If it is 15 percent, add half again to that. That is a huge number of people who philosophically believe that their path to salvation is in killing us, and that they don't really take a risk with their destiny when they attack us because if they are killed in the process, they will surely go to paradise. That is the enemy that we are against, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have left?

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman and my statement then would be, I also offer that same invitation. I would say if it is good enough for Prince Charles, it should be good enough for the imperial Pelosi regime.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. First I want to state that I appreciate this open rule and this open dialogue and debate that we have here on the floor of the United States Congress today. It is a healthy process that we are going through, and it is a process that, of course, is designed to perfect legislation or allow that perfect legislation to have an opportunity to be vetted and rise as a perfect piece. And as I look at this overall proposal to authorize $10 million to develop an additive so that we can put renewable fuels and particularly ethanol down through the pipeline, Mr. Chairman, I can't help but reflect back upon the beginnings of renewable fuels in the United States of America. As most people know, I represent the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. And there, of all the 435 congressional districts, we are number two in ethanol production. By the end of this year, we will be number one in ethanol production. We are number one in biodiesel production of all 435 districts. And also with renewable energy, we are today tied for fourth and will this year be tied at least for second and perhaps first in the electrical generation by wind. That puts us, Mr. Chairman, within the grasp of winning the renewable energy triple crown: ethanol, biodiesel, and wind all tied up in one congressional district. Now, I raise this issue because I have the great privilege of having grown up and having developed my business and my life and my experience in the epicenter of renewable fuels. And that perspective is so utterly valuable, at least for me. And when I go back to Iowa and have the opportunity to visit the Iowa Senate where I formerly served, I am always proud to shake the hand of State Senator Thurman Gaskill of Corwith, Iowa, who pumped that first gallon of ethanol back in 1978. And from that first gallon, we are here today on the floor of the United States Congress talking about a problem of how to transport all of these billions of gallons of ethanol that we are producing. It is a fantastic transformation that we have taken from 1978 to today. It hasn't been without work, it hasn't been without risk, and it hasn't been without its failures along the way. But it is a glorious success. And I appreciate the gentleman from Illinois coming forward. And here we are, Iowa is the number one ethanol-producing State in the Union as well, and it produces 26 percent of the ethanol in the country. And it is important to know that the United States has surpassed Brazil in overall ethanol production. So we have an industry here that is growing. We have an infrastructure that is being established and founded, and we are to this point now where we have so much fuel that we are producing. Not nearly enough, I want to add that. We have to find a transportation way to resolve that issue. I want to point out also, Mr. Chairman, that of these difficulties that we have had in the past, we have put some tax credits in place, and the private sector has been magnificent in finding solutions. For example, the increase in the production of ethanol out of every gallon of corn has come from a lot of industry-driven solutions, and this transportation problem also can come from industry-driven solutions. So I want to watch this authorization as it moves through. The private sector has been very, very effective. And yet we will be producing more and more ethanol as the years go by and blending it in. And as we move to cellulosic, of course, this becomes more and more important. One of the difficulties with this bill also, though, is the component of ultra-low sulfur fuels and the burden that it puts on our jobbers, on our fuel distributors, that they will have one truck and they will have to haul a load of low-sulfur fuel and then turn around and load that up and haul a load of ultra-low sulfur fuel. As that unfolds, they are going to find themselves in a situation where they will be vulnerable to regulations without any means to determine whether their load actually meets that very tight standard on ultra-low sulfur fuel. So as this process moves forward, I would remind this body and ask the Department of Energy and the EPA to pay very close attention to finding a way to develop an economic testing system that will allow these jobbers to be in compliance. So, overall, we have gone by leaps and bounds from that first gallon of ethanol that was pumped back in 1978, and here we are the number one ethanol-producing nation in the world. We have far eclipsed Brazil. Our technology is far ahead of theirs. And this is not just an ability to produce ethanol, but the intellectual property that grows from having done this. We have the science down and we have the research and development in place and that is growing and multiplying, and as that happens we build more and more expertise. That expertise grows from the epicenter of these renewable fuels out into the regions of the country. So I would say we will see ethanol flow out to the limits of the corn belt, biodiesel to the limits of the soybean area. We will see the cellulosics fill in the gaps. And we are going to see the markets drive this and tax structure be supportive of it. I am supportive conceptually of this legislation that is before us, and I thank the gentleman for bringing this legislation. Amendment Offered by Mr. Rogers of Michigan

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from California for yielding to me both times here this afternoon. Mr. Speaker, taking up the issue of the budget that is coming before us and this sense of responsibility and debates that I have had this year and debates that I recall I had in the national media that I had with members of the other party, and some of them took the oath that they would be willing to support a balanced budget without raising taxes; I don't hear any of that talk here on the Democrat side of the aisle. Nobody is stepping forward, and saying, yes, I remember what I said, I didn't mean it, or even, I remember what I said. They seem to have forgotten what they said. They do say they want to balance the budget. But we also know from listening to Mr. Rangel, there isn't any one of the Bush tax cuts that he would not want to eliminate, which would result in a tax increase. Yet we have the strongest economy that we have had in my lifetime, the most consecutive quarters of growth. We have a very healthy unemployment rating of about 4.5 percent, and that has been staying low. Inflation has been staying low. Interest has been staying low. Every economic indicator that is low when it is good is low. Every economic indicator that is high when it is good, it is high. The stock market has reached any number of all-time highs. These Bush tax cuts, the 2001 cuts and the 2003 cuts were essential and necessary to keep us out of a depression and a recession at a time when the dot.com bubble had burst, when our financial centers were attacked on September 11, and we had to go to war and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to protect the American people, of which there has been no significant attack against Americans by terrorists in our country since that time. Who would believe that our economy would be this strong, our safety would be this good, that there are so many things sitting where they are today? But we need to step forward and make progress. I can tell you frankly that I was not thrilled by the proposal here several years ago, 3 years ago, that we were going to cut the deficit in half in 5 years. That was not enough for me. Now, I believe that President Bush has offered a budget, and I think that we will see the House Republicans offer a budget that will reach balance within 5 years. That is a balance without dynamic scoring, and the increase that we are seeing in the revenue because of this dynamic economy indicates that could well happen within the next 3 years. I expect it will happen in the next 3 years. I am an individual, though, who would be willing to sign on to a budget that would balance the budget this year. I will not go very far into that for these purposes, because I recognize, practically speaking, there aren't enough votes to pass a budget like that. It would be a bit too Draconian. But had we have been able to slow some of this growth, we could be at balance today, except that we have been facing the war, and we took the hit from the burst in the dot.com bubble. So we are pulled together here now, and the principle needs to be, slow this growth in discretionary, nondefense discretionary spending. We are doing that, and we have effectively done that. We have kept it at below the rate of inflation or at the rate of inflation. The biggest problem we have is the constant growth in entitlements called Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid to a lesser degree, and, of course, the interest that goes up on that. You will see a budget comes from Republicans that gets us to a balanced budget within 5 years. I am grateful that that is coming out. But, again, I believe that if we can give the investors the confidence that we can continue the Bush tax cuts, the 2001 and the 2003 tax cuts, then I think that you will see this economy continue to grow, and you will see the budget balanced before the 5 years are up. But if we turn this over to the other side, if we turn it over to the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who wants to see the end of all of those tax cuts, we will see the goose that lays the golden egg slaughtered and on the field of class warfare. Now, we know that what you tax you get less of. The Federal Government has the first lien on all taxation in America. We tax everything that moves, that produces. We tax labor. We tax interest, investment, dividends capital gains, you name it, all the way down the line. Then the alternative minimum tax sits there and sneaks up on people and grabs people, and it is creeping down into the lower brackets over and over again. So to make this call, I would say this, extend those tax cuts. The American people need to clamor in order to extend the Bush tax cuts. If that can happen, the confidence in this economy will continue. We will get this budget balanced. The other side wants a balanced budget, too, because they called for one. But they want to raise your taxes to do it. I guarantee you, that is the only way that they can balance this budget, and that is the effort that they are down on. I stand with the remarks made by the gentleman from California, and I appreciate very much him taking the leadership to come to the floor and yielding to me.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I would point out that, as we have had exchanges here during special orders, I am one who has yielded, especially to Uncle Bill from Massachusetts. I would point that out. That is a matter of record. We can continue in that vein, I would hope.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Campbell for yielding to me, and I appreciate Mr. Ryan sticking around after the Special Order and the work that you have done. Over the last 2-plus years, we spent a lot of hours here on the floor together. It occurred to me as I arrived on the floor--

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would concede that point that not necessarily together, but on the floor. We have been together in some other things as well. But the point that occurred to me as I arrived here on the floor this afternoon is we often do not commingle our policies. We have an argument that is set separate on this side and on that side, and it occurred to me that Lincoln and Douglas had some effective debates that were very, very instructive, and it helped the people understand the distinctions between the policies. So as I mull this around in my mind, it occurs to me to offer an invitation that if our side could set aside an hour Special Order, and if your side would be interested in setting aside an hour Special Order, we could merge those together and then perhaps three from your side, three from our side, and we could spend 2 hours with an open debate type of a format so that we could have a free exchange with the best of attitude and comity. I think that would be a very good thing to do for the people across this country as they review what is going on here on the floor. I would ask your opinion on that.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time. If the gentleman would be interested, I would suggest you take it up above that pay grade and see if you come back with a positive response. I didn't check with anybody above me. I happened to be able to claim some time on the floor and make that decision. I offer that openly with the best intentions. I think 2 hours would be a very good thing for all of us to have that discussion. The offer is there. I leave it on the table, and I thank the gentleman.

Mr. KING of Iowa. It is interesting to me, the statistics that you put out on that data, that if you believe in a free market economy, you understand that description intuitively. You understand there is going to be dynamic growth that is stimulated because there is a return on investment. If you don't believe in the free market economy, then you think somehow that people that make money and create jobs are evil, and they should be punished for their productivity. When you punish productivity and tax it, you get less of it. That was another Reagan statement. What you tax you get less of. What you subsidize you get more of. We are going to see productivity more highly taxed. We get less productivity, and this economy will slow down. I point also that if we could freeze our spending at current levels, sometime in the middle of fiscal year 2010 we would be looking at a surplus. That is something else to consider.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you very much, Mr. Ryan. I yield back to the gentleman from California.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I want to thank the presenters of the previous hour that have come down here, especially my friend, Mr. Ryan from Ohio. They have been persistent and they have been relentless. At some point I think it would be very engaging for us to be able to actually share an hour and do that kind of point, counterpoint that can bring these issues to the top for the American people. And I want to say again, my highest compliment is for persistence. I am going to make some comments here on accuracy and on perspective. I think we need to take us back. Since we have gone back to the future in this last hour, Madam Speaker, I would take us back to where we were here in the United States of America on the date, and I will call it September 10, 2001. That was the date on which we were in the middle of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the day before the September 11 attacks on our financial centers, the Pentagon and in the fields of Pennsylvania, which may have been the White House or this Capitol building itself, Madam Speaker. On that day, the American people were just beginning to understand what had happened to our economy. We had this growing economy that has been credited over here many, many times over to President Clinton. I want to tell you that the Republican Congress balanced the budget through the 1990s. And they might have done so because they did not approve of the Clinton policies. There might have been a measure of spite. But they balanced the budget. And the reason I will give that credit to the Republican majority in this Congress is because Bill Clinton vetoed their budget several times. That kept us from having a balanced budget until finally they had to reach a compromise, and those balanced budgets flowed forward. This economy grew, and it grew out beyond expectations. And the biggest reason, Madam Speaker, that it grew was because we had this economic phenomenon called the dot-com bubble. Well the dot-com bubble was that we had discovered in our research, in our technology and science and in information, that the microchip and the configuration of the microchip and the configurations of the software and our infrastructure that allowed us to put that all together, we found out in the middle 1990s that we could store and transfer information more quickly than ever before in all of history. And when that happened, there were companies that looked around and said, voila, we have a microchip. We can find a way to do something with that. Let's start up a dot-com company and we will go public and we will sell shares on our ability to store and transfer information more efficiently than ever before, Madam Speaker. And so those companies lit up and did that. And the stock market grew and grew and grew and grew. And there was a return on those investments, not because the companies were making money, but on the speculative value, Madam Speaker, on the ability to store and transfer information faster than ever before. That went through the 1990s and into the year 2000. And in the year 2000, President Bush was elected. And about that time, sometime about the beginning actually of the year 2000, the market, the stock market began to understand that this dot-com bubble, which was this growth in the values of their shares on the New York Stock Exchange was really based upon the speculation that we could store and transfer information more quickly than ever before, and not based upon the economic value of the ability to be able to store and transfer information more quickly than ever before. And so the adjustments began to be made in that stock market. And when they were made, it took it down to, what is this information worth? Just because we can store and transfer it more quickly does not mean it has more value, it has to add efficiency to the productivity of companies, or it has got to have a marketable value to people that will say pay a higher price for a higher speed Internet, not just for their business reasons, that is legitimate, but also for their recreational reasons. Only two reasons this information age that had blossomed and grown, Madam Speaker, only had value because it added efficiency to the companies that we had and those that would be developed and grown, or that ability to store and transfer information could be marketed for recreational purposes. Well, about the year 2000 the market began making those adjustments. And the market decided there is too much capital invested in this. There is too much speculation invested in this. We really cannot turn out the kind of productivity that is necessary to justify the capital investment that had grown this dot-com bubble in our marketplace. And so astute investors began to divest themselves of their investments within those dot-com companies, some of them not all of them. Those that had the highest promise, at least on the measure of the capital invested, the money stayed with them. Those that had the least promise the money left them. As the market adjusted, we had this thing we called the bursting of the dot-com bubble. That took place in about the year 2000, 2000, 2001, as President Bush was being sworn in out here on the west portico of the Capitol for his first term in January of 2001, the bursting of the dot-com bubble was almost audible at that point. Well, as that bubble slowly burst and flowed across the year 2001, Madam Speaker, it took us up to September 11 of 2001, when, as we know, the planes went crashing into the Twin Towers and into the Pentagon, into the field in Pennsylvania. And the attack on our financial centers, and an attack on our strategic center over here at the Pentagon, of our military strategic center, was devastating. It was designed to take the financial center of the United States of America to its knees. Well, that did shut down our financial center the rest of that week. We were open for business, might have actually been on the following Friday, but we were at least open for business the following Monday after September 11. But we got our stock market up and going again, our financial centers started going again. We patched things in. We rigged them up so that we could work and we could trade. As we began to trade, the markets began to adjust the impact on them. That blow to our financial centers on September 11, on top of the bursting of the dot-com bubble where there were two devastating hits on our economy, yes we were cruising along, Madam Speaker, with anticipated balanced budgets as far as the eye could see. But those balanced budgets did not anticipate the bursting of the dot-com bubble, nor did they anticipate the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. And so we began to make our adjustments. And then following that, the obvious result was, that we had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to protect us from the terrorists who were attacking the United States of America and western civilization itself. That took money, Madam Speaker. And this Congress pulled together in bipartisan effort, Democrats over here, Republicans over here, came together and said we are one people. We are the United States of America and our number one most responsible Constitutional position is to protect the American people. And so we set forth here in this Congress to protect the American people. And some of the things that we did were to provide that our military could, number one, go over to Afghanistan and into the mountains in Pakistan and go take out those al-Qaeda centers where they had been strategizing and planning these terrorist attacks on the United States. And in the process it was necessary to liberate Afghanistan and set up a government in Afghanistan that reflected the will of the people, a government of, by and for the people of Afghanistan. We did that within 2 to 2\1/2\ months of the September 11 attacks in 2001, at the cost of billions of dollars, Madam Speaker. Now here we are, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the attacks on the Twin Towers, our financial centers, and the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, and the necessity to engage in military conflict clear across the globe over in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which our glorious United States military did so successfully, and took out the Taliban and liberated the Afghani people. The Afghan people went to the polls there in that country for the first time in the history of the world. A magnanimous thing, all at great cost for a great cause. These three things that I have talked about, Madam Speaker, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which brought our stock market down, the attacks on our financial centers at the Twin Towers took it down further, and the cost of supporting and maintaining and equipping our military to liberate the Afghan people all three things hit this budget hard. Now, I do not think there was anyone on that side of the aisle that made the argument then that we should have only done these things within the confines of a balanced budget. I did not hear them say that. I did not hear anybody say that. I did not even read an editorial that said, well, you know, it is a pretty responsible thing that we have to do here, we have to recover from the bursting of the dot-com bubble, we have got to recover from the attack on the Twin Towers, and we have to spend tens of billions, in fact more than a hundred billion dollars going into Afghanistan to take out the Taliban and al-Qaeda and free the Afghan people, but we should only do so within the confines of a balanced budget. No, nobody said that, Madam Speaker. Nobody on that side said that. Nobody on this side said that. We were unanimous in our judgment that we needed to protect the American people at whatever cost. And so our military went forth, under the command and order of our commander in chief and carried out their duty and liberated the Afghan people and took out the Taliban and took out al-Qaeda in the mountains in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. They did their job. We all knew that we would be deficit spending here in this Congress to protect the American people because the decision of balancing the budget in a time of great national peril was not a hard decision. When you are in great national peril you go into debt. Can anyone imagine fighting World War II when we spent 38 percent of our gross domestic product on our military, fighting that war without going into debt? We sold war bonds over and over and over again. We ginned up Hollywood. Hollywood started running movies to raise the morale of the American people and to keep us together as one people. And strategy after strategy was designed here out of Washington and from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to pull us together as a people, to not be divisive, to unify in our efforts against the Nazis to our east and the imperialist Japanese to our west. That was the strategy of the United States, and we pulled together as one people, Madam Speaker. And we spent 38 percent of our gross domestic product in those years of World War II. And the zero unemployment that we have today at about 4.6 percent during World War II went to 1.3. That is closer to a full employment economy. It is still not a full employment economy, but that is a lot closer. And we sit here today, and I am hearing the argument that somehow we should have walked through this whole thing with a balanced budget. You know, if we had done that, there is something my friends on the other side of the aisle that know to be fact and, in fact, I think they are whistling through the graveyard crossing their fingers behind their back saying I wish that that had been the case. They know that if we had done so and balanced the budget then we would have gone into a tailspin recession, if not a hard core depression. But what happened throughout that, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the attacks on the twin towers, the liberation of Afghanistan and subsequently the liberation of the Iraqi people, what happened, was our Commander in Chief, who also is the President of the United States, George W. Bush, came to this Congress with two financial proposals, two tax cut proposals, one in 2001 and one in 2003. And the vision was this, if we don't reduce taxes and stimulate this economy, the burden of this bursting of the dot-com bubble and the attack on the twin towers and the necessity to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, the burden of all of that will fall on this economy, and the United States of America would certainly, and I don't mean, Madam Speaker, almost certainly, I mean the burden certainly would have fallen on this economy and it certainly would have put us in a recession, and perhaps a severe depression. Now, Madam Speaker, I would submit that if we were to consider what this country would have been like if we had not cut taxes, if we had not reduced capital gains, if we had not reduced dividend taxes, if we hadn't let people keep more of the money that they earn and allow them to reinvest it and get a return on that investment, if we hadn't made those changes in the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, this economy would have slowed to a crawl. It would have tail spun into a recession, perhaps a depression. But the President knew, and this Congress knew, and the Republican majority knew, and I thank you all of my colleagues for being part of that, knew that if we could cut taxes we could stimulate economic growth. If we can stimulate economic growth, we can grow our way out of this deficit spending that is necessary at this time of great national peril. And that is what we did. We did follow the leadership of the White House and President Bush. We did cut taxes in 2001. We did cut taxes in 2003. And the economy responded in kind. And there is no logical argument that the cutting of taxes did not stimulate the economy. If anybody over on this side has a disagreement, I would be happy to yield some time. But it did stimulate the economy, and this economy grew. And quarter after quarter after quarter, we saw the longest period of economic growth in the history of the United States of America flow forth through this economy, quarter after quarter. And most of those quarters were over 3 percent growth. And I would quote it all back to you but it has been so good that I have lost track the last two or three quarters, so I can't tell you exactly what those numbers are. But I know there have many, many quarters that this economy has grown and grown significantly, perhaps grown dramatically. But this is a stable, long term growth just the kind you want if you draw it up on the chart. And so here we are. After a political campaign, November 7 election, after I have heard over here this economy is bad and it is not providing jobs for people, well, when has it been better? If anybody on that side of the aisle has an answer to that, I would be happy to yield to you. Just stand up. I would be happy to yield to you. When has the economy been better than it is now? When has it grown more consistently? When has it provided more jobs? When has the private sector had more stimulation than it has now? Not in my lifetime, Madam Speaker. This is the best economy that we have ever seen. And here we are, it is stimulated by the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, and we are faced with, now, a Democrat majority that wants to increase taxes. So I have a few charts here to help people out, Madam Speaker. And this chart says, having called the tax cuts beyond irresponsible, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee said, he cannot think of one of George Bush's first term tax cuts that merit renewal. Well, those first term tax cuts include all of the Bush tax cuts, as my recollection is. So if he can't think of one that merits renewal, Madam Speaker, I would point out, I can't think of one that does not merit renewal, that this economic growth and this economic recovery has been almost a historical miracle. But for the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to not acknowledge an economic fact, Madam Speaker, is an astonishing thing. And as I listen to the debate here on the floor tonight, and as I listen to my colleagues here deliver their view and their opinion, which they are entirely welcome to, and I respect that, it occurs to me that their probably isn't one shred of empirical data that would pry them off of their political position. But I will say that we have the ability over here on this side of the aisle to deductively reason, and we know that there are incentives for people, and when there is profit involved, people produce more. When there is less profit involved they will produce less. And if there is no profit involved, even if they want to produce, they won't last long. Their business will go under and they will go broke. So in a free market economy, you have to have people that can make a little bit of money. And if they can make a little money, they are going to like it and they will make a little more money. And when you have a tax and a regulatory structure that allows for people to have some profit, they will continue to produce. And our gross domestic product goes up and the number of jobs go up and the wages that they can afford to pay go up and the benefits that they pay go up, which means the families are better off, that is more money, Madam Speaker, in the pockets of the families of the American people. And then we become a better place to live. And these Bush tax cuts have not reduced the revenue stream into this country. They have increased it by every measure imaginable. And it might be possible to do a static kind of a calculation that says, well, yes, if we just increase taxes 50 percent we will get 50 percent more revenue. Madam Speaker, I won't disagree with that. You can do that static calculation, and you may actually even get 50 percent more revenue the very first quarter that you increase taxes by 50 percent. But human nature has got to play into that equation too, and human nature says, well, taxes were too high. I don't think I really want to work those extra overtime hours. I don't want to do 60 hours a week. I am going to be happy with 40 because Uncle Sam takes too big of a cut. The taxes are too high. I am not going to sit there and make those extra sales phone calls at night. I am going to go home and see my family. I am going to settle for less income. Or the business owner that says well, the taxes are too high. I was going to add an extra line on to my manufacturing plant here and hire an extra hundred people, but, no, taxes are too high. The regulations are too high. I am going to be just satisfied with what I have. Or maybe shrink it down a little bit and maximize my profits and just stay here, hold the status quo. That is what goes on in the minds of the people who are creating the jobs in America, especially America's small business people. For when they hear over here, Madam Speaker, that they want to increase taxes and punish the producers in America, the producers aren't stupid. They are going to decide I can take so much punishment but I can't take that much punishment; so I am going to back up a little bit and I am going to back off. I am going to quit creating jobs and probably lay a few people off. I am going to consolidate my business, and maybe I will just coast out the rest of my life. And you have lost that business owner for the rest of their life. And you have got to then rely on some young entrepreneur to come in and light this thing up. But why will they if you take away, in your perverse way, taxing the incentives of the entrepreneurs of America, which is a life blood of who we are as a people? So the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, having called the tax cuts beyond irresponsible, the chairman said he cannot think of one of George Bush's first-term tax cuts that merits renewal. Astonishing. Would you really want to back up and give up on the longest period of growth in history, and I have to be careful of that, at least in my history? And I know of no time in the history of the United States of America where we had more growth. Well, it is one thing, Madam Speaker, to take the position that the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee cannot think of one that merits renewal, but here is a statement that comes from the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and that is September 26 of 2006, where he vowed to put all of President Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts on the chopping block. Why? Why in the world, Madam Speaker, would you take something that has proven success, this long period of growth that has run 3 percent and more for most of the last dozen quarters or more, dozen and a half quarters at least, and put them all on the chopping block and chop them off and let them go? Why? Why would that be the case? Aren't we looking forward to a chairman of the Ways and Means Committee that maybe is an economist or at least a well-versed, well-read amateur economist, and wouldn't an economist who is the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee want to have reasonable growth, maybe even dynamic growth, here in the United States of America? What would be the merit in trying to kill the economy of the country that you have sworn to defend and that you love, and, in fact, in his case, has stood up and put his life on the line and defended, to his credit? It can only be one thing. I do not think he really wants to destroy the economy of the United States of America, but I think there is a political agenda, Madam Speaker. And this will be devastating to the economy of the United States if these tax cuts from 2001 and 2003 are put on the chopping block. And it isn't that they have to be put on the block and voted down. These tax cuts sunset. They will need action in the House and the Senate to be renewed. And they need to be renewed because we know what kind of growth they have stimulated. In fact, last September, and I believe the date was September 15, under these Bush tax cuts, the Federal Government collected more money on that day than any other day in the history of the United States of America. September 15, 2006. That would be the last time that happened under the Rangel plan. So, Madam Speaker, I would submit that these tax cuts do have a sunset and that sunset for them, the date that they expire, is 1,426 days from now; 1,426 from now, Madam Speaker, and if this Congress does nothing, they expire. Now, I would ask why would it be that the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Speaker Pelosi, and the leadership on the Democrat side of the aisle would want to see the Bush tax cuts expire. Well, it is because if that does not happen, they cannot balance their budget. They can't balance their budget without an increase in taxes. And this brings about, when those dates expire, a real increase in taxes. Regardless of how it is voted, regardless of how the bill is brought forward, regardless of what might be amended, in the end if these tax cuts are not extended, the result is a tax increase. A tax increase will temporarily fund their spending increases, and they will be able to claim that they have a balanced budget for a little while. But that won't last long, Madam Speaker. But the temporary timing of this comes together in such a way that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 1,426 days is nice and handy because they can use that to claim that they are complying with PAYGO, the pay-as-you-go plan, the not- going-to-spend-any-more-money-than-you-have-coming-in plan, the plan that says if we want to spend more money, we will just increase taxes on the backs of the American people, the hardworking American people. And I believe the government takes enough out of their paychecks, Madam Speaker. I believe we have hardworking Americans who are still working hard and struggling to make ends meet. They have to have a budget. The American people have to meet that budget. When they look at what they need to do in order to live within their means, they make those decisions, Madam Speaker. And they don't have the option to decide in 1,426 days I am going to raise taxes. I am going to kick that up to the point where now I can raise spending. No. The American people have to be responsible. They have to look at the paycheck they have coming in and make decisions on what they can afford, what standard of living they can afford to have. And so they will decide if they can have that cabin at the lake or that new SUV or that boat or whether they are going to plastic their windows and try to keep their heat bill down so that they can live within their means. We all have to make those kinds of decisions to live within our means, and when a decision is made to take money out of the pockets of the American people, those people that are out there putting plastic over their windows in one of the coldest winters that we have had in a long, long time, Madam Speaker, and we are taxing them, raising their taxes so that this government can spend more money to buy more votes and influence more people across this country, it is a travesty of justice. I have been with some of the Democrats, Madam Speaker, and some of them said they want to balance the budget. And when they say that, you can't get them to admit that they want to increase taxes to balance the budget. Some of the Blue Dogs will say they want to balance the budget in a responsible way. I can't get them to say they would do so without increasing taxes. In fact, whenever they have offered a balanced budget here on the floor, it always has had an increase in taxes as part of their balanced budget. So I have taken a look at our budget, Madam Speaker, and decided what needs to happen. If we are going to balance the budget, the American people ought to know what it takes to balance the budget here in the United States of America. About $2.8 trillion is our budget, and we have a lot of revenue coming in, and the revenue increase has been double digits the last 2 to 3 years because this economy has been so strong and the unemployment has been so low and the new jobs created have been so dynamic. All of this seems to be a secret to the American people, but that is all fact, Madam Speaker. But still we have this growth in entitlements. The entitlements of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and you add to that the cost of interest that is going up, and as interest goes up, of course, the more national debt that we have. No one in this Congress aside from myself, Madam Speaker, is talking about how do you balance the budget, how do you balance the budget without increasing taxes. I want this dynamic economy. I want to see double-digit increase in our revenue stream. I don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The people on this side of the aisle, Madam Speaker, have a belief that there is something evil about that goose that lays the golden egg, and they want to kill that goose by increasing taxes. But as for me, I will submit that I am willing to cut some spending. Let us take this on down to the point where we can balance this budget and then balance the budget without increasing taxes, Madam Speaker. And I have done a little calculation on this, and this is nothing but a little napkin calculation with a calculator off of my belt, and the final numbers will be coming in in the next couple of days, and if all goes well, I will be able to introduce a bill and we can have a debate on this floor on a real balanced budget, Madam Speaker. But if we were to hold defense spending harmless, let defense spending grow the way it needs to, because we have to protect the American people, set that part aside, and then put into it non-defense discretionary spending, that is the spending that is not including the entitlements, being Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, also the necessity to pay for the interest on the national debt, those things all tied together, plus non-defense discretionary, all of that together, if we would look at the 2007 fiscal year budget and make adjustments in that for 2008, it would be necessary for us to cut about 8 percent across-the-board in all of those categories if we were going to balance the budget. So when the American people clamor for a balanced budget, they need to understand what they are talking about. They need to understand the impact on their own budget, what happens to their Social Security benefits, their Medicaid and Medicaid benefits, and, of course, we have to pay the interest bill, and then how we have to shrink down some of the discretionary spending in this Federal budget. All of that can happen with the support of the American people. An 8 percent cut seems to me to be a bit Draconian. But if we had frozen our Federal spending when I came to this Congress in 2003, we would have a balanced budget today, Madam Speaker, with a minimal amount of pain, and we would be able to have a debate for the American people that would be focused on what is the future of this country going to be? We can't make these adjustments to Social Security if we are not willing to make those changes that were called for by President Bush with personal retirement accounts. If we can't give people a percentage of their Social Security that they are contributing into their own control so that they can have some investment in their own destiny, while we guarantee those benefits to our seniors, if we can't make those changes, the inevitable result is, Madam Speaker, we will have to cut the benefits to our seniors. I want to keep that pledge to our seniors. Because of that, I want to configure a kind of Social Security reform that will allow for a measure of that to go into personal retirement accounts so that we can get people with their own accounts down the road a ways that can be independent and stand up and take care of their own retirement. That an essential component of this. If we don't do that, we are going to have to look the American people in the eye and say we didn't have the will to do the right thing. Now we are going to have to do the necessary thing. The necessary thing then would be to reduce benefits or increase contributions. In either case, increasing contributions at a time when we have fewer people working and more people collecting, as the baby-boomers come on line, and I am one, Madam Speaker, it is no time to put more burden on the workers in America. That will be the inevitable result if we are not able to bring reform to the Social Security plan. So, 8 percent across-the-board, holding defense spending harmless, that will get us pretty close to a balanced budget. That is 8 percent plus or minus about half a percent. Closer numbers are coming in in the next few days. Now, the question is, over here as I listen to the people on the other side of the aisle, they don't seem to trust the free markets. In fact, I don't know that they understand the free markets. But the question for the American people, Madam Speaker, is do you trust government or do you trust free markets? Do you trust them when it comes to who is going to do the best job of managing and controlling your money? I will submit that the people that earn the money ought to have control of the money, and they will spend it better than government spends it almost every time. When it comes to health care, they need control of their own health care. They have to be able to control their own destiny, to have the freedom of choice to decide where they want to invest their health care dollars. I appreciate the President coming here to this floor and speaking from the location where you are, Madam Speaker, about the need to provide for full deductibility for health insurance premiums, at least for those with under $15,000 in health insurance premiums. We have had a pretty good and healthy history with employer-based health care plans, but it is not enough. We have too many American people that are not insured for health care. If we can give them full deductibility of their health care benefits so they can make that deduction and make the calculation on their bottom line and determine it is better for them to be insured than not be insured, we will have, instead of having 47 million people uninsured, we will have far less uninsured, and this country is better off and people will be making more decisions individually between them and their doctor. I want the American people to negotiate with their doctor, every individual American to have that personal relationship and be able to control that account and have an insurance policy that they know and understand and one that is fully deductible and one that is portable; one that even though the employer may contribute to the premium, they can take it with them when they go from job to job, which there is more job moving now than in the history of this country. I want the American people to have a Health Savings Account, Madam Speaker, that they can invest money in; that goes in tax-free, and then as the money rolls out that is spent back into premiums, in major medical health care and having regular annual tests to monitor their health situation, so that we have a healthy America with all the right incentives that are set up, rather than the perverse incentives being set up. Then one day, having those Americans that are young today, they could put a little over $5,000 into their Health Savings Account annually and manage their health care and get the tests done, watch their weight, exercise, abstain from tobacco, minimize their alcohol use and have a healthy lifestyle, those Americans will arrive at retirement with six figures times something in their Health Savings Account. Madam Speaker, it is my view and my vision that that day will come when there are hundreds of thousands of dollars wrapped up in individual Health Savings Accounts that haven't been used because they have a healthy lifestyle, and they have been insured for catastrophic insurance and had enough money to take care of the deductible in order to do that, and saved hundreds and thousands of dollars in their health insurance premiums. When they arrive at 65 and qualify for Medicare, we can look at them and say, well, Joe and Sally, you have done pretty well. You have taken care of your health and you have got this nice nest egg in your Health Savings Account. And let's just say it is half a million dollars, just to put a big number up there on the board, and let's just say at age 65 they can negotiate for a paid up health insurance plan, Madam Speaker, for the balance of their life that would substitute for Medicare. Let's just say the Federal Government can step in there and say, you know what we are going to help subsidize that? We would like to buy you down on that. We can get together on that. Out of your $500,000 and our Federal Treasury, we will put together some money so that we can provide a paid health insurance plan, and that paid up health insurance plan would substitute for Medicare, and the rest of your life you would be covered under that, kind of like an annuity that takes care of your health care. Then, let's just say that that takes $250,000 out of the $500,000 that happens to be in the Health Savings Account by the time Joe and Sally, who are now at the young age, arrive at 65 and qualify for Medicare, now they have a quarter of a million dollars left over. What we would they do that? My answer would be whatever you so choose. You have managed your lives well. You have been fortunate. You have a strong Health Savings Account. You provided a paid up health insurance plan for the rest of your life, you and our Medicare funding has supplemented to create that. Now we want to reward you and let you take the money out of your Health Savings Account, travel the world, will it to your kids, do whatever you would like to do. Madam Speaker, who could be opposed to such a thing? I would submit there will be many on this side of the aisle that will be opposed to such a thing because they don't want independence for the American people. They don't have confidence in the judgment of the American people. They want dependence for the American people. They want the American people to be dependent so they can come back to Congress and say I need you. Set me up a health care plan and tax my neighbor, tax that rich person, punish them for their productivity. Give me some of the benefits of that. They set up this class warfare which empowers them politically. That is the side of the aisle, the psychology that comes there. Then, Madam Speaker, as I watch this clock tick down, there are a few other pieces of subject matter that need to be addressed. One of them was brought up by our group here in the previous hour, and that was the issue of energy. I know that we have disagreed consistently on what we should do to develop American energy sources. My view is we need to develop our American energy sources. Every place where we can legitimately do so in an environmentally friendly fashion, we should open up American energy. We have at least 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore, and most of that is offshore around Florida and some in the gulf that is not Florida. 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas; and yet we sit here, and last fall, last minute in our lame duck session we opened up a tiny little sliver of offshore drilling. We have mineral rights out to 200 miles, and yet the idea is if we would put a gas well down at 199 miles out, somebody that was planning on going to Florida to sit on the beach would hear about that and decide, well, I know I can't see 199 miles out offshore, but somehow I would know that was out there so I don't want to sit on a beach that has somebody drawing natural gas off a platform that is invisible to me and environmentally friendly. And, by the way, there has been no gas well that has ever polluted anything anytime. If there has ever been a gas well eruption, it went off into the atmosphere. And so it is not an environmental issue; and because they are out so far from the shoreline it is not a scenery issue, which is no excuse anyway, Madam Speaker. It is a political issue. Here in this country we have people who are environmentalists who jump on the environmental band wagon and then they oppose anything that they decide could have an argument that would be against the environment, and they do so so they can raise political money and they can support political candidates, and they do so in defiance of rationale and they do so in defiance of logic. Again, they have set aside this Western Civilization tenet of the age of reason, deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning says, well, if you have a lot of natural gas offshore in Florida and if you can only see about 12 miles offshore, and even if you could see those rigs out there, it doesn't matter to me, I could sit on the beach with a rig out there, it is something to look at. But it is beyond where they could see. Would you not in a deductively reasoning way, Madam Speaker, go in there and explore for that oil and the gas and open that up and bring that natural gas into the United States and produce all the things we do, plastics and fertilizer? I mean, the cost of our fertilizer is the cost of our food. The nitrogen fertilizer that goes in, 90 percent of the input comes from natural gas. So you can't grow anything without nitrogen. And our corn that produces our ethanol is founded in a nitrogen base. So if we are going to be able to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, we have got to have more natural gas to produce the fertilizer. And we can go out there and explore for that and have American energy coming up out of the bottom of the ocean and pumping it into the United States and turning it into fertilizer and heating our homes and our factories and using it to produce all kinds of a myriad of products. But somehow the environmentalists have blocked that all down, not because it is rational, not because they can deductively reason that it makes sense, but simply because there is some visceral instinct that says we think we can raise some campaign dollars and we can get some people to oppose that. And, by the way, if we are emotional about it, they won't even stop and think. Which is the truth, Madam Speaker. They didn't stop and think about ANWR, either. And I did. And I thought, well, if this is perhaps today's largest energy reserve that the United States of America has, and if I am seeing commercials that show the Sierra Club and they put out this commercial that shows this pristine alpine forest and they say don't go up there and explore in ANWR because you will be destroying this pristine alpine forest, and I looked at that and I thought some of that doesn't add up so good for me, Madam Speaker. So I went up there to ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR, traveled all over it, flew over it, down low, looked for everything, looked for wildlife, hours in the air at the lowest altitude they let us fly looking out the windows trying to find massive caribou herd or maybe reindeer herd or a lot of polar bears or maybe some seals swimming around out there. And in all of that flight back and forth and looking down and all of us looking out the windows, Madam Speaker, we saw two white birds and four musk oxen. And those four musk oxen were standing there with their heads down doing nothing, of course it was cold, and they weren't disturbed by anything going on. Madam Speaker, I would submit that some of the environmentalists on the other side of the aisle, and one comes to mind would perhaps be my friend Dennis Kucinich from Ohio, go up there with me sometime and let's look out the window of the plane and fly along and see if you can point out the oil fields that are there in the North Slope, the North Slope that went through all the court action back in the early 1970s, the beginning of the Alaska pipeline, and point out there on the North Slope where are these oil wells; where is this desecration to our environment; where is the desecration to the scenery. Show it to me. I will fly you over the whole thing, Madam Speaker, and look down. And I can point them out now because I have been there and I have been to school, and I will tell you there is not a single derrick sticking out of the air like you imagine, no Texas oil rig from the 1930s. There is not a single pump jack sitting there cranking out the oil out of the ground and leaking a little oil back into the ground. It doesn't exist. The only thing you will see, and now I will tip you off if you want to go, you might be able to see it as I tell you what you are going to be looking for, and that is a rock workover pad maybe 50 feet wide by 100 feet long, maybe a little longer, that sits up about 3 feet above the arctic tundra, white stone like limestone, probably is, a pad that you can bring a workover rig on if you need to work the well in the wintertime. And as they come in to work those wells, they will come in on ice roads, ice roads that will melt in the summertime that don't damage the tundra, and they will set the rig up. And the pumps are all submersible. You can't see the well, you can't see the casing, you can't see the pump, and you can't see the collection tubes. That is all out of the sights and minds of the people that are up there because this is an environmentally friendly development of the North Slope. Madam Speaker, we can do better in the development, even better in the development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We have technology to do directional drilling, and that will reduce our footprint considerably. So why would we, the American people, insist upon going over to the Middle East and buying oil from, some are friends, many are enemies, enriching them, making us more dependent on Middle Eastern oil while we have these massive supplies of energy within our own country? Why would we not, Madam Speaker, develop American energy supplies. Why would we not go down into the Gulf of Mexico and open up the Chevron fields down there that have been found that might increase the supply of our energy by 50 percent, just what is found offshore in the gulf south and west of New Orleans, the Chevron fields. Why would we not do that? Why would this Congress, Madam Speaker, pass legislation that would change the deal that these companies have with the United States of America and say to our best friend oil companies who are developing this energy: we are going to have to renegotiate your leases. We thought it was a good deal when we made it, but now we know something that we didn't know then. So we want to scrap and tear up the leases that you had, the ones that gave you enough profit that you put some incentive into research and development and the exploration, and we want that money, we want that profit. We as a Federal Government want to tax your income more. And then if you don't do that, then we are not going to let you ever sign another lease with the Federal Government or the United States. What are you going to do, Madam Speaker, if you are Chevron or if you are Exxon or if you are Shell or any other company that is one of those great oil companies here in the United States if you get that kind of message from this Congress? I will submit, Madam Speaker, that what you would do is you would take your investments over to foreign countries. You would go offshore in Australia, you would go somewhere else, you would go up in the North Sea, you would go somewhere offshore in West Africa and put your investments there where they are safer. They might be nationalized by some tyrannical government, but they are probably not going to come in and change the deal. They are probably not going to come in and confiscate your investment like this legislation that passed off the floor of this Congress last week or the week before. When the United States of America makes a deal, Madam Speaker, they have got to keep the deal. We saw oil prices go up, we saw barrel price go up to $75 a barrel. We watched it now drop down to the low $50 a barrel. The reason for that is because the supply has gotten greater on the marketplace. The biggest reasons for that is because there was profit in it, that companies that were making money were reinvesting that profit in research and development and producing more oil and putting more of it on the market. We need to thank those companies that have provided this supply for the United States, not punish them for the extra taxes, because these American companies have made us less dependent on Middle Eastern oil, not more dependent. And the actions of this Congress in this past month have made the United States of America more dependent on Middle Eastern oil, not less dependent on Middle Eastern oil. And that is the difference. What we have passed has hurt America's economy, and what we need to do is allow the companies that invest in research and development to make some profit so they will do more of the same. And if there is more energy on the market, then energy will be cheaper. So I will submit, Madam Speaker, that we need more BTUs in the marketplace; we need to grow the size of the energy pie. The more energy there is in the marketplace, the cheaper it all will be. And we have to have incentives for business to step in and do the right thing. That is the natural part that we should understand when we understand free enterprise capitalism. If anybody has a little difficulty handling that, they should pick up a copy of ``Wealth of Nations'' written by Adam Smith published in 1776. He was an economist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and he laid out the principles of free enterprise capitalism, free market economics, and he understood human nature. And all of those things have to be tied together to make these work. We can't defy human nature, Madam Speaker. We must respect and honor human nature.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas for that insightful input. In other words, he is so gentle and subtle when he said the Soviets kept their promise because they didn't make one. And the thing that I am addressing here, Mr. Speaker, is that there were a lot of promises made, and the integrity in this system, that is what you have to function in this body. We have to give our word and we have got to keep our word. And when we do that, this system functions. When you give your word and you don't keep your word, the system breaks down. And the people that pay the price for that are the American people. So I would submit that all of that whole series of promises were subordinated to the 100 hours' promise, which turned out to be 42 hours and 25 minutes. Fine. I am going to grant that that stuff got done in 100 real hours. Actually, it got done just underneath the 100 real hours. But the clock has ticked over by anybody's measure. It is over 100 hours. And there was never a justification for it anyway. I mean, I want to be on record in this Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker. There is not a justification for expediting the process at the expense of the voice of the people. But that is what has been done. Well, it has been done at least under the promise that when the 100 hours is up and the six pieces of legislation are passed, we are going to then try to keep our promise on the most open Congress in history. As we know, you cannot expedite legislation very well in the process that we have now and be able to improve it. So what they have done is they have brought this 150-or-more-page bill that was just first available last night at 11:03 p.m. on the Internet. Some of our staff had actually quit work by that time and gone home to bed; so some of them didn't find that until this morning. But of those 150 or 160 pages, in there is 463-point-something billion dollars of spending and it has changed a fair amount of line items, and what it does is it increases the spending from the Republican plan by $7 billion, Mr. Speaker. Seven billion. And it changes the resources that are committed. They go back to the districts in some places. We even have some locations, in our short little time of looking at this, where we believe that because they have underfunded and this budget has gone on now for almost half a year that there will be some agencies that may well have to pay back because of this omnibus spending bill. And they will come, Mr. Speaker, to the floor tomorrow, and they will say, Well, this is a CR. This is a continuing resolution. And a continuing resolution being that you pass a resolution that says we are going to keep funding government at the current level and all of its line item appropriations until such time as we can get the Senate to act. And I have to say that the Senate needs to act. We passed nearly every single one of the appropriation bills last year, sent them over to the Senate, where they sat. And so that is one of the reasons that we end up with this ugly monstrosity of an omnibus spending bill. But it would be one thing to pass a continuing resolution and say that stuff has been through the subcommittee, committee, the markup process, been to the floor, at Appropriations. We had worked our will on all of that. It is a different Congress, but we had worked our will in the 109th Congress. It would be one thing to pass a continuing resolution to meet those standards because that has been due diligence at least. It is quite another to take all of these dollars, roll them all up, package them up, rewrite them, and then throw them out here on the narrowest of notice, $463 billion, and then say, well, there won't be any input and there won't be any amendments and it is going to be strictly an up-or-down vote, and you get 30 minutes to tell us why it is a bad idea and try to convince our people whose arms are twisted up behind their shoulder blades that they are going to have to vote for it. And there they sit with a large class of freshmen. Some of them served in State legislatures. In fact, I would speculate that most of them have. And I would also speculate that not a single one of them has experienced a process that was so closed in its loop, that was so narrow in its scope, that was so draconian that the collective wisdom of 435 Members of Congress and all the staff and all the constituents and all the media input all goes for naught. I would be very happy to yield to the gentleman from Georgia, and I will pick up whenever I need to. Thank you, Mr. Gingrey.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I am going to have to guess. I am going to turn this back to you for a definitive answer. My speculation would be, Mr. Gohmert, that Duma probably didn't see it and maybe we get to see it for a pro forma vote, or am I wrong?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey). And I will say that my sympathy and heart goes out to especially freshmen Members of Congress when they go back home to their town hall meetings, and I would just ask you, out there, and Mr. Speaker, I convey that message to the people in America, that when these freshman especially show up for their first town hall meeting, I would say to the citizens, stand up and ask them, what has been your input? What has been your impact? How have you kept your promise so far? What do you think of the process? What has been your involvement? Have you produced any amendments? Have you done anything to impact this process whatsoever? And their answer is going to be ``no.'' You need to challenge them, Mr. Speaker, to come back here and open up this process.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege and the honor of being recognized to address you on the floor of the House of the United States House of Representatives, the people's House, this people's House and this new day, this new dawn that was pledged to come to this 110th Congress. As you may or may not know, Mr. Speaker, I spend many hours here on the floor in these Special Orders and in debate on bills and in 1- minutes and in 5-minutes as we engage in this dialogue and raise the issue of what is good for America. One of the very important things about determining what's good for America is to have a process for America that is conducive to the right result, and the right result in most cases, we will agree, I believe, would be the will of the people: the will of the people properly informed, the will of people properly educated, and the will of the people that have access through the first amendment rights to all the information and all the knowledge possible. But, then, I would point out that we do not live in a democracy. As much as I have said about the reflection of the voice or the people here in the people's House, each one of us does have an obligation to listen carefully and attentively to our constituents, to the people in this country, and not just confined within our districts, but to listen to the Nation as a whole and focus on the interests of our district. But sometimes we have to put the Nation ahead of, sometimes, the will of our district. But this is a constitutional Republic that we serve in, not a democracy. I point out that our Founding Fathers had a significant concern, and I will say even a literal fear of democracies. On one of my earlier trips out here to Washington, DC, quite some years ago, I visited the National Archives on my first visit. As I waited in line to go around and be able to stand there and gaze upon the Declaration of Independence, upon the Constitution, upon the Bill of Rights in their original form, the original documents that our Founding Fathers placed their hands to and pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, as I waited to view that for the first time, on display at the National Archives was a display of Greek artifacts. The Greek artifacts that had come from 2- to 3,000 years ago in the era where the closest thing that there has been to a pure democracy from the standpoint of the Greek city-states, where of-age males would gather together, and they would debate; they would debate the issues of the day. They had a number of things they put in place for stopgap. One of the things they found out was, you will recognize the term ``demagogue.'' ``Demagogue'' is a term that we use occasionally in our vernacular, perhaps here on the floor reluctantly, but also throughout our dialogue across the country. There is not a lot of history on demagogues. It is hard to Google demagogue and to become an expert, to look under amazon.com and to come up with real books that are written on real facts that identify demagogues in the Greek era. They are almost nonexistent in this Nation's literature, at least so far as I have been able to identify. But what the Founders knew and what young Americans growing up today and, really, all of its citizens should have an understanding of is that in that purer form of democracy in the Greek-city state, they had Greek demagogues who had such an oratorical skill that they could stand up in front of that small coliseum, so to speak, and make their pitch in such a passionate, logical and rational way that it would move the emotions of the Greeks within that city. They would not necessarily analyze the information behind that debate. They would not necessarily analyze the data, the calculations. They maybe were not even thinking for themselves. But what they would do is, they would listen to the demagogue that had that ability to move the masses with their dialogue. That, sometimes, in fact, often, took the Greeks off on a path that was not necessarily the best path for them, because they didn't stop, step back and think about where they were going. They were moved by the emotion. So a demagogue would be someone, then, who had that ability and that skill. When they were identified as detrimental to the best interests of the city-state, then they had a blackball system. That blackball system, again, as I recall it, was that they would each go through, and there would be a, let us call it a black marble and a white marble, and there would be one large gourd to drop the voting marble in and then one to discard your empty in. So each voting member of a city-state got two, a black marble and a white marble. As they went through there and as they dropped that marble in, they said, I want to keep this individual here in the city-state because I like his position, or he is good for us, or he helps out with the knowledge he has, whatever the reason might be, the same way we vote for or against Presidential candidates in a lot of ways. They would drop a white ball if they wanted to keep him, into the voting. It would actually be a piece of pottery, a smaller-necked piece of pottery, actually. Then they would discard the black ball in another piece of pottery. So no one knew how they voted; it was a secret ballot. But if that demagogue received three black balls dropped down in the voting piece of pottery, then that would be all that was required from the entire city to banish that demagogue from the city for 7 years. That was one of the ways they protected themselves from the emotions of a democracy. Mr. Speaker, I bring this up because quite often, I think, in the classrooms of America, it is taught consistently and continuously that this is a democracy. We toss the term around, we are in a democracy. This is a democracy that goes on over and over and over again, and I always argue, no, this is a constitutional Republic. Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it. That is why we are a constitutional Republic. That is why we are called Representatives here in the United States Congress, because we each represent about 600,000 people. It isn't the 600,000 people, those that are qualified and registered, those that go to vote will select each one of us, and then it is our job to be their voice here. But the first thing that we owe our constituents is not to put our finger in the wind and listen to the polls. It isn't our job necessarily to put our ear to the ground and try to stay ahead of the moving public opinion, but it is our job to listen to that public opinion. It is also our job to be involved in all of the dialogue here and have access to all this information that is available to us here in this capital city, the information center of the world, from my experience. We owe our constituents and all American people our best judgment as we serve in this constitutional Republic. The voice of these Members here in Congress is essential. It is essential for the functionality of a republic, and it is essential for the functionality of this great Nation. In this system of government that we have now shaped, a tried and true system for more than 200 years, we found a way to use this process of gathering the information and the data and the input from our constituents who come through my office every day. And I sit down with them every day that we are open for business here, and it is for me to gather that kind of input and information. Then I exchange back with them the things that I know about policy from sitting here. Then we have discussions about, well, here is our budget, these are our limitations, these are the policy questions. Here is the legality, here are some of the constitutional constraints that we have, and your needs are this. So how do we shape this together so that we can come forward with a proposal that meets the needs of my constituents or anyone's constituents, stays within the framework of our budget and the Constitution and moves this Nation forward to our destiny? Those are the questions that we are obligated to struggle to resolve here in this Congress, and we have developed a process by which we have many, many public hearings. We bring forward in the public hearings witnesses that testify into the record under oath, so that we can rely on the accuracy and the honesty and the veracity of their statements. That is some of the information. A lot of the other government reports and other data that come from nongovernmental organizations and individual citizens and the letters that come every day and the e-mails that come every day and the phone calls that come every day, we put that all together. We sort that. We synthesize that. We go to the subcommittee or the full committee for the hearings. We ask the appropriate questions so that we can probe into these issues to represent our constituents. Then, after the hearing process is done, then a bill comes forward, a bill comes out through the subcommittee process for a markup, and that markup always must allow legitimate germane amendments in order. It is not just a theory; it is a tried and true proven fact. The reason for amendments is to improve the legislation. The first term that you run into, as any, one step forward, to become a legislator, whatever level of government might be, whatever political subdivision it might be, is the law of unintended consequences. That is what happens when any of us, most often in our youthful idealism, come charging into the legislative process. We say, I have a law I want to pass, this is what I want it to be. You write that down, put it into the right format, and you submit that into the process, and immediately the wake-up call is, well, what about this implication and that? What happens when you unfund this side of it. What happens when you don't have law enforcement on the other side? What happens when you punish more people than you were trying to help because you didn't think of all the aspects? Well, that is the law of unintended consequences. That is what happens when you have a legislative process that circumvents or usurps this tried and true, more than two-centuries-old process that we have here in the United States Congress. This constitutional Republic cannot sustain itself if we do not have a regular order of doing business that guarantees the rights of each Member to be heard, for each Member to bring their judgment to the hearing process, to probe the witnesses, to put into the record the background that they want to gather from the witnesses they choose, as well, to offer amendments at committee and subcommittee level and at the level up at the Rules Committee. This is all a process to perfect legislation, to reduce, and, ideally, eliminate that Murphy's Law of unintended consequences, and also to improve the quality of the legislation so that it is far more effective than it may be as if just one person with their limited vision, their limited knowledge, limited background and limited understanding could bring to this legislative body. I have to point out, the system and the process that I have described here is anything, but what has been taking place in this 110th Congress. This is the 110th Congress that was promised to be the most open and the term, I believe, was ``democratic Congress in history.'' The leadership was going to set up a system that had rules, that allowed for amendments at every level, that allowed for open dialogue, that allowed for open hearings. In fact, the Speaker of the House is clearly on record time after time after time, making those kinds of pledges. Well, I will point out that has not been the case. I will get back to the facts of that here in a moment. What I would like to do is illustrate this poster that tells us what has been going on here in this new 110th Congress, which began on the 4th day of January when we organized and first brought forth the rules. The opinion that this Congress had to live by was the promise, campaign promise, and they won the majority. In the first 100 hours, six pieces of legislation shall pass; we will do this for the American people, was the argument. So we have two different ways of keeping time. The American people would wonder, well, the first 100 hours, if that promise of doing these six pieces of legislation in the first 100 hours is so sacrosanct that you have to suspend, maybe temporarily, and maybe not temporarily, the regular order that we call it here. This really is the entire process that I have described: the suspension of hearings, subcommittee meetings, full committee meetings, rules, consideration of amendments, and amendments being allowed on the floor, being debated, so the American people can understand what this body is doing. That entire process has been suspended, and it has been suspended because the argument was made by the incoming leadership that those six pieces of legislation couldn't be passed within the first 100 hours if we went to a regular order and allowed any Member to have any voice in trying to improve any piece of that legislation. So here we are this first 100 hours. I thought, well, all right, if the promise of 100 hours is sacrosanct, and it is so important that this legislation that has never been done in the history of America has to be done in the first 100 hours, if that is so important, then we ought to know at least what the criteria are for turning it on and turning it off. We ought to be able to know when that 100 hours is over, when we will go back to regular order, and the people who have campaigned and been elected to legitimately represent their 600,000 people will have a choice in this Congress to improve and perfect legislation. So I started the clock, and I have kept this clock from the beginning. You know, there are only two legitimate ways to count time. One of them would be the 110th Congress began when we gaveled in here on the 4th day of January. You could just let the clock run all through the day, the night, the next day, and it will just essentially tick when we get sine die, gavel out of the 110th Congress roughly 2 years from now. I don't think that is necessarily a fair and legitimate way, that keeping track of 100 hours is sacrosanct. We may give them a little bit different way to do that. Let us make it the legitimate way of keeping time, was my proposal. Fairly simply, when the gavel comes in here in the morning, and we gavel in to start our day, and we start with the prayer and the pledge, that is the beginning of this congressional day. When we finish these Special Orders and there is a motion to adjourn, and you adjourn this Chamber, click, with the stopwatch, time is over, that is how many hours it is for that day. Well, the Pelosi clock has a different way of keeping time. But just by comparison--and first I want to point out that those six pieces of legislation were passed not in the form I thought they were going to come to the floor in, probably not the form that the American people thought that they would be passed in, but a form that had those six titles of that legislation that came to this floor, passed within the first real 100 hours of legislation. And that ended on a Friday at 11:44 a.m. when the real clock ticked over at 100 hours. But the Pelosi clock which was on the Web page, that was put up so that they would have all the time that they wanted to have to get this legislation done, and we just took a little picture of that. That clock went to 42 hours and 25 minutes. That is how much, Mr. Speaker, had been expired on the Pelosi clock. So one can only presume that this clock was a slow clock. The Pelosi office refuses to grant us any criteria as to when they turn their clock on and when they turn their clock off. The only thing we know is this clock was not going to run up to 100 hours until those six pieces of legislation were passed. So it is kind of a backwards figuring thing, but now it has been pulled down from the Web site of the Speaker, but that was the end of the game. So when that 100 hours is over, the request was give us some time, give us some patience. We need to have the suspension of our rules. We are going to have to go to this draconian process that no Member has a voice in anything until these six pieces of legislation are passed. We are going to have to go to that to get our six pieces passed in the first 100 hours. Well, the six pieces are passed. The 100 hours now, it is about 148- point-something actually, where it is going to be 149 when we finish this up. That is how many hours that we have invested here in this 110th Congress. But we are still under draconian martial law in this Congress. We are bringing to the floor of the United States Congress tomorrow, and I don't mean me, but the leadership on the other side of the aisle is bringing an omnibus spending bill. That omnibus spending bill is coming to the floor, $463 billion, without a single hearing, without a single subcommittee or committee meeting, without a markup, without an amendment; and we are going to spend $463 billion out of here tomorrow on 30 minutes of debate from the dissenting side and 30 minutes of debate from the proponents' side, and the taxpayers are going to take the hit. And I feel sorry, Mr. Speaker, for the American people. And I feel really sorry for the freshmen that came to this Congress, especially the large class of Democrats who no doubt said, I will be your voice in Congress. I promise you that you haven't been represented well. I will be effective. When I go there, I will be heard. I am going to delve into all of this policy and I will be there. You will see that come out in the language. It will go into law. But to this day come to the floor and I will yield to anyone, any freshman especially, who could come down here and say, I went to a hearing and I offered an amendment in a subcommittee markup or in a full committee or I am going to be allowed to offer an amendment here on the floor and it is going to improve some legislation. I think there was a freshman that ran some legislation here last week. I just don't know if she ever got to see the language before she came to the floor to be the sitting duck for the criticism, for the narrow debate that we had. That is the tone of where we are. The American people are being cheated by this process. And I will be very happy to yield to the man who is a judge of that, Judge Louie Gohmert from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, again I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) for reminding me about some of the earmarks that we have out there. And the list is long. And my point on this is the American people can make that list a lot longer. And at least in theory, any piece of appropriation that comes across this floor that makes it through the process should have the majority support of the House of Representatives. It ought to have the majority support of the United States Senate. We ought to agree on that number, and it should go to the President for his signature. That is the process that is structured within our constitution. That is the process as the American people envision it. That is the process that we are struggling to attain here, that will not be, even presumed to be happening tomorrow when this--not a CR, but this omnibus spending bill which is a catch-all for every single appropriation that goes into discretionary spending for the rest of--until the first day of October is when this is over. And, again, I am so sorry for the freshmen who come here that right now don't know any better, and they aren't even outraged. They have been led, taken by the hand and led down the primrose path. And I have offered them time and again, come down here. I would be happy to yield. Tell me what legislation you have had a voice in. What have you made a difference in? Did you make the promise to represent your constituents or didn't you? Yes, you did. Obviously everybody makes that promise. So didn't you have some high and shining ideals? When you see the flag go up over the Capitol doesn't that make your heart beat a little faster? Don't you get that feeling in your stomach and that swelling sense of pride when you look up at the dome and that you are here to represent the American people of the United States Congress? But my news to you is you are not representing them. You are not being allowed to represent them. You aren't even a voice. You haven't been heard. Your input is not there. The expertise that you bring with your background, whatever it might be, has no value in this place. It is just a handful of people in the cabal that decide what is coming down here, the same ones that make the promise that there is going to be that opportunity, freshman, for you to be able to have that kind of input. So, Mr. Speaker, I illustrate that and the absence of rebuttal here on this floor is confirmation of my statement of my position and that of Mr. Gingrey and that of Mr. Feeney here this afternoon. The absence of rebuttal speaks loudly and it echoes in my ears. But on the earmark part of this, that is why I drafted the CUT Act, so that this Congress could be able to eliminate any line item that did not have the majority support of the House and the Senate and the President, and it recognizes that the President would sign an appropriations bill and that money would get off his desk and go to the agencies, wherever it might be, and it takes them sometimes the whole year to spend the last dollar. And at any point where we rescinded that funding, it would go to reduce the national debt automatically, and then that fund would no longer be available to whatever entity was about to receive it. That is one way that gives Congress, the CUT Act gives Congress a line item veto. And that is the piece of policy that we need to get resolved here in this Congress, along with many others. But the open process, and this is going to be and has been so far, Mr. Speaker, a very closed process, a process so closed that I will point out that, not just a matter of information, I mean, I have sent my staff down to the majority leader's office to try to find out what the criteria was for the clock, or what is the criteria for providing and offering amendments; when is this draconian martial-law going to be lifted, this open process that is promised. And I want to point out, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper) was doing a national television program here on the news, the beginning of the 110th Congress, a couple of days before we gaveled in. And they said to him, but you are going to suspend all the rules and you are going to drive all this legislation through without input from Members on either side. And he got kind of a funny look on his face and he said, well, just please, will you give us a little patience. Have some patience and let us get through this process. And once we get these six bills passed, you are going to see the most open, democratic Congress in history. Mr. Cooper, I am waiting for you, too. I would be very happy to yield. That is not the case today. The hundred hours is clearly up. The process is not open, and the American people are not being heard. They didn't decide they were going to anoint some people with a royalty position, whether they allege that they are the most powerful woman in the world or not. This is a government that rules by the consent of the people. And the people did not give their consent to a process that is not an open process, a process that muzzles 99 percent of the Members in this Congress. And clearly, they are not here to speak up because they know they don't have a voice and they don't have an argument. And so we are going to continue to push on this process. We are going to go before the Rules Committee. I took an amendment up before the Rules Committee, and there were a number of us that did. We all know the results of that, the charade in the Rules Committee, which is, bring your amendment up. You can offer your amendment up here, but before you come up here, we are going to tell you we are not going to accept a single one, even if it is some kind of revelation. If it is an epiphany that just fixes the whole thing, we are not going to consider it because the meat cleaver has come down. So we are going through a charade. No amendments, but come here and argue them anyway if you want to and we will sit through this and we will put one or two people up there and we will rotate and we will get through this process. And then we will say, why are you complaining? We had a rules process. You just didn't have any amendments with any merit. Oh, really? No amendments with any merit is the same result as no input into the process, Mr. Speaker. This government cannot function with that. And I will also point out that the House of Representatives is where all the appropriations has to start. That is what the Constitution says and that is what we need to follow. But this bill, this omnibus bill, is going to go over to the Senate, over to those 100 Senators over there, and you can bet that they are going to be offering amendments and they are going to be improving this omnibus spending bill, and they are going to be fixing this all the way through their process. So their voice will be heard. And then we will get an amended omnibus bill back here again, and I would submit this question, will then, Mr. Speaker, will it come to the floor again with no opportunity for amendments again? And if that is the case, why have we ceded the improvement process to the United States Senate? We are the hot cup of coffee here, and they are the saucer to cool it in. We are supposed to be the quick reaction force that has the elections every 2 years, so that vigor that comes with a new freshman class and that risk of being up for re-election every 2 years, it keeps us tuned in with our fingers on the pulse of the American people who can be heard in the legislative process. The hot cup of coffee, the quick reaction force, the storm troops that are going to come in and fix things quickly, especially in the change-over of a majority, Mr. Speaker, is just what our Founding Fathers envisioned when they drafted our Constitution and set up this miraculous system of government that we have. But the leadership in this House of Representatives has handed over the amendment process to the United States Senate which they have a legitimate claim to their version of it, we also have a legitimate claim to ours and a constitutional duty to do so that has been usurped by this decision to make a promise and have that promise of 100 hours be sacrosanct and then like that draconian approach so much of not being challenged that they go ahead and shut the clock off at 42 hours and 25 minutes. And we could go on in perpetuity until the American people revolt at the polls. That is what is coming. You are going to see mistake after mistake after mistake. One of those examples would be the Minimum Wage Act, American Samoa, and being exempted from the Minimum Wage Act of all of The states and territories of the United States of America, one place on the map with 60,000 people, we find out after the fact, after the minimum wage bill is passed, is exempted from the minimum wage. Well, if you can legislate wages to go up and help people, which is the argument that came out of this side of the aisle continually, Mr. Speaker, then why can't you do so in American Samoa? What is wrong with them that they don't deserve a raise like everybody else got in America that was working for a minimum wage? And the answer that I get back is, well, we had to do that because the tuna market there won't sustain this. The international competition won't sustain higher wages, so we would lose that to Asia or maybe South American companies that can produce that tuna cheaper than they can in the American Samoa. Well, that is called competition. And how is it that Democrats can understand the effect of competition and the deleterious effect of minimum wage on a small business, large business in a small microcosm of a location like American Samoa? They can understand it when it is a microcosm, but they can't understand it when it is 300 million people in a macrocosm. It is the same principle that applies, Mr. Speaker. But that is a fatal flaw of this approach of a closed process rather than an open process. That is what happens, Mr. Speaker, when we don't allow for amendments. And then things start to smell fishy. What was the reason? I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the esteemed gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Phil, for his input. I did not mean to imply that I was short of time to deal with it. So if you feel the urge a little later as well, Mr. Gingrey, I am open to whatever dialogue you may have to bring to this floor. I appreciate that input. We are here to represent the American people. We each represent roughly 600,000, for each of us 435 Members here in the United States Congress. There is not anybody in this Congress that would concede a point that there is anybody's constituents that deserve more representation than theirs. I will just say it this way. There are no one's constituents in America that deserve more representation than my constituents. And, conversely, there are no constituents out there in America that deserve less. That means you have got to have an open process that provides for open dialogue, that provides for opportunities along the way to perfect legislation to avoid unintended consequences and to improve legislation to perfection if we possibly can. That is the process that is absolutely missing. It has been totally usurped. It has been a rug jerked out from underneath this entire Congress. And the promise of an open process is a broken promise. The 100 hours are up, and no one knows that better than Mr. Feeney from Florida. I yield to Mr. Feeney.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, just an inquiry then. What are the odds of the people within your stadiums in Florida with 60,000 or more people in them, what are the odds of them paying Federal taxes compared to that of American Samoa?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Feeney, for adding the clarity to this issue and putting the numbers down and for also listing into the Congressional Record the seven points, any one of which qualifies as an earmark, all of which will be breaking the promise tomorrow, and 2,000 times larger than that large earmark that 80-some percent of America understands as the Bridge to Nowhere. I would point out that there is a way to address this. And I have not been necessarily a critic of well-managed earmarks, as long as they are within the budget and as long as it is a Member initiative that actually is researched and debated, and it is open and it is public, there is an opportunity to go in and strike it out. But the problem with the earmarks has been, they show up after it is too late, and the bill comes to the floor, and there is not time to read the bill, and not time to prepare amendments; or they come up in a conference, and then here comes the conference report with a whole stack of earmarks in there that are agreed to by the conference committee, but not aware, not made aware to the rest of the Members, and no access to it. So I looked at this. And I thought, how can we fix this? And we have done some things with earmarks. But last year, in the middle of this, about this time a year ago, I began grinding and churning my way through and created an act called the Cut Act. And I have drafted and filed that information; I believe that both gentlemen here on the floor are cosponsors of that Cut Act. But what that Act does, Mr. Speaker, is it recognizes that there will be legislation passed off the floor of this Congress, and that Members will not have an opportunity to act on that legislation, on that appropriation, and that there will be earmarks in there that are either identified or may be not identified, but maybe they are objectionable to the American people. And it recognizes, Mr. Speaker, that this is an instantaneous Information Age if we give access on the Internet to the people in this country, all of whom have access to the Internet in one form or another. We have not done that. We need to put sunlight on everything that we do. We need to let them have real-time bloggers be able to access all of the bills that are filed, all of the amendments that are filed. They need to be able to track this whole process. But then once we get that system set up and we provide sunlight, the Cut Act allows, recognizes that those appropriations bills will find their way over to the President's desk, and he will sign them to keep this government running. And this is that there will be a whole collection of objectionable, irresponsible spending to projects that comes to mind. The bridge was referenced by Mr. Feeney. The Cowgirl Hall of Fame strikes me as something that could be privately funded if we need one. There are a number of others out there that are objectionable earmarks. But if we pass the CUT Act, and the President signs the appropriation bill and the bloggers light up and they start sending this in and it becomes a national issue, or even just a tip that goes to a certain Member of Congress, like Mr. Gingrey for example, we could, under the CUT Act, once each quarter, four times a year, provide under the rule so that a bill would be brought to the floor that would allow for the rescission of any one of those individual line items. So the Shell bill might come to the floor. Any Member would bring an amendment that would say I want to eliminate the funding for the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. We put it up here on the board. We vote it up or down. We do that to every single line item if we chose to do that, and it might take a long time to debate that first bill.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker how much time do I have left?