Steven LaTourette

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I give you 30 seconds.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman. I thank the Chair. I yield back.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Thank you, Mr. Diaz-Balart, for the recognition. And I want to thank Mr. Boccieri of Ohio for introducing this piece of legislation. Mr. Boccieri--I can't call him Congressman Regula's replacement because nobody can replace Congressman Regula, but he is his successor. And, unluckily, I also happen to be his successor as the dean of the Ohio Republican Delegation because in the last two elections you guys have wiped everybody out, and at eight terms, I'm the head guy on our side in the State of Ohio. But, as has been mentioned, Ralph served 36 years here. And 36 years is the longest that any Republican Member of Congress has served from the State of Ohio. He had a lot to do, and I think Mr. Petri is going to talk about his work with the parks when he was the chairman of the Interior Subcommittee, but Ralph's real gift, when it came to our side of the aisle at least, back in happier days--and Mr. Boccieri, happier days are when the Republicans were in the majority, that definition. Ralph guided us. And if you looked at the Ohio delegation back in the 1990s, most of us were the chairmen of full committees. We had two cardinals, Mr. Regula and Mr. Hobson of Springfield. And that was all Ralph's doing. He made a commitment to make sure that there was an Ohioan on every committee that mattered. When I was elected--I'm a lawyer by training--I said, Ralph, I think I would like to be on the Judiciary Committee. And he said, What are you, nuts? We need a Republican from Ohio on the Transportation Committee. And he put me there, and it was one of the happiest times of my life. There are two things that I want to talk about. Mr. Serrano is right about his observations, but I came in the Class of 1994, so I'm one of those Republican revolutionaries that created the first majority since 1954. And Mr. Speaker, you may remember--and others may remember--that at that time there was a lot of rhetoric in this Chamber and there were some things that became targets. And parks became targets. But what I will always remember is that it was the desire on my side of the aisle to zero-fund things like the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And I thought that was misguided, and Congressman Regula, as the chairman of the Interior Subcommittee, also felt that that was misguided. And as a result, although those agencies saw reductions during that time, they were never zeroed out. And I think in this appropriation cycle we will finally get back to the level of funding that they received prior to 1994. I will tell you that a few years before Congressman Regula's retirement he was in line as the most senior guy to become the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. And he worked very hard at that. He created an organization called CARE, and worked hard--raised a lot of money in what you had to do and all that other business--and he was denied that honor, that opportunity. I will tell you that, in my mind, it had a lot to do not with the quality of the other candidates, who were both excellent. It had a lot to do with the fact that Ralph had angered people back in the 1990s because he wouldn't eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, he wouldn't eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities, he wouldn't agree to shut down the Department of Education. And as a result, even though Ralph had a long and distinguished career here, I think he was punished. The other thing I want to say about Ralph is his partner, his life partner, Mary--Mary, of course, is the brains behind the First Ladies' Library. Mr. Speaker, if you ever happen to be traveling through the State of Ohio and you have to take a restroom break or you have to get off and get a soda, stop at the First Ladies' Library, because it really is an amazing creation that wouldn't be in existence today if it wasn't for Mary Regula, with the support of her husband, Ralph Regula. So, Mr. Boccieri, I again want to thank you very much. This is an amazingly wonderful bipartisan effort on your part, and Senator Brown, who you mentioned, to name something after somebody who really deserves to have something named after him. I never have served with a finer public servant than Congressman Regula. I know that that building will make him proud, and it should make the citizens of Canton, Ohio, proud as well. And I thank you for honoring my friend.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman. Mr. Tiberi, I would yield to you for an observation.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. To answer the gentleman's question, I think it's both. I think we'll see the administration taking credit for saving 2,000 jobs and for creating 2,000 jobs. It will be too bad for the folks in the Miami Valley, and that's just the way it goes. I would close with: we sent the President of the United States, President Obama, a letter that was signed by 36 of our colleagues. I believe all of the Members on the floor signed it. It basically asked the President to take a deep breath. As Mr. Jordan has indicated, this unappointed task force, in my opinion, is not serving the President of the United States well. So take a deep breath. Go back to 1979. There was Jimmy Carter, Lee Iacocca and the problem with Chrysler back in 1979. Have thoughtful hearings. Have thoughtful discussions. Have people who are experienced in the automotive industry or who, at a minimum, own a car, and let's have this conversation. In that case, my colleagues will remember, the United States not only got paid back, but we made money. We made $35 million on the first Chrysler bailout. The problem that the government had is nobody ever expected us to make money on it, so there was no provision on how to spend it; but people at home need not worry--that Congress at the time figured out how to spend it rather quickly. It goes to show that, when done thoughtfully, it can be done okay. So we come to Clue, the travel edition--and oh, by the way, we haven't heard back from the President yet. I know he is overseas and that he is a busy person being the leader of the Free World, so he hasn't had a chance to get back to us. I hope that he does. I hope he takes our suggestion. It is a bipartisan letter--I want to say that-- from Republicans and Democrats who are concerned about the autoworkers, the plants, the auto dealers, and the people who invest money. Mr. Speaker, in closing, I think it's a shame. You know, if our constituents want safe monkeys, they can rest easy tonight because we've passed that bill twice. If you like cats and dogs, they're okay. You can rest easy. If you like trains, it's not a problem. If your post office hasn't been named this year, call your Member of Congress, and I'll bet we can slap a name on it sometime rather than dealing with the problems that ail the country. If you're a union member who works for the United Autoworkers, too bad. We don't have time for any legislation for you. We will train you for a green job--cutting somebody's grass. If you, God forbid, were a stockholder in one of these companies or invested money in one of these companies, you're now being told your investment is worthless, so things like secured debt don't mean ``secured debt.'' It's a little bit like the mortgage crisis. If you're tired of paying your mortgage, don't worry about it. We'll pay it for you. There is the supply chain that Mr. Tiberi talked about, and there are the dealers that, I think, we've all talked about. We're talking about 200,000 people. Again, it doesn't make sense. I think Mr. Jordan's observation was right on the money. First of all, we have got to solve Clue, the travel edition, to figure out who did this. Secondly, I think they owe people an explanation. Why did my plant get closed and not somebody else's? Why did this dealership get closed and not somebody else's? Why are 1,200 people out of work in my district and not someplace else? Why are we picking on the dealers when, according to Mr. Nardelli, he doesn't know if they cost him any money? It is, indeed, a strange business model to think that you're going to sell more Chryslers with less stores and with no advertising, but maybe that's just me. Mr. Speaker, I thank you. I thank my colleagues--two from Ohio and one from Michigan--for joining us for this hour. I yield back our time.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Sure.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank you, Mr. Jordan, for saying that. Listening to your story, I couldn't make that conference call. I made one the next day with Fritz Henderson, who's the CEO after the President fired the old CEO of General Motors. Hearing your description, it sounds like the Supreme Court used to wrestle with the definition of pornography. They don't know what the definition is, but they'll know it when they see it. So perhaps a major event will be known by the President's task force when they see.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I'm glad my friend brought that up, because one of the people that has been sent out as a member of the auto task force, Mr. Montgomery, and he was in Twinsburg, and rather than explaining how Twinsburg got picked and these 1,200 people are out of jobs, they were there to announce a great new initiative, a nationwide initiative, $50 million, to take now 30,000 unemployed autoworkers, $5 million for 30,000 unemployed autoworkers, and transition them to green jobs. Now, I made the observation, and the Labor Secretary didn't like it very much, but I made the observation at the rate these guys are going, the only green jobs that are going to be left are cutting the grass of the Wall Street guys that got the $700 billion bailout. So some of this defies logic. I just want to close the loop on these auto dealers, not only the workers, but the dealers. Because if you look who's being negatively impacted, it's the bondholders who had $27 billion in General Motors and they are being forced to settle for peanuts or they're called not patriotic. You have 30,000 autoworkers whose livelihood and their family's livelihood depends upon getting up and going to work for this company. You have the communities that are impacted, and you have over 200,000 people that work at auto dealers. Mr. Nardelli was on the witness stand in New York and he was being questioned by Amy Brown, who's an attorney for the Chrysler dealers who doesn't seem real happy about this decision. And the question was, Well, what is it that these dealers are costing the company? Mr. Nardelli's response was, Well, there's a host of expenses relating to such things as tooling, service training, advertising, and sales incentives. But when Ms. Brown asked him to quantify how much those things cost the automaker, Mr. Nardelli said he could not, and he wasn't sure if the automaker had ever determined those exact costs. So I don't think that that's what's going on here. I think that you have people taking advantage of a bankruptcy situation, a crisis, to engage in an agenda that they perhaps have been wanting to engage in for a very long time. And I think that it's disingenuous. And that's why we have unveiled Clue, the Travel Edition. We would like to know. I want to yield to my friend now, one of the great champions of the auto industry from the State of Michigan that's been more impacted. I think at lunch today I heard his State may crest 25 percent unemployment as a result of some of these decisions. My friend, Mr. McCotter from Michigan.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. General Motors has made clear that there's going to be a new Chrysler and an old Chrysler--the bad assets going to old Chrysler; the new Chrysler, the good assets. The same thing with General Motors. The letter to the dealer is clear that if you don't sign these participation agreements and agree to whatever terms we can think of, you're out. And you're going to go under the old General Motors. Not much of a choice. We were talking about you, my friend; our friend from the western part of Ohio, Mr. Jordan. We were talking a little bit about your experience in the Judiciary Committee. Maybe you can share, since you were there. I tried to relate it as best I could, but maybe you could chat about what happened.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank my friend from Michigan. I just want to bring to a conclusion this evening, we hear a lot that we can't deal with some of the problems in the country because we're really busy here in the United States Congress, and so we don't have floor time. I talked a little earlier about the AIG thing and the majority leader can't schedule it on the floor because we're really busy doing other stuff. As a matter of fact, when we broke for the Memorial Day district work period, the Speaker and the majority leader and the Democratic leadership had a big press conference hailing all of the great things that we did. But I can tell you we didn't do anything about Chrysler, we didn't do anything about General Motors. And so I went back, and in the last Congress, Mr. Speaker, you may remember that gasoline was going through the roof. In Ohio, it topped $4 for the first time in my lifetime. And you would think that we would be doing something about a national energy policy here in the United States Congress, the greatest deliberative body in the world. When the majority changed--and, again, as Republicans, we did such a swell job that the voters threw us out and they installed the Democrats as the majority. They took over and began their legislative responsibilities on January 29, 2007. Gas was about $2.22. On that day, the most important thing that the majority leader could schedule was congratulating the University of California at Santa Barbara's soccer team. Gas goes up a little bit to $2.24, and that's getting people's attention. The most important thing we could do in the United States Congress is pass a resolution honoring National Passport Month. Gas goes over $3, which has people alarmed. My phones are ringing off the hook, and my colleagues' phones are ringing off the hook. On that day, the most important thing we could do is commend the Houston Dynamo soccer team. You see a pattern here, Mr. Speaker. We are told, in order to be successful in elective office, we have to get the soccer moms. So, as gas is going through the roof, we are congratulating a soccer team in California and one down in Texas. Just to make sure nobody is confused, we like soccer and we like soccer moms. Gas goes up to $3.77, and the most important thing that the majority can put on the floor is a resolution honoring National Train Day. Most of us like trains, but gas is $3.77. Gas goes up to $3.84. We passed-- and I had to look this up because I didn't know what a ``canid'' was. When gas hit $3.84, we passed the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act. Again, if you have trouble with canids, Mr. Speaker, that's a dog. So gas is $3.84. Our constituents are suffering as they fill up their tanks, and we're talking about cats and dogs here in the United States Congress. It gets up to $4.09. It crosses $4 for the first time. Do you know what? A lot of people in my district don't know this, but 2008 was the International Year of Sanitation. So that was the most important thing we could do. Then out here, when we get to $4.14, which is about where it crested in Ohio--it might have been higher or a little bit lower in other States--the most important thing that the majority can put on the floor is the Monkey Safety Act. So, again, when talking about tone deaf, that made some of us think that perhaps the new majority was tone deaf, and we talked to them about it. We said, Hey, you know, maybe we could do other stuff. So this year, when hundreds of thousands of people in this country who work in the automotive industry are losing their jobs, we're thinking, oh, they get it; they understand you can't do goofy things and commemorative things when people are losing their jobs. Earlier this year, 4,000 people were axed at Chrysler. On that day, we honored former Senator Claiborne Pell. He had a long, storied career, but we've got 4,000 people out of work, and maybe we could be doing something else; 9,500 Chrysler people are out. On that day, the most important thing that the majority can put on the floor is a resolution supporting the goals and ideals of national team dating. All of us think team dating is important unless you happen to be the father of one of the team members; but we passed that resolution. You get up here just south of 10,000 Chrysler workers who are losing their jobs; and son of a gun, we pass the Monkey Safety Act again. So we had time not to deal with gasoline prices, not to deal with an energy policy, not to deal with the automotive industry, but we did have time to take up floor time, 2 years in a row, on the Monkey Safety Act. Then we got out here where 13,000 people are losing their jobs, and son of a gun, I guess the Senate didn't pass the bill about cats and dogs, and so we take more floor time talking about cats and dogs even though 13,000 people have lost their jobs. Then you get out here. This is another guy who, I think, we all like, but now 16,000 people are out of jobs, and the most important thing the majority can put on the floor is awarding a gold medal to Arnold Palmer. I think most of us like Arnold Palmer, and we think he has had a nice career, but 16,000 of our friends and neighbors are without jobs. Then when it hits the top at 18,365, son of a gun, it's National Train Day Again. So there clearly are difficulties with priorities here in the House, and I don't want to disparage the Democratic leadership too much. I would be happy to yield to my friend in just a second because it's not fair just to talk about the Monkey Safety Act and National Train Day and the International Year of Sanitation. I want my colleagues to know that, since the beginning of this Congress, the majority has also taken up floor time at 40 minutes a pop to name all of these post offices in the United States of America. So, if you live in one of these towns, Mr. Speaker, you can rest assured that the United States Congress is on the job and that we have named your post office. So, when you go in and get that 44-cent stamp, it has got a name on it. The folks know that each one of these takes about an hour of floor time and a vote. I think there are 14 of them. There may be a few more. So that's about 14 hours of precious time when the United States Congress could have been talking about jobs at Chrysler, about jobs at GM and about gasoline prices last year when we couldn't quite get there. Just to close the loop on that thought, as we know, 11 plants have closed this week, GM plants, and another 21,000 people are out of work. So you would think, okay, because Chrysler is smaller than GM, maybe we didn't think it was that huge; but Flagship GM, as my friend from Michigan has talked about, is a national icon. So we came back from our district work period yesterday, and just to make sure that people don't think that I'm somehow bad-mouthing the Democratic majority, they really did stuff yesterday to take care of the GM situation other than naming post offices. Yesterday, we debated legislation on the direct fish stocking of certain lakes in Washington State, and we commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains. Apparently, the soccer moms have been replaced with basketball moms, and we honored the University of Tennessee's women's basketball team. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from Michigan.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. That's a great question, and the reason that President George W. Bush is up here is that there's some people that blame him for everything bad. And so as a result, I thought to be fair, just in case, even though he was back in Crawford, Texas, when all this was going on, just in case, we should have President Bush up there to satisfy those that blame him for just about everything that has happened. I want to move on for just a second before I yield to my friend again, and the news has gotten worse. And the news has indicated that in addition to the 9,000 people who worked for Chrysler that aren't going to be able to work for Chrysler anymore, for some reason, through the bankruptcy, first Chrysler indicated and sent notices to 789 auto dealers across the country that they needed to shutter their doors. And according to the National Association of Automobile Dealers, about 60 people work on average at each auto dealership. And then this week's news, with General Motors news, 2,600 General Motors dealerships, and again, 60 employees. So the first job loss is projected to be 47,000 roughly, second job loss 156,000. So another 200,000 people are going to be out of work. And you know, some people don't understand how an auto dealer costs the car company any money. And some people further think it's a strange business model to have less stores. You want to sell more stuff, and in particular in rural areas and in particular when it comes to their service department. On top of that, The Detroit News reported on May 11 that this task force that Mr. Geithner's on and Mr. Bloom's on indicated that during the bankruptcy proceedings not only were we going to have to approve these closures of these 789 Chrysler dealerships, they also said they didn't want Chrysler spending any money on advertising during the course of the bankruptcy. And finally, when it was indicated to them how stupid that was, they let Chrysler spend half of what they intended. So, again, you have a business model where the thinking is that Chrysler's going to be more successful with less stores, and Chrysler's going to be more successful with no advertising, especially when it's in the news and people have concerns about buying a car from a company that's in bankruptcy. So some strange decisions have been made, and it's caused some people to ask Harley Shaiken, who is a labor expert at the University of California, Berkeley, certainly not a hotbed of conservative thought; he said the auto task force tends to be a little tone deaf. A large part of their approach tends to be at cross-purposes with the stimulus package. The Obama administration is trying to spend money to create jobs at the same time that they're cutting jobs. I know my friend from Ohio knows that another colleague of ours from Ohio, Mr. Jordan from the western part of Ohio, participated in a hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee. And the question came up, These people on the task force, do any of them have experience in manufacturing, manufacturing cars, selling cars, making parts? And the answer was none, nobody has. They had plenty of Wall Street experience, but they don't have any experience when it comes to the automotive industry. And the witness went on to say--and this was really startling--that most of them don't own cars, and not only don't they own cars, those that do own cars drive foreign cars. But again, this is a group of people that are making--and they're not elected, they're appointed-- this is a group of people that are making these decisions that is going to cost, if you add in the Chrysler stuff, we're getting north of--and you have to put in the GM workers, another 21,000 workers this week, you're north of 250,000 jobs. I yield to my friend.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, I'm going to tell you, first of all, you don't have the affected parties, and so all of the people that worked for General Motors, all of the dealers that depend on it, they're not in New York. They could only find one dealer in Harlem, and so you avoid that problem. In addition, you are able to judge shop. I mean, it's called forum shopping, and every lawyer would love, I mean love--lawyers like to win--every lawyer would love to be able to go out and pick his judge or her judge, because who wouldn't? I mean, this judge is tough, this judge is not so tough; this judge is smart, this judge is not so smart. So I mean if you could pick where your case goes, you could do pretty well. And it appears exactly what our friends at the task force did and our friends at General Motors did. And then on top of it, I go back to the job losses at the auto dealer. It's worse than that chart because every dealer who sells GM products has gotten a letter, and it's either a you're gone letter or you're safe letter. But the guys that are safe, they are going to be required, the dealers that are going to be part of the new GM, to sign participation agreements. And if they don't sign the participation agreement, they're out and they will lose their franchise, their livelihood--their 60 people are out of work. And we have both State and Federal legislation that says, look, the car companies are pretty powerful. They have bargaining power that the small dealer doesn't. They've got lawyers, they've got millions of dollars. And so we're not going to let this sort of unfair stuff happen. But, again, the beauty of picking a New York bankruptcy judge is that they are arguing that we should preempt all of those laws, and the car dealers no longer have protection. So they're telling them things like, Well, you have to buy so many cars from us, even if it's a horrible business decision. And they used to have these noncompete clauses that the car company agreed not to put another GM dealership within 2 miles or 5 miles, or whatever the case may be. If we decide to put a new GM dealership right next to you, tough. That's just the way it goes. It's unconscionable. The Sopranos would be proud of this letter by General Motors. It's clearly not--I never thought I'd see the day that this was happening in the United States.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the recognition, and I thank the minority leader for giving me the opportunity to take some of the Republican time this evening. And we're going to talk about a couple of things that, one, we've talked about before, and two, we're going to talk about this mess. Never in my lifetime did I think that the United States of America would not only own a lot of banks in this country, but also two of the big three automakers are soon to be owned by the American taxpayers. The first issue of business, just to do some cleanup, you will recall, Mr. Speaker, that earlier in the year, in President Obama's stimulus bill there was a provision, originally it was inserted by the Senate, and the Senate indicated that AIG executives should not receive exorbitant bonuses unless there were some conditions put on it. That legislation, that section of the stimulus bill was authored by a Democrat and Republican: Senator Snowe, the Republican of Maine, and Senator Wyden, the Democrat of Oregon. And the House version was silent. And then it went into this conference committee and, Mr. Speaker, you know well that when we pass something and the Senate passes something and they're not exactly the same, we have to have a conference and we have to work out the details and resolve things. So there was a conference committee. Sadly, there weren't any Republicans on the conference committee. The conference committee was comprised of all--completely of Members of the Democratic Party. And in that conference room, somebody took out the Snowe-Wyden language that put restrictions on the AIG bonuses and instead put in this paragraph, about 50 words over there to my far left, that not only removed the Snowe-Wyden language but it put in that paragraph--and that paragraph, if you read it closely, indicates that not only were we not going to put restrictions on the AIG bonuses but that specifically protects them because it says any bonus that was entered into before February 11 of this year--which happens to be the date that the stimulus bill passed, the conference report passed--is protected and you're not going to mess with it. Well, a lot of people were embarrassed, and I would dare say--and I don't cast aspersions on my Democratic friends. I suspect a lot of them didn't know about it. But every Democrat in the House of Representatives voted for the stimulus bill with the AIG bonuses protection language included in it except for 11, and every Republican voted against it. And we had made kind of a simple argument. If you remember, the stimulus bill was a thousand--it was over a thousand pages long and it spent upwards of $790 billion of taxpayers' money. And we had sort of this novel idea, and that was maybe Members of Congress should have the opportunity to read the bill before we are asked to vote on it. So the Tuesday of that week we had a motion on the floor and everybody, every Republican, every Democrat voted that we would have 48 hours to read the bill. And as a matter of fact, it further stipulated that it would be put on the Internet just in case some of our constituents were wondering how the government was going to spend $792 billion of their money. A funny thing happened between Tuesday and Thursday at midnight, and that is apparently the President had promised he would have the stimulus bill on his desk for signature for the President's Day weekend, and that weekend was the President's Day weekend. So the bill was filed at about midnight on Thursday night and it was brought to the floor. And rather than having 48 hours, we had 90 minutes--90 minutes-- to read a thousand pages of how the hundreds of billions of dollars were being spent. And son of a gun, it got missed that this paragraph was in there protecting the AIG bonuses. The next day, if you remember the news, Mr. Speaker, everybody was shocked. The President was shocked, Members of Congress were shocked. We can't believe it. We couldn't believe that $173 million was going to be given out to AIG executives in the form of bonuses. How can this happen? You have to do something about it. You have to lock them up. They came up with a goofy idea to put a bill on the floor--and I said it wasn't a fig leaf, it was a fig tree--that we should tax these bonuses at 90 percent. And oh my gosh. First of all, the thought that we would use the United States Tax Code to punish people that we're mad at to the tune of 90 percent is nuts; but then secondly, if you look at the top bonus receiver at AIG, he was getting $6.4 million. And so if we're really, really mad at them, why are we only taking 90 percent away from them in taxes? Why don't we take the whole thing? That guy or gal--I don't remember if it was man or woman--still got $640,000. Somebody in my district making 40,000 a year has to work 16 years to get $640,000. So clearly stupid, clearly people were embarrassed. So we have been on the floor the last little bit, and most people who grew up in my generation are familiar with the very fine Hasbro game Clue, and we have been trying to determine how that paragraph got into the bill 'cause nobody wants to claim it. It just all of a sudden showed up, but we know that can't be right. Somebody had to physically take out the Snowe-Wyden language and put in this language. So we do have a game of Clue that we're working our way through. And I think, hopefully, we're going to be close to solving it. And just around the board, Mr. Geithner, who is the Treasury Secretary, Rahm Emanuel--who happens to be the President's chief of staff--Charlie Rangel, who is the Ways and Means chairman, Senator Dodd from Connecticut, who was the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, the Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi, and the leader of the Senate, Mr. Reid of Nevada. If you remember, in the game of Clue you have to identify where the thing happened, what was the weapon used and who did it. And over the last couple months we've made amazing progress. We know that the weapon used was a pen--might have been a computer but we're going to go with a pen. We also know from the President's reports that it either happened in the Speaker's office where there was shuttle diplomacy going back and forth, or the conference room. And now we just have to get down and figure out who did it because nobody is willing to stand up and say who did it. Mr. Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, has testified that he got instructions from Senator Dodd's staff. Senator Dodd says, Okay. Maybe we put it in but we did it at the request of the Treasury. We ruled out Mr. Rangel because we don't think he had anything to do with it. But Mr. Emanuel, the Speaker, and the majority leader were in the room when the deals were being cut. And so we're just trying to figure out who did it. And it would be nice so we could move on to other things if the person that did it would come forward and say, You know what? I wrote those 50 words to protect $173 million in bonuses at AIG and here's why I did it. But sadly, we haven't had anybody step up to the plate and be willing to talk about that. So we filed what's known as a resolution of inquiry, and if there is a very cooperative bipartisan person in the story, it's Barney Frank, who is the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and he moved that legislation out of his committee--I think the vote was 63, 64-0. Everybody said let's get to the bottom of it. But now sadly--and somebody who's not pictured here is the distinguished majority leader of the House of Representatives, Mr. Hoyer of Maryland. He has the power to schedule things and not schedule things, and sadly, we're now entering our third month and Mr. Hoyer has not seen fit to schedule this legislation on the floor for consideration. But Chairman Frank did organize a meeting with folks at the Treasury, and they had promised to send us a letter. And they have indicated in this letter that we might finally be able to say that it was, for instance, Senator Dodd in the conference room with the pen. So we hope to get there from here. But, sadly, this isn't where it stops. The automotive world has been shaken by the bankruptcies, forced bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors. And the auto world has been shaken with the forced bankruptcy of Chrysler and now General Motors this week. And a couple of things happened that have again spawned our curiosity and we can't quite get to the bottom of it. Chrysler. We'll start with Chrysler. Chrysler filed a viability plan with the Treasury on February 17, and that was rejected. They then filed another one and it was accepted. And they sent on the Wednesday of the week that the President made his announcement on April 30, anybody that was a UAW member, United Auto Worker, who worked for the Chrysler facilities went to the ballot box, if you will, to determine whether or not to authorize a new contract that gave pretty serious concessions in terms of wages, health care benefits, retirement benefits to Chrysler. And one plant in my district--I'm from northeastern Ohio, Twinsburg, Ohio, stamping plant there, 1,200 people employed--they went and they said, Look, we want to keep our jobs and so even though these are pretty significant reductions in pay and benefits, we're going to vote for it. And they did. Eighty-eight percent of the autoworkers in Twinsburg voted for the contract. They were further emboldened and happy because this paragraph that's on this chart was specifically bargained for by the Twinsburg workers with Chrysler--and you can read it for yourself, Mr. Speaker--but it basically indicates that Chrysler has agreed to bring more work to Twinsburg. So 88 percent of the people voted for it. And as a matter of fact, all across the country the contract passed pretty handedly. Then you fast forward to Thursday. Thursday, if you were interested and you are a Member of Congress, you could get on a conference call with the President's automotive task force and they indicated to us that it's a great day for Chrysler and we're saving a lot of jobs. There will be no disruptions. There will be no displacements. People aren't going to lose their jobs and communities aren't going to be affected. So I was pretty happy. I sent out a press release saying ``thank you'' to the President, ``thank you'' to his task force, ``thank you'' to Chrysler, ``thank you'' to the UAW, that this looked like pretty good news. Then at noon that day, that's what President Obama had to say on noon on April 30. He indicated, Lest no one should be confused about what a bankruptcy process means, it will not disrupt the lives of the people that work at Chrysler or live in communities that depend on Chrysler. So that's pretty good news. So the President says no people's lives are going to be disrupted who work at Chrysler and no communities will be disrupted. Which, again, just from my parochial view was pretty exciting because 13 percent of the tax base where this stamping plant is located is based upon the stamping plant and the people that work there. So the mayor was relieved. She sent out a press release. Everything was good. So then at 1 o'clock on April 30, we had a conference call with Robert Nardelli. He was former chief executive officer at Chrysler. And it was a question-and-answer session. And the first question was asked by the Democratic Governor of the State of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm. And she said, Congratulations, guys. This is great news. I just heard the President, but I want to make sure that the President wasn't speaking in code because I heard him say that this deal saves 30,000 jobs and we, especially in Michigan, know that more than 30,000 people work for Chrysler. It's about 39,000. So I'm just asking it to make sure that he wasn't saying we saved 30,000, but we couldn't save the other 9,000. And the answer was, Absolutely not. The President was just giving us a round number and there would be no disruptions to people's lives and no disruptions to the communities. Well, son of a gun, that afternoon there was a pretty famous picture in most of the newspapers of this young guy with a truck taking these bankers boxes into the bankruptcy court up in New York. And buried in that set of documents is an affidavit by a guy named Robert Manzo. Mr. Manzo happens to be one of the consultants who was guiding Chrysler through this process. And in there it identifies eight plants and 9,000 people that are going to be shut down, including the Twinsburg plant. And, clearly, that came as kind of a shock to people. And I have an article that talks about--they interviewed the President of Local 122 in Twinsburg, and he said, Well, what do you think? And his response-- Doug Rice is his name--he said, I don't know if I was told the whole truth on everything. I don't feel like I was. It would be a shame if this was something that was known for some time. If they kept this back from people, that's wrong. That's wrong. He was later on a radio program, and the host of the radio program asked him, Would that vote have been the same had you had the information you have now? And he says no. Needless to say, people ain't gonna vote to eliminate their jobs. And I think Mr. Rice is right. What autoworker would go to approve a contract on the belief that their jobs are going to be saved if they really think their jobs are going to be gone? So we have developed, Mr. Speaker, Clue, the travel edition now, to supplement our work on AIG. And in this case clearly--I mean, the documents that were wheeled into the bankruptcy courts on the afternoon of April 30 with Mr. Manzo's affidavit, clearly somebody knew. Somebody knew that when the President got up and delivered this happy news, this good news that five plants--eight plants were going to be closed and 9,000 people across the country were going to be out of work. And here's how silly it got. One of the next questions was by a Democratic Representative from Wisconsin, Gwen Moore, who represents the Milwaukee area, and she said, Hey, Mr. Nardelli, how about our plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin? Eight hundred people and we are really proud of it. It has a long history of manufacturing automobile parts. And so are we going to be okay? And Mr. Nardelli says, We're proud of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kenosha is part of the new Chrysler, and we very much look forward to continuing that partnership. Sadly, like my stamping plant in Twinsburg, the Kenosha plant was one of the eight scheduled to be shut. Obviously, Representative Moore had some questions and said, Well, I asked you. It's not like I didn't ask you. I asked you about Kenosha, Wisconsin. And Mr. Nardelli's response was he got confused. He confused Kenosha, Wisconsin, with Trenton, Michigan. They don't sound alike to my ear, but when he was saying that Kenosha, Wisconsin, was safe, he really meant Trenton, Michigan. In addition, the mayor of my town, Katherine Procop, wrote Mr. Bloom on the President's task force and said I heard the President say no communities were going to be affected. We're just taking a pretty big whack here; what's going on? And she got a nice letter back, and the letter said, well, what the President meant to say was that no communities were going to be disrupted other than the eight with the plant closures and the 9,000 people out of their jobs The problem with that is that was known by no one. Nobody knew, at least the auto workers, the elected officials, the mayor and others, that this was going to happen. And when you ask them, they said, well, we couldn't tell anybody, it was a secret. Somebody knew, because it was in the documents. So we have created Clue, the travel edition, and this time instead of a pen, we know that the weapon is an ax, because they axed 9,000 people who work in this country and had good, paying jobs. And again, we have the same rooms where these negotiations took place, and our suspects this time are the President of the United States. President Obama is up there; Larry Summers, who is the President's economic adviser; down here Mr. Nardelli, who I referred to, the former CEO of Chrysler, the ax of course; Ron Bloom, whom I referenced and communicated with my mayor; again, Mr. Geithner, the Treasury Secretary; and up here is President George W. Bush. Now, somebody in this Clue edition knew that eight plants were going to be closed and how easy would it have been for the President's speech writers to give him the information that, great news, we saved 30,000 jobs, we saved all these plants, but we can't save them all. It's like four words. But rather than diluting the happy message, somebody didn't tell eight cities, eight plants, 9,000 workers, that their jobs were to be lost, and I think it's a shame. And again, I should just tell you, nobody is stepping up yet. The call that I referenced with Governor Granholm and Representative Moore was tape-recorded, and I called up the Chrysler guys. And I said, hey, the thing was tape-recorded; why don't you let us have the tape. And first response was, it wasn't tape-recorded. And I said, well, you know, my hearing isn't what it used to be when I was in my 20s, but I do remember people saying it was recorded. And then they called back and said, yes, it was recorded, we have a transcript. And I said, well, send it over, and they said, sure. And I said, how about that courier? They said sure. And so that was in the morning. About 5 o'clock in the afternoon. You know, I'm looking around, I don't see any package from Chrysler. And so I called back and was told that the lawyers have it. And listen, anytime the lawyers get a hold of something, you know you've got a big problem. And so I was beginning to think that I wasn't going to get this transcript. And then a couple days later, they called and said, I'm sending you a letter. And I said, I think that means I'm not getting my transcript. And they said absolutely not, we're not sending you the transcript. And again, if the facts were not as I just laid them out, the transcript speaks volumes. I mean, it is what it is. And again, in the game of Clue, I mean, who knew? Who knew? And I yield to my friend, Mr. Tiberi.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank you very much, and I want to go back to Mr. Manville because we know already that the President's task force determined that Chrysler shouldn't have an advertising budget that they wanted to have, and now with the GM news, it's sort of been like Pontius Pilate; they're washing their hands. These are all decisions that have been made by the car companies, we don't have anything to do with it. But here's an e-mail that was exchanged the day before the bankruptcy filing between Robert Manzo and Matthew Feldman, who is an attorney on the President's automobile task force. And just to indicate the depths and the breadth to which these unelected folks who have plenty of bankruptcy experience and Wall Street experience but don't have any automobile experience will go to, Mr. Manzo is saying, well, do you think it's worth giving us one more shot. And the one more shot that he's referring to, he testified in court, was maybe we don't have to go to this bankruptcy route, maybe we can come to some agreement with our bondholders, and do we have to do this? Well, the rather professional response from Mr. Feldman is that I'm now not talking to you, you went where you shouldn't. And Mr. Manzo backs up and he apologizes, and Feldman writes him another e-mail, it's over, the President doesn't negotiate second rounds. We've given and lent billions of dollars so that your team could manage this properly, and now you're telling me to bend over to a terrorist like Lauria. And Lauria is another bankruptcy lawyer who represents some of the bondholders in the GM suit, and I think he might--I may be wrong about that--but I think he represents the Indiana Teachers Pension Fund. And he was basically saying, it's all well and good that you want to do this, but I invested teacher pension fund money in Chrysler and you're now telling me that I have to go back to my clients and say that I agreed to take five or ten cents on the dollar. He could be sued. He might be able to be put in jail. So I don't think that's the definition of a terrorist. And of course, Mr. Feldman signs off with an affectionate ``that's BS.'' So the day before you still have Chrysler trying to work it out and the President's task force telling him to take a hike. And the same thing happened this week. And if you look at how this thing is being manipulated, the same thing happened when--as you know, the GM bankruptcy is in New York as well, and people think that, well, that's kind of strange because we thought General Motors was either organized under the laws of Delaware or the laws of Michigan certainly. And as a matter of fact they are, and you don't get into Federal court in New York without some kind of nexus. Well, lo and behold, the brainiacs at General Motors and on the President's task force found one General Motors dealership in Harlem, New York, and they are the lead pleader in the bankruptcy so that they could get a New York bankruptcy judge rather than having it decided where the company actually does business and people who work there, you know, live.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I'd be happy to yield.

Mr. LATOURETTE

Mr. LATOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information for publication in the Congressional Record regarding earmarks I received as part of H.R. 915, the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2009. Requesting Member: Congressman Steven C. LaTourette. Bill Number: H.R. 915. Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Lake County, OH Address of Requesting Entity: 1885 Lost Nation Road, Willoughby, OH 44094 USA. Description of Request: To authorize and make funds available to Lake County, OH for the purchase of Lost Nation airport from the City of Willoughby. The transaction will help maintain the capacity of the national aviation system. Up to $1,220,000 will be made available to Lake County, OH for the purchase.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I want to thank Mr. Mica for yielding to me. I want to commend the chairman of the full committee, Mr. Oberstar; the chairman of the subcommittee, Mr. Costello; the ranking member of the full committee, Mr. Mica; and the subcommittee ranking member, Mr. Petri, for bringing us, again, this well-crafted bill. It looks a lot like the bill that was successfully passed by a big margin here in the House during the last Congress. Sadly, the Senate couldn't see its way clear to pass it. I want to speak specifically on one issue. My time on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has come to an end, sadly, but I'd like to consider myself an ex officio member as we talk about this one issue. That is the issue of the air traffic controllers. I'm a Republican, and I'm proud to be a Republican but I have to tell you that one of my great disappointments during the last administration is that I do believe President Bush was ill-served by his advisers who told him to declare an impasse in the negotiations between the administration and the air traffic controllers and to basically impose a contract on them. I think everybody on this floor now engaged in the debate has been inside an air traffic control center and has seen these dedicated men and women who are peering in the dark at screens, controlling 10, 12, 15 jetliners filled with 138 or 150 Americans and travelers to our country, making sure that they get there safely. Now, it's not my belief that everybody who works in this country is entitled to have a contract that they're happy with. It is my belief, however, that everybody who works under a contract, a labor-negotiated contract, has the right to be happy about the process in which it was reached. This contract imposed by the last administration was not fair. I give credit to the Obama administration for appointing Jane Garvey to move that process forward. These people do an important job. Some people say they make too much money, but I'll tell you what, that's what you work out in negotiations. So they're entitled to have a contract where their representatives sit down and, eyeball to eyeball, talk to folks in the administration and get this done.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Madam Speaker, I thank you for the recognition, and I want to thank Leader Boehner for granting me the leadership hour on our side to share some thoughts this evening with you, Madam Speaker. As the Speaker's well aware, our economy is in pretty tough shape, and people all over the country are suffering. But despite the fact that people continue to suffer, there is sort of this bailout fever here on Capitol Hill, and it's not uncommon for me to go home to Ohio and have somebody come up to me on the street and say, Hey, where is my bailout like the guys on Wall Street and like many others? Literally billions and billions of dollars. Taxpayer dollars. People get up, work hard, pay their taxes just trying to raise their kids and keep a roof over their head. Billions and billions of dollars have been sent out in these bailouts. And we have come to the floor on a pretty regular basis to talk about AIG, the insurance giant on Wall Street, that, to date, has received about a $185 billion of taxpayers' money in the form of a bailout. We were told that they are too big to fail, and quite frankly, even though I happen to be a Republican, this started on the former President's watch when his Secretary of the Treasury, came to us and said, If you don't give us $700 billion, here's a three-page bill, if you don't give us $700 by the end of the week, we're going to have a collapse. And sadly, in my opinion, some Members of this body abdicated their responsibility of oversight and bum rushed $700 billion to Wall Street. But a funny thing happened in that bill that has caused some in this House some chagrin and has led us to come to the floor on a regular basis and talk about a game that's pretty well known by most people in America. It's a game I loved playing as a kid. It's a game I continue to love playing with my kids called Clue made by Hasbro. And the reason we bring Clue to the floor and have is that in the conference, first of all, is this $700 billion--have to fast forward to the President's stimulus request earlier this year. As this bill was being crafted, there was an amendment placed into the stimulus package that said that you know what, we've given billions and billions and billions of dollars to these Wall Street firms, but perhaps we should put some conditions, or strings, on the multimillion-dollar bonuses that are being paid out to these folks. And the amendment was put in over in the other body, in the United States Senate, by a Democratic Senator, Senator Wyden from Oregon, and a Republican Senator, Senator Snowe from Maine. And that was in the bill. It wasn't in the House bill; it was in the Senate bill. So you get together in a conference report. Madam Speaker, you know, but some folks don't necessarily know, that when the House and Senate pass a separate version of a bill, we have to have a conference committee. And the conference committee works out the details and then that conference report is brought back to both Chambers for a vote on the conference report. Well, in the conference committee somehow the Snowe-Wyden language that indicated that we were going to put some restrictions on these million-dollar bonuses--multimillion-dollar bonuses to AIG and other executives, that language was taken out and, over on the second easel, this language, subparagraph (iii), was inserted. And this language, Madam Speaker, not only removed the Snowe-Wyden language, it put in these about 40 words that specifically protected the bonuses paid to AIG executives and other executives on Wall Street who had received, again, billions of dollars of money through the TARP program. And so the stimulus bill came to the floor with this language protecting the bonuses. It was a partisan vote on the stimulus bill, pretty much. And all of the Democratic Members of the House, save 11, I think, voted for the President's stimulus initiative. And by casting that vote, they were approving, among other things, a piece of legislation that specifically protected the $173 million in bonuses that were then paid to AIG. Well, shortly after it was brought to light, because this was a big bill--and I should tell you that I don't think that a lot of my colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle did this intentionally, because this was a bill of over a thousand pages. And the Tuesday that the stimulus bill was being considered on the floor, there was a motion made that Members of the House should have 48 hours to read whatever the final bill was, a thousand pages, and that, here's a novel idea: It should be put on the Internet and anybody in America that was interested in what was in these thousand pages would have the opportunity over 2 days to reflect on it and, if necessary, if they felt the need, to correspond with their Member of Congress or their United States Senator. Well, a funny thing happened to that. Even though every Member in this body that was present that day voted to give every Member in this body 48 hours to read the bill and the American public 48 hours to read the bill, we came up and the bill wasn't ready until Thursday night at midnight that same week. Somehow, the commitment to give everybody 48 hours was forgotten and this thousand-page page bill was filed at midnight on Thursday. It was voted on the next day, Friday. And Members who arrived to work that Friday morning basically had 90 minutes to read a thousand pages. So I don't think, Madam Speaker, that everybody read that bill prior to casting their vote. I think some people were embarrassed when they found out they voted to give out $173 million in bonuses to AIG executives. I know that the President of the United States, President Obama, didn't like it, because he came on television and he said, I'm shocked. I can't believe that this has happened. Why is AIG giving out the bonuses? Well, he may have been shocked because he hadn't been informed either. I don't know. But there are some people that should not be shocked. They are the people who form the conference committee, where somebody took out the Snowe-Wyden language that would have put some restrictions on these bonuses and inserted this paragraph that protected those bonuses. And so the conference committee is a small group of representatives and senators and, using the Clue set of observations, we know that somebody that put this language in--the weapon, if you remember the Clue game--was a pen. That they used a pen to put in the language that's under discussion. Here, we have the Clue board slightly modified to reflect the United States Capitol. I think over the course of days we have--the times we have discussed this--we have been able to eliminate some people and we have been able to eliminate some rooms. And the people that we have been able to eliminate are down here. Charlie Rangel, who is the distinguished Chair of the Ways and Means Committee. He has been quoted in the press as saying when he came out of this conference committee, It's pretty tough to work with a government that's run by only three people. And so I don't think he had anything to do with it. But we're left with this sort of list of suspects. Suspect number one that the press is blaming is Senator Chris Dodd of the State of Connecticut. He is the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. There was some discussion that he and/or his staff inserted that language. We know also that the Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi, was present during that discussion. Senator Reid, as the leader of the Senate, was involved in those discussions. And over here we have Rahm Emanuel, who is the President's chief of staff, and the Secretary of the Treasury as well, Mr. Geithner. Well, somebody put this language in. All we are trying to find out is who put the language in, why they put it in, and why people were shocked and amazed that these bonuses went out when the legislation specifically permitted it. Now we have made great progress. And I have to give great credit to the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank of Massachusetts. We filed what is known as a Resolution of Inquiry because nobody would sort of own up to this. We filed a piece of legislation here that said, Hey, Treasury, how about handing over the documents and communications so we can get to the bottom of this, so we can figure out that it was one of these people with the pen in the Speaker's office or in the conference room. Chairman Frank moved it through his committee. Everybody that was present that day voted for it. But now, sadly, it's languishing at the desk and the majority leader of the House, Mr. Hoyer, has chosen not to call it up. But, again, to Chairman Frank's credit, he has indicated to the Treasury that he wants this thing resolved. There was a meeting this week with members of my staff and members of the Treasury, and they have promised to produce some documents that, maybe the next time, Madam Speaker, that we are able to talk about this, we can identify who it was that inserted the language, on who's instruction, and why. And I think, Madam Speaker, the American people are entitled to know. Now, as the Speaker knows, aside from the financial services bailout, the bailout of Wall Street, there's a lot going on with the American automotive industry as well. Chrysler was given 30 days to reach an agreement with the Italian automaker Fiat. And has recently gone into bankruptcy. Unfortunately, we have another clue--this time, Clue, The Travel Edition, because some of the facts that have been sort of laid out there are not, as we dig further, as they appear. And so to set the stage, Madam Speaker, as you know, the Union, the United Auto Workers of America, were asked to make significant concessions in order to keep Chrysler alive. As a matter of fact, on the 28th and 29th of April, every union hall, every UAW union hall that was involved in Chrysler operations, had an election. And the election was whether or not to ratify this new contract with the concessions. As a matter of fact, in my area in Ohio, we have a Chrysler stamping plant in a great city by the name of Twinsburg, Ohio. In Twinsburg, Ohio, the UAW local, Local 122, had done an outstanding job of negotiating language in this concession package that indicated that additional work was going to come to Twinsburg. I will show you that language in just a minute, Madam Speaker. So people voted. All the union members voted on the 28th and 29th. The contract with concessions was approved. As a matter of fact, in Twinsburg Local 122, 88 percent of the union members who cast ballots voted in favor of the new contract because they thought by making these sacrifices, it would make a stronger Chrysler and they would get to keep their jobs and they would get to continue making automobiles. Fast forward to the next day, April 30. The President of the United States, President Obama, announced this deal that Chrysler was going to go into bankruptcy and the contract had been approved and good things were going to happen. And on that date at his press conference this quote on the far board, Madam Speaker, the President of the United States said, ``No one should be confused about what a bankruptcy process means. It will not disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or live in communities that depend on it,'' meaning Chrysler. Now I have got to tell you, back in Cleveland there was news coverage of this series of events. And after the President made this announcement on April 30th, the champagne corks were popping. People were happy. They had approved a contract. They had taken a hit in their wages and their benefits. But they knew that no one should be confused that this decision wasn't going to disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or live in the communities that depend on them. As promised, Madam Speaker, the chart now on the easel, this paragraph is the specific language that was negotiated by the UAW in Twinsburg, Ohio, that indicates when they went to vote to approve this contract on April 28 and 29, they believed they were agreeing to a provision that was separately negotiated for their plant that said during these discussions, the company, Chrysler, agreed to-- and basically find ways to bring more work to the stamping plant in Twinsburg, Ohio. Well, after the President made his announcement at noon, there was a conference call between the former CEO of Chrysler, Robert Nardelli, and interested parties--Members of Congress, governors, people who were interested. And the first question that was asked on that conference call--and I should say I have asked for the transcript of that conference call from Chrysler, and they are refusing to give it to me. We will try another way. There's always a couple different ways to skin a cat. But the first question came from Governor Granholm from the State of Michigan, and she said, basically, Congratulations. This is great news. As a matter of fact, Governor Granholm had a press conference and she said, Not only does this agreement preserve jobs, the opportunity for expanding growth in jobs in Michigan is very well. At the end of this path--which is the temporary idling while the company is in bankruptcy--we can see that the jobs are going to be there. It's a defining moment for Michigan, and certainly a defining moment for Chrysler. Well, her question to Mr. Nardelli was, We just heard the President's announcement. Great work. But he said that by this agreement, 30,000 jobs at Chrysler had been saved. We know that there are 39,000 people who work for Chrysler in the United States. So was the President speaking in some kind of code that we saved 30,000, but we couldn't save all 39,000? The answer back from the officials at Chrysler who were on the telephone call: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. The President just had the number wrong. And there's going to be no plant closings. Nobody is going to lose their job. Well, during that same phone call, Representative Gwen Moore, who's a Democratic Member of Congress, does a great job on behalf of her constituents in Milwaukee, asked Mr. Nardelli directly about the future of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, engine plant, which employs 800 people. And he specifically indicated that they loved the Kenosha plant; it had a long history; it was productive; it made money; and the 800 people up there in Kenosha, Wisconsin, didn't have to worry about anything. Sadly, what happened after that conference call, after the President's announcement--I think we've all seen the pictures--this picture of the sort of nerdy-looking guy with all those bankers boxes taking the bankruptcy filings to the court in New York. They were filed that afternoon--the same afternoon; April 30. Buried in those documents was the fact that eight Chrysler facilities in the United States of America were going to be closed as a result of the bankruptcy and, among them, Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Twinsburg, Ohio. So, again, you had Mr. Nardelli saying Kenosha is great and you had the UAW in Twinsburg negotiating an agreement where they think work is going to come to them, but the news was, when the bankruptcy filings were read, that they're going to be closed and they're going to be out of jobs beginning next year. Now, to be fair, Mr. Nardelli--you know, obviously there were some questions asked about it. So they asked, What happened? He said Kenosha was okay. He wrote to Representative Gwen Moore of Milwaukee that he mistakenly conveyed the status of the Phoenix investment. He confused Kenosha, Wisconsin, with a plant in Trenton, Michigan. So not only isn't it the same State, Wisconsin. You have sound-alikes. We have a lot of Madison, Ohios, and all this other business. He apologized to Representative Moore because he said that he confused Trenton, Michigan, with Kenosha, Wisconsin and that Trenton, Michigan, is going to be okay. Don't worry about it. The mayor of Twinsburg also was obviously confused because people were celebrating. If you think about it, Madam Speaker, 88 percent of the union in Twinsburg voted to approve this contract. Well, you'd have to be pretty dumb to vote for a contract that was going to end your job. In conversations with the union leaders and membership, they didn't know. They didn't know that by the company going into bankruptcy, that they were going to be out of a job. Clearly I don't think 88 percent of them would have voted in favor of a contract that meant that they had no job. They were heartened by the President's comments the day before that no one should be confused about what a bankruptcy means. It will not disrupt the lives of the people who work for Chrysler or live in communities that depend on it. Now maybe this is like a Major League Baseball statistic. He needed to have an asterisk next to it and in small print say, oh, except for those eight plants, those eight cities and those 9,000 people that work there. But that isn't what the President said, and I think the President meant this. Again, it's my view that the President may have been ill-served by those who report to him about what was going on at this moment in time. Also, the mayor of Twinsburg, Katherine Procop, who is a great mayor, expressed some concern. She wrote a note to Ron Bloom, who was part of the President's automobile task force about, Hey, wait a minute. We were watching TV. They said no plants were going to be closed. Nobody was going to lose their job. Now in Twinsburg, it's 1,200 jobs. We find out our plant's closing. It's 13 percent of our tax base, and 1,200 people are going to be out of work. What's the deal? So Mr. Bloom wrote back to Mayor Procop on May 6; and he indicated the pertinent paragraph, While the original February 17 plan submitted by Chrysler was not deemed viable by the task force, the more recently proposed Fiat/Chrysler alliance plan has been approved, which is true. This plan included the same plant closure schedule as the one originally proposed by Chrysler, and the President's comments were meant to convey the message that the bankruptcy of Chrysler had in no way changed these plans. Now that's a fine observation, except that nobody ever identified any plant closings in the February 17 filing or in the subsequent filing because they said they couldn't. I think what Mr. Bloom's letter is saying, that no lives are going to be interrupted, and no communities are going to suffer, except for those eight plants, 9,000 people, and eight communities that nobody knew about, which is a stretch. I mean, I have to tell you, it's a stretch, and people have questions. So the question now is--and we have, again, filed a resolution of inquiry asking the administration to have the automobile task force get with us and talk about how this happened. This time we have the Clue travel edition. We have the Clue travel edition. This time it's not a pen, but we know that the weapon was an ax. Nine thousand people with an ax are going to lose their job. Their jobs have been axed in eight communities across America at Chrysler. So this time on the board we have the President of the United States. I do not think President Obama knew all of the details when he made this announcement. I have sent him a letter saying that I give him great credit for the leadership he has shown. But again, my observation is that he has not been well served. On that conference call and part of the team, Larry Summers who is an economic adviser to the President; Robert Nardelli, who I have talked about, the former chief executive officer of Chrysler; Mr. Bloom; Mr. Geithner, the Treasury Secretary; and former President George W. Bush. The last time we talked about this, somebody said, Why do you have President Bush up there? This all happened this year. But I just wanted to be fair because I know that there are some people in this country that blame President Bush for anything that happens that is bad. So I wanted to have his picture up there as well. So somebody in this group--and I think I can safely exclude the two, the former President of the United States and the current President of the United States from this list--but when the President went to the microphone on April 30, 2009, and said no communities were going to suffer, somebody in this Clue game knew that when the bankruptcy--think about these banker boxes. If you've seen that picture with the guy with the cart and the bankers boxes. He filed them at like 3 o'clock in the afternoon the same day. I know that the lawyers are quick, and we've got all kinds of computers and stuff. But those documents didn't get written between noon and 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Somebody on the President's task force or somebody at Chrysler or somebody someplace knew that when those documents, those bankers boxes were opened, we were going to find eight plant closings and 9,000 people losing their jobs. I think the thing that bothers me more than anything, even though people being thrown out of work is horrible enough, it is that these 9,000 workers at these eight plants went to vote on a contract where they were giving up big time wages and benefits; and they voted, not knowing that by casting that vote, they were going to lose their job. Again, I don't think any reasonable person would make that vote in the days before the President's announcement, knowing that it meant that their job was gone. So we are going to attempt to determine now, and we've asked the President if he would direct his automobile task force to share with us who knew prior to April 30, who knew at the time the President was saying that nobody was going to suffer that, in fact, 9,000 people were going to suffer. Because I have to tell you that again, I think the President's achievement here is significant. It would have been real easy for his advisers to say, You know what, we saved 30,000 jobs, we couldn't save them all, and so there's going to be some suffering in eight cities and in 9,000 homes; but overall, we saved three-quarters of the jobs at Chrysler. Nobody said that. What they said was, nobody was going to be without a job, and nobody was going to suffer. So, Madam Speaker, we're going to work diligently over the next little while and see if we can identify who in this particular game of Clue took the job, took the ax and basically axed 9,000 people out of a job. In addition, the news this week in the bankruptcy court and something that we need to find out about is who's responsible. It's not just 9,000 jobs anymore. It's not just eight Chrysler plants. The news today, or this week, was that they are directing 789 Chrysler dealerships to close, that they're going to take their franchises away. According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, about 60 people on average work at each Chrysler dealership in the United States of America. So these 789 dealerships times 60, another 47,340 people across America, in Ohio, everywhere else, are soon to lose their jobs. That is going to be on the back of this next week, it's anticipated that General Motors, which is also having difficulty, that they are going to attempt to get rid of 2,600 franchise dealers. Again, using the math of an average of 60 people at each dealership, that's another 156,000 people that will lose their jobs at General Motors dealerships. So altogether, you now have, in addition to the 9,000 people at Chrysler, 203,340 additional people that are going to be out of work as a result of these bankruptcies. Again, I don't think that the President of the United States has been well served by his advisers or else I don't think he would have uttered the statement that no one should be confused about what a bankruptcy means, that it will not disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or live in the communities that depend on them. We're now up to, Madam Speaker, over 210,000 people that are going to be out of work as a result of this decision. And because I know that the President of the United States is a man of character, I know that the President of the United States didn't have in his mind when he made that observation that 210,000 people would be out of work because clearly that number, by any calculus, means that a lot of communities are going to suffer, and a lot of families are going to suffer, and a lot of people across this country are going to suffer. Some of us can't figure out how the car company, Chrysler or GM, saves money by closing car dealerships. I mean, they don't cost the car companies any money. It's kind of a strange marketing proposal that you can sell more stuff by having less stores. So let's have less stores, maybe we'll sell more cars. That logic is lost on me. But maybe somebody on the Clue travel edition can explain it to me. Also, in the April 17 edition of Time magazine, there is something here that in response to pressure from the Obama administration, Chrysler has proposed more plant shutdowns. Again, that is April 17, almost 2 weeks before the President says that nobody's going to suffer, no plants are going to be closed, and we're not going to have a problem. On top of that--and this one kind of puzzles me too. The first thing that puzzles me is how you sell more cars with less stores. The second one is--and this is from the Detroit newspaper on May 11 that says that Chrysler wanted to spend $134 million in advertising over the 9 weeks that it is expected to be in bankruptcy; but the auto industry task force originally told them, we don't want you spending any money on advertising and then begrudgingly said, Okay, you can spend half of it. That comes as a result of Robert Manzo, who is the executive director of Capstone Advisory Group, who is a consultant to Chrysler. He testified in bankruptcy court that the task force--again, the administration's auto task force--believed that it was not feasible to spend anything on marketing and advertising over this period of time. So just as it confuses some of us that you can sell more cars with less stores, stores that don't cost the car companies any money, how you don't damage your sales by not having any advertising. But that is where we find ourselves. So, Madam Speaker, we're going to do Clue the travel edition. And I hope, unlike the AIG Clue edition, we have people that are willing to come forward and say, Yeah, I didn't think Chrysler needed to advertise, or, Yeah, I knew that those eight plants and those 9,000 people were going to be out of a job, but here's why we kept it from them when they were asked to approve the contract with concessions. Now, Madam Speaker, we hear a lot that we don't have the time here in the United States Congress to deal with some of these issues. I just want to do a quick review of the last couple of years when that argument has been made and share with you the things that the United States Congress has been dealing with, rather than dealing with a variety of subjects, such as gasoline prices last year when gasoline went to over $4 a gallon and now these many, many people who work at Chrysler who are losing their jobs. Madam Speaker, I apologize for taking a long time. I don't have assistance. You will be pleased to know I have also dog-eared the corners because the last time I did this, my fingernails couldn't reach under the sticky notes and take them off in a timely fashion. Last year gasoline prices went through the roof, and there were a lot of reasons for that. There was a feeling when Congress went on its district work period a year ago August that perhaps we should have a debate on a national energy policy. I can remember calls of ``drill, baby, drill.'' There are people who want nuclear power. There are people that want green renewable energy, hydropower, geothermal power, solar, wind. The request was made that we should really have a discussion, and let's talk about all the alternatives, and again, the ideas that get the most votes from the most Members will succeed. But we have to do something about gasoline prices in this country because our constituents are suffering. Well, January 29 was when the Republicans did such a bang-up job of being in charge of the Congress that the voters threw us out in 2006 and replaced us with a Democratic majority, and that Democratic majority started on January 2007. At the time, gasoline was $2.22 a gallon. And people said, okay, that is getting up there, but it is not horrible. And so on that day, January 29, the most important thing that the leadership of the House could decide to put on the floor was a resolution congratulating the University of California Santa Barbara soccer team. Now, I assume that every member of that team, their families and their fans are proud of their accomplishment. They certainly deserve to be complimented. But I don't know, when people at home are suffering with increasingly high gas prices, if that is the most important thing we can do. Well, it creeps up. We get out here to September 5 of the same year. Gas has now moved up. The national average is $2.84 a gallon. And on that day, the most important thing we could do here on the House of Representatives was recognize National Passport Month. And I guess September is National Passport Month. You might want to go home and jot it down on the calendar, Madam Speaker, because I actually forgot that was right. Gas continues to go up. Here we are out here, February 6 of the next year, gas $3.03 a gallon, and the most important thing that we can do on the House floor on that day is commend the Houston Dynamo soccer team. When you are in elected office, you know this, Madam Speaker, we are told that if we want to be elected, we have to go out and get the soccer moms. And so by having two of the most important things, while gas is going up to over $3 a gallon, commending soccer teams, I think we have the soccer mom vote taken care of, and maybe we could have gone on to talk about energy. Well, we get into May of 2008. Gas is $3.77 a gallon. You would think we would be talking about a national energy policy. But on that day, the most important thing we could come up with was to celebrate National Train Day. And I used to be the chairman of the Railroad Subcommittee. I like trains. But for crying out loud, my constituents were paying $3.77, and they were calling the office in droves saying, when are you going to do something about gasoline prices? Well, we get out here, it continues to go up to $3.84 on May 20, and the most important thing we can do, rather than talking about gasoline prices, is to pass a resolution honoring or protecting great cats and rare canids. And I can tell you, Madam Speaker, I voted for that legislation because I know what great cats are, lions and tigers and things like that. I didn't know what a canid was. I had to go back to my office and look it up. It is a dog. So on the day that gas was $3.84 a gallon, we were celebrating and recognizing lions, tigers, and dogs here on the House floor. We are up to June of that year. Gas goes up to $4.09. I'm sure we are going to talk about energy because people can't even afford to fill up their car and go to work. But on that day, June 10, rather than talking about gasoline prices, the most important thing we could do here in the United States Congress was to recognize 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation. And a lot of people back home in Ohio, when they were filling up their cars, didn't know that 2008 was the International Year of Sanitation. And I don't know that their lives were greatly improved because of that. Then it finally peaked out on June 17, 2008, when gasoline hits $4.17 a gallon. Gasoline was over $4 for the first time in my lifetime, and I'm 54. And I'm sure that we were talking about energy on this occasion in June. But we weren't. The most important thing we could do was pass the Monkey Safety Act. And I don't know any Member of the House, Republican or Democrat, that wants unsafe monkeys. But clearly, when gas prices were going through the roof, the most important thing that the greatest legislative body in the world could be working on, I would hope, wouldn't be the Monkey Safety Act. So they said, okay, we get it. Now we are going to be serious. We start this new Congress. And in the new Congress, we have this horrible problem at Chrysler, which is the subject of the Clue travel edition. And it began in January when 4,000 people at Chrysler lost their jobs. And rather than talking about that, we honored the life of Claiborne Pell, a former United States Senator. And he certainly was deserving of recognition. But 4,000 people are out of work. We get over here to right before March, and now we are up to 9,500 Chrysler people are out of work, and we passed a resolution supporting the goals and ideals of National Teen Dating. Now, as a father, I want teens to be safe, and I want them to be dating. But again, 9,500 people are out of work, and we are recognizing the goals and ideals of National Teen Dating. Still before we get to the middle of March, before we get to a little bigger jump up to almost 11,000 people out of work, the most important thing we could do, and here is a repeat, Madam Speaker, apparently, we don't have time to talk about gas prices. We don't have time to deal with people being thrown out of work. But apparently the United States Senate didn't act last year on the Monkey Safety Act, so we debated the Monkey Safety Act again and passed the Monkey Safety Act. Now you get out here to mid-April, and you are now up to 13,000 people at Chrysler who are out of work. And you would think maybe we are going to be talking about that. But instead, son of a gun, I guess the Senate didn't honor cats and dogs last year either, and so we had to bring back on the floor the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act. You get out to May, and now there are 16,000, a little over 16,000 people at Chrysler out of work. And the most important thing we can do on that day is to award a Gold Medal to Arnold Palmer for his sportsmanship in golf. Now I happen to be an admirer of Arnold Palmer of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. I think he is deserving of whatever recognition comes his way. But when 16,000 people have lost their jobs and we have these issues with how we are going to help the car companies, how we are going to help the people that work there, I think even Arnold Palmer would have said, honor me next week. And now we get out to last week we are now up to 18,365 people out of work at Chrysler, only Chrysler, and again, we are about to have another 200,000 at automobile dealerships all across the country. I'm sure that obviously we should have been talking about Chrysler and the auto industry on that day, but, son of a gun, they say that history repeats itself. We again had to recognize National Train Day here in the United States Congress. So I would suggest, a little bit more than tongue in cheek, that we had time. We had time to deal with this, Madam Speaker. And for whatever reason, those who are charged with scheduling legislation in this floor felt that our time was most well spent honoring soccer teams, recognizing cats and dogs, making sure that monkeys are safe in the United States, not once but twice, and some of the other things. But that isn't all, Madam Speaker. You're aware that on the day we come back, we do suspensions. Suspensions are bills that are brought to the floor. They are debated for 40 minutes. Republicans get 20 minutes. The Democrats get 20 minutes. And then we have a 15-minute vote. So if we put the vote together with the suspension, it is 55 minutes. Just since the beginning of this year, this list of bills here on the left and their dates of passage, we had time to name--these are post offices. This list of legislation are post offices. So everybody across America should be happy that when they go into a post office it probably has a name on it. And these are the post offices that we have taken 1 hour a piece to name since the beginning of the year. And 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 14 hours of putting a name on a post office when we could have been talking about gas prices. We could have been talking about Chrysler. We could have been talking about the billions of dollars that we are bleeding on these bailouts for everybody. But again, when you walk in, if anybody, Madam Speaker, lives in any of these communities, they can rest assured that in Rye, New York, for instance, if you go to buy stamps in Rye, New York, your post office now has a name, named after somebody, thanks to the United States Congress. Now the difficulty with that is that the people at Chrysler, the 18,000 people at Chrysler who have lost their jobs, and the 203,000 people who are about to lose their jobs at the car dealerships across this country, they can afford to go in and buy the 44-cent stamps in the post office. But clearly, they have names. Madam Speaker, this is problematic. And I think that the people who work at Chrysler, the 9,000 people in those eight communities and the citizens of those eight communities who popped champagne corks when they heard the President of the United States, and reaffirmed by Mr. Nardelli, the CEO of Chrysler, indicate that their jobs were going to be okay and their plants were going to be open, and that they cast ballots in large numbers signifying that they were willing to give up how much they made an hour, how much they had to contribute in health care, what their pension looked like, because they believed that they were going to be able to keep their job. And that wasn't true. So again, Madam Speaker, we will come back again until somebody, somebody helps us solve the game of Clue. Who took an ax in the Senate leader's office, the Speaker's office, the conference room, who took the ax to 9,000 hard-working Americans in this country, their plants and the communities that depend upon those tax revenues for police protection, fire protection, and schools? Who took the ax and ended those jobs? And again, President Bush was meant in jest. I don't think President Obama did this. But others on this board, I would posit, had to know, had to know prior to the President's announcement that this was going to happen. And I just don't think that that is right in the United States of America. Likewise, the 203,000 people that are about to be out of work at the dealerships across this country, again, some of these dealers, these automobile dealers, some of them paid upwards of $2 million to have a Chrysler franchise or a General Motors franchise. And it really boggles my mind that in the United States of America if you are a car company you can come in and say, I don't want to honor these franchise agreements. And the news just last week was the lawyers for Chrysler are arguing that this Federal bankruptcy should supersede State franchise law. And even though State franchise law says, if you sold this guy a franchise for $2 million, he is entitled to keep it, they want to terminate him and just say, you got no business. Again, Madam Speaker, I don't know how it goes in your hometown, but in my hometown, the car dealers have been there, in some instances, for generations. They support the little league teams, the bowling teams, and the Chamber of Commerce. A lot of the lifeblood of our community is supported by auto dealers. So I know that the President didn't mean that this set of conditions, this set of circumstances, wasn't going to disrupt people's lives and wasn't going to impact negatively on communities all across this country. And I am baffled that in the United States of America, if you, Madam Speaker, took $2 million, and I wish I had $2 million, but if you took $2 million and bought something, that the government could come in and just say, guess what? You don't own it anymore. And do you know those 60 people that work for you, who in some instances have worked for you 20, 30 years? They are out of work. They are out of work. So Madam Speaker, we will attempt to unravel this mystery. I appreciate very much the time. And I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to determine how this could happen in the United States of America. I thank you, Madam Speaker.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Tonight, I return to talk about an old topic and also to talk about something that's just happened in the last couple of weeks. The Speaker may recall that a number of weeks ago there was outrage at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue when it was determined that located within the $792 billion stimulus bill there was a provision that authorized $173 million in bonuses to executives at the insurance company AIG. At the time, a number of us thought, Well, how could that happen? It seems, just to review, Mr. Speaker, that when the stimulus package was considered on the other side of the Capitol in the United States Senate, two Senators, in a rare display of bipartisanship--Senator Snowe, a Republican of Maine, and Senator Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon-- authored an amendment that would have put restrictions and basically indicated that if you were a firm like AIG that has received billions and billions of dollars in bailout money, perhaps there should be some restrictions on executive compensation and what people should make. Well, a funny thing happened, however, on the way to the conference committee. The Snowe-Wyden language was removed and instead this paragraph was inserted. Now this paragraph, if you read it carefully, Mr. Speaker, indicates that rather than placing restrictions on the bonuses, it specifically authorizes and exempts any bonus at AIG or any other Wall Street giant that received billions and billions of taxpayer money. Any executive compensation scheme that was entered into before February 11 of this year, which happened to be the date that the stimulus package was considered, would be exempt and the bonuses would be paid. Now I have indicated a number of times on the floor that I know that a lot of people were embarrassed by that. I would suggest that that's what happens when you legislate in a sloppy, rushed, haphazard, nonpartisan fashion. The Speaker will recall the week of the consideration of the stimulus bill, the members of the Republican Party--the minority party--put forward sort of a novel proposition, and that was since we were talking about spending $792 billion in the stimulus bill, it might be a good idea if Members had 48 hours to read the bill, and further suggested it should be put on the Internet so anybody in America could take a look at this over a thousand pages of legislation. Well, that proposal passed. It came to a vote here in the House, and every Member who was present that day, Republican or Democrat, voted and agreed that that was a good idea. That we should have 48 hours to read the bill. That was Tuesday. On Thursday, apparently the majority leadership forgot about the vote on Tuesday. And the bill was filed about midnight on Thursday. The next morning--and I have apologized to my constituents that I didn't read the thousand pages at midnight. It didn't come to my attention that we had a thousand-page bill that we were going to consider on that Friday until I arrived at the office that morning. But the debate was 90 minutes and, basically, Members, both Republican and Democrat, had 90 minutes to digest a thousand pages and determine whether or not that piece of legislation deserved an up or a down vote. It was a bipartisan vote, in that every member of the Republican Conference voted against the stimulus bill, together with some Democrats. But the overriding majority of the Democratic Party voted in favor of it. And it passed and went on to be signed by the President of the United States. What is strange is that everyone who voted for the stimulus bill voted for this paragraph that authorized the bonuses to AIG. Yet, the next day or days after the bonuses were announced, everybody was coming to the floor beating their chest and pulling out their hair and saying, I'm shocked. I can't believe it. I don't know how this happened. We want our money back. Well, nobody should have been surprised, nobody should have been shocked, because anyone who supported the stimulus package in the House or the Senate voted--the final conference report--voted to specifically allow AIG and anybody else that had received billions of dollars of taxpayer money and bailouts to receive those bailout payments. But people were shocked. And so they came up with--I will call them goofy--they came up with goofy pieces of legislation in an attempt to cover their political rear ends. And so the first one was, Let's tax those bonuses at 90 percent. Well, what a dumb piece of legislation that was, Mr. Speaker. So tomorrow we decide we're mad at somebody else. Maybe tomorrow we're mad at the oil companies so let's tax them at 90 percent. Day after that, we're really not happy with the airlines so let's tax them at 90 percent. To use the Tax Code to punish a small group of people when the mistake was made when this paragraph was inserted in the stimulus package is inappropriate and, thankfully, the President of the United States--President Obama--expressed his opinion that it wasn't a worthy piece of legislation, and it has died a natural death over in the United States Senate, where it exactly should have. The next dumb idea that people came up with was, Well, I know. Let's not tax these bonuses at 90 percent. Let's have the United States Treasury--the government--tell people how much money they can make. What a dumb idea that is. So, today it's the AIG guys. Again, tomorrow, let's say that we are not so crazy about the amount of money that bus drivers make. Well, why doesn't the Department of Transportation--Secretary LaHood--just figure out what the bus drivers in the country should make? Another cover- your-rear-end piece of legislation. So in response to all this we have been coming to the floor on a semiregular basis to try and determine, because even though everybody was outraged, no one will say how the first language was removed from the bill and how this paragraph was placed in the bill. And so we have devised a game that most Americans are familiar with-- the game of Clue. A great game, and I recommend that everyone think about running out to Hasbro to get either the original edition or this edition. This is the case of ``The Hidden Hand.'' And that is: Who took out the Snowe-Wyden amendment and who wrote that paragraph that I had displayed on the chart before? Now there are a number of suspects. We have taken some out, we have put some in. But if you read the news reports of the final negotiations on the stimulus bill, we know that it either happened in the Speaker's office or the conference room, and there was this shuttle diplomacy going back and forth as to what the final bill was going to look like. As a matter of fact, the distinguished chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel of New York, was quoted in the paper the next day words to the effect that, It's difficult to get stuff done when only three people run the institution. So we excluded a couple of weeks ago Chairman Rangel. He's not the hidden hand. He didn't do it. So, like the game of Clue, we know that it happened in the Speaker's office or the conference room, and we know that the weapon that was used was a pen. What we can't figure out and what people haven't owned up to at this moment in time is: Who did it? It's pretty simple. Quite frankly, somebody did it. The thing didn't appear from nowhere. Someone had to actually say to the drafters of the document, take out Snowe-Wyden, and put in what's commonly been now referred to as the Dodd amendment. Put in the Dodd amendment. Now we have asked repeatedly, and we have asked everybody we can find, Did you do it? And no one has answered the question, I did it or why. So because we couldn't finish the game of Clue on our own, we embarked on another tack. About a month ago I filed what's called a resolution of inquiry. It was directed to the Secretary of the Treasury, and it basically asked the Treasury to provide to the United States Congress all of the documents and communications with AIG and others to try to figure out who the hidden hand was, how the Dodd amendment had got into the stimulus package. Well, I want to recognize a champion, somebody who's been more than good to his word, the chairman of the full Committee on Financial Services, Barney Frank of Massachusetts, after it was filed came to me and said, I'll do whatever you want me to do with this resolution. If you want me to not consider it, I won't consider it. If you want me to consider it, we'll consider it. And I said, I would like you to consider it. So Chairman Frank took it before the Financial Services Committee. Everybody would have 48 hours to read the bill. The resolution of inquiry was called up, and everybody on the Committee on Financial Services, every Republican and every Democrat voted for this resolution of inquiry. And I'm thinking to myself, Now we're going to get someplace. Now we're going to figure out who the hidden hand is. Now we are going to figure out who sought to protect the $173 million of bonuses paid to AIG. And right before we broke a couple weeks ago, Chairman Frank came to the floor, good to his word. He filed the report and recommended that the Financial Services Committee report the bill favorably to the House. Now I thought surely we would have a debate on that. Again, this wasn't a party-line vote. It wasn't close. It was 63-0 or 64-0. And I thought for sure we could get this resolved so we could go down to the Treasury, and the Treasury could hand over the documents and we could be done with the game of Clue, and we could solve whether or not it was the Speaker, did she want to do it? Whether it was Harry Reid, the majority leader in the Senate. Whether it was Mr. Geithner, who is the new Secretary of the Treasury. Whether it was the chief of staff to the President of the United States, Mr. Emanuel, because some press accounts indicated that before it could be removed, they had to get the approval of the White House. Well, who in the White House approved it? We've cleared Chairman Rangel, and a lot of fingers were pointed at Senator Dodd, the distinguished Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, that perhaps he had inserted it. But what people have said to this moment in time, Mr. Speaker, is that Secretary Geithner called the head guy at AIG, and the head guy said, Well, we've got some legal problems with the bonuses. So we need to go forward. But nobody yet has come forward and said, I took the language out, and I put the language in, and here's why. So I was happy when Chairman Frank reported the bill. And I thought, I know that the distinguished leader, majority leader of the House, Mr. Hoyer of Maryland, is going to call that bill up. We're going to debate it. We're going to vote on it. Again, 63-0, all the Democrats, all the Republicans voted for it. I was sure it would sail through the House. But I've been waiting, and I've been waiting a month. I know you know this, Mr. Speaker. But legislation can only come to the floor here in the House of Representatives when it is authorized and called up by the majority leader, in this case, Mr. Hoyer of Maryland. There isn't exception to that. So I waited for the bill to be called up. I waited for a debate. It never happened, and so I filed, about 2 weeks ago, a rule and today at the Speaker's desk is a discharge petition to discharge that rule so we can have a debate, so we can finally get down to brass tacks, and we can figure out who the hidden hand is, and we can figure out who decided that we should protect the AIG bonuses when these companies have gotten billions of dollars of bailout money and why. That's a pretty simple question. Now I'm optimistic--there's a meeting tomorrow at 4 o'clock with the Treasury Department, and they've been pretty cooperative. They're going to come over, and hopefully we'll be able to resolve what it is that we are seeking through the resolution of inquiry. I hope so. If not, I really hope that the distinguished majority leader would call up this piece of legislation so that we can have a debate, and we can get on with it. And we can solve this problem that outraged the President of the United States, it outraged Members of Congress, it outraged the public. This would help us figure out how to solve the problem. Now what we hear a lot of times around here is, well, we have so many important things to do that you're looking backwards. I mean, okay. We gave away billions of dollars in TARP money. We gave away and authorized $173 billion, and somehow somebody in the dead of night inserted this language into the bill with a hidden hand. But get over it because we have important work to do in the House of Representatives. Sadly, Mr. Speaker, we have heard that a lot since the beginning of the 110th Congress, the last Congress. I will tell you, I mean, we voted today. I think every person in the United States needs to feel comfortable because they will not go in and buy a new 44 cent stamp at a post office that hasn't been named by the House of Representatives over the last 2 years. We spent a lot of time naming Federal buildings. We spent a lot of time naming post offices, and this happened to us last year too. The Speaker may remember that last summer everybody was talking about not AIG and bailouts, but everybody was talking about gas prices. And in many parts of the country, gas--for the first time in my lifetime, a gallon of gasoline went over $4 a gallon. At that time we asked the new majority party, could we have a debate and come up with an energy bill and relieve some of the pain that people are experiencing at the pump? And they said, Well, we're really too busy to get to that. So a lot of Republicans took to the floor during our August recess and talked about the fact that we needed to do something. We needed to do all of the above. We needed to have clean coal technology. We needed to look at the renewables, wind, solar, geothermal. We needed to determine whether or not we were going to explore for more oil and natural gas in the United States. But again, because it is the majority party that calls the tune in the House of Representatives. They're the only people, with some exceptions, that can call up legislation. That never happened. And they said, you know what, we're really busy, and we really don't have time to talk about gasoline. And a lot of us said, you know, okay, when gasoline was $2.22 on January 29, 2007, which was about the beginning of the 110th Congress when the voters--because we, Republicans, had done such a great job--threw us out and installed the Democrats as the majority party in the House of Representatives, gas was $2.22. And rather than talking about energy, we passed a resolution congratulating the University of California Santa Clara soccer team. Now, Mr. Speaker, I'm sure that every parent and every player on that soccer team is proud of what it is that they accomplished, but not as important as the pain that our constituents were beginning to feel at the pump. But you could say, hey, it's only $2.22. What's the big deal? So maybe it's not a crisis. Well, then on September 5 of that year, gasoline goes up to $2.84. And you would say, oh, you know, I'll bet we're going to talk about gasoline prices and the national energy policy. That has to be something that we're going to consider on the floor of the House of Representatives. Well, when gas hits $2.84, the most important issue that the majority can bring up is National Passport Month. Now I like passports. I think passports should be honored. But gas is creeping up to $2.84. Well, it begins to get a little more serious. In February of 2008 it hits $3.03. You know that we're going to begin talking and take this problem seriously. But on the day that the national average reached $3.03 a gallon, the most important piece of legislation that the majority could bring to the floor was to commend the Houston Dynamo soccer team for what they did. Now, you know, those of us in elected office know the new buzzword, we have to look at the soccer moms. So apparently we had to get the soccer moms not once, we had to get them twice because our two resolutions, when gas was $3.03 and when we started, they honor soccer folks. But then a big jump happens. In the spring of 2008, gas goes to $3.77 a gallon. And you say, well, listen, you know, we're going to talk about gas now because my phone was ringing off the hook. I assume the Speaker's phone was ringing off the hook. And you know that we're going to have a national energy bill that we were going to discuss because they are honest disagreements. Some people were saying, Drill, baby, drill. Some people were saying conserve. All we wanted to have was a debate. So gas hits $3.77, and you know we're going to have that debate in the House, but not yet. On that day, gas hits $3.77, and the most important thing we can do here in the Congress is to commemorate National Train Day. Now, again, I think trains--we've made a big mistake in this country by not investing in rail transportation, passenger rail transportation. But when gas is $3.77, maybe we could come up with something better than National Train Day. Gas continues to climb. We're out to almost Memorial Day last year, where we are about this year. $3.84 a gallon. And the most important thing that the majority can give us is the Great Cats and Rare Canids Day Act. Now, I have to tell you, I know what a great cat is. Those are lions and tigers and things like that. But I didn't know what a canid was. And if you don't know, Mr. Speaker, it's a dog. So on that day when our constituents were paying $3.84 a gallon to fill up their cars, we were recognizing dogs and cats on the House floor. It continues to go up as we get to June, $4.09. It crests $4, as I said, for the first time in my lifetime. You know we're going to talk about gas in the greatest deliberative body in the world. But no. On that day when the national average was $4.09, we declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation. Now some of the people back in my district were not understanding this. They're saying, are you kidding me? We're paying $4.09 a gallon, and you are declaring this the International Year of Sanitation? But it peaks out there on June 17, 2008, $4.14 a gallon. Now clearly everybody in the country is screaming about energy. All you have to do is turn on the television and see the talking heads. They're all talking about energy, why is gas so expensive? Well, you know now, we're going to get it. Now we're going to understand. We've got to have a national energy debate. What direction are we going to go in to reduce our reliance on foreign oil? Seventy percent of the oil that we use in this country is brought in from other countries. Surely we're going to do something about that. And I'll bet when I take this sticky note off of June 17, the day that gas hits $4.14, I know we had a debate on energy that day. No. It wasn't an energy debate on that particular day. We passed the Monkey Safety Act. Now, Mr. Speaker, I don't know anybody that wants unsafe monkeys. We should want safe monkeys in the United States of America. But on the day that our constituents are paying $4.14 a gallon for gas, do you think that the most important issue facing the United States Congress, this august body, is the Monkey Safety Act? Well, it was to those who schedule the floor. So, sadly, we thought maybe people got it, that that probably wasn't the best use of our time when gas was going through the roof. Well, this year, Mr. Speaker, as the gentleman knows, we have had a big problem with unemployment. Our Nation is hurting. There are people that have lost their jobs, and there are people that continue to lose their jobs. And so on January 6, which was the opening day of this 111th Congress, we all got together, and it is before President Obama took the oath of office, because we all know that that historic day was January 20, you have an unemployment rate that is beginning to climb. But as you see at the outside, by the time we get to the end, it is pretty significant. Well, so January 6 is the opening day of the United States Congress. January 20 is the day that President Obama was inaugurated, and there you see unemployment has inched up a little bit. You certainly can't blame President Obama. He was not even the President of the United States then, but the Congress was in session since January 6. That is when the new Congress started. We elected Speaker Pelosi again to be the Speaker of the House. So we get along to February 3. Again, the Congress has been working hard for 1 month, and you know that we are going to have some economic package to help alleviate the pain that is going on in this country with people that have lost their jobs. But on February 3, the most important thing that we could do here in the House was to pass a resolution supporting the goals and ideals of National Teen Dating. Now, I don't know whether that means that teens are dating nationally or it is a national day of teen dating, but rather than talking about the pain that was being experienced in communities all across the country, we recognized teen dating. Now, again, like with the monkeys, I want teen dating to be safe. Well, unemployment continues to rise. We get to February 10. Hundreds of thousands of more people lost their jobs, and on that day, the best we can do here in the House is to commend Sam Bradford for winning the Heisman Trophy. And just like the soccer moms, I'm sure that the Bradford family is more than pleased, and they should be. They should be proud of what their son has accomplished. But again, unemployment continues to rise, hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs, but we are too busy to talk about that. We are going to do that. Now, February 24, you will notice a theme here, Mr. Speaker, unemployment continues to go up. And I know we are going to deal with this situation and that we are going to find a way to help people who have lost their jobs. But because the United States Senate didn't enact the Monkey Safety Act last year, we called up the Monkey Safety Act again. And so for the second time in 2 years, we didn't have time to do an energy policy, we didn't have time to talk about unemployment, but we did have time in the House to pass the Monkey Safety Act not once but twice. Unemployment continues to go up on March 3. And just in case anybody is confused about the United States Congress' commitment to animals, we pass the Shark Conservation Act. And as unemployment continues to arc out, and I apologize for only going to March 12, because it has continued to rise since then, I bet we are going to talk about unemployment and how we help people back home. But on that day, we passed the resolution supporting ``Pi Day.'' Now, I was excited when I got the whip notice, because I thought it was p-i-e, pie. And I like pie a lot. But this pi is the mathematical 3.14. And rather than discussing a lot of things that are going on in the United States, we felt it was necessary and that the most important thing was to recognize pi and support ``Pi Day,'' and we all did, and we are all really happy that we did, because the country is a better place because we recognize pi on March 11. So, coming back to the game of Clue, I think that we have demonstrated that maybe we weren't too busy to get to the resolution of inquiry. Maybe we weren't too busy to figure out who put that offending paragraph in. Maybe we weren't too busy to explain to our constituents how folks on Wall Street who have sucked up billions and billions of taxpayer dollars that are paid into the Treasury by hardworking people all across the country, how through a drafting, it wasn't an oversight, somebody intentionally put it in there, how they rewarded these people with $173 million of bonuses. Now, all we want is for people to say, ``I did it, and here is why I did it,'' and then we can move on to do something else. But to indicate that we are too busy to get to that question I think is not okay. Now, Mr. Speaker, the second issue that brings me to the floor is last week and the week before, the country was rocked with the announcement of the bankruptcy filing of Chrysler. And a lot of people deserve credit. The President of the United States deserves credit. His auto task force deserves credit. The workers at the Chrysler plants across the country, the ownership, the employees, the white collar employees all deserve credit for making concessions and attempting to work it out. The Italian automaker Fiat had been courted. The President said, You have 30 days to work out a deal with Fiat or bad things are going to happen. Fiat stepped up to the plate. And 1 week ago Wednesday, and this is where, really, it is baffling to me, 1 week ago Wednesday, United Auto Worker members all across the country, and there are about 38, 39,000 of them that work for Chrysler, went to their local union halls to determine whether or not to ratify an agreement making these concessions so that the Chrysler deal could move forward either in or out of bankruptcy, and Fiat could purchase those assets out of bankruptcy if that is the way it went. And you may remember that there were a number of bondholders, people that held the paper for Chrysler, and most of them agreed to negotiate what it is they were owed. There were some that did not. And so the only route left was to go into bankruptcy, and Fiat now will purchase Chrysler's assets out of bankruptcy. But all of the autoworkers that worked for Chrysler went to the union hall and voted whether or not to accept these pretty big concessions, and it passed. As a matter of fact, I have a Chrysler facility in my district, the 14th District of Ohio. It is the Twinsburg stamping plant. And those approximately 1,200 union workers went to vote on Wednesday, and 88 percent of them voted to approve the concessions that were being asked of them. And a couple of things. The paragraph, Mr. Speaker, that is on the easel now behind me is, if you look at the agreement reached between the autoworkers and Chrysler, there was a specific provision. And as a matter of fact, the president of local 122 in Twinsburg, Doug Rice, deserves a lot of credit, because if you look at the stamping plant in Twinsburg, what you saw was they were stamping parts for an assembly facility in Newark that was not going to be utilized anymore. So recognizing that there may be a downturn and that people may use that downturn as an excuse to shutter the facility, Doug Rice specifically negotiated a paragraph that is labeled, ``Twinsburg Stamping Plant.'' And, Mr. Speaker, I will insert page 4 of the UAW agreement into the Record. Sourcing, Product and Investment Commitments Sourcing The UAW strengthened our involvement in early product sourcing decisions. Annually, the company will review its five-year global assembly and powertrain cycle plan with the union. In addition, sourcing-related activities have been identified in which the UAW will participate to accomplish early and direct involvement for our members. Current and Future Product Commitment and Future Insourcing Opportunities The 2007 Product Commitment and Investment Letter reflects the company's plans. It is understood that additional confidential dialogue has been exchanged with respect to the favorable effect of a Chrysler/Fiat alliance on Chrysler's operations. The effect could result in incremental product loading in the company's assembly and powertrain operations. Union involvement and Supplier Relations The UAW and Chrysler agree that there are ways in which a seat supplier and its union can achieve a competitive labor cost structure that enables the supplier to provide a competitive bid to the company. To advance those opportunities the union will explore a variety of means to ensure a competitive, fully fringed labor rate. During these negotiations the UAW and Chrysler agreed that a fully fringed labor rate of $35 per hour for seat assembly when the work is being done at a supplier is considered by the company to be competitive. Supplier Meetings The parties will continue ongoing dialogue to review the supply base and review opportunities to improve the company's supplier base. Discussions will include the quarterly Distressed Supplier Roundtable meetings with senior management from Procurement and Supply, Union Relations and the National Committee, and UAW Chrysler Department leadership. Product Loading Review The UAW and Chrysler LLC will meet to review vehicle plans for assembly, stamping, powertrain and components operations in the United States, Canada and Mexico. The meetings also provide an opportunity to discuss long-term plans for the company. Sourcing Addendum As stipulated in the 2007 CBA, the current Roundtable and Powertrain meetings will continue to provide an avenue for union involvement in the Chrysler product decision-making process. Roundtable Meeting The UAW-Chrysler Roundtable Meeting will continue on an annual basis and will include comprehensive vehicle plans for the United States, Canada and Mexico assembly, stamping, powertrain and components. Powertrain Meeting The UAW-Chrysler Powertrain meeting will continue each year and include a comprehensive review of the United States, Canada and Mexico Powertrain Long Range Plan and Powertrain Plant product loading. The UAW will continue to participate in the Product Team Sourcing, Pre-Program Start and Program Start meetings, giving us the opportunity to focus on information provided throughout the Chrysler Development System process and Supplier Selection Period. The National and Local Job Security Operational Effectiveness and Sourcing Committees provide an additional avenue for UAW input on sourcing decisions. UAW, Chrysler and Supplier Partnerships The company has agreed to a quarterly meeting between the UAW Vice President and Director of the UAW Chrysler Department and Chrysler Purchasing Directors for commodities and supplied parts, to foster partnership between the UAW, Chrysler and key suppliers. Twinsburg Stamping Plant During these discussions the company agreed to review the long-term utilization plan for the Twinsburg Stamping Plant and to share those plans with the UAW. The company will consider investment costs and current market demand in determining the plant's suitability for placing non-stamping work in the facility, at tier-11 rates, to keep TSP viable. fiat investment and Product Commitment Your UAW leadership has been in intense negotiations with representatives of Fiat and Chrysler over the past several months to arrive at a partnership arrangement that will secure Chrysler's long-term viability. As a result of these discussions, the term sheet establishing the Chrysler/Fiat alliance includes a commitment from Fiat to manufacture a small car in one of Chrysler's U.S. facilities. In addition, Fiat will share key technology with Chrysler, (such as the 3.0 liter diesel and 1.4 liter gas engines) and all its product platforms. This is equivalent to an investment by Fiat amounting to more than $8 billion and will create approximately 4,000 new UAW jobs in the United States. So this paragraph indicates that during these discussions, and this was Wednesday again when they were asked to vote on it, Chrysler agreed to review the long-term utilization plan. The company will consider investment costs and current market demand in determining the plant's suitability for placing nonstamping work at the facility at tier 2 rates to keep the stamping plant viable. So what the people at 122 think that their president negotiated, and he did, was a provision that, okay, we have tough times here in Twinsburg, but now the company has agreed that we are going to look at ways to bring other work to Twinsburg. So they went to vote 1 week ago Wednesday, and 88 percent of local 122 voted to approve the contract. Well, then sadly for those folks, the sun came up 1 week ago Thursday, and my day was a lot like the day of other Members of Congress who have Chrysler facilities in their district. The first thing that happened was that we had a conference call, if you wanted to participate, with President Obama's automobile task force. And on the phone was Ron Bloom, who is the head of it, Larry Summers, who is the President's financial adviser, and maybe a couple more. And Members of Congress, Governors and other people who were interested were in on the call. The notes that I took contemporaneously with that telephone call, it began with, ``This is a good day for Chrysler and the people that work there.'' They went on to describe how the bankruptcy was going to work and basically what I described before, that because some of these bondholders wouldn't come to the table, we had to go the bankruptcy route, but the good news was, on the other side, Fiat was going to purchase Chrysler out of bankruptcy and we were going to move on. I thought I--I know that I understood that that meant that the plants were going to stay open. We did hear that there was going to be some idling, which they said at 1 o'clock, when you talk to Chrysler, Chrysler will tell you what the idling is, but no indication of plant closures, no indication of job losses, and so we moved on. So then at noon, at the White House, and it is a pretty famous picture now, the President of the United States, President Obama, made the announcement at 12 o'clock 1 week ago Thursday about Chrysler. And like many Americans, and certainly many people who work at Chrysler, this is what the President of the United States said on April 30 of this year at the White House: ``No one should be confused about what a bankruptcy process means. It will not disrupt the lives of the people who work at Chrysler or live in communities that depend on it.'' Now, that is a pretty clear observation. I understood it. And then at 1 o'clock, the former CEO of Chrysler, Mr. Nardelli, had another conference call in which anybody who had questions or wanted to hear from the head of Chrysler could participate in that conference call. And you could ask questions. I asked a question about the supply chain, would the suppliers be paid? The first question during that call came from the Governor of the State of Michigan, Mrs. Granholm, and I thought that she asked a really great question. She said that when the President made this announcement, he said, it is a great day, words to that effect, we are going to be able to save 30,000 jobs. And Governor Granholm asked Mr. Nardelli, This is great work, nicely done. We are very proud of you, but I just want to ask a question. I want to make sure that when the President of the United States said 30,000 jobs, he wasn't speaking in code, because there are about 39,000 people that work for the Chrysler car company in the United States of America. And after a lot of discussion about how many people were worldwide and all this other business, no, the President wasn't speaking in code. The jobs are safe. The plants are safe. Now, I left that phone call feeling pretty good. And as a matter of fact, I called my communications director and I said, Hey, put out a press release praising President Obama, praising his task force, and praising all the people that made sacrifices at Chrysler, because this was a pretty good day. No plants are closing. Nobody is losing their jobs, and we are going to move on. Let me just go back to that phone call and express the disappointment, because I know that the folks at Chrysler are under a great deal of pressure today. But that phone call, when we got on the phone call, you had to agree and understand that the phone call was being taped. And so what I just referenced about Governor Granholm would have been tape-recorded on that telephone call. We also had a Democratic Member of Congress on the phone from Wisconsin, and it was Representative Gwen Moore of Milwaukee. She asked directly about the future of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, engine plant which employs 800 people. But for some reason, and Mr. Nardelli now says that he made a mistake and he confused Kenosha with another plant in Trenton, but in responding to Congresswoman Moore, he said, I mistakenly conveyed the status of the Phoenix investment in Trenton, Michigan. It is not even in the same State. I thought Trenton was in Wisconsin. So you have got Kenosha, Wisconsin, and you got Trenton, Michigan. The facts that I described were accurate, and he basically told Congresswoman Moore they loved the plant, everything was good, everything was going to be okay. And like my folks in Twinsburg, Ohio, I assumed that the 800 autoworkers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that went to the ballot box to determine whether or not they would voluntarily reduce their compensation and benefits thought that meant they would continue to have jobs. But that turned out not to be the case. Later that afternoon, buried in the voluminous bankruptcy filing by Chrysler, which was anticipated, was the fact that the first five, and then erstwhile reporters dug out eight Chrysler plants across the country were scheduled to be closed on a sliding schedule. In the case of Twinsburg in 2010, and roughly 9,000 auto workers who worked for Chrysler were going to be out of jobs and their plants were going to be closed. Imagine my surprise, among other people, and the fellow from Chrysler called and apologized. He said, We are sorry to have communicated that in that way. We wish we could have done it in another way. I said, Listen, who knew that these plants were going to be closed? If you were an auto worker in Twinsburg, Ohio, why would you vote for a contract that meant you wouldn't have a job? Why would you vote for a contract that meant that you weren't going to have a job any more? It didn't make sense. Although the apologies are nice, we have a situation where 39,000 auto workers went into the ballot box believing that by approving this new contract and these concessions, they were going to save the company and they were going to save their jobs. So I issued a second release saying that is not what I heard on the conference calls, it is not what I heard from Chrysler, it is not what I heard from the President's Auto Task Force, and it is not what I heard the President of the United States say on Thursday. Well, the first response to my local newspaper, Cleveland Plain Dealer, was that I was confused. And so I immediately went out and I bought one of those new Miracle Ears, and I now have the Miracle Ear so I can understand things a little more clearly than I did before. But I began checking with other people on the call, and their recollections were the same as mine. I called Chrysler and said, You know what, I don't think I misunderstood, but I know this telephone call was taped because your contractor said at the beginning of the call the call is going to be taped, and if you don't want to be on a taped call, hang up and don't participate in the call. I said to really prove this, Why don't you just give me the tape. And then I said, Well, okay, not the tape, give me the transcript. They called back. They said there is a transcript; the lawyers have to figure out whether or not you can have the transcript. This was last Wednesday. And today, I got kind of a terse letter that has a question that was asked by a representative of my Governor, Governor Strickland, on the phone call, and they have been kind enough to give me those two paragraphs, but no transcript, no observations, no words that I know that they have that were spoken by Governor Granholm, no words that were spoken by Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin either. So I have to tell you, it is a difficult conversation that we are having. The mayor of Twinsburg, Kathy Procop, who is a wonderful mayor, sent Mr. Bloom, the head of the President's Auto Task Force, a note; and I have to tell you, he was very prompt in responding to her on May 6 and basically she was saying, I don't understand. I don't understand how we went from Twinsburg is open and people popping champagne corks celebrating to Twinsburg is now closed. So Mr. Bloom in the operative section of the letter, which is the second full paragraph, writes: While the original February 17 plan submitted by Chrysler was not deemed viable by the task force, the more recently proposed Fiat- Chrysler alliance plan has been approved. This plan included the same plant closure schedule as the one originally proposed by Chrysler, and the President's comments were meant to convey the message that the bankruptcy of Chrysler had in no way changed these plans. So when the President spoke at noon a week ago Thursday and said no one should be confused about a bankruptcy or what the process means, it will not disrupt the lives of people who work at Chrysler or live in communities who depend on it, it is kind of like in baseball where they put an asterisk next to the record, that ``except.'' I mean, it would have been a simple thing for him to go on to say except for the eight plants that have been identified but not revealed to anybody in the February 17 plan which we rejected. Then everybody would have understood. Everybody would have known. But when the leader of the Free World stands up and says, It is not going to disrupt the lives of people who work for Chrysler or the communities that depend on it, I can just tell you, Mr. Speaker, that 1,200 people work at the Twinsburg stamping plant. It is disrupting every one of their lives. And the city of Twinsburg, where it is located, the Chrysler plant is 13 percent of their tax base. And it is clearly not only the pain of individual families and individual employees, but it is clearly going to affect the schools, the police department, the fire service, the garbage pickup. So I have trouble accepting this paragraph from Mr. Bloom that the President was just saying, Listen, no lives are going to be disrupted unless we have already determined you are going to get the ax. The problem with that is they all point to this document that was rejected by the President's Auto Task Force that was filed on February 17. The problem with that argument, and when people were saying I was confused, it was a simple misunderstanding, we went out and I read and my staff read the agreement, or the proposal, that was filed by Chrysler on February 17 that was rejected. Nowhere in this document, nowhere in the 177 pages is there any indication that the stamping plant in Twinsburg was going to be closed; that the plant in Kenosha was going to be closed; that the plant in Fenton, Missouri, was going to be closed; that the plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, was going to be closed. So I guess when people say that the workers who voted for the contract and then were told the next day that they were going to lose their jobs should have known, the only way they could have known, because everybody says we didn't make it public, we couldn't make it public, the only people who would have known are people with ESP, people who can read the minds of the President's task force and the minds of people at Chrysler, because clearly nobody else could have contemplated that these 9,000 people who voted in good faith to ratify a contract that reduced their benefits, reduced their pay, could have said, Listen, I'm voting to end my job. As a matter of fact, the president of Local 122 who I mentioned earlier, Mr. Rice, will be here this week. But in conversations with me on the telephone he said, Look, we are shocked. I specifically negotiated this paragraph into the UAW- Chrysler agreement that said that we were going to bring more work to Twinsburg. So to go from voting for an agreement that you think will not only preserve your job, and you are getting additional work, to not having a job, I don't understand why people are surprised that people are surprised. So, clearly, Mr. Speaker, we have a problem. So in the spirit of the theme, since we have almost concluded The Case of the Hidden Hand as to how the AIG bonuses got into the stimulus package, we have developed Clue, The Travel Edition. And this is one that you can play in a car with your kids. It is called The Travel Edition because we are talking about Chrysler. In this case we don't have a pen. The perpetrator didn't alter the stimulus package with a pen. Instead, he or she used an ax. They basically used that ax to stop the employment of 9,000 people who work in this country making automobiles. And as you see around the edge, of course in the top right you recognize the President of the United States, President Obama; and his economic adviser, Mr. Lawrence Summers; Robert Nardelli, the former CEO of Chrysler; Mr. Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury; and Ron Bloom who was the head of President's task force. I also, just for the benefit of the Speaker, I put a picture of President George W. Bush up there, and you may ask why did I put President Bush up there, and I would just tell you there are some people in this country who blame President Bush for everything, and so we wanted to make sure that we had him as a potential suspect. But, again, in this group, and I really don't think it was the President of the United States, President Obama, but in this group between the President's Automobile Task Force and Mr. Nardelli and others at Chrysler, somebody knew, and I would suggest more than somebody knew, that the bankruptcy filing which was going to be filed a week ago Thursday afternoon had a provision in it to cease the livelihood over time of eight Chrysler plants employing about 9,000 people. The only problem with that is they forgot to tell the 9,000 people. They forgot to tell the people who were thinking that they were being good employees, good Americans, and agreeing voluntarily to a reduction in the amount of money they make, but the trade-off was Chrysler was going to survive and they would have jobs. So hopefully at the 4 p.m. meeting tomorrow with the Department of the Treasury, we will solve the Case of the Hidden Hand and figure out how the AIG bonuses were protected. We now embark on a new mission, and that is where, we go the ax, we got the weapon out of the way, we just need to identify what room it took place in and which one of these gentlemen, and I would remove the 43rd and 44th President of the United States who knew, and why didn't you tell anybody? And why did you let 9,000 people vote to end their jobs? Now, we are going to continue to ask Chrysler for a copy of that telephone call from 1 p.m. in the afternoon. We are going to, if necessary, file another resolution of inquiry directed at the White House. But we will, I think, get to the bottom of this. Again, Mr. Speaker, I know, sadly, that what we will hear is, Let's look forward; let's talk about rebuilding. Let's talk about doing wonderful things. But before you can look forward, you need to look back and you need to find out what happened to these 9,000 hardworking Americans that have manufactured American-made cars in some cases for many, many years. But I fear based upon our debate on energy prices and gasoline prices last summer, and based upon our experience with the AIG bonuses this year, that we will again be told we are too busy. We have post offices to name. We have to honor pi, 3.14, the mathematical formula. This is my last chart and the last observations I will make. This chart indicates the number of people who work for Chrysler who have lost their jobs from January 12 of this year to this week. And so in January, 4,000 people at Chrysler lost their jobs. Again, rather than figuring this thing out, we passed a resolution here in the House of Representatives honoring the life of Claiborne Pell who was a wonderful and great former United States Senator; but we didn't talk about Chrysler. Then in February, and by then about 9,500 people from Chrysler have lost their jobs. And for a reprise, a surprise revisit, we again, because the Senate apparently didn't take it up last year, we again passed supporting the goals and ideals of national teen dating. So while people are losing their jobs at Chrysler by the thousands, at least teen dating has been covered here in the Congress. We get to the middle of March, and you are now up to about 11,000 people at Chrysler have lost their jobs all across the country, and the Monkey Safety Act makes a return appearance. This time there was a tragic accident where a pet monkey attacked a woman and really injured her, and so I don't make light of the fact that she will need serious medical attention and the Monkey Act is probably a decent piece of legislation, but when you have 11,000 Chrysler workers out of work, what are we doing passing the Monkey Safety Act again? In April, we got up to about 13,000 jobs, and, you know, we'll do something for Chrysler, but the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act comes back to the floor. And, again, when 13,000 people are out of work, we talk about cats and dogs. But then it gets up to 16,000, and, you know, just like with gas prices, just like with the AIG bonuses, I know that the United States Congress will not sit still while 16,000 of their countrymen have lost their jobs. But the most important piece of legislation that the majority can schedule on the day that 16,000 people were now unemployed at Chrysler, we awarded a Gold Medal to Arnold Palmer, the golfer. Now, I think Arnold Palmer is a great American. I think Arnold Palmer deserved the Gold Medal. I don't know, when you have 16,000 Chrysler workers out of work, why that's the most important issue that the majority can bring to the table. And now this week, that number is up to 18,000. That 18,000 does not include the 9,000 people that voted the other day to terminate their jobs. But, again, we have a repeat, 18,000 people at Chrysler out of work, and the most important issue on the House floor, National Train Day. Madam Speaker, we are not too busy to do this, as these charts clearly indicate, and the 9,000 workers and the people in communities all across America that will now see their tax bases decrease, people out of work, deserve to know which one of these gentlemen, or do we have to add another suspect, which one of these gentlemen knew, as they sent those people into the polling place to approve a concession contract, which one of these people knew that they were going to terminate their jobs, close their plants, and decimate their communities. So, Madam Speaker, I look forward to returning to another day and continuing the adventure of Clue, the Travel Edition. I thank the Speaker for her courtesy.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Madam Speaker, in honor and in celebration of National Nursing Week, I'd like to recognize the achievements of Francis Payne Bolton and the impact of the Bolton Act on the field of nursing. Madam Speaker, the Bolton Act of 1943, introduced by Congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton, created the Cadet Nurse Corps. The Corps provided Federal funds to nearly 125,000 nurses during World War II to facilitate their training and greatly increase the wartime supply of nurses and care for American citizens on both the home and war fronts. It also significantly improved post-World War II nursing education, replacing the apprenticeship-type training approach in nursing schools with an academic approach and encouraging nurses to study related areas of public health, pediatrics, psychiatric care, and convalescent care. It further benefitted the nursing field by prompting attention and Federal financial aid to graduate nursing degrees, and contributed to the integration of African-Americans into the nursing field. Madam Speaker, Francis Payne Bolton was the first woman in Ohio elected to the House of Representatives. She served fourteen consecutive terms and later served as trustee of Lakeside Hospital (Cleveland, OH), Lake Erie College (Painesville, OH), and the Central School of Practical Nursing (Cleveland). Trustees at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, named their School of Nursing in her honor. She died in Lyndhurst, OH, on March 9, 1977. Madam Speaker, last year, I introduced legislation with the late- Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) recognizing the 65th anniversary of the Bolton Act. Frances Payne Bolton single-handedly made sure we had enough nurses at home and overseas during World War II, and helped elevate nursing as an important and critical profession. I am honored to recognize her and her contributions during National Nursing Week, and I yield back.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, I'd like to thank my good friend from New York (Mr. Weiner) and his involvement in getting this bill to the floor today. I am pleased to support its passage, and am proud to be the lead Republican on this bill. Mr. Speaker, not to date myself, but the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program was established the year I had the privilege of being elected to this body, in 1994, by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (the '94 Crime Act). The COPS program has aged better than me, enabling more officers to be hired, contributing to lower crime rates than would otherwise be the case, and increasing the technology and equipment available to our law enforcement officers to do the job we ask of them. According to the Department of Justice, the COPS program has helped state, local and tribal governments hire more than 117,000 officers and has awarded more than $11.4 billion to over 13,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has estimated that COPS funding contributed a 2.5% decline in the violent crime rate between 1993 and 2000. In my own district, nearly 300 officers have been hired since the program started. Statewide, the COPS program has funded more than 3,700 officers and sheriff's deputies, more than 225 school resource officers, and has provided more than $55 million in technology grants for departments. It's hard to argue with fighting crime, lowering crime rates, hiring trained officers in our local communities, and providing equipment and technology upgrades otherwise not available to cash-strapped communities. As my colleagues know, the recent stimulus bill contained $1 billion to hire or rehire laid-off officers. Some may say: Why are you authorizing this program again when you just gave it a considerable amount of money in the stimulus bill? Mr. Speaker, last week was the deadline for departments to apply for a slice of that stimulus money to hire officers. The COPS office tells me that the $1 billion in the stimulus bill will pay for 5,500 new police positions nationwide. The COPS Hiring Recovery program--the stimulus program--received applications from a staggering 7,200 departments nationwide! That's $8.4 billion in requests for 40,000 officers. Again, the stimulus program contained $1 billion and will fund just 5,500 officers. So, when the funding is doled out, departments in every corner of the country are going to be greatly disappointed because more than 34,000 of the officers requested will not be funded. Also, the COPS office tells me that the vast majority of applications for the stimulus funding were for new officer positions, not to replace laid-off officers, so clearly there is a need for this program. To give you some perspective on the number of applications just received by the COPS office, when the program started in the mid-1990s, the office received about 6,000 applications. When the application period ended last week, there were 7,200 applications, so clearly police departments are in need and the COPS office is swamped. Mr. Speaker, this popular community policing program will reauthorize through Fiscal Year 2014 the COPS program. I am pleased to see it includes Mr. Weiner's Troops-to-Cops Program, which would fund the hiring of former members of the Armed Forces to serve as law enforcement officers in community-oriented policing, particularly in communities adversely affected by military base closings. It also includes technology grants and authorizes up to $350 million a year for grants to departments to obtain or upgrade technology and equipment. Mr. Speaker, the COPS program has advanced community policing in all jurisdictions across the United States by enabling law enforcement to hire and train law enforcement officers to participate in community policing, purchase and deploy new crime-fighting technologies, and develop and test policing strategies. You'd be hard pressed to find a program that is better liked by the law enforcement community and city officials. More importantly, the COPS program is well run and an effective use of taxpayer money. I urge my colleagues to support the bill.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, the gentlelady is right. And that's why we have really done some hard work. I have to give credit to a lot of my cohorts on this. They've really done a lot of work from going from 535 that I think we really are down to these 6 and 7 people. I should explain the question mark down there because the Secretary of the Treasury has twice appeared before the Financial Services Committee and given testimony. And when asked directly who did it, he said staff at the Treasury communicated with staff and Senator Dodd's office. Now, listen, that is the biggest ``what, are you kidding me?'' I've ever heard because staff can't write legislation, the Treasury can't write legislation. Members of Congress write legislation. And to hide behind the skirts of some unknown, unnamed staff member I think is a tremendous act of cowardice, and so just come out. But I put the question mark there because that question mark we hope to eventually fill in with the staffer at Treasury who apparently is somehow involved. All we're going to ask that staffer is, ``Who told you to do it?'' It has to be somebody in power. It can't be the staff got together and said, ``Hey, I got a good one. Let's give out some bonuses to AIG.'' So we are going to continue this quest. But the point in your special order that I just wanted to raise is that we have this budget next week. And this bill where this horrible thing happened only--and I can't believe I have been in Washington so long I can say ``only spent a trillion dollars,'' the proposal next week on the floor proposes to spend $3.6 trillion. And I would just hope under the straight-faced test, can I look at myself in the mirror when I wake up in the morning, that whoever is in charge, whoever happens to be in the next room where this is being negotiated says, You know what? I've got a novel idea. Why don't we let everybody read the bill, understand the bill, so we can have an intelligent debate on the bill. And when it goes to the conference committee and it goes in these rooms and there are only five or six people involved, maybe you check back and say, ``You know what? I have made this change. Here's why I made the change. I hope can you go along with it.'' But this back door, backhanded sneaky stuff, it doesn't belong not only in the United States Congress, it doesn't belong anywhere. So I thank the gentlelady for yielding, and I would enlist the gentleman from Georgia, the gentleman from Pennsylvania and the gentlelady from North Carolina as junior sleuths. And we will continue this discussion next week, and we're going to find out who did it, what room it happened in, with the pen. I thank the gentlelady.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina. You know, I think the gentlelady from North Carolina and the gentleman from Georgia have correctly hit on the fact--and I think anyone who realistically looks at the budget that we are going to be asked to pass judgment on next week--spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much from future generations, but of as much concern or maybe of more concern to me is, basically, that there are things occurring in this House that I never thought would occur. This is my 15th year in the United States Congress. I am proud to represent my corner of Ohio. There is this notion that we can rush legislation through without reading it and without knowing what is in it. Especially on our side--and I will talk about the stimulus bill in a minute--we got about 90 minutes to read 1,000 pages, 1,000 pages in the stimulus bill. They gave us 90 minutes to read it, and then people are surprised when funny things happen. The funny thing I want to just mention and why I hope we don't go down this road with the budget that spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much is what happened in the stimulus bill. So, again, this was put forward as ``we have to get it done.'' We had to get it done by the President's Day recess for some reason. I don't know what the reason was, but we had to get it done and get it done in a hurry. On the Tuesday of the week that we considered the stimulus bill, we had a vote here in this Chamber. The proposition was--and it was a silly proposition--before we would be asked to vote on the stimulus bill, every Member would be given 48 hours to read the bill, and it would be posted on the Internet so our constituents and anybody who was interested could also read the bill and could have 48 hours to sort of digest it. Everybody voted. Everybody who was here that day voted to do that--every Republican and every Democrat. Well, then we came along to Friday, and the bill was filed at a little after midnight on Thursday night. I apologize that I wasn't up to receive the 1,000 pages to read it then, but when I did get into the office, there were 90 minutes to read 1,000 pages between the time I got to work and the time that we had the vote. That was the length of the debate. People said, ``Well, don't worry about it, you know. It's only 1,000 pages. It only spends $1 trillion. Why would you want to read the thing?'' Well, sadly--and we warned--what happens when you do things like that is that people get embarrassed, and in fact, people did get embarrassed. Some folks may remember that, for the last couple of weeks, people have been upset about these million-dollar bonuses, these multi- million-dollar bonuses, included in the bill, that went to executives at a company called AIG, which many point a finger to as at least participating in the economic decline that we, sadly, are experiencing. When the stimulus bill was considered in the United States Senate, across the Rotunda on the other side, two Senators--a Democratic Senator by the name of Wyden from Oregon and a Republican Senator by the name of Snowe from Maine--authored an amendment that went into the stimulus bill that said--and it was pretty simple--that if you are a firm that is getting billions of taxpayer dollars, do not give million- dollar bonuses to your executives. I mean that is something that I certainly support. As a matter of fact, it passed just like our thing-- that we were going to get 48 hours to read the bill. It passed in the Senate by voice vote. Every Senator said, ``Aye.'' Again, that sounded pretty reasonable to a lot of us. Now, there are those people who may not follow how everything works here--and God help you if you do follow everything that works here--but know that, once they have passed their bill on the Senate side and once we have passed our bill over here, we each appoint conferees. They go into a conference room, and they hash out the differences between the House bill and the Senate bill, and then it comes back to each body. We vote on it and we are done. Well, there's a funny thing. One of my favorite movies when I was growing up was ``A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.'' A funny thing happened on the way to this conference report. The Snowe- Wyden amendment, which said no bonuses for people who got billions of dollars of taxpayer money, was taken out. What was put in instead, Madam Speaker, are these 47 words that are next to me. The 47 words not only removed the Snowe-Wyden amendment that said ``no bonuses,'' but this language specifically protected the bonuses, and authorized AIG and anybody else who got TARP money--who got billions of dollars in financial help from the Federal Government, from our taxpayers--to pay out the bonuses. I'm going to talk about how it got in there in just a minute. The thing that was amazing last week was that we had people all over town who were shocked. ``I am shocked that they paid out bonuses.'' ``I am shocked that we all had this happen.'' ``We want our money back.'' ``I am shocked.'' Well, it is a little bit, Madam Speaker, like the guy who takes a bath with the clock radio on the side of the bathtub, and the thing falls in, and he's surprised and he's shocked. Clearly, anybody who voted for the stimulus bill voted to approve the bonuses to AIG and to all the other banks that have sort of led us into this mess, but then they were shocked.