Steven LaTourette

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. That is my recollection, yes.

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.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I would be happy to yield to the gentlelady.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. The gentlelady is correct. I would just say that, in talking to my Democratic colleagues who voted for the stimulus bill, I think some of them were surprised that this had happened, but I think the point is that this is not the way to legislate. You don't give the power to three or four people to go into a room, to take out an important provision, to then put in an important provision, to not give anybody time to read it, and then say you are surprised that there might be something goofy or embarrassing in the piece of legislation. So, basically, anybody who voted for the stimulus bill voted to give millions of dollars of bonuses to AIG officials and to everybody else. Now, when they found out and people were embarrassed--and we went through this political theater last week, a charade--a lot of people got up on the floor and said, ``We want our money back.'' You know, ``give us our money back.'' So they used the Tax Code in a way that I have never seen, which said we are going to tax these bonuses at 90 percent. That was their fix. You know, even that fix is--I will use the word--``stupid'' because it is only 90 percent. So the top guy at AIG got a $6.4 million bonus. Even under their fix, he still gets to keep $640,000. They are either entitled to some money, to all of their money or to none of their money. There is this notion that we fixed it and that we were mean to these people in that we only let them keep $640,000. You know, the gentlelady, Ms. Foxx from North Carolina, a person who works in my district outside of Cleveland, Ohio who makes $40,000 a year would have to work for 16 years to make $640,000. Anyway, we had a lot of fancy speeches, and people said, ``We are going to fix it.'' So we have been talking for 2 weeks, Madam Speaker, about how it happened, and nobody is willing to take responsibility. I mean, obviously, the thing, you know, didn't just drop down from the sky, and one paragraph goes out and this paragraph comes in. Somebody had to do it. We started last week with a number of our colleagues, and we said, you know, there are 435 Members of Congress. There are 100 Senators, and so we started with 535 suspects. Through good detective work by a lot of my colleagues, we have been able to narrow that down because sadly, not one Republican was invited in this room where this deal was cut. So you can take out all 178 Republican Members of the House, all 38 Republican members of the Senate. And then we continued to cram it down. And we have had public statements from a number of people. There was a report by CNN's Dana Bash that this thing was hashed out over 8 hours. And the President's chief of staff was here and the President's director of the budget was here. And so while we got down and eliminated a lot of Members of Congress, we had to add some people. So, Madam Speaker, what we have arrived at--and this was one of the favorite games that I played when I was a young person, and I enjoyed very much playing it with my children, and I bet a lot of people in America have played the game of Clue. With apologies to our friends at Hasbro, we now find ourselves with the sad situation where somebody put into this bill the authorization to pay out these millions of dollars of bonuses to AIG and everybody else, and now we're shocked. Well, those of you who play the game of Clue know you need to have a suspect--or the person that committed it--where it happened--in the House--and what the weapon was. Now, we started with a great advantage here because we didn't have to go lead pipe, wrench, gun, all of that other stuff. We know the crime was committed with a pen. So we're one-third of the way home. We also have the rooms located here in the Capitol that indicate where activity took place. And I will tell you that we're not there yet, and we really are seeking the person that did this. Just come forward. Just tell us you did it and we can move on to something else. And then maybe you can tell us why you did it, and we will be happy. But the reports indicate, first of all, they were all pointing to the senator from Connecticut, Senator Dodd. And why? Because he was the Chairperson of the Senate Banking Committee, and he is the person who has made some observations that his staff put it in at the suggestion of somebody else's staff and so forth and so on. And I don't know. But it went to him. But I am not really suspecting Senator Dodd because I think he has a vested interest in making sure we clean this up. And, you know, when there is a mystery and you can't solve it, people begin to speculate and people begin to pass out nasty rumors and you become the subject of rumors. And two rumors that have coordinated around Senator Dodd that makes people think, well, he must be the guy. Well, one, is he is the largest recipient of campaign donations from AIG and their executives. And that makes some people say, ``Well, of course he did it. He's paying back AIG.'' I don't think that's true. Second, there was a second report in the Hartford Courant this week that his wife was employed by a subsidiary of AIG. So that causes the tongue waggers to say, Hey, you know what? We really think it's him. But, Madam Speaker, I am a big fan of Agatha Christie novels. And the great thing about those novels is you read them, you always think it's the butler and you get to the end of the book, it's not the butler. So I really don't think it was Senator Dodd who did this. The other folks that we have listed here--and I am also ready to give up on the distinguished chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel of New York. And I think the only reason that we have him here still is was he was quoted coming out of the room--because he was in the room--but when he came out of the room, he said, ``It's very frustrating when the Congress is run by only three people.'' So I think since he's expressing disappointment by that, I don't think he's one of the three people that actually got it done. Press reports indicate there was shuttle diplomacy between the Speaker's office and the Senate leader's office, and that's why we have the distinguished Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi of California, and the distinguished majority leader of the Senate, Mr. Reid of Nevada, over there. And these are their offices. And we are told that these two people--well, we will start with this fellow. He used to serve with us in the House. He is a fine fellow. He is now the President's chief of staff. His name is Rahm Emanuel from Illinois. And he was here for 8 hours shuttling back and forth between these two offices. And so is this fellow, who may not be as familiar to the Members as Mr. Emanuel, that's Peter Orszag, who happens to be the budget director for the new administration. So we know from events that a lot of shuttling back and forth over an 8-hour period between these two offices, a deal was eventually struck, this language is inserted, the Snow White language is removed. And the problem we have is nobody will say they did it. And I think that that is a sad state of affairs. I think whoever did it should come forward and tell the American people you did it. Because whoever did it embarrassed--anybody that voted for the stimulus bill has to be embarrassed by the fact that they authorized the bonus to AIG.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I asked the whip to yield to me so I may inquire of the designee of the majority leader. Today, the House Financial Services Committee by a vote of 64-0 reported H. Res. 251. And as the gentleman is aware, the AIG bonus issue is something that has roiled both parties. Both parties are embarrassed that somebody slipped a paragraph into the stimulus bill. H. Res. 251 is a resolution of inquiry that directs the Secretary of the Treasury to provide not only the documents that he might have in his possession, but they also relate back to Secretary Paulson and his administration of the TARP program. So it clearly is a bipartisan measure. I think the vote of 64-0 speaks for itself. And I note that on next week's schedule the majority has scheduled the other bill that was just reported this morning out of the Financial Services Committee, and I would ask the gentleman if we are going to see H. Res. 251 next week. And if not, I would make my request that we do. And I would further make the request that since the vote was 64-0 and we appear to have run out of post offices, perhaps it could be a suspension next week.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I absolutely am moved by the conversation. And one of the things that puzzles me as we go through this financial mess is that people have decided to target trips and conventions and destinations and tourism, and that's exactly the wrong message. I don't know how it is in your part of the world. In Cleveland, where we have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and we have great hotels, There are people who have to work in the hotels, there are people who cook the food, people who serve the food. And when you choke down and just make fun of people that go and have conventions or go traveling, you really are cutting off your nose to spite your face because you are drying up those jobs and you really are having a huge impact on the local economy. And I don't know any local economy that doesn't have as a component a healthy dose of dollars from tourism. And so as people sort of say this is bad, that's bad, don't do this, one thing that they shouldn't target is, in fact, people need to travel, people need to have meetings, and people need to rent rooms and eat meals. I thank the gentlelady for yielding.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank you for the recognition, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank the minority leader for granting us this hour. I'm going to be joined by at least two other Members, Mr. Tiberi and Mr. Austria, also of Ohio. We're going to talk a little bit about what occurred last week and the week before. I know the Speaker will remember that the Capitol was sort of roiled, and our constituents continue to be upset, as well they should, over the news that somehow, after getting billions of dollars of taxpayer funds, the insurance company, AIG, awarded $170 million in bonuses. A lot of people came to the floor last week and said they were shocked. As I said last week, I'm really shocked at the shock. Because I can't figure out how some people in this Chamber and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue can be shocked when they approved the language that authorized the bonuses. Just a little bit of history here, Mr. Speaker. When the economic recovery plan or the stimulus bill was making its way through the United States Congress, there was an amendment offered by two Senators, a Democratic Senator from Oregon, Senator Wyden, and a Republican Senator from Maine, Senator Snowe. That would have put a limitation on bonuses like in the AIG case and in other cases that basically said that if you're receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to bail you out, perhaps you shouldn't be giving millions dollars away in bonuses at this moment in time. If you're not taking the taxpayer money, you run your business the way you see fit. Well, that amendment by Senators Snowe and Wyden was adopted by a voice vote in the Senate and was included in the Senate version of the stimulus bill. So I read about it in the newspaper and I thought: Okay, the bill is in pretty good shape. When the bill went into the conference committee--and, Mr. Speaker, I know you know this, but for those who may not be conversant with how things work here, we pass a bill over here, the Senate passes a bill over there, then each House appoints a few Members and they meet in a room and they sort out the differences between the two bills and then we eventually get a conference report. Now, in years past--this is my 15th year in the Congress--that conference committee always included Republicans and Democrats. We, being Republicans, were in the majority party for 12 years. The Democrats would come into the room, the Republicans would come into the room, the Representatives would come into the room, the Senators would come into the room, and we'd hash out the differences and then at the end of the process everybody who's on the conference committee would sign the report, and that's what you have. Sadly, even though people have discussed this being the most transparent administration, the most transparent Congress in the history of the country, no Republicans were invited into the conference room. Clearly, what we have seen--sadly, what we have seen--is that this Congress is about as transparent as this envelope. We are not being included. You know what? We don't have to be included. We are in the minority, and clearly the majority party can write legislation as they see fit. But what they can't do is what happened last week. So in this conference room all of a sudden somehow the Snowe-Wyden language is removed that would have stopped these bonuses from happening. And the words behind me--they're only about 50 words on the chart behind me--were inserted. This language specifically authorized the payment of millions of dollars of bonuses to people at AIG and anywhere else. So anybody who voted--when it came to us back in the House for a vote, this language was included in the bill. So the reason I said I was shocked at people's shock is that anybody that voted for the stimulus bill voted to give and authorize and protect the bonuses at AIG and any other company that has taken billion of dollars through the bailout program. We don't know--and I know the Speaker will remember last week we were on the floor for about an hour trying to figure out how it did it happen. We started with I talked about the fact that there's a face book. There are 435 Members of Congress, 100 Senators. We began crossing them out. We got down to about 520 during the course of that hour. I indicated we would come back and report to the Speaker the progress of this search. I'm pleased to report to you that we have made significant progress. My friends and I are going to talk about that this evening. First of all, we can remove all 178 Republicans because there were no Republican Representatives in the room. We can also remove all 41 Republican Senators because they were not in the room. And I mentioned that we also have this Senate race that is unresolved in Minnesota so we can cross off Al Franken and Senator Coleman. They are not the culprits in this particular case. So we got down to a smaller group that we are going to talk about. But then our group expanded because there are a couple of news reports out that there were people from the administration that were also participating in these negotiations. So we had to add a few suspects to figure it out. What is disappointing is that in a transparent administration, in a transparent Congress, people make mistakes. Everybody makes a mistake. I probably made three before lunch today. But when you make a mistake, you should say: I made a mistake. What is not acceptable is to compound the mistake by pretending you didn't know about it; and then when you are caught, you come up with some goofy piece of legislation like we had on the floor last week to tax people at 90 percent. And I have got to tell you, that was political theater. It never is going to become law. These people that are so outraged about AIG executive bonuses, they are going to get their bonuses because that bill is not going anywhere. My friend Steve Austria is going to talk about that in just a second, but that is never going to become law. That was to provide cover for people who voted for the Economic Recovery Bill, because they found out, sadly, that they had authorized these 50 words that protected the AIG bonuses, and now they are shocked. Now, on our side, I have to tell you that we were kind of saddened. Even though we don't need to be invited into the rooms, we don't have to be invited to negotiate, before the stimulus bill came to a vote in the House a motion was made, and the motion said that before any Member of Congress is asked to vote on the stimulus bill we are going to have 48 hours to read it. Every Member of this House, every Republican and every Democrat that was here voted to give the Members 48 hours to read the bill. And if you think about that, Mr. Speaker, that is probably a good idea, because the bill was over 1,000 pages long. Well, sometime between Tuesday when every Member said we are going to get 48 hours, and Friday when we voted on the bill, people forgot that promise. And on our side, at least, we were given 90 minutes, 90 minutes to read 1,000 pages to determine whether or not we could be supportive of the President's most important domestic economic policy position. I voted ``no,'' and I don't have any problem with the fact that I voted ``no.'' There were some good things in the stimulus bill, there were horrible things in the stimulus bill. But I couldn't go home to Cleveland and say to people, yeah, I voted for it, because I didn't read it. And I don't think any Member of this Chamber read the bill. If they did, more power to them, but I doubt everybody read the thousand pages. But what that leads to is an embarrassment, and the embarrassment is everybody that voted for the stimulus bill voted to give the bonuses to AIG. And then to cover their tracks, they come up with this, oh, let's tax at 90 percent. Which, if you think about it, that is pretty silly, too, because let's say the guy at AIG got $5 million in the bonus. Under that bill, he still gets to keep one-half million dollars. So if you are so outraged, why don't you take all of the money away from them? Forget about the Constitutional arguments and the bills of attainder and all that other business. It was political theater, and it makes you sad when that happens. So we are going to spend the remainder of our time this evening attempting to sort of ferret out who was in the room. And I have good news, because the Secretary of the Treasury was at the Financial Services Committee today, Mr. Geithner, and the Secretary was asked if he was in the room when this happened and he said he was not. So we can cross off the Secretary of the Treasury; he was not in the room when this was done. Last week, during the course of the debate on Ms. Kilroy's resolution saying that the administration was doing everything that they could to stop these bonuses, we asked the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank of Massachusetts. He said he wasn't in the room, so he is off the list as well. And the Speaker actually indicated the other day, Speaker Pelosi, that nobody from the House did it, and so we have to look elsewhere, I guess. And we are going to talk a little bit about that. But first, to sort of set the table on this bill, this 90 percent tax bill that was political theater, that was a farce, that was a fig tree to cover people who had made a mistake, I want to yield for a minute to my friend Steve Austria from Ohio just to talk about what we think the prognosis is for this tax bill.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I want to thank my friend from Ohio (Mr. Austria). Your comments really bring out why that tax piece of legislation that was political theater, that was a fraud was such a lousy piece of legislation. If we take the fellow, or it might have been a woman, that you have just identified that got $6.4 million worth of bonuses, the Democratic tax bill that used the Tax Code to punish people for the first time, at least in my memory, to that extent, that person still got to keep $640,000. Why? Why? If they shouldn't have gotten any money, they shouldn't have gotten any money. So why do you give them just 10 percent? I promised, Mr. Speaker, that we would attempt to move forward and try to solve this mystery. Now, it would be easier if somebody would just come forward and say ``I did it.'' You know, ``I did it. I am Professor Plum; I am Colonel Mustard, and I did it.'' But we don't have anybody that has been forthcoming on Capitol Hill or down at the White House or at the Department of the Treasury, except for Mr. Geithner and Barney Frank and the people that I mentioned that were not in the room when this happened. So with apologies to our friends from Hasbro, we have sort of put this in the form of the game of Clue, which a lot of us, Mr. Speaker, played as we were growing up, we play with our kids. And if you are not familiar with the game of Clue, Mr. Speaker, basically a crime is committed and the junior detectives have to try and solve the crime. And the successful person, the winner, identifies where it happened, who did it, and with what weapon. Now, we start with a pretty good advantage here this evening because we know what the weapon is. We know that somebody took out the language that would have prohibited these bonuses that were paid out and put in the language that is over Mr. Tiberi's shoulder. And so we know it was done in writing, and the weapon at the bottom of this chart was a pen. So we are one-third of the way there, and now we just need to figure out where it took place and by whom. And just to sort of go around with the whoms, we don't have Colonel Mustard, we don't have Ms. Scarlet, but what we do have are people who were either conferees or made observations or news accounts that we will get into in a minute indicate were in the room. Beginning at the bottom on my right is Charles Rangel of New York, who is the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee; he was a conferee, he signed the conference report. Next is Rahm Emanuel, who is the President's Chief of Staff, used to serve with us here in the Congress representing a part of Illinois in the United States Congress. At the top, the former president of Harvard University, Larry Summers, who is now an economic advisor to President Obama. At the top is Senator Dodd. Now, I have to say Senator Dodd in a lot of early news accounts was blamed for it. I am feeling kind of bad for Senator Dodd, because the last thing I saw him say was that, ``Somebody at Treasury said to put it in, and so my staff put it in.'' But clearly Senator Dodd is getting fingered for a lot of this. But if he did it, he should say so. If he didn't do so, he should say, ``I didn't do it.'' Over in the upper left-hand corner is the Speaker of the House, Ms. Pelosi of California. Again, the news accounts kind of indicate that this took place in her office, but we are not going to get there yet. Harry Reid, if you read, Mr. Speaker, yesterday's Roll Call, people have expressed concern as to the fact that he appointed himself as the majority leader in the Senate as a conferee, and that he may or may not have ties to AIG, and some questions are being raised. And, at the bottom is David Obey, the very distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee who was also a conferee and in the room at least some of the time. But let's talk for just a minute, Mr. Tiberi. Can you shed any light based on what you know or what you have heard that may help us sort of narrow this thing down?

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Right. In just taking back my time, what troubles me about this is, the last time I checked, the Constitution does not let anybody in the administration write a law. So somebody could have suggested it at Treasury, said the President wants it, the Secretary wants it, whatever the facts are, but the fact of the matter is that nobody at Treasury can write legislation. That is the job of the United States Senate and of the United States Congress.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, listen. I thank you. Mr. Tiberi, would you like to close?

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, taking back my time, I do hope that in the markup of the resolution of inquiry tomorrow that we do see transparency and bipartisanship. Both Republicans and Democrats on that committee want to answer the question as much as we do and as much as, I'm sure, Senator Dodd would like to have this cloud lifted from his shoulders, and so I hope it moves in that direction. I have to tell you I am not optimistic. I mean I will not be surprised when I get a telephone call tomorrow that the Financial Services Committee has somehow made it impossible for that to see the light of day, which it can by a majority vote--they have the votes--and we'll see what happens. But you know what? I'm a big fan of Chairman Frank's, and he is a fair man, and I think he'll give it fair consideration tomorrow. I look forward to that telephone call. Mr. Austria, is there anything you want to say before we leave here?

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, taking back my time, I am a big fan of Agatha Christie's, and as you read through those books, you're sure it's the butler or somebody else, and it's never the butler. So, you know, I don't think we can exclude the Senator, but I'm with you. I think, you know, when everybody is shooting at the Senator from Connecticut, it's probably somebody else.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I would be happy to.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Taking back my time, I thank the gentleman for that. And I hope we don't need to have an investigation. I would hope that whoever screwed up would come forward and say, do you know what? I did it. And then tell us why he or she did it rather than hiding behind the skirts of staff and hiding behind this bogus tax bill that we did last week. I would really hope somebody would come forward and do it. But the other thing I would tell my friend is we don't need to wait for an investigation. Tomorrow in the House Financial Services Committee chaired by the aforementioned Congressman Frank of Massachusetts, a number of us have filed something known as a ``resolution of inquiry.'' And the resolution of inquiry requests the Treasury Department to provide to the Congress, not to me, not to the Republicans, but to the Congress, all documents that they have in their possession that will help us identify--if the person won't come forward and say, ``I did it,'' then this resolution of inquiry would direct them to give us the documents so we can figure it out and not add expense on top of the taxpayer in trying to ferret out who did this thing. Again, I wish somebody, as I said last week, would just man up and say they did it.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, you could. And taking back my time, I will tell you that there are telephones, but the gentleman is making our task much more difficult if you continue to widen the net and now we have to deal with Mr. Waxman and others. But sure, conceivably. I would just say that today--I don't think it was under oath, but you're not supposed to lie to Congress--the Treasury Secretary did indicate that he only found out about it on March 10, which is pretty amazing, and that he understands that staff did it, but he really doesn't know a lot about it, and he knows he didn't do it. So, yeah, it could have been somebody outside the room.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, I thank both gentlemen for participating. Madam Speaker, I thank you for your courtesy. To reinforce Mr. Tiberi's point, I think Senator Dodd has a vested interest in helping us with this because, currently, it looks like ``Senator Dodd in the conference room with a pen.'' Now, I don't think that that is true, so I hope that whoever did this will tell us about it. Dana, what is happening? Dana Bash, CNN Senior Congressional Correspondent: Well, Anderson, as we speak, the White House chief of staff and the president's budget director are inside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office. And, in fact, they have been here coming up on eight hours straight--eight hours straight--shuttling between the House speaker's office and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office, trying to urgently broker a compromise between House Democrats and Senate Democrats in order to get the president's stimulus package to--to his desk by this week. And I just spoke to a Democratic source who says that, in these talks, they are narrowing their differences. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) Bash (voice-over): House Democrats are not happy that Senate Democrats cut some $100 billion in spending from their stimulus package, tens of billions slashed from Democratic priorities, like education. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now signaling, they will likely have to live with it. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Speaker of the House: As President Obama cautioned the nation, that we cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the effective and of the necessary. And we will not.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, that's exactly right. The resolution not only asks for documents, but it indicates that the American public now own, as Mr. Austria has indicated, 80 percent of AIG. And quite frankly, I will say something bad about the Republican administration. I thought President Bush and his Secretary of the Treasury were wrong in asking for this $700 billion. The mantra was that these institutions are too big to fail. Well, most Americans now recognize that they are too big period. And as a result, they should be broken into pieces, going back to Teddy Roosevelt and the trustbusters. Let's break these things apart. So we do have legislation to divide this thing up. And I hope that it is favorably considered. And as you mentioned, about 60 percent of the American public think that is a good idea.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I'm happy to yield.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman. And I think we are making some progress because we have a weapon, it was the pen. We are getting down in the suspect list. And I am comfortable, if you gentlemen are comfortable saying that this crime was committed either in the Speaker's Office or in the Senate leaders office because all of the--

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, the conference room was where the conferees met. Well, I'd say the conference room too. I think we know it didn't happen in the Appropriations Committee or the Ways and Means Committee. The Banking Committee is still out there. And the reason that the Senate Banking Committee is still out there is that the person that really came under the harshest scrutiny at the beginning was the Senator from Connecticut, Senator Dodd. And I would just suggest, Madam Speaker, that he has a vested interest in finding this out just like we do, because when you don't know who did it, when you won't help us find out who did it and have people come clean, people begin to circulate ugly rumors. And I have heard, for instance, that the distinguished chairman of the Senate Banking Committee is one of the largest recipients of campaign contributions from AIG. Now people will say, oh, well, he must have done it because he got campaign cash. Well, I think that is unfair to the Senator, quite frankly, and I think that he should join with us and let's find out who did it. Today, and Madam Speaker, I will submit an additional document from the Hartford Courant, if I may, into the Record. And today, this article starts with ``No wonder Senator Dodd went wobbly last week when asked about his February amendment ratifying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives at AIG. Dodd has been one of the company's favorite recipients,'' so an ugly rumor is out there. But it turns out that Senator Dodd's wife also benefited, in that she was employed by an AIG subsidiary. So, look. I don't know who did it, and I hope that the Senator from Connecticut didn't do it, but now people are throwing mud at him and are basically saying, you know, to the average Joe Sixpack at home, well, of course he did it. You know, he got a bunch of cash from him, and his wife used to work for one of their companies, so of course he did it. So the Senator should come out and identify--somebody knows who did it. That's the problem. So just tell us. Move on. They screwed up. Move on. Madam Speaker, I'll ask how much time we have left.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. New Albany, I think.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, I do too. And let me just get to that for a second. And there was another article that appeared on March 19, and the headline is that the ``White House Staff Botched It''. And this was, appeared in something called the Huffington Post, which is clearly not a conservative Republican organization. But I would submit this for the Record as well. It quotes an AIG executive, well, the article says according to AIG, the payments were okayed by the White House last Thursday. Why? Because it appears that David Axelrod, now we have got to add somebody else, senior policy advisor to the Obama administration and Rahm Emanuel grossly underestimated how infuriating this would be. The quote from the AIG executive is this: ``We were not authorized until Thursday night,'' that, is to give out these millions of dollars in bonuses. ``We were negotiating with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Treasury indicated that they needed it cleared by The White House as well. We hit the go for the payments on Friday,'' after they got the clearance from the White House.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. We know it is the pen.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well next time we come back we are going to put the Budget Director because he is up there too. And then she goes on to report, and, in fact, they have been coming up on 8 hours straight. Eight hours straight shuttling between the House Speaker's Office, and that is why we can't get quite to the Speaker's office yet because of this reporting. But maybe we will get there a little bit later. Shuttling between the Speaker's office and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid's office urgently trying, attempting to broker a compromise between House Democrats and Senate Democrats. And you know what is interesting about that sentence is I didn't hear the word Republican in there. So this was Democrats negotiating with Democrats negotiating with Democrats. And we now know that we had the President's Budget Director was here for 8 hours shuttling back and forth, a little shuttle diplomacy, together with the President's Chief of Staff, Mr. Emanuel, who was also there. So I think we are getting closer. And if it is all right with you gentlemen, I would like to exclude Mr. Obey because I don't think his fingerprints are on this. And Mr. Rangel, I do have an observation from Mr. Rangel, who indicated that, Mr. Rangel, in this same report, and actually this was in the Congressional Quarterly, House and Senate Democratic negotiators met in the Speaker's Office--and we are really getting close to the Speaker's Office here, Madam Speaker--with the White House Chief of Staff, Emanuel and White House Budget Director Peter Orzag into the evening Tuesday, breaking at 9 p.m. and then Chairman Rangel is quoted in this reporting, ``it is so difficult to talk with a body that is controlled by three people. You have no idea.'' So I think that the distinguished chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is expressing frustration that three people, basically, figured out how to spend $792 billion in an economic recovery package and okayed these 50 words that authorized the payment of bonuses to AIG and other people similarly situated. So I think we are getting a little closer.