Steven LaTourette

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. New Albany, I think.

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 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.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Taking 1 minute of my time. I have not seen that news report. The news report that I'm familiar with--and if that is true, that is kind of shocking--is that 11 people of the 73 didn't work for the company anymore. So you have 11 out of 73 who aren't even at AIG anymore, and so if they are retention bonuses, they didn't work so well, because they don't work for AIG anymore. I yield to the gentleman.

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. I thank the Speaker.

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. Maybe. Well, the smoking pen. We have got the pen.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Oh, I'm happy to.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, I have to apologize to the distinguished chairman of the Financial Services Committee because apparently I wasn't riveting enough when I was chatting before. And I'm happy to restate my question, and if the distinguished Speaker hasn't left the floor, she as well, I assume, had a representative in the conference committee. My question was simple. These bonuses were not blocked as a result of this paragraph in the stimulus bill. Now, 2 days before we voted on it, every Democrat in the House voted to give us 48 hours to do it. You didn't do it. You gave us 90 minutes. You said 90 minutes is plenty of time. So I assume the Democrats read it. I assume the conferees who were in the room when this paragraph was inserted read it.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. My question, Mr. Chairman: How did this get in the bill? I have the same answer, but I'm glad at least we have now heard the question.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, I have not seen this much gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts since Homer penned ``The Rape of the Sabine Women''. This is truly amazing. We are being asked to vote on a resolution today that says that the President is doing everything in his power to properly execute a program. Now, I wish I could vote ``yes'' because I happen to think that the President of the United States, Mr. Obama, is doing the best job that he can, but I can't answer that question. I can't answer that question. And I am going to yield to the distinguished chairman of the Financial Services Committee if he will answer the question. This is the paragraph--hold on, let me get the citation--title VII, section 111, subparagraph (iii). Somehow, when the bill left the Senate, it had the Wyden-Snowe language that said ``no executive compensation,'' and it taxed it. When the bill comes out of the conference committee, it has this paragraph in it that makes possible the bonuses that people are so shocked about today. Now, I wasn't in the conference committee, I've been transferred to the Appropriations Committee, and so I would yield to the distinguished chairman of the Financial Services Committee if he would tell me--I assume he was a conferee--how did this get in the bill? I'll yield to anybody on the Democratic side. How did this paragraph get in the bill? This paragraph said that the government could not stop the $170 billion worth of bonuses, and today we're taxing these bonuses at 90 percent and we're calling these people traitors. Come on. How did this stuff get in the bill? And if you can't answer the question, we can't vote on your resolution. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I am happy to yield my 1\1/2\ minutes to anybody on the other side of the aisle who can tell us who was in the room, who took out the Wyden-Snowe amendment that prohibited this executive compensation and inserted section 111, subparagraph 3(i). Anybody? Who did it? Was it some staffer? We see a Senator on the other side of the Capitol blaming it on the Treasury Secretary. We see the Treasury Secretary blaming the Senate. And the last time I checked, the Secretary of the Treasury doesn't have legislative authority. He didn't write it. Who wrote it? What I do know is that we told you, how can you give us 90 minutes to read a piece of legislation that's over a thousand pages long? You said, well, who needs to read the legislation? Well, apparently, today, when the chickens have come home to roost, and we have read the legislation and the Democratic majority and the Democratic administration authorized AIG employees--73 of them--to get over a million dollars, today they're embarrassed. And their response? It's a typical Democratic response: Let's tax people. It's unconstitutional what they want to do; it's wrong what they want to do. And if we let the majority of this House that does not believe in transparency, that made us vote on a bill after giving us 90 minutes to read it, that is now embarrassed by the firestorm that's been created and the finger pointing that they're now engaging in, we shouldn't be here.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, I'm shocked at the shock. I cannot believe that we are here and people are shocked. Every person--or, I don't want to offend anybody, but almost every person on the other side of the aisle--voted for the stimulus bill that had the provision in that protected, authorized, and allowed these bonuses. And today, they're shocked. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they were then pictured with fig leaves. The bill they want to bring today isn't a fig leaf, it's a fig tree. Now, Ross Perot, when he ran for President in 1992, he talked about the giant sucking sound. Well, today there is another giant sucking sound going on in Washington, D.C., and that's the tightening of sphincters on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue as people are having to explain who put into the stimulus bill this provision of law. And specifically, it's title VII, section 111, paragraph 3(i), that basically said that the bonuses that were paid out that people are shocked about today were protected and would not be touched. Now, I think people have to man up around here and admit responsibility. Mr. Speaker, how much more time do I have?

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Thank you very much. Let me get to Mr. Thompson of Pennsylvania. Did you write this?

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I want to thank our leader for giving us an hour to talk about something that happened today, this week, that really has us befuddled. Mr. Speaker, I like a good mystery, I just finished reading another Agatha Christie last night, ``Black Coffee,'' and it wound up being the personal secretary to the manor and Lord, who poisoned him with cyanide. But it took me until the last couple of pages until I figured it out that this Edward Raynor had in fact poisoned his boss. Well, who would have thunk that we would have a real live mystery here on Capitol Hill. But we have one. And we're going to talk about a variety of things relative to AIG and the stimulus package and these bonuses that have been paid out that really have people's anger up, at least in Ohio--the phone calls I'm getting. We'll hear from other Members. But here's what happened. A few weeks ago, the President of the United States indicated he wanted to put forward a stimulus bill and, unlike some commentators, I want President Obama to succeed. I think he's doing the best job that he can. He entrusted the leadership of the House and Senate to write the bill. The bill was a little over 1,000 pages. I think it was 1,117 pages long. We were nervous because it was spending $1 trillion. When I say my Republican colleagues and I were nervous, it proposed to spend $1 trillion rather quickly. We asked early in the week before the vote, Do you think we could read the bill before you ask us to sign on to spending $1 trillion? So we had a little motion here on the floor and every Member of the House--every Republican, every Democrat--said: You will have 48 hours to read this bill before we ask you to decide whether it's a good piece of legislation or a bad piece of legislation. Well, it left the House, it left the Senate, and it went to a conference committee which, Mr. Speaker, I know you know, but others may not know; that's where we send some guys and gals over from the House, they send some over from the Senate. They get together, they work out the final product and then they bring it back to the House and Senate for a vote. Well, something happened on the way to the vote in that we weren't given 48 hours to read the bill. We were given 90 minutes to read the bill. We made the observation that that's 90 minutes to read 1,000 pages, and a lot of us read pretty quickly, but that was a big challenge. So could you please not ask us to do this, because when you do something that quickly, somebody's going to be embarrassed. That leads us to our mystery. Today, we had some legislation where there was a lot of gnashing at teeth and pulling of hair, saying that AIG are crooks, somebody called them traitors, so forth and so on, and they shouldn't have gotten these bonuses. Well, when the bill left the Senate, there was an amendment in the bill offered by a Democratic Senator from Oregon, Wyden, and a Republican Senator from Maine, Olympia Snowe, that said there were not going to be--if you took money for the bailout and you're an institution, you couldn't give these crazy bonuses to people. You couldn't give them $18 million, $20 million worth of bonuses. That seemed pretty reasonable. Well, when it went into this meeting, all of a sudden that language came out and this language that I have put up on the easel here was inserted. For those who want to read it, it's title 7, section 111, subparagraph 3, subparagraph iii. Now, unlike the Wyden-Snowe language that said we weren't going to do it, this language specifically says that any bonuses, any executive compensation, any million-dollar golden parachute, any retention pay that was agreed to before February 11, 2009--guess what? It wasn't covered. So the bill specifically authorized the payment of these bonuses. Well, as we warned, and we are not happy that our prediction came true, but there were some people this week that were embarrassed by that. So we passed a bill to tax these bonuses at 90 percent. Stupid idea. But we wouldn't even have had that discussion if somebody, somebody put this paragraph into the bill that specifically allowed the taxpayers of this country to go ahead and pay for these bonuses at AIG. So we do have a Who Dunnit. From our social studies we know that there are 435 Members of the House of Representatives and there are 100 Senators. I had a piece of paper with the breakdown, and I've misplaced it, but I think after the last election there are 178 Republicans in the Chamber and there are 247 Democratic Representatives. Over in the Senate, there are 41 Republican Senators, 58 Democratic Senators, and we can clear somebody of this mystery already because the Minnesota Senate race has not resolved so we know that Al Franken or Norm Coleman didn't put this paragraph into the bill. During the debate today I asked the distinguished chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank of Massachusetts, if he did it. And he said no. So we're going to cross Barney Frank off the mystery list. Now we are down to only--well, let me say this. I didn't do it. So we are down to 533. I'm joined by other Members here today.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Cole of Oklahoma, did you write this?

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. McCotter of Michigan, did you put this into the bill?

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, I'm glad that the gentleman from Louisiana mentioned the freshman bill that attempted to get to the bottom of this, because sometimes the criticism, and I think it is legitimate criticism sometimes, is that the Republican party is the party of ``no,'' that we don't have any solutions and that all we do is say ``no'' around here. The freshman bill is an opportunity, and it is a positive idea. Mr. McCotter and I and about 20 of our colleagues earlier this week introduced something known as a ``resolution of inquiry.'' And Mr. Speaker, if any of your constituents are looking for a project, maybe they could contact the Congress and say, ``support H. Res. 251'' which simply says, let's get to the bottom of this. Let's have Secretary Geithner come to Capitol Hill with his papers and with his documents, and maybe he, as the Secretary of the Treasury, can shed some light on the mystery of the hidden hand, how good language was taken out of the $1 trillion stimulus bill and bad language was inserted. So that measure, H. Res. 251, has been referred to the House Committee on Financial Services. Under the rules of this House, they have 14 days to report it out to the House. Sometimes when we engage in that type of legislative activity, we are told that we have got a lot of important things, we are very busy here in the House of Representatives, and we really don't have time to get to the bottom of the mystery of the hidden hand, even though that bill spent $1 trillion of taxpayers' money. I just want to move to a couple of other charts. I want to keep the paragraph up just in case anybody, any Member should be watching and he or she wants to exclude themselves as the hidden hand, I want them to know what it is we are talking about. Last summer, many people remember, Mr. Speaker, when the cost of gasoline was going through the roof. Thankfully now that the international situation has died down, supply and demand has taken over and speculators have been driven out of the market, people now in my district are paying about $1.89 for regular. But last year, when gas just kept going up--and again let me say this. I have consistently said that this is the second Congress, the 111th Congress is the second Congress where there are more Democrats in the House than there are Republicans. They are the majority party. And quite frankly, in the last Congress, I thought they should have been the majority party because we screwed up as Republicans, and we deserved a little bit of a wake-up call. And we are very proud of the fact that Congress created the first woman Speaker of the House since the founding of our country, Ms. Pelosi of California. But we were consistently told that we couldn't talk about how are we going to solve this energy crisis last year because we were too busy. We had a lot of other important things to do. I used this chart last year, and it is going to segue into what we are doing this year when the last Congress started and Speaker Pelosi was named the Speaker. Gasoline was $2.22 a gallon. And so we weren't so worried about gasoline, obviously, but we had important work here, and we passed legislation, and I'm sure these folks and their parents are very proud, congratulating the University of California, Santa Barbara soccer team. We were too busy to do anything about gasoline. Well, gas shot up to $2.84. I began to get some phone calls in my office--Mr. McCotter, I'll bet you did too--and so maybe we should begin to focus on gas prices. Well, no, we enacted, and we are very proud of this, National Passport Month. That is what they decided was the most important issue facing the country. Moving forward, gas goes up to $3.03. And so I know we are going to talk about gasoline today. No. We commended the Houston Dynamo soccer team. I think that we are all told in politics that you have to get the ``soccer mom'' votes. I think we were well on our way in that last Congress. Gas goes up to $3.77, so I know we are going to talk about gas prices, how do we solve the pain at the pump. The most important issue of the day here in the Congress was National Train Day. I like trains. Gas goes up to $3.84. Well, we honor great cats and rare canids. And I have to tell you, I didn't know what a canid was when the bill came to the floor, but it is a dog. So we honored cats and dogs on that day when our constituents were paying $3.84. Gas goes up a little bit more to $4.09. You know we are going to talk about gas prices, right? No. We declared the International Year of Sanitation. Then, finally, when gas hits $4.14, before it begins to come down, you know that we had to debate energy prices. We passed the Monkey Safety Act here in the United States Congress. So you would think that we were chastened by that and perhaps in this Congress, when we have a financial meltdown and 16 Americans are losing their jobs every minute in this country, Mr. Speaker, people have had their 401(k)s wiped out, and so I know that maybe they didn't, you know, they were new in the majority, maybe they couldn't get things rolling. Now that they have 2 years under their belt, you know that we are going to deal with this financial crisis in a serious way. This Congress started on January 6 of this year. That was the opening of the 111th Congress. And so we have been at it since January 6. We are now into the middle of March. And the stock market on that day was 9015. And then, of course, because I want to be fair to the new President of the United States, we get to, the stock market drops, and so maybe Congress could have acted in here, but certainly President Obama doesn't bear any responsibility because the next January 20, of course, we all know, was the date of the inauguration. And millions of people came, we were all excited, and we continue to be excited. The stock market then fell down after Inauguration Day to 7936. And the most important thing for us was to support the goals and ideals of national teen dating. Now, I have got teen-agers. I like teen dating. But when the stock market is going down, people are losing their life savings, clearly, we must have something more important to talk about than teen dating. Well, here is a big drop from 7888 to 7114. And on that day, we have commended Sam Bradford for winning the Heisman trophy. Now, I'm sure that Mr. Bradford is an outstanding football player. I wish him a lot of success as he moves forward through his professional career. But, again, as the stock market has dropped by this time 1,900 points, maybe we can do something about the economy. Well, then, it continues to go down. And not to be outdone, we had to pass the Monkey Safety Act again because when we passed the Monkey Safety Act in the last Congress, the Senate didn't pass the Monkey Safety Act, so we had to bring the Monkey Safety Act back to pass it this time. I don't want to make light of what caused that. There was a horrible situation in Connecticut where a woman had her face bitten off by a chimpanzee, and luckily she has now gone to the Cleveland Clinic, and she has had the first successful transplant in the country. That is certainly a serious matter. I don't have a problem with making sure that we have a Monkey Safety Act in this country to take care of that situation and others. But clearly, when the stock market has dropped almost 2,000 points, maybe we could do something else. We run it out to March 3, and do you know what? Rather than helping people with the economy, we passed the Shark Conservation Act on May 3 as the stock market hit 6726. And lastly, the run-out to March 9, this was personally one of my favorites, because I didn't remember, I wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer when I was going to school. So when they said we are going to have Supporting Pi Day, I thought, yeah, I like French silk. I like all the pies. But it was mathematical pi, which we know is 3.1416. And as the stock market goes down and approaches the mid 6,000s, the legislation, the most important thing that we could do here in the United States Congress was to celebrate and honor Pi Day. Folks, listen, there is a reason we get the reputation back home sometimes that we can't walk and chew gum at the same time. I am not saying that all of these things aren't fine things. But when the economy is in the tank, when the stock market is dropping, when people are hurting, when 16 Americans are losing their jobs every minute, maybe, just maybe, we could do something rather than the Monkey Safety Act not once, but twice. I would be happy to yield to my friend from Michigan.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, we have launched the mystery of the hidden hand. Again, the mystery of the hidden hand is somebody, and we just want that person to identify themselves so we can move on to something else. Somebody took out a paragraph in the stimulus bill spending a trillion dollars of taxpayer money that said that AIG and others, anybody who got taxpayer money, could not hand out excessive executive bonuses. The hidden hand removed it and inserted this paragraph in section 7700 that permitted and protected the $170 million of bonuses that people are now shocked AIG paid out. We have established motive. We have identified a clue. Mr. Cole was kind enough to give us a clue, and we started with 535 suspects and we have winnowed it down to, well, we are down to about 524 now. So I am going to bring the face book, Mr. Speaker, next week and every day to the floor, and I will seek out Members of this body and ask them if they are the hidden hand. If they didn't put this paragraph in, I am going to cross their face off. When I am done with the House, I am going to go over to the Senate, if they will let me over there, and I will ask the Senators: Are you the hidden hand? Did you foist this fraud upon the American taxpayer and then not have the courage to own up to it? Mr. Speaker, we will be back. We will solve the mystery of the hidden hand. The taxpayers deserve no less.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Thank you very much, Mr. Cole. And thank you not only for your comments but also for the clue. I know that other Members may be wandering around the Capitol giving tours or taking care of constituents, and just in case they didn't hear, Mr. Speaker, I will indicate that we are attempting to solve a mystery. I have something called a Face Book, and the Face Book has a picture of every Member of Congress in the House and the Senate, and we are going to try to find out, if we can, and maybe others will be willing to help us, who put this paragraph in the stimulus bill that shielded the $170 million of bonuses that AIG paid to their executives after they got another $30 billion. Parenthetically, I heard an argument, people have been beating up these executives as traitors and everything else. I have got to say, I kind of admire a bunch of folks that have bilked the taxpayers out of $175 billion and--but, anyway. So what we are doing is we are crossing people off, and I think we are down to about 525 left. Any Member that wants to come and have his or her picture crossed out so we know it is not them, we are happy to do that. At this time, it is my pleasure to yield to the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, Mr. McCotter of Michigan.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for adding his thoughts to the mystery of the hidden hand. Mr. Speaker, I would ask how much time of the hour remains?

Mr. LaTOURETTE. You know what? We're getting someplace. So now, by my count, we only have about 525 people to go. I pledge to you, Mr. Speaker, that I will spend as long as it takes to identify who wrote the language. We are making a little light of it, but it's not funny. Because what you have here on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, you have a Senator from Connecticut, the chairman of the Banking Committee over there, and he says, Well, yeah, maybe I wrote it, but I only wrote it because somebody in the administration told me to write it. Well, again, going from our social studies, we know for a fact that the administration can't write laws. This is the United States Congress. So somebody had to pick up a pen and scratch out the Wyden- Snowe amendment which would have prohibited these bonuses and then written this new paragraph--it's only about 50 words long--and inserted this. And somebody needs to own up to this because you can't have all the drama that we had on the floor today where: I don't know; this is outrageous; they're crooks. Well, the person that wrote this let this happen. And that's why we find ourselves in our situation today. We have a lot more that we are going to talk about. Now it's my pleasure to yield to Mr. Cole of Oklahoma.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman from Michigan for his thoughtful remarks, and I thank him also because from Mr. Cole of Oklahoma we got a clue and now from the gentleman of Michigan we have a motive and, thankfully, also the name, ``The Mystery of the Hidden Hand.'' I think that is what we are going to call this thing, The Mystery of the Hidden Hand. And, Mr. Speaker, just in case you need your memory refreshed, what we are talking about here is the fact that in the $1 trillion stimulus bill, which we were given 90 minutes to read and which we indicated maybe that could cause a problem, somebody might be embarrassed, language was removed by somebody, The Hidden Hand, that was put in over in the Senate that would have prohibited AIG from using taxpayers' money and paying out millions of dollars in bonuses to their executives. Now, The Hidden Hand wasn't done with that, because that didn't accomplish his or her purpose--I think we have got to include women in this, too. It could have been a woman. The Hidden Hand then wrote this paragraph in this $1 trillion bill that specifically protected and said, ``Here is 30 more billion dollars of our taxpayers' money, AIG. And, you know what? This protects you. If you want to give out bonuses, $1 million, you go right ahead.'' And today, this Mystery of the Hidden Hand, we don't know who did it. But we are going to work it out. Mr. Speaker, it is now my pleasure to yield to a new member of the House, Mr. Fleming of Louisiana. I have the Face Book, Mr. Fleming, and I have crossed you out. You are not The Hidden Hand. And it is my pleasure to yield to you for your observations.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Thank you, Mr. Cole. I think, as Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote, or Agatha Christie in her books, we're going to call that a clue. I think we have a clue and we're moving in the right direction. Are there any other Members that want to say anything? Sir, do you want to identify yourself and indicate whether you wrote this?