Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to reconsider.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Lynch).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Baca).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, as you listen to my colleague from Michigan and me, you will hear us say many of the same things. You kind of wonder, why does one vote ``yes'' and one vote ``no''? I have been on the Committee on Ways and Means since 1991. I have been involved in all the labor agreements in the last 12 years. Today, we are voting on the first two agreements negotiated by the new Trade Representative. Most of the provisions in the two agreements do not really require Chile, Singapore or the United States to do much more than they have already agreed to do in the World Trade Organization. In fact, the service sector portions of the Singapore agreement simply restate commitments made in the WTO General Agreement on Trade and Services. I have deep concerns about these two agreements because they are indicative of the Bush administration's poor approach to trade policy. The primary mission of the United States Trade Representative is to open up foreign markets to create economic growth and raise living standards. The agreements brought here today by the President and the ones that he is currently pursuing with Morocco and Bahrain, for example, will do little to provide economic gains for the United States. In fact, the entire economy of Singapore and Chile combined does not even equal Japan's service sector. Furthermore, considering that the size of Russia's economy is equal to 15 countries with which we are now negotiating free trade agreements, the limited resources at USTR would be perhaps better put in focusing on Russia's accession to WTO, not a free trade agreement with Namibia. The criterion that the Bush administration employs to determine which countries to pursue trade agreements with is dubious at best. It is apparent that our Trade Representative is basing his decisions almost exclusively on geopolitical rather than economic criteria. I believe that Secretary Powell's agency is the appropriate one to conduct our foreign policy, not the Trade Representative. America's best exports are the democratic values that we hold dear. While capitalism and open markets may boost trade flows, democratic values must always be a centerpiece of U.S. trade. I supported the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement because it incorporated labor and environmental issues. This was a profound development, because it symbolized the acknowledgment that we need to approach international trade in a more holistic manner. While the Chile and Singapore agreements incorporate labor and environment, they treat these issues as inferior to commercial interests, as illustrated by the inadequate dispute settlement process. This is a step backward from where we were with the Jordan agreement. Singapore, for instance, is a hub for illegal timber, illegal wildlife and restricted pollutants like chlorofluorocarbons. The Environmental Investigation Agency reports that Singapore is, quote, ``a major center of illegal trade in endangered wildlife including poached elephant ivory, tiger bone, parrots and other species.'' The same agency reports that Singapore is central to the regional Asian black market trade in chlorofluorocarbons, even though international trade in CFCs is strictly limited by the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances. The USTR had an opportunity to change Singapore's course of illegal environmental trafficking with this agreement. Unfortunately, they decided to turn a blind eye to these illegal and harmful environmental practices on behalf of free and unbridled trade. It is now up to Congress to stand up for the environment and say ``no.'' I mentioned in earlier remarks how disappointed I was over the clandestine, undemocratic process that the Trade Representative has gone about, negotiating these agreements. Mr. Zoellick simply does not seem to trust those whom he claims to represent. I am voting ``no,'' and I encourage my fellow Democrats and Republicans, vote ``no'' on these agreements because I do not agree with the process or the spirit in which these agreements were negotiated. And I am voting ``no'' because of the trade policies that these agreements symbolize. Although I expect these agreements will pass, the Bush administration had better take to heart the concerns of the Congress, of industry and of civil society as it continues to pursue this trade liberalization. They will not always have easy little ones like Chile and Singapore, and I do not think in the administration they yet understand the depth of concern that this Congress has about the environment and about labor. They continue to think if we just put some fuzzy words in there that kind of feel soft and warm, that maybe that will get it by. There is coming a time when that will not. They have seen the evidences already, and they are going to find it in the Doha Round. People are saying, how can the United States talk about liberalizing farm commodities and then pass out of the Congress $160 billion in trade subsidies to farmers? Where is the fairness? How are you going to keep doing that to the world? I think the Trade Representative had better listen.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Wu). (Mr. WU asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I offer a privileged motion.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the White House is beginning to sound more and more line Animal House, in that you have a bunch of adolescents over there and they keep running forward saying, I did it, I did it. First it was Mr. Tenet and now we have Mr. Hadley. When are we going to get the truth? When are we going to have an investigation, not in secret, done by the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, but out in the open. They did it in the British Parliament. They were not afraid of democracy there. But here we have to have everything secret. We need an investigation about who did it. Where was Condoleezza Rice? This guy Hadley worked for her. Does she make the decisions or does he? I have not heard her stand up and say, well, if I had only put my hand up and said no, it would not have happened. But what is even more devious about this is if you complain they attack. A Senator, a member of the other body, was attacked because he pointed out that somebody in the White House had the nerve, the nerve to uncover a CIA operative. That is a Federal crime. Now, if we do not have an investigation and find out who it is in the White House that thinks they can just get on the horn and talk to a newspaper reporter and say, hey, did you know so and so was working for the CIA? That person should be fired immediately and probably charged. But we know they were sent out there to do it by the folks upstairs. When we will have another, oh, gee, I did not know, I should not have done it? When do we get the investigation, Mr. Speaker?

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate the American Political Science Association on the 50th anniversary of its Congressional Fellowship Program. Since its inception, the program has brought more than 1800 talented political scientists, journalists, sociologists, domestic and foreign policy government specialists, Robert Wood Johnson health policy fellows, Native American Hatfield fellows, and international scholars to Capitol Hill for a hands-on understanding of the U.S. Congress at work. In my office, I have had the privilege to work with several Congressional Fellows. In 1991-92, Martynas A. Ycas brought with him valuable insights into the inner workings of the Social Security Administration. The following year, my office benefited from the exceptional experience Congressional Fellow Rosemary Ramsey had previously earned during her research on HIV/AIDS at the Centers for Disease Control of the Department of Health. In 1997, Kirsten Gerstner from Germany was the first international fellow I was able to host. Her work proved to be indispensable for the success of the Congressional Task Force on International HIV/AIDS, of which I am Chairman. Since January of this year, Mariana George-Nascimento from Chile and Lars Berger from Germany have been working on my staff. During the many foreign policy challenges Congress is currently facing, such as the free trade agreements with Singapore and Chile and the war in Iraq, they provided me with a unique Latin American and European perspective. I am very thankful to the Fulbright Commission and the German Marshall Fund of the United States for providing me with such a rare opportunity by generously supporting their fellowships. These days, international exchanges of this nature are of even greater importance than ever before. I know that in addition to their experience on the hill, all the fellows appreciated the additional education opportunities offered by the Wilson Seminar Series, the state-federal legislative comparative program organized by the University of Maryland-Baltimore County's Policy Institute at the State House in Annapolis, and the longstanding Canadian Parliamentary Exchange. I congratulate the American Political Science Association and Jeff Biggs, the Director of the Congressional Fellowship Program, on their extraordinary achievements and strongly encourage my colleagues to take advantage of their work in the same way I have done.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I was stunned this morning to pick up the newspaper and read in an article in Newsday dated July 22 that a columnist blew a CIA agent's cover. That is the headline of this article. Now, Robert Novak, who is the columnist who did this, said they came to me, they thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it. That is a criminal offense. To give the name of an American member of the CIA to uncover them is a criminal offense. Somebody in the administration thought it was important to let that news out. So they went to Mr. Novak, he is one of the Republican Party's pets in the press, and they knew it would go right into the press. But when will the investigation start in this House by the Republicans of the Republican administration people who broke the law? Who in the White House had the gall to think they were above the law and they could go down and take a reporter and say let me give you the name of one of our undercover agents who has been operating abroad? Members may ask themselves why would they do that? Were they threatening her or did they want other people to understand, do not talk anything bad about this administration? This administration is trying to make the American people afraid to speak up and dissent. They did this because she happened to be the wife of somebody that the administration sent to Niger to find out the truth of the forgeries that the President spoke about here in this very place. When he came back and gave his report, his report was ignored and they insisted upon putting it into the speech. Mr. Speaker, the question you have to ask is, who is writing the laws that cover the White House and the administration? Or are they operating on their own? They could do anything and the stonewall on the Republican side of the House of Representatives will never bring it up. I guarantee Members there will not be any attempt to have an investigation by the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; of course, we trust them, yes. Today, Mr. Bremer is going to sneak into this room and they are going to lock the doors and he is going to tell us a lot of things. Imagine what would happen if I or the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) or even the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Stearns) were to stand in this well and say the name of an undercover CIA agent. They would be in the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct in 15 minutes. They would be hanging by their thumbs; but not Mr. Novak and not those people in the White House. They get a free pass. They do not operate under the same laws you and I do. This is becoming a pretty strange place where the White House, whose job it is to enforce the laws of the United States, that is what the executive branch is about, right in the bowels of the White House, we have somebody who feels no compunction whatsoever to go out in the street and hand this information out. I am waiting for the investigation.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow the issue that faces this Congress will be brought to a point when Mr. Blair comes and explains to us what it was that he told our President that led the President to think that he should come in here in the State of the Union message and say things which are of questionable value. We are continuing to have people die in Iraq. Last night another soldier died, and many were injured. These people signed up to protect the United States, not to make things better for Iraq or anything else. They signed up to protect their country, and they are dying. There should be an investigation of what the reasons are that we were there. Did the threat rise to the level of a national security threat? Or was there a gathering of evidence? Certainly the uranium issue is bogus on the face of it, and it never should have been used by anyone in a defense of why we went to Iraq. We have lost 200 people, and 1,000 have been injured. It seems like small numbers when you know about Vietnam, but that is where we are today, and we need an answer from the President.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, last night I could not sleep. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe I was just trying to make some sense of the situation we are in before Mr. Blair arrives in Washington, D.C. Mr. Blair is in a lot of trouble at home, and Mr. Bush is in a little bit of trouble here. There are many, many reasons to question our actions in Iraq, but, for some reason, there is a huge focus right now on the Niger uranium claim. So far, nothing the administration said about Saddam's gallons of nerve gas or smallpox or Anthrax or missiles or any other dangers we were supposed to be facing from Iraq have been found to be true. But until the last rock in Iraq has been turned over, the administration can say it is continuing to try hard to confirm the justifications for war it offered just a few months ago. The uranium claim is different. I think that we are focusing on this claim because it was clear and concrete and seemingly supported by evidence and details. The President told us, ``The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'' In retrospect, the administration figures have claimed that the President did not claim that Hussein was trying to buy uranium but only noted the British claim. Leaving aside how truly pathetic that kind of desperate parsing is, the statement was still false. The British government has learned no such thing. The ``information'' the British relied on came from one source, or perhaps two. First, there were some crudely forged papers. ABC News has reported that the papers were created by an underpaid African diplomat who was stationed in Rome and sold to the Italian Secret Service which, in good NATO-ally fashion, passed the information on. We may know more about that soon, because the Italian judicial system opened an investigation into the matter earlier today. The other source is perhaps the French. In early April The Washington Post noted that Western intelligence officials were fingering France as the country that circulated the fake papers. Let us step back a moment from this who-did-what-to-whom and look at the actual claim. Was there anything believable about it? If the documents had been really top-notch forgeries instead of laughable fakes, would the claim that Saddam Hussein was making a secret effort to acquire hundreds of tons of uranium oxide from Niger have been something to stake a life-and-death decision on? Niger is a small country in West Africa, about the size of Rio de Janeiro in population. They have been mining uranium since 1970. There are two mines that produce uranium. Both mines are run by an international consortium that includes Japanese, German, Spanish and French interests. Both mines are closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. There is nothing, nothing that could lead an objective observer to believe that Iraqi agents would slip into Niger, make a deal, and slip out again without somebody in the tiny expatriate community noticing and mentioning to Dr. El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In fact, a distinguished retired American diplomat, Joe Wilson, spent more than a week in Niger sniffing around for any hint that the story might be true and found absolutely nothing. It is simply not believable that this tiny, highly regulated industry in this tiny, sparsely populated country could have or would have violated IAE rules and broken U.N. sanctions to sell uranium oxide to Hussein. There are plenty of legitimate customers. So why did the administration decide to believe it? Because of the overwhelming evidence? Hardly. Last week Secretary of State Powell gave the following ringing defense to the President's claim: ``There was sufficient evidence floating around at the time that such a statement was not totally outrageous.'' Well, there you have it. It was obvious to anyone who looked into it carefully that Niger had neither the means nor the motive to sell uranium to Iraq. It was obvious. It was reported. And it was known. And yet the Secretary of State said, people of his stature thought it was not totally outrageous. Mr. Speaker, actually it was totally outrageous. The President and the Congress are sworn to protect the United States of America. This is our most solemn duty. The question, and it is the only question that matters, is this: Did the threat posed by Saddam Hussein rise to the level of an imminent threat to national security or even to a grave and gathering danger? So far nothing leads to that conclusion. There can be little argument about whether the people of Iraq are better off today than they were under Hussein. They are. But the 200 young Americans who have died and continue to die, one died last night, did not pledge their lives to make the people of Iraq better off. They pledged to protect the United States of America from real threats to our security. They died believing that they did. So far, I do not know why they died. We should find out.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, Thursday will be a very historic day. Prime Minister Tony Blair of England will be scheduled to appear in this room before a joint session to make a speech and perhaps receive the Congressional Gold Medal. I understand it is not ready yet so he probably will not get it just now. It was also in this very same room that President Bush said in his State of the Union speech that ``the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'' It turns out that information Mr. Bush had was already understood to be bogus. Our CIA had already told the British that. Yet the President included that fact in his State of the Union message. Apparently, the British indicated they had other information in addition to the crude forgeries indicating that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. This has put President Bush in an awkward position. As people in the administration seek to blame one another and now the British and now the French and now the Italians, why and how did this happen? Mr. Speaker, we have an historic opportunity. In Parliament, the Prime Minister faces MPs and responds directly to their questions. If we had the British system, we could go to Mr. Bush directly to solve this conundrum instead of relying on Ari Fleischer. Perhaps Mr. Blair will be kind enough to allow us the privilege that British MPs enjoy and we can ask him what happened. I really want to know. Don't my colleagues? When we debated the award for Mr. Blair for the Congressional Gold Medal, I objected. I said it was either too early or too late. Either it should have been done when we did not know what was going on, or now that we have got some real questions, it is too late to give it to him. We have got to solve the question of what happened. I feel even more strongly now that we ought not to proceed in the absence of answers to our questions. It appears that Mr. Blair may have misled our President or at least our President's speechwriters about whether good information existed indicating that Iraq was in the process of buying the components of nuclear weapons. This is not a small thing. Perhaps Mr. Blair was responsible for the administration's discredited claim that one of the September 11 hijackers met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Perhaps Mr. Blair was the source of the administration's discredited claim that Iraq was buying special aluminum tubes for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. These and many more statements made by Mr. Powell, Mr. Rumsfeld, Dr. Rice, Mr. Fleischer and even the President have been found to be incorrect. We have not been told why our officials made so many misstatements about Iraq prior to going to war. If our leaders were led astray by the Prime Minister, we surely should not honor them with the Congressional Gold Medal. Of course, we certainly ought not to subcontract our decisions on war and peace to a foreign country's intelligence apparatus. How much we may like Mr. Blair means nothing. We ought to trust our own people. So maybe the problem is with ourselves. For example, why do we spend $30 billion on intelligence and yet no one is capable of fact-checking a State of the Union speech? Why have we sacrificed the lives of more than 200 young Americans? We have been told they would protect our country from immediate danger posed by Saddam's barrels of nerve gas and biological toxins and nuclear weapons and al Qaeda and all the rest, but the information was weak, bad and apparently manipulated. I think the people of Iraq are better off than they were before the United States took out the Saddam Hussein regime, but I am not sure that these Americans who died there were supposed to die to improve the lives of Iraqis. I think they were ready to die to protect their own country, the United States of America, from weapons of mass destruction that threaten our shores and our people. I am sure that the young people from Britain who have died were similarly protecting their own country. Perhaps Mr. Blair will answer our questions when he comes to the Chamber on Thursday. Perhaps as Head of State Mr. Blair will take personal responsibility for the errors that pervaded the intelligence he repeatedly cited and not let people who work for him take the blame. Perhaps Mr. Blair will set an example for our own President to follow. That would be worth a Congressional Gold Medal.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, on May 1, the Commander in Chief of the United States military forces declared the war was over. Since that day, 65 people have died. The last three who died were Craig Boling, Elkhart, Indiana; Barry Sanford, Aurora, Colorado; Robert McKinley, Kokomo, Indiana. Huge questions have arisen about whether we were misled about this war. In Great Britain, the Prime Minister, Mr. Blair, faced 2 hours of questioning by the British Parliament. It is time for this Congress to have a bipartisan select committee to look into the reasons why we are in Iraq and why people continue to die there. We must not let them be forgotten, as they were in my era of the Vietnam War. There is a wall with 50,000-some people on it. Their names were never read on the floor. They ought to be read here and not forgotten.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the gentleman for having this, staying up here at 10 o'clock at night, talking about this issue because I think the people need to understand the idea of universal health care is that everybody puts into the pot, and then when they get sick, they take out of the pot. Nobody, when they pay for their health insurance, stands around saying, gee, I hope I get sick so I can take something out of the pot. That is not the way people think. We have given universal health care to senior citizens. We have said anybody over 65 in this country is eligible for Medicare, and we put them all in together; and they put all their money in together collectively, and we put together a Medicare program that has worked very well since 1964. It has not required people's children to pay for anything. They have been able to have their own dignity. They had their own card. They paid for their own health care during all that period. I sat on the Medicare commission. I was one of the 16 people sitting on that commission for a year back in the mid-1990s, and there is a determined effort by the Republicans to privatize Medicare. What does privatize mean? It means to separate all the American people from one another and make them deal individually with this particular problem in their life, their health care. They would be given a voucher, and they could privately go out to a private insurance company and find somebody who would give them a benefit. Now, if we were to take my mother and myself, my mother is 93 and I am 65, if we were to take those two people and say, send them out with the same amount of money, we know that they are going to get different benefits. Well, they have tried this. They have offered the Medicare through an HMO, and people went and joined, and then the HMO closed, and they lost all the benefits. And people have been jerked around over the last 4 or 5 years by this whole process, but they are determined. And this bill is the real final effort to do that. It is kind of like when I was a little kid. My mother wanted me to take cod liver oil. There was some vitamins in it, and she wanted me to have those. But cod liver oil tastes terrible, so she would always mix it with orange juice. That is exactly what they are doing here. They want people to take the cod liver oil of privatizing health care, and they are filling the glass with orange juice, which is the drug benefit. So that is the first thing people have to understand. The drug benefit is not intended to give them a drug benefit, it is to get them to drink the cod liver oil, the privatization of Medicare. Now, how did they design this? Why do I say they do not intend to give a drug benefit? Very simple. They said, well, let us put up $400 billion. Now, that sounds like a lot of money to people. I mean, it sounds like a lot to me. But if we are going to fix the problem right, to do the deal right, it is going to take way more than that, probably twice that amount. But they just said, well, we will put $400 million in, and we will kind of mix it around so people will not see what we are really doing. Worst of all, as my colleague pointed out, this does not go into effect until 2006. They can put advertisements on television in the next campaign in 2004, or in 2006 they can put advertisements out and say, we gave you a drug benefit, because it will not go into effect until 2006. Now, most Americans look at politicians and they say, I do not know if I can trust them or not, and I want to see what actually happens. Well, when you put something out there so far, the people will never know that what they see advertised in the 2004 campaign, with all these millions of dollars of ads from the drug companies and from the Members of Congress who voted for this, that, in fact, it was never intended to work. Now, I will tell you why I know that. I was walking through the tunnel between the Capitol and one of the office buildings today, and one of the Republican Members said to me, do you think this bill is ever going to come out of the conference committee? Do you think the Senate and the House will ever solve it and bring a bill back to the floor? I said, no. He said, I do not think so either, and we hope it does not. This was a Republican talking. We hope it does not. I said, you do? He said, well, it is not a good plan. It does not solve the problem. So they know it does not solve the problem, but they want to say, I voted for a pharmaceutical benefit, and my opponent opposed it. Or my opponent does not think it is good, but I wanted to give pharmaceuticals to senior citizens. They have no interest in the reality of this bill. Now, I think there is a couple of things that are really sort of buried in this bill that people have to understand. They said we do not want the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate for all the 40 million old people in this country. We want each little insurance company to negotiate with the drug companies as best they can. Every other country in the world that has an industrialized country like us, France, Germany, Canada, anybody, the government negotiates for everybody. My colleagues know that that works better. If I were to go into a store and say, I want to buy 100 loaves of bread, I will get a better price. It is going to be less per loaf than it would if I were to buy one loaf at a time. But the Republicans set this up so that Tommy Thompson, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, cannot go and negotiate for them. They made it impossible to save money, or save big money. We know what happens in the Veterans' Administration, we get a 50 percent discount because they negotiate a price for every veteran. All 5 million of them get the benefit of a negotiated price for 5 million people. But when it comes to seniors, we say, no, no, you are on your own, Grandma. You can go 1 at a time or 2 at a time or 10 at a time, or whatever, but you cannot have the benefit of this. I think that alone should make people sort of wonder about this. The second thing they do is that they say, well, you can go into a Medicare HMO, some kind of health maintenance organization, and get your benefits, if they will take you; or you can stay in regular Medicare with your doctor that you have known for the last 30 years and knows everything that has ever happened to you, so that when you go in the doctor does not have to say, well, let us start with when you were 6 years old; when did you have the mumps; when did you have the measles? You know, when you get to be 65, or like my mom, 93, who remembers what year it was that you had the measles? You want a doctor that knows you and that you have dealt with for 30 or 40 years, so that they say, well, Mrs. McDermott, how is X, or whatever the problem is that they have been following. Seniors do not want to have to start over again with a new physician. But they say if you stay in Medicare, you are going to have to pay more for the drugs. Now, the problem with that is that drives up the premium. Right now the premium for seniors is something under $60. HCFA, the Health Care Financing Administration, that administration says that the premiums next year, if this bill goes into effect, would go up to $90 a month for nothing. It would just go up $90. Why? Because the sick people would stay in Medicare, the old standard Medicare, and the healthy ones would go get into these HMOs where they could get a better deal. So sick people who want to stay with their doctor are going to be stuck paying more money than people who are younger and healthier and are acceptable into some kind of an HMO. I believe, and what the gentleman is saying, is that it should be a Medicare benefit that everybody gets in the whole United States. It does not make any difference whether you live in Ohio or New Jersey or Washington or Atlanta, Georgia, or wherever, you ought to get the same benefit. It should not be dependent on whether you can find an HMO that negotiates better or anything else. For instance, maybe a parent would like to move from Tennessee, where they had a pretty good deal, to Montana where their kids are living. They want to move to Montana because they want to be near the grandkids. That is what my parents did. My parents left Oklahoma in 1972 to live with us in Washington State when my dad retired and there were grandkids. My mother said, hey, we are going out to be near the grandkids. Well, why should there be any difference in the benefit between Oklahoma and Washington State? This bill will guarantee that there is a difference. It may be better, it may be worse. My parents would not have anything to say. Anybody who moves under this new system will have no idea what they are going to. And then there is this question of a donut hole. Frankly, the bill mystifies me in that it seems to imply that the Republicans think that old people are not paying attention; that somehow we are going to whistle this past them, and they will not see what this is about. My colleague explained it. First of all, the Democratic plan is the only one that says what the premium will be, $25 a month, and there is a $100 deductible. They spell it out in the law. The Republicans do not give us that. They say there will be a premium, and there will be a deductible, but people are buying a pig in a poke right off the bat. Then you pay for that, and, at a certain point, you do not get any benefits. You are still getting your monthly bill for your premiums. You have to keep paying those premiums. Meanwhile every bit of drugs you pay for you have to pay all out of your pocket. Now, I tried to explain this at a couple of retirement homes in Seattle, and people just say, that does not make any sense. What are they trying to do? What is this about? The minute you explain to people what this really does, it falls apart flat. And yet they are coming in here, pressing this bill and talking about all the things they have done. But people should remember that it is not passed until it goes into effect. And there, I think, is going to be a very big fight between the Senate and the House on this issue because the Senate does not want to privatize health care. They are resisting the idea of putting the orange juice with the cod liver oil. They said, no cod liver oil. This is orange juice. They are doing a drug benefit over there, and in some ways that makes it a little better. It is not as generous maybe as ours is, but neither one of them works very well. The only bill that really works is the one the House Democrats put out which gives people a fixed payment and a fixed deductible and a fixed amount that they have to pay 'til whenever. And nobody wants this benefit. This idea that you are going to get an insurance company running in to offer an insurance policy to all the seniors, just ask yourself, and you do not have to be a rocket scientist to know why this will not work, who buys an insurance policy? You do not buy an insurance policy unless you have a car, right? You do not buy fire insurance if you do not own a home. Why would you buy this, paying month after month for a drug benefit, if you did not need any drugs? As soon as you need them, boy, you want to run in right away and get it. But why would seniors, if they had something else or they were tight with money, they would say, why should I buy it? So the only people who are going to buy are people who have big drug bills. Maybe they have cancer and their cancer treatments are very expensive, or maybe they have had a kidney transplant and they have drugs that are very expensive. There are a whole raft of conditions which require people to spend an awful lot on pharmaceuticals. Those are the people who are going to buy it. So an insurance company is sitting there saying to themselves, no way. The way insurance companies work is you sell a premium to everybody, and then you hope nobody gets sick so you can give all the money that is left to your stockholders. That is how they work. It is no mystery, and it is not wrong. It is the way they operate. Well, why would you want to take in a bunch of sick people who want drugs and give them a drug benefit? Well, the government, these guys recognize that. They realize the insurance industry will not do it. So what they said was, I know what, we will let them offer the plan, and then we will take 99 percent of the risk. The Congress will take it. And if there is any profit to be made, the insurance company can take it out the door. This is absolutely a fraud for the government to use all of its money and not try and control it, not look for the fraud and the waste and the abuse; turn it over to the insurance company, who has no risk. None. There is no explanation for why they would come up with a plan like this except that they hope it does not pass. And I hope it does not pass. I would like a real bill to pass, because God knows people are really having trouble, and there are so many things we could do that would not be hard to do. I see my colleague has brought some things here about the Canadian plan, and I will just say one or two more things and then turn it over to her. The Canadian Government did not go through any big plan or anything, they just passed a law that said that the price you pay in Canada is going to be the average of the G-7 countries. Now, the G-7 countries are the seven most vibrant economies in the world, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States, and so forth. So whatever the price is in Germany, they write that down, write down the price in France, add them all together and divide by seven, and that is the price in Canada. They never pay above the median. They always pay in the middle. Now, that is why people leave my State on buses on a weekly basis to go up to Canada. Anybody who lives near the Canadian border knows about this. Or they have pharmacies up there, and they mail in up there, and they have it all worked out so they can get them filled and have them sent back. What the pharmaceutical companies are doing now, just to show you how much they hate that, they have cut off the amount of drugs going to these pharmacies in British Columbia, which is north of Washington State. Mr. Speaker, they say to them you could not possibly sell this many drugs in British Columbia, so we are only going to give you 40 percent of your order so they cannot ship the other 60 percent down to the United States. They are cutting off their supply. It is incredible the lengths to which the pharmaceutical industry will go. In closing, in case Members would like to shed a tear for pharmaceutical companies, the Fortune 500, which is the 500 biggest companies in the United States, 10 of those companies are pharmaceutical companies. Those 10 companies last year had a profit of $38 billion. That was 50 percent of all 500 companies. Ten companies produced 50 percent of the profit of the whole of the Fortune 500. Now, I believe in research, and I believe in all of the things that pharmaceutical companies do, and I am not against pharmaceutical companies; but I think enough is enough. I think my colleague who has some Canadian prices here will make a very interesting case on this point.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, last fall I stood out in front of the Cannon Building and said I believed that we might indeed be misled by our leaders in the stampede to go to war against Iraq. When I was in Iraq a few weeks later, I was interviewed by ``ABC This Week'' and asked if I stood by that statement. I said I did. I got death threats for saying that. Well, folks, it is time to face the facts. The American people were misled and Members of Congress were misled. But who misled us? Apparently we were misled by the White House speechwriters. I do not know. I do not question that the motive was to do what they sincerely believed would be the best thing for our country. I do not question that they believed and still believe going to war against Iraq was the right thing to do. But for those who would not have supported this war save for the official dossiers and intelligence and information they relied on, my friends, you were misled. Those who believed that whatever the President said would have been carefully confirmed and who never doubted that what the President said in the State of the Union Address would have been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, my friends, you were misled. So far, 212 young Americans have died in Iraq. Someone will die tonight and tomorrow and the day after. And now what? Now the administration does not even claim that weapons of mass destruction will be found. Instead, we are told that evidence of a program that would have eventually created weapons will be found. This afternoon, today, according to Reuters, Mr. Rumsfeld, the Secretary of War, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that there was nothing new going on in Iraq. He said there was ``no dramatic new evidence,'' just old evidence seen in a new light. Is that the impression you had? I ask, because that is not what I heard. I heard urgency. I heard new revelation after new revelation. I heard that we were in imminent danger. The fact that nothing that we expected, nothing like storehouses of terrifying weapons has been found, certainly backs up Mr. Rumsfeld's contention. What we found are mass graves in Iraq, body upon body, people killed for no reason by the government of Saddam Hussein. So this is where the administration is turning to justify its actions in Iraq. The United States has never, never invaded a foreign country simply to get rid of an evil dictator. That is not what our young people signed up to give their lives for. That is not what our taxpayers have given their money for. That is not what America does. At least until now. Well, our troops in Iraq, these fine young people went into the service to protect America, not to bring democracy to someone else's country, not to stop human rights abuses or get rid of dictators, because if that was the basis of our military policy, there are a lot of governments out there that we would be ready to overthrow. Not to get rid of a bad guy because we are tired of messing around with containment. They enlisted to protect our country. What did our country need protection from? From biological and chemical weapons that could be launched within 45 minutes? Apparently not. From a nuclear arms program that was not just an aspiration of a madman, but was so far along that it was importing uranium from Niger? Apparently not. The President denied that today. From gallons of nerve gas and rooms full of test tubes and trailers full of equipment so sophisticated that biological and chemical weapons could be pumped out on Saddam's command? Apparently not that, either. We had a policy with regard to Iraq. It was a frustrating policy, but it was working. It is the same policy President Reagan used on the Soviet Union: containment. We had an embargo in place that the rest of the world supported. We had U.N. inspectors in place that the rest of the world supported. They did not have as long to look for weapons as our people have now had, but they were looking, and while they were in Iraq, Saddam was not going to be able to fulfill any of his evil dreams. Containment worked from the end of the Gulf War until the day we invaded. If you believe that the United States should go to war to get rid of dictators who would most likely want to have weapons of mass destruction if they were not watched closely, I will give you a list. If you believe the United States should go to war to get rid of dictators who have people tortured, I will give you another list. If you believe that the United States should go to war bringing democracy to someone else's country is a mission worth the lives of our young soldiers, I will give you a list. But if you share the belief of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, that our country is blessed, in part, because ``she does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,'' I say to my colleagues, we were all misled, and it is time for us to have a bipartisan committee, select committee, to look at this issue and find out who was it that misled us? I read in the paper today that Mr. Blair gave us some bad information, and our President took it, swallowed it hook, line and sinker, and now says, I did not know; it was Blair that gave me this bad information. Mr. Blair answered questions for 2\1/2\ hours before the Parliament of the United Kingdom. We ought to have that kind of thing going on here.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Point of personal privilege, Mr. Speaker. Were you making some reference about Baghdad whom? Is that appropriate for the Speaker of the House?

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, Parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, well the rubber stamp Congress is ready tonight. The drug companies, after they contributed and got the President elected, gave him this bill, and they said this is what we want. The President brought it up here. We are rubber stamping it out of here. Can you believe that the Senate, excuse me, in another part of this building they are considering something like 400 amendments, but we cannot have one because when you are using a rubber stamp, you cannot have one single amendment in here. Nothing can be improved in this bill. Can you believe it? It is like the Ten Commandments. It is perfect. It came down from God or somewhere, or the White House. This bill was put together by drug companies, 10 of them. They had $38 billion in profit last year. That is 50 percent of the profit of the Fortune 500. If the Members think they did not have an impact on this bill, why do they want to privatize? Why do they want to give no guaranteed benefit? Why do they want to have all openness in the world? And why do they put the one line in there that says that the Secretary cannot negotiate on behalf of 40 million people, soon to be 80 million people? They want it all broken up into little different pieces so they can divide and conquer. This little agency will get so much. But a little bit bigger one, we will give them a little bit higher benefit. They are going to divide and conquer the American people. This is a sham. In Canada they get their price reduced very simply by saying let us make the Canadian price the average of the G-7. The United States is way up here and Canada is way down there. Why could we not pass a little amendment in here that said let us give the average of the G-7? I do not know. In my State everybody goes across the border to Canada or they mail across the border. They do it in Vermont. They do it in New Hampshire. They do it in Maine. They do it in New York State. Why? Because everybody knows the Canadians have got a better deal than we. But you say no, no, we cannot make one change. When we are sent in here with our rubber stamp to approve of everything George Bush does, we have to give him the bill exactly as he sent it over here. The idea that you could come out here with a bill and say that we have a perfect piece of legislation, the seniors are like Abraham Lincoln. Do you remember, the founder of the Republican Party? He said, You can fool some people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time. I know the President is going to raise $200 billion for ads in this campaign to say this, I got this from that rubber-stamped Congress and it is good for you, and he is going to give the tax cuts and the child never left behind, and he is going to give this stuff, and every one of those is phony. The child never left behind? He puts a budget out here $17 billion short to fund it, and the people are going to figure it out. Counting on believing that the American people are stupid is not a good political way to go. Vote against this bill because the rubber stamp is wrong.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to realize that last night a miracle occurred in this body, a bill that left the committee costing $73 billion sometime after midnight suddenly became $173 billion. An actual miracle in the Committee on Rules. The fact is Members have to understand why that happened. All Members make $150,000 a year. They were not covered by this bill. It only went up to $65,000; but in the Committee on Rules they said, let us put ourselves in this bill, so they raised it up to $150,000 so that we could take benefit of this. Now that was a thoughtful thing for them to be doing, but did they think about the people in your district? My employees at Boeing, they get $65,000 a year. It is a pretty good paying job, and they get good benefits from their company. What is to stop their company tomorrow from saying, We are going to give you a $10,000 deductible policy, and we will put $500 into your account, you put $3,500 in, and you will have it all for yourself? They can do that. They can end a defined benefit package at Boeing tomorrow and give a defined contribution. Give employees a voucher, and say they are on their own. Do Members want them to strike over that? Mr. Speaker, how about the woman making $30,000 teaching school. We all know those school teachers are rich people. You end the school program, the State governments are in trouble, they could say let us stop giving insurance to the teachers, let us just give them a $10,000 deductible policy, put $500 in their savings account and say to the $30,000-a-year teacher, they can come up with $3,500 to put into their account. I love to hear people who make $150,000 talk about what it is like to be in this country making $30,000, which is the average pay. Or the people making $18,000. They work every day. They have no insurance. Do you think they have $3,500 to put into a savings account? This is for rich people. That is why it went up $100 billion miraculously between a $65,000 income limit and $150,000. It only cost 74 for all the people at the bottom, but it cost 100 for us. This is a bad bill. What it does, also, it says people are going to get out of the pool. People who are rich and healthy are going to get out of the pool, and they are going to leave the sick and the poor in the pool. And what happens to the premiums for the average person? They go up. The idea of insurance is to spread the risk, and you are letting the wealthy and healthy get out of the pool.