Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) for not only yielding to me, but also for coming out here and doing this. I think that a lot of people in this country right now do not realize how important tomorrow really is. This is the first time when we have got both the House and Senate working on the same issue, and my belief is the President of the United States has told them bring me a bill or you are never going home, because he knows if they do not do something on this issue of drug prescription prices and access to prescriptions, they are going to wind up losing the next election on that issue alone. So they are going to do something. So it is very important for people to watch what is going on here. What is fascinating about what we are hearing tonight, we have heard my colleagues from Michigan and New Jersey talk about what is going on over in the Committee on Energy and Commerce. There are about 45 people over there, sitting and making amendments and working away and putting together a pie; and then over in another part of the building, there are another 50 of us in the Committee on Ways and Means. We are making our pie, and somehow those pies have got to be put together. We cannot pass them both. So where is the real pie going to be made? I mean that is the question that people ought to wonder. Is it going to be in the Committee on Rules? Is what is going on in these two committees just for show? And then ultimately the majority leader will bring out the bill and say here it is, rubber-stamp it and let us get out of here. I think this process, as we listen to this, we realize why this is such a difficult process. One of the things that my distinguished colleague from New Jersey brings up and echoed by the gentleman from Michigan, this business about the Secretary of Health and Human Services, on behalf of us as Americans, us taxpayers, is absolutely by law prohibited from going in and doing any negotiation. Now, when the Government negotiates for the Veterans' Administration, it is all right; and when the Government negotiates for a lot of other places, but in this one area we are going to put a fence around the pharmaceutical industry and say we are not going to use the power of the Government. Now, that is one part of the bill. Then we go down a little further where the Republicans are promising that there will be two choices in everybody's district. Well, that is nice, but we have already heard from the gentleman from Michigan. Everybody knows what happened with the HMOs. Everybody was promised there will be a lot of HMOs and they will go out there and they will be competing. And pretty soon there was one and then there was none, and most people do not even have an HMO anymore. So this idea that there are going to be two competing plans out there is a really nice idea. The insurance industry said we do not want it because we have never done this and we do not want to get into this. So the Republicans figured out a way to make it appealing to them. They said, look, go out there and be one of these companies and we will take 90 percent of the risk and they can take the profit. But, remember, once we have cut that deal with them, our Secretary of Health and Human Services on the side of the Government cannot even go in and negotiate as a part of something he is accepting 90 percent of the risk on. I mean, boy, talk about buying a pig in a poke. I cannot imagine a more senseless kind of arrangement for them to be trying to deal with this problem of pharmaceuticals. Now, I think the other thing that people have to really understand, and I think the gentleman has already alluded to it, I sat on the Medicare Commission several years ago. We were planning to do some revamping of Medicare. It became very clear very soon that the leadership of that committee was interested in only doing one thing, and that is getting rid of the traditional Medicare program and giving everybody a voucher. Right now, seniors have a guaranteed set of benefits, things that they can count on, and what was going on in that Medicare Commission was how can we shift from these guaranteed benefits to a guaranteed contribution. Those are all fancy government words. What that means is they looked across and said, how much is being spent all across the country? Well, the average is $4,500, so we will give $4,500 to every senior citizen in this country and let them go out and individually find an insurance company that will take them. The government is not going to stand up and fight for them. The government is not going to try to drive down the prices. It is on you, grandma. Here is your $4,500, there is the street and the door, and go start. Go look. Now, anybody who looks at that says to themselves, this cannot possibly work, anybody who has a parent. My dad died a few years ago, 3 years ago, at 93, and my mother is now 93. The idea of handing my mother a voucher and saying, Ma, you have got to go out and find yourself an insurance company, is so crazy, it shows so little understanding of older people and what their needs are. They do not want more choice; they want certainty. My mother every once in awhile will call me up, there be some mail come up, and she will say, ``Jim, could you come over here and read this brochure and tell me if I should get into this or not? I don't know if it is a good idea or not.'' She cannot make those kind of decisions for herself. She is having a little trouble with her memory at 93. She will say, ``You know, I used to be able to remember some things a lot better than I do now.'' You are going to send my mother out looking for this? Luckily, she has four kids in Seattle, so we will be there to help her. My mom will be taken care of. But there are a lot of older people in this country who are not fortunate enough to have somebody around to help them through this mystery that we are creating here for them. Now, another funny thing about this, people have to really understand, in the Committee on Ways and Means, they have already written the bill. The bill is already printed. I heard about it because I said to one of the Republicans, ``Hey, what is in the bill?'' So he told me. He is giving me all of this stuff. I said, ``Is it written down somewhere? Could I go look at it?'' He said, ``It is upstairs in a locked room. If you go in there, you cannot take any paper or pencil or anything, and you can just read it, and that is all.'' So I asked the chairman, ``Could I get in there?'' He said ``No.'' I said, ``Why not?'' He said, ``Because you would go outside and tell the press right away.'' Now, here is the major social program in this country. I have been here 15 years, 13 years on the Committee on Ways and Means, and I am not given access to look at it one day before it is going to happen tomorrow.

Mr. McDERMOTT. They are using the drug benefit as a come-on. You see these ads from automobile sales, sales at Sears or something. There is always something that looks really good. It is a come-on. They are going to get people on the drug thing, because that is the thing people are hurting on most. But they have not looked at what it does to the other part of it, which takes away the benefits. The home health care, that will be such a target to get rid of. Why have home health care? Either be in the hospital or go to a nursing home. Why should we be wasting our money? Can you just imagine how they would cut the benefits? You are in home health care and you have to take medication, and instead of having somebody come twice a day, if they might need to, you come every other day. It is all those things that will be cut, little by little by little by little, and you and I will be stuck with our parents and their problems. Neither of my parents have cost me a dime.

Mr. McDERMOTT. We bought a hearing aid for my mother. It cost $800. My brothers and I and my sister each threw in $200 and bought her a hearing aid. That is the only thing we had to do. People do not understand what they are cutting away now.

Mr. McDERMOTT. The bill is going to come out of your committee, but the one in our committee, I understand there is a provision in it that sets this as a goal for 2010. They are going to put it in the bill now. They figure everybody is going to forget about it. It will not affect anybody, so nobody will jump up and down before the next election, because 99.9 percent of the people will not understand it is in there, because it does not affect them. What they want is to get it in place and started out there, and every imaginable problem one can think of I think will happen, because how does my mother, or how do I know what I should say to my mother? Mother, you should buy this plan. Let us say they are in Seattle and there are maybe three plans, so we have some choice. And I say this one is a little more expensive, this is less expensive, this is really expensive. How do I know which one to tell her she should take? Do I know what her health care needs are going to be over the next 5 years?

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the rubber-stamp Congress is in session. Last night, they came up to the Committee on Rules. Nobody even bothered to come up and talk about the bill. They had an order from the President. Ari Fleischer said, the President says, pass it so he can sign it. So they had the little meeting up there and rifled it down here, with no hearings in the Committee on Ways and Means, not one single minute of debate in a hearing where we could listen to anybody give any opinion about what this bill does. But all of them came with their rubber stamps. Let me tell the Members, if they go for what they put out there, the chairman has put out there, the President is going to be real mad, because the President does not like that bill. He likes the one that the Senate passed. So hold rubber stamps on the one for the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) and save it for the one for the President. All he asks Members to do is to approve; to say, I approve everything George Bush wants. That is what this Congress is about. They do not want any debate. They do not want to talk about how much this debt builds up or anything else; they simply want to be rubber stamps for the President. Boom.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, there seems to be some confusion here in the rubber-stamp Congress today. I will quote from an article in Roll Call this morning which explains to me what happened. It says that the President invited them all down to the White House, and this is from a senior Republican aide: ``Most people in the GOP leadership think it is inappropriate for the White House to bring our bosses down there to discuss congressional business and then not invite any staff to go with them.'' The aide said, ``Members who attend meetings are frustrated by the exclusion of the staff because it leaves them without aides to jog their memories of the sessions later.'' Now it is clear what has happened. The President said pass the Senate bill. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) had on his mind that he had to find all these legislators in Texas, so he had to call up the home security board and he had to call up the FBI, and he got confused and got down in there and told the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, Do anything you want. Now, here we are coming out here with no debate, and nobody wants to have anybody talk about what the issues here are. They just want to slam another $80 million on this bill, and wind up with what? A dead bill. They know the Senate is going to kill it. They are not as wild and radical as they are. With 74 to 2, this is a conservative Senate; or 94 to 2. I get carried away. This rubber-stamp Congress is really out of control. They are the gang that cannot shoot straight. They should at least have one meeting on this.

Mr. McDERMOTT. I think that is a good idea. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the article from Roll Call this morning to which I referred earlier. The article referred to is as follows: [From Roll Call, June 12. 2003] Hill Aides Spurned (By Ethan Wallison) Republican aides on Capitol Hill are incensed over a new White House policy to exclude virtually all Congressional staff from the semi-regular ``bi-cam'' meetings between President Bush and the GOP leadership. The aides contend that they are being kept out of the meetings even as White House staffers and other senior officials, such as top Congressional lobbyist David Hobbs, continue to sit in. ``It does strike one as a little bit arrogant,'' one senior Senate GOP aide said. But, the aide added, ``I think that's the way some people at the White House think about Congressional staff.'' Noting that the meetings focus on the Congressional agenda, one senior House Republican aide added, ``Most people [in the GOP leadership] think it's inappropriate for [the White House] to bring our bosses down there to discuss Congressional business and then not invite any staff to go with them.'' The aide said Members who attend the meetings are as frustrated by the exclusions as the staff, because it leaves them without aides to help jog their account of the sessions later. A White House official denied that there are any ``hard and fast rules'' about whether Congressional staff can attend the meetings. ``It comes down to the space that's available in the room and the topics that are being covered,'' the official said, adding that the same factors apply to White House staff. But Congressional sources said they have been told that the staff directive comes straight from the top and President Bush, who simply wanted less staff in the meetings. Under the new guidelines, according to these sources, Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-Ill.) top aide, Scott Palmer, and Lee Rawls, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's chief of staff, will be permitted to attend the bi-cam sessions. The new policy appears to be the upshot of a months-long give-and-take between the White House and the Congressional GOP leadership on the staff issue. Senior Congressional aides said the White House has been seeking ways to pare down the number of aides at the bi-cam meetings, but were finding it difficult to exclude some Capital Hill staff while allowing others to continue to attend. ``The figured they couldn't get away with the half-way approach, so they went all-or-nothing,'' one senior House GOP aide said. The same aide said the White House has pledged to pare down the number of administration officials and staff at the meetings as well in the weeks ahead. Congressional aides remain skeptical. One source noted that even Rawls was among the Capitol Hill aides who were kept out of the room Tuesday evening, when the GOP leadership went to the White House to discuss appropriations. (The spending meeting immediately preceded the bi-cam session.) Rawls made the trip to the White House along with Senate Appropriations Committee Staff Director Jim Morhard and Kevin Fromer, Hastert's policy director. All three were forced to wait outside the door to the meeting, even though Hobbs and Candida Wolff, Vice President Cheney's legislative affairs director, were allowed to participate. Neither Rawls nor Palmer responded to phone calls on Wednesday. To be sure, frustrated Congressional aides acknowledge that the personnel who are allowed into meetings at the White House reflects Bush's sense of what's appropriate. Some of the meetings in the past have taken place in the White House residence, a more intimate setting that provides less space for visitors, according to a White House official. But the exclusions have nevertheless fed resentments on Capitol Hill about what some Congressional Republicans believe to be the White House's disregard for Congress' role in shaping the overall agenda. ``It's particularly unhelpful in the same week that [the White House] cut our legs out from under us on the child tax credit,'' one senior House GOP aide said. And some senior GOP aides contend that the shortage of first-hand accounts has at times had significant practical consequences, such as misunderstandings about deals and other arrangements that were sealed behind closed doors. ``When it comes down to implementing an agreement, it's the staff that has to do that,'' a senior Senate aide said, citing the appropriations process as one area where such miscommunication has been a problem. ``It's just frustrating.''

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I take the floor right now to remind Members to bring their rubber stamp tomorrow. The rubber-stamp Congress will be in session. They are meeting right now up in the Committee on Rules, and they are dropping an $80 billion tax bill that never went to the Committee on Ways and Means I sit on. Nobody has ever seen it, but it is being dropped here all of a sudden because the majority leader finally quit resisting what the Senate wanted to do. We are going to run it out of here. The chairman did not even go upstairs to explain the bill, they just sent it up there, they greased it, and it is coming down here. Everybody should remember, bring this stamp. This stamp said ``Official Rubber Stamp. I approve of everything George Bush does,'' signed: The Member. That is what we ought to have tomorrow, because we are going to run another $80 billion out, put people more in debt, and that is what we consider legislation in this one-party system. Do not forget, Members should bring their rubber stamp tomorrow morning.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we are going to have another session of the rubber stamp Congress. There is an old song by Tennessee Ernie Ford that goes, ``You load 16 tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.'' This Congress at a Committee on Rules meeting tonight, the Committee on Ways and Means chairman did not even show up. The bill was all greased. We are going to pass $80 billion more of debt out of here tomorrow. Now, the Democrats offered a bill that would have cost $3.5 billion to take care of those people earning between $10,500 and $26,500. When the Republicans got this bill, they said, Oh, boy: Let's go, and so they have crammed everything in it that President Bush wants. They are going to come down here, and we will have about an hour's debate, half an hour on the Democratic side, half an hour on the Republican side; and they will stamp that baby and out she goes. That is how this Congress is operating. Not one single hearing will have occurred on this bill, not one single hearing. $80 billion in a half-hour. Think about it. That is why my colleague, the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), came out here, to show the almost--$1 trillion in debt that has been accumulated over the last 2 years under this administration. Well, tomorrow we are going to add another layer of frosting on the cake, and everybody will come with their stamp in their hand and do it. Now, we also had a discussion here with one of the gentlemen from Georgia who said next week we are going to deal with the issue of Medicare. There has been no bill put in the Congress for the single largest program in the Congress that the government runs, and that is the Medicare program. The Committee on Ways and Means that I sit on has had not a single hearing on the proposal that is being brought in here. It is being greased somewhere to take up to the Committee on Rules and run down here on the floor, and, in a couple of hours, everybody will bring their stamp out and go, Boom, I approve of everything George Bush does. That is what this Congress is about, approving whatever George Bush does. Nothing else. There is no thinking going on in here. They just wait for their orders from the White House, go up to the Committee on Rules, slap the bill together, bring it to the floor, and stamp it ``approved.'' Now, that is no way for the United States Congress to operate. We were made in the first section of the Constitution because the founders of this country believed that the Congress was where the basis of our government should derive, that there should be discussion among the 535 Members of both bodies as to what is going to happen in this country. But this time we are in a one-party government. It is a parliament with a fixed-end, and this party is President Bush, the Senate and the House; and they run them down here and run them through and stamp them, and that is the end of it. Now, there is a serious problem in that kind of government, because it makes it very partisan. I was told that the Medicare bill is written, but that you have to ask the chairman to go up to a room and sit there and read it in the room. You cannot take it out; you cannot take it to your office. I am a Member of Congress. I was elected by 690,000 people, and so was every other Member. But I am not allowed to read the bill until the day they drop it up here in the committee and ram it through the House in 24 hours. People I go home to, they say, What is in the bill, Jim? What does this do, what does that do? I do not know. And it is not because I will not read or I am not smart or I will not work or I will not do what has to be done, but this is the way this place is being run. People are not being given a chance to discuss this. We have got an even bigger issue, and that is the whole issue of how we got into war. Everywhere in Great Britain right now the belief is that Tony Blair is toast. The liberals are calling for an inquiry. And this House will not do it, because the Republicans have rubber-stamped what we did, ``I approve of Mr. Bush.''

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. It was Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. McDERMOTT. There is one other one you have left out. That is our allies, the British. Their defense chiefs are quoted in the newspaper as saying they are resisting calls for British troops to be sent to join American forces in Baghdad because they could, quote, be sucked into a quagmire. They do not want British troops caught up in the rising tide of anti-American violence. So even our allies are stepping back now and saying, hey, look, you guys got over in there and you said you knew what you were doing. It is more complicated even than our own problems.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for coming out here at 11:30 at night to discuss this. The tragedy and really travesty of this whole thing of us being out here at this hour of the night, we have no mechanism to which we can get at the truth. They will never have an investigation in this House that ought to be done on what the President has said, what he has led to believe. In Great Britain, they are calling for an independent judge to look at the whole question. What do we do in this House? Our distinguished colleague, who was mentioned before, from Florida was, Let's have the intelligence community look at their reports and see if they can evaluate how they did. That is about like asking the fox to go down to the hen house and check the lock, see if the key works. I mean, that makes no sense at all in my view. It is clear we have two choices. We either have the choice that the President and those people who presented the evidence, or whoever presented him bad information, which implies stupidity, or we have a situation where they manipulated us. I voted against it because it was clear to me from September that they were so eager to go to war that they were going to say whatever they had to, and they shifted from al Qaeda to weapons of mass destruction to aluminum tubes to cake from Niger. Anything they could grab they threw up here and said this is the reason we have to go to war. The other day Wolfowitz said the reason we had to go to war was because we did not have any other way to get at him. They were sitting on a lake of oil so we could not manipulate him financially anymore so we had to attack. North Korea, we can manipulate them financially because they are broke. We can squeeze them, but there was no way to squeeze the Iraqis. In my view, we were going to go to war from about the first of September on. They had made the decision, and they came out here and repeatedly presented information. In one of the training sessions before they went to the United Nations, they were rehearsing with Mr. Powell, and he finally got so frustrated looking at this stuff he threw pages up in the air and said bull-, and he used the word from the barnyard. He said this is nonsense. But yet the next day he got up and presented it to the whole world as this was the truth. And here we are, 80 days after they say the war is over. I mean, the President stages this photo op out there and lands and says, well, we have conquered it. You know why he does not say the war is over? Because if he did, he would have to face the reality or the real travesty of this thing is that they never planned for after the war. The mess they have got over there right now is incredible, and I mean all we have to do is read the BBC. The BBC says that the incidence of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid are 2\1/2\ times greater in the month of May 2003 than they were in the month of May 2002. That is what democracy brought the children of Iraq. That is what our President says he was going to bring. We are going to bring democracy, we are going to bring you cholera, we are going to kill kids on the basis of diarrhea. The electric lights are not on. Why? Because they are having a big squabble with Bechtel about whether they ought to privatize the electric industry. The water is not clean because they are having a squabble with Bechtel about privatizing utilities. And the worst thing was in today's newspaper. In today's newspaper, the New York Times on page 15, here we have a colonel that is responsible for 500,000 people in southern Baghdad. He has got 700 paratroopers and he is supposed to run a city of half a million people. He says, ``I was in Haiti but I arrived here with zero experience running a city. We all wonder if we can go back and apply for an honorary degree in public communication. A lot of this stuff we are just completely feeling our way in the dark.'' This is a colonel in the United States military talking.

Mr. McDERMOTT. My colleague is absolutely correct. The Arab world has had this before. They saw the West come in into Palestine, into Algeria, into Egypt. They were going to be there just a couple of years to get things stabilized after the Ottoman Empire was over and the First World War was done, and they stayed for 25 years. These people see us, they have got a memory, and they are just saying, hey, get out of here, let us run it; you said we were going to be able to elect our own people. My colleague from Pennsylvania has already pointed out that we have already said we cannot have an election until you learn to pick the right people. So we are going to give you a group of 10 that we will select, and that way we will put an Iraqi face on the government. Now, if you cannot ask where is our democracy, I do not know. They certainly have a right to choose their own government. It should not be decided by our government who is going to run that country.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, maybe a little explanation about what we are doing would help.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. McDERMOTT. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, we all could bring a picture, as some of my colleagues have done, of a family who has contacted them and told them a story. Mine today was from a woman, a grandmother, who told me ``I can't understand the unfairness of this bill. Why should my son and his wife and two children not be eligible for any kind of tax relief?'' Her son works at a job where he gets $11 an hour. If you multiply that out times 40 hours a week, times 52 weeks a year, no vacation, you are going to wind up around $22,000. And one of the interesting things is the answer that comes from deep in the heart of Texas, and that is ``there are a lot of other things that are more important than that,'' giving tax breaks to this family. ``To me, it is a little difficult to give tax relief to people that do not pay income tax.'' Now, those are the words of our distinguished majority leader on the other side, which really reveals where he is coming from. He says, if you do not pay income taxes. Now, every single one, including my family and the family that the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) had up here and the family the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) had up here all pay payroll taxes. They pay for Social Security and they pay for Medicare. They pay 7 percent of their paycheck for that, which means that my family that makes $22,000 pays $1,400 in taxes into the Medicare account and into the Social Security account. The Republicans say we are going to take that money out of the Social Security account and that money out of the Medicare account and give it to the rich people, and we are not going to give one thin dime to somebody who is working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. Not one thin dime. But we are going to give his payroll taxes to the rich. That is the only way we could be $400 billion in debt this year is to keep borrowing from every account possible, including Medicare and Social Security. Now, I want to take it a little bit further here. We have got more important things to do, the majority leader said. Well, what were the more important things we have to do? Today, we did not have a vote until 4:30. Oh, it is only, I suppose, a happenstance that that is when people got off the green from the Kemper Open golf course. That was what was more important than working on that issue. Or, if you want to look at what we have done on the calendar this week, what have we done? Well, we congratulated Sammy Sosa for hitting 500 home runs. We renamed a post office in North Carolina. We dealt with some Indian water rights in the southwest. We did a land exchange in the Grand Teton National Park. We named a courthouse in Indiana for Birch Bayh, a former Senator. Then we got to the heavy stuff. The heavy stuff. That is when we went after the first amendment again for the tenth time in the last 6 years. We voted on flag burning. Oh, but we have to do that again. We have done it every year since 1994, but we had to do it again because we did not have any time. Actually, what we had to do was fill up the time so we would not have any time to deal with a tax credit for the working class in this country, the people who work and do not have any of the perks. They do not have anything. They have to get up every morning and go to these jobs where they make $7, $8, $9, or $10 an hour. Oh, the other thing we did today. We did not have any time today because we had to spend, after we got back from the golf course, we had to have a big debate on partial-birth abortion. We have done that I do not know how many times, and it probably is going to get through and get to the Supreme Court and be declared unconstitutional, but we had to do that today. We could not give $400 to a working class family. We are giving $350 billion but we could not find $3.5 billion to give that $400. Yes, we are very busy, Mr. Majority Leader. I hope you shot a good game today.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for that reminder. Mr. Blair is going to be under investigation in the British House of Commons. One member said it is worse than Watergate, what has gone on in Great Britain. But in this country, do we expect the Republican Party to come out and investigate the President of the United States, misleading us, or the administration misleading us, excuse me? The administration misled us, these nameless, faceless people they put out there, sent out there to tell what they wanted said. That is what you have to get. You will get this if you read the Scotsman. If you do not read the Scotsman, you will not know where we are going next. You know, last night another American soldier died, another American soldier died in Iraq, shot in an ambush. Now, every one of those soldiers is important. When I was a psychiatrist during the Vietnam War and I dealt with these kids coming back, they were all important, and that kid that was killed last night was important. But you will not hear anything about it in our media, because you are not reading the right stuff. Get rid of the paper. It is the opiate of the masses.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor today to make a public service announcement. Yesterday was an extremely important day in this country's history. The FCC voted to allow increased consolidation of the media. They are tightening the noose on the neck of the First Amendment. The NRA is opposed to what happened yesterday, and so is Jim McDermott, so you know how damning what happened yesterday really is. If you can get people as far apart as the NRA and me on the same issue, you have got a real problem in this country. Now, my public service announcement is this: Stop watching the U.S. press. Stop watching the television. It is the opiate of the masses. They are using it to put you to sleep. You should cancel your subscription and buy a subscription to a foreign newspaper, maybe the Financial Times of London, or the Guardian, or the Scotsman from Edinburgh or the Sunday Herald from Sidney, Australia. Why do I say this? Because you have to read the foreign press to find out what is going on in this country. The Financial Times of London was the one that reported that the President hid, or, excuse me, I should not mention the President, it was the administration that hid the report that says we are going to be $44 trillion in debt because of these tax cuts. To put that in perspective, that means every single American, every man, woman and child, everything they earn for 4 years, that is what $44 trillion is. And the President and his folks did not want us to know about it, so they left it out. But the London Times found it. Reuters came up with a story about the chaos in Iraq. You think the Iraq war is all over and there is no more problem. According to our press, the only thing that matters is this guy that blew up a bomb in Atlanta about 6 years ago. They have suddenly forgotten Iraq. But if you listen to what happened, Reuters says they interviewed one of the chiefs in Baghdad who said the entire Iraqi people is a time bomb that will blow up in the Americans' face if they do not end this occupation. ``The Iraqi people did not fight the Americans during the war. Only Saddam's people did. But if the people decide to fight them now, they are in big trouble.'' One man said, ``All of us will become suicide bombers. I will turn my six daughters into bombs to kill the Americans.'' That is what we have created over there, and we are glossing over it now. But if you read Reuters, you will find that out. If you do not read Reuters, you will never get it out of our paper. Then we come to the next issue. You have got to read the Scotland paper, the Edinburgh Scotsman. What do they say? They say regime change in Iran is starting a countdown. That is the editorial headline. Regime change has not been in any of the speaking so far, but you start to see that the phrase has found its way into a bunch of briefings. And now, it is not a done deal, there is a big fight between the war department and the State Department. The war department is the one that took us into Afghanistan, they took us into Iraq, and they are over there ready to go again. It sounds sort of familiar. It is the same way the drumbeat started in this country in September when I said that the President would lie to take us to war. People were outraged. How could you say such a thing? Well, where are the weapons of mass destruction? Please tell me. I am looking. Mr. Blair is going to have an investigation of him. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, in this business you can tend to talk in big numbers, and you can talk about big issues and a lot of other things; but very often some of the most poignant and powerful things come to you in the mail or in e-mail. All the Members of the House walk around with these Blackberrys on their waist, and I got an e-mail today from a woman in my district. I really do not know how she got my e-mail. I am sort of surprised by that, but she is pretty creative. But she says: ``Our government should stand for basic fairness and justice. That is why I do not understand why families earning between $10,000 and $26,000 per year would be excluded from receiving the $400 per child tax refund that the wealthier families will receive this summer just so millionaires can have bigger tax cuts.'' She gets it. She understands that we have taken money away from the people at the bottom and said we are going to give it to the people at the top. The American people understand. She went on to say: ``As a constituent I ask you to please amend President Bush's unfair tax cut plan to include these poor families and their 12 million kids.'' She even has the numbers right. To leave the tax cut as it is brings too much shame upon this great Nation. Then she adds: ``I know this firsthand. I have a son trying to support a wife and two children on $11 an hour.'' I sat down and figured out what that amounts to. That is $22,000 a year in Seattle, which is a very high-cost area to live in, and they are trying to live on less than $2,000 a month. They pay taxes. They pay the FICA taxes. They pay for their Social Security, and they pay for their Medicare. They pay 7 percent of that $22,000. So that means every year they pay $1,400 in taxes. I do not know how much they pay because I could not get to them. I called them. I could not find out if they paid any income tax or not, but they are paying taxes. And the President and the group who put this bill together, I cannot understand how you could look at somebody in the eye who is working full time, has a wife and two children, the wife is staying home taking care of the kids, how you could look at them and say, We are not going to give you one thin dime. I mean, that takes a real heart of steel or rock. But we are going to give you who have a million dollars, we are going to give you $93,000. Now, think about the unfairness of that. People want to talk that this is class warfare; that that is warfare on working people who are trying hard to get there. Now, the President says we are not going to leave any child behind. He stood right in here and I was moved by that. I thought, as a child psychiatrist, I thought how wonderful to have a President who is not going to leave any child behind. And then I saw his budget. He puts the bill out here, and he told us how much it was going to cost to do this education program, Leave No Child Behind; but they gave $9 billion less than was necessary. Now, I do not know how he figures that we could have a program where we are not going to leave anybody behind, but we do not put out the money that we say we need. That is this family, this family. These kids need an education. Tell me, how are their parents going to put any money aside so that they can go to college? They are making $22,800. What is the likelihood that they are putting money away for those kids to go to college? One does not have to be a rocket scientist to know that they are spending every dime on rent and food, or maybe they are buying their house. I hope they have got a house, although it is pretty hard to get a loan when a person only has that kind of income. But let us hope they are buying their house and they have got food for their kids and clothes and some gasoline for the automobile, maybe the car payment, and what is left after a person has $22,800? People came in here and rammed this bill through. It did not have a hearing in the Committee on Ways and Means. They were not going to let us do that. We had 2 hours of debate and out she goes, and then they send us home and the President signs it and hopes nobody figures out what is in the bill. This lady figured it out. She is not stupid. Her kids are not stupid, but the Republicans think they are, and they are not going to get away with that. The American people are not going to stand up for this.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the Leave No Child Behind President recently signed into law the third largest tax cut in history. But the tax bill was really like one of those clown cars you see at the circus. Because of the budget gimmicks, the Republicans squeezed nearly a trillion dollars in tax cuts into something that only looked big enough to hold $350 billion. The whole tax bill was a big masquerade and the Congress participated in the party. While pressing for these tax cuts, President Bush declared, My jobs and growth plan will reduce tax rates for everyone. Everyone, I emphasize, who pays income tax. That is wrong. In fact, 8.1 million lower- and middle-class Americans who paid billions of dollars in income tax will receive no tax reduction whatsoever; 36 percent of American households, 50 million households, in the United States will receive no benefit whatsoever. Now, if I wonder where the next clown will pop up, maybe it will be in the White House.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, when you have been away from this House for a week, sometimes it is hard to tell what subject you ought to talk about first, because this administration is the gang that cannot shoot straight. They cannot tell anybody the truth about anything. Whether it is weapons of mass destruction, where we have heard every story in the whole world, yet everywhere you look people do not believe the President of the United States, they do not believe our Secretary of War or anybody else when they talk about those weapons of mass destruction. Or we could talk about Medicare, or we could talk about the tax bill. My colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), got up here and told the game that was run on the people in this House when they slammed the bill through here, this rubber stamp Congress. They did it in one 2-hour period. Bang, they passed out $350 billion, but could not find $3.5 billion to cover the kids of the working poor in this country. They could give money to millionaires, $93,000; but they could not give even $400 to the children of the working people of this country. Now, there is an overarching question here and that is this whole question of whether you can solve this country's problems by tax cuts. You know, it takes the British. You have to read the British newspapers to find out what is going on in this country. If you read the Financial Times of London, they tell us that our President hid something from us when we were passing this bill. He hid from us a report done by his Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. O'Neill. Remember him? He was the guy before the one we have now. The one now is Snow, so I guess we will get Snow jobs. But the guy before was O'Neill. Mr. O'Neill said to his staff, suppose the government could get its hands on all the revenue it could expect to collect in the future but had to use it today to pay off future expenditures, including debt service. Would the present value of the future revenues cover the present value of the future expenditures? Very simple question. He asked a guy from the Federal Reserve and his own assistant secretary to sit down and do this report. They did the report, and they came back with some pretty ugly facts. This thing was supposed to go into the budget to talk about what the future of this country was about, about those kids that cannot even get $400 this year. This was a report that was supposed to go in about the future. Their answer was, no, we cannot pay for it with the money that we need. We will be $44 trillion in debt; $44 trillion in debt because of what they are doing right now. Now, that is a number that, if you are sitting at home and you are thinking to yourself, my God, how much is $44 trillion, well, think of it this way: imagine that everyone in this country worked for 4 years, every single day went to work for 4 years, everybody in the country, and handed over every penny to cover this $44 trillion deficit. That is what it would take. Every man, woman and child. Even those little kids that they could not find $400 for now. They are creating a problem out there that when their fathers and their mothers come to Medicare and come to Social Security, they will say, well, gee, we would like to help you out, but it is all gone. They are creating it right here in front of us. And it is bad enough, I mean, people voted, we did talk a little bit about it out here, people talked about it; but what is awful about this is that they knew these figures and they kept them from us. Just like the weapons of mass destruction. There is a kind of a pattern, you see, in this administration. Feed the people the facts you want them to know, keep snapping your fingers so they will look up here, and meanwhile take away from them down here. They did it with weapons of mass destruction. We were assured. Our President said he has them. Our Secretary of State said he has them. He went to the United Nations and put up charts and graphs and all kinds of pictures. We have them, he said. The Secretary of War, Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the same thing. One after another these guys went down the line telling us what they knew was not true. The Voice of America carried a very interesting interview with a man who came out of the Iraq situation. He was in the United States, and he said there were no weapons of mass destruction after 1991. This administration will not tell you the truth, but you are in for one awful problem dealing with $44 trillion all of a sudden.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Well, Mr. Speaker, here we are back at the rubber- stamp Congress. Bring the bill out, rubber-stamp it and go on home. The American people have to understand, these guys are bringing out $1 trillion worth of tax cuts and say that you are going to get 1 million jobs out of that. That is $1 million for every job you are going to get. The bill was dropped on the desk out here at 9:20. So we have had just about 2 hours to look at how they are spending $1 trillion. The gentleman from New York stands up here and very confidently says, da-da-da-da, we're going to get a thousand for this and a thousand for that and all this kind of stuff. Not a soul on this floor knows whether that is right or wrong. Nobody has had any time to look at this bill. You do not want anybody to have any time to look at this bill, because if they did they would find out just how fraudulent it is. The theory behind it, that is, give the money to the rich and they will go out and invest. The people at the bottom buy most of the stuff that the people at the top make. If the people at the bottom have no money and no job, you could have given a payroll tax holiday and given the money to the people on the bottom. They would spend every nickel of it. But no. You are going to give it to the top, and then you are going to pray, please, Lord, have them invest and create a new job for some poor person in my district. The million that you left on the table in the last bill, in the bill on unemployment insurance, when you would not take care of the people who were unemployed, you would not give them any money there, you would not give them any money with a tax break, you are going to give them $325 if they make 30,000 bucks. That is a fraud. It will not work, and the American people know it. That is why the Wall Street poll looks the way it looks. You try to fool them. You can fool them once in a while, but after a while it really does not work.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, welcome back to the rubber-stamp Congress. This bill is a statement by the President of the United States that he does not care about 1 million people. He sent the message to his junta here, and they run a bill out last night, drop it in, never had one single hearing on it, will not give us a chance to amend it. If you gave us an amendment to cover those 1 million people, it would pass. The people on your side would be afraid to go home, having given the stiff arm to people who are off benefits. But we have to rubber- stamp everything George Bush does. ``I approve of everything George Bush does. I will leave a million people off the unemployment rolls deliberately.'' Deliberately. It is not an accident. It is not as though it just happened to us. I got this from the White House. I suppose everyone else has theirs. You are going to use that again tonight on another bill, the tax bill. I have figured out what the President is thinking. He figured out, ``Well, I'm leaving a million people off and then I'm going to give this huge tax cut and I'm going to create a million jobs. And all those people who have been left out, they're going to have a job.'' Of course they are going to have to wait until tax time next year or sometime. I do not know when all that is going to start. This is nonsense. You did absolutely the minimum you could do and keep a straight face and put out your press release that you did something for unemployment. How you could deliberately construct one when you have 70 percent more people running out of benefits now than Bush, Sr., did 10 years ago. At least he said 27 weeks. He was expansive. His son is about as tightfisted as we are ever going to see towards working people. Not to the military. Not to nuclear defense and all that kind of stuff, but to working people he is just saying, hey, folks, I am sorry you do not qualify or your State did not trigger but tell the kids to kind of suck it up. Pull their belt a little bit tighter because the rubber stamp Congress of George Bush is out here tonight. They are waiting at home to see what you do. If you had been out of work and you cannot pay your rent and you cannot buy for your kids and you are one of those million, you say to your kids, I am sorry but the President does not care. He has got $20 billion in a fund down there, but he will not give us anything. How is that going to look in the next election? You ought to be thinking about that. I guarantee that before we leave here you will be back here extending these benefits again. Your idea that people are staying at home from work to live off these fancy benefits is simply nonsense. Nobody who has lost a job stays at home when there is a job available. There are not enough jobs.