Dana Rohrabacher

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at noon on Wednesday, September 19, 2001.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I think it speaks well of all of us in this body and of our country that today, as we get to the business of designing our counterattack against savagery that has been unleashed against our countrymen, that we take this time to ensure that the rage that is felt throughout our country does not take us in the same evil direction that we plan to fight. It is very easy to do. We understand that. Because as we are fighting a group of fanatics overseas, it is very easy for Americans to lose sight that people who perhaps are Muslim in their faith, and those people who are responsible for the attack may well and probably were Muslims, to generalize in that way. But that would be just a crime against our own citizens and against innocent people. Our greatest strength as a Nation is that we are a people who recognize that we are of all races and of all religions. I was very proud today that at the National Cathedral we had all faiths represented there, including Islam. And if we break that strength, we are actually weakening ourselves. We as a people do not want to compromise that policy and that strength of our country, which is that we are of all races and all religions. We are bonded together by a love of liberty and a commitment to each other. U.S., United States. That means us, and us now includes many Muslim fellow citizens. And they are heartbroken, as we are, at what has happened. Just one thought. And I will be very quick because I know other people want to express this. Bin Laden wants us to alienate all the Muslims of the world, and especially to alienate our fellow Muslim Americans. That is part of this terrorist plot. Their strategy is that we, as Americans, will be so enraged, and we have a right to be enraged and angry, that we will strike out blindly and, without thinking, will alienate all of the Muslim world against us, including those Muslims who live as Americans next door to us. We cannot be stupid enough to fall for his strategy. We must proceed in seeking revenge for those people, our fellow citizens that have lost their lives; and we must do it in a smart way and make sure that we do not alienate those Muslims. Instead, we need to recruit and reach out to Muslims throughout the world who are good and decent people, who are freedom-loving people, who will join us in a crusade to see that a new standard of morality is set for all of mankind. And that standard is that no noncombatants will ever, no people will ever tolerate an attack and murder of noncombatants in order to achieve their ends. In this goal we can enlist the Muslim community and we should try to do so. It would be a crime against our own goals if we in some way fell to bin Laden's strategy and tried to strike out at all Muslim countries. We need to recruit the good people of that community. I appreciate the gentleman's leadership on this. It is really important we do this tonight.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to enter into a colloquy with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde), and I would like to ask about the eighth resolve clause in this resolution. In the gentleman's interpretation, does the intent of the phrase ``sponsor'' in terms of sponsor of terrorists, include those states or governments which harbor terrorists?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I yield to the gentleman from Illinois.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I think it is long overdue that the United States of America reaffirm a policy of supporting those moderate, responsible, and, yes, democratically inclined Muslims of Afghanistan and elsewhere who are in opposition to terrorism, and in opposition to the fanatical Taliban government which represses its own people and provides a safe haven for terrorists like bin Laden. This has not been the policy of our government over these last 5 years. Now it is necessary for us to act with strength and determination, to wipe out a terrorist enclave that has taken root in Afghanistan. I call on the people of goodwill, which includes the vast majority of Muslims in this world, to stand with us in this fight against terrorists like bin Laden and against fanatics and tyrants like the Taliban in Afghanistan. We need to ensure our government itself meets its responsibilities effectively and remains committed to free government and peace among the people of the world, and those people are of all races and of all nationalities and of all religions. Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, Americans are overwhelmed with sorrow at the loss of members of our families and friends, but we will act and we will do so with courage; and we will accomplish our mission, our sacred mission now of revenge against those who have taken American lives.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, tomorrow the House will vote on H.R. 1885, which extends the 245 amnesty program. I am surprised that this vote is actually coming up under suspension. I would like to draw the attention of my colleagues to this legislation and to this vote. What we are voting on tomorrow extends the date for illegal aliens to qualify for a 245(i) amnesty to August 15, 2001, and it extends the date for illegal aliens to apply for that 245(i) amnesty program for a full year, until April 30, 2002. For those who have a little trouble understanding what that all means, let me explain it this way, that what we have are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal aliens who are in this country; and we are now step by step trying to find ways in which we can make them legal, as the President has suggested. Perhaps the word is ``regularize,'' or whatever word one wants to use. But what we are really talking about when we offer a step-by-step process of whittling away this number of illegal immigrants, what we are talking about is an amnesty program, a step-by-step amnesty program, rather than just one large amnesty. The American people understand what amnesty is all about, and they will be watching and they will be looking at the record when they find out what Congress has been moving. Rather than being forthright in dealing with the amnesty issue, instead, it has tried to exercise its authority in a way that was a little less discernible to the public by granting amnesty to various groups within society. In this case, we would be granting amnesty in an interesting way, that is, anyone who is in this country illegally who applies, and now we are giving them until April 2002 to apply, can try to regularize their status in the United States. We have several categories of people who are here illegally to be able to do that. Guess what, that is an amnesty program. We are giving amnesty to several hundred thousand people who are in this country illegally. Yes, there are some heart-tearing cases here. Yes, some people who are in this country end up marrying American citizens, and the American citizens find that their loved one is going to have to go back to their home country in order to be here legally, because they have married an illegal alien. I am sorry, if someone is here illegally and they are going to have to go back, then they should go back to their home country to regularize their status. Tomorrow, on H.R. 1885, we are, for hundreds of thousands of people, going to be basically granting them the right to amnesty without going to their home country to legalize their status. This does nothing but encourage the millions, and we are talking about tens of millions, of people who are standing in line throughout the world waiting to come into this country legally so they can become citizens; but we have done nothing but encourage them to come here illegally, to reward the law- breakers, and to punish those people who are following the law. This is ridiculous. Our colleagues should consider this and vote against the suspension tomorrow on the bill, H.R. 1885. By the way, let me note that there has been a recent poll by Mr. Zogby, who is one of America's most respected pollsters, which has found out some interesting things about America's attitude toward amnesty. Most Americans think amnesty is a terrible idea. In fact, 55 percent of all Democrats think it is a bad idea; 56 percent of Republicans; 60 percent of union households; 45 percent of people who call themselves liberals; 59 percent of people who call themselves moderates; 61 percent of people who call themselves conservatives. And here is the real hook, here is the real bell-ringer: 51 percent of all Hispanics in the United States believe that amnesty for illegal immigrants is a bad idea. We have been lied to over and over again, and so much so that the Republican party has not had the courage to stand up and oppose illegal immigration, as we should have. The Democratic Party has made its deal with the illegal immigrants at the expense of the standard of living of our poorest citizens and at the expense of the wages that have been kept just level because we have had a massive flow of illegal immigrants into this country. The Democratic Party has made its deal for political power's sake. The Republicans, on the other hand, will not touch the illegal immigration issue because they are afraid to be called racist. They have been told over and over again that Mexican-Americans, Hispanic Americans, are in favor of illegal immigrants, for some reason. That is absolutely not true. We have finally got a pollster who has done a legitimate poll to show that Hispanic Americans, just like all other Americans, oppose illegal immigration. That is understandable. Tomorrow we will have our chance to vote against an amnesty program for illegal immigrants by voting against H.R. 1885, which will be coming on the floor.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Speaker, we have learned that the Vietnamese catfish industry is having a very detrimental impact on Americans who were involved with producing catfish for the American table. Yet also, at least I suggested, and I have not heard anything to the contrary, that what we are doing is laying down the economic ground rules so that we can subsidize, through American taxpayer subsidy or loan guarantees, businessmen to go to Vietnam and set up other businesses in order to do to the current businesses of the United States what the catfish industry from Vietnam did to the catfish industry here. That does not make any sense to me. What is this all about? This is about a dictatorship in which some American businessmen want to go over there and exploit the slave labor, and want to do so with loan guarantees and subsidies by the American taxpayer. I am very happy to hear that Oklahoma set up a business office in Vietnam. A lot of other people set up business offices in Vietnam. But what we need to hear about are all the offices that have closed up, all the businessmen who thought they were going to do business there, but the environment is so corrupt that they were unable to do business, and that they have closed shop and left. The only way American business companies are going to go over there is if we guarantee their loans and subsidize them. That makes no sense. We have already put all these people who grow catfish, we put them out of work. What is the next industry that we want the Vietnamese slave labor forces to be able to put out of work with the subsidy from American taxpayers? What industry is that? How about refrigerators, radios, clothing? I do not know what factories these people want to open. Probably I would guess it would be tennis shoes. I believe in free trade. People who oppose this particular trade legislation, it does not mean they are opposed to free trade. I believe in free trade between free people. When we sort of set the same rules with vicious dictatorships as we do with democratic countries, surprise, surprise, we are going to bolster the strength of the regime, of the clique that holds power in those dictatorships. No, we should be having freer trade with countries like the Philippines, who are struggling, struggling to have a good democracy with human rights, instead of giving more incentives and more ways of making profit by setting up businesses in dictatorships like Vietnam. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker). (Mr. WICKER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. Madam Speaker, let us, as this debate goes on, remember that Vietnam as it is today does not have an independent court system, does not have opposition parties, does not have freedom of the press, not to mention all the political prisoners they have thrown in jail, et cetera, and the persecution of religion. But without courts, without opposition parties, without freedom of the press, what does that mean normally? What it means is exactly what you have got in Vietnam, a corrupt system. We may try to say, well, we have already given these loan guarantees and these subsidies with the Jackson-Vanik waiver already passed by this House. The fact is, this vote freezes that into place. This vote freezes those loan guarantees and those subsidies into place that we put into place over my objection with the passage of the Jackson-Vanik waiver. We should not in a situation, in an environment where there are no courts or opposition parties or freedom of the press, expect that our businessmen are going to go over there and find anything available to them without a bribe. What they are going to find, and that is what is happening there, our businessmen are faced with bribes, they are faced with a corrupt regime they are not used to. And then what happens? The American taxpayer, because we have given these subsidies and loan guarantees, has to pick up the check when these businessmen close up their operation and flee back to the United States of America. This is a bad deal. It is bad business. Not only is it bad in terms of American values, in terms of human rights and freedom, but it is just a bad deal all around, having the taxpayers subsidize loans and guarantee these loans in order to go into this corrupt environment where you do not even have a court system that can operate independently and provide judgments there, when you have people asking for bribes, et cetera, et cetera. This is not what we should be doing. It is bad business and contrary to our values.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. I would ask our colleague, the gentleman mentioned the catfish industry. Is the gentleman aware of whether or not the American company dealing with the catfish industry there, was there any loan guarantees by the Export-Import Bank to any American company that was involved or a subsidy from the American taxpayer involved in the creation of the catfish industry in Vietnam that is now wreaking such havoc in the gentleman's State?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to the bilateral trade agreement with the Communist government of Vietnam. Madam Speaker, we just had a vote in this body of 410 to 1 reconfirming that we believe that human rights in Vietnam is something of importance to the people of the United States. I would submit that large votes like that, being followed by basically agreeing to a treaty to treat the Communist government of Vietnam the same way we treat economically democratic countries of not only that region but throughout the world, is one reason why, number one, the dictators of the world do not pay attention to us and think that we are being either frivolous or lying about our commitment to human rights. It also is a disheartening factor for people who live under tyranny, because those people who live under tyranny, their only hope for many of these people who live under tyranny is the commitment by the people of the United States of America to try to make this a better world. These types of contradictions between human rights, but giving precisely the same trade rights and economic rights to these vicious dictatorships as we do to democracies, is very disillusioning to most of the free people of the world who struggle for democracy. I urge my colleagues to vote no on this Vietnam bilateral trade agreement. Let us remember, as we have just stated in the last debate, during the last 12 months, despite presidential waivers, the Communist regime has actually increased its brutal repression of religious clergy, advocates of democracy and ethnic tribal minorities, many of whom were actually loyal to the United States during the war. What does voting against this agreement really do, and what are we talking about? What will happen with this agreement? We are not talking about breaking relations or isolating Vietnam. That is not what this debate is about. This will not in any way, no matter how we vote, break our relations with Vietnam. We will not be isolating Vietnam. People will still be free to trade. Americans can still go over there and sell their goods and services, and so it is not about whether or not we are going to have relations or isolate Vietnam. It is not about whether American companies can sell their products there, because there will be no law in the United States preventing that. So what is this bill all about? I have repeated this on numerous occasions because we have studied this trying to find what other reason a bill like this has such momentum in Congress. This bill is about whether or not American businessmen who want to build factories in Vietnam to exploit the near slave labor there and the lack of labor rights that they have in Vietnam, whether or not those American businessmen will be eligible for taxpayer subsidies or loan guarantees so that they can set up their factories over there, literally putting American workers out of work and setting up factories to exploit the near slave labor of this Communist tyranny in Vietnam done with American taxpayer subsidies and guaranteed loans through the Export-Import Bank and other international financial institutions that are supported by the taxpayer. This is a travesty. I do not know anybody who can really defend that policy. But, as I have presented the case, those people on the other side have refused to even acknowledge this part of the debate. And over the years, even though I have made this charge over and over again, no one seems to even comment on it, the people who are advocating from the other side. I would like to hear the proponents of this trade agreement tell me why it is a good thing for the American taxpayers, our working people, to be taxed in order to subsidize and guarantee loans to American businessmen so they can build factories over there which will produce goods that will compete with the jobs of the American people over here. I want to hear a comment on that. I would hope that my colleagues who are supporting this trade agreement will at least take that into consideration. So we are extending American tax dollars to subsidize and insure the businesses going into a Communist dictatorship. This is bad business, for one thing, because the reason they need the government to guarantee, meaning our tax dollars, to guarantee their investments over there is that it is a risky proposition to invest in a dictatorship. And it is especially risky to invest in Vietnam. It is a risky thing, because when you do not have really the rule of law working in a country and it is a dictatorial regime, they can have their property confiscated. Many American businessmen have already fled Vietnam. But they will not invest with their own money and our banks certainly will not give them a loan, unless the taxpayers guarantee it. That is bad business, and it is also contrary to American values. If we really do believe in democracy and human rights, it is contrary to our values. If we are going to be using taxpayer dollars to guarantee loans so that American businessmen can do business in a foreign country, and I do not think we should even be doing it anywhere, but if we do, at the very least it should be with democratic countries. And by insuring these loans and insuring this type of an incentive for American businessmen to go use that slave labor, we are not only hurting our own people, we are hurting governments and people like who are in the Philippines. In the Philippines they are struggling to have democratic government. They have got opposition newspapers. They have got opposition parties. They have trouble with keeping a truly democratic system because of corruption there. But there are honest people who want to have democratic government in the Philippines. What are we doing? Instead of encouraging our businessmen to go to the Philippines, a country that loves us, we are subsidizing our businessmen to plant factories in a Communist dictatorship. This makes no sense. No wonder why the dictators of the world do not believe us when we pass 410-1, a resolution claiming that we believe in human rights and that it is important to us. Let me talk about one last element here, and I appreciate the gentleman from New York (Mr. McNulty) yielding me the time that he has and the points that he made about American POWs in Vietnam. This is an important point. I have been in Vietnam numerous occasions. I took this personally upon myself. My chief staff member here, Al Santoli, was wounded three times in Vietnam. I was not in the military, but I spent time in Vietnam during the war in 1967 doing political work there; and so I have over these last 30 years had a personal interest and have gone back many times, as has Mr. Santoli, to Vietnam. The idea that the Communist regime in Vietnam has in good faith cooperated with us on the POW issue is a fraud. It is not true. There is no basis to it. They have exploited the POWs search since day one. Even to this day they are charging the American Government a million dollars every time we go out and try to search for some bones. What they have done is relegated our search for justice and our search for real truth about what happened to our POWs to a search for bones which they give up every now and then. The fact is that there were over 200 Americans last seen in captivity, alive and in captivity, in Communist hands that were never accounted for. Since that time, during this supposed cooperation, the Government of North Vietnam has done nothing that will help us determine what happened to those 200 men. I have repeatedly asked during this debate, during trips to Vietnam in which I talked directly to the leaders of North Vietnam, I asked for the records of the prisons in which American POWs were held during the war. Why? Because if we get those records, we can find out exactly who was in the prison, how many people were kept there, how much food was bought because they had the number of prisoners and we can determine if there is a difference between the number released and the number that they were taking care of during the war. What have I been told? ``Oh, those records aren't available. They were destroyed in B-52 raids near the end of the war.'' Well, baloney. The Communist regimes throughout this world have been noted time and again for the fact that Communists keep such incredible records. They keep records of everything. When they have meetings of their central committee, they keep intricate notes. They did not throw away those records. They were not burned by B-52 raids. They will not give them to us because it indicates that they kept Americans after the war. Now, why with a regime like this are we going to give our businessmen subsidies to invest over there and create jobs over there, exploiting their slave labor? This is ridiculous. I would hope that we can see an evolution in Vietnam. The people of Vietnam are wonderful people. In fact, I represent many Vietnamese in my area, Vietnamese Americans. They came to the United States and under freedom these very people have prospered. They are the very best of citizens. They love democracy. They have taken advantage of the opportunity to increase the standard of living of their lives. That could be true of all of the millions of people who live in Vietnam if they were not suffering under the yoke of tyranny. This is not the time to ignore what that government has done about the POWs. It is not time for us without any democratic reform going on in Vietnam. We have heard about what was happening in Cambodia. In Cambodia, they have not had those same reforms in Vietnam that they have had in Cambodia. In Cambodia there are opposition parties. There are actually opposition newspapers. They have got nothing like that in Vietnam. Let us see some reform there before we bestow upon them subsidies by our taxpayers and incentives for our businessmen to go over there and create jobs over there. I strongly urge my colleagues to vote against this bilateral trade agreement with Vietnam and to really take human rights seriously. If the United States takes human rights seriously like we did with Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, we will be striking a blow for peace. Ronald Reagan never provided most-favored-nation status for the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union fell apart, and we have a chance for true democratic government there today. Let us do the same thing in China, and let us do the same thing in Vietnam. Let us do the same thing with dictatorships around the world. Let us let America be a shining light of hope of liberty and justice for all. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, there is a real possibility, and neither one of us knows that now, but I do not think there is anyone on this floor that would step up and say, no, it is impossible; the catfish industry in Vietnam has not been created with the help of subsidies from the American taxpayers. We cannot say that, because we do not know. We are laying down the rules now, so that would be a real possibility.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 2833. Let me commend the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos) for the strong leadership they have provided. It has been my honor to stand with these two gentlemen on numerous occasions on issues dealing with human rights. I only wish our other colleagues had the commitment to freedom and democracy and human rights that the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos) and the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) have because America truly could save the world if we had that type of commitment. It is up to us to try to reach out to our colleagues, and that is what we are doing today. The Vietnam Human Rights Act stresses the importance of human rights in American policy towards Southeast Asia. During the last 24 hours, let us take a look at what has happened. The Vietnamese communists understand what is going on with the debate here. In fact, some people in Hanoi may understand this debate more than some of our colleagues who are not paying attention to this debate right now. They prepared for this debate by what? What happened in Vietnam? Well, two prominent elderly dissidents were arrested, one simply after he applied to set up an anti-corruption body in Vietnam to try to deter corruption in Vietnam. Think about that. The Vietnamese government, the regime, the dictators in Vietnam, have sent us their message. We talk about human rights in Vietnam. They start arresting dissidents. The British Broadcasting Corporation reports that dozens of other dissidents have been called and questioned by police, called into the police departments and been given the message. These incidents exemplify the reality of what we are voting on today. They have verified themselves by their own arrogance the need for us to pass a bill concerning human rights in Vietnam. During the past 6 years, the United States has normalized relations and extended trade subsidies through waivers in the Jackson-Vanik Act, and we have a bilateral trade agreement with Communist Vietnam. These initiatives by our government have made absolutely no impact on promoting democracy and human rights in Vietnam. To paraphrase a song I heard as a kid, when will we ever learn. Trying to cozy up and ignore the pitfalls and the bad parts of a dictatorial regime, trying to ignore the violence and the crimes of gangsters will not make this a better world. Right now the Hanoi regime is proving that they are as stubborn and as brutal as ever in their campaign against Buddhists, Catholics, and others. They are proving their very nature by continuing these attacks on anyone who believes in religion in Vietnam who has not succumbed to the temptation of simply trying to register their church and run their church affairs in the way that the government would have them run. Finally, we know now of a brutal suppression of the Montagnard hill tribes people. These people fought valiantly alongside Americans during the war and since then have faced brutal repression; and now that the war is long over when these chapters should be closed, the Vietnamese Communist Government is reopening this type of repression against the Montagnards. I feel a personal obligation for the Montagnards. I was in a Montagnard village in 1967, and I believe that my life was a lot safer with those Montagnards because they were on the side of the United States. It is up to us to be on their side now, and on the side of all religious believers throughout the world, especially in Vietnam, who are persecuted, and to be on the side of those people who believe in democracy throughout the world, especially Vietnam. That is what this legislation does. Madam Speaker, I would ask my colleagues to join us in supporting it.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I rise with a strong sense of concern, if not opposition, to what is being proposed here today. Two years ago, there was a compromise that was made on this very important matter. I, in fact, supported legislation with this wording in it; but only because it was part of a compromise that I felt was necessary to get the rest of the bill through. I thought the bill that we had come up with, and the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Coble) and I and Jim and others had worked so long and hard for, that it was worthy of that compromise. However, this piece of legislation undoes a compromise that was made with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Manzullo) to take this very language out of that bill, so we are, in effect, going back on a compromise made with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Manzullo). I might add that I was willing to support the legislation with this concept in it, even though I had reservations about it, if it was part of a bigger bill that was, I thought, a good bill that we had come up with. But now that we are bringing it up standing alone as part of an effort to basically go back on the compromise of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Manzullo), which he insisted on for his support of the legislation, I do not think that it stands alone and can stand on its own. We passed a sensible reform law 2 years ago, as I say, the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999. It has provided some very solid reform, which included, again, language that was inconsistent with what they are trying to accomplish here today. Many Members, including the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Manzullo) and myself, have been very concerned about the ability of corporations and of foreign nationals to use the legal process to drag small entrepreneurs and inventors into very costly legal battles. What we are talking about today is, instead of letting the patent office make the decision, and we have granted judicial authority to patent examiners; that is why they have a very special place in this system, so we expect them to act responsibly. But what we are doing here is permitting a third party, we are expanding the ability of third parties to use the court system as a way to interfere with rights that have been granted to inventors by patent examiners. We want the patent system to work, and we want these patent examiners, who have proven themselves to be people of responsibility, that is why we give them this responsibility, to be honorable people and people of great talent, and we hope they will be paid more money in the future, in fact. But then to suggest that, after the Patent Office has made its decision with these experts in technology, that we are going to permit a third party to come in and use the court system to negate that, I think that is a reason we have to think about this. I would suggest that we hold off on this amendment and give the Congress a little chance to figure out what the effect of this will actually be on inventions in America.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, as a young reporter, I remember the debate over the Alaskan pipeline. I remember it very vividly. I remember the hysteria and the charges and the warnings of the catastrophe, oh, the environmental catastrophe that would happen; and the caribous were going to quit breeding and all of those other dire consequences we would face. None of them came true. But do my colleagues know what happened? We won that vote by 1 vote, 1 vote in the Senate. Because we had that pipeline, America has received 25 percent of its oil, domestic oil production through that pipeline. If we had not had that oil, our people would have lived at a much lower standard of living, we would not have been helped out during the crises that we faced. What kind of crises are we going to face in the future? This 2 percent might help us out. We should make sure we can use it for the benefit of our people, keeping them prosperous and at peace.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of President Bush's comprehensive energy legislation. In California, we are on the edge of an economic disaster because for decades our State has turned down every effort to develop oil and natural gas resources, not to mention nuclear power, of course. The President's bill is a positive bill. It has provisions in it for conservation and, yes, my colleague is right, we in the Committee on Science have participated in this process, because this bill also contains provisions for developing alternative energy resources. But most important, this bill enables us to increase the supply of oil and natural gas in the United States of America. We have no reason to be ashamed of that. Of course, there will never be an energy bill that is good enough for the fanatic environmentalists who oppose us every time we try to increase our Nation's oil and natural gas supplies. This bill will help us have more oil and natural gas, take us off of foreign dependency and ensure American prosperity. Mr. Chairman, I support the President's comprehensive bill.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, first and foremost, let me say that I have the deepest admiration for the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer), and this body will be certainly not as bright and not as profound a place when he no longer is with us. And I know that he is not planning to run for reelection. We will miss him very much. Mr. Chairman, I feel very grateful to have had the opportunity to serve with the gentleman in the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. Over the years, he has been a voice for prudence and a voice for, yes, for second thoughts about the Space Station. Let me say that in the beginning of his term, his arguments made a lot of sense, a lot more sense. As the years have gone by, however, and we have invested billions and billions of dollars into this program, yes, in the beginning it might have made sense to postpone the Space Station for a number of years. The voice of the gentleman from Indiana was there saying, Do not waste the money. But sometimes once you have made a commitment, it is actually more responsible then to move forward and make sure that the project in which you are involved is a success, rather than turning back. If we support the Roemer amendment now, what it will mean is we will not have science on the Space Station. That is what it will mean. The laboratory will not work. We will not have the science experiments. Yes, there is some question whether or not, and from the beginning, whether or not we were going to have great achievements in space in these science labs; but one way to ensure that there is never any great achievement or breakthrough for mankind on this in the microgravity research being conducted in the Space Station is to pass the Roemer amendment, which fences off this money. Yes, we are now in a crisis at the Space Station. There has been an overrun, and we are going to need to come up with $5 billion. It does not mean it has to come from us. I am going to Ireland; I am going to Italy. I am speaking to other allies. I will be traveling over the break to those other countries and will be speaking to leaders, for example in the Gulf region, to try to find other people who might want to invest in this incredible, historic engineering project in space. If we look into the sky, we see a bright shining object that was not there before. We can either turn out that light and say that it is a failure and it represents the failure of mankind, or we can work at this moment, now, and make sure that we succeed in this endeavor. It is not time to turn back, it is not time to just fence things off, to put shackles on the hands of those of us who are trying to make this project succeed. Together, Democrats and Republicans, and it has always been a bipartisan project, can work together to make sure that that light in the sky is a symbol of progress and hope and, yes, even overcoming bureaucratic obstacles and great hardships, and overcoming them together. The gentleman from Indiana has had a great career. It has been an honor serving with him. But I ask my colleagues not to support his amendment.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Just to note that in terms of flexibility, the crew return vehicle and the habitation module, which the gentleman just mentioned, those are two areas we are working with right now to see if our allies could pick up the cost for these. Under the Roemer amendment, we would have to pay for them ourselves rather than if we could pick up an extra $2 billion from our allies. Why not let them pay for a crew return vehicle or habitation module?

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I draw Members' attention to President Bush and the great job that he has been doing withstanding public pressure to go in the opposite direction of which he believes to be true. We have a sense about what George W. is about; and I believe that George W. is proving himself to be a great president and that, as time goes on, we will find that this gentleman, who has been castigated by his opponents in some very vile characterizations, is actually a very thoughtful person, and a person of high character, and a person of strength. President George W. Bush has been willing to say things straight, in a straightforward manner that has enraged his political opposition, but yet by standing strong and tall, like President Reagan before him, who was also attacked in very personal and vile terms, our new president is finding that if he stands strong, that people will go in his direction. Because the things that he believes in, many of the things that he believes in, are clearly true but not in line with the liberal ideology that has dominated the American government and dominated the news media and communications in this country and in Western Europe. Our new president, for example, has stood firm on the idea and the concept of missile defense. Prior to going to Europe recently, the President was under severe attack by the leading Democrat in the Senate, Tom Daschle, and he was being told that by insisting that the United States move forward on missile defense that it would in some way bring about a renewal of the arms race. How many of us heard that? Now, I believe the Democrats certainly have a right to attack a Republican president or vice versa. That is what democracy is all about. We all have the right to criticize. But let us point out that while some people seem to be upset that the President was being criticized overseas, I am just upset with the fact that the Democrats were so adamant in their opposition to missile defense and that, now what, they were wrong, not that they were criticizing the President. Missile defense is something that now seems to be becoming more acceptable to our European allies. And in fact, instead of being this roadblock to any type of good relationship with the government in Russia, now we see President Putin in Russia edging towards President George W. Bush's position. Let us note that President Ronald Reagan first stepped forward with the idea that if we are going to be spending billions of dollars in order to protect the people of the United States it is better for us to build a system that indeed protects our people rather than a system that is based on annihilating millions of other people living in less free societies when they become engaged in a conflict with the United States. During the Cold War, it made every sense to have a situation where the Russians knew that if they attacked the United States with their missile force that hundreds of millions of Russians would lose their lives, like hundreds of millions of our citizens, and that was a deterrent. But during the post-Cold War world, such a deterrent makes no sense at all. Right now, for example, if there is an adversary, if there are people who in some way might be willing to take the risk of attacking the United States, they are not people who care about losing the lives of their own citizens. If the Communist Chinese were to launch one of their missiles at the United States, they could care less if there would be retaliation. The regime in Communist China murders their own people, so why would they care if we killed 1 million, 10 million or even 50 million of their people in retaliation for a missile attack that killed a million Americans? George W. Bush's position, as well as Ronald Reagan's position, makes all the sense in the world. Let us not put ourselves in a position of having to murder millions of people in another country because their dictators, their bosses, the gangsters that control their country have attacked the United States of America. Let us, instead, protect ourselves and use our technological genius to build a system that will protect us against some attack with one or two missiles from a rogue country, from North Korea or from China or Iran or Libya. Now, the Democrats have done everything they can to prevent this type of technology from being developed. During the 8 years Bill Clinton was President of the United States, he spent those 8 years spending the money on missile defense and channeling it in a direction so that that technology would not succeed. He kept us engaged in a treaty with the former Soviet Union, even though the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. He kept us in compliance with this treaty that we signed with old Communist dictators, even though communism and the Soviet Union no longer existed in Russia. We could have gotten out of that treaty. And this is one thing George W. Bush is pushing for, out of the treaty that prevents us from thoroughly developing our anti-missile system. We could have gotten out of that, and by now have developed a system so that if China would launch a missile towards the United States that we could knock it down and protect Los Angeles or southern California or northern California, or even parts of the United States as far as Chicago. We would be able to protect the United States from a missile attack. But Bill Clinton decided, as President of the United States, that he did not support missile defense. So the money that we spent on missile defense was frittered away, frittered away and wasted. Now we are vulnerable and we have George W. Bush standing firm against all those who try to pressure him and say back down. Well, I think it was one of Ronald Reagan's great moments, when he went to meet with Gorbachev and Gorbachev told him he had to agree not to develop a weapon system that could protect rather than kill people, and if he did that, if he stopped or gave up this idea of missile defense, he could sign a big treaty and be the biggest hero in the world, that Ronald Reagan walked away from it. George W. Bush is proving himself to be that same type of strong leader who will bring about a more peaceful world. Ronald Reagan had no idea when he turned that down that the people of the world would see him as a strong and a tough leader who they could trust to make a decision and that that in and of itself would have a dramatic impact for the promotion of freedom and peace on the planet. By the time Ronald Reagan was done being president, even though he had been nitpicked to death by people on the other side of the aisle, the Cold War was over, the Berlin Wall was on its way down, and democracy and peace were given a better chance than ever in my lifetime and in the whole 20th Century, all because Ronald Reagan stood tough. George W. Bush is making those same tough stands against the same type of nitpicking that went on during the Reagan administration. Every time we took a stand against communism, there were those on the other side of the aisle trying to find a mistake that we made in order to thwart our efforts, whether it was in Latin America or whether it was with the Mujahedin against the Russian expansion in Afghanistan or elsewhere, or in the development of missile defense. Our President today, George W. Bush, has that same strength of character. And if he maintains his courage, as he has been doing and as we have seen, and for the first time the world is starting to lean in his direction already in terms of the things he has said on missile defense, George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, will be able to make an incredible contribution to the contribution of freedom and peace on this planet. Now, one of the other areas that George W. has been standing firm on is his refusal to submit the American people to the dictates of a Kyoto global warming treaty. For this tough stand that he has taken, George W. has been under vicious attack. But those of us in the United States who are proud that our country has a high standard of living and that in our country ordinary people can live decent lives, we applaud George W. Bush and his wisdom and his courage when it comes to the Kyoto Treaty. Many people have heard congressman after congressman come to the floor of this body attacking George W. for not being part of the team when it comes to global warming and supporting the Kyoto Treaty. Time and time again we hear, ``America is doing nothing on this global warming.'' Well, maybe the American people should understand when these Members of Congress get up and start talking that way and condemning George W. Bush for doing nothing what it is they want him to do. What is it that the Kyoto Treaty is demanding of the American people that George W. Bush is saying, no, I do not think that we are going to do that? What we are talking about are severe restrictions on our standard of living. They claim the United States should be ashamed that we put more CO2 into the air than any other country. That is the way they judge it. The United States puts more CO2 into the air. Well, what does that mean? Well, that may mean that we have the highest standard of living of any other country of the world. And, yes, there is some CO2 we put into the air. But in terms of the standard of living, if we put per $1,000 of GNP, we actually put less CO2 in the air than anybody else. So if we just judge it by how much we are putting in, of course that is a mandate for what? For lowering the GNP, for lowering the standard of living of regular people. That is what they are trying to force George W. to agree to, lowering the standard of living of ordinary Americans. Is that what we want? By the way, these same fanatics who are trying to convince us about this ``global warming problem,'' do not take into consideration that America, through its agriculture, has had a vast tree planting over the last 100 years. And by the way, we have many more trees in America today than we had 100 years ago. Because at the turn of the century there was a replanting of trees across America. Up in the Northeast, up in Maine, and up in New Hampshire and Vermont and those areas that were treeless by the turn of the century, or the 1800s, those were replanted. Go up there today and there are vast forests there. Those trees take the CO2 out of the air. We actually take more CO2 out of the air than any other country in the world. The fanatics that want us to get involved in the Kyoto Treaty do not take that into consideration. Instead, they would have us, for example, pay $5 a gallon for every gallon of gas that we buy. Now, what is that going to do for the price of goods that are sent by truck? What will that do for the standard of living of average Americans, that $5 a gallon for gasoline? It will dramatically reduce the well-being of our people. When we see people up here attacking George W. Bush on the Kyoto Treaty, that we are doing nothing, they will say what they want us to do is be engaged in a treaty that will lower the standard of living of ordinary people in this country, that will suck money right out of our pockets that could go to better food, better health care, better education. Instead, they are going to put it into higher prices for gasoline and other types of fuel. It is vital that the public know what is going on in this attack against George Bush. Global warming, first and foremost, is not a scientific imperative. Let us talk about global warming for a minute. It is a politically driven theory. The people who are pushing global warming are not, by and large, being pushed by some scientific motivation but instead have a political agenda. Those people who are in the scientific community that have signed on have done so realizing that they are kowtowing to political powers and not to scientific knowledge. Those exposing global warming, those scientists who are brave enough to step forward, do so knowing that they might be retaliated against. Our young people, for example, are being lied to about the environment in general, and they are being lied to especially about global warming. I see this every time a group of young people from my congressional district comes to Washington, D.C. As a member of Congress, I represent Huntington Beach, California, Southern California, I went to high school in Southern California and now that I am a Member of Congress, every student group that comes from my congressional district here to Washington, D.C., I take the time and effort to talk to them and to get to know what they are thinking and try to find out as much about them as they are finding out about me and about government. I ask them the same question, every single time, every group. How many of them believe, these are students from Southern California, believe that the air quality today in Southern California is cleaner or is worse than it was when I went to high school 35 years ago in Southern California? Ninety-five percent always say the same thing, almost every group says the same thing. They believe, 95 percent of them believe that the air quality in Southern California today is so much worse than when I went to high school 35 years ago. I was so lucky, they say, to have lived in a time and went to school in a time when the air was so clean. Of course, they are surprised when I tell them that they are absolutely wrong, that the real answer is 180 degrees in the other direction. In fact, the air in Southern California has never been cleaner in my lifetime and they enjoy some of the best clean air ever in Southern California. These young people have been systematically lied to and been told that the environment is killing them. They are being told that the water is so much worse than it ever was. The fact is that water quality in the United States has been vastly improved in these last 4 decades. Forty years ago if you tried to put your finger in the Potomac River they would come out and say, What the heck are you doing put your finger in the Potomac for? Do you want to get the acid burn on your finger? Today you go out and people are swimming in the Potomac. People are fishing in the Potomac. What happened? I will have to admit that many regulations, many are regulations that the Democratic party pushed. Let me make no beans about it, the Democrats were in the front of the reform effort. That over the years tough measures were put in and there has been an enormous amount of environmental clean up that has taken place. Unfortunately, the information about that cleanup has not made it to the American people and especially to our young people. They are being told the water is getting a lot worse. They are being told that the land is much more foul. Over the years of our country's history there were toxic waste dumps all over the place. There was no hope of cleaning them up. The land was spoiled. This was a horrible situation. Guess what? With the technology we have developed today, we can clean up those sites. In fact, in my own district I worked with a company called Simple Green Company that has developed a way that in 60 to 90 days can take a contaminated soil and turn it into clean soil so it can be used for homes or schools or whatever. We tried a demonstration project in my district. We took 10 acres of soil that used to be an old oil sludge dump, and sure enough, in about 90 days Simple Green, this company in my district, was able to turn that into a usable piece of property again. Mark my words, when people find out about this process, we will have toxic waste sites being cleaned up all over the country because it will be profitable to do so and we have the technology to do so. But our young people are not being told that. Our young people are being told it is technology, the machines and the industrialization that has caused the problems. The fact is people are living longer today than they ever have. Although, yes, there are the diseases we face, other generations faced many of these same diseases long before there was this industrialization. Not to say that there is not some collateral impact, and we should be aware of that and study that. This President has not only full funded but doubled the budget of the National Institute of Health so that we can scientifically look at the health patterns to see if we can help to cure some of those problems. But in terms of the overall environment, it is so much better. For example, in 1966 a Mustang that my father owned, if you take the pollution coming out of that tail pipe and you examine the new Mustangs today and examine how much pollution is coming out of that tail pipe, 96 percent of the air pollution has been captured. The engines are that much more effective. They have cured 96 percent of that problem. In Southern California, what that has meant is we have doubled or maybe even tripled our population. Yet the air quality is much much better. Now, some people say, so what if they are lying to these kids? So what if the public is not getting the story. I can tell you so what. What is happening then is there are a group of people using these lies and the fear that our young people live in and that our other people live in to try to push their own political agenda which is a centralizing of power in Washington, D.C., and that is frightening enough, but their agenda as well is to empower global government through the United Nations and other institutions, to have the power to control our lives, our economic lives, in the name of stopping this horrible pollution. This threat of global warming that is supposedly going to destroy people's lives and the whole planet, I am sorry but I am not about to give up my freedom to a bunch of unelected officials from other countries. By the way, the people that would be running these international bodies that will oversee the environment and, thus, oversee our economic lives and, thus, oversee every decision which we make as people, these bodies will not be manned and not be controlled by individuals who are elected. No. They will be controlled by people who are not elected even in their home countries, much less by the people of the United States. Those people who run roughshod over their own countries in the Third World will end up with seats on the United Nations or on these global commissions or authority boards. They will be the ones making the decisions that we must run our lives by. I am afraid not. If that is what you are going to do to clean up the environment, count me out. Because within 10 years all of these bodies will be run by corrupt Third World people who are probably going to be bribed by Communist China, et cetera. By the way, let us note that in the Kyoto Treaty which the President has been, and we can be grateful for this, has been standing steadfastly against, the Kyoto Treaty that these Democrats are trying to push on us and force down our throats, exempts from its regulations and its Draconian controls, exempts Communist China. Surprise, surprise, surprise. What do you think that is going to do if we have all kinds of controls on America and in the United States? To open up a factory in the United States, it is going to cost so much more and that if you are going to create any jobs in the United States there is going to be all sorts of hoops people have to jump through and it will cost more money and more controls. But none of those controls and none of those extra costs exist in China. Where do you think people are going to set up their factories? They are going to set their factories up in China. Let me note, we have some controls in the United States, environmental controls that are exemplary compared to China, compared to these Third World countries that are all exempt. So we have our businesses going to these places to set up factories where they can pollute even more. So the irony of it is the global warming treaty will create more pollution, not less, because it exempts the countries that permit the dirtiest of industrialization. No. You can count me out on that one. Let us talk a little bit about global warming. What is it? People should understand what is being talked about. Global warming, supposedly, is carbon fuel, coal, oil and gas, et cetera, that is being put into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide, that is CO2, and supposedly CO2 will raise the temperature of the planet and that will cause drastic changes in our weather. The ice flows. Supposedly the ice caps are already melting, and animal and plant life are being really threatened by global warming. Every time there is a hot day you can hear some global warming guy get up and say, oh, well, this is all caused by global warming. Well, that is just so much global bologna. First and foremost, all of the recent scientific reports agree that there may or may not have been a minor change in this planet's temperature, its average temperature over the last 100 years. That there is, get this, no conclusive evidence that man has caused it. Now, that is what the facts are. But if you listen to Dan Rather or you listen to our friends trying to push their political agenda here in the House, or if you pay attention to the news media besides Dan Rather and the rest of them, you are being told that you have all of these reports and the reports are confirming that the world is getting hotter and man is the cause. In fact, it was not too long ago I saw a report on TV about one of these commissions and their study and it said the study has found out that it is getting warmer. This is Dan Rather in the beginning. That the Earth is getting warmer and man is at fault. By the end of that report where his own reporter in Washington said, of course, they have not indicated and they cannot prove whether or not man has had anything to do with this. A direct contradiction to this headline that Dan Rather lead into his own report. That is not something that is an odd situation. If you take a look at all of the media reports on global warming, you will find when you look into the details, by the time you get to the end of the story you will find quotes from the report that they are supposedly pushing or talking about, and there are weasel words throughout the whole report because the scientists that are conducting these studies are not sure and, thus, they want to put into the report words that they can point to and say, well, we did not really say this. We said maybe. We said could lead to the conclusion that or possibly. Look at these reports. Do not believe when you read something in the newspaper or hear it on television that some scientific body has conclusively decided this, do not believe it because it is not true. Not only is that not true, it is about as true as the fact that those poor kids in my district are being told that air pollution in Southern California is worse than it has ever been and they are scared to death that it is hurting their life. Climate science, by the way, had become really a new entry into this whole idea of scientific study. Prior to 1980, there were only a handful of climatologists. Now they are everywhere. Why is that? How come there are so many climatologists all of the sudden? The fact is that it is easy now to get a government grant if you are going to prove that global warming exists and it is very difficult to get a grant if you are trying to have a scientific study that will or will not prove that global warming exists. Eight years ago when President Clinton took over the Executive Branch, he saw to it that there would be no scientific research grants going from the government to scientists who did not support the idea that we were under attack from some global warming trends. Unless they furthered the global warming theory, they were not going to get a government grant. We were tipped off to this when the lead scientist, the Director of Energy and Research for the Department of Energy, a guy named Dr. Will Happer, immediately when Clinton was elected and took office, they could not move fast enough to fire this guy from his position because he did not agree with the global warming theory. Dr. Happer, by the way, now is a professor of physics at Princeton University. But his removal back in Clinton's first few weeks in office sent a message to the scientific community. There does not appear to have been much information about global warming prior to the mid 1980s. But what we have been able to find out is that that information that was available before the 1980s indicated that there was going to be a new ice age. Back in the 1980s, some of the same scientists who are now warning us against global warming were warning us that there was going to be a new ice age and that global cooling was really the problem. This Member of Congress sat through hearings in which the advocates of global warming would appear and after a few questions they would admit, well, it could be global cooling, yes, it could be global cooling. What is that all about? Why are we spending billions of dollars? Why are we giving up our freedom? Why are we permitting the standard of living of our people to go down based on that type of scientific logic? I think not. The fact is that in a span of 20 years, climate models have gone from predicting that we would all freeze to death in the new ice age to now we are all going to have to worry about being baked to death in a global furnace. Some of the leading proponents, as I say, of global warming went from freezing to burning to death. Historically speaking, we know, by the way, let us just take a look at it, everybody should understand it a little bit, that the global climate changes. Global climate changes. There have been ice ages in the earth's past and there have been tropical ages. Both of those came about off and on throughout the hundreds of millions of years of the earth's life without any interference of man. Now, the global warming theory, by the way, is that it is getting hotter because mankind is putting CO2 into the air. Mankind is putting CO2 into the air. Well, what about all those climate changes before humankind, before there were any railroads or industry or cars? Why did that happen? There is no real explanation for that. Well, there is an explanation. What the proponents of global warming will not tell you is that all of this CO2 that they claim is causing global warming, all of that CO2 that mankind puts into the atmosphere is only 5 percent of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere every year from all sources. Mother nature is putting 19 times more CO2 into the air than human beings. But human beings are being blamed totally because we want to have a little higher standard of living. By the way, when there is a volcano that erupts violently, all of a sudden there is dramatically more CO2 in the atmosphere. One volcano like Krakatau or something can put as much CO2 into the air as all of our industrialization. So it makes sense for us not to have good jobs? It makes sense for us not to have cars? Give me a break. The fact is that of all the reforms that global warming people want us to go through and restrictions and the Kyoto treaty, it would knock a little CO2 out of the air but that is just mankind's contribution to that CO2. If there is a volcano that erupts, that is taken care of right away and that does not even count anymore. I had a Member of this Congress grab me by the arm the last time I spoke about this and said, ``You know, Dana, you're wrong. The volcanoes do not put CO2 into the air.'' And he cited all of these scientists. I went back to my office, I got on my Internet, looked up the scientific basis and by the time I had to come down to the floor to vote the next time, I had the report right in front of me and, sure enough, volcanoes do put CO2 into the air. Three percent every year of all CO2 going into the air comes from volcanoes. Only 5 percent is coming from human activity. So if we have a large number of volcanoes or one big eruption, that means they just totally cancel out anything that we would do as humankind. By the way, one other factor is, all of these people are talking about, ``Oh, this horrible global warming, you can see its impact starting now.'' What is the global warming? What are these people telling us about our weather? Our weather supposedly is 1 degree warmer than it was 100 years ago. Let us look at this. One degree over 100 years and they are saying that that is a trend that is really frightening. These people cannot tell us what the weather is going to be like next week but they are afraid because they think that the weather is 1 degree warmer now than it was 100 years ago. I heard about this meeting President Clinton had of climatologists and weather reporters from around the United States into the Oval Office, into the White House, about 5 or 6 years ago. He was going to have all these weathermen there, they were going to talk about global warming and this 100 years and the trend that is set up and, oh, my gosh, 100 years from now how bad it is going to be, when they all got to the White House and they had their meeting and during that meeting at the White House, a storm came across Washington, D.C. and there was a deluge of rain, it was raining horribly, but of those hundreds of weathermen and climatologists who knew all about weather so much, they could predict weather for 100 years, only three of them had brought their umbrellas to that meeting. What does that tell you? You cannot predict what the weather is going to be like 2 weeks from now. And if it is just 1 degree over 100 years, they are telling us that we are going to be so frightened out of our wits by that that we are going to submit to a global treaty that would give powers over our economy and bring down our standard of living, exempt Communist China and let them get all the development? No way. One degree over 100 years is this thing that they are fearful about. And at the same time, let us go back to that basic fact that we were just discussing. There have been changes in the earth's temperature many, many times. Even if that 1 degree over 100 years was right and, by the way, we do not know how they took the temperatures 100 years ago. We do not know who was taking the temperature down in some Pacific Ocean place. Was it a sailor who was reading the thermometer right or what about the guys out west or out in the jungles or something? Who was taking these temperatures 100 years ago? How do we know that it was 1 degree cooler 100 years ago? I would doubt that it is 1 degree warmer, it might be, but if it was and even if we were in a period of our earth's history where there was a slight bit of warming, that is the way it is sometimes. That is no excuse to change the standard of living of the American people. Earlier in this millennium, we know, for example, or in the last millennium, I should say, Leif Ericson established a colony in Greenland. Greenland at that time was free from snow about half the year. Half the year it did not have any snow in Greenland. Yet less than 100 years after that, the colony had to be abandoned because the climate was growing colder. They had a mini ice age. Certainly we know that throughout our history, we have seen situations where the glaciers came down and then the glaciers receded. Is it possible now that maybe we are in a period where the glaciers are receding a little bit and then they will come down a couple of hundred years from now or a thousand years or a hundred thousand years from now? That is possible. Maybe we are in a period of the earth's history in which, as I say, those glaciers that came down and dug out the Great Lakes and now they have receded, maybe they still are receding. I know one thing, there was a report from the Canadian government that debunked the idea that the ice cap is melting. How many people have heard that? Again, it is like the kids being told in my area that the air pollution is so bad, now they are being told, the ice caps are melting, catastrophe is about ready to happen. The Canadian government just put out a report about 3 months ago, I happened to see it, no, the ice caps are not melting. The ice caps are not melting. They are not receding. There is just as much ice cap as there ever was. This is all baloney. It is called global baloney. Give up your freedom because we are going to try to scare you. I do not think so. I do not think the American people will buy that. I think that George W. Bush deserves a medal for standing strong against these fearmongers who are trying to scare us into again centralizing power in Washington, D.C. and trying to scare us into centralizing power globally. Let me just say a few things about George W. Bush overseas, the Kyoto Protocol and the media that has been really down on him. Ronald Reagan went through the same thing. I saw this personally. I worked in the White House with Ronald Reagan. He went through the same personal attacks. You had scientists, you had these liberal science groups that would get up and make the same claims about Ronald Reagan's theories, especially about his defense theories, and they all were proven wrong by the end of his administration. But let me just say, when you hear these reports by the scientific community, especially, for example, there was a report by the National Academy of Sciences, this is the one that Dan Rather was reporting on that I mentioned, and that National Academy of Sciences report which we were told proved conclusively that global warming was happening and that mankind was at fault, when you look at that, when you look at that report, it is so filled with caveats and weasel words that the scientific community was not putting itself on the line to support global warming, it was just drawing attention to the debate about the issue. I have some documents that I will make part of the record considering this. Again, we have to take a look at what is being said and why it is being said and look very closely at this issue when people are talking about it. I am not suggesting that we should take anyone's word, either people who are anti-global warming or pro-global warming and take them just on face value. We need to make sure that we are very skeptical when people are trying to tell us that something dramatic is happening, whether it is to our weather or to anything else and be very careful before we make such awesome decisions that would change the standard of living and bring down the standard of living of our people. One thing that people might want to note is that some people are telling us that the global warming phenomenon if there is a 1-degree increase in the earth's temperature, that there could be other explanations for it other than that mankind is using cars to get around in or that CO2 is being put into the air by machines. For example, the earth's orbit around the sun is elliptical. What does that mean? That means at some time, the earth is closer to the sun and sometimes it is further away from the sun. That happens in 100-year cycles. We are finding now that maybe we might be a little bit closer in that curve and maybe that would account for the fact that things were 1 degree warmer over 100 years. Ancient Mayans and Aztecs observed that cycle, that solar cycle of 208 years. They have suggested that there is a 104-year decline in temperatures and a 104-year increase in temperatures just by the fact of how far you are from the sun. By the way, also something that we might explain this is the fact that there are sun spots and there are solar storms. The sun itself may be the cause of global warming which of course has nothing to do with industrialization or automobiles or us putting CO2 in the air. We also have to remember that water, water comprises so much of the volume of this planet. I think it is three-quarters of the planet is water. Yet there are no adequate global ocean temperature readings. All the readings have been done on land, have not been done of the water or of the air. So we have not tested the water temperature nor have we tested the atmospheric temperature. In fact, a renowned scientist just prior to me coming up here was with me coming here and said, there is absolutely no evidence that there has been any temperature change, not even that 1 degree over 100 years, no temperature change above the atmosphere. If there has been no change there and no change in the water, how are these people able to come forward and be so fanatical about what they are trying to railroad us into? So, none of the readings include any deep water, and if there is any water temperatures, it is only very shallow water readings. So we have zero understanding of the deep waters that cover this planet, and no change, we see no change in the upper atmosphere. So how can we then try to think that with that type of data, not knowing how the other data has been collected, how can we possibly make decisions like the ones for the Kyoto Treaty that will so dramatically affect the standing of living of our people? Let me go on to say one other thing about global warming. About 7 or 8 years ago, during the height of the Clinton Administration, this Member of Congress was visited by a high ranking scientist in the U.S. Government, and he made me swear never to tell who he was, but he said, Dana, these readings that they are using to back up their theory that we are going through global warming, they do not take into consideration cloud cover. Get that. Not only do they not take water temperature or the sun or any of these other things, but cloud cover. They have not taken into consideration even if the clouds were covering that day, much less do they take into consideration that at one time, maybe 100 years ago, there was a lot of open space where they were taking the readings, and now that space is covered with concrete because it might be a city. Now, what does that have to do with that one degree of increase in temperature there has been? These things make a lot of difference, and yet those people who are trying to tell us that global warming is a problem have not taken any of these things into account. So, anyway, what can we determine by all of this? That global temperature records are flawed. We know they did not take into account what was going on with the sun, whether or not the areas that were being recorded were urban or rural over these last 100 years. They have not even taken into consideration the humidity factor in terms of the Earth's temperature. Finally, let us look at the Earth's orbit itself. They do not take into account the Earth's orbit. They do not take into account the sun's situation. They do not take into account the clouds. They do not take into account their own long-term readings. They do not take into account the humidity. What they do take into account is a theoretical calculation that man-made CO2s have something to do with global warming, and they have lots of hypothetical data about how human beings are polluting the world. Okay, human beings are polluting the world, and that is certainly a fact, and we have to work to make sure that we correct pollution by better technology all the time. It does not mean that we have a global warming problem. It does not mean that we have to make drastic changes in our life or increase taxes or centralize power. Most of the sources of CO2, and that is the pollutant they are looking at, these greenhouse gasses, methane and CO2, most of them are coming into the atmosphere naturally and are not man- made. Now, certainly we contribute a little bit. As I mentioned earlier, you have volcanic activity that creates CO2. Three percent of all of the CO2 in the world every year comes from volcanic activity. If a huge volcano goes off, it goes much more. But how about these other sources? That is about the same level as mankind. The volcanoes put out about the same thing mankind puts out every year, unless there is a big volcano that goes off. What about some of the other sources? The other sources of methane and CO2 are what? How about insects and termites, and how about rotting wood? Do you know that insects and termites and rotting wood contribute much more to the CO2 and methane that goes into the environment than human beings? All of our industrialization does not put into the environment as much CO2 and methane that termites and insects and rotting wood do. So if our main concern about pollutants is to bring those CO2 levels of methane down, because we are so afraid of global warming, what would we do? What would be consistent with that? Well, they say you want to limit human beings' right to have their own automobiles, make it so expensive people cannot own a car, $5, $6 a gallon gasoline. We want to make sure there are controls on all the factories so we do not have good jobs, ordinary people lose their jobs. That is what they say. That would only get to maybe 1 or 2 percent of the CO2 that is being put into the atmosphere. If you are really consistent with what these fanatics, the global warming fanatics, would have you do, what we would do is bulldoze, are you listening to this, bulldoze all of the rain forests and all of the old growth trees, because, according to the global warming theory, the CO2 and the methane that comes in, that is what is causing global warming, and rotting wood in rain forests and the insects eating that rotting wood and the old growth trees we have here in the United States and elsewhere are the major source of that pollutant. So what we need to do is bulldoze all those rain forests. Now, do you think you are ever going to hear some global warming fanatic come down here and admit that? No way. But if you ask them, you keep pointing questions, they always try to dodge this question. In a hearing you keep on them, and you will get them to admit that yes, this is a much greater source for global warming gasses, you know, they call them greenhouse gasses, than industrialization. Now. Well, I do not happen to think we should, and, by the way, I am not advocating that we bulldoze all the forests and all of the rain forests. By the way, what you would do then is plant young trees. It is young trees and plants that are young that soak in the carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. That is what you want for a better balance of CO2 and oxygen in the planet. But I would not advocate that. But I do not believe in the global warming theory. Interestingly enough, many global warming people also oppose nuclear power. Making sure we put the power of the atom to work in producing electricity would have a tremendous impact in lowering CO2. Are you going to find them out here advocating that? No way. Instead, what they are advocating are stricter controls on the amount of money that is invested in businesses in this country, the amount of money that is invested in manufacturing facilities, and restricting the kind of activity that we can do industrially in this country. And who does that hurt? It hurts ordinary working people who want to have working class jobs. That is who it hurts. They are willing to do that. Their own theory would suggest they said bulldoze down all of the forests and all of the swamps and rain forests we have. Do not hold your breath looking for those people to be consistent. Instead, what you can do is watch them come to the well day after day condemning George W. Bush for not going along with the global warming treaty, and being very nebulous about exactly what that means. He supposedly is doing nothing. George Bush was 100 percent right in rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and demanding further scientific research before any drastic government policies are put into place. The most frightening element of the global warming debate is that intelligent people backed up by so-called experts are willing to give up the American way of life, and, yes, put into place regulations and taxes that would lower our standing of living. Global warming advocates would have us give authority to unelected international officials. And all of this to me, I do not care if they call them international environmental bureaucrats or just international officials, if they have not been elected, I do not want them making decisions over my life. If these global warming fanatics have their way, Americans are going to be targeted as the bad guys. If you ever listen to these arguments, whether it is Daschle or other global warming advocates, it is always the American people that put more pollutants into the air. No, that argument does not hold. In fact, what every person in the world puts into the air is only a minor, a minor, contribution to what global warming is all about. But, yet, the American people are trying to be stampeded by this campaign. Now, I have seen campaigns like this before. I have seen people trying to scare people on various issues since I was a little kid. How many people remember when cranberries were supposedly going to cause cancer, and then all of a sudden the cranberry business for 2 years went to hell. People went bankrupt because our people were frightened into believing cranberries caused cancer. That is when I was a little kid. Guess what? People are drinking cranberry juice. There are so many cranberries being consumed in our county, I cannot believe it. Then there were cyclamates in soda. That was going to cause cancer. It cost our soda pop industry billions of dollars that evaporated. They put the cyclamates in, it was something to keep people from gaining weight. Canada never took the cyclamates out. Then 10 years ago, after billions of dollars of cost they mandated in our business, that means there are fewer people employed, that comes right out of the general welfare of our people, that we do not have that wealth to make our lives better, guess what? The FDA said, guess what? We are sorry, the cyclamates do not cause cancer after all. We also remember a very well-known movie star that convinced us only a few years ago that alar in apples caused cancer. Well, I am sorry, after about a year that actress was found to be wrong. But what happened in that year? Apple farmers suffered tremendous losses. Many families lost their whole life savings. They went out of business. When we buy on total theories that are haywire and unscientific theories, there is an effect to this. There is a cause and effect. We buy on to things that are not scientifically proven, they are trying to scare us. Just like they are trying to scare the kids in my Congressional District about dirty air. That is the cleanest air we have had in decades, but if we buy on to those theories and get frightened, it will impact in a negative way. Now, with the cranberries and the cyclamates and the alar, it just hurt various farmers. But if we buy on to the global warming theory, it is going to hurt all of us. It is going to bring down our standard of living. Thank God we have a President of the United States that is willing to say this does not hold water; we need a lot more scientific research before we make such decisions; I am not going to go along with this global warming Kyoto Protocol. I commend him for that, and I would hope that the American people understand his wisdom and his courage and that he is standing there to protect us and to protect our standard of living. With that, I would ask my colleagues to join me in recognizing that George W. Bush is doing this kind of job and that he is a good man, and wish him well.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

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

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to myself to close. Mr. Speaker, what are we debating here? Let us once again be reminded. Rejecting this waiver means one thing in policy. One policy decision is being made today, and that is whether or not we are going to subsidize American businessmen, take taxpayer dollars and guarantee the loans that they are getting and give them a lower rate of interest in order to set up factories in a Communist country, in Vietnam. Mr. Speaker, I do not think that is a good idea for Democratic countries, and it certainly is not a good idea for dictatorships like Vietnam. Vietnam does not deserve a subsidy for American businessmen to set up factories, closing their factories in the United States, so these businessmen can take advantage of the slave labor in Vietnam. They do not deserve it. As we have heard, Pete Peterson, one of our former colleagues, a former POW, could not come up with one example of where Vietnam was progressing in the right direction after all of these years of engagement. We are not talking about trade. We are not talking about isolating Vietnam. We are talking about subsidizing businessmen to set up factories there. That is immoral as long as that country is such a dictatorship. Let me add, this same government continues to stonewall us on the POW issue. Although they let us dig, we can dig, and they get millions of dollars for letting us dig in Vietnam for the bones of the 200 Americans left that we knew were in captivity at one point in Vietnam. They have put roadblock after roadblock which continues to prevent us from finding out what happened to those last 200 American POWs. Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to support my reject of the Jackson- Vanik waiver for this dictatorship in Vietnam. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record a letter addressed to me. Quinn Emanuel Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, July 17, 2001. Re U.S.-Vietnam Trade Agreement. Hon. Dan Rohrabacher, Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC. Dear Congressman Rohrabacher: I represent Mr. Dac Vi Hoang, a former Vietnamese businessman who fled Vietnam recently to escape persecution. I am writing to you to offer the testimony of Mr. Hoang regarding the political corruption and economic repression that stifle free enterprise in Vietnam. Mr. Hoang was a prominent Vietnamese entrepreneur who owned Thanh My, Inc., an international exporter of lacquerware. Thanh My, Inc. enjoyed astounding success as a private corporation in the midst of a Communist regime, with annual sales of U.S. $3 million and 400 employees. Than My was internationally recognized as the first private corporation in Vietnam to receive permission to sell its shares to a foreign entity (although that permission was eventually revoked by the Vietnamese government). Mr. Hoang accomplished this success despite having spent five years in a Vietnamese re-education camp because of his participation as an intelligence officer in the South Vietnamese army and cooperation with American armed forces during the Vietnam War. Mr. Hoang was severely tortured, both mentally and physically, while he underwent his ``re- education.'' The prominence Mr. Hoang achieved motivated him to advocate on behalf of private enterprise in Vietnam. In so doing, he repeatedly criticized, both privately and publicly, the repression of private enterprise and the economic policies of the Vietnamese government. This activity led to warnings, threats, and surveillance by the Vietnamese government. Eventually, Mr. Hoang received information that his arrest was imminent. Mr. Hoang and his immediate family fled to the United States soon thereafter and they currently are seeking political asylum before the United States Immigration Court in Los Angeles. Mr. Hoang was one of the wealthiest people in Vietnam, and now he has nothing except the prospect of freedom in this Country. The hearing on his case was originally scheduled for July 13, 2001, but was continued until January 20, 2002 at the request of the I.N.S. Attached is Mr. Hoang's declaration to the U.S. Immigration Court and a newspaper article that describes his plight. Mr. Hoang has continued to criticize the Communist regime in Vietnam since his arrival in this Country, and his comments have been widely broadcast in the media. Mr. Hoang was recently interviewed by Radio Free Asia, which broadcasts in Vietnam. If Mr. Hoang's testimony is relevant to the U.S.-Vietnam trade agreement ratification process, please do not hesitate to contact me at the telephone number listed above, or via e-mail at slr@quinnemanuel.com. Respectfully yours, Sandra L. Rierson.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), who knows this issue is mainly about subsidizing American businessmen for building factories in Vietnam.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, who will close?