David Schweikert

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, in this 45 seconds, I want to walk through a couple mechanical things really quickly. First off, this amendment is based on the OMB's circular that actually said this data is supposed to be public. Number two, the release of data, if you are making rules, does not pre-assume that the reg is too tough, too little, too soft. What it means is, if you are going to be doing public policy--public policy-- doesn't the public deserve access to public data because there is lots of smart people out there on the left and the right or just academia that should have this information, this raw data, to decide are we doing it the most rational, the most powerful way?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire into the remaining time on our side?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I thank the gentleman from Ohio for yielding. Mr. Speaker, have you ever had one of those moments where you are compelled to come running down here and come up to the mike because you are so enraged with the duplicity of some of the things you are hearing? Beyond the simple facts of the rhetoric, looking at the math of our trade surplus and deficits, the countries that we actually have trade agreements with, we have a surplus in manufactured goods; but let's move beyond the basic math of growing our economy, the demographics issue we have in our country, and the need to have markets around the world. Some of the crazy things I am seeing put out in the media by Big Labor, the willingness to make up stories, to make up facts, Goebbels would be very proud of them. Having paid attention to Arizona during the NAFTA disputes and some of the crazy things that were said then, now, we look back, and it wasn't true. NAFTA has been a net positive. All the scary things that were supposed to happen never happened. Be careful that we are not getting conned by made-up stories. This is good for America.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I thank Representative Gallego. I appreciate that. Let's put some facts around this. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is the tenth busiest airport in the United States, but we have something that is a little unique--and think about this because this is coming to your neighborhood, too. We actually have a downtown airport. Our city grew up around an airport, so it makes traffic patterns and the mechanics dealing with it quite unique. Also, our big county has about 4.2 million people in it. It is either the third or fourth most populous county in the United States--so a huge population. Remember, Arizona has been attributed as the most urbanized State in the country. I have a downtown airport, and then the FAA goes and starts to change the flight patterns. When it becomes one of the biggest issues at all of our congressional offices, they are arrogant; they don't return calls. We point out the fact that they are violating last year's law, and they just grin at you and then walk out of the meetings with this sort of arrogant vanity. This is the process we, as Members--and remember, there are seven congressional districts that touch this Phoenix metroplex area that all care about this. This is our opportunity to at least get our voices heard. I am going to ask the chairman, please consider what is happening to 4.2 million people in the Phoenix area. The fact of the matter is there is well-established corridors where you don't have to have the effects on the neighborhoods, and we can still be moving to the NextGen if I could find someone at the FAA who would actually listen to our concerns. Just to finish, this amendment is very straightforward. It would just simply ensure the FAA does not proceed with the redesign of the regional airspace around Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport until these issues are resolved in the local neighborhoods. Experts tell us that if the flight paths in Phoenix are eventually altered, then the entire metroplex airspace will also need to be revisited. By asking them to slow down, consider the overall effect of what is happening now, we are actually going to do them a favor by not having them to revisit it later on. Instead of rushing forward, the FAA should do the prudent thing and wait until our communities' concerns have been fully addressed. In closing, let me just offer a word of warning. For those of you who think this is exclusively a Phoenix problem, just wait because your city could be next, and then you will be dealing exactly with the same FAA relationship that we are dealing with right now, someone who is not responsive to the concerns of both the local politicians, the Members of Congress, and the citizens.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I will try to make this very quick because I know there is a point of order. This was one of those moments where there was a concern about new adopted technology. We have all heard the stories of some of these, shall we call them, dummy cell sites that are basically used to capture the phone calls because they produce the largest, most powerful signal. Now, some of this technology that has been being used at the Federal Government level is being transferred to State and local law enforcement. The amendment is meant to be very simple and just says for the Federal Government to design, for Justice to design, protocols that the constitutional rights are being protected, that if a local law enforcement is going to use this capture technology, that they better darn well be following the Constitution, and before that technology is transferred, that there is an understanding, mechanics of that being laid out. We tried to make the amendment as simple and clear-cut as possible. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. Point of Order

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, with the chairman's friendship and commitment and where he is on understanding the importance of the issue, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I remember you and I having this conversation on the floor and particularly Members from the left coming to the microphone and basically scolding me on how insensitive I was. Now I realize that my father may have been right about something. He said: ``It is almost always about the money.'' When you look at The Economist article, you start to realize that this was a jobs act for the Democrat supporters and the trial bar because they are running up and down our communities, suing small businesses. And I believe you are absolutely correct: our future will be hotels and resorts without pools at all. Once again, the folks in the opposition questioned our sensitivity, our love for our brothers and sisters. And we were trying to say, This is the economic argument, and here is the litigious argument. And we lost. The administration basically gave into the trial bar, and now we do have the ``I told you so.''

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to do a budget presentation in a couple of moments, but I wanted to actually come up here and, with my good friend from South Carolina, Mick Mulvaney, talk about a little article that popped up in The Economist last week, and there is the issue. This place has fairly short memories, but about 2 years ago, there were a handful of us coming here and talking about sort of an esoteric issue, something called--what is it--wheelchair lifts. For those of us who represent resort areas, I am blessed to represent the community of Scottsdale, a wonderful area. I had one of my resort owners call me, and in a fairly gruff voice, saying: ``David, do you know what the Justice Department is doing to me? I have seven pools and Jacuzzis, and apparently, I have to put permanent fixed wheelchair lifts at every pool and Jacuzzi.'' He said: ``I want to be sensitive and caring to my mobility- challenged guests.'' He went on to tell me the story that for 10 years, he had had a portable wheelchair lift, and it had never been requested. Here we are, 2 years later. He has torn up his landscaping; he has put in the units. Guess what is now happening? He has called me and told me that now his insurance rates are starting to really bounce up because of unattractive nuisance. The very things Mick Mulvaney predicted, I like to say I predicted 2 years ago, are coming true. I would like to yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Mulvaney). Tell us the other side of the story of what is going on.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to set up here in a second. I am going to actually walk through something we have been working on in our office now for the last month, and that is, what is really going on in budget numbers. We did a budget town hall about 2 weeks ago in Scottsdale. And I always like to start it with a simple question that says, How many of you are tired of seeing us in Congress fight with each other? And the hands always go up, and they say, Yes, you have to stop fighting with each other. And I always try to make the point: it is about the money. You need to understand how bad the underlying financial data is and what is really going on in the scale of debt and deficits and just the sheer scale of spending but also where that spending is going because we have so many of my brothers and sisters here, we go out and campaign and say things like: We are going to take care of waste and fraud. We are going to take care of this and foreign aid. We are going to do this and that. And they are not providing an honest picture of where the money is and where it actually goes. So we are going to do about 10 of these boards. I know it is going to get technical. When you run for Congress, one of the first things that happens, if you are a numbers guy, the pollster and the consultants sit you down and say, You can't use big numbers. People won't understand them. In this presentation, I am going to treat everyone like adults--these aren't Republican numbers; they are not even Democrat numbers, though the majority of these slides actually do come from the White House--to understand what is actually underlying in the data and how quickly it is eroding. Two points of reference: For decades, we used to talk about how we were going to hit this inflection point when baby boomers began moving into retirement and what was going to happen to the debt curve and what was going to happen to the curve of consumption of the entitlements. Guess what. We are now well into that inflection point. It has begun, and Congress has done very, very, very little in regards to mandatory spending. You are going to see on these boards that that is actually what may take us down as a Republic. So this is 2010. Let's just do this as a reference. And remember, 2010 was a year when there was still lots of stimulus money, lots of other spending out there. You see the blue. The blue is what we refer to as mandatory spending. It is primarily Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, some transfer programs, interest, veterans, and the new health care law. Okay. In 2010, about 63 percent of our spending was in that blue area; 37 percent was what we call discretionary. That is what we get to vote on here because what is in the blue is in formulas. I have been here a little over 4 years. I have really had absolutely no influence on that blue area. It is a formula. You hit a certain age, you get a certain benefit. But I want you to watch what is happening in that entitlement, in that mandatory spending. And, yes, this is the very discussion that gets people unelected because people get very upset, but we have to have an adult conversation of what is really going on here. So we are going to do a couple of these slides just to sort of create a reference. Here is where we are this year. And you remember, on that slide, I think the blue area was about 63 percent of our total spending. This year, it is 69 percent of our total spending. And obviously then the discretionary, what we get to vote on as Members, has now gone down to 31 percent. Do you notice the movement? And that is just in the last 5 years. So where are we going? Well, right now, to give you a different way of looking at this, this is our 2015 modeling from the White House. This green area is our revenues. That is the total revenues coming into your Federal Government. That purple area is our debt. That is what we are going to borrow this year to make up for our shortfalls, though you will be happy to know that, as of about 48 hours ago, the administration changed the debt number from $576 billion for the 2015 fiscal year to--now it is going to be $582.5 billion. This continues to erode. We are going to talk about that at the end here, what is actually going on in GDP, on economic growth in this country. And if we do not develop a growth-oriented agenda, we can't meet our obligations. We cannot keep those promises we have made. And with that, I stand here in shock of how often we engage in these debates, and it is not a growth-oriented focus. So one thing on this slide I really want you to get: blue over here is mandatory spending. The red is discretionary, with defense. Defense is considered discretionary. We have to borrow either every dime of defense or every dime of everything else, other than defense and mandatory or discretionary--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, veterans benefits, and the new health care law. Mr. Speaker, we have to borrow either every dime of defense or every dime of discretionary other than defense, and that is in this year's budget. That is how quickly this is moving away from us. So what happens if we look way off into the future, like 4 years from now? 2020 is only 4 years from now. When I first got elected in 2011, I did a presentation here. The numbers I am going to show you that happen in 4 years were not supposed to happen until 9 years from now. This is to give you an idea of how quickly the numbers are eroding. Yet I hear almost no one talking about it. So we are going to be working on that budget in 4 years. Do you remember that 2010 slide? Sixty-three percent of our spending went to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits, and the new healthcare law. Well, it is going to be 76 percent--76--three-quarters of all of our spending. We are only going to be voting on 24 percent of the budget, and half of that will be defense. I don't know if anyone knows, because these numbers are small and it is hard to watch, what we will be spending in 2020 on discretionary. So defense and all the litany of programs you think of are basically going to be almost identical to what we were spending 10 years earlier. I will hold that up as one of the successes of the Republican House. We have been very disciplined on spending on what we had the ability to influence, which was the discretionary budget, but the formulaic portion of our budget, entitlements, continues to explode. It is almost as if Washington, D.C., did not know that there was a baby boom, did not know people were going to be turning 65, did not know that 76 million of our brothers and sisters were born in about an 18-year period of time, and now we are into the third year of baby boomers beginning to retire, and that inflection has begun. So just as a reference, because I often get asked for this slide--and we are putting these slides up on our Web site--there is the spending pie chart for this year. You will see the blue area is all the way to here: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the transfer programs also including the new healthcare law, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits. Two weeks ago when we were doing a budget presentation in my hometown of Scottsdale-Phoenix, I had one woman who was absolutely positive, if we would cut foreign aid, we would be just fine here. It is important to understand. Do you see this little red area here? Foreign aid would be ultimately nothing but a small sliver within that. Yes, it is something, but in many ways, it is theater. If you have a politician standing in front of you and they are not talking about the mandatory spending and the speed of its growth, you are not having an honest budget discussion. It is hard because in many places around the country, when you stand behind a microphone and hold up these boards and start to say that we need to have an honest conversation about the math underlying Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and what is going to happen on interest on the debt, the new healthcare law and its cost projections blowing through the ceiling, and veterans' benefits, often those Members who have tried to have that conversation get unelected. But if you have someone walk in to our door here and say, ``David, we so desperately need new spending on this,'' we often pull out our charts and say, ``You are absolutely right. This would be wonderful. Do you have a solution to help me refine and deal with and manage the explosion of the cost in Medicare?'' And they just stare at you like we are not allowed to talk about that. But that is what is going on here. So let's do another slide to just sort of see how the numbers really are exploding. If I came to you and said, hey, in 4 years, that 3.8-- and it is actually a $3.75 billion budget we are going to have this year. So 3.756 trillion--sorry, not billion, trillion. So we are going to spend $3.8 trillion this year. In 4 years, we are going to be spending an additional $1 trillion on top of that, an additional trillion, and every dime of that is going into mandatory spending. It is not going into health research; it is not going into new parts; it is not going into building a new aircraft carrier; and it is not going into all these programs that we all talk about because it is easy politics. Every dime of that additional trillion dollars in 4 years from now will be in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits, and the new healthcare law. How many times have you heard that? This is right in front of us. This is what is going on. Your government is growing at an exponential pace, but it is not in the area where we, as Members of Congress, get to vote because it is in the formula areas, the mandatory spending. Are you starting to see a theme in this discussion and on the slides? I am trying to build an understanding out there with both my brothers and sisters here in Congress and the public out there that if we are not willing to have honest conversations, particularly with this coming Presidential election, about entitlements, mandatory spending, and ways we can manage them--and it is not cuts, but there are much better ways we can deliver these. You put all the programs, all the promises we have made at risk because just pretending everything is going to be fine means you are basically dooming them to a really ugly future, or the country to an ugly future. So, Mr. Speaker, this gives you an interesting projection. Now, if we go beyond that 2020 slide, if we go 9 years out--9 years out--we will be running over trillion-dollar deficits, and that is using the current GDP projections for the future, which we are going to talk about that model on the very end slide. There is something horribly wrong in how we are modeling our future income growth into this country. The math is real. I know it is uncomfortable and it is almost sacrilegious to many of the political people here, saying: Well, we are not allowed to talk about that. David, why are you such a downer? Don't you want to get reelected? Why aren't you doing happy talk? I am optimistic about the country. I am optimistic about some things happening out there in the economy despite government. But you have to understand, in 9 years, interest will be $1 trillion. And think about this: it is almost going to be approaching all discretionary. At that time, in 9 years, we will be about $1.4 trillion in interest. Our best interest projection is over $1 trillion. The chart, when you go a couple years out, we will be spending more money on interest than all of defense, all of discretionary, all of education, all of parts, all of health research, everything else. That is what we are doing. We are creating this trap where, as we build more and more debt and build more and more debt and build more and more debt, that becomes our Achilles heal. That becomes our fragility in this country. So once again, remember that earlier slide where I went over there and marked that now this year's deficit projection is $582.5 billion, and that is coming from the White House as of about 2 days ago. We had someone in our office earlier today. We were trying to do some modeling. If GDP continues to do what we think is happening right now, we could be having a discussion this coming October that the 2015 shortfall was almost $600 billion. You do realize that is approaching double what the optimistic projections were last year for 2015. There is something horribly wrong out there. It is a combination of lack of economic growth and, let's be honest, the mandatory spending, the entitlements, are growing faster than the underlying models we have built. So this is an interesting slide just to give you the point of talking about inflection. It is a fancy word that a lot of the statisticians like to use, and we politicians will use it. But there it, and it has begun. We are well into it. Do you see where those blue lines start to explode? But do you notice something interesting? The red lines, from about here over basically stay substantially flat. That is the discretionary spending. That is what we get to vote on. That is your defense. That is everything else other than the mandatory spending. But what is exploding through the ceiling? It looks like Washington, D.C., failed to understand the demographic issues that were heading towards this country and systematically avoided them, because I am sure it had nothing to do with my brothers and sisters often caring more about their next election than having to go through the painful process of educating our voters to understand this is your greatest threat, I believe, to our Republic. One more slide to put this in perspective. The blue line is interest. The red line is all--all--of defense spending. Do you notice something, that in about 7 years, 6\1/2\ years, we are now spending more money in interest than all of defense? All of defense. It is 6 years away. Actually, in reality, my math is closer to 5\1/2\, but we will use the 6 years. Think about that. We will be spending more money in interest on U.S. sovereign debt than we are spending on all defense of the Nation. It is absurd. And this is what we are about to hand to our kids. As a matter of fact, this is no longer about our kids. This is about us now. The numbers have eroded so fast, it is here. And the happy talk that we were doing just 1 year ago, particularly coming from the administration, has not turned out to be true. So one of the things that is going on out there, can you regulate yourself to prosperity? Can you tax yourself to prosperity? Can you, in an arrogant fashion, have a bureaucracy that is so inept, its ability to even when we do bipartisan, pro-growth pieces of legislation like the JOBS Act--we all got together here 3 years ago and did the JOBS Act. You do realize there are still substantial portions of that piece of legislation that are still sitting at the SEC that still don't have their rules because of the underlying politics behind them? They are 3 years beyond their due date, but we still don't have them. There is something horribly wrong in this government if we don't have an honest discussion and actually then do something about our Tax Code, our regulatory code, access to opportunity, and then the difficult one, the design within our entitlement state, which is something the Republicans for the last 4 years, 5 years, have been putting into our budget. Do you all remember the television commercial of the Paul Ryan look- alike throwing grandma over the cliff? Great politics, horrible math, because the Republicans, Paul Ryan and the rest of us, stood up and said that we are willing to actually propose a model that saves Medicare and deals with this curve that consumes everything in our path. It is really bad politics; it is honest math. And we get the crap kicked out of us for telling the truth. So now we get to look at a slide like this. We were projecting 3.1 percent GDP for this year. As of a few hours ago, the Atlanta Fed, which actually does this really interesting modeling of collecting current statistics and constantly adjusting their GDP projections, now has us not at 3.1 percent GDP for this year--and remember, every point of GDP is--it matters what velocity model you use--about $80 billion to $100 billion of revenue. So you start to realize that a couple of points of GDP is a big deal. The Atlanta Fed's GDP calculation on their Web site now is 0.7 percent GDP coming in in this quarter, and the indicators look like we are going to get additional downward revisions on the first quarter. Mr. Speaker, we are in trouble. Yes, the politicians will get up here and blame each other and blame each other, but it doesn't make the math go away. The other thing is also--and this is one of my pet peeves here--we systematically do not tell the truth, and this is a Republican and Democrat problem. Some of it is because we use really bad modeling data, really bad underlying statistics; we underestimate the swings during boom times and slowdowns. We systematically have blown our GDP calculation; but understand, that GDP calculation has a lot to do with what we model as our spending, has a lot to do with what ends up happening on our debt. If you look at this chart, the red is what real GDP turned out to be; the blue was our projection, and systematically, we are dramatically under the projection. It looks like this year we are crashing and burning. I am desperately hoping the third quarter and the fourth quarter get really healthy, but there is something horribly wrong out there. Is this administration, are my brothers and sisters on the left, finally willing to have that conversation about the Tax Code, about our regulatory state, those very things that--let's face it--are stymying future growth and our ability to save this country? One last slide just to sort of provide an opportunity--for those of you who have an interest in watching some of these numbers, and there are those out there who are also sort of numbers geeks, this is that GDPNow. Yes, it is often a pessimistic calculator; except for the small problem is, the last couple of years, it has actually been the accurate calculator of actual GDP growth. This is right off the GDPNow Web site from the Atlanta Fed, showing it looks like, now, we are all the way down to a .7 percent GDP growth in the second quarter. A little bit else on this and then I will stop this thing I am doing, which may be bordering on a tirade. If you are particularly geeky, last week, you would have seen the Journal of Economic Perspectives did an entire report on Social Security calculations. There is a handful of folks here with all sorts of letters behind their names, mostly Ph.D., talking about Social Security is actually in worse shape than we tell people, that they are close to $1 trillion additional underfunded in the latest projections, and that some of the modeling are simple things like we are actually using really bad life expectancy tables. Now, I have incredible respect for the actuaries over at Medicare and Social Security; I think they deal with some amazing data sets, but some of the Nation's finest economists and Ph.D. economists are starting to write public articles, saying: We are in real trouble here. Remember, last year, when the Mercatus did their detailed projection on unfunded liabilities and debt for the United States, they came in with a number that scared me half to death. They actually came in with a number of $205 trillion, as if you did GAAP standard accounting, not government accounting, standard accounting for the debt of this Nation and our unfunded liabilities. Go on the Internet right now, and look up what is the wealth of the world. Some of the best models say the wealth of the world is about $180 trillion. We have universities out there modeling that U.S. sovereign debt and unfunded liabilities are over $200 trillion. Our unfunded liabilities are greater than the wealth of the world. We are better than this. This is the greatest issue in front of us, and we spend so little time actually having an honest discussion about the math. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. The closing thought on this colloquy: We are already seeing the insurance world starting to charge higher and higher and higher fees for apartments, hotels, resorts that have these lifts, these permanent platforms. It is because they are already modeling the risk that someone--hopefully not with alcohol involved-- but someone is going to crawl up on top of one and jump in. The same litigation profile that removed diving boards 20, 30 years ago, the other side basically has driven us to. And they are going to be our brothers and sisters out there. There are going to be some that are going to be hurt, maybe hurt severely, and ultimately, what is our future? The removal of the swimming pools. We have got to thank the folks on the left that weren't willing to discuss rational economics and the DOJ, once again, for making a bunch of money for their trial bar friends.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. This is not a petty little issue. This is just a simple example that we talk about here almost every day of the runaway arrogance of Washington believing they are going to run our businesses, run our lives, and sort of the obvious outcomes that turn out to be fairly disastrous. So, Mr. Mulvaney, I appreciate you coming down and giving us some of your time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Darn it. I knew I was doing something wrong.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. For my friend from Texas, thank you. It is actually a joy being on this committee. It is fascinating the access to data. It is also fascinating how the data sort of gets, as you have already heard here in the first few minutes, sort of politicized by some of us almost to the edge of fantasy. Remember, if we step back to 2011, if we look at the President's own economic graphs, we were going to see economic GDP expansion approaching 5 percent of GDP. The indicators we were just getting this last week, it is this coming quarter, the quarter we are in right now, we may be about to see GDP of about 1.2 percent. At some point, holding up a board, it says look at the jobs, and then looking at the actual math, reality should hit home. Here is the President's own economic report. If you start to look at the numbers in here, if someone will actually break it open and actually read it, look at the numbers in here of workforce participation, how many of our brothers and sisters out there in the workforce are actually in the job market? There is something horribly, horribly wrong out there. So why do the Republicans so focus, so fixate on economic growth? It is the reality of what is about to happen in this country. In 4\1/2\ years--so right now we are discussing a $3.8 trillion budget. In 4\1/2\ years, we are expecting $1 trillion more in spending. Where is that growth? Where is that money coming from? Look at this slide. We are going to try to put up some slides that just show you how quickly mandatory spending is consuming everything in its path, and if we do not have a phenomenal economic growth, we are not going to be able to keep our promises. For right now, here is where we are today. We are basically, right now, only 31 percent of the budget we ultimately get to vote on. The vast majority of our budget is in what we call mandatory spending: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits, and the new ObamaCare health care law. Well, what happens over just the next 4\1/2\ years? How quickly does this mandatory spending begin to consume everything else in its path? Well, think about this. Just a couple years ago in the 2013 budget, we were projecting that it was going to take all the way out to the end of 2023 before we hit this split where only 24 percent were things we get to vote on and 76 percent--76 percent--of the spending was going to be Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits, and the new health care law. Well, guess what is happening because of the Democrats' policy on economic growth, this President's policy on economic growth. So how quickly do we now hit where 76 percent of our money is going into mandatory? It is not 2023. It is in 4\1/2\ years. Now, yes, when we track what is happening, particularly in Medicare and Medicaid spending, it is tracking faster than we expected. And, yes, we have had discipline in this body on dealing with what we are allowed to have discipline on because of the relationships having a split Congress and being disciplined in discretionary spending. But understand, if we do not do those things that are necessary to dramatically grow this economy--and it is more than just talking about fantasies within this economic profile. It is regulatory, it is tax systems, and it is trade. And yet simple things--and this one is rather personal to me, and the ranking member was actually somewhat helpful on this--things like crowdfunding, little things that are simple, disappear in the bureaucracy for years after we even have bipartisan legislation. What is it with this White House, with the Democrat Party's fear of those things that create economic expansion? Why does it always have to be some sort of massive, collectivist dogma to drive economic growth instead of letting the markets go? Understand, this is important because we are trying to help sell the story of why do we care so much about this economic growth. When you look at what is about to happen in net interest, look at how fast this grows. I am going to actually move to the next slide just so you have a comparison. I want you to think about this. In just a few years, Mr. Chairman, the interest--and this is using nominal interest rates. If we have a spike, then it gets really bad really fast. But in just a few years, we are going to be spending as much money in this body on interest as we do for all of defense. Well, at that point, if you care about the entitlements, if that is where you are ideologically, you care about protecting the country, you care about medical research, you care about these things, then the economic growth is everything. We can't grow ourselves out of this debt and deficit, but we can sure do some great good. I beg my brothers on both sides of the aisle and my sisters, too, you need to step away a bit from some of the crazy dogma, pull back on some of the crazy regulations, the arrogance of thinking Washington knows everything, and let America begin to grow, allow it to begin to prosper. That is what the Republican budget is doing. It is dealing with the reality of the math we have been given by this President's policies and trying to drive it to a progrowth future with lots of options.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chair, I would like to submit the following quotes and excerpts: Representative Pete Welch in a press release dated February 14th, 2008 stated ``President Bush needs to dust off this copy of the Constitution. Congress has a constitutional obligation to conduct oversight of the executive branch and we will not shrink from this responsibility'' in regards to his yes vote of contempt against George W. Bush's administration officials, Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten. Representative John Conyers (D-MI), then chairman of the Judiciary Committee, after announcing the committee vote on contempt on February 13th, 2008 stated ``if the executive branch can disregard Congressional subpoenas in this way, we no longer have a system of checks.'' He goes on further to pose a question during an oversight hearing with Mr. Gonzales, the senior Senator from Pennsylvania on July 24th, 2007, ``Do you think the constitutional government in the United States can survive if the president has the unilateral authority to reject Congressional inquiries?'' In a letter dated June 13th, 2008, Henry A. Waxman, then chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee informed the Honorable Susan E. Dudley, then the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, ``I regret that your failure to produce responsive documents has created this impasse, but Congress has a constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the executive branch. Therefore, unless the documents are provided to the Committee or a valid assertion of executive privilege is made, the Committee will meet on June 20 to consider a resolution citing you in contempt. I strongly urge you to reconsider your position and comply with the duly issued subpoena.'' Henry A. Waxman further goes on to state in a letter dated June 13th, 2008, on behalf of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to the Honorable Stephen L. Johnson that ``the documents reviewed by the Committee also indicate that the rulemaking was drafted through an insufficiently open process, that regional technical staff were given only the briefest opportunity to comment, and that even the strongest objections of the staff were disregarded.'' Furthermore, Representative Waxman in the conclusion states that ``Congress needs to be able to rely on the technical and scientific information provided by federal agencies. It is hard to do so, however, when technical and scientific data that has been carefully assembled over several years is suddenly cast aside as soon as it becomes inconvenient or embarrassing.'' Senator Barbara Boxer during the 110th Congress hearing before the Committee on Environment Public Works dated January 24th, 2008, on the Oversight of EPA's Decision to Deny the California Waiver stated, ``There remains much work to be done as we work to uncover the facts behind this decision. EPA has failed to fully respond to our request for information, which I will go into in the question time. I have never seen anything like it. We asked for the documents. First we didn't get them when they were promised.'' She then says that ``the mission of the EPA is to protect human health and the environment. The Administrator's decision does neither. The people who pay the Administrator's salary have a right to know how he came to a decision that is so far removed from the facts, the law, the science, the precedent, States' rights and all the rest that goes with it.''

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the motion.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of a point of order.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, to the gentleman from Hawaii, whom I have not actually had the chance to make friends with yet, you are actually hitting on one really good point: If there is data being used by bad actors, shouldn't we all know it? The way the EPA operates right now with their keeping their data sets secret, none of you are going to get to know that. That is actually what this piece of legislation fixes. If there is going to be data of groups that are bad actors--industries that you consider dodgy-- wouldn't it be a wonderful thing to have that data available for everyone, whether you be on the right or whether you be on the left, so it can be refined by sunshine? so it can be reviewed and meshed up against other data sets? If you believe that making information public refines it, if you believe public policy should be made by public data and public data should be available in the making of public policy, you like this piece of legislation. What is so fascinating in the debate we have had this time and last year is that I have a number of memos, demand letters, threats of subpoenas from when the left in this body was in both the majority and the minority, but there was a Republican President who was demanding this type of legislation. Let's try something new around here: a little bit of intellectual consistency. Do you believe the public--the researchers, the scientists, those who are academics, those who just have an interest in the subject area-- should have the right to touch the data, to model it, to stress it, to put it up against other data sets and see if we are doing what is best for our environment? Are we doing it the best way? Is there a better way? Is there a more efficient way? Is there a more cost-effective way? That is what this bill accomplishes, and I have no idea why my brothers and sisters on the left are so fearful of that. As I yield back, I beg all of my fellow Members here to vote ``yes'' on this legislation but to vote ``no'' on this motion to recommit. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I thank Chairman Smith for yielding, and to all my friends, I miss all of you, but are we having that sense of deja vu all over again? Have you ever started listening to a debate and you are starting to think: Are we discussing two completely separate pieces of legislation here? Mr. Chair, this isn't that complicated. So far, I have got to tell you, this debate--and this is going to be a little harsh--has been absolutely intellectually vacuous because we are not saying things that are true. Let's try one more time--no, Madam Ranking Member, you are not. So let's try it one more time. What does the piece of legislation do? It is public policy made by public data, public data by public policy. Why is that so terrifying to the left? This concept of, well, there's personal medical records used for part of this--there are. That is why this White House, 3 or 4 years ago, did a series of memos instructing how to do the deidentification of personal data. If you really object to that, then I am sure you are going to stand up and start saying that the FDA, the CFPB, all the others that get personal data, you don't want them to touch that either. Come on, a little intellectual consistency here, let's try it. Something I chose not to do when we ran this bill last time--and I am going to do this time--is that I will submit at a later time into the Record a handful of memos coming from my office from when this body was controlled by the Democrats and there was a Republican in the White House. The Democrats were demanding this of the White House--and a series of senior Democrat officials--demanding this type of disclosure to make public policy. I think that would be sort of amusing to put into the public record, so folks can see how duplicitous this argument has started to become. Now, back to sort of an underlying principle that I embraced--and I hope all those who actually are not at war with science and want to embrace the complete aggregation of information--is that we need to walk away from this arrogance that there is a small subset in our society that absolutely knows everything. Because the fact of the matter is you put up a study today and a handful of smart folks at Kennedy's--do you represent MIT? Sorry. That is where all the really smart kids are, right? But people like Arizona State, the next smartest school in the Nation, why can't they take that data set and bounce it up against studies they are doing? Why can't an industry group, why can't an environmental group, why can't an academic group, why can't someone who just really likes statistics? What you are basically saying is all information, all knowledge, is housed in a tiny population and the rest of the world be damned. There is a crowdsourcing concept of refining, and here is where I am fascinated that the left hasn't caught on. This bill, this piece of legislation may come back to us and say: EPA, you are actually not doing enough. It could actually come back and say: When we make the data public, when we bounce it up against other data sources, when we do other latitudinal studies, we may find we are not doing enough. We may find there is a much better way to do a regulation set. I would think, actually, in the modern world, where we know information is providing us so many opportunities, why aren't we embracing that? Why has that become partisan? There are actually also a couple of other things that have been said from behind the microphone across the aisle that we need to, one more time, restate honestly. What if a data set is provided by industry? One of the biggest complaints in the past said, Well, if a Republican President had a Republican EPA and they used industry data to set up a reg--guess what? That falls under this same piece of legislation. That also is disclosed. All data that is used to create public policy is public. Why does this terrify the left so much, public policy by public data and public data by public policy, and then the opportunity for everyone who takes an interest in this to be able to refine it and make it better and make it more efficient and more healthy for our families, for our environment, for our economy, instead of a small, arrogant population controlling all knowledge and all information?

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, thank you to my friend from Kentucky. All right, for my friends on the left, you are going to support this unconstitutional expansion of power. When there is a Republican President, are you going to sit there and continue to applaud, saying, ``Yes, we did not support the separation of powers when we had the chance'' and look the other way? One of my heartbreaks here is I believe there were creative things we could have done, but we are completely dearth of the willingness to try. Mr. Speaker, this is about trying to defend the U.S. Constitution that we all raised our hands to uphold, and yet are we going to allow a vote to go forward to walk away from that fight? This should break everyone's heart in this body.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I would like to acknowledge the steady leadership of Diane Enos who recently ended her term as 23rd President of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in my hometown of Scottsdale. Additionally, I would like to share my personal gratitude for Diane's friendship. Diane has spent her lifetime working to make Arizona better, and she has done so with incredible grace. Furthermore, it is with goodwill and faith that I welcome President Delbert Ray, Sr. to his post as the 24th President of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. I look forward to working on the many issues that are of vital importance to our community and the future of Arizona.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I will try to speak fast. I have missed all of you in my couple years' absence. Have you ever had a moment where you are heading towards the microphone and you are starting to wonder if some of the debate you have been just listening to is a little bit tongue-in-cheek? Can we do a quick explanation of CLOs, these collateralized loans? It is commercial paper. That is what the vast majority of it is. It has been around for a very long time. Now, here is the absurdity that is coming in. If I have commercial paper that is made up of marginal loans, 2 years from now the bank continues to get to own that. But if that paper, that collateralized managed debt actually has a covenant in it that, if something goes wrong, I get to reach in and grab some of the equity of the company, all of a sudden they can't hold that. So the more secure CLOs you don't get to own in 2 years; the more marginal you do get to keep on the banks' books. This is, first, absurd. But it is perfectly rational to say: Look, why don't we take this part that expires in 2 years and push it out 2 more years so there can be an orderly unwinding of a fairly absurd rule? But the rule is the rule. So a lot of this debate around the CLOs, I am sorry, it is great hyperbole, but it has almost nothing to do with what the actual product does. And understand, over the last 20 years, CLOs that were AA or higher, not a single instrument went bad.

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

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

Mr. SCHWEIKERT

Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the Soul Sanctuary of the Desert and the Heart and Soul Luncheon. This month, the Sanctuary is celebrating ten years of helping at-risk families in the community break the cycle of substance abuse and domestic violence. The dedicated volunteers and sponsors who make rehabilitation possible will be honored at the Luncheon. I commend the Soul Sanctuary of the Desert and all those who have participated in this important work in the last ten years.