Dave Weldon

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. The gentleman raises a very good point. The typical American family does not pay more in Federal income tax than they spend on food, shelter, and clothing. But when we add up the FICA, the Medicare tax, when we add up the property taxes, if they own their own home, their sales taxes and all the other taxes the families pay out, the typical American family is spending more money on taxes than anything else, and it is greater than food, clothing, and shelter combined. This family is going to get the $500 per child tax credit. But because their oldest son is getting close to college age, they can also get a $1,500 a year eligibility for an IRA scholarship deduction which, if we do the math and translate it all out, this family will be saving in excess of $1,500 a year on their income taxes.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. The gentleman is absolutely correct. An important point here that I would like to make is the Augers are not the only family in my congressional district who are going to benefit from this tax relief package. Indeed, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank here in Washington, DC, did a calculation for me indicating that 84,000 families in my congressional district will see their income taxes go down based on this Republican middle-class tax cut package. That will mean $39 million in the pockets of working families in my congressional district, which includes Brevard County, Indian River County, Osceola County, and portions of Polk County in Florida. I am sure in the gentleman from Minnesota's district, it is ditto. He has got thousands and thousands of families that will benefit from it. This is a very important point: When we put more money in their pockets, in working families' pockets, it not only makes it easier for them to make ends meet, it not only makes it easier for them to be able to send their kids to college with the tuition tax credits that we are providing, but it is also going to be good for the local economy, it is going to be good for the local businessman. If you are a businessman and you own a hardware store or if you work in a barber shop or a restaurant, you are going to have more families with more spending money in their pocket, and that is going to in turn, well, Jim Auger here in this picture is a perfect example. He is a plumber. There are lots of families that are going to benefit that he does plumbing work for. How many families in my congressional district or in the congressional district of the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Gutknecht] have a leaking faucet that they would like to get fixed but they do not have the money, the end of the checkbook comes before the end of the month? What is going to happen, people will have more spending money and the spinoff benefit will not only be that it is going to be easier for him to send his kids to college; they are going to have more spending money. But as well, it may actually help his business because it is going to help the families that he does plumbing work for. This is something that has the potential to help everybody in America. It will create jobs, it will make working families and families with kids better able to make ends meet, and probably most importantly, it is going to make it a lot easier for this mom and dad in this picture to send these three kids to college. These kids are bright kids and their parents believe they are college material and that they should be able to succeed in college. But as everybody knows, it is not just the tuition. It is the room and the board and the books and paying the medical insurance while the kids are in college. So providing for a kid for another 4 years and seeing him through the process of college is very, very difficult on families. This family is going to be better able to send their kids to college. That is a big part of what this tax package is all about. I am very, very pleased to rise today and join the gentleman in this special order and talk about not just the statistics and not just the numbers, but real flesh and blood people like the Augers and their three kids, because this is going to mean a real difference for their quality of life. For too long, American families like them have been bearing too much of the burden of government here in Washington. If we look at the facts and look back 40 years when my mom and dad and the gentleman from Minnesota's mom and dad were raising our families, I know I have my sister Carol visiting from Tennessee in the gallery up there listening to this speech. I have three sisters, Carol is the youngest, my sister Maryann, who is younger than me, and then my older sister Christine. When my parents were raising the four of us kids, my father was a postal clerk, working in the post office, they were sending about 2, 3, 4 percent of their income to Washington, DC. Now these families are sending 25 percent of their income to Washington, DC. As I understand it, she likes to cut hair and she enjoys cutting hair. But there are a lot of working moms who would rather not be out in the workplace. They would rather be home with the kids. Particularly when the kids are really little, they would rather be home with them. This tax package is going to go a long way to helping a lot of those families. One of the things that I think is most ironic is that not only has this been a very difficult process over the 3 years to get the administration to come along with us on a tax cut package, but as well it really is taking our initiative, the initiative of the Speaker, the majority leader, the leader in the other body as well as all the other Members, to really get the President of the United States to fulfill a pledge that he made in a campaign in 1992 to provide a middle-class tax break. So it is really a pleasure for me to join the gentleman.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Yes, if the gentleman would yield, I appreciate it, thank you. I just wanted to explain what this chart represents. And our tax cut package is about an $85 billion net tax cut, but actually its total amount is about $115 billion. This pie chart represents all of that money, the whole tax cut package, and we are looking at who does it go to. And this section in the yellow here represents 76 percent of that tax cut package, and it goes to families earning between $20,000 and $75,000. That to me says a great deal. It says this truly is a middle-class tax cut. That is the working middle class. Now some people may say well, gee, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, where I live is not middle class, and that is true. Where I am in Florida, making $65,000, $70,000 a year, some people would legitimately argue is not middle class anymore. But I can tell you in some of our more urban areas, places like New York City, Long Island, Los Angeles, there are a lot of families struggling to make ends meet on $65,000 a year because of the very, very high cost of housing where a house can cost $300,000 a year. And if you really look, that is the middle class in the United States of America, with incomes between $20,000 and $75,000 a year. This pie chart shows you very, very clearly, 76 percent goes to those working middle-class families.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the gentleman, and I want to talk about one particular aspect of the capital gains reduction which is part of the tax package that is being discussed here in Washington right now. The capital gains tax reduction, the reason why I support it and the reason why many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle support it is because it stimulates jobs, it helps create jobs, and the way it does that is if you have made an investment and you realize some profit off that investment, if when you go to sell and the government takes slightly less, you are left with a little bit more. And most people who make an investment reinvest their money. Now some people will use it for a vacation or a college education, but the majority of people reinvest their money right back into the economy in the form of stocks or bonds or business. And so when you lower the rate of tax on capital gains, and you leave more money in people's pockets who are most likely to invest it, they are putting more money back into the economy, and then, as a consequence, they are creating jobs. And what is probably most important about this is they are more often than not creating good, high-paying, quality jobs. Often it is in high- tech industries, the kind of industries that are clean, that are less polluting and that frequently are paying better salaries. I want to make one other extremely important point. In our Republican tax cut package we do something called indexing capital gains, and I want to explain what that is. If you make an investment today, a thousand dollars, and 10 years from now your investment has doubled in value to $2,000, according to the current Tax Code you have got a capital gain on a thousand dollars. But guess what? Inflation is such that 50 percent of your profit has been eaten up by inflation, so instead of really having an extra thousand dollars, because of inflation, the decline in value of the dollar, you maybe only have realized $500 in real profit. Indeed, when inflation is going along very rapidly, if inflation was at, say, 7 percent, and your investment went from 1,000 to $2,000, you have made absolutely no profit because your $2,000 now only buys what a thousand dollars did years ago. Well, in the current Tax Code, you pay taxes on that inflated money. You actually have to pay the Federal Government for the inflation, and I just think that is absolutely wrong, and one of the things I am most proud of in our tax cut package is we allow you to index it for inflation. So if you made that thousand dollar investment and it is now worth $2,000, but the dollar has gone down in value slightly so your real capital gains is only $500, you pay capital gains tax on only $500. What I have been most disappointed in is the President does not want this provision. He wants it eliminated, and he is going around this city, and he has his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, going around saying that this will, quote, explode the deficit, trying to put fear in the hearts of the American people that this tax cut package is going to explode the deficit. In truth, it is going to do nothing at all like that. And in truth, what we are trying to do is just basic fairness. We are trying to take the family values that you are trying to raise your kids with every day, a fairness and honesty, and we are trying to apply it to the U.S. Tax Code. And believe me in this city it is very hard. But to have the President running around and saying it is going to explode the deficit, in my opinion, is to say the current system is the way we want to keep it, we want to tax you on your inflated dollars. Even if your $1,000 investment is worth $2,000 and inflation has eaten up half of that, we are going to tax you on all of that. And I just think that is dead wrong, and it is just not fair. One of the things that I know that I have been striving for since I have been here in Washington, all the Members of our freshman class, particularly the freshman class of the last Congress and the people like Mr. Gutknecht, is to try to put fairness into the system, fairness in giving working families like the Augers, the people I showed earlier, more money to spend at the end of the month, more money for college education, better able to make ends meet, but also to put fairness into the law itself and have it make common sense. Mr. Speaker, it does not make common sense if the dollar has gone down in value such that your investment is really not worth anything more, but then for the Federal Government to come along and tax you on that; well, my colleagues, let me tell you, you can end up losing money on your investments if the government is going to eat away all of it, even the gains that have been made purely on inflation. Your purchasing power can go down, and what happens when you live in a country like that where they are taxing you on everything and taxing you on your taxes, well, people will not make investments, and then you will not create good, high-paying, quality jobs, and then we all suffer. So we want a Tax Code that makes sense, we want a Tax Code that is fair, we want a Tax Code that helps working families, we want a tax system that encourages families to be able to send their kids to college, and I am very, very pleased to be able to join the gentleman in this special order here.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I had or still have one of those boat companies in my district, Sea Ray, and it just about put them out of business. As I understand it, 20,000 working Americans who worked in the boating industry lost their jobs, and I know they laid off lots of people in my district, and it was a disaster because people stopped buying the boats, so they got absolutely no income into the Federal Treasury off of that tax. And because they stopped buying boats, it put the boating industry in a tailspin. I know in my congressional district it hurt the company very, very badly, and people ended up losing their jobs. When people lose their jobs they go on unemployment, they may end up on welfare, they are not paying income tax anymore. So that luxury tax I think is an excellent case study. I am glad the gentleman brought it up.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I wanted to rise and talk a little bit with the gentleman today and with the people viewing in the C-SPAN audience a little bit about who this tax cut package is really going to help. It is important for all our colleagues in the House of Representatives and everyone watching to understand exactly what this means for the families and their neighbors' families. Tax relief is about real people, real Americans. If the gentleman would allow me to come down there, I want to put up on that easel next to him a picture of one of those families.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank him for being a space supporter. I know he has been fascinated by some of these issues. I want to talk a little bit about our Nation's space program and the tremendous asset it is to America. We are a great Nation, 275 million people, 50 States, from sea to shining sea. It is a very variegated fabric of what makes up America. There are many great things that make our Nation great. Our number one asset is obviously our people and the people who make up so many of the great industries and institutions. Of course, the space program has been getting a lot of attention lately, particularly as it relates to exploration of Mars. I wanted to talk a little bit about that. Our space program is something that truly fascinates our children. Teachers in my district tell me, if you want to get kids excited about math and science and just why it is important and how it applies, just start talking about the space program and you will get their attention. Why is that? I think there is something that burns in the heart of every human being, not just every American but every human being: a sense of curiosity, what is our destiny. We all know we have explored the world. There is much more to explore in this world, but we also know that much of it has been explored. What is man's destiny? Is it just to reside here on planet earth, or is it to reach out and truly grasp the stars, to go to other planets, to visit other stars, to explore new worlds, to some day colonize other places in the universe? If I could quote Neil Armstrong, his ``one small step for man,'' we had a small step a few weeks ago with the Mars Pathfinder, an incredibly successful mission, a mission that was launched from Cape Canaveral in December of last year, and it arrived at the red planet, a successful landing of the Mars Pathfinder vehicle shown here in this diagram, or this is actually a photograph of Mars. This is a photograph taken of the Sojourner, the vehicle that is able to go out and explore around on the planet. Mr. Speaker, I want to also show this very, very interesting photograph. The Sojourner rolled off of the Mars Pathfinder and then turned around and took a picture of the Mars Pathfinder, and here we can see the Mars Pathfinder, and these bags that are around it are actually deflated balloons. The way that Pathfinder landed, once it came into the atmosphere balloons all around the Mars Pathfinder blew up, and the thing actually bounced on the surface something like 20 times and then came to rest. Slowly the air was let out of the balloons, and the thing opened up and out goes this rover. Here we can actually see in this photograph the tracks that the rover made in the surface of the planet. So it is a fascinating vehicle. It is a tremendous success, something I think that everybody at NASA can be proud of, particularly the people at JPL.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding this time to me, and I rise in strong support of the rule before us and in strong support of the bill, H.R. 2203, the fiscal year 1998 energy and water appropriation. Mr. Speaker, my colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. McDade] had a very difficult task before him of balancing all of the many meritorious and various requests with the very limited budget, and I commend him, his work as well as the other members of the committee and the ranking member. I would like to take this opportunity to express my particular support for the chairman's commitment to continuing to place an emphasis on coastal storm damage prevention projects, and in particular where there is an obvious and clear Federal responsibility and culpability. Mr. Speaker, we have experienced considerable erosion problems along our beaches in Florida and along the beaches in Brevard and Indian River Counties in my district in particular. In particular in Brevard County, there is a very obvious Federal responsibility in that much of the erosion began after the creation of a Federal inlet at Port Canaveral. The committee has chosen to continue to place a priority in these projects, and in particular they recognize the fairness and honesty and are continuing to pursue this. And I am hopeful, hopeful that the administration may soon realize the error of their ways in opposing such projects and begin to once again request funding for these very, very critical programs. We have seen the increasing devastation caused by hurricanes in recent years, and it is important that we pursue policies that protect our citizens and our property from these storms. Much like levees and dikes protect our citizens and property from floods along lakes, rivers and streams, storm damage prevention projects in the form of beach renourishment projects offer the same protection to our coastal citizens and properties from the high seas and the damage that accompanies these storms. I again commend the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. McDade] and I urge all my colleagues to support this rule and the underlying bill.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, sometimes you have to wonder if those on the other side who are talking about the tax package are misinformed or simply uninformed. Maybe they have not read the bill. Maybe they are so uncomfortable with the idea of tax cuts that they are attacking the bill out of habit more than conviction. Whatever the case, it seems that the rhetoric I am hearing has no connection to reality. If a person were to call me and say, hello, I make $500,000 a year, how would your tax proposal affect me, I would have to give him bad news. Would he be eligible for $500 per child tax credit? No. Would he be eligible for the education tax credit? No. That is interesting. I thought that those were the two biggest provisions that were included in this tax package. They are. Not a penny of it goes to high income people. Just from this fact alone, we can see that the charges that this tax cut package goes primarily to the rich are false.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Madam Speaker, let me begin by saying that I would like to be a cosponsor of the legislation being submitted by the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. McHale], and I very much endorse his very eloquent comments. I know Teddy Roosevelt has been an inspiration for me, not so much in my political career, but as well as a young man growing up and seeing how somebody like him could overcome adversity and take the risks that he did. So I congratulate the gentleman and the gentleman from California [Mr. Cunningham], on your endeavor, and I would like to support you in that. Madam Speaker, I rise this afternoon to talk about our Nation's space program. As all Americans know, our Nation's success in the arena of space has been a source of great pride and inspiration for many Americans, particularly our Nation's youth. Of course, it all got started by the people who were willing to take risks. There is probably nobody who has taken more of a risk than John Kennedy when he made the commitment to go to the Moon, and he said we go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard. The way to the Moon was paved by those many men and women who worked on the programs Mercury and Gemini, and then ultimately the successful Apollo program. Of course, following that we had the tremendous success of our shuttle program. The shuttle has proven its durability and its tremendous versatility, a vehicle that can go up and come back, a vehicle that can go up, retrieve satellites, bring them back to Earth and then launch them again. Of course, we recently all across the world were spellbound by the tremendous success of the unmanned program to Mars, the Mars Pathfinder, and the rover Sojourner and how that fascinated not only all Americans, but particularly our Nation's youth. Now we are getting very close to the point where we will be launching and assembling our Nation's space station, a tremendous international cooperative event involving people not only here in the United States, but as well people in Europe and in Japan. I have with me on my left a diagram of what the orbiting space station would look like. In this particular diagram, you can see the shuttle in the background there docked to the space station, and it is delivering another element. This will be hopefully becoming a reality in the next 12 to 18 months. We have some ongoing serious problems that we need to work through with the Russians and their failure to fund their components of the space station, but if we are really going to have an ongoing, growing space program, one of the things we need to overcome is the problem of the high cost of getting payloads into orbit. One of the ways we are hoping to do that is with this vehicle shown here in this poster, the X-33, the next reusable launch vehicle. This a vehicle that is being developed right now by Lockheed-Martin out in California, and this vehicle hopefully will dramatically reduce the cost of getting payloads into orbit. The goal or desire is to reduce the cost by a factor of 10, because that is one of the most expensive things about us going into space, is the actual cost of getting a pound from the surface up into orbit. This vehicle will be very similar to the shuttle, in that it will go up and come back and go up and come back, but will be using new modern technology that we all hope, all of us here in the House of Representatives, but as well all of those men and women that work in our space program at places like Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center, at the Jet Propulsion Center in Pasadena, CA, we hope it will dramatically lower the cost so we can do more. What do we want to do? What are our hopes and dreams in terms of the future of going up into space, and what would we like to be able to accomplish? Well, this next poster I have here shows something that I think has some real potential. It shows men and women working on the surface of the moon and doing what? Well, one of the proposals that has been put forward is that we may be able to collect solar energy on the Moon and actually send it by microwave beams. The technology on this has all been worked out. It is not new technology. Send it to the Earth in a way that we could get electricity so we would not have to use nuclear powerplants and use fossil fuels. You are talking about a completely clean way to generate abundant forms of electrical power. If we can develop cheaper, more inexpensive ways to get payloads into orbit, it may be possible for us to reduce the cost of electricity to as little as 3 cents per kilowatt. Madam Speaker, I encourage all our colleagues to support the Nation's space program and the tremendous promise that it holds.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise this afternoon to speak about our space program and the recent successes that it has had. They really, truly have been spectacular. They have drawn the attention of the whole world. As all of us know, there are some risks associated with going up into space. It is not a business for those who are risk averse but the payoffs are tremendous and we have seen that with all the tremendous breakthroughs in science and technology that came from our Apollo program and Mercury and Gemini programs. Those were really the pioneers, those were the men and women who first got involved, led the race to the Moon and we learned a great deal, a tremendous amount. Then we were able to follow on from all that with the current reusable launch vehicle that we have, the space shuttle program, a program that has shown and demonstrated its tremendous durability and its tremendous versatility with the ability to go up into space and retrieve satellites and fix those satellites and then redeploy them back out into space. Of course, right now we are currently involved with the shuttle-Mir program. We all know there are some serious concerns about the Mir and its ability to survive, but we have learned a great deal from men in space, from the cooperative effort there. But really what I did want to talk quite a bit about and acknowledge the tremendous work of NASA and particularly the people at JPL and everybody that was involved in this program, the tremendous success of the Mars Pathfinder program. Indeed, I think it has captured the imagination of men and women, young and old all around the globe. I just wanted to share with my colleagues today some of these tremendous photographs that have been made available to me by NASA officials. This is a photograph taken by the rover after it went off the ramp there. You can see here these tracks in the Martian soil. You can look back and see the Pathfinder vehicle right there on the surface of Mars where it landed. Then this is a shot taken by the Pathfinder of the Sojourner vehicle. It is really a tremendous photograph, tremendous detail. You can see the tremendous detail in the soil and in the rocks. There is our little rover, Sojourner. An amazing vehicle. It survived very nicely the landing on Mars and it has been roving around using solar power. These are the solar panels on the top of the Sojourner and it collects solar energy and it is able to travel around on the surface of Mars, analyzing rocks. It is really going to provide our scientists a tremendous amount of information about Mars, Mars history, and it is already revealing that Mars may have at one time had a climate much more similar to Earth's than what it is right now. I would also like to share, Mr. Speaker, with my colleagues here an artist's rendering of our international space station, something that we definitely need to get up in space soon to replace the Mir with all its associated problems. But this is going to be a great, tremendous opportunity for people from Europe and Japan, and hopefully if the Russians can get it together, they will be able to stay involved in it, and where people from all over the world will be working together doing tremendous scientific research. Where do we go from there is the question. We all want to see the space station up there and flying in space, but what is next? We need to go on from there. We do not want to just stop at that point. Here I have for you some artist's renderings of some very exciting concepts. This would be for a lunar base and the possibility of having something like this in the future truly does exist. For example, one of the potential uses of going back to the Moon is to actually collect solar energy on the surface of the Moon and beam it, using microwaves, to the Earth. This would be an inexhaustible source of solar energy that could be used well into the future. It would eliminate fossil fuel usages and nuclear power plants. Definitely a cheap and inexhaustible source of energy. But this is really what I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about today, and, that is, maybe someday the possibility of going on to Mars with a manned mission. There are people within NASA as well as within the American space society talking about ideas of how we could someday send men and women to Mars. This shows a Mars base and a return vehicle there as well as a little greenhouse. This is what it could someday be. I encourage all my colleagues to support NASA and support our space efforts.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I yield to the gentleman from Illinois.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Reclaiming my time, I would be happy to do that. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Regula].

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, this has been a very interesting debate. I know my father raised me with the belief always that the American Indians had gotten a raw deal in our Nation's history. I have tried to be very sympathetic to many of the problems they have had. Clearly, from listening to the debate today, this issue of tax collection is being handled very well in some States. But also it is very clear that there are some very serious problems with what is going on in some other areas. Indeed, I think the gentleman from Oklahoma has spelled out very clearly the nature of this problem and the severity of the problem. Indeed, it is worth noting that if we did not have a problem here and that if it did not need to be dealt with, we would not have a situation where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Conference of State Legislators, these are all our colleagues who work in the State houses, have supported this. The National League of Cities, no less, is supporting this. So I would encourage my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on the Istook-Visclosky amendment. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Istook].

Mr. WELDON of Florida. We asked the Park Service to designate Canaveral National Seashore as ``no nudity,'' like they had at Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and they have refused, for reasons that I do not understand, and we continue to have a serious ongoing problem. And then when they posted those signs, there were a lot of constituents in my district who were very disturbed about that. And there is concern amongst my constituents, because of their unwillingness to designate this beach as no nudity, that they may in the future again try to set aside a portion of the beach. So I am responding to my constituents, putting into law language that prohibits the Park Service from doing this again. And frankly, I think it was very inappropriate for the Park Service to do that in the first place.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. In closing, I would like to thank the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Yates] for supporting my amendment. I would encourage all of my colleagues to support this amendment. This is about whether moms can go to the beach with their kids and enjoy themselves. I have lots of case reports that I can share with any of my colleagues here of how the enjoyment of those families on the beach was very, very much intruded upon.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment offered by the gentleman from Oklahoma. While we all want to see our national parks preserved, I believe we have a responsibility in this body to have some oversight of a program such as this where we are designating huge areas of our country to be involved in an international program. This is not something that has been debated by an authorizing committee at all. We have no legal language on it.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I have a beach in my district, Canaveral National Seashore. It is a beautiful beach, a pristine beach, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful on the entire East Coast of the United States. Several years ago this beach began to be taken over by nudists and other people who engage in lewd and lascivious activity. I have with me today a binder containing more than 250 police reports indicating the nature of this lewd and lascivious behavior. This amendment is not about simply prohibiting people from sunbathing in the nude or swimming in the nude. This amendment is about sexual harassment of a form and nature that pales in comparison to what we see on the job sites in many of our places today. Indeed, if I were to describe some of the content of what is going on on this beach in my district, we would need a rating system for C-SPAN. I repeat, this is not just about nude sunbathers. This is about a lot of behavior that I would rather not even describe here on the floor of the House. Now, I approached the National Park Service and asked them to deal with Canaveral National Seashore like they dealt with Cape Cod in 1991 under the Bush administration, where they designated that nudity would not be allowed, and the National Park Service refused. In response to that, the county commission in Brevard County, FL, where the beach is located, passed an ordinance designating no nudity. And then, against my recommendations, the National Park Service chose to post signs designating a portion of the beach as ``clothing optional.'' What happened subsequent to that was that there were people arrested for violating the county's nudity ordinance, and then they used the existence of those signs in their defense and the charges were dropped. Now, in the defense of the National Park Service, they have now since removed those signs designating a portion of the beach as ``clothing optional.'' However, people in my community remain concerned that the National Park Service will not respect local authority on this issue and may choose to redesignate an area of the beach as clothing optional. My amendment is very simple. It basically states that the Park Service cannot designate a portion of the beach as clothing optional in the future. Additionally, my amendment states that this will not be in effect if the county should repeal its county ordinance. I therefore encourage all my colleagues to support the amendment. My amendment is very simple. It basically states it is limited to Canaveral National Seashore. Its also states that if the local ordinance is repealed, that this amendment is no longer in effect. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I object.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Reclaiming my time, some serious concerns exist with this Member regarding the authorization of this in terms of serious concerns raised by a lot of my constituents in terms of what this actually involves. I think to ridicule the opponents of this as though they are members of a flat earth society is wrong. I am on the Committee on Science along with the gentleman from California [Mr. Brown] and the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Coburn]. We really need to have a serious vetting of this issue, exactly what the program involves, what exact bearing it may have in the future in terms of our control as a body as the U.S. Congress of these national parks and these so-called biosphere areas and exactly what will be the United Nations involvement in them. After that process, it may be determined that this is certainly nothing that we need to be concerned about and it may garner the support of this body. On the other hand, I have yet to be convinced. Therefore, I feel that the gentleman from Oklahoma's amendment is a good amendment, I support his amendment, and I have supported his amendment in the committee.