[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 34 (Wednesday, March 17, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H1219-H1225]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2230
                    MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Rogers of Alabama). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. 
Pallone) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, earlier this week, an international 
consulting firm that specializes in monitoring the pharmaceutical 
industry released a report that showed that prescription drug spending 
in the United States rose 11 percent last year, and Mr. Speaker, I have 
heard President Bush plans to highlight his health care achievements 
this week, and undoubtedly he will boast about the passage of his 
prescription drug legislation.
  However, Mr. Speaker, seniors have already done the math and realize 
that the President's law will not help them with the ever-increasing 
costs of their prescription drugs.
  Just consider, a senior who now spends $1,000 a year on prescription 
drugs will end up paying at least $857 a year under the law passed by 
the Republican majority here in the House and signed into law by the 
President. Seniors with bills of $5,000 a year will still pay at least 
$3,920 under the Republican law. I do not understand how the President 
can tout this law as helpful to seniors when you look at those 
statistics.
  The trouble is that both the House Republican leadership and the 
President are having a difficult time selling this bad prescription 
drug law to seniors. Back when we were about to vote on this bill last 
year, the President was having a difficult time selling the plan to 
some of my fellow Republican colleagues right here on the House floor. 
In order to overcome the skepticism that not only most of the Democrats 
but even some of the Republicans had, President Bush and his 
administration got involved in some questionable activities that 
continue today.
  Now, these activities are outlined in an editorial yesterday in the 
New York Times which was titled ``The Actuary and the Actor,'' and I do 
not like to read the entire editorial usually in the newspaper, but I 
have to this evening, Mr. Speaker, because I just think that this New 
York Times editorial says it all, about how this administration is 
essentially misleading the public with regard to this Medicare bill, 
just like they misled many of my colleagues on the Republican side who 
ended up voting for the bill that night when we sat here for almost 3 
hours before the voting was closed.
  The New York Times editorial is as follows: ``An Orwellian taint is 
emerging in the Bush administration's big victory last year in wringing 
the Medicare prescription drug subsidy from a balky Congress. The plan 
is being sold to the public through propagandistic ads disguised as TV 
news reports, and it turns out the government's top Medicare actuary 
was muzzled by superiors during the debate about the program's price 
tag.
  ``Richard Foster, one of the government's foremost Medicare experts, 
says

[[Page H1220]]

he was ordered not to provide requested information to Congress last 
fall when doubts were being raised about the drug benefit's cost. The 
administration denies this, but a ranking former official has confirmed 
Mr. Foster's story. As the bill was being considered, Mr. Foster 
privately cautioned that its cost could amount to as much as $600 
billion, while the White House publicly stuck to the Congressional 
Budget Office figure of $400 billion over 10 years. The administration 
eventually conceded a cost of $534 billion, but only after the bill was 
safely signed into law.
  ``With program in hand, the administration then attempted to rally 
support, and take political credit, with government-produced TV ads 
masquerading as news reports. Actors were hired by the Department of 
Health and Human Services to pose as television journalists purveying 
faux upbeat `news' segments about the expanded Medicare coverage.''
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. PALLONE. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, my understanding is that was with 
taxpayer dollars that was done. Is that correct?
  Mr. PALLONE. I appreciate the gentleman bringing it up. It is 100 
percent paid for with taxpayer dollars, and these taxpayer dollars are 
being used to pay for these videos and these advertisements.
  This is a continuation of the New York Times editorial: ``Actors were 
hired by the Department of Health and Human Services to pose as 
television journalists purveying faux upbeat `news' segments about the 
expanded Medicare coverage. The hope is that TV stations will air them 
as their own. In one version, anchors are offered a script in which 
they promise that `reporter Karen Ryan,' an actress, will explain the 
details of the new drug plan.
  ``This sleight of hand openly deepens doubts about White House 
credibility on a complex issue. The public deserves straightforward 
information about the changes in Medicare, and Federal agencies should 
not be engaging in political spin. This is no way to run a democracy 
nourished by information and taxpayers' money.''
  Now, again, I am just reading my colleagues the editorial of the New 
York Times. As my colleague from Ohio (Mr. Brown) mentioned, this is 
taxpayers' money. This is not political campaign ads on behalf of the 
President's reelection. These are taxpayer funds.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to 
yield, I think one of the fundamental questions here, and I appreciate 
the gentleman from New Jersey's (Mr. Pallone) leading this special 
order tonight and the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) being 
here, and the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen), all of whom have been 
very involved in this Medicare issue.
  I think there are two questions. One is how can you justify taxpayer 
dollars being spent on an ad campaign in such a politically charged 
issue? Second, when the Medicare benefit does not even go into effect 
for 2 years so that you are running these ads at taxpayer expense 
during the Presidential election year, informing the voters and the 
beneficiaries of something that is 2 years away.
  I think the second question to ask is, why are they having so much 
trouble convincing the public the Medicare bill is a great bill? The 
fact is the public is not biting. The public understands intuitively, 
the seniors overwhelmingly, and I think people of all ages 
overwhelmingly, understand that George Bush and the Republican 
leadership have sat down with the drug industry and sat down with the 
insurance industry, and they went into the Oval Office, and they came 
into this Chamber, the drug and insurance industry, and they wrote this 
legislation.
  A $400 billion, they told us, bill, $139 billion of that goes to 
increased profits or the drug industry. Another $14 billion of our tax 
dollars goes to the insurance industry. It is just clear this is 
another example of President Bush's very close allegiance to the drug 
industry and the insurance industry.
  The word on the street in Washington is the President is going to get 
$100 million from the drug industry for his campaign. The drug industry 
loves this President. They have gotten everything they want from this 
President, and you can bet if that $100 million from the prescription 
drug industry goes to President Bush, that is one of the reasons 
seniors in this country are paying such a high price. No wonder it is 
darn near impossible to convince seniors that they got a good deal with 
this drug bill.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, if I could just interrupt for a second, 
what happens from my experience is when I go to the senior centers in 
my district and I talk to the seniors, I do not have to say anything 
because essentially they have already figured it out. You know how it 
is. Senior citizens look at everything. They read all the material, and 
many of them just tell me they have calculated this is a voluntary 
program, it does not take effect for another 2 years, very much aware 
of the fact that it is not going to help them for the next 2 years. 
They just see it as a political ploy to get through the next election.
  Then when they actually sit down and figure out how much they have to 
pay out of pocket versus what they are going to get in terms of 
benefit, they say, Why would I sign up for it? It is essentially a 
volunteer program. You do not have to sign up for it.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. PALLONE. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I would posit that this is a great example 
of waste, fraud and abuse being perpetrated by this administration in 
trying to sell a pig in the poke to senior citizens who are not buying 
it, and it is waste, fraud and abuse in its most classical sense for at 
least three reasons.
  Number one, it is not working. Seniors listen to this and almost 
laugh at it. I was at a meeting put on by the local chapter of the AARP 
in Edmonds, Washington last week, and there were about 150 seniors 
there, 150 seniors who had listened to this ``gobbledy-gook'' put out 
by the administration, trying to sell this ad to them. Not one single 
person out of 150 seniors, not the lobbyists who they hire, but the 
real seniors who supposedly need to depend on real coverage, not one 
person bought this as a decent plan for them. And I have got to tell 
you, there was fire and vigor and youthfulness in that room because 
they were so angry at the government trying to sell them this wasted 
opportunity. So first thing is the waste, because it is not going to 
work, because seniors are not going to buy it.
  Second, it clearly is propaganda. I think the GAO has looked at this, 
General Accounting Office, and they cited several omissions, at least 
in the charitable sense of the term, of these advertisements not 
telling seniors what the real deal is; which is, number one, left out 
the fact they conveniently forgot that this legislation prohibited 
Uncle Sam from trying to try to get better drug prices for seniors, 
prohibited seniors from getting drugs from Canada, prohibiting 
reimportation in a safe way. Somehow they conveniently forgot that. It 
is waste because it is propaganda.
  The third is it is simply not true. Let me tell you, it seems like 
every week we hear about another abuse of governmental power here. But 
let me tell you about one I heard about just yesterday, and that was 
that this administration is sending out deliberately phony alleged 
videos that purport to be news accounts from news reporters which, in 
fact, were paid models and actors who were faking like they were doing 
a news conference. Now if that is not an abuse of government authority, 
I do not know what is. Right now, the General Accounting Office lawyers 
are investigating this abuse and I think they are going to find a 
violation. I will tell you why.
  This administration hired actors to pose as people. One of the people 
they hired, actors, who at the ending of this video that the 
administration is using our taxpayer dollars to send this around to all 
these local news stations around the country, and at the end they have 
this actor who says, ``In Washington, I am Karen Ryan reporting.'' 
Turns out she was just an actor on the take, paid for by this 
administration with our hard-earned dollars. It is a fraud. It is a 
fake. It is being investigated, and the administration should be 
ashamed of itself, not only for the substance of this bill which is 
insulting enough to seniors, but then they pay

[[Page H1221]]

these people to fake seniors, to think there is cheering mobs out 
there. They pay these people to clap for this thing when we go out and 
talk to real seniors that I know think it is a bunch of garbage, 
politely speaking.
  So this is a perfect incidence of waste, fraud and abuse that I wish 
my Republican colleagues would write letters to the White House and 
tell them to knock it off because it is our taxpayers dollars that are 
being wasted here, and it is not going to work.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate what you said, and I just 
wanted to go briefly, and then I would like to yield to the gentleman 
from Maine, back to this story with Richard Foster who was the actuary 
who was basically told, do not reveal the true cost of this Medicare 
bill, because I think we have to mention that on the night when this 
bill was passed, and you will all remember, we were here in the House 
Chamber.
  It was about 3 o'clock when the votes were first posted and the bill 
was defeated. The majority had voted ``no'' on the bill because they 
knew that it was basically worthless. And there is no question in my 
mind that if the Republicans who were wavering that night, and their 
arms had to be twisted and there were all kinds of things being done by 
the President and the administration to try to get people to change 
their votes, that if they had known what Foster knew and was told not 
to tell us, that the actual cost of this was not $400 billion over 10 
years, which was what was in the budget, but $600 billion, essentially 
50 percent more, there was no way that bill would have passed.
  So this is a fraudulent effort to deny the true cost of the bill to 
the Congress to get those votes for the bill, and even with all that, 
it was almost impossible. If they had not twisted arms and basically 
bribed a couple of people that night, they still would not have gotten 
the votes. That is why the Richard Foster story is so important. That 
is why I think he has to be commended for coming forward and telling 
the truth, even at this late date.
  Mr. ALLEN. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. PALLONE. I yield to the gentleman from Maine.
  Mr. ALLEN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding and for 
leading this Special Order. And the case of Richard Foster, though his 
name may not yet be a household word, is one that needs some review. It 
is an example of what we have tried to explain to people, that the 
legislative process in this Chamber, the democratic process in this 
Chamber, has been corrupted by special interests. And those are strong 
words, but there are no kind words that fit what the Republican 
majority is doing in this House.
  So let us just for the moment look at the case of Richard Foster. 
Back in June 2003, when the Medicare bill first came to the floor of 
this House, it came with a CBO, Congressional Budget Office, assessment 
that the cost would be $395 billion over 10 years. At that very time, 
the chief Medicare actuary, Richard Foster, had done a number of 
scenarios, all of which showed that the cost of the bill would be 
somewhere between $500 billion and $600 billion. He settled on around 
$550 billion.
  He never told any Member of Congress what that projection showed. And 
why did he not tell any Member of Congress? Because his boss, Tom 
Scully, the head of Medicare for this country, told Richard Foster that 
if he told Members of Congress what his numbers showed, that it would 
cost $550 billion and not $400 billion, he, Tom Scully, would fire 
Richard Foster.

                              {time}  2245

  So here you have the chief Medicare actuary, under an ethical 
obligation, at least, to convey to the Congress of the United States 
information about what the Medicare law was likely to cost, and he 
could not say it because he would be fired.
  Well, now look what has happened. The bill comes back in the fall and 
we have the long night, the 3-hour vote held open. And the process had 
been corrupted before that because Democratic Members from the House 
had been appointed to the conference committee, they were not allowed 
in the room. They were not allowed to attend the conference to which 
they had been appointed because the Republican chair of the conference 
would not let them in.
  Now, if you try to explain this to people back home who read their 
textbooks about how American democracy is supposed to work, they do not 
believe you. They cannot believe that one party here, that the majority 
party would simply shut down the legislative process, would withhold 
information, would manipulate information.
  And it continues today, because now that bill has become a law by the 
narrowest of margins, a bill which would not have passed if the truth 
had been told about its projected cost.
  Now what happens? Well, Health and Human Services goes out and runs 
TV ads. Many people have seen them. They say same Medicare, better 
benefits. And it is not true. We are witnessing a concerted effort by 
the administration, in close collaboration with the insurance industry 
and the pharmaceutical industry, to move 35 percent of Medicare 
beneficiaries out of the fee-for-service plan they have today into 
private insurance.
  And why is private insurance such a problem? Well, it costs more. It 
costs a lot more. And Members on the other side of the aisle have come 
down into the well here and they have said Medicare is in financial 
difficulty, that we need to do something; and what we need are private 
insurance companies to take it over.
  Well, nobody in Maine has ever said to me, you know, I am willing to 
give up my choice of doctors and hospitals, which I have under 
traditional Medicare, and what I really want is a choice of insurance 
plans. Send me those brochures. Send me those insurance agents. That is 
the way to take care of our health care for seniors. Nobody has ever 
said that.
  The latest projections are that the insurance companies will need to 
be paid 20 percent more than it costs today to deliver health care to 
the average Medicare beneficiary. A 20 percent bonus. A 20 percent 
overpayment to the second biggest lobby here in Washington.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield.
  Mr. ALLEN. I would be glad to yield.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I think it is intriguing what the 
gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen) is saying about the whole Medicare 
structure and how my friends on the other side of the aisle and 
President Bush, in large part at the behest of the insurance industry, 
which sees huge profits in this Medicare bill, say that they want to 
privatize it.
  One of the most important facts about Medicare public versus a 
private insurance HMO Medicare is administrative costs. Traditional 
Medicare, the Medicare that we know, that 85 percent of America's 
seniors are enrolled in, has about 2 percent administrative costs, 
while private insurance has administrative costs averaging between 15 
and 20 percent.
  So no wonder if we have privatized Medicare, it will cost taxpayers 
more, yet Medicare beneficiary seniors will actually get less.
  Mr. ALLEN. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to finish right now with a 
couple of comparisons.
  The $80 million that Health and Human Services is going to spend to 
advertise this law, which does not take effect until January 2006, and 
Secretary Thompson made it clear why he was doing it, he said because 
there is too much criticism of the law. People do not understand that 
it is really the same Medicare. Of course, the author of the law in the 
House was quoted on television as saying, ``To those who say this bill 
will destroy Medicare as we know it, my answer is, I certainly hope 
so.'' He has made it clear his goal is to destroy Medicare as we know 
it.
  But I wanted just to finish up with this: $80 million in advertising 
to the American people. $80 million. Guess how much the President 
proposes to cut out of rural health care? One-half that amount, $39 
million. We cannot afford $39 million to improve rural health care, but 
we can spend $80 million just to advertise a flawed Medicare bill to 
the American public.
  The $80 million is more than the $58 million which the incoming FDA 
commissioner, Lester Crawford, says would be needed to establish a drug 
reimportation plan. So in other words, we are going to spend, according 
to the Bush administration, $80 million to run

[[Page H1222]]

TV ads to help his reelection campaign out of the Federal Government, 
to promote a bill that is flawed, $80 million to do that, when we could 
spend $58 million and establish a reimportation plan that would allow 
seniors to buy their drugs from Canada without interference, and that 
would reduce their present drug prices dramatically.
  Those are the priorities of this administration and the Republican 
Congress. And I do not know of anyone in my State of Maine who says 
those are the right priorities for the country.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments; and 
before I yield to the gentleman from Washington, I just wanted to say 
when I was listening to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) and 
his statement about Republican abuse of power, that is essentially what 
this is. This is an abuse of power by the President and by the 
Republicans in the Congress.
  And when I listened to my colleague from Maine and he talked about 
how the Medicare administrator, Tom Scully, had basically threatened 
Richard Foster that if he told the truth about the numbers that he 
would be fired, what the gentleman did not mention and I will add, is, 
of course, what happened to Tom Scully. Tom Scully during all this, 
while this Medicare legislation was moving in committee and moving in 
the House, was negotiating to get a job, which he ultimately got, with 
the law firm that represents the pharmaceutical industry. He actually 
got a waiver from the President that allowed him to negotiate for the 
job.
  Normally, the agency rules that he worked for say that you cannot go 
out and seek a job and try to find yourself a job while you are still 
in the agency working on this legislation. So the abuse is just 
unbelievable, and the fact that he got the waiver and everything.
  Mr. ALLEN. If the gentleman would yield just for a moment, Mr. 
Speaker.
  There is one other finish to this story. We are not sitting here on 
the Democratic sides of the aisle making all this up. Yesterday, 
Secretary Thompson initiated an investigation into these facts: that 
Richard Foster was threatened with being fired if he disclosed the true 
cost of the Medicare bill. So now Health and Human Services itself is 
investigating what clearly, at least to my mind, was an ethical and 
perhaps a legal breach by this administration, but one that clearly was 
absolutely essential, absolutely essential to getting the Medicare bill 
to become the Medicare law.
  Here again, we see a kind of distortion and misrepresentation of 
information that really has no place in the House of Representatives.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Washington.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. I 
believe it is very important we bring this issue to the American 
people. Because in this election, the issue on which the people have to 
decide is if there is anything that comes out of the White House that 
they believe. Is there anything that comes out of the administration, 
anything, they can believe.
  On weapons of mass destruction and connections to al Qaeda and all 
the reasons why we went to war in Iraq, it is clear they made it all 
up. Now we come to the domestic side of things; and I sit on the 
Committee on Ways and Means, and Secretary Thompson comes before us and 
admits that when they did a study on the inequities of health in this 
country, that they rewrote it because they did not like the way it came 
out. The Secretary said, well, we are going to change that. The next 
thing we know, the same person is calling for an investigation of his 
own Department on the issue of the actuary hiding the figures from the 
Congress.
  This is the gang that cannot shoot straight. They cannot tell the 
truth about anything. Because if they told the truth about anything, 
they would have to change the way they act. They could not give all 
this money away in tax breaks. They would have to pay for the programs 
that they tell the people they are giving them.
  Now, I had a very interesting experience over the weekend, and I 
suspect some Members will have the same experience this weekend. I went 
back to Seattle and had a community meeting in a retirement home with 
about 100 or 125 people there, and I showed them a video which has been 
made by the Families USA about the whole issue of the drug issue. Mr. 
Walter Cronkite is the narrator. Now, everybody knows Walter Cronkite. 
He is so believable and has so much integrity, he could tell you the 
sun was going to come up in the West and you would almost think it was 
going to because he is so believable.
  Well, these 125 people, and this is an old people's home, where 
probably most everybody is 70 or older. So we are talking about people 
who are real senior citizens. They sat there and they listened to this, 
and they could not believe the things that are in this thing that have 
never come out.
  So, then, we talked about these advertising statements they had been 
seeing on television. They said those television ads are not right, 
they are not telling us the truth, if Walter Cronkite says that, that 
we are not going to get any help until 2006, and that this drug card 
they are coming out with is a hoax of the first order.
  These are people who some were school teachers or business people or 
whatever who are retired. They are now in their 70s or 80s. One of them 
said, you know, that drug card, I think we ought to boycott that drug 
card. I do not think we should even bother taking it. Why would I go 
and choose a card and they give me a list, and they say, now, these are 
the drugs that this card covers, and I pay $30 for it; and then after I 
got the card in my pocket, I am locked in for a year and they can take 
the drugs off the list.
  The seniors were incredulous that this administration was trying to 
run some kind of game on them. I said to them, the reason you are going 
to get this card on the first of April is so you will have it in your 
hands when you go to vote in November. They want you to believe you 
have got something from them. But do not believe there is anything in 
that card. There is nothing guaranteed except that you have been sold a 
piece of paper for $30.
  And these people said, what can we do to fix this, or what can we do 
to stop this? Do you think there will be some change in this Congress? 
I said, look, we are having an election year. Nothing in here is going 
to be good public policy. It is all going to be about convincing the 
American people that the Republicans have done everything good for 
them. And this drug card and this pharmaceutical bill is simply the 
worst of the examples, but there are all kinds of others.
  The video by Mr. Cronkite shows the donut hole. You could hear the 
audience gasp when they realized that they were going to go for a long 
period of time, have to pay a premium and have no benefits. They could 
not believe that. And the donut hole does not stay the same. It grows. 
Every year it gets larger.
  Finally, the crowning blow of it is what they discovered. They said, 
you mean when we pay this once, up to $5,100, or whatever, that we have 
to do it again the next year? You mean this happens every year to us? 
We fall into the donut hole every year? I said, yes. I said if that is 
what you want for public policy as senior citizens, then you ought to 
vote Mr. Bush back in, but I think it is a terrible hoax.
  And if Members of Congress have the smarts to go out and show this 
video, they will have turned the whole thing around. Because these 
seniors watch TV, and they are being a little bit affected by those 
phony ads.
  As I was coming over here, I was listening to my car radio. The 
Department admitted that they had put those out as fake news reports. 
They taped them in such a way that they knew if they were picked up 
just as they were taped, they would look like a news report.

                              {time}  2300

  They planned to fake the old folks out.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, it is incredible to me. The whole idea was 
to take this video with the actors and hope a station would use it and 
think it was the real thing.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. They did it, and Fox News and all of the rest of these 
phony news stations picked it up and put it out there as though it was 
real. There is nothing real about this administration. They have 
misrepresented from the Iraq war all of the way through, the economy, 
the deficit, all

[[Page H1223]]

these things are all predicated on misrepresentations. I try not to use 
the word ``lie,'' but they have certainly misrepresented and tried to 
delude the people. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and 
some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the old 
people all of the time, and they are going to pay in this election for 
having tried to run this game on old people.
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman taking the time to be out 
here at 11 at night putting this program on together, because it 
requires real dedication to come out here night after night and do 
this, and I thank the gentleman for what he has done.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, as the gentleman pointed out to me, it is 
only 8 p.m. in Seattle.
  The other thing that I wanted to point out, we have talked about the 
misrepresentation and the schemes, if you will, that were being played 
the night when this was voted. And, of course, the numbers being wrong 
was certainly one of them. But one of the things was that after the 
vote occurred at 3 a.m. and the board was left open, and there was a 
majority against the bill, and we went on for 3 hours when the 
President and Republican majority tried to change Republican votes, one 
of the people whose vote they tried to change was the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Smith). And we heard very credible accounts from the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith) and others about the chicanery that 
was going on, statements being made to him about since he was retiring, 
his son would never get to succeed him in Congress if he did not switch 
his vote because the money would not be there by the Republican Party 
to finance his campaign.
  I just wanted to mention today it was announced that the House 
Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is going to investigate 
these allegations that were made in that regard. Until today, they had 
refused to take up the issue. However, they did announce today that 
they were going to take up the issue. I do not know what the outcome is 
going to be.
  If we think about the way that they got Members to change votes that 
night and the misinformation provided about how much it was going to 
cost and now all of these ads being paid for by the taxpayers to 
convince people this is a good bill, it is just a barrage of 
misinformation.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, today was the second shoe. The first shoe 
was Mr. Foster saying, I had the figures and they told me they would 
fire me if I gave the figures. Then we find out with the phony figures 
out here, they still could not get enough votes until they twisted some 
guy's arm into a pretzel. I think it is very important that the 
Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is looking at this issue.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, it needs to be said, too, that our colleague 
who made the assertion that he had been offered essentially a $100,000 
bribe or something akin to that to his son's election campaign was a 
Republican. This was a Republican Member, a colleague, who made this 
assertion, and that is why it is important to find out what happened in 
the situation.
  But I will tell Members why I am here at 11 at night and that is 
there is such a growing pattern of a corruption of democracy here in 
the Chamber that I have great respect for, the House of 
Representatives, the people's House. I am a relatively new Member to 
this Chamber, and it is troublesome to me and I can tell Members it is 
getting very troublesome to my constituents when they hear this 
repeated consistent drum beat of a corruption of the democratic 
process.
  It is not just one thing. It is the fact they do not let Members read 
the bill before they vote on it, which my people believe is a 
corruption of the democratic process, which happened in the Medicare 
bill. It is the fact that when they lose, they leave the time open for 
3 hours to try to break arms, like the Russians did in the Olympic 
Games in the 1960s when we won the game and the Russian official just 
put another several seconds up on the clock. My people believe that is 
a corruption of the democratic process. And then during that 3 hours, 
according to a Republican colleague, he was offered a $100,000 bribe 
essentially to change his vote, which he had the moral integrity not to 
do, by the way, and remained a ``no'' vote solidly because he believed, 
I suspect, this is a bad bill, as we do. This is a pattern, and it is 
not just isolated to the Medicare bill.

  Let me tell Members about another couple of problems that trouble me. 
I serve on the Committee on Resources, and we had the Department of 
Agriculture people. They supervise our national forests. We found out 
due to some diligence of an investigative reporter, that of our hard-
earned taxpayer money, this administration has spent almost $100,000 
hiring a public relations firm to try to spin the public into accepting 
a forest plan that would allow more old-growth trees to be cut, which 
is against public sentiment in the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky 
Mountains, and this PR firm advised the Department of Agriculture to 
keep it secret. It did not want the public to find out that they had 
spent $100,000 to spin the public. Their memo is a classic. He said we 
cannot tell the public because this is, quote, ``a matter of 
perception.'' We should not be spending $100,000 to create 
misperceptions or worry about perceptions. We ought to give the public 
the straight scope.
  That is not the only one. The Department of the Interior, I picked up 
The Washington Post and I see we have an investigation going on at the 
Department of the Interior of a gentleman who works for the Department 
of the Interior, who, on repeated occasions, essentially was associated 
with beneficial decisions for his former clients in the oil and gas 
industry to open up methane wells in Wyoming and in the Rocky Mountains 
when he was specifically ordered not to do it.
  Time after time, we are finding incidents where common sense and good 
practices of democracies are being violated.
  Let me go back to a fundamental tenet. We have disagreements in this 
Chamber, and our constituents have disagreements. They disagree on a 
lot of things and it is not unexpected that we would have disagreements 
about matters of great import. But Americans ought to be able to expect 
at least one thing from the administration and from the President: That 
is the truth. Even if they may disagree with it, they are entitled to 
the truth in exchange for paying their taxes, and they have not got it, 
repeatedly. I want to go down a list of some of those things.
  The President's administration told the American public and the U.S. 
Congress that the Medicare bill would cost about $460 billion. That was 
false; and more importantly, it was false and known to be false by this 
administration. To add insult to injury, not only was it known to be 
false, they ordered their own actuary to refuse to disclose this 
information to Congress. It is one thing to commit the sin of untruth 
and falsehood, it is a second sin to cover it up, which they have tried 
to do. That is falsehood number one.
  Number two, they used taxpayer money to phony up these videos, acting 
like it is a news report, saying it is a news reporter reporting live, 
Sally Smith or whatever her name was, hiring actors to act like they 
liked the Medicare bill; and seniors all over the country are rejecting 
this Medicare bill. They want to hire actors. It is a falsehood to do 
that, and they did this consciously. They cannot do that by negligence 
or mistake. They made a decision. Somebody who works for the President 
of the United States said, I am going to hire an actor to fake out the 
seniors of this country, consciously, intentionally, and it is wrong.
  Mr. PALLONE. And at taxpayers' expense.
  Mr. INSLEE. And third, they told us their tax cuts were going to 
result in large surplus. We were going to have surpluses as far as the 
eye could see. They cut taxes wildly for the upper class. We now have 
the largest deficit in American history. That is falsehood number 
three, and they keep making the same mistake.

                              {time}  2310

  Fourth, and to me a series that I want to go through, because it is 
one thing to give falsehoods to Americans when it is about money, it is 
another thing to give falsehoods to Americans from the executive branch 
of this country sworn to defend the Constitution and the United States 
of America when it jeopardizes and takes the lives of Americans.

[[Page H1224]]

  I just want to read some quotes that I think we need an accounting of 
and some responsibility from this administration. On March 17, 2003, 
the President of the United States told the American people, and I 
quote, ``Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no 
doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the 
most lethal weapons ever devised.'' That is a direct quote. It was 
false. Of all the information that we have gathered after hundreds of 
millions of dollars, the best evidence we have is that statement by the 
President of the United States, ``it leaves no doubt.'' America 
deserves an answer why the President of the United States told 
Americans that there was no doubt when the facts were at least there 
was significant doubt as reported by multiple intelligence agencies and 
the facts have come to bear that multiple statements by this 
administration were false and as a result of that Americans paid the 
ultimate sacrifice, one of whose family I visited this weekend whose 
children will never see their father again who died in the Tigris River 
trying to save an Iraqi policeman while serving in the United States 
Army. That family and the other 500 families and the other over 3,000 
families of our wounded GIs and Marines and other proud service men and 
women deserve the truth, and they deserve to know why they did not get 
it.
  On August 2, 2002, the Vice President of the United States, while 
talking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a group that deserves the 
truth after their proud service to this country, said, ``Simply stated, 
there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass 
destruction.'' That statement was false. According to the best 
information we have after hundreds of millions of dollars spent 
searching for these weapons, that statement was false. Americans who 
served in Iraq deserve to know why that happened. We do not know why 
that happened. It may have been a failure of intelligence. Our 
intelligence agencies may have overstated the threat. They may have 
left out caveats in their report to the White House. Somebody in the 
political machinery may have stretched, exaggerated, spun; we do not 
know what happened and why those statements that were made were so 
grievously in error that cost American lives, but we deserve an answer 
and this Chamber deserves an answer.
  On January 28, 2003, during his State of the Union address in this 
Chamber to us, the President stated, ``The British Government has 
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of 
uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has 
attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear 
weapons production.'' That statement was false. Americans deserve to 
know the exact circumstances that led to that falsehood being given to 
them leading to this war.
  On March 16, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney on an interview with 
NBC's ``Meet the Press'' said, referring to weapons of mass 
destruction, ``He had years to get good at it. We know that he has been 
absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons and we believe 
he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.'' To our knowledge that 
statement was false.
  On January 9, 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer stated, ``We 
know for a fact that there are weapons there,'' referring to weapons of 
mass destruction. That statement was false.

  On April 10, 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer stated, ``But 
make no mistake, as I said earlier, we have high confidence that they 
have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and 
it is about, and we have high confidence it will be found.'' That 
statement may be correct in the sense that he may have had high 
confidence. He may have had high confidence. But the underlying 
statement was false. With all due respect, we are hopeful about the 
people of Iraq; but this war was based on false information, and 
Americans deserve to know why they did not get the straight scoop about 
this situation.
  On September 19, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated, 
``No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the 
security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime 
of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.''
  People have been saying that, well, gee, the administration is now 
telling us that we did not mean to actually make Americans worried by 
saying this was an immediate threat. But, in fact, the Secretary of 
Defense gave reference to an immediate threat with his own language, 
and on multiple occasions they have continued to make that statement. 
When White House communications director Dan Bartlett was asked if 
Saddam Hussein on January 26, 2003, was ``an imminent threat to the 
United States,'' he stated, ``Well, of course he is.'' This is repeated 
references, and we have page after page after page of statements that 
were false. Again, I want to repeat. The people who made these 
statements may have believed that they were true at the time they were 
making them. We do not know that. I do not know that. I like to give 
people the benefit of the doubt. But when this country has suffered the 
loss of over 500 of its sons and daughters and wives and husbands and 
fathers and mothers, this Chamber owes it to the United States of 
America to get to the absolute bottom of who is responsible for these 
multiple falsehoods on multiple occasions with absolutely no 
contrition, accountability, or responsibility.
  No one has lost their job over this false information except one disc 
jockey. Maybe it was not a disc jockey. He was a person who was 
involved in political discourse. Where is the accountability? Where is 
the personal responsibility for these falsehoods? Where is the smallest 
discipline of anyone for giving Americans false information leading to 
the deaths of over 500 Americans? Where are the changes of procedures? 
Where is the joint committee in this Chamber? Where is the report of 
the Congress? Where is the action from the Republican Party to help us 
find out what happened here? It is missing in action. It is AWOL. With 
all due respect to our intelligence committees, and they have been 
doing some discussion of what is happening here, but it is sadly 
lacking, the type of responsibility that we need to see taken, an 
explanation of what happened to this information.
  Let me make one suggestion when we do get to the bottom of this what 
we are going to find. Let me tell you about a couple of things I have 
found through my research. There was a statement by the administration, 
frankly I cannot recall if it was the President or the Defense 
Secretary that told Americans that Iraq had developed a drone aircraft 
that was capable and intended to be able to spread biological and 
chemical weapons, that could fly over America and spread these 
horrendous materials over the United States of America. Obviously, that 
is something we should be concerned about and we should do everything 
we can to prevent. The problem is that the Air Force, the experts in 
airplanes, had told the administration before they told Americans this 
information, before they told Americans the information, that these 
things were made out of balsa wood and almost duct tape and what they 
were good for is maybe taking pictures. They were not meant for this 
other nefarious purpose. They had that information and did not share it 
with us because frankly there was a lot of doubt about this. There was 
doubt about this. We cannot expect our intelligence service to be 100 
percent, but they did not tell us that.
  These aluminum tubes. The President of the United States in his State 
of the Union address made reference to these aluminum tubes. He said 
specifically, ``Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted 
to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons 
production.''

                              {time}  2320

  In fact, before the President made that statement, one of our 
agencies, and it was either the CIA or the Department of Energy, I 
cannot remember which, had concluded that that was not what these 
aluminum tubes were for. They were meant for other purposes.
  If this was one misstatement, we would chalk it up to the fog of war 
and the need to be responsible as we need to be in the war on 
terrorism. But when it is a pattern, when it is a pattern of falsehood 
that continues to be consistent in their approach to the Medicare bill 
and the effort to clear-cut old-growth timber in the Sierra Nevada and 
a whole host of issues, it is

[[Page H1225]]

responsible for Members of the House to come and blow the whistle on 
this multiple corruption of the democratic process. And that is what we 
are here to do.
  Let me suggest there is a simple answer to some of these things, 
these issues that we are calling for. If the President would really 
initiate a thorough investigation of this, we could find out why this 
information was false and why we found out. But do my colleagues know 
what he did or his people did? When this mistake was found out about 
this yellow cake in his State of the Union address, we found out that 
his statement that they were trying to get yellow cake from Africa was 
false, when the administration found out that was a falsehood, it was 
pointed out by a gentleman named Joe Wilson, who was a former 
ambassador who was sent by the CIA to Africa to find out whether this 
assertion was true, and he concluded it was not and told the 
administration it was not; and then the President went ahead, and 
somebody gave it to him. I cannot believe he did it himself and put it 
in the State of the Union address.
  I am not faulting him for that specific failure. Somebody had to give 
that misinformation. But when his administration found out there had 
been a big mistake in the State of the Union address, one might think 
he might want to thank the person who helped him correct publicly this 
mistake because obviously none of us want to make any mistakes. We like 
to make sure what we are saying is credible. Does the gentleman know 
what the administration did? Instead, they tried to destroy the career 
of a CIA agent, who was Joe Wilson's wife, by outing her to destroy a 
citizen's career in public service who blew the whistle on this 
corruption of the democratic process. And that is wrong.
  And we are many months passed this issue, and the President of the 
United States, the most powerful person in the Western World, cannot 
find out who in his administration did that. I am not satisfied with 
that. I am not satisfied unless the President picks up his phone and 
says I want an answer by eight o'clock tomorrow morning who did this 
because they are fired. And he has not done that. This is a pattern 
that needs to be corrected.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to point out, and I know what 
the gentleman is talking about, that the war and the loss of lives is 
certainly more important, but we have the same thing here with Richard 
Foster that we talked about earlier where he was basically told that if 
he revealed the correct information about the cost of the Medicare 
bill, he would be fired. And the irony of it is now there is a 
statement which he made recently where he says that ``I'm perhaps no 
longer in grave danger of being fired but there remains a strong 
likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding of 
important technical information from key policymakers for political 
reasons.'' So this poor guy who now basically came clean and explained 
what happened, I do not know what his career is going to be like as 
well, and it is just really tragic that this administration puts honest 
people that want to be honest with the public in danger of being fired 
or ultimately losing their jobs because they are just trying to be 
honest and tell us the truth. And we are just seeing a pattern of this 
continue with this administration in so many cases.
  The gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) used the word before when 
he talked about abuse of power. That is essentially what we have here. 
It is false information and the willingness of this administration to 
essentially say whatever is necessary, the means justifies the ends, in 
order for them to justify their ideology.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, if I may, I suppose there are gray zones 
about conduct, but when the U.S. Congress is debating something as 
important as the Medicare prescription drug benefit and we are trying 
to figure out how to finance it so this deficit does not continue and 
the President knows that there are many people concerned about the cost 
of this and a good American patriot, in the fulfillment of his 
democratic responsibilities, figures out it is going to cost another 
$160 billion than the President tells us it is going to cost, and he 
tells the administration that and the White House and HHS and everybody 
else and they tell him that may jeopardize our ability to win our 
political battle and our political battle is more important than the 
truth. Because that is what this boils down to. They reached a 
conclusion here, and their conclusion is they are so smart and they are 
so gifted and they are so special that they are more important than the 
truth. Therefore, they ordered and they threatened to fire an American 
who wanted to and would have shared the truth with Americans and this 
Congress, Republicans and Democrats, because they concluded they were 
more important than the truth.
  And I just may add, I want to tip a hat to some of my Republican 
colleagues here because we have Republican colleagues that are madder 
than hops about this too because they were concerned about the cost of 
this bill because we have a $500 billion deficit and we have a number 
of our Republican colleagues who want to fix that problem. So they are 
mad about this too. They are not quite as vocal as we are in this 
context with their party member in the White House. But Republicans and 
Democrats ought to agree on one thing, and that is let us get the facts 
and the truth; then let us have our debate and let the chips fall where 
they may, and we are just happy to have that debate. But it is time for 
them to stop perverting the truth.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I agree. And it is important for us to 
continue to point this out because again we had a situation where this 
bill, which was a bad bill with prescription drugs, would not have 
passed if the truth had come out. That is abundantly clear. In fact, I 
cannot ever remember any legislation, and I have been here 16 years, 
where we have a vote on a piece of legislation and there is an absolute 
majority against it and we wait for 3 hours to try to change the vote. 
It is different maybe if the board is opened and there are some people 
who have not decided, but there was a majority against this bill, and 
now we understand all the things that were going on to try to basically 
make people change their minds about this.
  I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for 
yielding.
  We are here to review today's proceedings relative to the resolution. 
As the gentleman is well aware, there is a group of us, and we describe 
ourselves as the Iraq Watch and we will be joined shortly by the 
gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie), and of course the gentleman 
from Washington State (Mr. Inslee) is an integral part of our 
conversation. And I am sure that tomorrow morning there will be some 
coverage of what occurred on the floor today because we did consider a 
resolution that was put forth by the Republican majority without any 
input of course from Democrats, as we talk about the process that has 
become the norm here in the House. Unfortunately, it has become 
exclusionary. And I think we can concur that that is indeed unfortunate 
if we want to have an open and respectful debate. So during the course 
of time, during the course of the debate, sometimes passions become 
very fierce. But I think it is important to review this resolution 
today for a variety of different reasons.
  The resolution was about supporting troops and respecting their 
professionalism and their courage. We all agree on that. It also 
commended the Iraqi people for these early steps towards democracy.

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