[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 39 (Thursday, March 25, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H1583-H1590]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES FROM A PRIVATE SECTOR PERSPECTIVE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, as I sat here and listened to this 
debate tonight, a number of things crossed my mind. I would like to 
pass backwards through the comments that were made by the distinguished 
members of the Congressional Black Caucus and address some of the 
subject matter. As you sit in your living rooms this evening and you 
consider what you have heard, you have heard our President's name used 
over and over again, never in a complimentary fashion, not particularly 
derogatory, given some of the evenings I have seen in this Chamber, but 
we need to keep in mind that the apparent Democrat nominee for 
President is a Member of the other body. According to the rules of this 
House, I cannot nor can any Member use the name of that Member of the 
other body and designate them in the same fashion that the Members we 
have heard here tonight have the latitude to speak about our President, 
our Commander in Chief and the leader of the free world.
  And so that is a restriction that I have. And when I reference the 
apparent Democrat nominee for President, you will know who I am 
speaking of. However, what we have heard here is that the Congressional 
Black Caucus budget has fiscal responsibility because they offer a 
balanced budget. But the

[[Page H1584]]

balanced budget that they offer is balancing the budget by raising 
taxes, putting a burden on the private sector. By the way, there are 
two sectors to this economy. There is the private sector where the jobs 
are created, where the dollars get invested, and where Americans make a 
decision that they are going to save up their money and invest it and 
maybe buy some stocks, some mutual funds or start a business or go 
borrow that money and invest it in a business, which is what creates 
new wealth and which is what creates jobs.
  It is not a zero-sum game. It is a multiplier. We are always seeking 
to promote the maximum productivity of our citizens. That is directly 
proportional to the strength of this entire economy, that is, the sum 
total of the productivity of all of our citizens, all of our citizens 
working together, the maximum number of them going to work every day, 
producing the maximum amount of goods, the maximum amount of services 
multiplies itself through our economy and promotes our export markets 
and competes with our import markets and provides for the technology 
and the training and the capital investment and the higher education 
and all of those components that make our economy grow.
  When we raise taxes to balance the budget, there is a huge 
presumption in the minds of the people that advocate such a thing 
because they are presuming that the economy is going to move along in 
the same fashion as it did and that tax increases are not going to 
provide a disincentive for people that get out of bed and go to work.
  I can tell you as a businessman, one who started a highly capital 
intensive business with a 100 percent loan back in 1975 and went to 
work every day and operated that business with the checkbook in my 
shirt pocket and provided a service and collected the money and paid 
the bills and dealt with the Federal Government and the IRS and the 
regulations and all of the burdens that are there, and paid the taxes, 
of course, that there is a limit to how much anyone is willing to risk 
their capital, risk their sweat equity. At some point if you punish 
people for their work, if you punish productivity, you will get less 
productivity. Ronald Reagan said, What you tax, you get less of. What 
you subsidize, you get more of.
  If I just address the tax side of this, if we tax and tax and 
increase taxes to balance a budget in a time of recession, and we are 
coming out of that recession today, we will get less productivity. Less 
productivity equates to less revenue for the Federal Government and 
what you have done, then, is you have discouraged the goose that lays 
the golden eggs. And so I would point out that we are coming out of a 
dip in a recession.
  If I can direct your attention to this chart on my left, this is what 
I am going to describe as the dot-com bubble. Right about in this area 
here and if you were watching the economy grow as I did and as many of 
the investors did and they put their money in the information age and 
in technology, because we had an ability, a growing ability, a 
dynamically growing ability to store and transfer information more 
quickly and more efficiently and more cheaply than ever before in 
history, in fact, beyond the imagination of most of the predictors back 
in the earlier years in the nineties. So we invested in the ability to 
store and transfer information. People were investing in dot-com 
businesses, betting that those businesses would turn over and that this 
economy would continue to grow.

  Well, it grew and a lot of this economy here was speculative economy. 
It was an economy that grew like a chain letter as people invested more 
money in more dot-com businesses and in more technology and in more 
things that did not really reflect the value of information technology. 
Because, this was the major misconception, just the ability to store 
and transfer information in and of itself has value. I will point out 
that that is not the case. The marketable value of being able to store 
and transfer information is to the extent of two things: Can you take 
that information and improve productivity? And can you deliver that 
product more cheaply and more efficiently? And to a much smaller 
degree, what can you market this information for for recreational 
purposes?
  So information has value for research purposes because that 
information then allows us to be more effective and more efficient. 
That is the good thing on the economical side, but the recreation side 
is when people get on the Internet and they pay their $21.50 a month or 
their 40, 50, 60, $70 a month, depending on their service because they 
like to be able to get access to entertaining Internet information. 
That is a marketable value of information. The others are to be able to 
produce the good or the service more efficiently than before.
  So what we have with the dot-com bubble is this bubble right here was 
bound to burst. As some of us saw this coming and talked about how long 
we could sustain this level of this growth, it was a lawsuit that 
started against Microsoft that popped the bubble. I believe it would 
have popped of its own just of the sheer stress and tension of the dot-
com bubble as it grew and inflated higher and higher. Sooner or later 
it would have burst because of its own pressure. But what happened was 
some of the States attorneys general got together with some other 
interests and entities; and they sued Microsoft and when that happened, 
this dot-com bubble burst and the money that was invested in this 
economy came tumbling down, and we lost billions and billions of 
dollars' worth of wealth all the way through here. That happened 
through this stretch.
  If you look here, you can see what happened when we got to September 
11. George W. Bush was sworn in here, and then we had the September 11 
attack, which came about right in here. The economy was already racing 
down; and when our transportation industry came to an immediate and 
screeching halt within hours of the attacks of September 11, that 
stopped also a huge sector of our economy. We have had to recover from 
this bubble being burst and being dropped down into these levels. If 
you look where we are today, the Bush Jobs and Growth Act, which we 
passed in this Congress a little over a year ago, has grown us, then, 
back up to essentially the level where we were before.
  We have dealt with this dot-com bubble, made the adjustment to it and 
the real economy today is the economy of the ability to be able to 
produce goods and services more efficiently than before and the growth 
in our gross domestic product. But it is not the time to increase 
taxes, punish businesses and convince them that they should pull in 
their capital investment and produce less to avoid the tax liability. 
It is the time to make the tax cuts permanent, the time to be able to 
send the message that we are a business-friendly world where jobs are 
created by the private sector, not by government.
  As I listened to the gentlewoman from California and she referenced 
the Bush administration, and our President in particular, she said with 
regard to jobs, ``They don't have a clue.'' I would think that 
statement would be accurate, not with regard to the analysis of our 
President's statement, but with regard to the person who uttered that 
statement, not a clue on what creates jobs, if you cannot believe that 
private sector investment creates jobs and that is where the wealth is.
  That is part of the sector of our economy. The other one is the 
public sector. The public sector of the economy is the anchor that 
drags our private sector economy. We have people that get out of bed 
every day and produce a good or a service that has value and they 
market it in the marketplace and every day they try to figure out how 
to be more competitive, how to produce more of that good, more of that 
service for a more competitive price. Surely they are trying to 
maximize their profit; but when they do, they have got some money left 
over then to invest in technology, higher education, capital investment 
so that they can be more competitive and be able to provide that good 
or service even more competitively yet.
  That is going on around this economy millions of time every day. It 
is part of the equation that is in the minds of our managers and our 
workers, all in the private sector. The public sector, which now I am a 
member of, and my lifetime and my career and my training have all been 
in the private sector where I have competed for those jobs, public 
sector jobs are often in the regulatory section. Regulators are people 
that get out of bed in the

[[Page H1585]]

morning. They go out to look over the shoulder of the people who are 
producing a good or a service that has a value that is marketable in 
the marketplace. In essence you have to take from the profit from the 
private sector to pay your public sector regulator, the watcher of the 
work, the one who regulates the work and sometimes the one who 
obstructs the work. So there is always a drain on the private sector to 
fund the public sector jobs.
  What I heard mentioned over here this evening was a whole series of 
public sector jobs, from police officers, more teachers, on down the 
line. I did not hear anything that would address a way that we can 
create more jobs or fix the climate so that the private sector can 
create more jobs.

                              {time}  2030

  It was all public sector requirements, all burdens on the private 
sector always to wear down this economy, always to make it harder and 
harder for us to recover from this place that we are in today, which is 
not too bad a spot and we are moving up.
  And another proof of that would be, if I go to chart 2, the 
unemployment rate that we are dealing with. This would be the early 
days of the Reagan administration. About the time when Ronald Reagan 
took office, we had extremely high unemployment, extremely high 
inflation. And with the Reagan plan, we were able to drop this 
unemployment level down to under 6 percent for the first time in about 
a decade.
  And then, as the unemployment grew through the 1990s, this would be 
about a third of the way through the Clinton administration, then it 
went down, and we were arriving at about a 4 percent unemployment rate. 
But historically that was an unemployment rate from the year 2000 back 
to 1970 that we had not seen in that period of time. In 30 years we had 
not seen unemployment as low as this, corresponding, by the way, with 
the dot-com bubble that burst at about this point.
  And now we saw unemployment go up. These were technology jobs, by the 
way. And we had import foreign labor, H1Bs, a lot of technology people. 
And now we are back here at historically about standard level, at about 
5.6 for our unemployment rate. But we have made significant progress.
  We can expect these things to happen. The growth is on the way. And 
we should feel comfortable and optimistic about the future of the 
United States economy.
  The reference to No Child Left Behind, I come from the State of Iowa, 
and we can argue that our K-through-12 education system, in our public 
schools in particular, ranks at the top or very near the top in 
education. If we measure our Iowa basic skills test, which, by the way, 
are taken all over world as far away as China, and if we measure our 
ACT test scores compared to the students from the schools in the other 
States in the Union, we can argue that we are either at the top or 
maybe there are two other States that can argue competitively with the 
success of the public school system that we have. And yet we are 
dealing with No Child Left Behind in the same fashion as some of the 
States that are at or near the bottom in their K-through-12 education.
  So I hear a lot from the teachers in Iowa about the burden of having 
to fill out a lot of paperwork and meet the administrative requirements 
on No Child Left Behind, and yet we do not want to leave any child 
behind. There are States like Mississippi and Arkansas and Alabama that 
need this help, that do not have the commitment to education that I 
happen to have the privilege to live within and have been the 
beneficiary of.
  We have a tradition in Iowa on education that I believe roots back in 
about 1878 when the general assembly of the State of Iowa, in a series 
of about three different pieces of policy, put together a policy that 
no child would grow up and have to walk more than 2 miles to a school. 
So it set up the rural school system, our country school system, and my 
nearest one was a school about 1\1/2\ miles down the road from me, 
which I just missed going to by 5 weeks, the way the transfer of people 
in schools went. But there in those country schools where if no child 
was going to be more than 2 miles from a school, then the school 
districts were often, especially in the flat country, 4 miles wide and 
4 miles high. So that would be 16 square miles to a school district 
with a school sitting right in the middle. Sometimes the farmer could 
not get out of sight of the school from his tractor, his team of 
horses, but they sat on the school board.
  The property taxes for that 16-square-mile chunk of that school 
district funded the entire school, and the school board was elected 
from the property owners that lived and raised their families and 
farmed within that 16-square-mile section. And so the elected school 
board then approved the curriculum, hired the teacher, built the 
school, carried in the coal, carried out the ashes, fixed anything on 
the playground, and pretty much it was a community center for that 
area.
  But as we watched those young people grow up in the country schools 
and get that education with a single teacher in grades K through 12, 
and then later on the high school students would go on to the nearest 
town to go to school, but as that happened, we established a commitment 
to education, a tradition for education that I believe is second to 
none in the country, primarily because it is rooted in that commitment 
to education to the extent that in our State budget we commit 62 
percent of the entire budget to education.
  If we did that in this Congress, there would be a lot of thunder to 
pay, and I would hear a lot from over on this side, but it is important 
to not let children fall behind. And as the President addressed the 
``soft bigotry of low expectations,'' let us push all of them to reach 
their expectations.
  And I will say this: I would not have voted for No Child Left Behind 
had I been in this Congress when that bill came up, because it was not 
something that Iowa needed. But we have it, and we are going to meet 
the regulations on that. And there is funding for No Child Left Behind, 
but we have it because we want to lift those students up in those 
States that do not have that kind of support, whose States are not 
committing 62 percent of their budget to education. And I am committed 
to reaching out to those students because we want to again maximize the 
sum total of the productivity of our people. And education equates to 
prosperity and prosperity equates also to freedom, and I am all about 
the freedom.
  But when we hear that it is underfunded, do not buy into that. There 
is a difference in this Congress between authorization and 
appropriation. Authorization is a number that says, all right, we can 
appropriate up to this number, but there is a cap; do not appropriate 
beyond that.
  So authorization almost always is higher than appropriation, and when 
we hear over here the criticism that No Child Left Behind is 
underfunded, that is the measure of, well, it was not appropriated up 
to the level of the authorization, it was somewhere down here.
  And if we look back at the criticism we have seen with the Bush 
administration, tracked through the previous administration, and I can 
say his name, President Clinton, in 1994, the last time that there was 
a Democrat in White House and a majority in this House for the 
Democrats and also for the other body, I have to say, the authorization 
for the education bill was higher than the appropriation. They had the 
chance to do it, and they did not fund it; but they are not willing to 
accept the criticism that it was underfunded education then. And we did 
not argue that it was cut. Now I am hearing an argument that would not 
have fit in 1994. If the shoe did not fit then, it does not fit now.
  With regard to Homeland Security, Homeland Security was formed by 
putting together a number of different agencies into the Department of 
Homeland Security. And it was done quickly, and it was done in the 
climate of the beginning of the war on terror and in an effort to find 
a way to reach out and gather together the information and the data 
that we needed to quickly establish a way to protect and secure this 
country from what we anticipated very soon would be another domestic 
attack.
  I want to compliment our FBI and our law enforcement people and 
Homeland Security to the extent that they were all involved in 
protecting this Nation; and we have intercepted a number of terrorist 
attacks on our soil. There

[[Page H1586]]

has not been a significant one on United States soil since September 
11, 2001. We have to call that a success. We have to believe that al 
Qaeda wants to hit us. In fact, if we look at Spain, it is pretty clear 
that they are going to be turning their sights on us in a far more 
aggressive way. Maybe a little more on that later.
  But Homeland Security, FBI, to the extent that the CIA has turned out 
information that has helped us overseas in the war on terror, we have 
been safe in our homes and on our streets from these attacks, not at a 
small cost, at a high cost. Those agencies that were put together for 
Homeland Security were put together with an effort to save money. Merge 
these agencies, get rid of duplications of services, provide those 
savings, and then be able to roll those savings into more appropriate 
ways to spend money.
  Looking at 2 years' budget in the Department of Homeland Security, we 
are looking at nearly double-digit increases each year. And where does 
it stop? And when we build on a 10 or 12 percent increase, we have got 
the line in the graph going up dramatically. The next year we are up 
here, and we build again another 9\1/2\ percent on homeland security, I 
do not believe we have the mechanisms in place to be sure that we are 
spending that money appropriately.
  I believe there is a significant amount of money that is wasted in 
Homeland Security, and I happen to have information that we have 
bureaucrats there who are making $150,000 a year, in another 
department, retired, took their golden parachute, their $100,000 a 
year, and went on to answer the phones at Homeland Security and started 
to cash a $150,000 check. That adds up to about a quarter of a million 
dollars to answer the phone, and I think we can hire people in this 
city for $25,000 a year to do that, not $250,000 a year.
  That just addresses the wage waste that I believe is there; it does 
not address the inefficiencies that I believe are there. And I do not 
think that we are able to scrutinize Homeland Security enough because 
all of us in this Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, live in fear 
of another attack; and if there is an attack on this country tomorrow, 
we can bet the fingers will be pointed at me for even uttering 
criticism.
  But I think we have a responsibility in this Congress to hold each 
department responsible to prudently spend tax dollars, and if they 
cannot do that, then we cut their budget until they find the savings. 
We are looking also for waste, fraud, and abuse, but each department 
will find them if we squeeze their budget down.
  And, by the way, I do not get all that motivated about being able to 
cut the deficit in half in 5 years. That just does not get me to charge 
the windmills. I want to balance this budget, and I supported the 
Republican Study Committee budget today because I think it goes closer 
to what we need to do to put fiscal accountability in.
  We need to grow our economy. We need to make the tax cuts permanent. 
We need to do a lot more to take this burden of the public sector off 
the backs of the private sector. But we need to move this country 
towards a balanced budget sooner rather than later.
  This budget we approved tonight moves us in that direction. I would 
have preferred that it had been more dramatically, but I am absolutely 
opposed to the idea that we can raise taxes, balance the budget, and 
there are not economic prices to pay. Certainly there are.
  So I listened to some of the other debate tonight. The discussion 
about the Bush administration, again using that outsourcing, because 
unfair trade practices are costing us jobs within this country. Yes, we 
are losing jobs in this country. We are losing some of our 
manufacturing base, our textiles industry. And I am wondering why that 
should be a mystery to anyone when we look at the tax burden that we 
have, the regulatory burden that we have.
  Over $850 billion is the weight of the regulatory burden from the 
Federal Government alone, and so when we are paying a tax burden that 
has a 22 percent embedded cost in anything that we might export 
overseas and we are competing against foreign countries who have 68 
cents an hour with the same kind of equipment on the lathe or the punch 
press, and they are producing products coming into the United States, 
it is not just unfair trade practices. It is people working far cheaper 
than we are willing to do, and we cannot compete with those kinds of 
wages in perpetuity without improving our productivity for every single 
worker. I do not know how we can do that, especially in competition 
with developing nations in the lower-skilled jobs. So we can expect 
that we are going to be seeing jobs drift overseas.
  What I want to do is slow that loss of those jobs and I want to 
incent the creation of new jobs, high-tech jobs, and I want to hold the 
industrial base in this country. We have got to hold some industrial 
base. If we do not, we will not have the facilities to build our 
military equipment, and that makes us vulnerable to the rest of the 
world. But outsourcing jobs, it is competition, and there is a reason 
why those jobs are going. I will come back to that in a moment.
  I also want to associate myself with the remarks made by the 
gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Otter) tonight with regard to the nuclear 
power. It is about time somebody stepped down to the floor of this 
Congress and spoke about clean energy, nuclear energy, the accident-
free energy and the environmentally friendly energy. I compliment the 
gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Otter) for those remarks, and I think we need 
to raise this kind of subject matter continually until the public 
begins to realize the safety and the efficiency and the cleanliness 
that we get with our nuclear fuel.
  But it is not the only kind of environmentally friendly fuel, not the 
only kind of fuel that is good for our economy. Being from Iowa and 
being from the number one corn-producing State, I have to raise the 
issue of ethanol. Ethanol does those things, too, and we produce not 
quite 3 gallons of ethanol out of every bushel of corn, and we are 
producing millions and millions of gallons of ethanol in Iowa and 
across the country.
  I have some numbers here that I think will be of interest. In Iowa, 
we produce ethanol out of an estimated 262 million bushels of corn, and 
that is a lot of corn. In 1980, we produced 175 million gallons of 
ethanol. Today, in this country, we have 74 plants, and they have a 
capacity of 3.1 billion gallons of ethanol production. As we develop 
and build that production, we believe that that production will go to 
3.5 billion gallons of ethanol for the year 2004, which is a 25 percent 
increase over 2003 in ethanol production.

                              {time}  2045

  This ethanol does a whole series of good things for this country. 
One, it is a value-added ag product and it is multi-pricing its value 
close to home, close to the corn stalk; and that value added there 
creates jobs, jobs in a location where we have been losing jobs over 
the last 20 to 30 years. It puts the dollars back in, keeps them there, 
there are good paying jobs and we add value to that.
  We are able to take the byproduct from the ethanol plants and feed it 
back to livestock. Whether it is distillers grain or gluten, it has a 
tremendously high demand for the feed value. I happened to run across a 
lady just yesterday who has a whole series of recipes to take the 
distillers grain and turn it into cookies and bars and neat little 
things like that. You will not know what you might be eating within the 
Capitol cafeteria here in the next couple years if we can find another 
way to add value to our corn.
  Ethanol is clean, clean burning and environmentally friendly. It 
replaces MTBEs. MTBEs are declared to some degree to be a likely 
carcinogen. I would ask you, would you rather drink a glass of ethanol, 
or would you rather drink some MTBEs? But it is environmentally 
friendly.
  We have an energy crisis in this country. The gentleman from Idaho 
(Mr. Otter) and I are addressing the energy situation here tonight. As 
we look across our entire economy, I will tell you that there is a 
component, there is an energy component in anything that we do. Whether 
you are producing a product or a service or delivering it, there is a 
production cost of energy, and there is a transportation cost of 
energy.
  So I am going to tell you that I think there is an E-tax on 
everything that we

[[Page H1587]]

buy, and it is related to the energy cost. But the energy is not what 
the E stands for in my E-tax; it is the environmental cost, the 
unnecessary regulatory environmental cost that goes on top of all of 
our energy in this country.
  Natural gas is critically important to us. In our part of the 
country, we use natural gas for all the traditional things that it gets 
used for in all the rest of the country with regard to heating our 
homes and our factories and providing the energy to manufacture those 
goods that we are marketing.
  But also we use natural gas for drying grain in the fall, and we use 
natural gas for producing nitrogen anhydrous ammonia so we can raise 
more corn in the spring. Sometimes in the fall we have fall 
applications too. That makes us more vulnerable to natural gas prices 
than maybe anyplace else in the country.
  In addition, natural gas is used to produce ethanol. So there is a 
component of that gas price that is a cost of every gallon of ethanol 
we produce. When natural gas prices are unnaturally high, that puts a 
burden then on the Midwest, on the corn belt, and really on the rest of 
the United States, because the ethanol we have goes into 30 percent of 
the pumps across America, and it is going to get to be more and more as 
time goes on.
  This environment tax is a challenge for us, and it is an unjust 
burden for the cost of our energy, and I am sensitive to this 
environmental burden. For example, the transportation bill, we have 
with Federal user fee on a per gallon of gas, which is 18.3 cents per 
gallon, out of that 18.3 cents, that money goes then to build our 
roads.
  Well, that is okay with us. When we put the hose in the tank, we 
expect we are going to pay 18.3 cents for Federal, and whatever your 
particular State gas user fee is. In Iowa I think our numbers add up to 
41 cents or 43 cents a gallon. The 18.3 is Federal.
  Of that, and according to a very well-informed chairman in this 
Congress, 28 percent of that amount goes to pay for environmental 
costs, what it costs to go around a wetland, what is costs to build a 
bridge across a river from hill to hill so you do not go down a scenic 
area, for example, or any of the environmental burdens of going in and 
doing the archeological study, doing the environmental impact study.
  All of these costs that are obstructions along the way of building 
our roads take 28 percent out of that entire user fee that we think we 
need to, and we do need to, go out and build more roads, because 
transportation is an essential component of economic development. It is 
the very first component of economic development.
  Now we have taken 28 percent out of transportation fees to spend it 
for environmental interests, and nobody knows that. The American people 
do not know that, that when they put the gas hose in their tank and 
squeeze down on that nozzle that for every dollar's worth of gas that 
they buy, or every dollar that goes to the Federal Government for the 
road fee, 28 cents of that is going to take care of the environmental 
demands.
  The environmentalists have become an obstruction to the economic 
growth in this country and raised the cost of transportation. They have 
raised the cost of natural gas.
  We have a lot of natural gas in Colorado, but we cannot get it to 
market because the environmentalists block it. I have yet to see a 
natural gas well that polluted anything. If you have a leak, the gas 
dissipates, and if you have a spill it dissipates. From my perspective, 
maybe they object to the idea of looking at a derrick for 4, 6, or 8 
weeks while there is a well drilled that will tap into the natural gas. 
Then you tear the derrick down and put a little head there and run a 
line to it, and there is your gas well. There is no logical reason why 
we cannot develop natural gas wells in Colorado where we have a good 
supply.
  Last year on the energy bill in this Congress, we had an amendment on 
the energy bill, and this amendment simply would have inventoried the 
natural gas offshore for Florida, just to go out there and calculate 
how much is there, and then if we can calculate how much there is, 
maybe we can also know we have a reserve and start to plan our energy 
development strategy and not be dependent upon foreign energy. But we 
could not pass the amendment that simply inventoried natural gas 
reserves offshore for the State of Florida. That tells you how strong 
the environmental interests are and how much of a religion it has 
become.
  My life, by the way, has been about soil and water quality and 
environmental issues. I spent 35 years of my life building terraces and 
farm ponds and waterways and wetlands and enhancing mother nature and 
sending the rain drop down through the soil profile, which is what 
purifies the water. My life has been about soil conservation and water 
quality, and I would not be supporting a policy that undermined our 
environment. But I believe it has morphed into a religion rather than 
logic.

  So we need to promote this ethanol market, and we need to move the 
energy bill, and we need to promote natural gas drilling in the lower 
48 States and where we can tap into this gas, up on the North Slope. We 
have got to move this energy bill that is over in the other body. 
Remember, I cannot say that, the people over there in the other body. 
We need to move that bill so that we can get our ethanol production up 
and going, so that we can get our biodiesel production up and going, 
and so that we can bring a natural gas pipeline down from the North 
Slope of Alaska into the lower 48 States to be able to slow this 
increase in gas prices.
  That is part of the energy component. But, in addition, the oil 
exploration in the United States has diminished significantly within 
the last year. We have gone from a 10 percent share of the world's 
investment in exploration down to a 7 percent share. We have the same 
environmental concerns.
  I saw advertisements on television that showed beautiful forests, and 
it said ANWR. The ANWR up in Alaska stands for Arctic National Wildlife 
Refuge. But when you see that it says Arctic, when you see an 
advertisement that shows you pine trees and a beautiful forest and 
mountain scenery, do not fall for that if it says it is ANWR, because 
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that word Arctic is a key phrase.
  If you go back to your 8th grade geography, you have the equator 
around the middle of the Earth, and you have the Arctic and Antarctic. 
When you ask the question how did they define the line around the top 
and bottom of the globe that defined the difference between the 
temperate zones and the Arctic, that was defined by that line of the 
Arctic Circle, the point north of which trees could not grow.
  So if you see a picture of trees and it is identified as ANWR, you 
will know that it is not, because trees do not grow up there. I went up 
to take a look at ANWR to verify this for myself.
  By the way, I flew over the North Slope oil fields. As we looked down 
on those oil fields, and I have worked in the oil fields and know a 
little bit about that, but I looked down from the air and they said we 
are flying over the North Slope oil fields.
  Well, I do not see any oil pumps down here; I do not see any oil 
wells, roads or collection systems. How do you know that we are over 
the oil fields in the North Slope?
  The answer was, well, look at those little square white patches down 
there. We were at about 750 feet in altitude, and you can see them 
clearly. They are white patches, patches of white rock that are about 2 
to 3 feet above the Arctic coastal plain, and those are pads that work 
over rigs, have a place to pull up and sit on the level, if they have 
to go into a casing and pull a submersible pump and maybe do some 
repair work there.
  But there is not a pump jack out there that you can see anywhere, the 
old traditional oil pumps. There is no leakage going on around the rod 
that some people think is going to drip on the soil and pollute the 
soil. These are submersible pumps with a collection system that is 
invisible; and when it gathers that all together and goes off to the 
terminal and then off to the refinery, the only place you see is the 
terminal.
  Then you see the Alaska pipeline, that large pipeline. You can see 
that go across the Yukon River. But there are not roads to each one of 
these wells, because we only go in there in the wintertime on ice 
roads, and then the ice melts and there is no sign of damage.
  Another thing that is a misnomer, a mistake, a misunderstanding and a 
perpetration of something that is an untruth, is the argument that 
well, you

[[Page H1588]]

will never get the tundra back. Once you tear up the tundra it is gone 
forever.
  We met up there at Kaktovik, a small little Eskimo town of 290 people 
right on the Arctic shore, not a tree in sight, I will remind you; and 
there the President of the Eskimo Corporation, and his name is Fenton 
Rexford, pointed ought to us they have reestablished tundra, and it is 
not that unusual.
  But if it should get torn up, and some of that has happened over the 
years in his lifetime experience, and he was about 56 or 57 years old, 
they would go in and drag that smooth and seed it over; and in 5 to 6 
years, the tundra had grown back again. I saw some of that from the 
air. The difference that I could tell was that it was a little brighter 
green. You know how new seeding looks after you plant your grass in the 
spring before it gets established? Five or 6 years later it all flows 
in, so we can reestablish tundra. We will not damage tundra. We are 
going to have ice roads.
  There is no logical reason not to drill for oil in the Arctic 
National Wildlife Refuge. We should be ashamed that this Congress 
cannot step up and put up a vote that allows that to happen.
  This House approved, took a look at an amendment, that would have 
allowed for the disturbing of only 2,000 acres on 19.5 million acres. 
That is all they really asked for to go in and start to develop that.
  I had people on the floor of this Congress on that night come up and 
ask me, How much is an acre? How much is 2,000 acres? And my answer 
was, Well that is not even a good-sized farm where I come from. A tiny 
little spot on 19.5 million acres. And even that would not be 
disturbed, but only just a little bit.
  Then there is the concern about the environment. What do we do if the 
caribou herd is decimated by developing the Arctic National Wildlife 
Refuge? Well, we developed the oil wells on the North Slope of Alaska, 
not very far from there, in the same type of topography. The caribou 
herd in 1970 was 7,000 caribou.
  As I was up there last August, that caribou herd is 28,000 caribou. 
So it cannot be argued that we damaged the environment for the caribou; 
and it can be argued that we improved it, that they come up on the pad 
where they are not having calves down in the swamp, where the calves 
might freeze and die, and they get up where the breeze can blow the 
flies away, and they like to get next to the warm pipeline. All of 
those things were improvements in the living area, the living room, 
living space of the caribou.
  When I pointed that thought to a reporter sometime back, he said, 
well, of course the population went from 7,000 to 28,000 caribou, 
because those pipeliners went up there and shot all the wolves, so they 
did not have a natural enemy any longer.
  I had a little trouble keeping a straight face with that. Of course, 
that is not the case. If any pipeliners had fired a gun at any animal, 
they would be gone in a hurry and punished severely.
  We need a comprehensive energy policy. We need to develop our natural 
gas from an inventory off the coast of Florida, access the natural gas 
in Colorado, build the natural gas pipeline from the North slope of 
Alaska on down to the lower 48 States, and we need to renew our efforts 
to drill for oil in ANWR, and we need to promote all of the ethanol we 
can promote and all of the biodiesel we can promote.
  By the way, the wind is a pretty good project too. One day I went up 
to a groundbreaking ceremony for an ethanol plants in Cherokee County, 
Iowa. We turned over a couple spades of dirt there and congratulated 
each other. By the way, that project is moving along very, very well.
  As I drove from there across country through about 20 miles as the 
crow flies from the grand opening of an ethanol plant, I drove through 
259 wind chargers that we have on an area called Buffalo Ridge 
producing electricity, surrealistically spinning in the wind and 
pumping that electricity down for collection in the feeder line, and 
from there down to a second ethanol plant, all within about 20 miles.

                              {time}  2100

  And the thought occurred to me, the area that I represent, 5 to 6 
years earlier had no, no energy production whatsoever, and today we are 
an energy export center. We are an energy export center that takes some 
of the burden off of importing foreign oil and enhances our 
environment, and it multiplies and value-adds to our economy. It does 
all the things we need to do environmentally and it replaces MTBEs.
  Now, those are all good things that come from technology and capital 
investment. By the way, these are private sector investments, not 
public sector subsidies.
  I have another issue with regard to transportation in my part of the 
world, the Missouri River. In about 1952 there was a huge flood that 
flooded the bottoms all the way from north of Sioux City clear down 
through Missouri. There was a tremendous effort put together and it 
ended up being a fixed loan program to build six dams on the upper 
Missouri River to control flooding, to control flooding and to generate 
hydroelectric power, and to be able to promote some, some irrigation, 
and to establish barge and transportation traffic along that corridor 
of the Missouri River from Sioux City, Iowa, all the way to St. Louis.
  That project is an amazingly efficient hydrological engineering 
accomplishment. It has worked very well since 1952. We have not had the 
flooding damage that we had had in previous years; it solved the 
flooding, it has given us our barge traffic, it has kept the cost of 
transportation on the rail lines and on the truck lines down, and it 
has produced economic hydroelectric energy that comes out of the dam 
where the turbines are.
  Well, we are going through a drought cycle and because of that, there 
was an unanticipated economic piece up in the Dakotas and in Montana. 
When they built the reservoirs, they stocked them with walleye, and so 
folks from all over the country would go up there to fish for walleye. 
Now, when the drought came, the water table went down, and it went down 
to 25 feet and maybe a little more below that static water table where 
they would have liked to have been able to maintain the pool. That, of 
course, diminished the habitat for the fish, diminished the 
recreational aspects of it and caused some of the docks to be 1 mile or 
more from the water.
  Well, that is unfortunate and that is a tragedy, but we cannot make 
it rain. And when it rains, it will fix that problem. There is nothing 
we can do to enhance the water tables upstream; even if we shut our 
dams down all winter long, we can only gain about a foot of water a 
month. But the recreational interest in the Dakotas took a look at how 
they would build a coalition.
  I heard the name of these species for the first time in October of 
1993: The least tern, the piping plover, and the pallid sturgeon, three 
species that I had never heard of before, and they were species that 
were either threatened or endangered that lived and relied upon the 
Missouri River for their environmental habitat.
  In 1993, we had a massive flood in Iowa. The Missouri River did not 
flood, but almost everything was under water regardless. I came out 
here to Washington, D.C. in October of 1993 to a Midwest flood 
reconstruction and cleanup conference. There, the Director of Fish and 
Wildlife, who was the lead agency on the flood recovery team, Molly 
Beatty, and a fine young lady who tragically passed away of a brain 
aneurysm some years ago, but she came before us and she said, 
Agriculture looks upon this flood as an economic disaster; frankly, we 
here at Fish and Wildlife look upon it as habitat rehabilitation.
  Madam Speaker, that did not make me happy when I heard that. That put 
animals ahead of man. We are to have dominion over this Earth. We have 
a Missouri River master manual plan that denotes how the water flow 
will be managed, and it was going to be altered and changed in the 
interests of these three species, and I wrote them down: the least 
tern, the piping plover, and the pallid sturgeon. In October of 1993 it 
was in my notes, and I have not forgotten those species since, and we 
are still battling with them. By my calculation, this came up about 12 
years ago. We are still on it. And they are still using the species to 
try to alter the flow, try to do a spring rise with the idea that if we 
raise the water table in the river and let it charge down the river 
long enough and hard

[[Page H1589]]

enough, it will wash the willows off the sandbars and then, when the 
river goes down, that is a place for the birds to nest.
  The environmentalists will not let the Corps pick up the nests and 
move them out of the way of the high water that could take them out. 
That would not be natural. The pallid sturgeons have to be floated out 
into the Ox Bows so they can lay their eggs out there, and then the 
river comes back down.
  Well, they swim around the Ox Bows all summer long and the ones the 
pelicans do not get, we have to raise the river again and go out and 
round them back up again. Surely we have negotiated a little bit and 
some of this logic does not connect as well as it did 11 years ago when 
I dealt with it.

  But this diminishes the efficiency of the river, and I must stand on 
the flood control, the hydroelectric, and the transportation side of 
this, and I will do so. We need to continue to work with the Corps, and 
this Congress will ultimately, I believe, have to address the 
situation.
  There is another issue before our economy, and it is an issue that 
the American public speaks very little of, but it is a burden that we 
all carry. And that is this burden of litigation that is on the backs 
of this entire economy. Some time back I sat down at a meeting at the 
boardroom table at Merrill Lynch up in New York City. Their building 
was the nearest building to Ground Zero of the September 11 attacks, 
the nearest building to survive. They lost the glass out of that 
building, something like 32 stories up, and you cannot look over that 
railing and believe that we are not in a war. That was a war zone.
  But that briefing focused on tort reform. And in that briefing, there 
was a compelling case made that convinces me that 3 percent of our 
gross domestic product is being consumed by litigation, by the trial 
lawyers, by lawsuits in this country, 3 percent of our domestic 
product.
  Now, if we want to grow this economy and grow this economy at a 
reasonable rate so that we can have enhancements in technology and 
improvements in transportation and improvements in our infrastructure 
and be able to educate our young people so that they can pick up the 
balance and they can do the same, if we want to do that, we have to 
grow this economy an average of about 3.5 percent.
  Fortunately, today, we are running on about a 4.1 percent growth, so 
we are ahead of that curve just a little. But even though we have that 
3.5 percent growth, it is not enough, because the trial lawyers get 3 
percent right off the top. So we have to grow at 6.5 percent to 
sustain, to sustain our way of life and to have that extra revenue that 
it takes to meet a growing population and the demands on our 
infrastructure. Three percent off the top to the trial lawyers.
  There is a series of malpractice pieces that we have dealt with in 
the House Committee on the Judiciary and brought to the floor of this 
Congress. One of them is medical malpractice. There are awards that go 
way beyond anything that is logical. We can go back to the cup of 
coffee and the fast food chain that was looking at a huge settlement 
because the lady spilled hot coffee on herself and seemed to be 
surprised that it burned her. That has been negotiated back some. But 
we have had to step in, this Congress, and defend those fast food 
chains, not because of the hot coffee, but because of a calculated 
nationwide strategy that is driven to us by the class action lawyers 
that they are going after the large industry of fast food, that large 
industry that employs 12 million people in this country and is viewed 
as having very deep pockets, to tap into them. Because why? They super-
size our french fries.
  Now, what a surrealistic world we live in when we debate on the floor 
of Congress how we are going to protect people because a group of class 
action lawyers, and also working sometimes in conjunction with the 
State attorneys general, are going to file a lawsuit to sue people who 
serve food in a healthy and efficient fashion. As if it is a surprise 
to any of us that if we eat greasy foods, it might clog our arteries.
  We accept that, but I reject the idea that it should clog our courts. 
It should not go into our courts whatsoever. It is a frivolous lawsuit, 
but yet in this Congress, we have to step forward and protect the fast 
food chains or they will be decimated in the same fashion as the 
asbestos companies have been decimated.
  We have lost 60 companies in the United States due to asbestos 
litigation, and now they are going into the second phase and they are 
filing suit against the successor companies.
  I am calling upon the people in this other body, those folks over 
there with 100 people that go to work doing the same thing we do here, 
let us get the asbestos legislation moved. Let us protect those people. 
Let us save those Fortune 500 companies that put their capital up and 
lifted those bankrupted asbestos companies out and put them back into 
some kind of production.
  There is not any kind of responsibility that can be put on our 
Fortune 500 successor companies with regard to asbestos, and it is 
essential that we move forward; and it is essential that the other body 
move forward quickly before this cannot be resolved and the horses are 
all out of the barn.
  So medical malpractice, another one. I will say that we went to 
California for a model. It is not the first thing I advocate. But in 
this case, in California, they established a limited medical 
malpractice of $250,000 for noneconomic damages. We assure, in our 
medical malpractice limitation that we passed here in this House of 
Representatives, we assure that anyone who is injured by medical 
malpractice is made whole. They get their medical bills paid and they 
get made whole economically.

  But when it comes to punitive damages, not just pain and suffering, 
but punitive damages, we cap those. We cap the noneconomic damages at 
$250,000. It takes away some of the incentive to go out there and go 
ambulance chasing, and it still allows the patients who need relief to 
receive that relief. That bill needs to move from the other body as 
well.
  This economy is being dragged down because we are not able to get the 
litigation reform, the malpractice, and the asbestos and the fast food 
chains and all of these reforms, we are not able to get those into 
place. We have to get that done. If they can move those over in the 
other body, then we will bring more here in this Congress. We are 
actually holding back because we do not want to stack up too much work 
over there.
  The same subject matter, a runaway judiciary. In 8th grade civics 
classes we learn that we have three branches of government. We have the 
executive branch, which is the President and all of the people that 
support his endeavors, the Cabinet and their agencies. We have the 
legislative branch, which is us in this Chamber and the folks in the 
other body. And then of course we have the judicial branch, and they 
are all three designed to have a separation of powers, a healthy, 
static tension between them, and a bright line between the separation 
of powers.
  Today, what I have seen happen in the judiciary branch is an ever-
growing activism, an activism that, I would have said a year ago had 
blurred the line between the legislative branch and the judicial branch 
of government. But today I will tell my colleagues, the line is no 
longer blurred. It is literally obliterated. We have an activist court 
that believes that they can take any responsibility into their hands 
and they can usurp the authority of the United States Congress or any 
other legislative body within the United States of America.
  That separation of powers is something that threatens our 
Constitution and our way of life itself. It is essential that we 
redefine this line of the separation of powers between the judicial and 
the legislative branch. If we do not, we will have a constitutional 
crisis, and the government of the people and by the people will perish 
from this Earth if we fail to redefine this line. I declare that an 
impending constitutional crisis.
  A couple examples would be the affirmative action cases, the 
University of Michigan, when Michigan was bestowing a certain academic 
value to being a minority. The case of Grutter v. Bollinger was one of 
the Michigan cases. The Supreme Court ruled that diversity, as indexed 
to ethnicity had, if the university believed they had the right 
critical mass, that that diversity had academic value. The Supreme

[[Page H1590]]

Court ruled that the diversity had academic value.
  Now, I will argue that diversity of human experience may have 
academic value if it is a good and essential and positive experience 
that can be shared in a classroom. And it is good to interact with 
people of all ethnicities from all over the world, and the more of that 
experience you can get, the better your educational experience is.
  But ethnicity does not have academic value. The Supreme Court ruled 
it did. They concurred with the University of Michigan and said, you 
reached that critical mass, you can be the sole determiner of that 
critical mass of diversity. Then, what we will do with this is, we are 
going to let you continue down this path, although you cannot have just 
a formula that spits something out of a spreadsheet, you have to have 
something that deals with each one of these individual students.
  Well, okay, so it takes a little more attention to get the same 
result. But, in the end, the court suspended the 14th amendment, the 
equal protection clause that is established in our Constitution, 
suspended equal protection so we could have a critical mass of 
diversity as defined by the university, because that diversity, as 
indexed to skin color, had, in the minds of the court, academic value. 
And then the court, in its majority opinion, ruled that perhaps in 25 
years, we can go back and we can revisit this subject matter of 
preferential treatment and affirmative action, revisit this subject 
matter and maybe, perhaps, this civilization, this culture, this 
American populace, will have moved forward into the new world far 
enough that we can then reestablish the 14th amendment equal protection 
clause, and maybe we do not need to have critical mass of diversity 
that we are going to declare to have academic value again.

                              {time}  2115

  Where does that come from, Justices? How do you believe that you can 
suspend the 14th amendment, for academic value on skin color and think 
we will be able to adhere back to our Constitution again? And if this 
Constitution does not mean what it says, if it can be suspended as 
simply myopic as this idea of critical mass of diversity, if that can 
happen, what meaning does the Constitution have whatsoever? Is it 
simply a document that happened to fall in our laps that the Founding 
Fathers stumbled across and stumbled into, and it happened to be a 
convenient thing that got us through the first 220 or so years of our 
existence?
  Or is it something that means what it says? Is it something that has 
a provision for amendment for a reason that we are to adhere to the 
Constitution, the letter of the Constitution and the intent of the 
Constitution and not deviate from same unless we are willing to step 
forwards and amend it? That is what our Founding Fathers intended, but 
it is not what we see happening here in the United States Supreme 
Court, and it is not what we see happening in the inferior courts that 
have been established by this Congress.
  It is not the only example. And by the way, many of these examples 
are using foreign courts' opinions. Zimbabwe, Jamaica come to mind as 
places we can go to be further enlightened on how to better evaluate 
the original intent of the Constitution and the letter and the intent 
of our Federal law and our State laws and constitutions and 
legislation.
  Foreign case law imposed upon United States of America? It is 
impossible to anticipate how the courts will rule given just U.S. court 
decisions let alone foreign, and some of these countries by the way do 
not let their people have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or 
freedom of religion or they cannot go to the polls and elect a leader. 
So those decisions in the courts will not reflect the will and the 
character of the people. We need to redefine this line.
  The Congress is also culpable; and I will hold them, in fact, more 
accountable because I think it is natural if you are a member of the 
executive branch of government, you are going to wanted to expand the 
authority of the executive branch. That is where you have got the most 
leverage, and that is where you have the most faith. And if you are a 
member of the legislative branch, as I am, I wanted to expand the power 
we have here because I think it reflects the voice of the people; and 
that voice of the people should be preeminent. And if you are a member 
of the judicial branch, I cannot image why human nature would not also 
apply there. And if you are a member of the judicial branch I would 
think you would want to then expand the power and leverage that you 
have in the judicial branch.
  I do not blame them for that. But I will ask the courts, please rein 
it in because if you do not rein it in, sooner or later this Congress 
will. We do have the authority to do so; and if we exercise that will, 
that sets up a conflict between us. And I would rather see that be 
resolved in a peaceful way, a willing way with the best interests of 
the American people than I would want to have to impose that upon the 
courts. In fact, I am a little apprehensive that we cannot find the 
will in this Congress until it becomes a crisis.
  Speaking of a crisis, the filibuster rules in the other body have set 
up another impending constitutional crisis. When we have a justice that 
is appointed to a Federal court and the Constitution requires that the 
President when he makes his nomination seek ``the advice and consent 
of,'' and now I have to save the other body, that advice and consent 
clause that is in our Constitution is something that is very well 
established. We do not have any problem with the advice part. We get 
plenty of advice from those people over there and some of it is down 
right offensive to the nominees. In fact, some of it is just plain out 
and out religious bias. It is character attacks. Declaring a nominee to 
be a Neanderthal is beyond the scope of what someone of that position 
ought to be in.
  Madam Speaker, I appreciate your attention tonight and I will take 
this issue up at a later date.

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