[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 43 (Thursday, April 6, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H1674-H1676]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          REPUBLICAN REBUTTAL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Fortenberry). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentlewoman from North 
Carolina (Ms. Foxx) is recognized for 30 minutes.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I am very much aware that I am the only thing 
standing between everybody going home tonight, so while I have 30 
minutes, I am not sure that I am going to use all of them. But I have 
been listening to some of the things being said tonight. I listened to 
them last week when I was in the Chair. And I get pretty wrought up 
about some of those things. And so I am going to talk a little bit 
about some of the comments that have been made tonight and present some 
facts.
  Now, I don't have tonight with me our great poster that says ``The 
Truth Squad''. But I am going to leave this white chart up here for 
just a few minutes. So imagine that that says on it ``The Truth 
Squad''. I couldn't find the poster tonight. I am sort of filling in 
for someone else tonight.
  But I want to say that, you know, I am a rather plainspoken person. I 
come from the mountains of North Carolina and generally am known as 
pretty plainspoken. And tonight, when I was listening to some of the 
rhetoric that was going on over here, I thought, one of the first 
things I want to say, if you believe that the Democrats will do a 
better job of providing for national security, then I have got some 
swamp land in New Mexico for sale for a great price for you.

                              {time}  2330

  I have not been a big watcher of C-SPAN before I came to the House of 
Representatives. I know we have got a lot of great folks who watch it, 
and I am grateful to you for doing that. But my guess is that there 
have been more untruths told in this Chamber in the past 15 months than 
maybe any other period of time in the history of this country. I have 
been watching it and I know other people have been too. That is what 
caused us to form the Truth Squad so that we could come out and set the 
facts straight.
  I get very concerned when people play fast and loose with the truth 
and particularly when they play fast and loose with talking about 
national security. You see, I take that very, very seriously; and I 
think most of my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle do too. 
The role of the Federal Government is to provide for the national 
security of this Nation. We were savagely attacked on 9/11, and we have 
responded to that, I think, in an appropriate way. These are people 
that hate us, that hate our way of life, and that want to take us back 
to the 5th century and have us live the way they live.
  I do not think the American people want to do that. I think the 
American people love their freedom and want to maintain that freedom, 
and we are interested in helping other people gain their freedom.
  What I am curious about, the Democrats get up here and say, We could 
provide better for the national security. I just have a couple of 
questions to ask them: Where were they and their President when the 
World Trade Center was first hit? Where were they and their President 
when we got hit several other times and we could have had a response to 
that? My guess is if we had had a Democratic President when we were 
facing 9/11, we would still be negotiating at the U.N. somewhere and 
pretty soon we would be losing our freedoms in this country.
  I do get a little upset about it. I think that they are absolutely 
ridiculous in the things that they say about how they would keep us 
safer than the Republicans have kept us safe. We are in a terrible 
time. We did not ask for the war. We are not imperialistic people, but 
we know how to protect ourselves when we are attacked, and we are going 
to continue to do that. The Democrats are Johnny-come-latelies on all 
of this stuff. They know that the American people see the Republican 
Party as the party that will protect us and protect our freedoms, and 
that is the number one role of the Federal Government and that is where 
our money should be spent. So I am very happy for us to be doing our 
job when it comes to national security. And we are going to be working 
on all of those things. Our budget will address that. Our budget has 
addressed that, and we will continue to do that.

[[Page H1675]]

  I want to make another comment to sort of clear up the facts tonight, 
comments made about the fact that we did not pass President Bush's 
budget today and somehow or another that is terrible. Well, we have 
never passed President Bush's budget, and there is no intention of 
passing President Bush's budget now. The President does submit a 
budget. The Constitution requires him to do so. However, it is the 
Congress's responsibility to take that budget and to look at what is 
proposed and then to come up with our own budget. And we will do that. 
But to be so duplicitous as to say that we are going to rubber-stamp 
the President's budget is just unbelievable to me.
  To talk about cutting student loans, as my colleague says here all 
the time, Representative Price of Georgia, you can have your opinions, 
but you cannot make up the facts. And there is no way that you can 
distort the facts in what we have done for the education budget and 
particularly the higher education budget.
  They talk all the time about what they would do, what they would do, 
what they would do. Well, I want to show you what they would have done 
had we let the Democrats have their way in Appropriations Committee 
meetings and in Budget Committee meetings.
  I am going to turn this chart around now. For all their rhetoric 
about cutting spending and doing something about the deficit, during 
the markup of the budget, they proposed new spending of $26.9 billion 
and new taxes of $19.3 billion. How much savings? Zero. Now, they can 
get up on the floor of the House and they can say lots of things, but 
when we bring out the facts, the comments that they make just do not 
hold true. They think people are just going to ignore what they really 
do and believe what they say.
  I said this the other night: our motto in the State of North Carolina 
is to be, rather than to seem. Some day I am going to figure out a 
clever way to show how the Democrats want to seem, rather than to be, 
instead of reversing that. But that is what they want to do. They want 
the American people to believe that what they are saying is true when 
they live a totally different kind of life-style. And I think it is 
very important that every time this happens that we respond to it. It 
is very, very important that we do that and not let them get by with 
it.
  I want to say a couple of things about the effect of what we have 
done in terms of cutting taxes. The difference between Democrats and 
Republicans is that the Democrats think they know how to spend your 
money better than you do and the Republicans think that the American 
people know how to spend their money better than the Federal Government 
knows how to spend it. So we want the American people to keep more of 
their money than they have been. So the Republicans instituted tax 
cuts, and what we have done is we see that tax receipts rebound with 
record increases based on tax cuts.
  They want you to believe that all the ills of the world have come as 
a result of tax cuts. Well, the good things that have happened in this 
economy, most of them have come as a result of our having cut taxes. We 
want to let you keep your money in your pocket and spend it the way you 
want to and not turn it over to bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. who 
waste a lot of it and then spend a little bit of it maybe on some good 
things. That is not the way it ought to be. We want you to keep your 
money.
  Let me show one other chart here that I have to talk about the 
projected growth of revenue and what will happen. We need to make the 
tax cuts that were instituted permanent, and that is one of the things 
that we need to be able to do so that we can keep this economy going in 
the right direction. And this is what will happen with tax relief made 
permanent. And, yes, indeed, we can cut the deficit in half by 2009, 
which is when the President said that it would be cut in half, and 
there is another chart over there to show that.
  They just very, very cavalierly leave out certain things when they 
are talking, like the President said that the deficit would be cut in 
half. The President did not say the deficit would be cut in half this 
year. He said very clearly in 2009. And it will be if we can make the 
tax cuts permanent. The biggest fight we are having around here is how 
do we make those tax cuts permanent and keep that money in your pocket 
instead of putting it into the hands of people who will not spend it 
nearly as well as you do.
  And you notice again that the Democrats are very, very selective in 
the things that they tell you in terms of their own actions and the 
things that they have done. They are fond of quoting third sources, and 
I want to quote something for you too tonight that you probably will 
not hear about in the mainstream media, the best friend of the 
Democrats. But Roll Call, one of the local newspapers here in town that 
is read primarily inside the Beltway, April 6, states: ``House 
Democrats have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds 
over the past several years on the party's annual retreats. Democrats 
have used official money to pay for a portion of their retreats for at 
least a decade. And a review of disbursement reports from the chief 
administrative officer shows that the House Democratic Caucus has spent 
more than $200,000 directly out of the caucus's official budget since 
2003 on chartered jets, rented buses, entertainers, brochures, staff 
travel, and a host of other retreat expenses.''
  These are not allowed. The Republicans do not do that. We pay for our 
retreats ourselves. But you are never going to hear this again from the 
mainstream media because they do not want you to know about the way 
Democrats abuse taxpayer funds.
  I want to talk just a little bit tonight about some of the good and 
great things that have been done in this session of the Congress. It is 
the ``do big things Congress.'' The Democrats would like you to believe 
that we have not accomplished a great deal. They are focused tonight on 
the budget. We did not get the budget passed. Well, we do not have any 
deadline for doing that until the end of the session, actually. But we 
set ourselves to task at doing that, and we will do that. And it will 
be a good budget when we do it, and it will cut spending, which is what 
we need to be doing. And it will rein in some of the spending that is 
on automatic pilot because programs set up under Democratic 
administrations are difficult to cut back.
  We passed the energy bill, H.R. 6, which brings America's energy 
system into the 21st century, signed into law by the President. We 
passed the highway bill, which creates millions of new jobs and 
improves public transportation and highways and other things all across 
the country, public law. We passed the Deficit Reduction Act, which 
provides $39.732 billion in savings by reforming the government, 
reducing the deficit, and renewing our commitment to hardworking 
American taxpayers.
  How many Democrats voted for reducing the deficit? Zero. None of 
them. They can stand up here again and talk all they want, but they 
have got to walk the walk. And when it comes to that, they just do not 
do it.
  We have passed liability reform, several liability reform bills. We 
have passed class action reform legislation to reduce frivolous 
lawsuits, to reduce all this money going into the hands of the trial 
lawyers.
  We have passed a Combat Meth Act. Methamphetamines are a terrible 
scourge on our country, and we are doing something about that.
  We passed the PATRIOT Act, again, something that we need to do to 
protect Americans, to allow our government to do proper investigations 
of the people who may be harming us. What did the Democrats do? They 
bragged that they killed it.
  We passed a United Nations Reform Act in the House with very little 
support from Democrats. We are mandating budget oversight, 
accountability, and ethics into U.N. reforms. You do not hear that 
coming out of the Democrats.
  We passed the Health Act, making positive changes to the health care 
liability system.
  We have extended the death tax repeal permanently. Help from the 
Democrats, very little.
  We passed the Tax Relief Extension Act. We are going to extend the 
tax provisions expiring in 2005. No Democrats helping with that.
  We passed the Job Training Improvement Act of 2005, enhancing the 
workforce investment system of the Nation.

[[Page H1676]]

  We have passed lots and lots of bills. We passed in December the 
Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act. 
Any help from the Democrats? No.
  We are working hard to protect the American people in the way that 
they should be protected. And one of the ways that we need to be doing 
that is to be reducing the spending of the Federal Government and 
reducing the burden on hardworking Americans.
  We also need to make sure that we maintain our freedom so that we can 
do all the other things that we want to do. That is what the 
Republicans are doing.
  What you hear out of the Democrats is a lot of empty rhetoric, and I 
am afraid that it just won't wash anymore, because the Truth Squad is 
going to be around all the time calling their hand on the things that 
they are saying that are simply not true.

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