[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 48 (Thursday, March 19, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H3691-H3697]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             BONUS MYSTERY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. LaTourette) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. I want to thank our leader for giving us an hour to 
talk about something that happened today, this week, that really has us 
befuddled.
  Mr. Speaker, I like a good mystery, I just finished reading another 
Agatha Christie last night, ``Black Coffee,'' and it wound up being the 
personal secretary to the manor and Lord, who poisoned him with 
cyanide.

                              {time}  1615

  But it took me until the last couple of pages until I figured it out 
that this Edward Raynor had in fact poisoned his boss.
  Well, who would have thunk that we would have a real live mystery 
here on Capitol Hill. But we have one. And we're going to talk about a 
variety of things relative to AIG and the stimulus package and these 
bonuses that have been paid out that really have people's anger up, at 
least in Ohio--the phone calls I'm getting. We'll hear from other 
Members.
  But here's what happened. A few weeks ago, the President of the 
United States indicated he wanted to put forward a stimulus bill and, 
unlike some commentators, I want President Obama to succeed. I think 
he's doing the best job that he can.
  He entrusted the leadership of the House and Senate to write the 
bill. The bill was a little over 1,000 pages. I think it was 1,117 
pages long. We were nervous because it was spending $1 trillion. When I 
say my Republican colleagues and I were nervous, it proposed to spend 
$1 trillion rather quickly. We asked early in the week before the vote, 
Do you think we could read the bill before you ask us to sign on to 
spending $1 trillion?
  So we had a little motion here on the floor and every Member of the 
House--every Republican, every Democrat--said: You will have 48 hours 
to read this bill before we ask you to decide whether it's a good piece 
of legislation or a bad piece of legislation.
  Well, it left the House, it left the Senate, and it went to a 
conference committee which, Mr. Speaker, I know you know, but others 
may not know; that's where we send some guys and gals over from the 
House, they send some over from the Senate. They get together, they 
work out the final product and then they bring it back to the House and 
Senate for a vote.
  Well, something happened on the way to the vote in that we weren't 
given 48 hours to read the bill. We were given 90 minutes to read the 
bill. We made the observation that that's 90 minutes to read 1,000 
pages, and a lot of us read pretty quickly, but that was a big 
challenge. So could you please not ask us to do this, because when you 
do something that quickly, somebody's going to be embarrassed.
  That leads us to our mystery. Today, we had some legislation where 
there was a lot of gnashing at teeth and pulling of hair, saying that 
AIG are crooks, somebody called them traitors, so forth and so on, and 
they shouldn't have gotten these bonuses.
  Well, when the bill left the Senate, there was an amendment in the 
bill offered by a Democratic Senator from Oregon, Wyden, and a 
Republican Senator from Maine, Olympia Snowe, that said there were not 
going to be--if you took money for the bailout and you're an 
institution, you couldn't give these crazy bonuses to people. You 
couldn't give them $18 million, $20 million worth of bonuses. That 
seemed pretty reasonable.
  Well, when it went into this meeting, all of a sudden that language 
came out and this language that I have put up on the easel here was 
inserted.
  For those who want to read it, it's title 7, section 111, 
subparagraph 3, subparagraph iii.
  Now, unlike the Wyden-Snowe language that said we weren't going to do 
it, this language specifically says that any bonuses, any executive 
compensation, any million-dollar golden parachute, any retention pay 
that was agreed to before February 11, 2009--guess what? It wasn't 
covered. So the bill specifically authorized the payment of these 
bonuses.
  Well, as we warned, and we are not happy that our prediction came 
true, but there were some people this week that were embarrassed by 
that. So we passed a bill to tax these bonuses at 90 percent. Stupid 
idea. But we wouldn't even have had that discussion if somebody, 
somebody put this paragraph into the bill that specifically allowed the 
taxpayers of this country to go ahead and pay for these bonuses at AIG. 
So we do have a Who Dunnit.
  From our social studies we know that there are 435 Members of the 
House of Representatives and there are 100 Senators. I had a piece of 
paper with the breakdown, and I've misplaced it, but I think after the 
last election there are 178 Republicans in the Chamber and there are 
247 Democratic Representatives. Over in the Senate, there are 41 
Republican Senators, 58 Democratic Senators, and we can clear somebody 
of this mystery already because the Minnesota Senate race has not 
resolved so we know that Al Franken or Norm Coleman didn't put this 
paragraph into the bill.
  During the debate today I asked the distinguished chairman of the 
Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank of Massachusetts, if he did it. 
And he said no. So we're going to cross Barney Frank off the mystery 
list. Now we are down to only--well, let me say this. I didn't do it. 
So we are down to 533.
  I'm joined by other Members here today.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. McCotter of Michigan, did you put this into the 
bill?
  Mr. McCOTTER. Through the Chair to the gentleman from Ohio, I was not

[[Page H3692]]

in the room that inserted the pro-AIG language into the stimulus.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. Thank you very much. Let me get to Mr. Thompson of 
Pennsylvania. Did you write this?
  Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. No, sir, it was not me.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Cole of Oklahoma, did you write this?
  Mr. COLE. No, sir. But I do have some information that might help you 
as you move forward. I wouldn't say that this would be definitive. I 
think you should ask every individual, as you're doing.
  But I do have a signed list of people that were in the room--that 
were principal negotiators in the room. I think they need to be able to 
answer for themselves, as one of them, Mr. Frank, already has.
  I do want to point out in defense of some of our colleagues, Mr. 
Lewis' from California name is there, but it's scratched out because he 
wasn't allowed to be in the room. There's also Mr. Camp from Michigan. 
His name is scratched out, too, because he also was not allowed to be 
in the room.
  And then there's the distinguished Senator Cochran from Mississippi. 
His name is also crossed out because he wasn't allowed to be there. 
Then there's Senator Grassley from Iowa. His name as well is scratched 
out.
  So I don't know that that would prove that they did not do it, but I 
think that's a very strong indication they did not. Coincidentally, 
they're all Republicans. But I thought that might help you as you 
pursue your vision.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. Thank you, Mr. Cole. I think, as Angela Lansbury in 
Murder She Wrote, or Agatha Christie in her books, we're going to call 
that a clue. I think we have a clue and we're moving in the right 
direction.
  Are there any other Members that want to say anything? Sir, do you 
want to identify yourself and indicate whether you wrote this?
  Mr. FLEMING. Before today, I've never seen that. So I would have 
liked to have been there, however. I can assure you of that.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. You know what? We're getting someplace. So now, by my 
count, we only have about 525 people to go. I pledge to you, Mr. 
Speaker, that I will spend as long as it takes to identify who wrote 
the language.
  We are making a little light of it, but it's not funny. Because what 
you have here on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, you have a Senator 
from Connecticut, the chairman of the Banking Committee over there, and 
he says, Well, yeah, maybe I wrote it, but I only wrote it because 
somebody in the administration told me to write it.
  Well, again, going from our social studies, we know for a fact that 
the administration can't write laws. This is the United States 
Congress. So somebody had to pick up a pen and scratch out the Wyden-
Snowe amendment which would have prohibited these bonuses and then 
written this new paragraph--it's only about 50 words long--and inserted 
this. And somebody needs to own up to this because you can't have all 
the drama that we had on the floor today where: I don't know; this is 
outrageous; they're crooks.
  Well, the person that wrote this let this happen. And that's why we 
find ourselves in our situation today. We have a lot more that we are 
going to talk about.
  Now it's my pleasure to yield to Mr. Cole of Oklahoma.
  Mr. COLE. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him for the way 
in which he framed the debate and did it in a way we can all 
understand. But this has been a troubling episode as well.
  I think I guess what I'd call Bonusgate begins, I like to think, with 
three words. We've heard a lot of the three words recently. We've heard 
the word inherit, we've heard the word transparency, and we've heard 
the word accountability.
  Well, this is not a situation that was inherited by this 
administration or by this majority. This was a situation that came into 
being on their watch. This is a situation where they have not been 
transparent. Quite the opposite. They have done everything they can to 
obscure what happened, when it happened, who's responsible.
  Finally, it's certainly an incident where, at least to this point, 
nobody has been held accountable for anything. It's just something that 
somehow is unfortunate, but we are going to move collectively to try 
and correct before we have even identified who created the problem for 
us in the first place.
  What do we know? Well, we do know a lot. We do know that Secretary 
Geithner has been involved in designing legislation around both the 
bailout and the stimulus literally since November--really, since 
September, when he was involved in his capacity as the Chairman of the 
Federal Reserve in New York.

  We do know that, frankly, he was aware at some point late last year 
or probably early this year, at the minimum, there were going to be 
large bonuses paid. Certainly, the Fed had been informed that, and we 
would expect in his position there and as Secretary of the Treasury he 
would have been informed.
  We do know that he had the means to stop this. He literally released 
$30 billion at the beginning of this month to AIG. At that point, he 
could have said, Look, you do this; no money. You're bankrupt.
  I suspect something could have happened where these bonuses wouldn't 
have been paid out.
  We also know that he didn't bother to tell the President of the 
United States, for whom he works and to whom he is responsible, 
anything about this until the day before it happened. That's what the 
Secretary has said, that's what the President has said.
  So we know that Mr. Geithner has been around this problem a lot and 
we know that he did not--or, it appears he did not inform the 
President.
  The second thing we know relates to the stimulus bill. My friend, Mr. 
LaTourette, went through that pretty well. We had a bill that was 
rammed through, literally was put together in a hurry, where this body 
guaranteed its Members by unanimous bipartisan vote we would have time 
to read it. We weren't given the time that in this body we said we 
would give Members.
  We know that the bill eventually ended up in a conference committee. 
We have a pretty good idea who the six people were there, one of whom 
we now presume had nothing to do with this. I would certainly take the 
chairman at his word.
  And we know that that language was inserted in that conference. It 
was not something that was inherited from the last administration. It 
was not something, to be fair, that was even in the first version of 
the stimulus bill. It was something that was specifically put there.
  And so, while we know that the majority didn't read the bill and we 
know that the minority didn't read the bill, and I doubt the President 
read the bill, somebody read the bill. Somebody read the bill well 
enough to know, Hey, there's language in here that's going to prevent 
the payment of bonuses--and we need to get that out and put something 
in. So somebody did indeed finally read the bill.
  We also know that today, rather than confront those questions, we 
decided we'd do everything we could on the floor of this body to look 
like we were doing something. As a matter of fact, I would argue we 
made a lot of the same mistakes.
  We presented a bill that hadn't gone through committee, that people 
hadn't seen, that hadn't been discussed, because we needed to show that 
we were going to act. And we presented a resolution which, thank 
goodness, did not make it through, which essentially would have 
exonerated the administration.
  Now those are all things that we know. What should we do, is now the 
real question, it seems to me. The first thing we should do is do what 
the President did in the very first week of this administration and 
say: I made a mistake. I think the classic word was: I screwed up.
  I think the President and the administration, certainly the majority, 
screwed up. I think admitting it would be helpful.
  The second thing I would do if I were the President of the United 
States is fire the Secretary of the Treasury. I wouldn't wait for him 
to resign. I would make the point that if there's something this 
explosive and this important and this damaging and you know about it 
for months and you don't bother to tell me about it until the day 
before it happens, when I'm in

[[Page H3693]]

almost no position to do anything about it, I'm sorry, you're not 
really who I need to be the Secretary of the Treasury. Goodbye.

                              {time}  1630

  I think the President would score enormous points within his own 
party. Indeed, earlier this evening we actually heard essentially a 
Democratic Member of Congress calling in this floor for him to do 
exactly that, something he ought to do.
  Finally, we need the people in that room to just simply fess up. One 
out of six of them did it; and, if they did it at somebody else's 
instructions at the White House, then they ought to tell us who that 
was. Who sent that language down? Or, ``I drafted it,'' or whatever. 
But there is not that many people involved. I still retain faith that 
the truth is going to come out here and that people will step up and do 
the right thing.
  The great British statesman Winston Churchill was often exasperated 
with our people and with the United States. He used to like to say, 
``You can always count on the American people to do the right thing, 
after they have exhausted every other possibility.''
  I would suggest that is what the administration has been doing, they 
have been exhausting possibilities. But in the end, they just simply 
need to do the right thing: Fire the Secretary, in my opinion, who 
certainly has not served this President well; admit, whoever put this 
language in there, that they did it, and tell us who instructed or 
asked them or requested that they do it; and, finally, just level with 
the American people instead of pass smokescreen, whitewash legislation, 
which, by the way, is dangerous in and of itself, as my friend from 
Ohio alluded. You don't use the Tax Code as a punitive weapon directed 
at people. It is pretty close to a bill of attainder. It is an 
extraordinarily bad and blunt instrument, and to do it only to provide 
cover is, I think, a dangerous thing. I don't think many of my 
colleagues who voted for this on the other side expect that this will 
become law. This was a political exercise on this floor put together at 
the last minute to give people cover when they went home.
  So let's show Mr. Churchill for once that perhaps he is mistaken; 
perhaps we can do the right thing without exhausting every other 
possibility. I ask the administration to step forward and do that, 
provide the kind of leadership that the President promised that he 
would give us in the campaign, leadership that is transparent, 
leadership that is accountable.
  I yield back to my friend from Ohio.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. Thank you very much, Mr. Cole. And thank you not only 
for your comments but also for the clue.
  I know that other Members may be wandering around the Capitol giving 
tours or taking care of constituents, and just in case they didn't 
hear, Mr. Speaker, I will indicate that we are attempting to solve a 
mystery.
  I have something called a Face Book, and the Face Book has a picture 
of every Member of Congress in the House and the Senate, and we are 
going to try to find out, if we can, and maybe others will be willing 
to help us, who put this paragraph in the stimulus bill that shielded 
the $170 million of bonuses that AIG paid to their executives after 
they got another $30 billion.
  Parenthetically, I heard an argument, people have been beating up 
these executives as traitors and everything else. I have got to say, I 
kind of admire a bunch of folks that have bilked the taxpayers out of 
$175 billion and--but, anyway.
  So what we are doing is we are crossing people off, and I think we 
are down to about 525 left. Any Member that wants to come and have his 
or her picture crossed out so we know it is not them, we are happy to 
do that.
  At this time, it is my pleasure to yield to the chairman of the 
Republican Policy Committee, Mr. McCotter of Michigan.
  Mr. McCOTTER. I thank the gentleman.
  Coming from the Great Lakes State, when I was younger I was always 
fascinated with the history of maritime travel in our beautiful 
homeland. And so when I was younger, I saw a book, it was called The 
Phantom Freighter, it was a Hardy Boys mystery, and I read it. I loved 
how they worked through to find the motivations and to finally unmask 
the culprit, and eventually I read the whole series. It has kind of 
rekindled in me today that sense of wonder at who and why something was 
done, and to work through the mystery to find out: Who could possibly 
be the hidden hand behind the mystery amendment?
  I commend my colleague from Ohio for his search to cut through the 
fog of our times to find that hidden hand that wrote the mystery 
amendment, and I will do everything I can to help him with this search, 
as I trust members of the media will.
  Look, in many ways, because this was in the stimulus bill, it has 
stimulated a lot of reportorial interest in who actually did this. I 
think that we can assume that if you can unmask the culprit, there may 
very well be a Pulitzer in it for someone for doing so. But when we 
look at this, in all seriousness, what we have seen is a classic 
example of a rush to judgment causing problems.
  Now, as a matter of civics, since the subject was broached, when the 
stimulus bill came to this floor with this amendment inserted into it, 
it was voted upon by the Members of the House. Not one Republican voted 
for a stimulus bill with this amendment in it, which means that every 
Republican voted against approving and protecting AIG's bonuses.
  On the Democratic side, every Democrat that voted for that stimulus 
bill voted for that amendment that approved and protected AIG's 
bonuses. The President of the United States signed the stimulus bill 
that included the amendment that approved and protected AIG's bonuses 
into law. And now that the public is aware of the AIG bonuses, we have 
seen another rush to misjudgment where we turn the Tax Code into a 
penal code, where we shred the Constitution to use it as a political 
fig leaf, and set a heinous precedent in the future for other people 
who may be disliked or disfavored given the political mood of the 
moment.
  In fact, one of the things, whether you agree with the Constitutional 
analysis or not, is this: This bill still allows the bonus recipients 
to keep 10 percent of their bonuses, and it doesn't do a thing to 
prevent the $30 billion that has already been committed to AIG from 
being drawn upon. I think that if we were going to do anything today, 
it should have been to get 100 percent of those bonuses to the 
taxpayers and prevent another dime going to AIG in bailout money. That 
is just me and 90-some others of my colleagues.
  When we look at where we are today with the resolution of inquiry 
that the gentleman from Ohio introduced, I think I can establish the 
motive behind the hidden hand that wrote the mystery amendment. I do 
not believe that this was a mistake. I do not believe that this was 
simply a matter of venality for a hometown constituency. I think this 
was an actual matter of economic policy by this administration. If I 
may explain.
  We heard from Mr. Liddy of AIG yesterday that he was very much afraid 
of losing the people who had caused the problem at AIG before they had 
managed to fix it. He believed that if these individuals left, he would 
see a meltdown again of AIG, which he believes would help create 
economic chaos throughout America.
  I believe that, in consultation with individuals from the United 
States Government and potentially the Federal Reserve Board, he made 
the determination that these bonuses, retention bonuses were necessary 
to keep those people at AIG, facilitating what he believes is an 
orderly unwinding of the mess.
  When viewed in the light of having to keep the people who created the 
problem so they could fix it before they left, this amendment makes 
sense. This amendment makes sense as a matter of policy, because on 
January 28, CNN's Mary Snow reported that AIG was expected to receive 
hundreds of million dollars, at least, in bonuses. That is out in the 
public realm.
  You see, the Senators put forward their amendment to preclude the 
very types of bonuses AIG received. If you are looking at this as a 
matter of economic policy, you say to yourself: The AIG bonuses that 
are coming down the pike are not public. You say to yourself: The 
politicians in Congress are

[[Page H3694]]

not going to allow this to happen because the public is going to be 
apoplectic.
  You see the opportunity in the stimulus bill with $1 trillion of 
spending being rushed through in the dead of night. You say to 
yourself, ``Oh, oh, the Senators have already put forward an amendment 
to preclude such bonuses. We are going to have to remove it, and we are 
going to have to put something in its place to approve, protect, and 
grandfather the AIG bonuses so we do not lose the, quote/unquote talent 
that produced the problem and that has to fix it.'' It now makes 
perfect sense. But having established the motive, we have yet to 
establish the culprit.
  The public is apoplectic, as I said earlier, because they do not 
believe that as a matter of economic policy this amendment is fair to 
them; that it is patently inequitable, and they do not want the people 
who caused the problem to benefit from being propped up courtesy of 
billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
  Now, the response in Congress is not to look at the economic policy 
to make the determination that AIG is too big to fix, that it should be 
wound down immediately, that taxpayers should be protected. Instead, as 
I mentioned earlier, we saw a political fig leaf put forward.
  The mood was also reminiscent of what I experienced as a young man 
watching a very important artsy film called Animal House. We all 
remember the scene where they are sitting around Delta House drinking 
beer, bemoaning their horrible grades at the midterm exams, and Dean 
Wormer walks in. Immediately the members of Delta House start to hide 
their beer under their seats and in the back, and the dean looks at 
them and says, ``You know, drinking is illegal in fraternities here at 
Favor College.''
  When the public found out about this bonus to AIG executives, when 
they found out what this amendment allowed and was voted for by a 
majority of this Congress and signed into law by the President of the 
United States, you saw the political equivalent of Delta House hiding 
their beer so Dean Wormer would not be upset. In the event Dean Wormer 
was not fooled, and neither has been the American public, they want to 
see the situation resolved; they want all the money back in those 
bonuses; they want to prevent more money going to AIG; and, as the 
gentleman from Ohio has pointed out, they want to find out who the 
hidden hand behind the mystery amendment was.
  We talk about transparency in government, we talk about 
accountability in government, and you are telling me that we can't even 
determine who put this amendment into a $1 trillion spending bill that 
was approved by this Democratic Congress and signed into law by the 
President of the United States. I would hope that this inquiry becomes 
a bipartisan cause in the interest of answering that question for the 
American people.
  I yield back to the gentleman from Ohio.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman from Michigan for his 
thoughtful remarks, and I thank him also because from Mr. Cole of 
Oklahoma we got a clue and now from the gentleman of Michigan we have a 
motive and, thankfully, also the name, ``The Mystery of the Hidden 
Hand.'' I think that is what we are going to call this thing, The 
Mystery of the Hidden Hand.
  And, Mr. Speaker, just in case you need your memory refreshed, what 
we are talking about here is the fact that in the $1 trillion stimulus 
bill, which we were given 90 minutes to read and which we indicated 
maybe that could cause a problem, somebody might be embarrassed, 
language was removed by somebody, The Hidden Hand, that was put in over 
in the Senate that would have prohibited AIG from using taxpayers' 
money and paying out millions of dollars in bonuses to their 
executives.
  Now, The Hidden Hand wasn't done with that, because that didn't 
accomplish his or her purpose--I think we have got to include women in 
this, too. It could have been a woman. The Hidden Hand then wrote this 
paragraph in this $1 trillion bill that specifically protected and 
said, ``Here is 30 more billion dollars of our taxpayers' money, AIG. 
And, you know what? This protects you. If you want to give out bonuses, 
$1 million, you go right ahead.'' And today, this Mystery of the Hidden 
Hand, we don't know who did it. But we are going to work it out.
  Mr. Speaker, it is now my pleasure to yield to a new member of the 
House, Mr. Fleming of Louisiana. I have the Face Book, Mr. Fleming, and 
I have crossed you out. You are not The Hidden Hand. And it is my 
pleasure to yield to you for your observations.
  Mr. FLEMING. I thank the gentleman from Ohio.
  Mr. Speaker, just a few months ago, I was on the other side of C-
SPAN. I was watching what was going on. I was only elected in December.
  I come from North Louisiana, where people respect the institutions, 
and we are talking about two very big and very important institutions: 
AIG, which we know is too big to fail. That is the reason why we have 
been bailing AIG out. And then, of course, our Presidency and Congress 
itself.
  I guess the rhetorical question I have after this embarrassment, 
which is, first of all, how did this screw-up happen? And, where is 
that person or persons who is willing to own up to the mistake that was 
made here?
  But going back to the beginning. We remember that in the first TARP 
issue, money was of course dealt out very quickly, almost overnight, as 
a result of the need or perceived need for bailout, and we found that 
money was going to spas in California, and pheasant hunting in the U.K. 
That should have at least given us some warning that this kind of abuse 
would happen.
  Then, we fast forward. We released the money again, no strings 
attached, and we find out that some kind of deal was struck, only with 
Democrats in the room, that first put in and of course then took out in 
conference, we think, this very important clause that would have 
avoided bonuses, very rich bonuses, over $1 million in some cases, to 
people who were part of the problem.

                              {time}  1645

  It really comes down to this: Is it incompetency, or is it 
dishonesty? I think that is the second question that we have to answer 
beyond who was involved in this. Certainly, we have the Secretary of 
the Treasury, who was approved under dubious conditions to begin with, 
having somehow forgotten to pay or perhaps incompetently did not pay 
his taxes. And then he was up to his hips in this whole situation with 
the bailout but somehow didn't realize that this clause would be put in 
and then somehow jerked out. Even the administration has more or less 
offered him up as a scapegoat by saying that they really didn't know 
really what was going on and that really happened on his watch. I 
certainly think first and foremost that Mr. Geithner should resign. I 
think he has done enough damage as it is.
  Also today there was a disgrace in the House where we had rammed down 
our throats a stimulus bill which no Republican supported and which did 
not contain a protective measure that should have been in to avoid 
these disgraceful bonuses. It was released only hours before. And 
being, of course, over 1,000 pages, it was impossible for anyone on 
this side of the aisle to have any idea of what was in that bill, much 
less some small clause as this.
  After all of that, hoping to gain that money back and perhaps some 
honor to this House, the Republican freshmen advanced a bill that would 
have put such strings attached to the $30 billion left in the bailout 
that would make it impossible for them to receive it without paying 
this back 100 percent. Instead, that bill never made it to the floor, 
and we had upon suspension another bill that was, honestly, a horrible 
bill, although it was the best bill we have to date, which only took 
back, through taxes, 90 percent of the money that was paid out in 
bonuses.
  Of course, the question is, is this even constitutional? Is it 
constitutional to pass a bill that has pointed at a very small segment 
of the society to punish them and to do it on a retroactive basis? I'm 
not a lawyer. I don't know. But it would be very interesting to see 
what comes to light. I would also like to know what part our Speaker 
had in this. It just seems like that once light is thrown into a 
situation like this, all the leadership who is behind it blow out like 
a covey of quail.
  So I ask today that perhaps we have investigations, perhaps we find 
the

[[Page H3695]]

folks who were really behind this. In any event, we need to avoid this 
from happening again. So in closing, I would say, Mr. Speaker, that the 
question is, is it incompetency or dishonesty? I certainly hope it is 
not the latter. And if it is incompetency, I think we need to renew 
some leadership positions and get us back to a competent pathway.
  And with that, I yield back.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for adding his 
thoughts to the mystery of the hidden hand.
  Mr. Speaker, I would ask how much time of the hour remains?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Twenty-eight minutes.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, I'm glad that the gentleman from 
Louisiana mentioned the freshman bill that attempted to get to the 
bottom of this, because sometimes the criticism, and I think it is 
legitimate criticism sometimes, is that the Republican party is the 
party of ``no,'' that we don't have any solutions and that all we do is 
say ``no'' around here.
  The freshman bill is an opportunity, and it is a positive idea. Mr. 
McCotter and I and about 20 of our colleagues earlier this week 
introduced something known as a ``resolution of inquiry.'' And Mr. 
Speaker, if any of your constituents are looking for a project, maybe 
they could contact the Congress and say, ``support H. Res. 251'' which 
simply says, let's get to the bottom of this. Let's have Secretary 
Geithner come to Capitol Hill with his papers and with his documents, 
and maybe he, as the Secretary of the Treasury, can shed some light on 
the mystery of the hidden hand, how good language was taken out of the 
$1 trillion stimulus bill and bad language was inserted.
  So that measure, H. Res. 251, has been referred to the House 
Committee on Financial Services. Under the rules of this House, they 
have 14 days to report it out to the House.
  Sometimes when we engage in that type of legislative activity, we are 
told that we have got a lot of important things, we are very busy here 
in the House of Representatives, and we really don't have time to get 
to the bottom of the mystery of the hidden hand, even though that bill 
spent $1 trillion of taxpayers' money.
  I just want to move to a couple of other charts. I want to keep the 
paragraph up just in case anybody, any Member should be watching and he 
or she wants to exclude themselves as the hidden hand, I want them to 
know what it is we are talking about.
  Last summer, many people remember, Mr. Speaker, when the cost of 
gasoline was going through the roof. Thankfully now that the 
international situation has died down, supply and demand has taken over 
and speculators have been driven out of the market, people now in my 
district are paying about $1.89 for regular. But last year, when gas 
just kept going up--and again let me say this. I have consistently said 
that this is the second Congress, the 111th Congress is the second 
Congress where there are more Democrats in the House than there are 
Republicans. They are the majority party. And quite frankly, in the 
last Congress, I thought they should have been the majority party 
because we screwed up as Republicans, and we deserved a little bit of a 
wake-up call. And we are very proud of the fact that Congress created 
the first woman Speaker of the House since the founding of our country, 
Ms. Pelosi of California. But we were consistently told that we 
couldn't talk about how are we going to solve this energy crisis last 
year because we were too busy. We had a lot of other important things 
to do.
  I used this chart last year, and it is going to segue into what we 
are doing this year when the last Congress started and Speaker Pelosi 
was named the Speaker. Gasoline was $2.22 a gallon. And so we weren't 
so worried about gasoline, obviously, but we had important work here, 
and we passed legislation, and I'm sure these folks and their parents 
are very proud, congratulating the University of California, Santa 
Barbara soccer team. We were too busy to do anything about gasoline.
  Well, gas shot up to $2.84. I began to get some phone calls in my 
office--Mr. McCotter, I'll bet you did too--and so maybe we should 
begin to focus on gas prices. Well, no, we enacted, and we are very 
proud of this, National Passport Month. That is what they decided was 
the most important issue facing the country. Moving forward, gas goes 
up to $3.03. And so I know we are going to talk about gasoline today. 
No. We commended the Houston Dynamo soccer team. I think that we are 
all told in politics that you have to get the ``soccer mom'' votes. I 
think we were well on our way in that last Congress.
  Gas goes up to $3.77, so I know we are going to talk about gas 
prices, how do we solve the pain at the pump. The most important issue 
of the day here in the Congress was National Train Day. I like trains. 
Gas goes up to $3.84. Well, we honor great cats and rare canids. And I 
have to tell you, I didn't know what a canid was when the bill came to 
the floor, but it is a dog. So we honored cats and dogs on that day 
when our constituents were paying $3.84. Gas goes up a little bit more 
to $4.09. You know we are going to talk about gas prices, right? No. We 
declared the International Year of Sanitation.
  Then, finally, when gas hits $4.14, before it begins to come down, 
you know that we had to debate energy prices. We passed the Monkey 
Safety Act here in the United States Congress.
  So you would think that we were chastened by that and perhaps in this 
Congress, when we have a financial meltdown and 16 Americans are losing 
their jobs every minute in this country, Mr. Speaker, people have had 
their 401(k)s wiped out, and so I know that maybe they didn't, you 
know, they were new in the majority, maybe they couldn't get things 
rolling. Now that they have 2 years under their belt, you know that we 
are going to deal with this financial crisis in a serious way.
  This Congress started on January 6 of this year. That was the opening 
of the 111th Congress. And so we have been at it since January 6. We 
are now into the middle of March. And the stock market on that day was 
9015. And then, of course, because I want to be fair to the new 
President of the United States, we get to, the stock market drops, and 
so maybe Congress could have acted in here, but certainly President 
Obama doesn't bear any responsibility because the next January 20, of 
course, we all know, was the date of the inauguration. And millions of 
people came, we were all excited, and we continue to be excited. The 
stock market then fell down after Inauguration Day to 7936. And the 
most important thing for us was to support the goals and ideals of 
national teen dating. Now, I have got teen-agers. I like teen dating. 
But when the stock market is going down, people are losing their life 
savings, clearly, we must have something more important to talk about 
than teen dating.
  Well, here is a big drop from 7888 to 7114. And on that day, we have 
commended Sam Bradford for winning the Heisman trophy. Now, I'm sure 
that Mr. Bradford is an outstanding football player. I wish him a lot 
of success as he moves forward through his professional career. But, 
again, as the stock market has dropped by this time 1,900 points, maybe 
we can do something about the economy.
  Well, then, it continues to go down. And not to be outdone, we had to 
pass the Monkey Safety Act again because when we passed the Monkey 
Safety Act in the last Congress, the Senate didn't pass the Monkey 
Safety Act, so we had to bring the Monkey Safety Act back to pass it 
this time. I don't want to make light of what caused that. There was a 
horrible situation in Connecticut where a woman had her face bitten off 
by a chimpanzee, and luckily she has now gone to the Cleveland Clinic, 
and she has had the first successful transplant in the country. That is 
certainly a serious matter. I don't have a problem with making sure 
that we have a Monkey Safety Act in this country to take care of that 
situation and others. But clearly, when the stock market has dropped 
almost 2,000 points, maybe we could do something else.
  We run it out to March 3, and do you know what? Rather than helping 
people with the economy, we passed the Shark Conservation Act on May 3 
as the stock market hit 6726. And lastly, the run-out to March 9, this 
was personally one of my favorites, because I didn't remember, I wasn't 
the sharpest knife in the drawer when I was going to school. So when 
they said we are going to have Supporting Pi Day, I thought, yeah, I 
like French silk. I like all the pies. But it was mathematical pi, 
which we know is 3.1416. And as the

[[Page H3696]]

stock market goes down and approaches the mid 6,000s, the legislation, 
the most important thing that we could do here in the United States 
Congress was to celebrate and honor Pi Day.
  Folks, listen, there is a reason we get the reputation back home 
sometimes that we can't walk and chew gum at the same time. I am not 
saying that all of these things aren't fine things. But when the 
economy is in the tank, when the stock market is dropping, when people 
are hurting, when 16 Americans are losing their jobs every minute, 
maybe, just maybe, we could do something rather than the Monkey Safety 
Act not once, but twice.
  I would be happy to yield to my friend from Michigan.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Thank you. To the Chair, how much time is remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Seventeen minutes.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we want to make 
clear about the resolution of inquiry that was drafted and introduced 
by the gentleman from Ohio is that it is an attempt to get an answer 
for the American people, and what we want to do is be fair both in 
providing them the answer and in terms of the people who could be the 
mysterious hidden hand behind this amendment. We want to get to the 
bottom of it. We do not want to rush to judgment and cast aspersions on 
others. We believe that this would be very fair to all involved, 
especially someone like Secretary Geithner, who no one has said was in 
the room, who himself has not said whether he was or wasn't. We do not 
want to prejudge the situation. We would like and welcome Democratic 
support for this, because we believe that in many ways, the Democratic 
majority was as blindsided by this amendment as was anybody else.

                              {time}  1700

  Of course, we warned that it might take time to read the bill that 
you vote on, but in the end I truly don't believe that the majority of 
Democrats in this body supported and approved and wanted to protect the 
AIG bonuses. We have to be fair about that.
  But what they do have the opportunity to participate in now is to get 
behind the resolution of inquiry so they can show their constituents 
that they want a fair, orderly process to get the answer to the 
question of who was the hidden hand behind the mystery amendment. We 
also would like to have the support of members of the general public 
who could participate in this and put forward their own theories of who 
was the hidden hand. If they chose to do so, they can e-mail me at 
Thaddeus at republicanhousepolicy.com with their theories on potential 
motives for this mystery amendment and who they believe could be the 
hidden hand.
  As we have seen throughout this process, someone did this. Now I can 
understand why no one is rushing up to accept the, quote, ``credit'' 
for this fine and noble amendment; but we need to know. Again, we 
welcome Democratic participation and public participation.
  But we should not let this opportunity pass us by to get to the 
bottom of this because the worse thing to happen would be for this to 
recur. I don't think that is in the interest of the American people, 
and I don't think it is in the interest of anyone who was elected to 
serve them in this Chamber. We are sent here to vote on important 
matters of the day. We are sent here to make very important decisions 
as employees of the sovereign American people, and they deserve to know 
what we are voting on because they have to go home and account.
  When they don't know what they are voting on, and in many ways get 
caught in an honest mistake supporting a larger issue while another 
issue festers beneath the surface, they will be called to account for 
something that they had no way of knowing. The vast majority of Members 
wanted to know what was in the bill, and they were not given the time 
to do so. That is unfortunate. But let's get to the bottom of the 
mystery of the hidden hand so Members will know what they are voting on 
when a bill comes to the floor.
  One of the things that we have to take into account is the next 
problem can be avoided. That's why again we welcome Democratic 
participation and we welcome public participation in getting to the 
bottom of who was the hidden hand.
  In voting today, we have also seen a spillover consequence of what 
happens when government reacts in a crisis. There is the old joke that 
is too unfortunately true, is that when in a crisis, government will 
throw your money at something and hope it goes away. We now have the 
corollary that when a political crisis happens that threaten 
politicians, they will rush to judgment and they will take money away 
as quickly as they can to solve it. We need to break that.
  I come from Michigan. We have an 11.6 percent unemployment rate. My 
constituents cannot understand an economic policy that pays people to 
stay in their jobs, especially when those were the people who caused 
the problem that cost them their jobs in the first place by creating a 
global credit crisis that brought us to the precipice of a global 
depression. They cannot understand the sanity behind the logic of 
keeping people who were smart enough to break something, as if they 
were smart enough to fix it and rewarding them for it. They cannot 
understand how people who got rich causing the problem are now going to 
be overcompensated for fixing the problem that they caused.
  What they want is for us to be responsible. What they want in a time 
of economic chaos is for their subservient government to help 
reestablish order and equity to our economy. They want us to help build 
institutional trust again within the financial community.
  This amendment in front of us today did more to undercut the attempts 
to restore public confidence in financial institutions than anything I 
can think of because when you go home, the reason people do not want to 
put their hard-earned money out there is for fear of losing their job 
and seeing their nest egg become smaller. They do not have faith in 
public and financial institutions that are proven no longer to be too 
big to fail, that appear to be too big to fix, and they are also very 
concerned that the economic chaos and institutional disorder that has 
affected them so direly in these past months is now being replicated by 
their Federal Government, a government that spends a trillion dollars 
in a rush to judgment, a government that talks about a $3.6 trillion 
budget, that talks about trillion dollar tax increases. This is chaos 
to my constituents.
  And now we add to that the fact that amidst all the talk of trillion 
dollars, trillion dollars borrowed, spent, trillion dollars taxed, they 
find out that no one in their government can tell them who wrote the 
amendment that let AIG executives receive bonuses. They deserve better 
than this. They deserve an answer because the first thing we have to do 
in the wake of this AIG bonus disaster is restore public confidence in 
the one institution they look to to help provide order and sanity and 
equity within their lives in times of chaos, and that is their Federal 
Government. Let us not fail them again.
  I yield back to the gentleman from Ohio.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank my friend from Michigan.
  The Speaker of the House spoke today very eloquently, and it is the 
whole issue of who gets Federal taxpayer dollars and what we require in 
return. The gentleman from Michigan has been one of the champions in 
the House relative to the auto industry. I happen to agree with you 
that we need to make cars in this country, just like we need to make 
steel in this country. But we told the auto manufacturers that if there 
was going to be Federal assistance, I didn't happen to agree with it, 
you did, but if there was going to be Federal assistance, they had to 
cram down the contracts of the people who worked in the auto plants. 
And I assume those are contracts. I assume they signed a contract they 
were going to make X dollars an hour, and the Congress and Democratic 
leadership and others said well, if you get some money from the 
taxpayers, you have to renegotiate those contracts.
  About 3 weeks ago we had a piece of legislation on the floor that 
really baffled me, and it was called the Cram-Down Bill. Even though we 
tried to get an amendment that said that you couldn't participate if 
you lied to get a mortgage, that bill basically said if you went to 
your bank and you lied on

[[Page H3697]]

the application to get a $100,000 mortgage, you weren't supposed to get 
it, you made up your income and you didn't talk about what you owed, 
the majority gave the judges of this country the ability to cram down 
that mortgage and say you don't owe $100,000 any more, you only owe 
$60,000.
  So clearly if that is where we are going to go, if we are going to 
target people who make cars in this country and we are going to reward 
people who lie on their mortgage applications, it is obnoxious. Some 
people say what's the big deal, it is 50 words. What the big deal is we 
have said to the auto guys, cram down your wages. We have said to the 
mortgage holders, cram down your mortgage. But in the dead of night, 
the hidden hand inserted language that not only didn't prohibit the 
awarding of $170 million in bonuses to people, it protected those 
bonuses; and today, they are shocked. It is a little bit like the man 
who is taking a bath and throws his clock radio in the bathtub and 
says, I'm shocked. That's what we have here.

  Mr. McCOTTER. On your line of thought regarding the sanctity of 
contracts, in many ways we heard that these contracts here could not be 
voided, that the sanctity of contracts prevailed.
  The reality is this amendment was necessary because the sanctity of 
contract ``ended'' when a company that would have gone bankrupt but for 
taxpayer money being injected to save it occurred. That is why this 
amendment was necessary for precisely the reasons you talk about.
  When you look at the disparate treatment of auto workers who have to 
give up hard-earned, negotiated contractual benefits in exchange to 
show viability for taxpayer bridge loans, when you talk about 
responsible lenders having to foot the bill for people who have even 
lied on their mortgage applications to be bailed out while mortgage 
contracts are crammed down and rewritten, they cannot abide a company 
that says we have a sanctity of contract when the reality is there 
would have been no bonus, no contract if they had gone into bankruptcy. 
Again, as you have pointed out, but for the Federal taxpayers, the 
American people's hard-earned savings going in to bail that company 
out, a company that has not been asked to restructure but to wind down, 
those contracts were no longer void.
  And it also shows the point that had this Congress known, both 
Republicans and Democrats, I believe, would have demanded that any 
further bridge-loan assistance to a company, a financial institution, 
had to have as an attachment, as a precondition, the preclusion of any 
executive compensation in the terms of a bonus.
  Again, we were not allowed that opportunity because in the dead of 
night, this mystery amendment was offered by a hidden hand.
  Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, we have launched the 
mystery of the hidden hand. Again, the mystery of the hidden hand is 
somebody, and we just want that person to identify themselves so we can 
move on to something else. Somebody took out a paragraph in the 
stimulus bill spending a trillion dollars of taxpayer money that said 
that AIG and others, anybody who got taxpayer money, could not hand out 
excessive executive bonuses. The hidden hand removed it and inserted 
this paragraph in section 7700 that permitted and protected the $170 
million of bonuses that people are now shocked AIG paid out.
  We have established motive. We have identified a clue. Mr. Cole was 
kind enough to give us a clue, and we started with 535 suspects and we 
have winnowed it down to, well, we are down to about 524 now.
  So I am going to bring the face book, Mr. Speaker, next week and 
every day to the floor, and I will seek out Members of this body and 
ask them if they are the hidden hand. If they didn't put this paragraph 
in, I am going to cross their face off. When I am done with the House, 
I am going to go over to the Senate, if they will let me over there, 
and I will ask the Senators: Are you the hidden hand? Did you foist 
this fraud upon the American taxpayer and then not have the courage to 
own up to it?
  Mr. Speaker, we will be back. We will solve the mystery of the hidden 
hand. The taxpayers deserve no less.

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