[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 64 (Wednesday, April 29, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H4987-H4993]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       TIME TO LET GO OF THE PAST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Grayson). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  In listening to the dialogue that has taken place here in the 
previous hour, I think it's time for a little bit of information to 
unfold, and, that is, it's time to move on. It's time to let go. It's 
time to take responsibility. It is not any longer time to come to this 
floor and spend your time beating up on George W. Bush. He's not the 
President today. Or beating up on Dick Cheney. He's no longer the 
President of the United States Senate today. And neither is Denny 
Hastert the Speaker of the House. And neither is Mitch McConnell the 
majority leader of the United States Senate. All of those things have 
changed, and they have changed recently, Mr. Speaker.
  So to listen to this dialogue that's here tonight--and, by the way, 
fairly devoid of humility--with the exception of seeking to impose that 
on others--but 60 minutes of defense of, whose name came up more often 
than George Bush's and Dick Cheney's? Barney Frank. Members of the 
committee here on the floor spending 60 minutes describing how it is 
that Barney Frank's leadership was the correct path to follow 
throughout all of this time and explaining that we can't afford the 
status quo, that Republicans wanted the status quo.
  I would just take you back, Mr. Speaker, to think about this. They 
talked about 2005. I remember the debate here in 2005, and I remember 
the exact date. It was October 26. And it was an effort to regulate 
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a piece of the subject matter from all of 
these highly informed people from the Financial Services Committee. 
They seem to forget that Republicans weren't satisfied with the status 
quo; it was Barney Frank that was satisfied with the status quo. The 
one who said over and over again into the record, on committee, here on 
the floor in debate, specifically on that date that I mentioned, that 
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were just fine, they don't need any more 
regulation. He would resist, and he aggressively resisted the effort to 
try to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
  Mr. CAPUANO. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I would be happy to yield to the gentleman. I had 
engaged in this and I was hoping you would come back.
  Mr. CAPUANO. Well, I am leaving in a few minutes, but I will come 
back.
  I don't have the records in front of me, and that's fine.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. And I don't either.
  Mr. CAPUANO. And that's fine. But would the gentleman agree that the 
Democrats didn't run the House?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I would easily agree to that 
and that's the point I am seeking to make--that now today you do. That 
time has passed. Now you have President Obama and you have Speaker 
Pelosi and you have Majority Leader Harry Reid. And so that whole 
scenario that you were using to describe this in past Congresses, today 
it's a new world. It's time to move on.
  Mr. CAPUANO. I totally agree.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. That's my point.
  I thank the gentleman for coming back and engaging. I always enjoy 
it.
  Mr. CAPUANO. It's nice to agree for a change.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Continuing on, Mr. Speaker, that debate here on 
this floor, October 26, 2005, was about seeking to regulate Fannie Mae 
and Freddie Mac.
  There was an amendment that I recall that was brought by the 
gentleman, Mr. Leach, who believed strongly that Fannie Mae and Freddie 
Mac were underregulated, undercapitalized and I agreed with him, and a 
good number of the rest of us agreed with him.
  But the defense was of Fannie and Freddie coming from the current 
chairman of the Financial Services Committee who has not only been all 
over the airwaves playing self-defense in this economic calamity that 
we're in the middle of but who, on the eve of our departure to go home 
for Easter vacation, came to this floor for a 60-minute Special Order 
to explain how it was that he was right and the rest of us were wrong.
  And now I hear a committee that comes down and deploy themselves 
across the floor, and it's essentially the same thing. And they dig 
back into the Community Reinvestment Act and they argue that in that 
reinvestment act, there wasn't a requirement that there be bad loans 
made into bad neighborhoods.

                              {time}  2100

  That's true, Mr. Speaker. There wasn't a specific requirement that 
required lending institutions to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. 
It was simply this: You will not expand your operations if you don't 
make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. And we know that there were people 
that came and sought to intimidate the lenders and pushed their desks 
around. And sometimes it was Members of Congress. I may have actually 
heard a confession here on the floor tonight, Mr. Speaker, to 
intimidate lenders into making these bad loans. And lenders put people 
on their payroll in order to fill out portfolios and be able to hand to 
the regulators their case that they had been complying not just with 
the letter of the Community Reinvestment Act but what they perceived to 
be the intent of Congress, the changing intent of Congress, in the 
Community Reinvestment Act. That act was part of the foundation for the 
financial problem we have today. Not the only reason. It wasn't the 
only reason at all. But it laid a rotten foundation for the other 
things that were built on top of it.
  And when the gentlewoman from Wisconsin makes a statement that many, 
many loans were made to African Americans and Hispanics, I long for the 
day that there is no box to check in a loan application. I think we all 
should be treated equally. I think that we should be color blind. I 
think someone who qualifies for a loan should have that loan granted to 
them without regard to race, creed, religion, ethnicity, national 
origin, or any other characteristic. I don't want to see people that 
are God's children categorized by skin color or national origin or 
sexual orientation, for that matter, or any other component that we are 
obsessing with here in this Congress.
  This is about dividing people. This is what's going on. It's pitting 
Americans against Americans. You can hear it in the tone in the 
previous hour, where there's some more virtue in one ethnicity than 
there is in another. I don't believe that, Mr. Speaker. In fact, I 
heard the statement made that they

[[Page H4988]]

were bragging about ``we loan to black people,'' closed quote, from the 
previous hour. I wouldn't know I was doing that. I would think I'm 
lending to God's children without regard to race, ethnicity, color, 
national origin, or any other characteristic, mutable or immutable.
  And it was said in the previous hour that race was the single factor 
in the past 30 years in determining who would not get a loan. Maybe it 
was in some cases, and I think that when that was the case, the 
motivation was right for the Community Reinvestment Act. It's just the 
policy that was wrong. There were lenders that were drawing a red line 
around different neighborhoods in the cities, especially in the inner 
cities, and they had concluded that the asset value of that real estate 
was going down, not up. And they had decided it wasn't a prudent 
business investment to make loans into those neighborhoods that were 
red lined.
  Now, if they drew a line around a neighborhood because it was African 
American and probably wasn't Hispanic back in those days, if they did 
that for race reasons, that was wrong, Mr. Speaker. If they did it for 
economic reasons, it was perhaps a prudent economic calculation, a 
prudent business model, but not because of race.
  So the Community Reinvestment Act was formed. Fannie Mae and Freddie 
Mac began picking up loans in the secondary market that were being 
issued in order to build a lender's portfolio so they could expand into 
these neighborhoods and beyond. And the bookkeeping that was done to 
make this case to the regulators was set up more and more from, I'll 
say, a perverse incentive to make enough loans that they could 
characterize them as, well, race was the single factor in the past 30 
years in determining who would not get a loan. It may well have been 
the single factor over that same period of time in determining who 
would get a loan under the Community Reinvestment Act.
  I would just make a point, Mr. Speaker, and I, again, believe that we 
should not categorize people by race or ethnicity or national origin or 
any of these other characteristics that I've mentioned, but this data 
that I see shows that 96 percent of African Americans voted for our 
first black President. That's the largest percentage of any ethnic 
group ever known to vote for a single presidential candidate in the 
history of the United States of America, the most pluralistic nation in 
the world, and we probably always will be. And I would just submit, Mr. 
Speaker, that this President would not be President today if any of the 
other races were so racially motivated in the ballots that they cast 
when they went to the polls.
  So I think if there's going to be a color painted on anyone, a bias 
that's painted in there, an implication that comes out of this 
dialogue, I think the folks that were making those statements ought to 
look home to themselves first rather than outward to try to place some 
blame. And I'm happy to acknowledge every legitimate vote, and I think 
they should be counted. But I think we need to recognize that these 
things do swing both ways and it swung dramatically the other way.
  I would just reiterate, Mr. Speaker, it's time to let go. It's time 
to move on. It's time to govern with the people that were elected in 
the majority today and not point fingers backwards and place blame 
where there is no blame due in particular. And I think when you hear a 
hue and cry come up, and when you see a relentless effort to advocate 
in favor of an individual in this Congress, and when I see him do it 
himself here on the floor as chairman of the Financial Services 
Committee, when I see these Members here tonight spend an hour 
essentially doing the same thing, that tells me there must be something 
there that caused them to want to be defensive. And I'm going to submit 
that the opposition to the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 
looms as another significant component in what went wrong in our 
finances.
  So to run through this thing from the Community Reinvestment Act to 
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and to recognize that the secondary loan 
market was underregulated, undercapitalized, Fannie Mae and Freddie 
Mac, who were purchasing these loans and selling them back, and they 
were the secondary market and they were bundling them up and moving 
those on through the financial sector, they had an unnatural advantage. 
Less capital, less regulation. And behind them they had, technically 
speaking, and the gentleman from Massachusetts would raise an objection 
and disagree with me on this, but I'll submit this: Fannie Mae and 
Freddie Mac had the full faith and credit of the United States 
Government behind them. That made their capital more effective than the 
capital of a private lending institution that had to compete with them. 
And I will concede the point they would like to make if they were here, 
that technically they didn't have the full faith and credit. But they 
had the implication of the full faith and credit of the United States 
Government that was there, which allowed them to take more risks and 
take those risks with less capital than if they had been another 
lending institution.
  And what happened, Mr. Speaker? Clearly we know what happened. Fannie 
Mae and Freddie Mac got in trouble, in big trouble. And they were 
looking at $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities if their investments 
fell apart. They had to be capitalized. They had to be managed. So what 
happened? Roughly $200 billion from the U.S. taxpayer went into 
capitalizing Fannie and Freddie, and they became nationalized, wholly 
owned subsidiaries of the Federal Government, no longer quasi 
government entities but wholly owned subsidiaries, nationalized. The 
guarantee of the full faith and credit of the United States Government 
did come to pass, and the taxpayers did fork over $200 billion. And 
today these are nationalized government entities that were quasi 
private that had been wholly private.

  And I introduced legislation to capitalize and regulate Fannie Mae 
and Freddie Mac and privatize them last September or perhaps October. 
It needs to be done yet, Mr. Speaker, although we have enough things 
going on in our finances today that I choose not to advocate 
aggressively on that path because we'll get bogged down and not be able 
to do the things we need to do.
  So that's just the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and 
Freddie Mac.
  And if we move on and we look at some of the other things that went 
wrong, we had the bursting of the dot-com bubble that just started to 
happen in the last year or two of the Clinton administration. It was 
initiated by the lawsuit against Microsoft, and that was what pierced 
the dot-com bubble. I think it would have burst anyway. The bubble was 
created because we had technologically figured out how to store and 
transfer information more effectively than ever before, cheaper than 
ever before. And yet the speculators were investing in these dot-com 
companies, anticipating there would be a lot of money made in the 
industry. And there was. But the calculation that was the burst of the 
dot-com bubble was when the bubble had to collapse and let the air out 
of it that was there because there also had to be an increase in 
production and efficiency that came with all of that information. If it 
didn't create that, it didn't have an economic value. So we speculated 
on what that value might be. The bubble burst when it was pierced by 
the Microsoft lawsuit. And as the economy began to decline, George Bush 
was elected President. And we had this bubble going on.
  Alan Greenspan saw this happening and concluded that he needed to 
create an economy that would fill the dot-com bubble. So he began to 
rachet interest rates down and to do so especially on our long-term 
loans, and we ended up with subprime loans, to create an economy that 
would fill the hole that was created by the bursting of the dot-com 
bubble. Alan Greenspan was busily ratcheting those interest rates down 
to unnatural levels, creating a housing bubble to fill the dot-com 
bubble hole, while September 11th rolled around and the United States 
was attacked by our enemies. The financial centers of the United States 
attacked by our enemies.
  We saw this all happen. And while it was going on, we needed to make 
some adjustments to bring this economy around because we were wobbly 
when the attack came on September 11 of 2001. This Congress passed the 
first round of Bush tax cuts. It filled a

[[Page H4989]]

minor hole. It was May 28, 2003, when the real Bush tax cuts took 
place, and they were the ones that had long-lasting value that brought 
this economy throughout the entire Bush term, even though we were in 
the middle of fighting a war, even though our financial center had been 
hammered. And while all this was going on, the housing bubble was being 
created yet, even though as the interest rates went higher, the 
subprime loans and the variable interest rates were being adjusted and 
putting people in trouble with homes that would have been in trouble 
probably anyway, many of them. Not all of them by any means.
  So this was almost a perfect storm. And I haven't even gotten to the 
mark-to-market accounting side of this thing and credit default swaps 
and AIG Insurance that had nobody looking over their shoulder that were 
setting their own premium rates and had such a market share that there 
wasn't a way that anyone could look in on them and second guess the 
rates they were providing to guarantee the return on the bundles of 
mortgage-backed securities.
  So this perfect storm unfolded until the day Henry Paulson came to 
this Congress and called for $700 billion. And he said, I've been 
watching this problem for 13 months.
  And we said, Why didn't you do something?
  He said, Well, if I had said anything, it would have accelerated a 
downward spiral in our economy.
  Well, so what was he doing here in Congress asking for $700 billion 
and doing press conferences and interviews every step along the way 
around this Capitol but scaring the living daylights out of everyone 
and demanding $700 billion? So could he have just done that 13 months 
earlier, maybe we could have had a way to digest all of this and the 
crisis wouldn't have been as bad. But it got bad.
  I will say, though, that where we are today, the United States 
economy hasn't taken the hit as hard as the rest of the industrialized 
world has and that President Obama picked up the plan that was proposed 
by Henry Paulson and endorsed by President Bush. He picked this up. 
And, by the way, he came back to vote for the $700 billion TARP, and 
yet as elected President, he was fond of saying, I inherited a trillion 
dollar deficit; so don't blame me for all the things that have gone 
wrong in the past.
  Well, part of that trillion-dollar deficit he voted for. Maybe not 
all of that because he didn't spend a lot of time in the United States 
Senate, but he voted for a lot of the deficit that President Obama 
claims to have and for a significant portion of it did inherit.
  But it's his economy. He voted for it. He supported it. President 
Bush initiated it. Who knows how far he would have gone. Would 
President Bush have allowed General Motors and Chrysler to move into 
Chapter 11, or would President Bush have simply decided enough was 
enough? We actually will never know what President Bush would have 
done. But we do know what President Obama has done and what he has 
said. And what he has said is the New Deal actually did work, that FDR 
got part of it right, but he ran out of nerve and he got worried about 
spending too much money; so he backed off in the second half of the 
decade of the 1930s, and that brought about a recession within a 
depression.

                              {time}  2115

  This is the President talking, not me. I don't believe that this is 
what happened. I've studied it and I draw a different message from it.
  But the message that our President drew was that FDR should have 
spent a lot more money. If he had done that we would have recovered 
from the Great Depression before World War II had to come along to be 
the largest stimulus plan ever and get us out of this depression. Not 
that anybody is concluding that we would not have had World War II if 
we had had a stronger economy. I don't think that's actually a valid 
exercise in the study of history.
  But I will make this other point. Whenever you borrow billions of 
dollars from the future of our children, and you inject it into the 
economy and make-work projects that do not have economic value, you put 
this Nation in a debt that is harder and harder for it to climb back 
from. That's what this policy has done, that's what this stimulus plan 
does, and that's what many of the proposals that have unfolded here 
from this Federal Government have done.
  If Franklin Delano Roosevelt had gotten it right, we would have seen 
a positive recovery from the Great Depression take place in the 
thirties. But instead we saw unemployment rates going into World War II 
that were very similar to the unemployment rates in the middle of the 
decade. I will say that FDR inherited some very high unemployment 
rates.
  The numbers that I recall are about 25 percent. That would be the 
peak. But at 15 percent, it's really serious. And we are seeing 
unemployment rates now that show at least 11.5 million people in 
America that are out there actively looking for jobs.
  Now this 25 percent unemployment rate that we had in the early 
thirties carried through at 15 percent, in that range or a little more, 
on throughout that entire decade, and then World War II came along and 
put people to work. When I hear people tell me that 4.6 percent is a 
historically low unemployment rate--and we had that rate 3 or 4 years 
ago--I would disagree, Mr. Speaker. When I look through the rates, my 
recollection is, and I am very confident I am right on this, at the 
close of World War II, 1945, the United States of America had a 1.2 
percent unemployment rate.
  That's about as close to a full employment economy as you can 
actually devise out of a society, because there's always going to be 
some people in between jobs. That was the scenario of a full employment 
society.
  And had we done the free-market thing back in the thirties, had we 
just simply pulled government back out of the way, lowered some taxes 
and given the entrepreneurs an opportunity, instead of competing 
directly with them for capital, for employees, and, actually, for jobs, 
had we let the private sector flourish in the thirties, I believe we 
would have seen a lower unemployment rate and real economic growth 
going on into towards World War II. The war would have happened, 
anyway, but we would have been on the footing of not carrying the debt 
we did into the Second World War which put a tremendous amount of debt 
on our economy.
  We need to remember, Mr. Speaker, that from the time that FDR was 
inaugurated as President of the United States and initiated the New 
Deal program--let me back up a little more. I will back up to October 
1929 when the stock market crashed.
  The stock market on the day that it crashed, that point as a 
benchmark, we went through to 1930, the beginning of the decade of the 
thirties, all the way through the thirties, not reaching the point 
where the stock market had been when it crashed in October of '29, all 
the New Deal, we exhausted every dollar invested in New Deal, spent it 
all, make-work projects of all kinds, borrowed money hand over fist, 
hired people to work directly for the Federal Government to do make-
work projects, to dig holes and fill them back up, all the way through 
the thirties, and still the stock market hadn't recovered in a 
substantial way.
  We went into World War II and industrialized all of America and we 
were the surviving industrial nation at the close of World War II, and 
still the stock market hadn't caught back up with where it was in 
October of '29.
  So we had the post-World War II era when our troops came back home 
and the economy got a shot in the arm because we had good, well-trained 
employees that were starting families, and there were real investments 
going on. And throughout that period of time, from 1945 until the early 
fifties, still the stock market didn't catch up with where it was in 
October of '29.
  And then the Korean War began, and we went over there and fought that 
war and lost those soldiers over there and negotiated to a draw in 
Korea. And still the stock market didn't catch up with where it was in 
October of '29. Not until 1954, Mr. Speaker, not until Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt had been dead for 9 years did the stock market recover from 
where it was on the day that it crashed in October of 1929.
  That's not data that tells me the New Deal worked. But our President 
has adopted the idea that the New Deal actually did work, to use his 
terms, except FDR lost his nerve.
  And I can say this, Mr. Speaker, this President will not lose his 
nerve when

[[Page H4990]]

it comes to spending money. If there is one thing that he has courage 
to do, that's to spend our money. And he has spent trillions of our 
money, and I predicted when he made the pitch for the stimulus plan 
that his economic recovery model was about an $8 trillion project. And 
I got ridiculed for being such a radical reactionary.
  But he has surpassed $8 trillion some time back. His very budget that 
he presents to this Congress creates a $9.3 trillion deficit.
  Mr. Speaker, I can't help but seek to inform you and the balance of 
the body of what a trillion dollars is. You know I come from Iowa, and 
we happen to be, and we are pretty proud of it--and I don't raise any 
of it so I don't get the credit--we are the number one corn producing 
State in the Union. We raise a lot of it, and we are pretty good at it. 
We have the right weather and the right soil and the right people to do 
it. We have been increasing yields 3 to 4 percent a year for some time, 
and we will do that for sometime into the future.
  But we will raise about 2\1/4\ billion bushels of corn in this 2009 
crop that's being planted, well, as we speak, if it's not raining at 
home. Two and a quarter billion bushels. Let's just say for the sake of 
simplicity and math, it's worth $4.40 a bushel. It's not today. It's 
worth less than that, less than $4 today. We have had some markets that 
went well above that. This works out so that I can memorize these 
numbers. I can't do the math this fast in my head.
  That makes Iowa's corn crop this year worth about $10 billion. So we 
have a good yield, the markets are down a little, or if we have not 
such a good yield, the markets are up a little, we will raise enough 
corn to cash sale that for $10 billion.
  Now, how much is a trillion? Well, let's see. If we could take all 
the corn we could raise in Iowa this year and next year and next year 
and the year after, and we handed every kernel of corn over that we 
could raise in Iowa for the next 100 years, we would have generated a 
trillion dollars. A hundred years of Iowa's corn crop just to pick up 
the trillion dollars that is not even enough to pay for the first 
proposal on the stimulus plan, let alone the Obama budget deficit, 
which comes to $9.3 trillion. A century of all of our corn accumulated 
comes to a trillion dollars.

  But this is not a trillion dollar deficit. It's a $9.3 trillion 
deficit created. And if you would just bear with me, and we will 
presume that we are going to round this up to 10 trillion for 
simplicity, and because government always spends more money than they 
promise you they will--we know that to be a fact. It's a historical 
truth.
  So a $10 trillion deficit created by Obama's budget, now, how much 
corn is that? It's all the corn that Iowa can raise, and not one 
century or two centuries or three centuries, Mr. Speaker, the deficit 
created by the Obama budget is the equivalent to all of the corn, the 
value of all the corn that Iowa can raise in a thousand years, an 
entire millennium of our corn crop, a thousand years, way longer than 
anybody has been farming this ground. It will take a thousand years of 
all of our corn just to pay the deficit created by this budget.
  And now, if you wanted to add to that the value of the existing 
deficit, which is around $11.3 trillion, now it's easy. It's easy to 
get to $20 trillion.
  In fact, the numbers will come to between $20.8 trillion and $23 
trillion. But let's just use 20. This is a conservative number.
  How much is $20 trillion? That's if we take the present value of the 
production of corn in Iowa from the time of the birth of Christ and 
multiply that every year for more than 2,000 years, you would finally, 
at the end of two millennia, accumulate enough money in present value 
to pay off the Obama budget and the national debt. $20 trillion. That's 
how big this is, Mr. Speaker. This is a huge deficit put upon our 
children and our grandchildren.
  And I happen to think that the economic problems that this country 
has aren't the worst problems that we have. They sound insurmountable. 
Perhaps on another night I will approach this with a solution, and I 
have in the past.
  But I think what happened here on the floor of the House of 
Representatives today tells us something about the other problems that 
are great, that are huge, that undermine the core of our civilization, 
the character of our nation. That is, Mr. Speaker, the hate crimes 
legislation that passed the floor of the House of Representatives 
today.
  This is legislation that sets up a special protected status for 
sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, I think they have also 
disability in there, which I am not particularly concerned about. We 
did a 2-day markup in the Judiciary Committee on this legislation, Mr. 
Speaker.
  What it does is it defines special classes of people that will have 
special protection from, let's say assault, and special classes of 
people whom if someone does assault them, the perpetrator, if 
convicted, will get an enhanced penalty, an enhanced crime. It sets up 
sacred cows in our society. This civilization that we are so blessed to 
be part of has always punished the overt act, not the thought, not the 
hate that's underneath many of the crimes that we have, but we have 
punished the act, not the thought.
  Because throughout history, we have understood that. We can't know 
what goes on in someone's head, but we can prove definitively, many 
times, the extent of the crime that was committed and who committed it. 
It's the crime that's wrong, not the thought associated with it that's 
wrong. This is a free country that we have, after all.
  And so this legislation reflects for me George Orwell's book, 1984, 
written in 1949, studied by many of us as we went through the 
educational system, and I would present for your consideration, Mr. 
Speaker, some phrases from George Orwell's book, 1984. He was writing 
about the force of the new totalitarians. That's my term, not his. 
Well, actually it is his.
  He didn't call them the new totalitarians, but he called them the 
totalitarians. And they were the successors of the German Nazis and the 
Russian Communists. And he argued that the totalitarians wanted total 
control, not just total control of the economy and the military and the 
society. They wanted to control everyone's minds, Mr. Speaker.
  So here is what goes on. This hate crimes legislation seeks to 
punish, to punish not the overt act but the thought that is associated 
with the overt act. There wouldn't be any reason to have hate crimes 
legislation if we were just going to punish people for committing the 
crimes, because we have laws against them.
  But this legislation puts up a special penalty for the perception 
that is in the head of the perpetrator, which is identified by the 
perception that's in the head of the victim.
  And for the first time, there would be legislation, passed this House 
today, that evaluates the skull contents of the perpetrator and of the 
victim, and what goes on in that gray matter and what motivated them, 
rather than the crime itself. Now, George Orwell wrote, and I quote, 
``The party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we 
care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. We 
are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject 
submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own 
free will. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should 
exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. 
Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation.'' That's 
out of George Orwell's 1984, Mr. Speaker.
  The party then, the new totalitarians, were not interested in the 
overt act. But they were interested in the thought. Because they knew 
that if you control the thought, you control the act.
  Now, that was written to stretch our minds and, I think, predict for 
us what could happen when government got to be the be-all, end-all, 
super intrusive conscience for everyone. And I think we have heard that 
here tonight.
  As I look at this legislation, Mr. Speaker, I find all kinds of gaps 
in it.

                              {time}  2130

  When I take it apart piece by piece and go through it word-for-word, 
line-by-line and subsection by subsection, I find that this legislation 
doesn't hold together, that it has references in it that references 
other sections of code that are inconsistent with the language in the 
bill itself.
  So as I look through these definitions that are here, I recall the 
gentlelady

[[Page H4991]]

from Wisconsin in committee saying that sexual orientation only meant 
homosexuality or heterosexuality. Apparently it didn't mean 
bisexuality, and obviously according to that definition doesn't include 
all of the proclivities listed in the American Psychology Diagnostic 
List.
  So if that is the case, I am still concerned. But I offered an 
amendment to eliminate pedophiles as a special protected class of 
people. And, Mr. Speaker, if we are going to put a shield of statutory 
protection around someone for their proclivity, couldn't we at least 
exempt it for the pedophiles? But on a party line vote, the Democrats 
in the Judiciary Committee voted no on the exemption of pedophiles from 
special protected status. And that is just one of those groups, Mr. 
Speaker. It is just one of the groups.
  Here is a list. This is a list that is a list of the paraphilias. 
Paraphilias, things that I call proclivities, they are the powerful and 
persistent sexual interest other than typical interest and behavior. 
That is paraphilia. There are, according to one of the well-respected 
definitions, how about from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of 
Mental Disorders, here is a list of some of the paraphilias. There are 
547 of them altogether, Mr. Speaker.
  Among them there is a high list of 30 that we will recognize some of. 
Let me see which ones could I actually mention into this Record without 
embarrassing myself.
  One is Asphyxophlia, and that is a sexual gratification derived from 
oxygen deprivation. I didn't know that was out there. But that is a 
special paraphilia, a proclivity, that would be protected under the 
hate crimes legislation. So one dare not assault one of those folks or 
discriminate against them in any way, because you could be subjected to 
a Federal hate crimes legislation.
  I will argue that everybody ought to have protection without regard 
to any of these things. But these are special protected classes of 
people created by this law. And even that side, even though they won't 
discuss it and they won't answer the questions, doesn't agree with each 
other. I get a different message from the gentlelady from Wisconsin, 
Ms. Baldwin, and a different message from her from the gentleman from 
the Rules Committee, Mr. Hastings.
  Mr. Hastings read from a list of paraphilias, and I don't remember 
just which ones he read into the Record, there are so many. But, let's 
see, as he read through these philias, he said he thinks they are all 
protected under the legislation under the definition of sexual 
orientation. So Autogynephilia, Coprophilia, what other philias do we 
have here, there are a number of others, Kleptophilia, sexual 
excitement from stealing. I didn't know that existed. Klismaphilia, I 
won't give you the definition of all of them. Necrophilia, that is 
fixation with a corpse. Pedophilia, I mentioned that to you. I think 
all these philias should be in the bill and are covered by sexual 
orientation. But his own party member and main proponent of the bill 
says no, it is only heterosexual and homosexual, but not apparently 
bisexual.
  This is a major discrepancy in this approach, but what it does is it 
allows the courts to decide what is and isn't covered under ``sexual 
orientation,'' a very, very broad definition of the term.
  Then, Mr. Speaker, as I reach to pull this bill out, here is a 
definition of gender identity. Gender identity, when I make the point 
that there is no definition of gender identity, I get this response. 
Yes, there is. It is defined in the bill. Just look in the bill.
  So, I looked in the bill, and I read here that I guess you could 
argue it is defined, although I wouldn't want to make this argument. 
Gender identity, from the bill: ``For the purposes of this chapter the 
term gender identity means actual or perceived gender-related 
characteristics.''
  Okay, so if you are coming in off the farm, what in the world does 
that mean? I say I don't know what gender identity is, can you help me 
out here, because we are going to be setting the destiny of America. So 
define it for me. I would like to know.
  Well, gender identity means actual or perceived gender-related 
characteristics.
  All right. Let me see, how would you define clothing? Well, clothing 
could be actual or perceived clothing-related characteristics. Well, 
would that be like a heavy Russian winter coat, or would it be a itsy-
bitsy bikini, or a pair of blue jeans? What would you describe it as? 
It is not very specific. Could you identify that all as clothing 
without a definition of clothing as having clothing-related 
characteristics? Can't we do better in law?
  I argued that fence posts come in a lot of different versions too. We 
have creosote-treated pine fence posts. That would be wood. We have 
hedge posts. We have cedar posts, split cedar posts. We have steel 
post, T-posts, electric fence posts. What if I defined it as fence 
posts mean actual or perceived fence post-related characteristics? Now 
what have we?
  I am just telling you this, Mr. Speaker, because these are inanimate 
objects that I am describing here, and even still the silliness of this 
I think emerges in my argument. But when you start talking about not 
inanimate objects, but animate objects that are being described by what 
goes on in their mind and using terms such as ``gender'' instead of the 
word ``sex'' and ``gender identity'' and ``sexual orientation'' and 
recognizing that there are three different categories for some of these 
definitions, Mr. Speaker.
  One of them is gender, okay, for example, as opposed to sex. Sex is a 
physical characteristic. Gender can be a physical characteristic, or it 
can be what you think you are, a mental characteristic. All right. So 
there is two different categories of gender, two different definitions 
of gender.
  You have sexual orientation. Gender identity. Let me go to gender 
identity. Gender identity can be whatever you think you are, I don't 
know about the physical component of this, and sexual orientation can 
be what you think you are, what you act upon, or let's just say the 
composite of those two. And the thought, the act and the physiology are 
the three categories we are trying to define here and blending and 
blurring them all together.
  So it is no wonder that when I try to explain this law, it sounds 
like gibberish, Mr. Speaker, because it is gibberish. It is a piece of 
gibberish legislation that seeks to set up sacred cows, those people 
that would walk the face of the United States of America, could lay 
down in the center of traffic like a cow in India, they could walk 
through the bakery shop and do whatever they wanted to do, and 
everybody would have to walk around them for fear that the Federal 
regulators would come in and bring hate crimes charges against them.
  Or I described this scenario last night, Mr. Speaker. Let's just say 
we had a baseball game going on in Chicago and it was an inter-league 
game between the Cubs and the White Sox. And let's just submit that 
there were 15 Cub fans in the sports bar and they were of mixed 
ethnicity, mixed race, mixed sex/gender, sexual orientation and gender 
identity. These are the Cubs fans over here. While the game is going on 
hot and heavy, here are the White Sox fans over here mixed up the same 
way, every imaginable race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and 
gender identity, and even whatever sex they might be.
  Now, as the game goes on and the barbs fly back and forth and the 
insults go from the Cubs fans to the White Sox fans and back and forth, 
let me presume here there will be some racial slurs that will come out, 
there will be some gender-oriented slurs, there will be some slurs that 
have to do with these paraphilias that I talked about. Then a fight 
would break out, White Sox fans versus the Cubs fans. And they would 
line up along those lines, because they would know who was a Cubs fan 
and who was a White Sox fan. They might forget who fired which insult 
at which particular special protected sacred cow class that has been 
created by this Federal legislation if the Senate should pass this to 
the President.
  Now we have the Feds coming in to sort out a bar fight in Chicago and 
bringing Federal charges against people whose primary motivation might 
not have been anything to do with any of the insults that they hurled 
back and forth. It might just have been a more effective way to insult 
a White Sox fan or a Cubs fan.
  When you get into the path of punishing people for what goes on in 
their

[[Page H4992]]

head, this law cannot figure it out. They can't even figure out how to 
define the terms that are in it, let alone psychoanalyze anybody that 
falls under the purview of this hate crimes legislation.
  While we are on that subject, Mr. Speaker, let me just surmise this, 
that most of us would agree that preventive medicine is a good idea. So 
if we go to the doctor regularly and get our checkup and get our 
physical, he will run the blood samples on us and let us know what kind 
of shape we are in. And if he will do that and we submit ourselves to 
an exercise regimen and watch our diet, take the medication that we 
need to, that preventive medicine will save a lot of money and a lot of 
lives over time, and our lives will be more productive. It is a good 
and healthy thing to do to have preventive medicine.
  Mr. Speaker, if we can divine what is in the head of the perpetrator 
of these crimes, if we can go in and psychoanalyze the perpetrator 
without bothering to psychoanalyze the victim and taking their word for 
whatever their paraphilia might be, but if we could do that, why don't 
we just pick up the Orwellian approach to this, psychoanalyze people 
and figure out they are likely perpetrators before they commit the 
crime, rather than let us have a victim lead us to that perpetrator, 
and then we could have the preventive medicine of hate crimes.
  Wouldn't that be great, if we could just punish people when they have 
the thought, before they actually acted upon it? I would suggest that 
if we can actually psychoanalyze people after the fact, we can 
psychoanalyze them before the fact, and then we could do crime 
prevention. But truthfully you all know, and I know you know, Mr. 
Speaker, I don't believe that can happen. I don't believe we can know 
what is in their head.
  Let me take up another definition of sexual orientation. Even though 
we had a couple of different definitions along the way, sexual 
orientation as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, medical 
dictionary, we have sexual orientation by Merriam-Webster as one's 
attraction to and preference in sex partners.
  Here is another definition from the American Heritage Stedman's 
medical dictionary. Sexual orientation would be sexual activity with 
people of the opposite sex, the same-sex or both.
  So one says it is the attraction, it is in the head. The other one 
says it is the activity. It is the overt act, or maybe a covert act, 
Mr. Speaker. That is two polar opposite definitions of sexual 
orientation, which is in the bill.
  And we have two polar opposite definitions coming from the Democrats, 
neither of which is in the bill. One definition says homosexual, 
heterosexual, nothing else, not even bisexual. The other says every 
kind of proclivity, paraphilia, all philias whatsoever, Mr. Hastings 
from Florida.
  I go to the American Psychological Association for their definition 
of sexual orientation, and this is it: ``Sexual orientation is 
different from sexual behavior because it refers to feelings and self-
concept. Individuals may or may not express their sexual orientation in 
their behaviors.''
  So, you can give no sign that you have some particular paraphilia 
sexual orientation and be a special sacred cow protected class, that if 
someone commits a crime against you they are facing a punishment far 
more severe than they would be facing if it was just someone that 
wasn't carved out in this legislation as a special protected sacred cow 
class. And herein lies some of the flaw and some of the fault in this 
legislation.
  Some other is this. It isn't just violent crimes against people, Mr. 
Speaker, because there is a reference in the legislation that takes us 
back to an existing section of the code that defines a crime of 
violence. Crime of violence in this bill means what it says in this 
section of the code, and I will read from that.
  The term crime of violence means an offense that has as an element 
the use, attempted use or threatened use of physical force against the 
person or property of another or any other offense that is a felony 
that by its nature involves a substantial risk that physical force 
against the person or property of another may be used in the course of 
committing the offense.
  So, the crime of violence means a physical act against a person or 
the attempted use or threatened use of that force, but also against 
property, Mr. Speaker, also against property. And it says an offense 
that has an element.
  Now, if there is an offense, let's just say someone maybe perceives a 
thought that goes on in somebody else's head and decides they want to 
send him a message, and so they go and paint some graffiti on a garage 
door, there is a crime against property, not an individual. Well, that 
would be the crime of violence definition. It would meet it because it 
would have an element in it that the use of and/or the threatened use 
of physical force against property has taken place.
  Physical force is another broad term. Is physical force leaning 
against the garage door? Is it pushing the spray button on some spray 
paint? Yes, it could well be. But the element that is part of that 
takes us back also to the thought crimes part of this, and it tells the 
pastors of the world, be careful if you preach from Leviticus, be 
careful if you preach from Romans, because if you do, there might be 
someone who could intimidate someone else based upon their new Biblical 
beliefs that you have just informed them of last Sunday, and now you 
have become an element in a hate crime that maybe was not any crime 
against an individual, but maybe even a crime against property. And 
this is set up so that we would send Federal forces in to assist in 
prosecution to political subdivisions, Mr. Speaker.

                              {time}  2145

  Political subdivisions being cities, counties, States, parishes, any 
subdivision smaller than that in the United States. And not only would 
we help them in the prosecution of hate crimes, but we'd also, 
according to this legislation, Mr. Speaker, we would be in there 
helping to enforce any of those political subdivisions' existing hate 
crimes laws, whether or not it fit the definition here in this bill. It 
doesn't have to conform with the Federal standard; it just has to be 
whatever they decide it's going to be.
  And so, I happen to recall that the Speaker of the House's home city, 
San Francisco, has an ordinance in San Francisco that says essentially 
this: Thou shalt not disparage the short, the fat, the tall or the 
skinny. Now, that's an antidiscrimination. One might characterize it as 
a hate crime if you disparage somebody that's short, fat, tall or 
skinny. I think all of us think we're one of those categories, 
sometimes two or three of them at the same time, but that would be a 
case where if we could actually have Federal prosecutors go in to San 
Francisco and decide they're going to support an ordinance like that.
  Now, think how intimidating it is when you have Federal prosecutors 
coming in to enforce hate crimes legislation that's created by a city 
council that might be so utterly biased in their approach that they 
could reflect the judgment of the people on the other side of the aisle 
on the Judiciary Committee that brought this legislation to this floor 
under a closed rule, denying all amendments, and a very short period of 
time to debate, Mr. Speaker. It's no way to run the House of 
Representatives.
  And so--and by the way, the pedophilia that was apparently approved 
for special protected status in two ways, voting down my amendment to 
exempt pedophiles from this special protected sacred cow status, and 
also, I think, if we listen to Mr. Hastings, and if he's right, if all 
philias whatsoever should be protected under this legislation, then a 
pedophile is this. It's an adult sexual disorder consisting in the 
desire for sexual gratification by molesting children, especially young 
children. That's the pedophile.
  Here's another definition of sexual orientation. They're all over the 
place, Mr. Speaker. Refers to feelings and self-concept, not behavior. 
Maybe. But we know that another definition in the dictionary that I 
referenced says that it actually is the act, not the thought, not the 
attraction.
  So, as we go through this piece by piece, Big Brother is reaching out 
and telling us that they're going to control our thoughts by passing 
hate crimes. And they're going to give us definitions like gender, 
gender identity, sexual orientation, and not even engage in a debate on 
what those words might mean, but leave it wide open for trial lawyers 
and defense lawyers and judges

[[Page H4993]]

to decide what it is we might possibly mean. And how are they going to 
decide if we don't have clarity even from the proponents of the bill?
  It'll be decided in a slipshod fashion, Mr. Speaker, and it will not 
be a happy result.
  And I will submit also that we will see soon on the floor of this 
House the chairman of the Financial Services Committee's legislation 
called the ENDA Act, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which 
really means discriminate against employers and impose your values on 
them, tell the churches they have to hire people that are the 
antithesis of their teachings, for example.
  And in the end, there also was another amendment. There were many of 
them that were rejected. One of them was the immutable characteristics 
amendment. I just simply want to protect people who have immutable 
characteristics. It was mentioned in the opening remarks in the rules 
today erroneously. Immutable characteristics are not protected in this 
bill. It was specifically rejected when I offered it by amendment. 
Immutable characteristics are often poorly defined or wrongly defined.
  And, Mr. Speaker, immutable characteristics are those characteristics 
of people which can be independently verified and cannot be willfully 
changed. Those characteristics we can protect when we cross the line 
and we start protecting especially behaviors. Those are not immutable 
characteristics. They are mutable. Behaviors are those kind of 
characteristics that one can just simply self-allege.
  And so as the question was raised back in those years when I was in 
the Iowa Senate, constantly lobbied by the students, often they came 
from the University of Iowa, and they asked a State senator there, we 
need special protection because--and he said, why? What, protection 
from what? Well, discrimination. Well, how are you discriminated 
against, and how do you people discriminate against you? Because of 
your sexual orientation. And they said, well, they won't rent us 
apartments and we can't do this and that and the other thing. We don't 
have certain opportunities that might exist for others. We think we're 
discriminated against and we need special protected status.
  So this State senator said, let me ask you a question. What am I? 
What, am I a heterosexual or am I a homosexual? And they looked him up 
and down and they finally said, well, we don't know. We don't know.
  And his answer was, exactly my point. Now, if you don't know, how 
could you discriminate against me? Or if I don't know, how could I or 
anyone discriminate against you? If you keep those things private, 
there can be no discrimination. And that's what I submit is the right 
thing to do when it comes to sexuality, Mr. Speaker.
  Except, I believe that the laws should be respected. And I don't 
believe that we should be establishing a special protected status for 
people who carry such proclivities that many of them are punished with 
prison time for the very sake of carrying them out.
  I think this bill restricts religious freedom, and I think it 
restricts our First Amendment rights. I think it intimidates pastors. I 
think it takes us to a place where we are seeking, by law, to define 
what is in the head of the perpetrator and what is in the head of the 
victim. And sometimes it's the plumbing of the victim and sometimes 
it's the mental attraction that exists for it within the victim and the 
perpetrator. And we can't agree. Even the authors of the bill don't 
agree on where the perception actually exists, whether it's in the head 
of the perpetrator or the head of the victim. I'll submit that it has 
to eventually be analyzed in both, and that cannot be done, not with 
today's science or technology.
  And with today's understanding, I'm very concerned because, Mr. 
Speaker, this society has, to a large extent lost its ability to 
reason. We're racing from emotion to emotion, from feeling to feeling. 
We are not racing from scientific data to empirical analysis and 
logical conclusion arrived at by deductive or inductive reasoning. That 
seems to be lost in this civilization.
  I look back on the Age of Reason of the Greeks 3,000 years ago, and I 
think of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. I think of them sitting 
around under the shade trees in their togas analyzing, thinking, 
testing each others' brains, writing the classical works that they did, 
and shaping the foundation for Western civilization, the theorem, the 
hypotheses, the basis for our science, for our math, the basis for our 
reason. If it hadn't been for the Greeks, Western civilization maybe 
would have never found this modern era.
  But the Age of Reason that came from the Greeks primarily, that 
flowed through and was the foundation for the Age of Enlightenment, 
centered in France, and at the dawn of the industrial revolution, that 
all came to the United States and found itself in an environment of 
almost unlimited natural resources, very low taxes, in many cases, no 
regulation, with a moral people that came over here for their religious 
freedom, with Judeo-Christianity the inspiration for freedom and the 
core of this culture. It found the perfect petri dish to thrive, and 
the vigor that we have in the United States enhanced by legal 
immigration that skimmed the donors from every other civilization on 
the planet, the best vigor, the best vitality, from each of those donor 
civilizations. And our Founding Fathers had the wisdom to sit down and 
place into the Declaration and into the Constitution the foundations 
for our freedom, the rights that come from God, that are vested in the 
people and the sovereignty of the people that loan that power, those 
rights, to their Congressional Representatives, their elected 
Representatives in this Constitution Republic that we have. The 
greatness of this Nation is diminished by the mushy thinking of hate 
crimes acts, Mr. Speaker.

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