[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 65 (Thursday, April 30, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H5052-H5058]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            A PERFECT STORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I appreciate the 
privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of 
Representatives.
  As often happens, if I come down to this floor for the purposes of 
addressing you in this Special Order hour, I find myself following the 
gentleman from Minnesota, who was here with his posters up, advocating 
the Web site of the Progressive Caucus and advocating for things that I 
just simply disagree with. I went over and looked at the charts because 
I was trying to understand what kind of insight was being conveyed, 
Madam Speaker. I know he was addressing you, but you couldn't see the 
charts, so I'll describe to you what I saw.
  I saw the chart that showed the subprime loans that started in about 
1995. It grew. Then the numbers of subprime loans diminished in about 
the year 2000, at about the time that George W. Bush was elected 
President. Then they increased again substantially throughout that 
period of time until such time as there was an abrupt end to the chart, 
which was the beginning of the Obama administration. So I guess we 
don't know the trend since President Obama has been elected, but here 
is what I also hear:
  I hear criticism of the past administration, criticism of the past 
majority, in other words, criticism of Republicans because subprime 
loans went up during that period of time. I hear defense of the 
Community Reinvestment Act because the Community Reinvestment Act 
apparently, one could conclude, was properly crafted legislation that 
brought about a good result. There might have been an even better 
result, if I'm hearing the gentleman from Minnesota correctly, if it 
hadn't been for Republicans in the way of administering this in a 
fashion that would have been different and that would have been done if 
we would have had, say, President Gore rather than President Bush and 
now, of course, President Obama.
  The Community Reinvestment Act was something that was put in place so 
that there could be more loans that went to minorities, especially in 
the inner city, and it recognized that there were lenders that would 
draw a red line around some of those districts in the inner cities 
because they saw that crime rates were going up and that property 
values were going down, which was in inverse proportion to the crime 
rates. As the inner cities began to devolve, the lenders understood 
that it wasn't a good place to put their money, so the Community 
Reinvestment Act was passed in 1978 to provide an incentive for lenders 
to loan into those inner cities because they wanted to get away from 
the redlining that was being done.
  I think it was done with the right motivation, but what you saw were 
the results of the Community Reinvestment Act--those results on the 
chart, Madam Speaker.
  In fact, what you didn't see was the result on the chart that showed 
an increased number of subprime loans, and the subprime loans that were 
increasing were in response, in significant part, to the Community 
Reinvestment Act, which compelled lenders to make bad loans in bad 
neighborhoods. So they devised this method of subprime loans that they 
could get so they could get more bad loans into these bad neighborhoods 
in order to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act so that they 
could take some of the profits from other places and invest and expand 
their operations. They couldn't expand. They couldn't meet the 
regulation requirements of the Federal Government unless they complied 
with the Community Reinvestment Act, and so they made bad loans in bad 
neighborhoods, and they created the subprime loan market, at least in 
part, to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act.
  The President, President Bush, came to this floor, Madam Speaker, 
where you're sitting--in fact, in front of where you're seated right 
now. President Bush addressed this Nation in his State of the Union 
Address. This would have been January 28, 2003. He said that we had the 
highest percentage of homeownership in history, that we had 68 percent 
homeownership in the United States of America. Democrats cheered, stood 
and cheered. Republicans stood and cheered, because we wanted people to 
own their own homes. Everybody wanted that to happen. It was being led 
by Republicans, but it was in reaction to a Democrat law called the 
Community Reinvestment Act, which put bad loans into bad neighborhoods 
so lenders could expand in other neighborhoods and could expand their 
operations.
  The Community Reinvestment Act was inspired, I think appropriately, 
but it was bad law because it didn't hold collateral underneath the 
loans that were being made. It encouraged bad loans.
  We heard a Member of Congress on the floor last night say that she 
was part of ACORN when they went into bankers' offices to intimidate 
the lenders so that they would make more bad loans in more bad 
neighborhoods, driving up the subprime chart you saw from the gentleman 
of Minnesota, and building a rotten foundation underneath our financial 
structure in America. When it began to crumble and collapse, we saw the 
downward spiral in all of our markets, not just in America but in the 
world, because we didn't have our finances built on a sound foundation.
  You can't make bad loans in bad neighborhoods with little or no down 
and with collateral that is diminishing in value and, by the way, 
without a fixed interest rate, with a floating interest rate that is 
going to go up over time.
  We know that Alan Greenspan saw the bursting of the dot-com bubble, 
and he decided he would try to shore up that hole created by the 
bursting of the dot-com bubble by creating a housing boom, a housing 
market that would lift this economy. He did that with unnaturally low 
interest rates. That was built into the Community Reinvestment Act. 
Then there was the intimidation that was going on by ACORN that was, in 
significant part, funded by the American people's tax dollars. They 
would go into a bank or into a loan banker's office--let's just say the 
south side of Chicago. I don't know why I think of that, but I do. They 
would march in there with a group of people from the neighborhood, 
shove the banker's desk out of the way and begin getting in the face of 
the banker and intimidating him into making loans to people who don't 
have the means to pay them back. Then they have the audacity to come 
here to the floor of the House of Representatives and blame this all on 
Republicans. The Community Reinvestment Act was a Democrat bill.

                              {time}  1715

  It was sought to be adhered to, not just to the letter of the law but 
the intent of the law, by the lenders who made some bad loans. And yes, 
there was greed involved and there was some mindset that existed there 
which was

[[Page H5053]]

the lenders would just keep doing what everyone else did, understanding 
that if they did that, everybody would be making or nobody would be 
making money. So if they're making money, then each participant would 
be making money. Also understanding that if things fall apart and blow 
up, these big lenders would be bailed out along with the other big 
lenders, that mindset existed.
  This was a perfect storm, a perfect calamity, a chain reaction of the 
disasters that took place, rooted in 1978 in the Community Reinvestment 
Act. It was built within the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were 
undercapitalized and underregulated and the chairman of the Financial 
Services Committee resisting every effort to try to regulate and 
capitalize Fannie and Freddie.
  And while that's going on, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the 
shoring up of a housing boom with low interest rates, subprime loan 
mortgages, bankers that saw an opportunity to use those mortgages to 
increase their portfolios with the subprime loans that were bad loans 
into bad neighborhoods to satisfy the Community Reinvestment Act. And 
all of this going up to the point where we had bundled mortgage-backed 
securities that were guaranteed by AIG, which set premium rates on it 
with no one able to look over their shoulder. They had such a large 
market share, there wasn't competition, and they set the risk without 
oversight.
  This built into mark-to-market accounting, and add to that, the 
credit default swaps which were part of all of this, and bundles of 
mortgage-backed securities that start out with a loan in your local 
bank or your local savings and loan that would then be sold off into 
the secondary market, perhaps picked up by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, 
who would then bundle it up into a bundle of like secondary-market 
mortgages and sell that into the marketplace on up to the investment 
brokers or investment bankers on Wall Street, who would take that thing 
and slice and dice it and tranche it, they say, and bundle them up in 
different packages.
  What was going on with these mortgage-backed securities was the 
equivalent of if you have ever been to a farm sale or a yard sale, a 
house sale where they put the hayrack out there and the auctioneer 
begins to sell these things off that people don't really want very 
much. So he will put a washtub out there on the hayrack, and nobody 
will bid on it, and then he will throw in a hammer and crowbar and some 
old pictures and some nuts and bolts, and pretty soon somebody will bid 
on it because there is one thing in there that they want and then he'll 
sell that to them. And then that washtub goes back to the garage of the 
buyer. He sorts that out, and he's already bought several others at 
other sales, and then he will sort out and he will take all of the 
hammers and take them and sell them at a sale where it brings a better 
price for hammers. And then he'll sell the crowbars at that kind of 
sale and the garden rakes at a different sale, maybe.
  But in the end, slice, dice, tranche, shuffle, cut, deal these 
mortgage-backed securities up through the financial chain--so many 
times that nobody knows not necessarily where they originated but how 
they actually got all the way to the other end of this chain--evaluated 
not on the value of the real estate, which is the underlying 
collateral, but evaluated by the premium that you had to pay to AIG to 
ensure that these loans would perform. All of this into a financial 
market system that was the underpinnings of what should have been the 
actual asset value of the mortgage-backed securities, not the 
performance of them, in my view.
  So, we have a lot of things we need to fix in this Congress. But this 
Congress is so busy shifting blame that we cannot get to the solutions 
that we need to have at hand. We need to repeal the Community 
Reinvestment Act. We need to capitalize and regulate Fannie Mae and 
Freddie Mac equivalent with other lending institutions, and we need to 
privatize them eventually. We need to end mark-to-market accounting. 
That's the kind of accounting where if you have an asset value on your 
balance sheet today and you're required to post that value, you have to 
go out to determine what is the actual bid for that today.
  And so a bundle of mortgage-backed securities, for example, would 
have a rating, a rating to them, say AAA, and there would be a certain 
bid. So you would have to adjust your balance sheet to what those bids 
are. And now if there happened to be no bids, you might go from $60 
million down to zero, effectively, overnight.
  I would compare it to--let's just say if you had your grain bins full 
of corn and corn was worth $4 a bushel, you would multiply 10,000 
bushels, for example, by $4 a bushel, and you end up with $40,000 worth 
of corn. You put that on your balance sheet. Now, that's fine. It's 
legitimate, and I would nod my head in agreement. But what if a big 
flood comes along, washes out all of the bridges and there are no 
trucks running, no rail lines running, nobody is transferring, shifting 
any grain? All of a sudden, this grain that's in the bin that has 
value, you have to evaluate it at zero.
  That next day along came the flood, your $40,000 worth of corn goes 
to zero. You know, you put that in your balance sheet and you go to 
your banker and say, I want to borrow $30,000 to put my crop in. Sorry. 
There are no bids on corn. You don't have any asset value here. So if 
you don't have any other assets, we aren't going to loan you any money. 
That's how that works.
  So the bankers come into the lending institutions, and they will say, 
Give me a look at the collateral that's there. And if this collateral 
is mortgage-backed securities, commercial paper, or there are no bids 
on it or the bids are dramatically down because the instability takes 
away the marketplace, then it gets marked down and the bank has to go 
out and recapitalize, get their capital level up. That means they have 
to call some loans. That means they have to quit giving some loans that 
they might be giving to some really effective entrepreneurs that have a 
real opportunity, and our economy begins to shrink.
  All of these things flowed out of this not because George Bush was 
President, not because Republicans had the majority in the House of 
Representatives and the Senate for a time. It flowed because we had, 
from a long time back in our history, back to 1978, had a series of 
mistakes, one stacked on top of another that set up this scenario for 
this perfect storm. And we're not able to even identify that or hold a 
legitimate hearing in this Congress that can shine some light on what 
has happened so that we can start to fix the problem.
  No, we're into growing government. We're into a lurch to the left 
that every time we have a financial problem with an institution, what 
happened? The President of the United States steps in and takes a step 
to nationalize the private sector businesses which are the mother's 
milk of our economy.
  Private sector is the goose that lays the golden egg, and when 
government competes with it, it starves that goose and she can't lay 
those eggs like she did before and, eventually, she will stop laying 
eggs altogether.
  But the nationalization of General Motors and the nationalization of 
Chrysler--it was Daimler Chrysler. They got out of it. They dropped a 
few billion dollars and stepped away. And now we have the President of 
the United States who came out on a specific day, I think--I don't 
clearly remember that exact day, late March--March 26th would be my 
guess, and he took credit for nationalizing General Motors, firing the 
CEO, hiring a new CEO. That means the White House is managing General 
Motors. And he took credit for directing that Chrysler merge with Fiat, 
the Italian company, and that they would now be compelled to make 
automobiles, at the direction of the President, that got a certain 
mileage and they were energy-efficient vehicles, whether anybody wants 
them or not.

  Now, Madam Speaker, I can go back and look at the parking lot at my 
church, and I happened to take a little note. It was Palm Sunday, I 
noticed. It was hard to find a car in that church that would meet the 
satisfaction of Speaker Pelosi or President Obama--I am not sure what 
Harry Reid thinks--because we couldn't have gotten to church on a two-
wheel drive vehicle that day. I would have to have--mass transit means 
something different

[[Page H5054]]

where I come from. You'd have to come home and set up some transit to 
get me to mass if I didn't have a four-wheel vehicle to get me through 
the snow on Palm Sunday. That's the place I live. That's the way my 
neighbors are.
  But this idea that the President of the United States can nationalize 
major corporations--what is a more American business than General 
Motors, Chrysler Motors? I guess Ford is more American today because 
they said, Don't give me the money. I don't want to have strings 
attached. We think we can run this business without government 
intervention, without the government bailing us out.
  And what we saw happen was a President Obama that went down to the 
Central American conference--and I was looking for him to join up with 
President Uribe of Colombia. We have an important free trade agreement 
that we've negotiated in good faith with Colombia that not only is it 
important for our trade to be able to export to Colombia and cash their 
checks and bring the money back here to help our balance of trade and 
allow them to trade back to us, yes, but it's important from a national 
security perspective. It's important for the security of the Western 
Hemisphere.
  The FARC rebels down in Colombia, the Marxist rebels that are in 
Colombia, President Uribe has been fighting them, and he's been 
defeating them; and he's been fighting the drug smugglers and the drug 
cartels, and he's been defeating them. We need a President of the 
United States that would go down there and do a big glad-handed grin 
with President Uribe and say, We've negotiated this bipartisan--it 
actually is bipartisan--bilateral free trade agreement with you, and I 
want it brought to the floor of the House of Representatives and the 
U.S. Senate for a vote in accordance with keeping our word of honor in 
the best interest of the United States, Colombia, and the Western 
Hemisphere.
  I saw no photo-op of any meeting that took place with President 
Uribe. I just saw the video and the photos that took place with the 
glad-handed gripping handshake--somebody said a fist bump. I didn't 
actually see that, but the two grinning leaders side by side. And the 
image that I saw was this:
  Chavez went to the United States a year ago and called our President 
of the United States El Diablo, the devil, and he said there is a 
stench of sulfur here that lingers from his speech yesterday. The most 
vile insult I can ever remember on an international stage. And what do 
we see within the first 100 days of President Obama's administration is 
a big, glad-handed, grinning handshake with an extra hand up on the arm 
to really reestablish this--apparently a happy get-together that I 
don't know if it was planned by staff or it was spontaneous.
  But it says two things very loudly to me, Madam Speaker. One of them 
is there is no penalty for challenging the United States and insulting 
the biggest funder of the United Nations. We pay way more into the 
United Nations than anybody else to support the Security Council, to 
support the United Nations, and what do we get out of the United 
Nations? Just insulting resolutions that attack the United States and/
or Israel. That's what we get out of the United Nations. We host them 
here. And instead, it's a constant drumbeat of insults against the free 
people in the world, the leader of the free people in the world, capped 
off by Hugo Chavez's vile insult against the United States of America 
and our Commander in Chief and the leader of the free world. And our 
new President goes down to do a glad-handed handshake so all of the 
world can see there is no penalty for that kind of a vile insult 
against the United States of America. That's the first message that 
comes out.
  The second one is this other message, these two leaders of their own 
sovereign countries, within less than 30 days of each other and just 
last month, nationalized major businesses within their own countries. 
President Obama nationalized General Motors and Chrysler and Hugo 
Chavez nationalized a rice processing plant that belonged to an 
important Minnesota company, Cargill, Cargill Company. The gentleman 
from Minnesota who just spoke doesn't seem to have an ounce of 
heartburn about the nationalization about a proud and important 
Minnesota company, Cargill. Chavez just went in and said, I own this 
now. This is my ground. I will run it the way I see fit because I am 
not happy with the way you run your operation. If you try anything else 
that's out of line, I'll take care of any other property you may have 
in Venezuela.
  Well, I have got an answer for Hugo Chavez, Madam Speaker, and it's 
this: We produce enough ethanol from corn in America today to 
completely replace any of the energy that's coming from Venezuela.

                              {time}  1730

  We can replace it all just with the ethanol we produce from corn.
  So we don't need Hugo Chavez. And I don't need his gas stations in 
this country, and I don't need his leering grin coming out of my 
television. He is a self-evolved Marxist, a hater of the United States, 
and someone who is building relations--not just diplomatic or 
political, but military activities and operations with the Russian Navy 
and our own Caribbean designed to send a message to the rest of the 
hemisphere; Hugo Chavez is a troublemaker.
  And what does our President say about that? He says, well, the 
national military budget of Venezuela is only one-six hundredth of what 
ours is, so it really isn't a threat. Is that what you measure? Do you 
measure the money that they are spending today on military, or do you 
measure what this means when it sends inspiration to FARC, the Marxist 
revolutionaries--the Marxist rebels is what they are--in Colombia that 
undermines Uribe, who believes in freedom and free enterprise and a 
rule of law, our sound partner--that we can't even get a vote on the 
floor of the House of Representatives to ratify a free trade agreement 
that was negotiated in good faith by our U.S. Trade Representative, 
under the direction of President Bush, with a legal obligation to have 
that vote within 90 days of it being presented to this Congress. No, 
even the rule of law, even that commitment was defied by order of the 
Speaker with a convoluted rules vote that undermined the very law that 
was in the books, the good-faith provisions.
  So, Madam Speaker, we have a whole series of different concepts here 
that I think need to be debated, and I brought out some of them. But 
when the gentleman from Minnesota talked about his reverence for ACORN, 
his reverence for La Raza, that also comes with the Congressional Black 
Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, a whole list of separatist groups here 
that exclude Members from their list. There are a whole lot of Members 
of Congress that can't walk into either one of those caucuses I 
mentioned; they wouldn't be accepted in there. They can't be members 
because they don't have the right race. And they get a pass. And I just 
say, let's treat everybody equally. Let's just recognize we're all 
God's children, we're created in His image. And He has seen fit to 
bless us with characteristics so we can tell each other apart. Why do 
we fight that? Why don't we just accept that and recognize it and be 
grateful that he has a wisdom that maybe we don't see as well as we 
should.
  But, instead, we have a legislative effort that is determined to 
divide Americans and pit Americans against Americans. Why, majority 
party, why does the President of the United States, Madam Speaker, why 
are they determined to divide us? I would like to know the answer to 
that question. Don't divide us; unite us. Unite us by eliminating these 
classifications of race, sexual orientation, gender, skin color. Let's 
look at everybody as an individual intrinsic in their sacred value as a 
human being. And if we do that, we can continue to move down the path 
of the things that actually do unite us, like establishing English as 
the official language of the United States, a common form of 
communications currency that would bind us together.
  The things that bind our culture together are important components. 
What is it about being an American that makes us unique? What is it 
that makes it common for us to be Americans? What do we have in common? 
What are these characters, Madam Speaker? And I will submit this: we, 
for the most part, do speak a common language. You can pick up a 
newspaper most anywhere in America, open it up and read it and be able 
to understand it. You can walk into a city council meeting most 
anywhere in America

[[Page H5055]]

and conduct that business in English so that you understand what's 
going on there. You can travel across the breadth of this land and find 
Americans that get that feeling in their stomach and in their heart and 
a tear in their eye when they see the Flag come down the street in a 
parade on Memorial Day or at the cemetery or in the parade on the 4th 
of July. Americans bound together by a common history, common 
experience, having pulled together. Americans that were pulled together 
when we saw the attack on this country on September 11 in New York, 
Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon. Those attacks bound us together.
  I know about the divisions in America; I hear them here every day, 
the debates we have against each other, the parochial differences that 
come up--urban versus rural, North versus South, right versus left. All 
of the divisions that are economic interests--manufacturing States 
versus the intellectual property States versus the ag States, cotton 
versus corn in the Ag Committee. These things go on constantly. And 
yet, when this country was attacked on September 11, I remember seeing 
the devastation. I remember watching the buildings tumble down, the 
flaming buildings go down and the dust go up. And as I watched that, a 
sick thing came through my heart. And I watched Americans in the 
Midwest transfixed in front of the television at the Clay County Fair, 
to have 70 and 90 people standing in front of the television at one of 
the displays, it went on all day long, just a constant rotating dirge. 
It was like being at a wake, the sadness and the mourning and the 
prayers that went up for the victims and their families all across this 
country.
  In our schools, prayer came to the public schools September 11, 2001. 
And no one objected on that day. Many of our public schools gathered 
together, filled their auditoriums, brought their pastors in, stood all 
of the students and the parents that came together and they joined 
hands and they prayed together and they read Bible verses together in 
an ecumenical expression of faith and unity and hope and prayer for the 
victims and for this country. All that was fine when we were under the 
stress load of being at war and of the attack that came our way.
  I remember, also, a picture of a young black man who was standing on 
a street and the smoke was rolling down the street. And as he stood 
there, his face was covered with dust, but one tear washed his cheek 
from gray to black, and that tear said more about the unity of this 
country than any image that I have seen in association with September 
11. It sticks in my mind what kind of a Nation we are.
  But I also knew, as the discussion about how many people had lost 
their lives, in those Twin Towers in particular, the numbers went up, 
estimations from 10,000 to 15,000 to 20,000--20,000 was the highest 
number I heard. And I can remember as the estimate went down, and as 
each time the estimate went down from 20,000 it was with a sense of 
relief that it wasn't as bad as it might have been, it wasn't quite as 
bad as we thought it could have been. And as those numbers went down 
and they approached that 3,000 number--which is the one we use today 
that I think is pretty close to the numbers of people we lost that 
day--I remember the relief that I was feeling as the numbers went down, 
while at the same time I knew that the lower the numbers were, the 
sooner we would forget about this attack on Americans on our soil, and 
it would be in inverse proportion.
  If that number had gone down to zero, if it had just destroyed the 
buildings and no one had been killed, I would submit, Madam Speaker, 
that we wouldn't have had these wars that we're in. This would have 
been a law enforcement practice a long time ago instead of a 
war against these radical jihadists. But we lost more people on 
September 11 than we did in Pearl Harbor. And the attack was on the 
continental United States in a domestic facility rather than--at that 
time not yet a State--the great State of Hawaii and the attack mostly 
on a military base in Pearl Harbor.

  And so immediately afterwards I heard from Members of Congress and 
leaders, thought leaders, it was, what did we do that caused them to 
hate us so much that they would attack us? And part of this Nation went 
into this introspective mode of trying to figure out what we might have 
done wrong because, after all, part of the guilty Americans--which 
usually come from this side of the aisle--are always looking for a way 
that it's the fault of the people on this side of the aisle, like 
subprime loans are President Bush's fault somehow, or Republicans' 
fault, and somehow we should not have done the things that caused them 
to hate us enough that they attacked us on September 11.
  I went off to those weekend seances with bipartisan Members of 
Congress--I point out that I call them weekend seances facetiously, 
Madam Speaker. But I sat for 3 days on end in rooms with other Members 
of Congress that constantly asked the question, What did we do wrong? 
What did we do wrong? How are we ever going to get ourselves to where 
they don't hate us anymore so they quit attacking us? And what are we 
going to do if people are willing to die when they attack us?
  Well, in the first place, it's not our responsibility to know what 
causes a person to be so deranged that they would fly planes into 
buildings just to kill people because of the success that we have. They 
hate our freedom. They hate the success of our free enterprise 
capitalism. They must have burned some subprime mortgages on that day--
maybe that's a measure of happiness for the people who think they are 
naturally bad. But it is not our responsibility.
  We had a series of Middle Eastern experts in the room, and they had 
been talking for several days. And I finally posed this question, and 
it was this: Of that culture--and I hesitate to call it a 
civilization--of that culture, what has been their contribution in the 
area of math, science, medicine, or chemistry in the last 700 years? 
Can you give me a single contribution that that civilization has made 
in the last 700 years? And of all the experts we had there, not one 
could come up with an answer because the improvements in civilization 
have come from outside that type of a culture.
  We have a culture here that is grounded in the things that grow us 
and make us good. We are rooted in the rights that are in the Bill of 
Rights and natural law and free enterprise capitalism and property 
rights and the entrepreneurial spirit and the vigor that comes from the 
donor civilizations that have sent immigrants to America from the first 
day. We have had that vigor of the people that had a dream, and they 
were willing to take a risk and go across an ocean to come here to 
build a dream on this continent. That is unique about America. They 
hate that. They haven't seen that level of success. And so they just 
simply say, we want to kill you unless you will kneel before us and 
accept our God and reject your own.
  It is not my job to know what is going on in their heads. We can try 
to understand it so we understand our enemy better, but we are not 
going to accommodate to that kind of thinking, Madam Speaker. We need 
to challenge it, we need to defeat it wherever it exists, and in fact 
we've done so in Iraq.
  In Iraq, we have reached a definable victory in Iraq, and I have 
introduced a resolution that says so. And it has its purpose. But the 
reason that I will say that we reached a definable victory, the list of 
reasons come along this way: that ethnosectarian deaths, from our high, 
have dropped 98 percent, civilian deaths have dropped 90 percent in 
Iraq. We had three successful elections, one constitution that has been 
ratified in Iraq. The distribution of the oil revenue has been, in a 
fairly reasonable process, has distributed that revenue from Baghdad 
out to the other cities.
  The mayor of Fallujah has declared it to be a city of peace. The 
mayor of Ramadi sounds like the mayor of Peoria: ``I need more money 
for sewer water, lights and streets.'' The mayor of Fallujah said it is 
a city of peace. They are going to repair every sign of war in Fallujah 
and plant a lot of flowers instead so that one day soon when we go to 
Fallujah there will be no sign of war.
  All of those things are good signs that this war has gone to the 
point where we have achieved a definable victory. But the most 
important statistic is, from June 30 of last year until the last report 
that I received some days

[[Page H5056]]

ago, the loss of American lives in Iraq has been equal to or less for 
those Americans lost in accidents than we have to the enemy. That tells 
you when a war is going the right direction.
  Those statistics tell us the right things. They don't give comfort to 
the families who lost a son or a daughter there. They deserve our 
constant prayers and respect and appreciation for their noble service 
and their noble sacrifice. But George Bush ordered the surge. Had he 
not done that, we would be looking at having already pulled our troops 
out of Iraq and chaos would have ensued, and there would be a defeat in 
Iraq. And you cannot retreat and declare it victory; you must own the 
land you fought for before you can declare victory.
  And so the ideas that came from some of the people, like the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania that said it is a war that can't be won, 
it's a civil war, we have got to get out of there, we've got to retreat 
to the horizon--we find out the horizon was Okinawa, which takes me 
back to the courage that this Nation needs to have to face the enemies 
that we have, and the fear that we had because four planes were crashed 
into the United States and we didn't know how to fight these people 
that were willing to die to kill us. Well, Okinawa tells us how.
  I went to a National Convention of Survivors of Okinawa a few years 
ago. They faced 4,600 Kamikaze attacks on the fleet, on their land 
forces around and on Okinawa. It was a massive suicidal effort to try 
to wipe out our American forces and a last ditch stand to stop the 
efforts of the American invasion of Okinawa; 4,600 Kamikaze attacks, 
and we are worried about four.
  We think we don't have the steel within us, the mettle within us, the 
conviction within us to face off against people like we have today, 
when you think of what happened in World War II, two-front war, global, 
16 million men and women in uniform and in arms and an industrial base 
that supplied the world because the Second World War destroyed the rest 
of it.

                              {time}  1745

  We are a Nation that became the world power and one of the two 
competing superpowers until the end of the Cold War, which resulted in 
one lone superpower, the unchallenged greatest nation in the world 
economically, militarily, socially, cultural, the beacon for freedom, 
the inspiration for the free people of the United Kingdom from which 
originated the English language, which binds us together, and the 
inspiration for freedom that goes with that language wherever it goes 
around the globe.
  When I read Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking 
Peoples, I finally closed that book and I thought of all the places the 
English language has gone, it's been accompanied by freedom. Freedom 
has followed. It's gone with the English language. There is an 
inspiration that's built into the culture that makes us the vanguards, 
the defenders, the beacons for freedom. We have that responsibility, 
Madam Speaker, and it's a responsibility to stand up to the tyrants of 
the world, whether they be Osama bin Laden, Hugo Chavez, Ahmadinejad. 
Anybody that undermines freedom is our enemy. And anybody that adheres 
to and loves and works for and sacrifices for freedom, we adhere to 
them. The free people of the world need to stand together.
  I had a lunch with the Japanese, some members of their Parliament, 
today. And I said to them that the peace and the security of Asia will 
depend significantly upon our ability to be friends together today, but 
peace is not achievable unless we have freedom, and we must defend our 
freedom.
  And then bringing us back to the issues that have been before us here 
in this Congress this week and last week, there has been an effort to 
undermine the freedoms of the American people. We're losing track of 
those underpinnings, those pillars of American exceptionalism. The 
majority that's here that seems to want to spend their time criticizing 
the past President, criticizing the past majority in the House of 
Representatives, and criticizing the past majority in the United States 
Senate, the people that just can't let go of their rooted criticism for 
Republicans, the people that can't move on, that must be drilling down 
and blame shifting back onto our side of this aisle, have lost touch 
with the fundamental values of human beings. They've lost touch with 
the criminal law, the criminal law that flows from English common law, 
the traditions that were there. Criminal law rooted in, if it's the 
king's deer and you kill the deer, you've committed a crime against the 
Crown. And if anyone ever is a victim of a crime and they go to court 
to support as a witness or to observe the proceedings that take place 
in a criminal prosecution, they will hear the clerk or the bailiff 
announce this is the case of the State versus John Doe, the alleged 
perpetrator. They don't say anything about the victim. They don't say 
that Mary Jones, the victim of this crime, is involved in it. They say 
that this case is the State versus John Doe, alleged perpetrator. 
That's because the crime is presumed to be committed against the State, 
not against an individual victim, rooted back from if you take the 
king's deer, you've committed a crime against the Crown. If you kill 
one of the subjects of the king, you've killed one of his assets that 
he would be deprived of the labor of the subject; so when the king gets 
his version of justice, the actual victim of the crime is not in the 
equation anymore. It's the State versus rather than the king versus the 
perpetrator of the crime.
  Now, that's one of the fundamentals, but it always was punishment for 
the criminal based upon the overt act of the criminal, the action 
itself. Not the thought, not what went on, not the motivation, but the 
very act. If you assault someone, we punish you for assault, assault 
and battery. If you attempt to murder someone, we punish you for the 
attempted murder. If you murder someone, we punish you for the murder 
itself, not for the murderous thought that might have preceded the 
murder. And if you rape someone, we punish you for the rape, not for 
the motivation or the thought. Now, it might come into a sentencing 
hearing, but it's not part of the crime, until this House of 
Representatives, in a breathtaking leap away from hundreds and hundreds 
of years of criminal law, leaps into this arena to declare that there 
actually are thought crimes that should be punished separate from the 
act itself. Now, they call it ``hate crimes'' and they call it Matthew 
Shepard's law and they call it a lot of other things, but it's thought 
crimes, Madam Speaker.
  Someplace in here I have the text of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, 
written by George Orwell. Orwell wrote this book in 1949, and he made a 
prediction that there would be thought crime control taking place in 
the world by 1984. Now, we are here in 2009; so he was a little bit 
ahead of himself in the thought crimes prediction arena. But he said, 
and I'm going to just paraphrase, Madam Speaker, that we don't care 
about any overt act; we care about the thought. It's the thought that 
counts, because if you can control the thought, you can control the 
act.
  Now I do find it here, Madam Speaker, and here it is verbatim from 
the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is the new totalitarians speaking 
to Winston: ``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 obediency 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.''
  Madam Speaker, that's what this hate crimes/thought crimes 
legislation does. It controls, it punishes the thought. And now it sets 
up a special class of protected people and it subverts our language in 
a way that's not defined, and I had indexed it from the bill. It 
subverts our language this way: It replaces the word ``sex'' with the 
word ``gender.'' And here's why, and I have some history in litigating 
this. Here's the definition of ``sex'' from Black's Law. ``Sex: The sum 
of the peculiarities of structure and function that distinguish a male 
from a female organism.'' The physiology of male versus the physiology 
of female. That would be your sex. But the word ``sex'' has been 
constantly replaced in this society willfully in a premeditated way by, 
let me call them, homosexual activists who see the law of this and they

[[Page H5057]]

began to push this in this way: They replace the word ``sex'' with 
``gender.'' And ``gender'' is used in this hate crimes/thought crimes 
legislation. And here's the reason: Gender is ambiguous; sex is 
specific. Anybody can identify a male from a female. Any plumber or 
electrician can do that easily. They see the sense in my argument. Some 
others do not. But sex is specific to the physiology, the physical 
characteristics. Gender is not so. The definition of ``gender,'' and 
I'm in the American Heritage Dictionary now, it might be the condition 
of being female or male.

  It's odd that they're so politically correct that they actually 
willfully switched the male-female to be female first. That's okay with 
me, but I just noticed that in our literature these days, too.
  ``The condition of being female or male sex.'' Gender might be that. 
But right below that it says that ``gender is your sexual identity, 
especially in relation to society or culture.'' So if you have a gender 
that is a sexual identity, doesn't that include a cross-dresser, 
someone that goes out on the streets as the identity of a female that 
may have the physiology of the male? That definition doesn't fall under 
``sex.'' You don't have any cross-dressers under ``sex.'' They are 
whatever anyone can determine they are by the physiology of being male 
or female, but now this legislation plugs the word ``gender'' in.
  I tried to replace them, Madam Speaker, but the amendment was voted 
down exactly by party lines. Now they're a special protected class of 
people. You can't discriminate against anyone because of gender. You 
may not be able to determine what it is. That's in the head of the 
alleged victim.
  Then you have gender identity. The definition of ``gender identity'' 
gets a little bit broader and a little harder to nail down. But gender 
identity, the definitions that come along with this become definitions 
that are either a mental definition or a physical definition or, in 
some of these cases of the paraphilias, of which there are about 547, 
it can be the act as well.
  But we don't know from reading this legislation or talking to the 
people that wrote it what these words really mean. So if you have 
sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender identity can be a 
person's own sense of actual or perceived gender-related 
characteristics. That sounds a lot like gender to me under that broad, 
loose definition that's there. What would be the physical definition of 
gender identity? Could anybody take a look at someone who said that 
they are of a specific gender identity and determine if they were that 
gender identity? No. We can determine their sex independently, but the 
individual has to characterize their gender identity because that's a 
self-perception, and then it may or may not include a particular act.
  But when we get to sexual orientation, sexual orientation includes 
paraphilias that are listed here by the American Psychological 
Association. And paraphilias are ``a powerful and persistent sexual 
interest other than typical sexual interest.'' There is list of 547 
specific paraphilias. I call them proclivities. Many of them are 
perversions, Madam Speaker. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings) 
read a whole list of them on the floor in the debate yesterday: 
asphyxiophilia, apotemnophilia, autogynephilia, kleptophilia, 
klismaphilia, necrophilia, pedophilia, and we know what that one is--
that's, of course, the sexual activity with children--urophilia. There 
are some philias. And the gentleman from Florida said, I think we have 
to have special protected status from all philias whatsoever, all 
proclivities whatsoever. These that are perversions are specifically, 
at least within some of the idea of the definition of this legislation, 
protected.
  It's outrageous to think that the amendments to protect the unborn 
child, the amendments to protect the pregnant mother, the amendments to 
protect the senior citizens, the amendments to protect our uniformed 
soldiers from this kind of hate crime against them motivated by what's 
in the head of the perpetrator were all voted down in the Judiciary 
Committee and denied to be debated on the floor of the House of 
Representatives because we had this draconian closed rule that would 
not put these Members up and require them to make a decision on whether 
they were going to protect these proclivities, these paraphilias, these 
perversions, while we had one Member say, yes, they're protected in 
this law. We had one of the strong advocates of this bill say, no, it's 
only homosexuals or heterosexuals.
  Presumably it's not bisexuals. Well, I don't know what happens when 
you cross the line between heterosexual to homosexual. There must be 
somebody in the middle that's a bisexual that she would want to 
include. But this lack of specificity gets us in trouble, Madam 
Speaker.
  Another thing that gets us in trouble is the statements that are made 
in the debate in this bill that are just flat erroneous, such as, well, 
it requires a crime of violence before it will kick in the Federal 
extra penalty against someone because they've committed this hate 
crime/thought crime. It requires a crime of violence.
  Well, it doesn't, Madam Speaker. It doesn't require a crime of 
violence. It does under the imposition of the Federal law but not when 
we are sending the Department of Justice down to any political 
subdivision, city, county, or State, municipality, parish, tribal area, 
to help out with prosecution there. Then we honor whatever they might 
have written into their local ordinance for hate crimes.

                              {time}  1800

  We use Federal forces to enforce it, and these crimes can be 
committed against property, specifically in the bill that can be crimes 
against property, not just crimes of violence against people. And here 
is where it comes from. They reference the section in the code.
  So I go to this section, and it's a definition of crime of violence. 
And it says: ``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 as an element.''
  Even the threat of physical force against only the property of 
another, if they presume that it's motivated in part by a built-in bias 
against someone's proclivity that cannot be divined by the perpetrator 
but has to be self-identified by the victim.
  Sounds a little like the sexual harassment that we debated here in 
this Congress about the time, well, it was exactly at the time of the 
confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas. It sounds a lot like you can 
sexually harass someone and not know it, because the rationale is it's 
in the mind of the victim.
  And so if someone comes in and tells an off-color joke at work, if no 
one is offended, it's not sexual harassment. But if someone is 
offended, then it's sexual harassment.
  And if someone paints some graffiti on a garage, and that garage 
happens to belong to someone who says I have one of these philias, one 
of these proclivities, one of these paraphilias, then they can bring 
Federal hate crime charges against the person with a can of spray 
paint. Or, Madam Speaker, here is a case in point. It could be, brings 
me back to Ellie Nessler.
  Ellie Nessler is well-known in California. Her son was a victim of a 
sex crime. And when they brought the perpetrator into court, the 
alleged perpetrator, because he hadn't been convicted at that point, 
and the trial stopped right after Ellie's act, he smirked at the mother 
of the victim, who was there to protect her son who needed to be there 
for the case of this trial.
  And after he smirked at her, she went out and got her pistol and shot 
the perpetrator in the courtroom. The justice that was brought to Ellie 
Nessler was manslaughter, and I believe that she served 6 months in the 
California penitentiary, and then she was paroled on good behavior.
  This sets the scenario up where Californians were satisfied with the 
justice that Ellie Nessler received. But if there had been some that 
were connected at the national level, under this kind of legislation, 
then the Department of Justice could send in Federal prosecutors to 
prosecute Ellie Nessler for a hate crime that she committed against the 
perpetrator who was a pedophile. And that pedophile would have that 
special protected status.
  And even in his death, the punishment could have been multiplied up 
to and including life in a Federal penitentiary because he had 
committed a politically--he committed an act--and

[[Page H5058]]

she had committed a politically incorrect act, for an extra penalty. 
Now I don't make excuses for Ellie Nessler's act, but I point out that 
Federal involvement in local crimes is unnecessary, and it's 
interventionary.
  And it's unjust for us to believe that we can set penalties here on 
the floor of this Congress and lock people up for as long as life in 
prison for what we think was going on in their head, about what they 
might have thought was going on in the head of the victim.
  And we are going to for the first time match up the psychoanalysis of 
the victim, the psychoanalysis of the perpetrator, put them together 
and come down with a decision not on the overt act, Madam Speaker, but 
on the very thought that might go on in the mind of the perpetrator.
  It's wrong to take justice down this path. It's unjust to do so. It's 
unprecedented to do so. It pits Americans against Americans. It sets up 
sacred cows, people that can walk through this society, and they will 
be dealt with differently because there will be the threat that Federal 
law will come in and give them a special protected status, a shield 
that doesn't exist for people that don't fit within this list of 
special protected status.
  I urge the Senate to oppose this legislation, to defeat it with every 
effort that they can; to filibuster this hate crimes, thought crimes, 
legislation; to amend it to the high heavens; to take us back to the 
rule of law where we punish the overt act, not the thought. Thought 
crimes legislation should not be part of American law, not in the land 
of the free and the home of the brave.

                          ____________________