[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 78 (Wednesday, May 20, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H5875-H5882]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
IRAN'S MISSILE TEST
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is a pleasure to be able to join
you this evening and my colleagues on a couple of very interesting
topics. I think the first thing that we will talk about is something
that has been on the minds of people since this morning. That was when
we got an announcement from Iran that they had just fired a missile
some 1,200 miles. That is what they claimed.
{time} 1930
We don't know the details. We're waiting for a brief on the Armed
Services Committee on exactly what it was that Iran did, the nature of
the missile that they fired. But this is something that has captured
the attention and the concern of Americans because you have coming
together here a combination of three things that we find to be of high
level of concern.
The first is the ability to make these long-range missiles;
particularly, we're talking about solid fuel missiles that have
multiple stages. That allows a missile to go some considerable distance
and therefore target larger areas of the Earth's surface.
The second thing is nuclear energy. That is a weaponized nuclear
energy in the form of a warhead. So now you have a missile that can go
some distance; it has a nuclear warhead on it. That becomes extremely
dangerous.
And now when you add the third element, that is radical Islam, to
that, people who think it is their destiny and their duty to destroy
other people who don't think the way you do, you put those three
together and you have something that has indeed captured the news for
the day. So I thought that would be important today to look a little
bit at what do you do when you have an adversary that has a missile, a
nuclear warhead, and a will to use it against you.
That was the question that was faced historically some years ago by
Ronald Reagan. Up to that time, there had been a whole series of
treaties and different things had come along, and we had gotten to the
point where we said, Well, they have got missiles; they can blow us up.
We've got missiles; we could blow them up. And that would be so crazy,
we will have a Mexican standoff. We will call it mutually assured
destruction. But that really was a very, very foolish idea.
I'm joined tonight by one of the foremost authorities in the U.S.
Congress on the subject of missile defense and strategic missile
defense, my good friend, Congressman Franks. And it's a treat to have
you here on the floor, and talk about a timely subject, Iran just
having launched a missile.
And surprisingly, this has been a matter of a great deal of partisan
division and a lot of debate on this subject, and if you could help us
with a little bit about the logic and the history. I would like to do
the background on missile defense so we can understand what is going on
today in context.
I would yield.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I
appreciate what you're doing here tonight, Congressman Akin.
Ever since mankind took up arms against his fellow human beings,
there has always been an offensive capability that essentially, in
time, has been met with the defensive capability. And first it was the
sword or the spear and the shield, maybe, and then--
Mr. AKIN. Or a rock and somebody had a shield to stop the rock or
something. So one offense, one defense.
I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. When we came to having firearms and bullets,
we came to find armor and came up with a tank, and it has been an
ongoing back-and-forth for a long time. But now that we face the most
dangerous weapons in the history of humanity--that being a nuclear
warhead borne by an intercontinental ballistic missile which can reach
thousands of miles with accuracy--all of a sudden there became a debate
whether we needed a defense for something like that. Now, for a time,
there wasn't really the technological ability to defend against
something like that.
And as you said, when the Soviets had thousands of warheads and
hundreds of missiles that were capable of destroying every city that we
had that was of any size, we had to come up with this equation to where
they knew that if they attacked our cities and they
[[Page H5876]]
killed our women and children, that our missiles would leave almost
shortly after theirs left the launching pad and they would suffer the
same fate. And it was such an unthinkable scenario that there was this
grim achievement that said we will have mutually assured destruction
and, therefore, each will be afraid to launch against the other.
In a sense, as frightening as it was, it gave us a real tense time
when we could have a chance to feel relatively safe because we placed
our safety in their sanity, as they did with us.
Mr. AKIN. And just to reclaim my time.
I recall--and even that was a very troublesome kind of truce, because
one thing we found was they cheated on every treaty that they signed,
and we didn't cheat. And we had made an agreement that we were not
going to develop a defense against nuclear missiles, and then that
whole idea was challenged.
Now, why don't you run through----
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. That was the ABM Treaty that you speak of. And
fortunately Bush, this last George Bush, was wise enough in this day
and age recognizing that the coincidence of jihadist terrorism and
nuclear proliferation gave us a different equation than we had with the
Soviets because all of a sudden deterrence wasn't enough. We were
dealing with an enemy that was willing to see their own children die in
order to attack our children.
And so he knew that we needed to discard this outdated ABM or
antiballistic missile treaty, and he did that, and unfortunately,
tremendous strides seemed to be made very quickly in the area of
missile defense.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time.
I think the one thing that I really recall--and I think it's
something we historically skip, and that is really the guy--we have an
awful big ``thank you'' to say to Ronald Reagan. He had the imagination
to take a look at this mutually assured destruction and say, This is
nuts. I mean, as you said, all through history of mankind, somebody
picks up a rock and somebody picks up a garbage can lid, you know? I
mean, there's always offense and defense. He said, If we're saying
we're not going to defend ourselves, we're crazy.
So we start talking to scientists and came up with this idea that we
could use different kinds of technology to stop those missiles so they
wouldn't come and hit our children and families. And then he went a
much more gracious step and said, What's more, we're going to share our
defensive technology with our opponents so that mankind does not have
to live under the threatening shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud. And
he sold that idea to the American public. And, of course, the liberals
all made fun of him. They said, You can't do it. It won't work and it's
too expensive, and all of those kinds of things. But he hung on and
kept talking about it, but he actually didn't build it, did he?
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The truth is that Ronald Reagan was, indeed,
the father of modern missile defense. And there is a great irony there
because, while we owe him everything, in a sense, to where we are, he
said, Isn't it better to protect our citizens rather than to avenge
them? And I thought that was the quote that, in my mind, started it all
out.
But the tragedy is that somehow now the modern-day liberals who
disdain Ronald Reagan as much as they do, sometimes they are biased
against missile defense simply because it was Ronald Reagan's idea. And
we don't discuss it in the realm that it should be discussed, which is
what is best for the country rather than we don't want to give Ronald
Reagan too much credit. This is the ironic tragedy of it.
Mr. AKIN. You know, the funny thing was--I was elected in 2000, came
here in 2001 and started right off in the Armed Services Committee. And
we had these debates in the Armed Services Committee in those long
hearings, and every year for about 4 years or 5 years when it came to
funding missile defense, it was a party line vote. The Democrats never
wanted to do anything with funding missile defense. And yet, because we
had a majority, we voted for it.
And President Bush became very unpopular in Europe and with Russia.
He went over and he gave them their 6 months' notice. I think the
treaty required, give us 6 months' notice. So he went over and said,
Okay, guys. The clock's running. We're going to start developing
missile defense in 6 months. And the Russians just had kittens, Putin
went nuts, and the Europeans were all upset about this. They thought he
was some kind of cowboy from Texas. And yet at the end of that 6
months, we started funding it in the Armed Services Committee, totally
party line vote, and we started on the path of actually building the
dream that Ronald Reagan had passed down to us.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Two things have happened since then.
First of all, Democrats in Congress have begun to see that missile
defense does indeed have a very, very important role to play in this
age of nuclear proliferation. That's a good thing. It's a good thing.
The downside, of course, is that the Democrat President in the White
House right now is incredibly, in my judgment, naive as to the danger
that we face and to his approach with our allies.
He has now, under his budget, submitted numbers that would cut the
European missile defense site by 89 percent, nearly 90 percent, which
is effectively killing the program. And this was the system that we
were putting in place under the Bush administration to protect the
homeland of the United States, to protect Europe and our forward-
deployed troops against an Iranian missile.
Mr. AKIN. Wait, wait, wait. Reclaiming my time.
What you just said is pretty important. When Bush left office, the
setup was there was--we were going to build a couple of sites. One was
a radar site and one was an actual place to launch these ground-based
missiles. The radar site, was that in Romania?
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. No. The radar site is in the Czech Republic.
That was the X-10 radar there, and they went through tremendous
political machinations to accomplish that overcoming a 2-1 dissent
among their public. And yet they had the leadership to say, This is
important to us, this is important to the world, and we're going to
move forward. And they put tremendous capital in that, and now they're
being betrayed by the country that asked them to do it.
Mr. AKIN. So the Czech leadership responded to our initiative, said,
We'll put the radar site in the Czech Republic. The leadership of
Czechoslovakia had a public that was not that enthused about that idea,
but they sold it to them. We are going to move ahead. And so you had
the Czech Republic was going to have the radar and the actual missiles
were going to be loaded--was it in Poland?
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Yes. The intercepter field itself, with 10
intercepters, it would have been in Poland.
Mr. AKIN. This has been, with the new administration, President Obama
has traded that away to the Russians, is that correct, or do we know
what the deal was? Because he's cut all of the money out of it.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The tragedy--and this goes back to the
statement that I said about the naive way of approaching this--because
the Russians said that somehow they could exert influence over Iran or
over other countries, that we would give up defending our homeland, our
physical mechanism to defend our homeland in order to gain the
influence of the Russians over Iran. Well, this is unbelievable.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time.
Now, wait a minute. This isn't supposed to be funny hour. We're here
talking about missile defense because Iran just launched a missile. Is
that the sort of influence that Russia has over Iran, that it's going
to help them launch solid rocket loader multistage missiles that can go
1,200 miles? Is that what we traded away in order to give up missile
defense for Europe? Wait a minute. I don't see--the logic of this is
incredible.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Unfortunately, the Russians have sold us their
influence over Iran about a dozen times now and never have really given
us anything of substance to be helpful. And I think this is incredibly
dangerous.
Iran has continued to go forward and defy the world community. This
solid fuel rocket that they have used today is something that you said
was very,
[[Page H5877]]
very important. And the ability to stage is incredibly significant
because it ultimately means that if they have the guidance systems--and
they've already proven that they do by launching the satellite--that
they will have almost an indefinite range across the world, because
once they learn to stage, they can do almost anything in terms of
reach.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time.
These are some of the missiles. This picture was taken before the
launch this morning. And then we have a picture, I believe--I believe
this picture was one released of the actual launch this morning. So you
can see this appears to be a multistage kind of a missile, but we don't
know the details on it yet because we haven't had the brief on it.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. This is a Sager, a solid fuel rocket that is
something that we've known about for some time, and we knew the
Iranians had it and at some point they would test it. But the danger
of--
Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time.
Is this a multistage, do you believe?
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Yes. I'm convinced that it is.
The danger, of course, is that Iran is not only a dangerous enemy, to
have these types of weapons, but they can sell and proliferate this
type of weaponry. And when they prove that it works, it makes the price
go up and it makes other countries who are trying to gain this
technology much more interested in the technology. And I believe that
it's important that we do whatever is necessary to prevent them from
having successful tests in the future, including--and this is a big
statement--including shooting those missiles down with our own missile
defense capability, our Aegis capability when they come over
international waters.
Mr. AKIN. We have a few more minutes to talk about that. I think
people might be interested in how did this--how does this technology
that we have work, because for years, people are saying, You can't do
it; it is impossible.
I'm an engineer by training, and what we have developed in America--
basically on the dream of Ronald Reagan--is an incredibly elegant
solution. And from a physics point of view, this is the kind of thing
that should inspire kids in school to be studying up on physics. And I
didn't know if other Members want to join us.
We have Congressman Bishop here. We'll talk a little bit about the
way the thing works, and then we'll jump in.
And what we have when you talk about missile defense is you've got--
basically you've got the boost stage where the enemy's rocket here, if
this is aimed at our country or one of our allies, this is taking off.
It's called a boost stage. Then as the missile starts to go more
horizontally, it goes into what's called midcourse. And eventually,
when it comes down on the target, and that's where it's reentering--if
it's a very long-range missile, reentering the atmosphere.
So we kind of break missile defense into these three areas, and we
have different technologies to try to shoot the thing down before it
hits us. And our thinking is, well, the more shots you can get, the
better, because if you miss with the boost phase, you may get it in
midcourse. And if you miss in midcourse, you may still stop it in
reentry. So we have different kinds of technologies.
But the main one that's been developed that's just incredible, from a
physics point of view, is a metal-on-metal kill. We don't use any
explosive in it. We just send the missile up, and the guidance is so
accurate, and the head-on collision that we energize generates so much
energy that it just literally vaporizes the missiles. And I would
encourage my friend from Arizona to just sort of flesh out how it's
done.
{time} 1945
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. If you will permit me, I can get through this
just briefly.
You know, the age-old argument against Ronald Reagan's perspective is
that this like hitting a bullet with a bullet. Well, as General
Obering, the former Defense agency head said this, he said, We don't
just hit a bullet with a bullet. We hit a dot on the side of a bullet
with a bullet consistently.
And interestingly enough, in recent days, you know, now they say
well, there's so much fratricide, if there's some type of collision,
that if there are multiple reentry vehicles or multiple vehicles, we
wouldn't be able to hit all of them. But just recently we, in a test
down in Hawaii, we shot a Scud missile off of a destroyer and it went
218 kilometers into the air and then, off of a THAD battery in one of
the islands there, we shot two interceptor missiles 16 seconds apart to
try to intercept this. The theory is if the first one hits, the second
one will fly on by, and it's no big deal. If the first one misses, the
second one will hit.
But here is the amazing thing that occurred. At 218 kilometers into
the air, literally exo-atmospheric, into space, the first THAD
interceptor hit the target dead center and blew it to smithereens.
Fratricide was everywhere. And the second missile, they had it almost
coordinated at that time to only 2 seconds apart, it picked the biggest
piece, which was a little over a meter long, and hit it.
Now, let me suggest to you, if that doesn't light your fire, your
wood is wet, because this was an incredible accomplishment by our
missile defense agency, and it showed that our sensors have the
capability of finding that most important target, even in an
environment of that kind of fratricide, and it was an incredible
accomplishment and you didn't hear it on the news.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, it's interesting that you just
explained something that really put a little spring in the step of a
lot of Americans and should give an awful lot of our kids that are
reading Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, that should fire them
up, jazz them up a little bit, and there's not a word about this. All
we hear is, oh, it won't work, it won't work, and the amazing thing is
I've seen some of those pictures where here comes the enemy missile.
These things are taken in fractions of a second, and you see basically
the thing is creating through a sighting mechanism a target on the side
of the enemy missile, and it is literally picking a spot, as you said.
It's not hitting a bullet with a bullet. It's hitting that spot right
on the missile where they want to hit it.
And to be able to do that--I've always been awfully skeptical as an
engineer about when people say you can't do it. You know, when you tell
Americans you can't do something, it's like, oh, yeah? Well, the fact
of the matter is, we did, and as you said, not only did we hit the
first missiles dead-on, we just picked off the biggest piece of scrap
metal that was left after.
We've got our friend, Congressman Bishop from Utah. If you would like
to join us, we would love to have you in our discussion this evening.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I'd appreciate that because we have been talking
about so many upbeat messages right here on what we can do, that I want
to be the downer of the group and present the fear that we have simply
because the administration budget for missile defense has been
submitted.
And I'm grateful my friend from Arizona is still here, because in our
land-based--maybe you can add and flush this out--our land-based
interceptors, we have 30, and as short as nine months ago, every expert
was telling us we need to have at least 44, and a backup site from the
Alaska site down in California to be expanded at the same time. And yet
mysteriously in this particular budget, somehow we have now changed the
expert opinion that we only need 30 of these instead of 44. Even though
in Alaska, where the site is, they are ready to start in the short
construction period to building the extra silos that they may need. In
fact, one person said it might be cheaper just to build them and use
them as storage bays until we're ready for something else.
But maybe the gentleman from Arizona can talk about how significant
this issue in the budget is and what this does to our potential
defense, not just from Iran but from especially North Korea at the same
time.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, the gentleman speaks of a system called
GMD, or ground-based mid-course defense, and it is our only system
capable of defending the homeland against an incoming intercontinental
ballistic missile from either North Korea or, in some cases in the
United States, from Iran.
And the significance, as he said, just a year ago, there was a
conviction that
[[Page H5878]]
we needed at least 44 interceptors, and as you go through the war
colleges here in the area, nearly always when they go through their
scenarios, they say we need even more than the 44. But now all of the
sudden--and we only have 26 actually now. We're capped at a number of
30. Now all of a sudden we're going to cap it at 30, and I think that's
very dangerous. Because keep in mind, this is not just one interceptor
per incoming missile. We want to do everything that we can to have some
redundancy where we sometimes shoot three and perhaps even four to one
where if we have one missile coming in, we want to make sure we get as
many shots off as possible to make sure one doesn't land. Because if a
nuclear missile lands in one of your cities, it will ruin your whole
day.
Mr. AKIN. No doubt about that. I yield.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. If I can go back, though, I want to make this a
little bit worse than it is, because not only is this program capped at
30 when we need at least 44, the KEI, kinetic energy interceptor, a
program where the contracts were let only in 2003, they have gone
through seven static tests. In fact, they are on the launch site and
ready to do the first flight tests, and the Secretary of Defense has
decided to cancel that program, even though the admiral in charge of
the Chiefs of Staff says we need more research and development.
This is a remarkable idea to try and catch these missiles coming at
us at a different stage in the game, where with the technology that is
being developed, it's working, it has been successful in the static
tests. We should at least go forward and see how far this program can
go. But this program has also been chopped, and at the same time, the
old traditional defense of the Minuteman 3 has been stopped and capped.
We will no longer refurbish or rebuild these particular rockets.
And indeed, what is scary to me is the Russians have already said
they are going to rebuild and redo their ICBM projects so that by 2018,
80 percent of their ICBMs are going to be brand new with new
capability, and we do not have the capability in our defense budget to
actually meet any of that future need which may be there.
Mr. AKIN. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The gentleman is correct on a number of
different points. Once we don't build those, not only are they not
there for the defense capabilities, but we also eventually lose our
industrial base to build them at all. We can't just go out in the
street and find someone on the sidewalk and say come on, we would like
to build a missile defense capability; we'd like to have you come in
and be one of our rocket scientists. It takes a great deal of time and
energy to have that industrial base which is in place now, and I think
we make a terrible mistake.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, let's take a look at what this budget
is doing because the gentleman from Utah has brought up some good
points.
What's happened is the Democrats are basically cutting component
parts of missile defense. They know it works. They have seen the tests.
They know the stuff works. They can't say it doesn't work, but they are
not going to fund it. They're funding some of it, but they're not
funding some of the key programs that are important.
The first thing they're cutting is the number of what's called
ground-based missiles. Those are the ones, if you think about a missile
and how far it can go, the missiles that go the farthest, we call them
intercontinental ballistic missiles, and those missiles, the only way
you stop them is with that ground-based defense. And so we're going to
freeze the number of those ground-based defenses, but that's not all
that we're cutting.
What we're also going to do is, we're going to stop the kinetic kill.
Is that in the reentry aspect? Is that what that was for, or is that a
different part?
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. No, sir. The KEI is an extremely fast missile,
and it was made to intercept other missiles in the boost phase, and the
airborne laser and KEI were our only boost phase systems, and both of
those have been cut precipitously, and that's the most important place
to try to interdict a missile because it's moving slower. There are no
countermeasures. There are no decoys deployed, and of course, if you
have an impact, then the fratricide falls back upon the offending
Nation. So this is the most important phase that we could ever attack
or intercept an enemy missile, and we're essentially doing away with
both of those programs, leaving only the ABL in place as an experiment,
as a research project.
Mr. AKIN. So what's happening, though, are they cutting the funding
for the airborne laser, also?
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The airborne laser has been cut precipitously
and is now essentially a research project, rather than a deployable
future system.
Mr. AKIN. So, in other words, what we're doing is we've got the three
stages where you can shoot at a missile: when the missile is being
launched, which is in some ways the place where the missile is most
vulnerable and where you turn it into junk, it falls on the
country that launched it at you. Then you've got the mid-course and
we're limiting that. And then you've got the reentry part of it. So
what you're saying is we're doing some serious cuts in all of those
areas.
And so here you have Iran just this morning launches this, and their
technology is moving fast, moved to solid rocket, multiple stage.
They're busy putting the centrifuges together to make the nuclear
devices. Let's take a look at what a range of 1,200 miles would mean.
Here from Iran, as you come out in these circles, what you are saying
is, first of all, you can hit all of Israel, and second of all, you can
threaten sort of the southwest part of Europe with that range missile.
Is that correct, gentleman from Arizona?
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. That is correct, and of course, the other
irony here is that there's really only one payload that makes any sense
to put on a missile like that, and that's a nuclear warhead. The other
applications don't make a lot of sense.
Mr. AKIN. And yet our President has negotiated away, from what we
know, putting the radar that we need and the battery of missiles to
protect Europe and eastern United States.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, that's correct, and of course, to try to
make the rhetoric they say, well, there are other mechanisms that we
have potentially to defend Europe, which may be a land-based SM-3
system with the augment of Aegis, but there are two things wrong with
that. Number one, it's more than twice as expensive to do that, and
number two, those systems do not protect the homeland of the United
States against any ICBM from Iran.
Mr. AKIN. I'm going to reluctantly recognize the gentleman from Utah.
He's been bringing a lot of bad news tonight, but still I guess we
better know what the truth is.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate that, and I'm sorry to be the downer
in this party night. This is one of the ironies. Not only did the
Iranians launch something today, but when the administration announced
their budget cuts for the missile defense program, on the very day,
7,000 miles away, North Korea's Kim Jong Il was shooting another
missile. Now, admittedly this one landed in the Sea of Japan, but it
threatens Japan and it was on a trajectory toward the United States.
They are not backing down, and they're not backing off, and I want to
put in perspective what we're talking about because all of the
discussion we've heard so far is these are very expensive programs, we
may not be able to afford them.
The entire savings for these programs in 2010 is $1.7 billion,
roughly. Now, that sounds like a whole lot of money, until you remember
on our stimulus bill we spent $800 billion, supposedly to create jobs
we're now cutting here. And what's even worse in that bill is $5
billion for government organizations like ACORN. Now, I'm sorry, that's
not my priority list.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, now you're stopping the preaching and
getting on to meddling.
What you're saying is in the first five weeks that this Congress met,
we passed this porkulous bill or stimulus bill or whatever you want to
call it at $800-something billion, and you're talking about cutting
missile defense by less than $2 billion. Did I understand the number
correctly?
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. That's what I said.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The total missile defense budget, in total, is
less
[[Page H5879]]
than $9 billion, and the administration wants to cut it almost $2
billion more.
Mr. AKIN. So we're talking about less than 1 percent, a minuscule
part of our defense, to protect our cities from being turned into dust.
I don't understand the logic of that.
Also, this is a North Korean ballistic missile threat. So it's not
just Iran, and Iran threatening Europe. We're also talking about North
Korea developing longer and longer-range missiles, and as they stack
more--as you have said before, you take these solid rocket motors and
you stack them up into multiple stages. You get the velocity to get the
distance to start threatening the continental United States from North
Korea. And he hasn't shown any signs of backing off. He's still busy
making nuclear weapons and still busy working on his warheads. And even
if he doesn't use them, he wants to sell them to other people. So why
would we want to be cutting our missile defense at this time? It just
seems like about insanity.
I yield to the gentleman.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The thing that's important to remember is that
Iran gained most of its missile technology from North Korea, and Iran
has actually outpaced North Korea now in their missile capability, but
North Korea has nuclear warheads now, and if North Korea sold Iran
missile technology, is it unthinkable to think they might sell them
nuclear warheads at some point? It may not be even necessary for Iran
to build their own warheads.
And here's the really astonishing tragedy about this. Rhetorically,
some of the liberals say that the reason that we should cut our GMD
system is because we need more testing. Well, under this system, where
they're cutting down on the number of interceptors we have, we won't be
able to test this system again until after 2014.
Mr. AKIN. So we're talking out of both sides of our mouth here again.
What you are saying is, on the one hand, they're saying we need more
testing, and second of all, they're cutting the budget so we can't
test.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. That's exactly right.
Mr. AKIN. It just comes back out to the same thing. There's this
hostility to developing the defense that we need to protect our
homeland, and the excuses that it won't work have been proven--test
after test, these things are working extremely well, and the fact is
that if there's any function of this Congress that we should be paying
attention to, it's protecting our own citizens. And so I just find it
impossible to understand the decisions that are being made in cutting
the missile defense.
{time} 2000
I don't think that's the right thing to do. I can certainly say that
on the Armed Services Committee, I will not vote to cut missile
defense.
And I would yield back to my friend from Utah, Congressman Bishop.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate that commitment, and you have my
commitment at the same time. This is a work that needs to go forward.
We have money to do this.
One of the things we also--when Secretary Gates talked to us, he
talked about a zero sum game, meaning that if we wanted to improve this
missile defense budget we would have to take money from some other part
of our military needs to put over here. And I'm sorry, I reject that.
One of the things we need to do is make sure that the military is
properly funded. It's really the only constitutional role we really
have to do, and make sure that it's not coming from some other--we're
not going to cannibalize another area of the military just to make sure
that this done. That is simply flat out wrong, and I'm not going to do
it.
I'd like to add one other negative since I'm on the role of whining
here about things going on. This administration did something that was
totally unique in its budget process called a ``gag order'' which
simply meant that when the Kinetic Energy Interceptor Program was
canceled, it was canceled during the time of the gag order. There is
not a single person on Capitol Hill, in any branch of Congress, that
knew what was taking place because no one in the Pentagon was allowed
to talk about what the decision was. A stop work order had been
administered by this administration before anyone knew what was taking
place.
And, in fact, when the Secretary of Defense announced his overall
view, not one word on this missile program was mentioned in that, even
though, 2 days earlier, the decision had been made to cut it.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, wait a minute now. I recall that the
President stood on this floor, and one of the things that he made a big
point about was transparency. I have a hard time understanding the
transparency of the administration cutting a major part of missile
defense that's very important, and we're on the Armed Services
Committee and we didn't even have a clue that that was going on. Is
that transparency?
I yield to my friend from Utah.
Mr. BISHOP of Utah. No, in my definition it's not transparency. Now,
I know that some people have said the Pentagon leaks like a sieve. To
be honest, that's what President Nixon said about the White House when
he came in there, and I hope there's no plumbers left around to try and
fix the Pentagon situation.
But it's one of those things that, in a republic, in a republic, we
are not devowed by those types of secrets that should take place there.
And the representatives of people who make these decisions should be
made aware, you can do it in some kind of a system or order in which
sensitive information is let out.
But this is not sensitive information. This is what the future
direction of this country should be. And I'm sorry, before you put the
stop work order, you at least should be able to tell Congress what
you're about to do.
I hope we never, never engage in this kind of gag order in any branch
of this administration again because, as the gentleman from Missouri
accurately said, it is not transparency. It was not what was promised.
And it is simply a wrong problem which allows a whole lot of issues to
be pushed to the side, which could have been easily fixed, adjudicated,
simplified had we simply had some kind of communication as the process
was being developed.
Congress is now behind the 8 ball on this. If we want to fix this
problem, and I desperately think we should, our options are severely
limited because of the way the administration handled this year's
budget preparation.
I yield back.
Mr. AKIN. Well, that's quite an indictment. And you sure had a
snoutful of bad news for us. I didn't even know about that last one.
And it's enough to really make you irritated, isn't it?
You know, we hear about transparency, and yet there isn't
transparency, and this isn't the way we should be running a country. It
seems to me that somebody's trying to hide something. That's what it
seems like, somebody is trying to cover something up.
Now we're about done with our first half hour so we're going to be
finishing up on ballistic missile and strategic missile defense. I am
going to let the last word go to my good friend from Arizona,
Congressman Franks.
Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Ostensibly, the whole purpose of cutting
missile defense is so that we can use the money somewhere else. But
sometimes we forget that when we suffer some type of weakness in our
military system it invites or it provokes some type of attack from an
enemy which nearly always costs us much more than any savings that we
had. When airplanes hit our buildings and our Pentagon, they cost us in
our total economy, around $2 trillion. And so this is not only bad
defense. It's bad economics.
And if some day, if we build a system and we don't need it, I will
stand before the American public and say, you know, we used this system
every day because it deterred an attack. But I'll still apologize to
you for spending all the money.
But God save us all from the day when we have to stand before the
American people and apologize to them because some type of an attack
left hundreds of thousands of our people dead in a city or worse and we
had the ability to defend them and we didn't out of political
correctness.
And with that I yield back to the gentleman and thank him very much.
Mr. AKIN. I appreciate your passion on that subject. Gentlemen,
there's one point that I always like to make on
[[Page H5880]]
missile defense that it seems like many times people overlook it. And
what I hear, just talking to people back in my district they say, well,
couldn't these bad guys basically smuggle a missile into our city and
just set it off? And they don't really need a missile to do that. And
the answer is, they can try, but that's not as easy to do as it appears
because the bombs and things do emit some radiation and there's some
chance we could catch them.
But the other main point is that a bomb set off up in the air is far,
far more deadly, hundreds of times more deadly in terms of casualties
than one set off on the ground. I think that's part of the reason why
you see our opponents developing these ballistic and intercontinental
ballistic missiles because of this high level of threat and a very
rapid ability to deploy a weapon. And so that's part of the reason why
this is a very key topic.
And I thank you so much. The gentleman from Arizona has taken a lot
of time to understand this, knows it inside and out. He's just about
like an expert. And Arizona has been doing the right thing sending you
up here.
And I think we're going to move on to another topic which is
particularly of importance to Americans today, and that's the subject
of taxation and energy. Not so long ago, our President said, under my
plan of a cap-and-trade system, or that is cap-and-tax system, electric
rates would necessarily skyrocket. That will cost money. They will pass
that money on to consumers. This is the President in a meeting in
guilty January of 2008.
Well, he is now the President. And they're talking about this cap-
and-tax system that's been the subject of debate now for hours and
hours in the Energy and Commerce Committee. And from what we're seeing
and taking a look at what's being proposed, the President was accurate
in this statement. It is going to be extremely expensive, and electric
rates are going to skyrocket indeed.
The interesting thing about this though was he stood here at the
beginning of this year and said, I'm not going to tax anybody that's
making less than $250,000. And yet what's being proposed here is every
time you turn a light switch on, you're going to get some more
taxation.
How much taxation are we talking about? And what's the logic of this?
Well, the logic is supposed to be that the Earth is getting too hot,
and that's really a serious problem for us. The Earth is getting too
hot. And so I thought it was interesting to take a look back
historically over the last hundred years, not at the temperature of the
Earth, but at what the scientists have been saying down through the
years.
In 1920, the newspapers were filled with scientific warnings of a
fast approaching glacial age, 1920s.
1930s, scientists reversed themselves and they said there's going to
be serious global warming in the 1930s.
In 1972, Time magazine, citing numerous scientific reports that
imminent runaway glaciation is what the Time magazine called it. And by
1975, Newsweek, scientific evidence of an ice age. And so people were
being called to stockpile food, and the question of whether we should
use nuclear weapons or some method of melting the Arctic ice cap.
1976, U.S. government: ``The Earth is heading into some sort of mini-
ice age.''
And now we've got global warming. And so over the period of the last
hundred years, well-meaning scientists and, supposedly majorities of
scientists, even, have changed their opinion about this global warming
about three times or so.
Well, the complaint now is that we've got this CO2 that's
being generated which makes the Earth warmer and, therefore, we want to
tax the CO2. When the government wants to tax something,
usually you'd better hang on to your wallet. We're talking about a lot
of tax.
And tonight we have probably one of the most foremost experts in the
House on the whole subject of this what's called cap-and-tax. A man
who's been in the middle of these hearings for hours and hours is
joining us. It's a treat to have Congressman Shimkus from Illinois. I
yield time, gentleman.
Mr. SHIMKUS. Thank you. I appreciate the time. As stated, we're in
the, in essence, the markup of the bill right now. And so I thought I'd
just take a few minutes to talk about what happened yesterday and
what's happening today.
The basic premise that we're trying to just remind the public that
because to address this global warming you have to monetize carbon,
that is, in essence, adding a dollar amount to carbon, which that
dollar amount would be passed on. Ratepayers will pay more. President
Obama admits it. Really, the draft bill admits it because there's 55
pages of what to do with job losses in the bill.
Here's a couple of amendments that we debated last week--I mean
yesterday. An amendment offered by Lee Terry, Republican, of Nebraska,
would require annual EPA certification of the average retail price of
gasoline. If the price exceeds $5 per gallon as a result of this act,
this act would cease to be effective.
We're admitting that there will be an increase in cost. Voted down on
a party-line vote.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming, you're just saying that what we said is, hey,
gas is painful when it gets up there to $3 or $4 a gallon. But you're
saying if gas gets to $5, we put an amendment saying enough already;
that's enough tax at $5 a gallon. And that was a party-line vote. The
Republicans voting, I assume, that they don't want to let it get over
5. The Democrats saying it's okay to tax more than that; is that
correct?
Mr. SHIMKUS. That is correct. Another amendment offered by our
colleague, Mike Rogers, Republican, from Michigan, that would require
an annual certification by the administrator in consultation with the
Department of State and the United States Trade Representative that
China and India have adopted a mandatory greenhouse gas reduction
program at least as stringent as that would be imposed under this act.
And what we're saying is this is all pain and no gain unless we have an
international agreement that brings in China and India.
Well, my colleagues on the other side all voted ``no'' against
requiring China and India to be under the same regime. Republicans all
voted that we should be in the same regime.
Another amendment that said if unemployment gets to 15 percent, that
we ought to change course, that this cap-and-trade scheme is not
working. Another party-line vote, Republicans saying we ought to get
out of this agreement if job loss gets to 15 percent. Democrats stayed
on the party line saying, no, 15 percent job loss is acceptable under
this bill.
Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time for a minute. What--how much
unemployment do we have now? We're not up to 10 percent yet, are we
gentleman?
Mr. SHIMKUS. We are right around 10 percent.
Mr. AKIN. Right near 10. So you're saying if it gets to 15, enough
already. We've got to ease back on this thing that's hurting us.
Because the point of the matter is this tax is going to create
unemployment. Right? And if they say, well, it's not going to create
unemployment, then they don't have any problem with an amendment saying
that at 15 percent unemployment we're going to stop it. Right?
But, no, so they're saying no we don't want that amendment, saying
they think it will go over 15 percent.
Mr. SHIMKUS. And I am going to head back to the committee and I
appreciate the time. Let me just say we also had an amendment: will
global warming bills' costs be disclosed. We asked for full disclosure
on electricity bills. Republicans said, yeah, that's a good idea.
Democrats voted ``no.'' Democrats declined to shield homeowners from
electricity spike hikes.
So what we're trying to do is, understanding that this is going to
cause an increased cost to the ratepayer, no one's speaking for the
ratepayers. Well, the Republicans are speaking to the ratepayer. The
Democrats in the committee markup are speaking to those special
interest groups that cut this deal behind closed doors.
{time} 2015
You've got a lot of my colleagues here who all want to speak with
you. I appreciate your yielding me some time. Keep up the great fight.
Mr. AKIN. Congressman Shimkus is just doing the yeoman's job on the
committee. It's a tough thing. Those amendments seem to me so
commonsense that I'm kind of amazed that
[[Page H5881]]
anybody in the political business would dare to vote against something
that's saying, hey, it's $5 a gallon for gasoline or unemployment is at
15 percent. Actually, that's not such an odd idea because Spain has put
in this same thing that is being proposed here. Their unemployment now
is 17.5 percent, and they're suffering. They're calling all the green
jobs ``subprime jobs.''
Thank you very much, Congressman Shimkus.
We're joined by a very sober judge from the State of Texas, my good
friend, Judge Carter. Welcome to our discussion this evening. Let's
talk a little bit about these taxes.
Mr. CARTER. Well, some of the things that our friend Congressman
Shimkus said are pretty sobering.
Mr. AKIN. Yes, they're sobering. They even make a judge sober. I
yield.
Mr. CARTER. We're saying $5 a gallon for gasoline with that increase
being caused by this tax-and-trade scheme that's being sold to the
Congress as some kind of clean-up-the-world project. We think that at
least ought to raise the issue and should slow down the process. Yet
they say, No. Let's see what's going to happen when it gets to be $5 a
gallon.
Let's think in our recent past as to what happens when gasoline gets
to $5 a gallon. Well, of course it's going to be the evil oil
companies' fault that secretly have made deals with each other to fix
prices and to make them go up. That's why, when they said the
electricity bills are going to go up, we just said that we wanted them
to say on the electricity bill what caused this to go up. Well, it
happens to be our cap-and-tax program that caused it to go up. That's
fair. The American people ought to know what caused the doubling of
their electricity bills. Guess what they're going to say? Oh, the evil
power companies have jacked the prices up to bilk the poor consumers.
Truth and sunshine is what this government needs. Put the truth in the
bill.
Mr. AKIN. That's absolutely right. I appreciate the gentleman's
perspective, and that's coming from a judge.
You want to know what has happened and exactly what's going on. Don't
put this behind smoke and mirrors. We're talking here about comparing
the cost of these taxes being proposed. This is the cost of World War
II right here, this big blue circle. This cap-and-trade here at $1.9
trillion is a tremendous, tremendous tax. The other wars--this thing
here--would be the war in Afghanistan and the terrorist wars and all.
All of these are small by comparison to what's being proposed.
So what does that mean for the average family? What are their costs
going to be?
Well, you can see the energy here. The blue here is gasoline, and the
gasoline is going to jump 16 percent. This is just by 2012. You're
going to see a 16 percent increase in the cost of gasoline. The green
is electricity. That's going to jump 9 percent, and that's just the
beginning. That's only by 2012. Then you've got natural gas, which is
going to jump 14 percent. Now, when the economy is rough and people are
having trouble with unemployment, this somehow or other seems like a
pretty strange thing to be talking about, a massive tax increase like
this.
We're joined by my good friend from Georgia, and I would yield time
to the doctor.
Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I think the American people need to understand what this is going to
mean to them directly. I think these charts are great. As Judge Carter
said, I think the facts that Mr. Shimkus gave us were absolutely
sobering, but there are a number of people in this House of
Representatives who have openly said that they would like to see gas go
up to $10 a gallon. They think that that will start people conserving
gas in America. Well, most folks can't afford $10 a gallon gas. There
are people in this House who want to federalize--nationalize--the whole
of the energy system, and there are many Members of the Democrat
majority who are promoting that. I think this may very well be the
opening for them to try to nationalize it, just like Hugo Chavez has
done in Venezuela, and that's exactly the picture that we see here in
America.
What Nancy Pelosi and company are doing here in this Congress is
they're going down the same road, and they're trying to force America
into the same policies and down the same road that Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela has taken that country down. Yet what is it going to cost
each individual family?
It is estimated that every family is going to pay over $1,000 in
increased electricity costs. It's estimated that the tax, itself--I've
seen various estimates--will be anywhere from over $3,000 per family in
America to over $4,000 per family in America per year in increased
taxes. It's going to increase the cost of food and of medicines. Every
single good and service in this country is going to go up because every
bit of food and every medicine--every good and service in America--is
dependent upon energy. If you flip on the light switch, your bill is
going up. If you go to the gas pump, your bill is going up. If you ride
public transportation, the bill is going up. The bill is going up. The
bill is going up for everything in this country. The American people
need to say ``no'' to this idiotic, what I call, ``tax-and-cap.'' The
reason I call it ``tax-and-cap'' is because it is a huge tax. It's not
about the environment.
The President, himself, said that this needs to pass so that he can
fund his socialistic agenda. He didn't call it a ``socialistic
agenda,'' but that's exactly what it is. It's a big government agenda
for health care. For every single thing that this country does, they
want to do that.
Mr. AKIN. Dr. Broun, I appreciate your firmness and your just
basically calling this what it is.
An hour ago, we heard the Democrats talking about the fact that, oh,
they're really into technology and innovation and all of this kind of
stuff. This thing has nothing to do with technology or innovation. This
is just a plain, old tax increase. It's a plain, old tax increase, but
it's a big, whopping tax increase, is what we're dealing with here, and
the justification is kind of amusing.
I'd like to take just a minute, and then I'm going to recognize my
good friend, Congresswoman Lummis from Wyoming.
Having an engineering background, I kind of get interest out of it.
How much human activity does it take to affect greenhouse gases? This
block here of all of these boxes represents all of the greenhouse gases
which comprise only 2 percent of the atmosphere. So these are all of
the things that cause global warming. Most of this is water vapor. By
the way, it's not CO2, okay? Now then, this yellow stuff
over here is the part of the greenhouse gases that is CO2.
Those are the yellow boxes. The little red box there is the
CO2 that is caused by human activity, and that little red
box right there is the excuse for this whopping, big tax. Now, somehow
or other, the logic of this just seems like a very, very thinly veiled
excuse for a great big tax.
Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. AKIN. The thing that is the most amusing on this is that the one
major source of energy that we have that makes no CO2 is not
being given any credit or is being pushed forward at all, which is
nuclear power. We'll talk about that, but I want to yield to the
gentlewoman from Wyoming, Congresswoman Lummis.
Thank you for joining us tonight. It's just a treat to have you here.
Mrs. LUMMIS. Thank you, Congressman Akin. I appreciate being involved
in this discussion.
This is a national energy tax. This will not solve our problems with
pollution, but what will? Sometimes we Republicans are called the
``party of no,'' and it's because we need opportunities to express our
better ideas. Indeed, I believe we do have better ideas, and some of
them are being illustrated by the chart that Mr. Akin has on the board
right now.
We have opportunities to clean up the technologies and sources of
energy that we have right now. We have the opportunity to increase the
number of hybrid and zero-emission vehicles on the road. We have the
opportunity to increase wind and solar and biofuels. We have the
opportunity to add to the amount of natural gas that we use because it
is, by far, the cleanest burning hydrocarbon. We have opportunities to
sequester the CO2 that comes from coal, and as we know, coal
is more than half of the electricity that is produced in this country.
So, to abandon coal
[[Page H5882]]
abruptly is just not possible. We should pursue ways to clean it up.
That includes sequestering carbon.
My State of Wyoming has the most advanced carbon sequestration laws
in the country, which say that the pores under the surface where carbon
can be sequestered--or captured and secured--belong to the surface
owner, and that liability for the escape of hydrocarbons that are
introduced into those pores are on the companies that put that carbon
in the ground. So that creates a mechanism that other States are
looking at right now, including Montana and others that are following
Wyoming's lead.
In addition, we need to produce from coal liquid products that burn
less. In addition, we need more nuclear energy. As we know, nuclear
energy is not a carbon emitter, and it is producing 20 percent of our
electricity now. So we absolutely cannot take nuclear energy off the
table. It's very important that we add more nuclear.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, Congresswoman Lummis, what you're
saying is really exciting. You're talking about what the Republicans
have been pushing for now and since I've been here, which has been
since 2001. It's an all-of-the-above strategy. It's saying let's let
freedom work. Just get out of the way, and let's start developing
hydrogen. If we've got places we ought to drill for oil, then do that.
Fine. If we've got to do coal, let's figure out if you're going to
sequester it or not. If we need nuclear and if you're really worried
about that percentage of CO2--I mean if you're really
serious about that, then why not embrace the number 1 technology that
doesn't make any CO2, which is nuclear? We're saying do all
of these things. Let the free marketplace work and let freedom
basically run. Let American innovation--and let the resources that God
gave us on this land--work, and we will have energy.
You know, there's an ironic thing that is just absolutely crazy about
government. Do you know why the Department of Energy was created years
and years ago? This is kind of a quiz question if any of my colleagues
happen to know the answer. Why did we create the Department of Energy?
Dr. Broun from Georgia, do you know why we created the Department of
Energy?
Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Absolutely. It was created to make America
energy independent.
Mr. AKIN. What has happened since we've created it, Congressman?
Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Well, it has not made America energy
independent whatsoever.
Mr. AKIN. We are less that way.
Mr. BROUN of Georgia. We are less.
Mr. AKIN. What has happened to the number of employees in the
Department of Energy?
Mr. BROUN of Georgia. It has skyrocketed. They're really not
fulfilling the obligation that they have under the charter of
developing the Department of Energy, so they've been an abject failure
at what they were charged to do.
Mr. AKIN. In fact, you could almost say it's of inverse proportion.
The more people they've hired and the bigger it has gotten, the more
dependent we have become on foreign energy. That doesn't make a whole
lot of sense.
I want to thank Congresswoman Lummis, and I also want to get back to
Judge Carter here.
I want to give you a chance to take a look at some of these things.
We've got, I think, only just about another 5 minutes or so.
Mr. CARTER. First, if they're not doing their job, we ought to fire
them. That's just really easy, okay?
Mr. AKIN. I think that was pretty straightforward. If they don't do
the job, fire them.
Mr. CARTER. That's simple stuff. If they're not doing what we hired
them to do, we've got to fire them.
Mr. AKIN. Now, Ronald Reagan wanted to close the department down.
Mr. CARTER. Yes.
Mr. AKIN. Is that what you're advocating?
Mr. CARTER. That's fine. I don't have a problem with that at all, but
let's get back to what we're doing.
You know, there's an old saying: ``I won't tax you and I won't tax
me. I'll tax that fellow behind the tree,'' okay? That's kind of what
we heard from the Obama administration when we started off: Don't
worry. Ninety-five percent of the people in America are not going to be
taxed by this administration. Yet, as my colleague from Georgia said,
there's not anything you can think of that doesn't have an energy cost
in it. Nothing. I mean it's in everything. So I don't care how rich you
are or how poor you are. You're going to be taxed by this.
Now, don't give me the excuse of, well, we're just taxing the
company, and they're taxing you. That doesn't work. Everybody knows
where this tax is going. They know it in the administration, and we
know it in Congress. It's going to us, to the individual Americans, and
we're going to pay this tax. Look at that. Shoes. Plastic. Food.
Electricity. Housing. All that.
Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, these are all different places. If
you're going to have to use it up, it's going to cost you $1,900 per
household just for the first year of this tax. This just tells you what
you'd have to give up to save that money to pay that tax. This one here
is all of the meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy products, fruits and
vegetables that a family eats in 1 year.
{time} 2030
That's what you've got to give up to compensate for this tax that's
being proposed. Or, maybe you don't want to do that. You want to give
up this--all furniture, appliances, carpet, and other furnishings. You
can give that up for 1 year.
Mr. CARTER. If the gentleman would yield for just a minute. On that
food thing, you have forgotten the next tax they're coming up with is
the flatulence tax on cows.
Mr. AKIN. Are you going to collect that in bags, gentlemen?
Mr. CARTER. Ask our farmers if they like that idea.
Mr. AKIN. I think we're getting close on time, but the good news is
my good friend, Congressman King from Iowa, is here. I think he is
going to continue talking on the same subject. I think he might be
willing to recognize some of the other Congressmen that want to weigh
in on this absolutely crazy sort of tax system that's being proposed.
The funny thing is that, just to conclude, this chart right here,
this is something the Democrats have been unwilling to deal with or
talk about. But, see this little card? There's a little plastic thing
here and there's a thing inside there that's the size of two mechanical
pencil erasers. There's enough nuclear energy in that little pill right
there to equal 149 gallons of oil, 1 ton of coal, or 17,000 cubic feet
of natural gas. That's how much energy is in that one little tablet.
Maybe we ought to be thinking about real technology.
Thank you all for joining me this evening.
____________________