[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 137 (Friday, September 25, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H9989-H9996]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            MISSILE DEFENSE

  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.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized for the 
privilege and the honor to address you here on the floor of the House 
of Representatives.
  As we wrap up this congressional week and I listened to the gentleman 
from Ohio, the gentleman from Utah and the gentleman from Arizona talk 
about missile defense and our national security, what I have heard over 
this last hour is a technical, tactical, strategic explanation of why 
America has taken the positions that we have, the decisions that have 
been made in the previous administrations, and I think a clear and 
stark analysis of what apparently is a huge diplomatic mistake made by 
the President of the United States.
  I would make the point that those who defend him seem to always 
revert back to a default position of, The President must have gotten 
something for it. They speculate that there must be a quid pro quo to 
pull the rug out from underneath the Eastern Europeans--in particular, 
the Poles and the Czechs--who in their headlines, as I believe Mr. 
Franks said--the headline in one of those papers said ``Betrayed!'' To 
betray the Poles and the Czechs, the United States of America, the 
integrity of our Nation and the confidence in our national security 
have been diminished in a way that probably can't ever be rebuilt.
  But those who defend that decision will argue, Well, the President is 
a smart negotiator. He is a brilliant man. Therefore, we have to trust 
his knowledge and his judgment because he must know something that we 
don't. Yet I haven't heard one of these imaginative characters that can 
defend anything and advocate for anything come up with a single thing 
that would be worth doing what the President did. What could possibly 
be worth giving up the integrity and the credibility of the United 
States? What could possibly be something that could come out of any 
negotiations with Iran or Russia that could emerge as a plus on this 
side that would offset the loss of international credibility, the word 
of the United States and our commitment to our allies, let alone giving 
up the strategic position of being able to take out Iranian missiles 
shortly after they leave the launching pad, instead of leaving this 5-
year window, as Mr. Turner just said?
  If your President is so much smarter than you are that he must have 
gotten something accomplished behind the scenes that's so valuable that 
even you can't conceive of what it might have been, I don't know if you 
call that a rational thought or a religion. But, Mr. Speaker, we're in 
a situation here where the United States and the world is in a very, 
very dangerous place. This globe is a giant chessboard; it's a giant 
Monopoly game, and it's a giant Risk game that's going on. It's a giant 
poker game that's going on. And there are some poker players, chess 
players, Risk and Monopoly players out there that are really good and 
really smart, and they spend their time trying to figure out how to 
outmaneuver the United States. It has taken place ever since the dawn 
of the Soviet Union, and the Monopoly game here in the United States 
broke the Soviet Union, and they imploded.

  Now we have Putin over there on the chessboard, at the poker table, 
and he is making moves on this global chessboard that seek to 
reconstruct what he can of the former Soviet Union. It's been in his 
interest to cause Iran to be a thorn in our side and for us to think 
that we could ask Putin to, well, be open and do us a favor and maybe 
he could talk real nice to the Iranians and they would stop their 
nuclear endeavor--after all of these years and these billions of 
dollars spent and the great diplomatic risks that they take?
  These people are not going to just simply tip over their king and 
walk away from this chessboard. For the President to think that 
dialogue is diplomacy and that you can accomplish things just because 
you talk about it is an inherently left-wing, myopic European view, and 
it's something that I've heard from their mouths in the discussions 
that we have over in that part of the world.
  We have with us Mr. Bishop from Utah who has significant insight into 
that part of the world, the politics of Western Europe as well as 
geography of that part of the world--Iran, the Middle East, Eastern 
Europe and also Western Europe. I have asked the gentleman if he would 
stick around long enough to impart some of that broader view to explain 
the forces that are at play in this dynamic, the forces of Russia, the 
forces of Iran, the Islamic effort that's there, the Israeli position 
that's there, the threat that comes from Iran threatening to annihilate 
and wipe Israel off the face of the Earth.
  And by the way, this move, in my view, brings it closer and closer 
that Israel likely will have no choice but to at least attempt to take 
out the nuclear capability of Iran. Their survival might very well be 
at stake. So this move that might look like its a move designed to 
pacify the Russians might

[[Page H9990]]

well end up being something that compels the Israelis to make a 
military strike. And it may well be a tool that, once removed, the 
missiles are in the Middle East, and this is a decision that is now 
made that moves us to the inevitability that there will be military 
action take place as a result of a pacifist action on the part of the 
President.
  This is what comes when you go to--let me call it the Neville 
Chamberlain School of Diplomacy or capitulation, for remember when he 
returned from Munich waving a letter saying that he had achieved 
``peace in our time.'' Well, that peace in our time didn't last long. I 
was thinking about the situation of how it was that Hitler actually 
negotiated with the Russians for a while and that ended up with Poland 
being divided and a global war as a result.
  I would be happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the 
gentleman from Utah. I am interested in your perspective on this global 
chess, poker, Monopoly, Risk game that's taking place.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the gentleman from Iowa spending 
some time talking. We had the opportunity earlier this year of 
traveling to Germany together to meet with the chancellor, the foreign 
minister, the economics minister, the interior minister, several of 
those to talk about it. I recognize that I'm not putting myself here as 
an expert in this particular area because sometimes it is a matter of 
perspective.
  I know at one time when I was over in Germany meeting with our fellow 
parliamentarians, who are members of the Bundestag, that I was amazed 
as we started talking about the impact of the Helsinki Accords on the 
ultimate destruction of the Soviet Union and the falling of the 
Communist empire. They seemed to have a greater emphasis on the 
significance of the Helsinki Accords than I have ever heard any 
political scientist in the United States putting on it.
  So sometimes there is that perspective that is somewhat different. 
But in dealing specifically with how we should resolve and go forward, 
specifically with Russia which is rejuvenated, there are a couple of 
things to keep in mind. I'm not sure quite how you play with them all, 
but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. The first one to keep 
in mind is, the Russians have not played nice with their neighbors who 
used to be part of the empire. So the Ukranians, they clearly cut the 
oil and gas and threatened the economic security and independence of 
the Ukrainians at a time when it was not the most convenient, and it 
created more political instability in the Ukraine, as if that was a 
part of an overall goal.
  Shortly after that, there was the invasion of Georgia, another former 
republic of the USSR that is now an independent nation. Certainly, the 
consequences of that have yet to be actually played out in the 
international arena. But what the Russians did cannot be considered as 
a nice neighborly approach to any type of situation.
  I would also put into that milieu of understanding some concepts of 
what is going on internally in Russia. The Russians have traditionally 
liked having scapegoats for internal problems. One of the problems that 
the Russians are facing right now is one of demographics. They are 
losing population. They have a massive amount of land to control 
without a population that is growing or an economy that is growing to 
handle that. And one of the elements that historically has happened 
within the Russian mind-set is to try to find some scapegoat for that 
particular approach. I think we have got to keep that in the back of 
our minds as we are dealing with how we actually move forward in 
relation to the Russians and everywhere else.

  It is, indeed, correct, as the gentleman from Iowa said, that if the 
Russians had been helping us to pressure the Iranians in a nonviolent 
embargo approach, that we would be further along in that effort to try 
to pressure the Iranians to use only a peaceful nuclear program, rather 
than what we, I think justifiably, suspect for all kinds of concepts 
that would be going there. We would not have Mr. Morgenthau from New 
York City, who can never be considered a right-wing radical Republican, 
talking in newspaper and magazine articles about the interconnect 
between Iran and Venezuela and how some of the money that was supposed 
to be stopped in the embargo has been able to be laundered through 
Venezuela and the connection between this. Eight times Chavez has 
visited Iran. Iran is now putting money into Chavez' efforts. So I see 
the future of the problem when we look at the Iranians on the east, 
Venezuela on the south of our country, the North Koreans on our west 
coast and realize that we are living in some very perilous times.
  I happened to be in Germany when Ronald Reagan was talking about 
putting the missiles in Germany. It was heavily contested at the time. 
The Soviet Union was violently opposed to it, and there were a lot of 
pacifists within Europe who said that putting missiles in there was the 
worst thing we could possibly do; it will escalate the conflicts; it 
will escalate the violence. And what we found out in looking at history 
is it did just the opposite. It worked in actually bringing about a 
longer term peace as well as, ultimately, the end of a reign of terror 
of communism and allowed people who had never been free to finally 
become free.
  That is why I am so worried about our decision, after our Polish and 
Czech allies went out on a limb politically to allow us to have some 
kind of missile defense system that would protect Europe and the 
eastern coast of the United States before the Iranians could develop 
anything offensively, to stop that prior to that, saying that we will 
now come up with a program that won't work until 5 years after the 
Iranians would probably be effective. I worry about what the result is, 
and I worry that we, as a country, have not learned the lessons from 
history, from the past, because we seem to be making what I consider to 
be mistakes as we deal with these rogue nations.

                              {time}  1330

  And mistakes as we deal with our allies in Europe, insulting them, 
putting them in difficult positions, and then yanking the rug out from 
under them, as well as putting ourselves at some kind of military 
disadvantage as to the defense of this country against other countries 
that significantly are malevolent in their attitudes towards the United 
States, it's a very cumbersome and difficult situation as we look at 
how that chess game is being played.
  I think the demographics of what is taking place in Russia should not 
be overlooked. They have decisions that have to be made, and they don't 
have a lot of very good choices before them right now. They will be 
looking for choices which kind of deflect the inability of their 
interior policy that is not working.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Briefly reclaiming my time, a question forms in my 
mind, and I'd like to take advantage, Mr. Speaker, of the expertise 
which I will assign to the gentleman from Utah in his understanding of 
history. And I'm looking back upon those events in the 1980s and this 
event that's coming up for the 20th anniversary this November 9, the 
fall of the Berlin Wall.
  When I watched that happen on television, I saw literally the Iron 
Curtain crashing down. Every time a hammer blow landed, every time they 
hit it with a chisel, every time they knocked another chink or pulled a 
section of the wall down, that was the Iron Curtain being 
deconstructed. Demolition of the Iron Curtain that took place began on 
November 9 of 1989.
  Now, at that moment the pundits in the news media didn't understand 
what was taking place. They didn't see that as the Iron Curtain. They 
saw it as the family reunification plan. And therein lies the large 
flaw that took place on the part of the liberals. They didn't 
understand the dynamic that had taken place. But Ronald Reagan 
understood it at that moment. I'm not convinced that his immediate 
successor understood it to the depth that Ronald Reagan did.
  But this question has always lingered in me. I thought that it proved 
to the world that free markets and free enterprise and freedom would 
always prevail over communism, socialism, despotism, totalitarianism of 
any kind because of the dynamics that come from the creativity and the 
productivity and the freedom that comes from the human spirit and the 
checks and balances that exist in the marketplace.
  Yet I didn't hear them capitulating in their argument. They just 
suspended

[[Page H9991]]

their arguments for a little while. And then front-and-center, full-
blown, proud, global Communists disappeared.
  But where did they go is the question? Did they go back and lick 
their wounds and change their ideology and come back as free enterprise 
capitalists? I don't remember their doing that. But I wonder if the 
gentleman from Utah has any thoughts on what happened to those front-
and-center Communists from 1989. Where are they? Some have passed away 
but some are still with us. What are they doing today and what do they 
believe in, and how does this fit into the equation?
  I yield to the gentleman from Utah.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the gentleman from Iowa offering me 
this opportunity to tell you flat-out that I don't know what they have 
done or where they are going.
  I do know that what we have found is for the United States to be 
effective, we had to be strong and secure and make sure that our self 
interests could be protected.
  I just finished a book about the Civil War and about Lincoln as the 
Commander in Chief and his approach to it. He was much more 
intellectual about his view of the war than we are. He understood that 
time and resources are weapons just as much as individuals are or 
soldiers are in using war. And to be honest, the problem he had with 
the Union generals through most of the war was they didn't catch the 
concept of time and resources as an integral part in making decisions. 
He got it. And he was very much vilified at the time because he 
insisted on an approach which ultimately said the only way we can win 
is if we are forceful and strong and insist on this.
  If Lincoln had simply backed off and said, What we're going to do is 
we're going to negotiate a peace with the South, there would have been 
a lot of people that would have said, Yeah, I am tired of the war; 
let's negotiate a peace with the South. And a lot of people in the 
North would have said, Yeah, let them go; we don't want to be part of 
them anyway.
  But what Lincoln clearly understood from the geography of the 
situation and the future is that the Civil War would have been the 
first war between the States, not the only war. It would have been the 
first of many wars in the States as the North and South then battled 
over economic issues, transportation in the Ohio Valley, use of the 
Port of New Orleans, frontier land in the West. He clearly got what the 
future would be.
  I think President Reagan, when he decided to stand tough and he was 
highly criticized for it, got what the future would be. He did not want 
to see a world where there was nuclear proliferation, but he understood 
that America had to be tough in order to get to that point.
  I worry that we have somehow lost those lessons of history, and we 
don't realize that for the United States to move forward, we have to 
ensure that we are perfectly capable of defending ourselves. That's why 
I'm worried. The decision that we made to take the missiles, not 
implement the missiles in Poland and the radar system in 
Czechoslovakia, does not make us more secure. The idea of trying to cut 
our ground-based missile defense does not make us more secure. And 
where is this overall vision that we are trying to go? Where is this 
concept that we have to have security first before we can therefore 
start to negotiate other items around the world?
  I'm concerned with our enemies, especially Venezuela, who are clearly 
malevolent in their approach to us, spreading that document throughout 
the rest of Latin South America. At the same time, the Iranians are 
very bellicose, to say the least. And North Korea, who knows what you 
want to do with him. Those are the concerns. Those are concerns.
  I appreciate the opportunity of speaking with the gentleman from 
Iowa. I know when we had the chance of going to Germany, he was very 
forceful in presenting an American approach, and he was willing to ask 
the tough and difficult questions when the rest of us were trying to be 
reticent here, not in an obnoxious way, by any means, but in a way of 
saying somebody's got to play the devil's advocate and say, What does 
this really mean, and where will we go in the long term?
  And I appreciate his efforts in that. And I know, if you'll excuse me 
at this time, that he will also go through that in this period of time 
that he has on the floor. And, Mr. Speaker, he will do what he always 
does. He asks the right questions in a way that you can't avoid trying 
to find a good answer to those questions.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I very much appreciate the 
diplomatic gentleman from Utah for his contribution to the knowledge 
base and the decisionmaking process that we do here in this Congress. 
And I would suggest that he's a little overly humble when he says he 
doesn't know the answer to what happened to those Communists. When I 
think about the discussion that we've heard about Ukraine, Georgia, 
Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, South America, Mr. Speaker, all of these 
areas are discussed in a book written by Colonel Robert Chandler called 
``Shadow World.'' It's 500-and-some pages long. And Mr. Chandler takes 
the situation of the world at the end of the Cold War, and that would 
be at the implosion of the Soviet Union, and he begins to identify the 
leading personalities in the world, those leaders and those ideologies 
within the countries that are, let me say, Communist interests, 
hardcore Communist interests.

  And he takes the person around the globe to every populated continent 
and talks about the core politics of each of those countries, including 
these countries that have been mentioned by Mr. Bishop of Utah and 
especially Venezuela and North Korea and some of the other countries in 
South America, also Putin in Russia and how things unfolded and 
Gorbachev's position as well.
  It is a very, very educational compilation of what happened after 
almost 20 years ago when the Berlin Wall went down, the Iron Curtain 
came crashing down, and the people who were holding up that part of the 
world, the left side of the world, those on the east side of the Berlin 
Wall, who had a managed economy, who had the central planning that set 
up 5-year plans for the collective farms, those that told everyone else 
when to go to work, what raw materials to deliver. And if you remember, 
Ronald Reagan and some of the others made the joke that, well, people 
in the Soviet Union pretended to work and the Soviet Union pretended to 
pay them. But eventually that house of economic cards collapsed.
  A question was before us as a Nation, and that question was, while 
the Soviet Union was developing a missile capability to eclipse our own 
capability here, such a devastating force of ICBMs that there was 
nothing the United States could do to survive such an attack, that 
mutually assured destruction was going down the path of a destruction 
that would be so bad in this country that civilization itself may not 
survive.
  The question that was before us was articulated best by the former 
Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who, as she 
stepped down from that position in the early 1980s, said this contest 
that's going on, this Cold War, is the equivalent of playing chess and 
Monopoly on the same board, and the only question is will the United 
States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before the 
Soviet Union checkmates the United States militarily? That was the most 
succinct example of what was taking place in that Cold War in the 
1980s.
  We know how it played out now. We look back on that, and almost 20 
years ago the Soviet Union could no longer hold their economics 
together. They couldn't keep their military out even in places like 
East Germany. So they opened up the border with Hungary. People flowed 
around through Austria and Hungary. And at a certain point, there 
wasn't any merit in guarding the Wall anymore because people were 
streaming around the end. And so they went over the top and began to 
sit up on top of the wall with hammers and chisels and saws and 
anything they could get their hands on. And, yes, some broke bottle of 
champagne, and there was family reunification.
  But it was the Iron Curtain crashing down nearly 20 years ago that 
should have been a lesson for the whole world that free enterprise 
always defeats a managed economy, because no matter

[[Page H9992]]

how many smart people you put in positions of power, they can't 
micromanage an economy that is a combination of everybody's individual 
productive and economic activity every day.
  The invisible hand, as Adam Smith famously described, and actually 
didn't, about how free enterprise works with providing the incentives 
and managing the supply. So it works like this: If the grocery store 
runs out of bread, the store owner understands he has to have more 
bread or otherwise people will go someplace else to shop. And if 
there's a cheaper, better bread at the neighboring store, that store 
owner is not going to sell his bread. So that's how bakeries get 
started, how grocery stores grow and shrink, how chain stores begin, 
how manufacturing begins.
  Our control, our managed economy is this: Free enterprise drives our 
economy. And the buy, sell, trade, make-gain culture that we have 
that's part of what made America great, one of the central pillars of 
American exceptionalism is free enterprise. When we have that working 
for us in this country, Americans are more productive than anybody else 
in the world.
  Our job here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, is to get government out 
of the way and to provide the kind of tax and regulatory structure as 
minimally as we can so that the result is the individuals in this 
country will see our average annual productivity go up. And if people 
are rewarded for their productivity, they will produce more. If you tax 
them and punish them and regulate them, they will produce less. So in 
places like the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, they just simply 
suppressed the productivity by taking away the rewards.
  I can give you a simple example that stands out in a very stark way. 
And that is Communist China, a country of more than a billion people, 
about the same geographical area of the United States, having trouble 
in a lot of ways competing in the technological and educational side of 
this. But some years ago, they decided they were going to let their 
farmers, who are less controlled now than they were, be able to get 
engaged in the honey business without having government interference. 
So, in other words, government doesn't appoint themselves a few 
thousand beekeepers and have them deliver all that honey for a set 
price. They let them compete on the open market.
  And what has happened? China almost immediately began exporting honey 
and competing against the honey here in the United States because they 
had some people that could be beekeepers. That's like a little 
microcosm of free enterprise that sprung up out of China because they 
took the regulations away, took their managed economy away and let 
people produce all they could produce and sell all they could sell and 
keep a significant share of the profits.
  Well, here in this country, we've had that as a tradition across the 
breadth of this economy, and it's diminished significantly, Mr. 
Speaker.
  So the vitality of free enterprise brings about the best in us, the 
highest productivity, the most innovativeness in us. It gives us an 
incentive to extend each of our educations. It gives the inventors an 
incentive to invent. It gives the people that are producing and doing 
the experiments on pharmaceuticals an incentive to produce better 
medicine. And those who invent better surgery techniques get to cash a 
bigger check.

                              {time}  1345

  Well, even though they are humanitarians driven by a desire to do 
good in their work, when you really need to reach back for that extra 
adrenaline when it gets late at night when the rest of the world is 
tired, or maybe you don't feel very good because you are exhausted, 
that extra incentive of profit makes a difference and a reward for it 
in a society that appreciates it.
  Around the globe, there is a line of scrimmage between freedom and 
the suppression from freedom. So when the gentleman from Utah (Mr. 
Bishop) humbly said he didn't know the answer, I think perhaps he 
didn't know the answer that I wanted him to give--that will happen--but 
he understands very thoroughly how the rearrangement that took place 
after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the Cold War, some 
countries and philosophies lined up on the side of the freedom. Those 
countries are among those countries where we already had the holes dug 
to place the missile defense shield, Poland, Czechoslovakia.
  Mr. Speaker, have you failed to notice that the people who have 
achieved their freedom most recently love it and adhere to it the most? 
The Poles love their freedom. The Romanians love their freedom. And the 
Czechs love their freedom. They remember what it is like to live under 
the boot heel of the Soviet Union. They remember clearly within their 
own families the fear of the occupation that took place before, in many 
cases World War II, and certainly during and after it.
  I recall in a trip over to that part of the world with Mr. Bishop a 
conversation with a man about my age whose father's first military 
operation he was engaged in was Auschwitz, not at Auschwitz to liberate 
Auschwitz, but at Auschwitz fighting for the Russians. Those things 
don't pop up easily in our history books, but this broad global concept 
of who is on what side of this line of scrimmage, who is on the side of 
freedom and who is on the side of suppressing freedom, we need to 
understand this.
  These forces know instinctively what is at play out here on the 
globe. And so we wonder, what is the chess board that Putin is playing 
on? The Monopoly board that Putin is playing on? He is not about 
advancing freedom; he is about diminishing freedom. The freedom in the 
Soviet Union, I should say Russia, and some of our satellite states, 
has diminished since Putin stepped into control.
  We met with significant leading personalities in Russia, and I am 
going to avoid saying their names because I don't need to turn more 
heat up on them; but you would recognize many if not all of them, Mr. 
Speaker, and they told us that there really no longer exists a free 
press in Russia, not a newspaper that they can count on that has any 
influence that is free to print what it wants to print. There is not a 
free legislature in Russia any longer either. They are the people who 
are controlled by Putin, and they don't have free markets. We know that 
the Mob has taken over a lot of that economy, and there is a payoff 
that goes on inside of all of that.
  So a Russia that had an opportunity to take a step up after the 
implosion of the Soviet Union now is stepping into the darkness of the 
left again, moving towards a communist state, taking away the freedom 
of its people and their ability to effectively have freedom of speech 
and freedom of assembly and freedom of the press and freedom of their 
economy. Those things have been significantly diminished under Putin, 
and they understand that and they see that.
  The leaders of freedom in Russia today would have believed that the 
Russian people would have stepped up by now and gone to the streets and 
taken their country back. It has not happened. I would encourage that 
they do so, that they take their country back. We thought it was 
happening during the days of Yeltsin when he climbed up on the tank. 
Good things happened there, but we should not forget that we are the 
vanguards of freedom here in the United States of America for the 
world. We are the inspiration for the world.
  And when it looks like the model for our diplomacy is simply 
capitulation to Russia, under the belief that our community organizer 
in chief somehow is a master of foreign policy, well, he is the manager 
of foreign policy and he is the Commander in Chief of our military, and 
certainly I stand with our military, and I want to help coach him on 
the foreign policy a little bit.
  I don't know why the press has not been more critical of the 
President's foreign policy. This huge plunder of just announcing that 
he is going to pull the missiles out of Poland and Czechoslovakia, take 
that shield away, and almost at the same time you notice that the 
information was leaked out about the nuclear capabilities of Iran, 
which we have just heard in the previous hour, Iran developing the 
capability, that they have the capability to develop a bomb now and 
they are in the process we know of developing the capability to deliver 
it.
  And it doesn't take very much of a missile to drop one into Israel, 
and it

[[Page H9993]]

only takes one weapon dropped into Israel to annihilate the entire 
country. And they have said that is what they intend to do.
  We look at the President of the United States, his foreign policy 
experience seems to have, before he became the Commander in Chief and 
the chief architect of our foreign policy, his foreign policy 
experience comes to this: having been raised in part in Indonesia at a 
young age which would give him some sense of the culture but probably 
no sense of the global, military, cultural dynamics, but raised at 
least in part in Indonesia.
  A President who has once traveled to Kenya, and once traveled to 
Pakistan. I don't know quite how that happened, but it was announced. 
And beyond that, the foreign policy experience for our Commander in 
Chief and the chief architect of our foreign policy seems to be a trip 
to Germany to give a speech during the campaign. That is not anything 
that has ever happened before that I know of during a Presidential 
campaign, but it looked at the time like he wanted to be President of 
Europe, the United States, and the world.
  In any case, very, very limited on foreign policy experience. And the 
lessons of history, the lessons so well drilled into us by Neville 
Chamberlain's School of Appeasement when Chamberlain came back from the 
trip to Munich and waved the letter in his hand, the letter that Hitler 
had signed, and he said: I have guaranteed peace in our time.
  That was the image of Chamberlain getting off the plane from Munich. 
And what happened? Within weeks the Nazis invaded Poland. They carved 
it up with the Russians, and we were off and running in a global war 
that cost tens of millions of lives. They remember that in that part of 
the world. They are afraid of being brought back into another war. The 
Poles remember being run over by the Nazis and the Russians, and then 
occupied by the Russians for all of these years up until 1990 or so.
  This is a very sensitive situation that is going on. When the 
gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) mentioned the Ukraine and Georgia, the 
importance of the sovereign state of Georgia should not be diminished.
  We should understand that this chess game that I have talked about, 
the central square on the chess board for Putin is Georgia. That is the 
nexus through which the energy flows, the energy that is produced in 
gas and oil wells east of Georgia, east of the Caspian Sea, roughly 1.2 
million barrels of oil going through Georgia by pipeline on a daily 
basis, 1.2 million, a train that has constant tankers of crude oil 
being hauled through the nation of Georgia on their destinations to the 
tanker ships and the Black Sea, and the natural gas that flows in 
pipelines through Georgia to other places in Europe.

  Georgia is the nexus. Think, Mr. Speaker, of an hourglass, and on one 
side of that hourglass is a lot of the production of oil and natural 
gas that is east of the Caspian Sea, flowing through this nexus of 
Georgia with pipelines, rail lines, and coming out the other side at 
the Black Sea and going on to land-based places around Western Europe.
  Think of the Russians shutting off the natural gas to Germany a year 
ago January. Think what that meant when they did that. And to have the 
Germans take the position that it really didn't affect their foreign 
policy toward Russia because they only got 30 percent of their natural 
gas from Russia.
  Can you imagine if Hugo Chavez had 30 percent of the natural gas 
coming into the United States and he turned the valve down and shut off 
our gas in January? Our furnaces would have gone dark on us, and our 
houses would have gone cold. If that had happened, what would we do? 
Would we accept that? If we didn't have the power to do something about 
it, would we capitulate to the demands of Hugo Chavez?
  My answer, I think we would say yes. I think if we didn't have the 
power or another alternative, we would have to negotiate.
  I am going to suggest that the Germans are negotiating with the 
Russians because they can't do a confrontation, and Putin knows it. 
That's why he shut the energy off that was flowing through Georgia for 
4 days. He sent a message to Europe that he can do that anytime he 
pleases. When he shut the gas off that was flowing through into 
Germany, that said clearly that Putin can do that anytime he pleases.
  So if someone controls your energy and they can shut the valve down 
anytime they please, you end up being a little nicer to those folks 
unless you produce another alternative. Well, the alternative that is 
being produced is building a new pipeline around to the North Sea. And 
where does it come from? Russia. That puts them in more control. My 
answer would be: I don't want any of that; let's develop our own energy 
sources and not be dependent upon those energy sources that are coming 
from Russia. But that has been Putin's strength. When energy prices 
went up, he found himself sitting on a lot of cash. That is unusual for 
a country whose energy falters; but because Russia has a lot of energy, 
they have had a significant advantage.
  But, Mr. Speaker, we should remember when the Berlin Wall went down 
in 1989 and the Soviet Union imploded within the next couple of years 
that the people that were Communists, Socialists, Marxists, Maoists, 
they didn't go away. They didn't look at the model of this dynamic 
vigor of the United States economy that is driven by our people and 
decide they wanted to be more like us. Some did; not many.
  Most of them went underground for a little while and then tried to 
get back in power. The former Communists are there seated in the 
legislatures across that part of Europe today. In small numbers, and in 
some cases they don't get to call themselves Communists because that 
has been stained by the history of it, but they still believe the same 
thing. They still want to manage. They still believe that their elitist 
mind-set can tell the rest of us what to do. They want to take away the 
freedom of individuals to make their own choices economically and 
militarily and politically and culturally. And, in fact, persecute the 
churches while they are at it.
  We need to understand Communists haven't changed. They might have 
taken on different names. They might have declared themselves Social 
Democrats or to be Progressives. They might just be the Democratic 
Socialists of America that are supporting Progressives in this 
Congress, but they are the same people with the same ideology.
  And us freedom-loving people, I should say we freedom-loving people, 
need to understand that there are basic principles of Americanism, and 
free enterprise is one of them. And those who undermine free enterprise 
are undergoing anti-American activities because they are undermining 
our vitality and our freedom and are taking away our ability to take 
this Nation up to another level of our destiny.
  That is part of this equation that is taking place here as the 
President of the United States--whom I happen to have this portrait of. 
I think it is a flattering one actually and well done as far as the 
artwork is concerned. The President of the United States brings an 
ideology to the task of community organizer in chief. With a limited 
foreign policy experience of having traveled, lived shortly in 
Indonesia and traveled to Pakistan and I understand to Kenya, and 
beyond that his trip to Germany to give his speech there with the 
Autobahn Bismarcks--I think that is the victory monument or the triumph 
monument that's there in Berlin--with that in the backdrop, not the 
Vandenberg Gate which he tried to do, that is not a lot of foreign 
policy experience to be playing on this global chessboard with the 
world's number one economy, the world's number one military, and with 
the destiny of the world hanging in the balance if you make a mistake.

                              {time}  1400

  No one has a crystal ball, but this is a very high-risk endeavor 
taken on by our Commander in Chief. And those who are experts on the 
military side of this, it's not quite universal, but there has been a 
broad criticism that has been made. And I have no idea. My imagination 
cannot tell me what he could possibly have gotten for capitulating on 
the missiles in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
  And so, Madam Speaker, that brings me to the subject matter that has, 
I will say, riveted the American people over the last couple of weeks, 
and that

[[Page H9994]]

is the issue of ACORN, ACORN being the place where the President got 
his start in politics, where Barack Obama first engaged in community 
organizing, and his community organizing being part of--the most high 
profile that he did was Project Vote, the get-out-the-vote effort. And 
Project Vote that he worked for is a very close, indistinguishable-from 
affiliate of ACORN.
  So ACORN in Chicago has always had a broad and deep connection. It 
has always been very active there. From the early days when ACORN 
originated in Arkansas and emerged across the rest of the country, 
ACORN has had a very solid presence in Chicago. And the President of 
the United States might, in his most candid moments, confess that he 
wouldn't be very likely to be the President of the United States if it 
hadn't been for ACORN, ACORN's ability to register voters and get out 
the vote and bring about the kind of leverage within the inner city 
that allows ACORN to influence votes at the inner city level.
  Now, ACORN is a corporation, and its structure is something that 
seems to be a little bit mysterious. It has been often reported that 
they're a 501(c)(3); that's not for profit. That means they can't 
engage in partisan political activities. And we have seen as a report 
from the Government Reform Committee that ACORN has up to 361 
affiliates; in fact, they list 361 affiliates in their report. Some of 
those may not be active affiliates, and there may be some affiliates 
that didn't get picked up in the report done by the Government Reform 
Committee. But ACORN has turned into a spiderweb of this conglomeration 
of affiliates.
  So when I speak of ACORN, Madam Speaker, I'm speaking of ACORN and 
all other affiliates, think 361 corporations, a third or more of them 
being 501(c)(3) not for profits, some 527 organizations, and some 
501(c)(4) organizations, and other corporate structures, organizations 
that share, in many cases, interlocking boards of directors and an 
interlocking mission that reaches out and has become a vacuum that 
sucks up taxpayer dollars in many of the States and from the Federal 
Government.
  They have received over 53 million Federal tax dollars since 1994, 
and I think that's a small piece of it until we examine all of the 
affiliates. Many of the States have contributed to ACORN in one way or 
another by reentering into contractual agreements with them; ACORN and 
ACORN Housing, for example, essentially in the business of brokering 
low-income housing.
  So these are some of the things that ACORN has done. They've 
contributed to the toxic mortgage situation that brought about the 
economic meltdown just a year ago, and they've done so by shaking down 
lenders, by demanding contributions from lenders. What large major 
investment bank has not written at least one fat check to ACORN?
  Madam Speaker, I'm going to suggest that they have shaken down many 
of the banks that have been bailed out. And we should take a look and 
see which banks received TARP funds and look there and see which banks 
also contributed money to ACORN. And we need to bring all of the 
finances together of the private corporations that are part of this 
funding for ACORN as well as government. It's not enough just to audit 
what government sent to ACORN. It's important that we go to the private 
corporations as well and see what has happened.
  But we know that ACORN has gone in and intimidated lenders. Lenders 
have written checks in order to, let me call it, ``influence'' ACORN to 
stop demonstrating in their banks so that they can actually do 
business. We know that ACORN personnel, including Maude Talbot--her 
first name actually escapes me, but Talbot is the last name, the head 
of ACORN in Chicago who has claimed Obama as her own--have bragged 
about going in to intimidate lenders in their offices and talked of 
other circumstances about shoving the lender's desk over against the 
wall, surrounding the loan officer, screaming and yelling and chanting 
at him until such time as he would get tired of that behavior and 
commit to loaning certain amounts of money into these areas in their 
neighborhoods. That's a shakedown, Madam Speaker. ACORN was involved in 
that.
  And we know while they were shaking down lenders, they also were here 
in Washington, D.C., convincing this Congress that we should pass 
legislation to lower the standards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on 
their secondary lending market. And when that happened, it lowered the 
standards that undermine the foundation of requiring credit for loans. 
And when that happened, it laid the foundation, in fact, it eroded the 
foundation for credibility and credit and it began the downward spiral 
of the mortgage lending crisis. And at the core of that, as you look 
through it, you will see ACORN there over and over again shaking down 
lenders, coming to Congress, undermining the underwriting requirements 
that Fannie and Freddie required in order for them to purchase these 
bundles of mortgage-backed securities that were being created by 
individual bad loans in bad neighborhoods that were promoted by ACORN, 
who was getting checks from the lending institutions and getting 
agreements from the lending institutions to provide blocks of money 
that would be loaned into neighborhoods that ended up being bad loans.
  ACORN is at the core of the financial meltdown. And by the way, the 
President of the United States was at the core of ACORN as a lot of the 
genesis of this was being generated; headed up Project Vote, later on 
hired ACORN to work for him to get out the vote during the Presidential 
campaign. So the President of the United States started out with ACORN. 
He trained their trainers. He represented them in court to undermine, 
by the way, the integrity of the ballot box, in my view. And that's a 
Motor Voter issue, which we would disagree with philosophically. Headed 
up Project Vote.
  The actions of ACORN in Chicago have been tied together integrally 
with the President of the United States all the way through. And here 
we are now with ACORN helping to, on film, apparently facilitate child 
pornography and being willing to work with and advocate for what to do 
with illegal immigrant children brought into prostitution rings in five 
cities in the United States at a minimum, that being Baltimore; 
Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn, New York; San Bernardino, California; and 
San Diego.
  Madam Speaker, that was appalling to this Congress. It finally got us 
to the point of revulsion where we could finally vote to shut off 
funding going to ACORN and their affiliates. And that vote was a vote 
of 345-75 here on the floor of the House of Representatives. Just the 
day before, I didn't think it was possible, but the American people saw 
the character and the culture of ACORN in that film, those five films 
that took place inside those five cities, and we understand there are 
more that have not been released yet. And what happens? Finally, some 
of us that have been calling for investigations are starting to get a 
little bit of movement.

  But what needs to happen, Madam Speaker, is an all-out full court 
press on ACORN and all of their affiliates. We need to have the 
Department of Defense unleash their investigators to trace down, 
through all the activities of ACORN and all of their affiliates, and 
work in cooperation with IRS investigations of ACORN and all their 
affiliates, track every dollar that comes into the affiliates and every 
dollar that goes out. The commingling of funds, the transfer of funds, 
we need to have the Department of Justice go back down into the 
embezzlement that took place of nearly $1 million out of ACORN by the 
brother of the founder of ACORN, covered up by the founder of ACORN.
  Brothers do that, I understand. One of them commits a crime and 
apparently the other one covered up the crime, which is a crime itself. 
And then they misappropriated funds that were pension funds in order to 
backfill the hole that was created in their accounting by the 
embezzlement of Dale Rathke, all of this covered up by his brother, 
Wade Rathke. And they covered it up and held it away from the 
functioning board of directors of ACORN at the time.
  We have ACORN producing over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations, 
complicit in the beginning, and part and parcel of the mortgage lending 
crisis, embezzlement/coverup by its top officers, and now we have ACORN 
helping to facilitate child prostitution rings and setting up houses of 
ill repute and helping to facilitate loans to

[[Page H9995]]

do that, and advocating that the, let me just say, pimp and the 
prostitute not claim all of the 13 or 14 presumably illegal children 
that they were going to bring in from El Salvador into Baltimore, but 
just to claim three of them so it wouldn't raise the levels of 
suspicion. And then they could qualify for the earned income tax credit 
and the child tax credit, child tax credit up to three children, $1,000 
a year per child, and then the earned income tax credit, which would 
probably add another $3,000 to that, most likely, given the advice that 
they gave, to game the taxpayer for a check for a cumulative of about 
$6,000, and just as a matter of fact and a matter of course.
  ACORN would help with the income tax filings. They would help with 
gaming the taxpayer. They would help with a loan for the house of ill 
repute, and they would turn a blind eye, at a minimum, to illegal 
immigration. This is Baltimore. But in San Diego, they advocated to 
help with that. We have friends in Mexico. You have to trust us. We'll 
get this done for you. Unbelievable. No conscience.
  We saw the culture of it. But all the parts that we've been talking 
about up to the part of the prostitution, people would deny it. We had 
defenders over here on this side of the aisle, but now they can't deny 
it because once you transpose the image of facilitating child 
prostitution as a matter of culture within the corrupt criminal 
enterprise of ACORN and their affiliates, once you expose that, none of 
the rest of this is unbelievable. It's entirely plausible, and it is, 
in fact, entirely real.
  ACORN has created now a closed, contained economy within itself where 
its tentacles reach out and suck in and draw down Federal money, State 
money, contribution money, shakedown money from banks and other lending 
institutions and corporations to keep ACORN off their back, do the 
shakedown endeavor. And once that money gets drawn in, then it becomes 
something that gets commingled. And as it's commingled, then it goes 
out to further their political enterprise, corrupting the election 
process in the United States. And if there is anything that I am 
aggressive on defending, it is the integrity of the ballot box, and 
they have assaulted the integrity of the ballot box.
  The President of the United States grew up in ACORN. He hired ACORN. 
He worked for ACORN. He hired ACORN. He is a player and a coach. He 
wore their jersey and now he is the equivalent of the owner. And he had 
set them up to do the census, and twice now the Census Bureau has 
announced that they aren't going to use ACORN to help with the census. 
Why would anybody think ACORN can count people better than they can get 
people registered to vote? Four hundred thousand fraudulent 
registration forms. Can't we imagine that ACORN would pay a commission 
for everybody that the census workers could count?
  And if they paid people on commission, they would just simply fill 
out forms and expand the numbers, or count people two, three, four, 
five, six times. Even if they set up expectations and not a quota, the 
result ends up being the same, even though it's not as stark a 
violation of the law. You can't have American people counted by people 
that can't even handle a voter registration form with an expectation 
that it has an even even chance of being a legitimate voter 
registration form.
  Madam Speaker, when they take your vote, when they undermine the 
integrity of the ballot box, that's more important itself than the 
Constitution, because even though the Constitution guarantees the 
rights that we have, the only thing that guarantees the Constitution 
itself is a legitimate election process. If the American people lose 
their faith in a legitimate election process, the whole thing comes 
crashing down.
  If we don't believe that our vote counts, we can't accept the 
decisions of government. I mean, think what would happen if we elected 
a President of the United States, or Members of Congress, United States 
Senators, Governors of the States, and the American people believed 
that they were not the elected President, Governor, or Congressman, but 
they were simply those that happened to be on the side that was gaming 
the system.

                              {time}  1415

  We wouldn't accept their decisions either. If we don't accept the 
decisions that are made by government, then the progress of 
civilization comes to a halt and digresses, and we fall into the depths 
of a totalitarian state eventually as well.
  Legitimate elections are the underpinnings of our Constitution, and 
the guarantees in the Constitution can't be sustained if we lose our 
faith in the election process. The worst thing that can happen in this 
country from a policy standpoint would be to see the integrity of our 
ballot box further eroded by organizations like ACORN. So this is very 
important. It is very important that the President of the United States 
stands up and takes a position on ACORN.
  Did you notice he was really quiet about some things? He was quiet 
about Van Jones. Van Jones, the former Green Jobs czar, quit on a 
Friday night. I guess it was a Saturday morning, at 12:01 a.m. on a 
Saturday morning. Curiously, the President had nothing to say about Van 
Jones. Curiously, the press had no questions for the President on Van 
Jones, and he is a self-alleged Communist. Yet Van Jones drifted from 
the scene because he became too toxic.
  There was a little incident up in Massachusetts of a professor from 
Harvard who was trying to break into his own house and who had a police 
officer called to his location. The President saw fit to engage himself 
in that and to hold a beer summit between Professor Gates and Officer 
Crowley.
  Now we've had the United States Senate vote to un-fund ACORN. We've 
had the House of Representatives vote to un-fund ACORN. We have the 
Treasury Department starting an investigation. At least it's implicit 
in their press release that's coming out. We have the Justice 
Department looking to see if they've written any checks to ACORN but 
not investigating ACORN and their affiliates thoroughly. We have a 
number of ranking members of full committees on this Hill who are doing 
what they can with the resources they have.
  We don't have a single full committee Chair who has announced 
investigations and hearings into ACORN at this point. We've got 
Congress doing a slow walk right now on ACORN. We have the President of 
the United States, who could get himself injected into a lot of 
different discussions but who has not yet really made much of a peep 
regarding ACORN.
  Now, if the Senate says un-fund ACORN and if the House says un-fund 
ACORN, why can't the President say un-fund ACORN? That's what I'd like 
to know.
  If the President of the United States would step forward and say to 
this Congress, Investigate at my request, and I'll turn over all the 
resources of the entire executive branch of government to drill down 
through ACORN and all of their affiliates, and will chase every dollar, 
every director and every employee who has committed an illegal activity 
and will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law and will bring 
about perp walks and prison time for people who are breaking the law, 
it would happen--it would happen overnight. But he has not. He sat in 
his ivory tower, and alluded a little bit to the inappropriate actions 
that might have taken place and about how we should, maybe, get to the 
bottom of it. They are not yet serious, Mr. Speaker.
  They are not going to be serious until the American people make it 
the highest priority that they have. It's hard to make it the highest 
priority when you're watching your health care on the chopping block in 
the United States Senate, when you've watched our national security be 
diminished significantly by pulling the missile defense shield plan 
from Poland and Czechoslovakia, when you're not keeping faith with the 
people who have most recently achieved their freedom--that's the 
Eastern Europeans--and when you're putting the United States at risk 
and are empowering Ahmadinejad and empowering Putin and are setting up 
a tone of going wobbly at a time when we need to be the strongest.
  Madam Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

[[Page H9996]]



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