[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 186 (Friday, December 11, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H14813-H14818]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             WE ARE LOSING OUR FREEDOM IN THE UNITED STATES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from California (Mr. Daniel E. Lungren) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. Mr. Speaker, earlier the 
majority leader, in his dialogue with the Republican whip, stated that 
perhaps the reason that Republicans were relieved of their 
responsibility of being the majority in the House of Representatives 
was because of the substance of legislation considered at that time, 
rather than procedure.
  Well, I am not going to quarrel with the majority leader, but I would 
like to change our debate from the past to the present and the future. 
I would like to examine some common themes that are running through the 
substance of the legislation that has been presented on this floor 
during this year.
  I might say that my desire to have this hour today was prompted by a 
discussion I had with a member of my constituency, a woman living in my 
district, who came up to me at my last town hall meeting. As we were 
wrapping up the meeting and after I had spoken with a number of 
individual constituents, I was starting to leave the room when this 
woman, somewhat older than I, came up to me, and she had tears in her 
eyes and she literally began to tremble as she began to speak to me. 
What was noticeable immediately was that she spoke with a heavy Eastern 
European accent.
  She explained to me that decades ago she had had the opportunity to 
escape from a communist country and come to this country for the 
freedom that it allowed her. She said, with tears in her eyes, Mr. 
Congressman, please help us stop what's happened. She said, I fear that 
we are losing our freedom here in the United States and that my 
children and my grandchildren will not have the same freedoms that I 
came to this country for. She also said that she had recently visited 
friends in Europe, and she said, Mr. Congressman, they are laughing at 
us. They are seeing us give away our freedoms in this country. Please 
don't allow that to happen.
  I thought that it might be important for us to, on this occasion, 
pause for a moment and think about what that means. What do we mean 
when we talk about freedom in this country? What was this concept of 
freedom or liberty? How was it understood by our Founding Fathers? 
Well, the best way to try and figure that out, I would suggest, is to 
go to what we call our founding documents, the primary of which is the 
Declaration of Independence.
  In the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence it says 
these words, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are 
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain 
unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit 
of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted 
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, 
that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, 
it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute a 
new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing 
its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect 
their safety and happiness.

                              {time}  1545

  Words that many of us have read as we have studied them in school, 
perhaps not studied them enough. These words are not that difficult to 
understand. Their meanings are not that difficult to ascertain. ``We 
hold these truths to be self-evident'': It means that they are easily 
understood. By applying reason, we can see that these truths exist, not 
just for us but for all people who have the capacity to reason. The 
first thing they say is that ``all men are created equal.'' Of course, 
they meant that in the universal term, that all individuals are created 
equal.
  ``That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 
rights.'' Now, the revolutionary aspect of that simple statement was 
this: Prior to that time, organized governments appeared to suggest 
that the rights that people had were not given to them by their 
creator; that is, they did not find themselves within individuals. 
Rather, all rights were those invested in the government, usually the 
majestic monarch, who, if they had a religious belief, it was that the 
monarch had a direct relationship with God far more direct than the 
individual, and that therefore the monarch decided what rights were 
given to the people. In other words, individuals only had rights at the 
sufferance of the government. The revolutionary aspect of this 
Declaration of Independence was not only that we were declaring our 
independence from the mother country but we were basing that 
declaration on self-evident truths that we as individuals had rights 
given to us directly by our God. This was a transformation of the then 
traditional thought that the individual was subservient necessarily to 
the state.
  And we went further in this statement, our forefathers did. That is 
to declare some of those unalienable rights to be life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness. And then interestingly in this Declaration, 
our Founders thought it important to say this: ``That to secure these 
rights, governments are instituted among men.'' Not to obtain these 
rights because the rights already exist. To secure these rights. 
Government is to be put in a place of protecting those rights that 
already exist, not to give us those rights. Now, this is revolutionary 
because it established a relationship in which the people essentially 
rule. And that's why it said further that governments are instituted 
among men--meaning men, women, and children--among all, deriving, that 
is, the governments, their just powers from the consent of the 
governed. In other words, once again it is the notion of limited 
government, a government limited in its power only by that which is 
given to them by the people and the people only give up those rights 
which they voluntarily decide to give up. And then, of course, when we 
get to our Constitution, the actual legal document which underlies all 
of the laws of the United States, it begins with these words:
  ``We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect 
Union,

[[Page H14814]]

establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common 
defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of 
Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this 
Constitution for the United States of America.''
  In other words, if you look at the operative parts of that opening 
sentence, it is ``we the people of the United States'' do ordain and 
establish the Constitution for the United States of America. ``We the 
people,'' not the government. We're forming the government and we're 
establishing the contract which then exists between ourselves and our 
government. And it very clearly states, as informed by the Declaration 
of Independence, that our independence comes as a right essentially of 
natural law. They didn't have any trouble saying ``Creator'' with a 
capital ``C.'' Now, this doesn't mean that rights in this country are 
not acknowledged among people who don't believe in God, but what it 
means is our foundational documents presume that we have rights given 
to us directly by God.
  One would think, therefore, that under those circumstances when we 
the people decide to establish a governmental structure that that is a 
blueprint for majority rule, and in most cases that is true. But one of 
the other intriguing and important aspects of our Constitution, as 
amended by the Bill of Rights and the other amendments, is that the 
majority voluntarily restricted its majority rule in specific 
instances. We in some ways specifically said the majority rule will be 
limited so that minority rights in certain specific instances may 
exist. So in some ways you can say that the Constitution and the 
amendments put a restriction on democracy. It limits democratic 
practices. It limits our ability as free individuals to collectively 
make a decision as to our governance. But we accepted that. We 
volunteered that on our own.
  Why do I bring that up? I bring that up because essentially if we're 
going to follow the Constitution, it means all branches of government 
must follow the Constitution and it means that we ought to be concerned 
if we have a court that presumes to trespass on the appropriate areas 
of responsibility that we the people did not give away or restrict but 
retained to ourselves and therefore allowed for decisions in the future 
to be made by majority rule. That's why it's important for us to 
understand that while the Congress has a role, the President has a 
role, and the courts have a role, none is truly superior to the other.
  There are certain areas in which we are given primacy of 
responsibility. Here in the Congress we're responsible for legislating, 
the executive branch for executing, and the judicial branch for 
deciding in some ways proper interpretation of what the legislative 
branch has said or rules and regulations that the executive branch has 
promulgated. But just as importantly, if our courts are going to not 
unnecessarily interfere with our freedom, the courts should apply what 
I call ``legal humility'' and understand the limitations of their ambit 
of authority. And if they trespass into those other areas, they by that 
act take away from our individual freedom. Why? Because they then 
arrogate to themselves decisions that were to be left to the people. 
And if, in fact, they say they are doing it on a constitutional basis, 
they are saying, from our decision, there is no appeal; we are the 
ultimate decider.

  Now, to put it in simpler terms, one time, and I believe I was 
watching television when I saw this, I heard Justice Scalia attempt to 
explain this problem in this way: He said when he was a kid and you saw 
a problem, you saw something you didn't like, you saw something that 
ought to be changed, he said you would say ``There ought to be a law.'' 
He said, unfortunately, now today all too often when people see 
something they don't like, see something that ought to be changed as 
far as they're concerned they say, ``Oh, it's unconstitutional.''
  Now, those two different statements convey a tremendous difference in 
substance. On the one case if you say, I don't like what I'm seeing, 
there ought to be a law, you say the legislative process, the 
democratic process, people by way of persuasion and ultimately by vote 
either directly by the people, and in my home State of California we 
have some direct votes by way of initiative, or by our representatives, 
which is normally the case, either in our State legislatures or here in 
the Congress, you make an appeal to attempt to persuade a majority in 
those bodies to your position, and that's how you change law. Too often 
people give up on that process and attempt to try to say that their 
particular problem is uniquely a constitutional problem and that that 
problem, therefore, is so important it can only be decided by way of 
reference to the Constitution and the final arbiter of the Constitution 
is the Supreme Court.
  In one case in California in the Ninth Circuit, and I'll paraphrase 
this because I don't have the words exactly in front of me, a judge on 
the Ninth Circuit in dissent said that because something is important 
does not mean it is constitutional. And he went on to say it would seem 
in our scheme of government it should be just the opposite way, that 
most important questions would be decided by the people because we're a 
democracy and that under only exceptional and limited circumstances 
would they be decided by the courts as something constitutional.
  But what have we done here in this House this year with respect to 
the freedoms? What, in fact, was my constituent saying to me, what was 
that lady saying to me, about her fear that we're losing our freedoms? 
Well, I could engage in a conversation with her about my concerns over 
where the courts have overreached. I believe she was directing me to 
those subjects that we have been discussing here and voting here on 
this floor and in the Senate, in the other body, on matters of 
substance, the debate of which rarely includes a discussion of freedom.
  Let me just take one to start with: The health care bill that was on 
this floor and the provisions of a health care bill or bills that are 
being considered in the Senate. One of the rarely remarked-upon 
elements of that bill here, or the bills over in the Senate, is the 
mandate on the individual whereby it states that as a condition of 
remaining in the United States as a legal person in the United States, 
you must purchase health insurance as determined by the Federal 
Government on a yearly basis.
  Now, the argument has been made that, well, we have a problem with 
health care in this country. Some call it a crisis. I would say that I 
know of no one who wants us to maintain the status quo. The question 
is, what is the proper response to the challenges we have? But some 
have said if you're going to look at this from afar or systemically, 
what you ought to do is to require everybody to have health care 
insurance.
  Well, that might be an interesting idea. But we have a sense of 
limited government established in the Constitution of which I spoke 
before, and the idea that government is limited is essential to that 
understanding of freedom. And I look in vain in the words of the 
Constitution to find anywhere that I am charged with the authority as a 
Member of this body and working with other Members collectively in this 
body to say that an American may not remain an American unless or until 
he or she purchases the insurance that I deem they must have and that I 
could change from year to year to year.

                              {time}  1600

  Not only that, I see nowhere where it says that I can enforce that 
obligation by way of threat of fine or jail sentence, and that is what 
happens in the bills that we have had before us.
  And my question is, as much as I want us to solve the problems 
inherent in the current health care system, I run up against, with all 
due respect to the former Vice President of the United States, what I 
consider to be the real inconvenient truth. It is called the 
Constitution. It doesn't allow us to do everything that we would like 
to do. It doesn't allow government to take all of the money or to take 
your freedoms away or my freedoms away when it is convenient. We have 
to do it within the context, within the four corners of the 
Constitution of the United States.
  Now the President of the United States in his address to the Congress 
said, well, this is similar to having auto insurance. It is not, Mr. 
President. And to those who have argued that on this floor, I would say 
it is not. If you have ever been involved in cases

[[Page H14815]]

involving cars, automobile accidents, and insurance coverage, et 
cetera, you know that we do not have a right to drive on the public 
roads; it is called a privilege. You can condition a privilege. The 
other thing is no one has an obligation to have a car. If you choose 
not to have a car, you don't have to have car insurance. If you keep 
your car in the garage, you don't have to have car insurance. If you 
keep it on display in your house, you don't have to have car insurance. 
If you have a farm or ranch and you never put it on a public road, you 
don't have to have car insurance. Why, because you are not on the 
public roads upon which it is a privilege to drive, not a right.
  My right and your right and the right of anybody in this Chamber or 
any of our constituents to exist in the United States as a legal person 
should not be conditioned on some obligation that we in the Congress 
decide. Oh, we think it is a good thing for the overall system that 
everybody must have health care; therefore, we are going to require 
each person to have it, and if you don't have it in exactly the form we 
say, you are going to be fined, and if you don't pay the fine, you can 
be sent to prison. If we say that on this particular part of our life, 
where does it end?
  There has been very little talk about freedom when we talked about 
the cap-and-trade bill, and yet we know it is going to impose 
tremendous taxes and a regulatory regime on virtually everything we do. 
When you turn on your light switch at home, when you turn on your 
computer, when you pick up your telephone, when you walk out the door, 
when you get in your car, when you drive your car, when you go 
anywhere, the costs are going to be enormous. One of the dirty little 
secrets around here is that they hope we won't notice because they will 
be hidden costs. You are not going to be presented with the cost every 
time you turn on your light switch, but it will be embedded in the cost 
that you pay on a monthly basis. It is not going to affect you each 
time you turn on the car because they are not going to put a bill in 
front of you every time you drive your car, but every time you get 
gasoline, you will. Any time you use anything that is energy related, 
you are going to pay a penalty, essentially, for using that, and that 
determination will be made by the Federal Government.
  But that was not enough for some. No, last week, or was it earlier 
this week--I forget now--the EPA administrator made an endangerment 
finding on CO2 and other greenhouse gases as being 
pollutants. Now, you and I could sit down or others could sit down and 
argue about how we would define pollutants, but there is no one who can 
rationally argue, in my judgment, that the Clean Air Act, there was any 
anticipation by those who voted on it in the House or the Senate that 
this would include such a determination by the EPA administrator, and 
that as a result, the EPA administrator would be in the position of 
regulating our lives to the extent that he or she will have in the 
future.
  When you realize what this regulatory regime is going to be, they are 
telling us that if your Congress--that is, your legislators, and I am 
talking about generally if constituents would be told this--that your 
elected officials as legislators make the decision not to eventually 
pass cap-and-trade and give that authority to the Federal Government, 
it will not matter because the EPA has, by administrative decision, 
taken that out of the hands of the Congress and now will decide it 
themselves.
  So, therefore, and I believe that many Federal employees are 
wonderful people attempting to do the job as they see fit, but 
nonetheless, in many ways they are faceless bureaucrats who are not 
responsive to people at town hall meetings, who do not have to go 
before the people for reconsideration or vote every 2 years as those in 
the House do, or every 6 years as those in the Senate do. In other 
words, they are part of the executive branch, and in administering, 
they are at least another arm's length away from the people that are 
supposed to be free in our Nation. And so we are being told by some, 
that unless we in the Congress follow what they want us to do in the 
executive branch, they will take a command and control authority 
themselves and do even worse than we would do, so, therefore, we better 
act.
  Now, I don't know what you call that. There are a lot of words that 
come to mind, but ``freedom'' is not one of them.
  We also hear that Members of this body, including the Speaker, are 
desirous of attending the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. It 
used to be called ``global warming.'' It is now called ``climate 
change.'' Many people have questions about global warming. You can't 
say there is not climate change, because that is one thing we can all 
agree on. Climate does change. That certainly doesn't help us 
understand what the nature of the climate change is and the cyclical 
nature of the climate change and the natural part of the climate change 
versus the man-made part. In fact, we have been told by some, including 
the former Vice President, that we have no right to question it.
  I don't know, Mr. Speaker, what you were taught when you were in 
school, but I was taught that science is the continuing activity of 
questioning, that science is attempting to pursue certain truths in the 
natural world, and the only way you can determine those is by 
constantly putting up your proposition to peer review, if you will, and 
questioning and that skepticism is a good thing; not cynicism, but 
skepticism. And yet we have been told that we are not allowed to 
question it, that all of the questions have been answered and that, 
therefore, we should genuflect to this current notion of the scientific 
determination and, in essence, take the normal sense of politics in the 
best sense, that is, I mean, individuals through their power at the 
ballot box, to be able to make determinations as to how they wish to be 
ruled in this, a self-governing Nation.

  But we have been told, no, if we do that, we are selfish. In fact, 
the newly elected leader of the European Parliament announced that 
number one on his hit parade was to make sure that they had some sort 
of schematic achievement at this Copenhagen Conference, and in 
explaining it he used the term ``global governance'' at least three 
times; global governance. Interestingly, because I believe the former 
Vice President of the United States, in speaking to a group in London 
on the day that this House passed cap-and-trade, announced to that 
august group that this was a great triumph for what they were working 
on because it was the first real step toward global governance.
  I do know one thing about our Founding Fathers, the Founders of this 
country: they were not about global governance. They were not about the 
idea of a powerful, deciding force across an ocean ruling their lives. 
As a matter of fact, the essence of the revolution was casting off the 
authority of the mother country and allowing us here, in what became 
the United States, to be involved in a process, an experiment in self-
governance that continues to this day.
  So when I hear the term ``global governance,'' I get worried. I get 
worried because I think the Founding Fathers of this country would have 
been worried. Global governance suggests an authority somewhere up 
there with a global perspective that is somehow considered superior to 
our ability to govern in our country, in our State, and at the local 
level.
  And if we accept that argument, it seems to me that we reject the 
notion of federalism that is at the base of the protection of 
individual rights in this country. Some people have said or made the 
observation on more than one occasion that Congress appears to be an 
inefficient institution involved in an in inefficient process. Well, 
you know, that is right. And in some ways that is a direct result of 
the Founding Fathers who believed that in order to avoid the fads of 
the time, that they needed to have a system of checks and balances 
which sacrificed efficiency for the protection of freedom. That is, 
they thought that a government further away from you and more powerful 
than you and individual institutions closer to you could do more harm 
overall than a decision made by an individual or by a family or by a 
group where that wrong might be confined to just that individual, that 
family, or that group. So they believed that in order to protect 
against the overreach, the mistakes of a government that could have 
overwhelming power, they would try and defuse that power and

[[Page H14816]]

promote the idea of numerous different entities recognizing what some 
call--and it is called, actually, as a matter of Catholic social 
policy--the principle of subsidiarity. That essentially means that 
decisions ought to be made by the individual when he or she can make 
them; then an individual within the family; and then an individual or 
family within or surrounding what are known as mediating institutions, 
voluntary institutions, churches, voluntary associations, clubs, 
neighborhood groups, and then government, but government at the closest 
level, meaning local government, then county government, then regional 
government, then State government, and then Federal Government.
  The interesting thought there is not only does it protect the freedom 
of the individual, but in most cases it creates a more vibrant society, 
because all parts of that society, beginning with the individual, 
contribute to the vitality of the society because they, in fact, 
themselves, are vital to that community. It is a notion that local 
government is important.

                              {time}  1615

  I mean, if you look at Tocqueville's tremendous work about this 
country in the 1800s, he talked about us being a country of joiners, a 
country of voluntary associations, a country of churches. And he 
likened this new America to the old Europe, or he contrasted this new 
America to the old Europe, and suggested that America was different, 
and America had a future that was different than what Europe had 
precisely because of the recognition of the worth of the individual and 
all of these institutions that protected the individual from the 
overwhelming power of the government but also created a more vibrant 
society as a result of this activity.
  And yet, if you're looking at cap-and-trade, if you're looking at the 
EPA endangerment finding and the consequences of that, if you're 
looking at the hopes of the people at Copenhagen who wish they had 
global governance, it moves us in the other direction.
  What other decisions have we been making that may impinge upon the 
freedom of the American people? Well, you know, when you talk about 
taxes, you're not just talking about taking money out of somebody's 
pocket; you're talking about when you take money out of your pocket, 
they may have less money to do something that they, in their own 
individual lives, believe is best for them or best for their family or 
best for their church or best for their association or best for their 
local government, as opposed to the Federal Government.
  And too often, we have been told that it's un-American to pay low 
taxes. In fact, I believe in the last election in an interview, the 
current Vice President of the United States said something to the 
effect that it is American to pay more taxes. The Supreme Court has 
said you're not obligated to pay any more taxes than you're legally 
required to. If you want to voluntarily give money to the government, 
that's fine.
  Why would the court say that, and why would that be right? Because 
taxes are an involuntary taking from an individual to the government. 
Don't get me wrong--I don't think taxes are unnecessary. They are 
necessary. But I think we have a legal and moral obligation as 
protectors of the freedom of the people to not exact from them anything 
more than is absolutely necessary to do the proper functioning of 
government. Because if we do more than that, we are taking some of the 
freedom of the American people away.
  Similarly, in the area of spending--as well as in the area of debt, 
and perhaps even more in the area of debt because that not only impacts 
us today as individual members of this society, but that impacts our 
children and our grandchildren and children still unborn in terms of 
their ability to be able to live their lives and to have the free 
expression of their talents in such a way that they may make 
contributions to this world and that they may be free men and women.
  And so the--I will use a legal term--the gravamen of my argument 
tonight or this afternoon is that my constituent who fled from 
communism in Eastern Europe to this country decades ago for the freedom 
that this country allowed her and the fear that she's expressed that 
we're losing some of these freedoms is not a wild notion on her part 
but is in fact a significant concern that has a reasonable basis. And 
that we in Congress have an obligation to listen to people such as my 
constituent who said, Please don't take our freedom away.
  We rarely hear freedom spoken of on this floor, and we rarely hear it 
spoken of in the context of the legislation that we have before us. But 
we should understand. If we genuflect to an overweaningly powerful 
government, we are essentially changing the relationship that exists 
between those of us as individuals and our government as understood by 
our Founding Fathers in the Constitution.
  And I would stand with Abraham Lincoln when he said that the 
Constitution can only be properly understood as informed by the words 
of the Declaration of Independence. And the words of the Declaration of 
Independence, once again, tell us that we hold these truths to be self-
evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their 
creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, 
governments are instituted among men.
  Not that government gives us these rights; government is supposed to 
protect those rights, secure those rights, those rights that we, 
through rational perception, can determine--our God-given natural 
rights.
  I would hope that we wouldn't believe that those are just old-
fashioned words, but those are in fact guiding lights by which we make 
our decisions here on the floor of the House, or that we ought to throw 
away or cast aside comments made by our constituents indicating to us 
that they fear we may be losing our freedoms. That is not a panic 
attack by someone. That's not an act of delirium. Rather, it is a deep-
seated concern that I think we should follow advisedly.
  And Mr. Speaker, I would just hope that as we go forward with the 
remaining days of this year, and as we approach next year, that as we 
look at something as important as health care, we try and say, how do 
we deal with the challenges that exist in health care without 
subverting the sense of freedom and liberty that is contained in the 
Constitution? We can do it; we just have to think again. We can do it 
because we know generations that have gone before us have reached their 
challenges without in any way violating our Constitution but rather 
working towards securing those liberties that are recognized in our 
Constitution.
  And my friend from Texas, would you like me to yield to you?
  Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate my friend's point. I have been listening, 
and I have been very moved by the words from my friend from California.
  When you think about, as my friend from California pointed out, the 
Constitution and the words ``We the people of the United States, in 
order to form a more perfect union,'' then it says ``and to secure the 
blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,'' and you look at 
the 1,990 pages in that health care bill, and you realize, as my friend 
pointed out, you're going to require people to purchase a policy just 
to live, and do it under the guise of helping them. When you read the 
bill, you find out if you're just above the poverty level in that bill, 
but you don't make enough money to buy the Cadillac policy required in 
that law, then we're going to add an extra 2\1/2\ percent income tax to 
you just to live in this country.

  And as my friend pointed out, so often we've heard the President talk 
about, Well, you have to buy car insurance. I would challenge anyone to 
find a State in this country that requires any individual--because 
there isn't one--requires any individual to purchase insurance to 
protect his or her own car for damages to his or her own car. No.
  Every State requires you to buy insurance against hurting another 
individual or property. It does not require you to buy insurance even 
to have the privilege to drive. As my friend pointed out, it is a 
privilege, but just to have that privilege they don't make you buy 
insurance to protect your own car. No. They make you buy it to protect 
somebody else in order to enjoy that privilege.
  And then we've heard so many people here say, We're worried about the 
jobs, and that's why we've got to pass climate change. And we have 
people come

[[Page H14817]]

one after another to the floor and say this will not cost jobs. This is 
going to help people. It's going to provide green jobs. And what that 
said to everyone who has read the bill, when they heard someone say 
``this bill will not cost jobs,'' what it said is they didn't read the 
bill, because if you read over past 900, between 900 and 1,000, there 
is something created called the--I believe it's the Climate Change 
Adjustment Fund, and it says very clearly in there it is designed for 
those who lose their jobs as a result of the climate change bill.
  And so, they obviously didn't read that.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. If the gentleman will yield.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Yes. Certainly I'll yield.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. In other words, the bill 
anticipated a loss of jobs and creates a specific fund to reimburse 
people or to subsidize people or to in some way help those people who 
lose their job as a result of the effects of the bill.
  Mr. GOHMERT. That's right. And it's going to have to raise taxes and 
raise costs for everything else in order to create the fund to pay the 
people that lose the jobs as a result of the bill.
  And there's other good news in there for Members of Congress, though, 
that voted for the bill--and it seemed a little self-serving to be in 
there--and obviously the people who said it wouldn't cost jobs just 
hadn't read the bill, but whoever's staff member or special interest 
group wrote that bill, they knew people would lose their jobs.
  But then also the fund is created to provide relocation allowances 
for those who lose their jobs to try to help them move to where their 
jobs are going. Unfortunately, it will not provide money for you to go 
to China, India, Argentina--the places where the jobs will really be 
sent if this bill becomes law.
  But that bill provides a self-serving aspect because I know in my 
heart, having read that bill, that when people across America get those 
huge energy bills that result from the cap-and-trade bill, when they 
start getting those bills, they're going to be so mad. They're going to 
vote Members out who voted for that bill, but the good news to the 
Members is when they lose their job as a result of this bill, they may 
be entitled to a relocation allowance and subsidies for losing their 
jobs as a result of the bill.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. If the gentleman will yield on 
that.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Yes, I will.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. One of the concerns we ought to 
have is making people more dependent on government. When you make 
people dependent on government, you necessarily take away some of their 
freedom. And that's one of the things that we ought to be concerned 
about here.
  We know through every economic analysis that's available that the 
progenitor of jobs, the creator of jobs, the source of jobs in this 
country is the private sector. We know that more and more abides in the 
small-and medium-sized businesses.
  And if in fact we were dedicated to creating jobs at this time, it 
would make far more sense to do what the gentleman suggested well over 
a year ago, that we suspend the payroll tax, that we suspend the 
payroll tax both from the employer and the employee, which would have 
the effect of having immediate income in the pockets of both employer 
and employee, and we would then trust the individuals.
  Because employers and employees are individuals. We would trust them 
to make rational decisions in their lives which may just be better 
collectively than the decisions imposed on them by the Federal 
Government, where we choose winners and losers, and necessarily have to 
make political decisions with respect to winners and losers. And 
wouldn't that more quickly cause an impact on the economy on a positive 
side than waiting for whatever Congress and whatever administration 
decides finally in terms of distributing funds as they see it?
  Mr. GOHMERT. The gentleman is so right. And it goes back to the 
beginning of the Constitution. That would go so much farther to secure 
the blessings of liberty. For, as they said, to ourselves and our 
posterity--posterity of the future generations.
  But you go back to this atrocious health care bill that was passed, 
there's even what's come to be called the wheelchair tax in that.

                              {time}  1630

  How is that going to secure liberty for anybody?
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. Is the gentleman talking about 
the medical equipment tax?
  Mr. GOHMERT. That would be the tax.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. I believe it's not only on 
wheelchairs. As someone who recently, well, 2 years ago, had a new hip 
replacement, I understand that I was lucky I had it then because under 
this bill, a hip replacement, like a wheelchair, would be considered a 
piece of medical equipment and there would be a tax placed on that. So 
for the privilege of being injured in some way and then receiving 
medical attention requiring a piece of medical equipment, you get the 
indignity of having a tax placed on you. Now I don't know what kind of 
a tax you call that. It's not a comfort tax. It's not a sin tax.
  Do you remember when we used to call these taxes on cigarettes and 
alcohol ``sin tax'' because they were supposedly aimed at vices that 
people had? But it makes very little sense.
  And here is the other thing. I had the tele-town hall the other 
night, and one of the people on the line said, well, why don't you just 
have a government program and why not just do it through the Medicaid 
system; expand it for other people to have it in the Medicaid system. 
And I said to her, well, how would we pay for it? Well, we just pay for 
it through taxes. And so I was reminded of that great quote by the 
French economist, Frederic Bastiat, who said many years ago that the 
state is that great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live 
at the expense of everyone else. Now what he was saying is when we 
create in our argumentation the idea of ``state'' without understanding 
what we're talking about, it is easy to say, well, the state can take 
care of it, or we'll just tax for it; where the suggestion is that 
somehow that comes from somewhere else. And if you got it down to the 
real individual level and say, at what point do I have a right to say 
to you that I can reach into your pocket and take money from your 
pocket to pay for something I want done?
  Now I think we would all agree that there are those who can't help 
themselves, that we want to create some sort of safety net. But if the 
idea that we are going to have larger and larger percentages of the 
population have their needs or wants taken care of by the government 
because it doesn't cost them anything, at some point in time, we are 
going to reach that point of which Margaret Thatcher spoke, when she 
said, the problem with socialism is pretty soon you run out of other 
people's money. And it's even more than that, because if you corrupt 
our system such that people forget to, well, people no longer 
understand how you generate wealth, rather than just redistribute 
wealth, you essentially create less wealth, you essentially put 
limitations that otherwise would not exist on creating new wealth that 
then can be utilized for individuals and their lives and, yes, to 
support government.
  I think that is what we have to continue to remind ourselves, not 
necessarily remind our constituents, but remind ourselves because we 
are here making these decisions, that just as Ronald Reagan said, 
freedom is never free, meaning that we always have to have a commitment 
towards freedom on a military sense and people that would sacrifice, 
freedom is not automatically free in our own country. We have to fight 
for it all the time, and we have to remind ourselves sometimes that 
maybe we have to ask more of ourselves individually, in our own 
families, in our churches and in our voluntary associations to do more. 
And we ask more of ourselves and less of government, and then determine 
exactly those areas where we help people who truly can't help 
themselves and make sure that we have a true undergirding of our 
society to help those people. But don't basically damage the capacity 
of the American people to use their genius, use their creativity and 
use their dedication to try and utilize the talents God gave them.
  Mr. GOHMERT. If the gentleman would yield, we have no better example

[[Page H14818]]

of just what the gentleman is talking about than the pilgrims. There's 
a marvelous, huge mural down the hall in the Rotunda of the pilgrims 
having a prayer meeting with the Bible open to the beginning of the New 
Testament. And I know the gentleman from California's heart, and I know 
his Christian faith, and I know there are many of Christian faith here, 
and we don't try to push our religious beliefs on others, but you have 
to recognize what a part of our heritage they are.
  Now, the pilgrims, being Christians, signed a compact, an agreement 
among themselves, because they thought we want liberty for everybody, 
but we're going to give that up, put that in a common pot, we're going 
to all own the land together, we're going to all bring into the common 
storehouse, and then we're going to divide equally.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. How well did that work?
  Mr. GOHMERT. It didn't work out so well. The first winter, nearly 
half of them starved to death. And as the gentleman from California 
points out, they came up with this incredible ability of the people in 
America to come up and innovate. They came up with this great idea. 
They said, okay, we nearly starved half the people out. What we're 
going to do from now on is we're going to divide the property up and 
give everybody their own private property, and then everybody works 
their own property; you're responsible for your own upkeep, and if you 
have some left over, it's up to you. You can give it away, you can sell 
it, you can trade it or whatever. Remarkably, that's where the 
liberties we derive came from. And when Jefferson said the natural 
course or progress of things is for liberty to yield and government 
gain ground, he knew what he was talking about. He knew our history.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. It sounds as if they were 
talking about freedom or liberty with responsibility.
  Mr. GOHMERT. That's it.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. And I think we need to talk 
about both ends of it. If we are going to be a free people, we have to 
be a responsible people. If we are going to be a people who cherish 
freedom, we have to be a people who cherish responsibility. And we must 
ask of ourselves, each and every one of us, to be responsible in our 
actions, to understand there is something of the common good that 
requires something of all of us, but that if we, in fact, mistake that 
notion or misinterpret that notion such that we think that no longer 
are individuals free, and that only important questions can be decided 
by the Federal Government, and in the Federal context only by the 
Supreme Court, what we are doing is not only becoming dependent on 
others, in this case government, but we are undercutting the 
tremendous, as I say, vitality that this country has always had. And so 
we're not only cheating ourselves, but we're cheating everybody else, 
as well.

  I think that every once in a while it is good for us to have a 
conversation on this floor about, some would say, huge concepts of 
freedom. I would say essential concepts of freedom, foundational 
concepts such as freedom, freedom which is spelled out in the 
Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
  And so, I would just hope that as we continue in the last days of 
this congressional year, and as we look forward to the next 
congressional year, that we not forget about freedom and that, in fact, 
as we try and meet the challenges of the present and the future, that 
freedom be our lodestar.
  With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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