Congressional Record, Volume 156 Issue 53 (Thursday, April 15, 2010)

[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 53 (Thursday, April 15, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H2631-H2638]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

{time} 2200
THE DIRECTION THAT THIS NATION NEEDS TO GO

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, it's a privilege and honor to have the
opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House of
Representatives. And having listened to my colleague, Doctor and
Congressman Burgess, speak in the previous segment in the previous
hour, I'll pick up on some things that are on my mind and see if we can
clarify the direction that this Nation has taken and the direction that
this Nation needs to go.
This is tax day, April 15. This is the day that there are a lot of
bleary eyes from people that have stayed up way into the night trying
to do their own taxes. We have some people out there that have borrowed
the money to pay the tax preparer so that they can file their taxes on
time. And we have people that have paid the tax preparer to file an
extension because they couldn't get their paperwork in on time.
We have a huge amount of American dollars that are invested in paying
tax preparers and doing tax preparations. And I often think about this
economy that we have and ask the question, you know, what about these
sectors of the

[[Page H2632]]

economy? Is there anything contributed to the economy by paying
accountants and IRS agents to collect money?
And I'll argue that the White House gets it wrong. The President's
economic advisers get it wrong. They seem to believe that this economy
is a giant chain letter, and if they can just go into the U.S.
Treasury, or borrow from China or borrow from the Saudis and dump a few
hundred billion or a few trillion dollars into this economy and give a
lot of it away and get people to spend the money, or do it on contracts
and the shovel-ready projects, which actually are some of this that has
the least amount of demerit and some merit to it--they seem to think
that throwing these dollars through the economy stimulates the economy
and then we grow.
But the flaw in that premise is this, that, you know, this economy
isn't built on spending. It's not built on something that's viewed by
the White House as a giant chain letter, where you just dump in the
hundreds of billions of dollars, and somehow we go out and spend money
and the economy spends. That's the Keynesian economist approach. That's
the approach that John Maynard Keynes actually rebutted himself back
during the thirties when he said that he could solve all the
unemployment in the world.
Now, remember who Keynes was. He was an economist who was a
contemporary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And he was credited with
producing the concept that if you have a shrinking economy, you can
stimulate it by borrowing money and spend; the Federal Government can
dump that money into the economy and have that flow through the economy
and stimulate it.
Now, John Maynard Keynes made the remark about the early or mid-
thirties that he could solve all the unemployment in the world. This is
how good this Keynesian economics approach it is, that he would solve
all the unemployment. This is the author of his own program, of course.
He would solve all the unemployment in the world this way. If he could
just go to an abandoned coal mine and go out into that abandoned coal
mine with a little drill rig and drill a whole bunch of holes out there
across that coal mine, and then he'd take American currency, cash
money, greenbacks, and then bury them down in these holes in this
abandoned coal mine. And then Keynes went on to say, he'd fill that
whole coal mine up with garbage.
Now we would have an abandoned coal mine with holes punched in it
with drill rigs all over the place, presumably in some kind of grid
pattern or random pattern, these holes all full of cash, hundreds of
feet of garbage piled over the top of it. And he said he could solve
all the unemployment in the world by just simply now turning the
world's entrepreneurs, or the American entrepreneurs, loose to go dig
out the garbage, dig up the money and take the cash.
That's pretty similar to what you're talking about with these
Keynesian economics. You try to get people to work to do things that
are make-work. And the President himself said, we're not going to pay
people just to dig a hole and fill it back up. I thought that that was
an interesting metaphor or way to compare that since I've spent my life
digging holes and filling them back up. And I can tell you that it pays
if you're digging the hole for some purpose, that builds something that
has value.
Our economy, our economy, Mr. Speaker, needs to be built upon the
foundation of increasing our productivity. Americans have to make
things. We have to produce things. We have to expand services so that
our economy grows.
If you think of it in terms of what it would be like if we were still
back in the tribal village, and if we didn't have any money to work
with, and we had to trade, how do we grow wealth?
Well, some of us would make bows and arrows, and some of us would
make the arrowheads, and some of the people would skin the hides and
make the clothes. And pretty soon we'd find out that some are good at
one thing, others are good at another thing, and then we start to trade
these products back and forth, and we have clothing, and we have
weapons, and we have utensils, and we have gardeners, and we have
hunters and people that specialize. And after a while, this wealth
builds because we acquire material goods that increase.
First they provide the necessities of life, which the simplistic term
is food, clothing, and shelter. And then we add to our material goods,
all of this out of the wealth that comes from producing something that
has value and trading it or selling it and then taking the money and
buying something from someone else for something that has value to us.
That's how this economy works. And it's got to be based on our
productivity. Americans have to build things. We have to make things.
And here we are on tax day with these millions of Americans that have
filled out their forms and spent their money to do so so that they can
do their best to comply. And a lot of Americans that don't want to walk
close to the edge of complying with the IRS, they don't want to face an
audit, and so they perhaps pay a little more in taxes than they owe
because they don't want the question to come up.

Frank Luntz produced a number that was pretty interesting to me, and
it was this: that 58 percent of Americans would rather have a root
canal than a tax audit. I didn't ask him if that was without
anesthetic. For me, I'd take the root canal without the anesthetic
before I would want to go through a tax audit. But a lot of the
American people today are very concerned about a potential tax audit,
so they're paying a little more taxes than they might otherwise.
They had to file. They drop it in at the last minute. And we have
post offices that will close at midnight tonight so that people that
are hustling up to fill out their tax returns can drop those in and get
them postmarked by midnight. And that will be advertised, and they'll
plan it. And procrastination will take place. It's not something we
enjoy doing.
This day, this day that the 16th amendment enabled all those years
ago was a day that brought tens of thousands of Americans into this
city, and they have been demonstrating and rallying and giving speeches
and singing God Bless America. These are true patriotic Americans that
are here in this city today. And they're at over 700 locations around
America.
We're going to try to get a real count on how many Americans came out
today that carried an American flag, that brought up the new standard
of the constitutional conservatives that are the new majority makers
for America. The new standard is an American flag and a yellow Gadsden
Don't Tread on Me Flag to fly. That Don't Tread on Me, it carries a
message that adds to Old Glory. And I am very, very happy to tell you,
Mr. Speaker, that I have one flying outside my office at 1131
Longworth. Anybody that walks by there that sees that flag knows where
I stand. That's the new standard of liberty. It's a new standard of
freedom, and it supports and defends the United States of America. It
flies with deference to Old Glory, and it supports and defends the
principles that are in the Constitution and the principles of free
enterprise and free enterprise capitalism.
I would wonder, watching the activities and the behaviors at the
White House over this last year and a half or so, if they actually
would agree with one of the questions that are on the naturalization
flash cards that are put out by the U.S. citizenship immigration
services. These are the people that provide the services to naturalize
new legal immigrants to become American citizens. These flash cards, a
stack about this thick, Mr. Speaker, and nice little glossy things
about like that. And I regret that I didn't bring one over here.
But there are around 120-or-so questions, and it'll start out on the
one side of the flash card, you can read it and it'll say, Who's the
Father of our country? And you snap it over the other way and it'll
say, we know this, Mr. Speaker, George Washington.
You look at one side of another flash card and it will say, Who
emancipated the slaves? Flip it over to the other side: Abraham
Lincoln.
Now here's the one that might stump the White House today. And it's
this: What is the economic system of the United States of America? Flip
that flash card over: free enterprise capitalism.

{time} 2210

Haven't seen a lot of that going on out of the White House in quite
some

[[Page H2633]]

time. In fact, when I look at what has been happening out at the White
House, it starts with this. At the tail end of the Bush
administration--with the full support and endorsement of then-candidate
and United States Senator Barack Obama and now President, we saw the
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson come to this Capitol September
19, 2008. And he came into our closed-door session and he said, You
need to give me $700 billion, and you need to give it to me now. And if
you ask any questions or if you try to amend my request in any way,
you'll mess up the works. But what's bound to happen or what could be
happening is we could see a complete meltdown of the global currency
and the confidence and capital and collateral, and we could see the
entire world money supply fall apart if they lose this confidence.
So he said, Give me $700 billion, give it to me now, and if you have
any ideas, they will not be as good as his own ideas. He said that he'd
been watching this now for, I believe he said 13 months and we had only
been watching it for 24 hours--some had--therefore, his ideas were a
lot better than ours and his should not be questioned. And to come to
this Congress and ask for $700 billion of the taxpayers' money without
an assurance that his plan, if he carried it out and he got the money,
would actually work. Well, that was the TARP proposal. Seven hundred
billion.
The Congress eventually authorized and appropriated $350 billion in
one chunk in early October, I believe it was, of 2008 and another $350
billion to be reauthorized by the next Congress, people to be elected
later, approved by people to be elected later and approved by a
President to be elected later and a Secretary of the Treasury to be
confirmed after his tax problems later.
So that started this, $700 billion in TARP. And we saw in rapid-fire
succession behind that came the nationalization of three large
investment banks, government takeover of three large investment banks.
Then we saw, while this was going on, government takeover of the
insurance company, Mr. Speaker, AIG, to the tune of about $180 billion
dumped in because, remember, these entities are entities that are too
big to be allowed to fail.
Now, that's a new concept for America. We never had that concept
before. All through our history books and the current documents, I know
of no place where we had come to a conclusion that these businesses
were too big to be allowed to fail and so, therefore, we were going to
prop them up with taxpayer dollars. But that is what happened.
$700 billion in TARP; three large investment banks nationalized,
taken over by the Federal Government; AIG nationalized, taken over by
the Federal Government; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taken over by the
Federal Government; and, by the way, formally locked into that full
nationalization by Executive order of the President right before
Christmas last year. And that saddled the American taxpayers with a
$5.5 trillion contingent liability in addition to the capital that had
to go in to prop up Fannie and Freddie--and never mind all of the
people that got rich out of that, including the Chief of Staff at the
White House.
So we don't know what happened in all of those places because the
chairs of the committees here in this Congress control the
investigations of this Congress. But we saw $700 billion in TARP, three
large investment banks nationalized--AIG nationalized, Fannie Mae,
Freddie Mac nationalized.
By now, Mr. Speaker, people are nervous, but they think they've
elected some folks who understand high finance better than they do.
This is a constitutional Republic, and we are to elect people to this
Congress that owe the American people our best judgment and our best
effort. And they trusted that best judgment and best effort and they
trusted that we had access to more information and we'd use our good
judgment.
But when the Federal Government got into the nationalization of
General Motors and Chrysler, all almost simultaneously, the American
people began to lose their faith in the judgment of the White House and
their Congress and their government. Because even though the American
people may not have confidence that they understand investment banking
and high finance and insurance or the secondary mortgage market, the
Fannie and Freddie components of this, the American people understand
cars. We love our cars. We especially love our American-made cars. We
love them. We drive them. We fix them. We show them. We collect them,
and we make them.
And we know that if you want to make an automobile and sell a lot of
them, it takes a lot of dealers to sell them. Anybody's intuition can
tell them that if you go out in your garage or up in your attic or out
in your shop and you invent the master widget and you patent that
master widget and decide you're going to sell that widget across the
country and the world, what you do easily is first lock down your
patent, set up your manufacturing so you can meet the demand, and then
you go out and set up dealers. And if you want to sell a lot of
widgets, you have to have a lot of dealers, and you have to support and
promote your dealers.
But when the Federal Government came in with a bankruptcy settlement
that cut the numbers of dealers by 3,400 dealers in America, the
American people know that the automakers didn't have a financial burden
with the auto dealers. The auto dealers owned their franchises. They
supported themselves. They paid for the services that they got out of
the automakers. And for the White House to decree that there was going
to be 3,400 dealers that got shut down in America, not only was that an
unjust taking of the property rights of their franchise, but it also
brings about sales of less automobiles. You can't sell more cars with
fewer dealers even though they'll say, Well, we had bigger and better
dealers that were healthier. That is not the point.
A lot of car dealers are face-to-face, retail marketing, neighborhood
niche marketing. That service that goes on between the restaurant and
the church and out there in the dealer's lot, a lot of that got shut
down. But the American people saw that happen, Mr. Speaker, and then
they really lost their faith in the judgment of the White House and
this Congress and the Federal Government and they began to pay
attention.

And we saw bankruptcy terms that were dictated by the White House,
and when that was presented to the bankruptcy court, there wasn't a
change that was made by that court. They accepted the terms that were
dictated by the White House.
And we had a car czar at the White House that was 31 years old that
had never made a car, sold a car, I don't think fixed a car--I don't
know if he owned one, and if he did, I don't know if it was an American
car. So all of this brings a high degree of nervousness on the part of
the American people.
And then they see the President of the United States go down there
and do his glad-handed grip and grin with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
When I saw those fellows standing side by side with this grip and grin
of this two-handed handshake--the old buddy handshake--I looked at
that, and someone asked me in the Washington Journal program--I believe
it was the following morning--what that made me think. Well, I thought
a lot of the things that other people thought, but I also thought that
Hugo Chavez is a nationalizer of the businesses that he's taken over in
Venezuela, including a cargo rice plant not too long earlier than that.
He is a piker when it comes to nationalization compared to our
President, Mr. Speaker.
Three large investment banks nationalized. AIG nationalized. Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac--formerly private, marginally quasi-government at
the time--nationalized. General Motors nationalized. Chrysler
nationalized. The CEO of General Motors fired and replaced by the
President of the United States. The President of the United States
appoints all but two of the board members of General Motors.
And the shareholders, the secured creditors saw their assets in those
companies wiped out. Even though they were secured assets, they wiped
them out and they handed share ownership of 17\1/2\ percent of General
Motors over to the unions. And the Speaker of the House, Mr. Speaker
for the evening, made the statement going into this that she would not
give bargaining leverage to the automakers over the

[[Page H2634]]

unions, and that is the way it shook out. The unions got bargaining
leverage over the automakers. And now we have a Federal Government that
is running the car companies, and the unions have an ownership share,
at least in General Motors, to a significant amount, 17\1/2\ percent is
my recollection.
And then on top of that, if you're a government, a Federal
Government, and you're running a car company like General Motors or
Chrysler and you're having trouble competing, you're also running the
regulatory organization.

{time} 2220

So I am not, Mr. Speaker, suggesting that I know anything that the
American people don't know about what might have brought about the
intense scrutiny of Toyota that cost them at least a $16 million fine
for their throttle and untold amounts of negative publicity on their
throttle control and a number of other things.
But I will only submit, Mr. Speaker, that I have the American people
coming to me on a regular basis and ask me if that intense scrutiny of
the regulators on Toyota couldn't have something to do with the need of
the Federal Government to see General Motors and Chrysler succeed,
perhaps, more.
I don't have any evidence that would suggest that. But the appearance
of impropriety certainly exists, Mr. Speaker, and the American people
don't want to see one-third of their private sector activity
nationalized and taken over by the Federal Government. But that's
what's happened, one-third of the private sector activity swallowed up
in those eight entities that I talked about.
Oh, and by the way, on the tail end of that is $787 billion in this
thing called the economic stimulus plan, of which 6 percent of
Americans think actually worked, 94 percent believe that it didn't help
and didn't do any good.
Now, this is a pretty sick scenario, $700 billion in TARP, $787
billion in economic stimulus plan, eight huge national entities
nationalized--and these are net private entities that are
nationalized--one-third of the private sector activity nationalized.
Now where are we? Now we get to ObamaCare, and ObamaCare is another 18
percent that was formerly private. Now it's under the auspices of the
Federal Government, command and control and regulate.
Yes, some will say that these are private insurance companies, and
it's not the Federal Government. But the Federal Government will
effectively cancel every health insurance policy in America and
reauthorize only those that meet the new standards that will be
written, not the standards that we have today.
The options that the American people have will be diminished, not
increased. American freedom will be diminished and not increased. The
costs will go up for these premiums, because the Federal Government
will impose more and more mandates on these health insurance policies.
They will require that every health insurance policy covers
contraceptives, and they will require that it covers mental health, and
they will require piece after piece after piece, and one of these is
require that health insurance policies cover the children up to age 26.
Huh. I didn't really raise a family with the idea that my kids would
start to grow up at age 26, and the law has been that 18 is a good
place to say that they are grown up. Now, we like to keep them around
longer than that and get them a college education and transition them
into adulthood, but we do not need the super nanny Federal Government
setting a 26-year standard because somebody in this Congress thought it
was a good idea.
I had a young man come to me this afternoon at one of the Tea Party
rallies; and he said, well, I am 23 years old. Don't you want me to
have insurance under my parents until I am 26? And I said, no, I want
you to grow up. When do you think you are going to be an adult? You are
not one yet at 23?
I mean, well, then why 26? Why not 28? Why not 32? Why not all the
way to Medicare eligibility? Then you have got the whole thing covered.
This is the mentality that's going on. This is a President that
believes in single payer. He said so over and over again. He debated
Hillary Clinton, who was for single payer. The bill that she brought
back to this Congress in 1993 and 1994 was single payer. That means
that the Federal Government pays it all.
They got all they could get to toss us into the abyss of socialized
medicine. They went as far as they could go. They imposed a bill on the
American people, that ObamaCare bill that about 3 weeks ago passed off
the floor of this House and went to the White House for his signature.
On the day that it passed this House and went to the White House, it
could not have passed the United States Senate. On the merits of the
bill, it sure looked to me like it couldn't pass the House either, Mr.
Speaker.
But, nevertheless, ObamaCare became the law of the land, and it's
going to take 4 years to implement the socialized medicine policy, but
immediately the tax increases kick in. And so I will lay out a better
sequence, I think, Mr. Speaker, and it is this.
The American people are rising up. They have filled this capital city
up time and time again. They did so on November 5 of last year. They
did so on November 7. They did so the previous 9/12. The day after
September 11, the 9/12 Project Group, hundreds of thousands came to
this city.
They are doing it again. This coming September, there will be other
rallies across the country. The tens of thousands that are here in this
city today are multiplied across some 700 locations, thousands and
thousands of people that I think will add up into the millions that
come to the streets and say, enough, I have had enough. I have had
enough of watching my country run into the ditch. I have had enough of
watching this overspending, this irresponsible increase in our spending
without regard to trying to balance a budget or any sense of fiscal
responsibility.
If you simply want something for your constituents and you sit on
Appropriations Committee or you are in tight with the Speaker or you
have somebody, then a staff that can write that number in for you, the
spending just comes, and we will see.
We will see again no appropriation bills probably come out of this
House, no budget probably come out of this House, because if we passed
a budget, however irresponsible the budget is, it still is a spending
constraint and a debate point. So they are going to avoid a budget and
just spend all the money they want to spend. But they have a little
trouble because there is an election coming and the American people are
getting real savvy to these tricks.
So what I think will happen will be we will see a continuing
resolution or several of them that deal with these appropriations
components, kick the can down the road. Then there will be an election
in early November, and then I think they come back with an omnibus
spending bill that will take these continuing resolutions, these CRs,
as we call them, and stack it up in about 3,600 pages and someplace
between 500 billion and a trillion or more dollars will get spent. And
there won't be any amendments allowed, and there will be a limited
amount of debate, and, once again, the American people will not have
the opportunity to scrutinize what's going on here in this House of
Representatives.

I suggest this, that I have a bill that's called the CUT Act, to cut
the unnecessary tab is what CUT stands for, cut the unnecessary tab,
the CUT Act. And it recognizes that there is an upward spiral of
spending that's naturally built into this system. The President
proposes his spending. The House, by Constitution, has to start the
spending here. If the House doesn't want to say no to the President of
the United States, they just simply take the President's proposed
budget and add the things into it that they want, and they send it over
to the Senate, who doesn't want to say no to the President and doesn't
want to say no to the Speaker of the House or the will of the House. So
they simply accept the spending that's come from the President,
increased by the House, and they stack their spending goodies on top of
that.
The Senate is really good at adding lots of billions of dollars, and
now it has to come back around to the House where the Speaker will not
want to say no to the Senate or the President again. So it will jack up
the spending

[[Page H2635]]

again, and the bill will go to the President's desk, and we will go
deeper into debt.
That's the spending spiral that happens when you have a ruling
troika, Mr. Speaker. That's when the President of the United States,
the Speaker of the House, and the Majority Leader in the United States
Senate, all of the same party, all with super majorities--well, Harry
Reid is just one short of that super majority over there--the three of
them could go into a phone booth and decide what they want to do with,
to or for America.
What has happened has been a sad, sad state of affairs indeed,
irresponsible spending, ObamaCare, unconstitutional, and in a whole
number of ways, no budget coming forth, the tax cuts that were so
important in stimulating our economy back in 2003, that would be those
cuts that were signed into law May 28, 2003, the second half of the
Bush tax cuts. Those tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this
year.
Right now, Mr. Speaker, it's a good year to die, because there is no
inheritance tax. However, it goes back to a super high rate the first
of next year, and no action has been taken.
And even though we have a bit of an extenders package today, there is
nothing there for the blenders credit for biodiesel, and it's hanging
our capital investment out to dry. The people that have followed the
direction of the Federal Government and risked their capital, when the
government put out the message that was we want to see renewable fuels
developed in an industry and to replace at least in part gasoline, we
built an industry, the ethanol industry, the biodiesel industry. In
fact, the first legislation that I drafted and introduced as a new
Member of Congress was that blenders credit for biodiesel.

{time} 2230

And these biodiesel plants now, with hundreds of millions of dollars
invested and hundreds of thousands of employees altogether, have shut
down, many of them, perhaps all of them in my State are shut down and
they are being mothballed. There is silence there where there was
production before, 24/7 production in many of their cases. Now it's
silence. You might hear a fan run. It's a cooling fan; that's about it.
They have to make a decision on whether they walk away and cut their
employees loose and leave them unemployed and lose that good core
workforce or whether they try to eke it out and stay in. And this
Congress has an obligation to turn that card over and get that
blender's credit passed so that the 14 plants that I know of in Iowa
that are shut down that are viable with it can get up and running
again. One of those plants is being dismantled and shipped to India.
I make this point to the Speaker and the environmentalists that are
in this Congress, that if it's your idea to build a second generation
of renewable fuels, such as cellulosic ethanol or sugar-cane based or
whatever it might be, unless we have a viable first generation which we
have built--and it's not viable today without the credit--if we don't
have a viable first-generation renewable fuel, then we're not going to
be able to build a second generation. You cannot attract capital to
that industry when government doesn't keep their word. And this time it
has gone on too long; it has gone on since the first day of this year.
This is the 15th of April. That's January, February, March and half
of April, and all of those have been money-losing weeks for the people
that stepped forward to do the bidding of the government. So I'm
hopeful that we get that turned around and get that passed out of this
House and we do so soon and send that component at least to the
President. It is a responsibility, and it is irresponsible to just kick
the can down the road.
But, Mr. Speaker, I take us back to ObamaCare. And what is the
solution? First, I think I should go through a list of some of the
things that are wrong. A half a trillion dollar cut in Medicare
punishes our seniors. I represent, I believe, the most senior
congressional district in America. A half a trillion cut, and what
happens? AARP, or the American Association of Retired Persons--or
People--cut a deal with the White House to support a half a trillion
dollar cut to the benefits to their members. And why? I think it's
because the bill mandates that people buy insurance, and AARP is in the
insurance business. I don't know that, but I would sure like to hear
the straight story about what went on back there with the President and
Rahm Emanuel and the representatives of AARP.
I'd like to know what went on with the health insurance companies,
why so many of them supported this. This is anathema to their beliefs.
But could they have just concluded that the Federal Government is going
to compel everybody to buy health insurance, therefore it's a bigger
market for them? And why would they feed the alligator, hoping that
they get eaten last? Haven't they seen the pattern? Do I need to
explain that, Mr. Speaker? Okay, I will.
I'm glad that you nodded in the affirmative. And that would be this:
back in the sixties--I think the year would have been '62 and '63--we
had at that time all of the property and casualty flood insurance in
America was private, not government. And because we had had some
floods, there was an argument made in this Congress that the Federal
Government should provide all the flood insurance--or should provide,
excuse me, competition in the flood insurance business. And so the
Federal Flood Insurance Program began just to keep the insurance
companies honest and make sure they could provide the flood insurance
that was necessary in the flood plains that we had.
So one would think that the Federal Government would set up a little
company and sell flood insurance and these other companies would just
get more competitive, leaner and meaner, and more of them, perhaps, and
we would have good flood insurance in America. But what happened was
the Federal Government squeezed out 100 percent of the private sector
property and casualty flood insurance so that today, Mr. Speaker, if
you want to buy flood insurance for your home or your office or your
factory or your farm, or whatever it might be, you have no choice but
to buy that flood insurance that's provided by the Federal Government.
That's what has happened. One hundred percent of the private sector in
1962, and over a number of years the Federal Government swallowed up
all of the private sector flood insurance.
Now, one might say this is an anomaly, it really isn't a pattern, it
was a circumstance, it had special circumstances involved with it so we
can't anticipate that the Federal Government will swallow up the health
insurance industry. Well, here is the definitive irony, and that is
this: years ago--about the time that I was going to college anyway--I
believe that all of our student loans were private, not government. And
then government decided they wanted to get into the business, so they
took a chunk of the student loans over. But they said, oh, we don't
want to own it all, we don't want to run the whole thing, we just
simply want to provide some competition here because that will make
everybody better. I don't know why anyone would think that the private
sector doesn't provide enough competition, and I will talk about that
in a moment, Mr. Speaker.
So when the Federal Government got involved in the student loan
business only to provide some competition and do a segment of the
market and let them compete against each other, a lot of us said, no,
the Federal Government is positioning themselves to take over 100
percent of the student loans program. And however that was denied for
some time, it hasn't been denied in this Congress since Speaker Pelosi
picked up the gavel, not by the other side of the aisle, not by George
Miller. It was his goal all along, and he will tell you that he's been
honest about that. But in any case, that's what happened. Written into
the reconciliation package of ObamaCare was the final nail in the
coffin to anything except Federal student loan programs. The private
stuff was all swallowed up, it's wrapped up, it's packaged up, and it's
wiped out.

So we have examples before us: flood insurance, formerly 100 percent
private, Federal Government got involved in that, now it's 100 percent
government. You have the student loan program that was formerly 100
percent private, the Federal Government got involved in that, now it's
100 percent government. And here we are, the health

[[Page H2636]]

insurance program, where the President of the United States has
consistently said we don't have enough competition in the health
insurance industry so he just wanted to start one more company, a
Federal health insurance company, just to provide some competition. No,
it would never replace all those other companies, just to provide some
competition. Now, here are some facts that I mentioned that I would
bring out a few minutes ago:
When ObamaCare passed, we had 1,100 health insurance companies in
America, 1,100. That's not a mistake; it's not a decimal point out of
line. We have--or at least a couple, 3 weeks ago had that many
companies, 1,100 health insurance companies selling right in the
neighborhood of 100,000 possible health insurance policy variations. So
if you go shopping out there, 1,100 companies, 100,000 policies and 50
States--and, yes, you can't buy in all those because buying insurance
across State lines is not something that has been accepted.
So, simply, if you wanted more competition, you would allow people to
buy insurance across State lines and you would end this question. But
the President's idea was create some Federal competition because what
happens is when the Federal Government gets involved, then they turn in
and they subsidize. And when they subsidize, then no private sector can
compete with them. Oh, and by the way, a little known tidbit fact, the
Federal Flood Insurance Program that they run 100 percent of now is $19
billion in the red. So the premiums don't reflect the risk, and people
continue to build in the flood plains out of proportion to the high
risk that's there, and we have more and more property that we have to
protect with Federal taxpayer dollars, and it just snowballs, and it
gets worse and worse and worse.
Well, ObamaCare drives up cost, it discourages research and
development, it will reduce quality, it discourages doctors and health
care providers. I said that our doctors in America, they may not be on
suicide watch, but they are assigned to only use plastic silverware,
and it's kind of hard to conduct surgery with that, so it has been real
hard on the health care providers.

{time} 2240

The freedom and the liberty component of this is the worst part when
we think, Mr. Speaker, that, ever since 1973, the people on that side
of the aisle--I'll call it the left side of the aisle--primarily, and a
few on our side made the argument that Roe v. Wade is settled law, that
a woman has a right to an elective abortion under any circumstances and
that the government has no business telling a woman what she can or
can't do with her body. That argument was made by men and women--by
almost everybody on that side of the aisle and by a few of the people
on this side of the aisle. It's a pretty interesting point. The Federal
Government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do
with her body.
Now look at it. The very same people who have made this argument
since 1973 are saying to us, Well, the Federal Government has every
right to tell everyone in America what they can or can't do with their
bodies, and that includes thou shalt buy a government-approved health
insurance policy or sign up for Medicaid. We'll make sure we can give
you a stipend if you don't have the money, and we'll tax you if you do
have the money. If you're an employer with 50 or more employees, you'll
have to make sure they all have government-approved health insurance.
If you're an employer with 49 employees, thou would be stupid to hire
the 50th one.
So we'll see a lot of small businesses that will reach that level of
growth, and they'll stop. They might go out and create another entity
and roll some employees into that and stop. We will not just see all
kinds of machinations of business configurations for the purposes of
tax delay or avoidance that is driven by this Tax Day and the IRS, but
we are going to see, also, business models that will be configured in
order to avoid the Federal mandate because the Federal mandate
requiring people to provide health insurance because they're employers
is immoral and is unjust and is impractical, and it will create
convoluted business arrangements.
I am for, Mr. Speaker, abolishing ObamaCare, for repealing ObamaCare.
I have introduced a bill that repeals ObamaCare. Congresswoman Michele
Bachmann has also introduced a bill that repeals ObamaCare. They happen
to be verbatim in their language. Parker Griffith has one and, I
believe, Bob Inglis. They are a couple other names that come to mind. I
am for all of them. I want to work with all of them and with everyone
else who has a bill. It's interesting. Within the 2,700 pages of
ObamaCare, nobody read it all, I don't believe. If they did, they
didn't understand it all.
I have a bill that I drafted that addresses this, and it's far better
than the one they put in. I asked the College Republicans to sit and
listen while I read through my bill, every word of it, and I asked them
to pay attention and not to lose their concentration. I read the 40
words, not 2,700 pages, not 40 titles, not 40 pages, not even a page. I
read 40 words on a page that essentially say to repeal ObamaCare, every
bit of it, to pull it out by the roots. Now I'm going to embellish
beyond the language. Take it out. Repeal ObamaCare lock, stock and
barrel. Pull it out root and branch. Make sure there is not a vestige
or a remnant of any DNA particle of ObamaCare left in the Federal code,
because this policy that was and had become a toxic stew that was now
force-fed to the American people has become a malignant tumor in our
society, and what we do with malignant tumors that are on the verge of
metastasizing is we take them out, and we pull them out by the roots.
We cut out the entire tumor. If there happens to be a little good
tissue around the edges, it's better to err on that side than it is to
leave some malignant cells.
There is not one single part of ObamaCare that should be retained by
this new Congress, and I expect to have a discharge petition down here
at the well sometime in the next few weeks asking Members to sign onto
it, working our way towards 2018 so we can send a repeal bill out of
the House of Representatives. Hopefully, the Senate will pick this up
as well.
The sequence becomes this: Yes, if we could get it there--and it's a
hard task to get it there, and I'm not predicting it's possible.
Everything is possible. Scott Brown is in the United States Senate
today. So, with that optimism in mind and knowing that northern Iowa
beat Kansas in the NCAA tournament, I'm pretty confident there is a
chance that we can repeal ObamaCare in this Congress. There is a
chance. We put the marker down, Mr. Speaker. Then we have an election
in November.
The President is fond of saying, Push the reset button. I think what
we have in America today is that millions of people are in a different
place politically than the administration is. A lot of them didn't know
what they voted for. They voted for change. They had Bush fatigue. They
wanted to shift the way we do business. Some of them--and a lot of them
now--have buyer's remorse for what they did. You have the newly
activated constitutional conservatives across this full spectrum of
people. You have the 9/12 Project Group, all of the patriot groups, the
Independents who are newly activated, the Republicans who are in
greater numbers, newly activated constitutional conservatives, and all
of that.

Mr. Speaker, they intend to make a difference, and I intend to make a
difference with them. The constitutional conservatives I've described
represent the new majority makers in America, the heart of the
heartland, and the values that flow from there which index from
California to Massachusetts into the Northeast, the Northwest, the
Southeast, and beyond.
This Congress today doesn't represent the will of the American
people. By 2 to 1, they oppose ObamaCare. It's still the law of the
land today, and it can and must be repealed, every single bit of it.
There is no excuse for those who voted ``no'' on ObamaCare to be
anything except in favor of a full repeal of ObamaCare.
After this Congress has reset at the election in November and after
the swearing in of the new Congress on January 3 of 2011, we will exert
the will of the American people, and ObamaCare will be repealed. I
expect that the President will veto such a repeal. When that happens,
we will have on record the will of this Congress, the will of the
United States Senate.
We will have the opportunity then with the appropriations bills to
refuse

[[Page H2637]]

to allow any of the appropriated funds to be used to implement
ObamaCare. With simple majorities in this House, which is where all
funding and spending has to start by Constitution, we will be able to
shut off the implementation of ObamaCare. We can do that for all of
2011 and send another repeal bill to the President's desk, which he is
likely going to veto. In 2012, we can do the same thing for the
appropriations cycle so that there is not a shred of ObamaCare that
gets implemented, not in 2011, not in 2012.
Then we will have a new Presidential election in 2012, and we will
have a new President. We will have a President who will sign a repeal
of ObamaCare, and we will put it on his desk in January or February of
2013. We can begin the process then of real health care reform.
We need to do it, Mr. Speaker, not with a big Republican bill, not
like this 2,700-page ObamaCare bill. We need to set up our priorities
for health care, and we need to move down the line, one after another
after another, with clear, standalone pieces of legislation that
actually fix this problem and reform it in a way that the free market
and the doctor-patient relationship are improved. The trial lawyers are
going to have to give up a lot. We'll just go right on down the line,
one after another, with standalone pieces of legislation. We can
actually implement real, logical free market reforms and have that all
done before ObamaCare would be implemented under the plan that is laid
out today, because those pieces don't come into place, in finalizing
most of them, until the beginning of 2014.
So what we can do is go through the sequence of this: Repeal
ObamaCare; win the majority; shut off the funding for the
implementation of ObamaCare; run a new election; expand a new majority
in the House and the Senate; elect a new President; and repeal
ObamaCare; pull it completely out by the roots so there is not a
vestige of it left behind, not one single particle of its DNA left
behind.
We can do all of that, Mr. Speaker, and still bring real reforms and
put them in place and have them up and running before ObamaCare would
have even kicked in. The American people will have their freedom, and
they will have their liberty. That is the most egregious violation.
From a constitutional perspective, ObamaCare is unconstitutional in
several ways:
One, there is nothing in the enumerated powers that grants this
Congress authority to establish ObamaCare--we can go into that in more
detail--and it's a violation of the Commerce Clause. There are people
and have always been people who have been born, who have lived and died
who have not participated in health care at all but who would be
compelled to buy a product produced or approved by the Federal
Government for the first time in history just to be an American. In
spite of what some of the people have tried to argue, there is no
example to the contrary.
It is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. People in Florida
are treated differently than the people in Texas. It's not the
Cornhusker Kickback any longer, but there is a package in Louisiana
that treats Louisianans differently than it does the people in all the
rest of the country.

{time} 2250

There's a strong argument on equal protection violation. And there's
a 10th Amendment violation; these powers need to be reserved for the
States or the people respectively, not the big reach of the Federal
Government.
All of this needs to happen. We can do this and we will have the
leadership in this country and in this Congress to get it done.
I see that we have a strong leader from east Texas, the Aggie, my
friend, Judge Louie Gohmert. I would be happy to yield so much time as
the gentleman from Texas may consume.
Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate my friend from Iowa yielding.
What was one of the most heartbreaking aspects of this health care
bill that was crammed down the throats of Americans, a majority of whom
were begging and pleading and demanding not to pass it, but it was the
aspect of the increased taxes at a time when we're in a recession. We
could not afford increased taxes which was going to bring about an end
to more jobs. We couldn't afford what was in the bill which meant that
people were going to be laid off. It meant that people were going to
have salaries cut. It meant that people were going to lose their health
care insurance. Because whoever's staffer or the special interest
groups, all those folks that worked on this thing, they knew a number
of things. First of all, of course, whoever's staffer in leadership
helped draft it made sure the leadership staff was not included in the
mandate for Members of Congress and their staffs to have to participate
in the Federal program, so they knew they didn't want to be part of it.
But then here we are in a recession. It should be all about jobs. It
should be about careers and helping people get back employment so that
once they have the jobs, they've got employment, they can do the things
they used to do that helped drive the economy: go back to the store and
pick up something to wear; go back to a restaurant and get something to
eat. And then that feeds those that work in the restaurant and the
cycle goes on.
Instead, we increased taxes $500 billion over 10 years; $50 billion a
year average. Employers were telling us in advance of the vote, If you
do this, it's going to cost us billions of dollars across the country.
We're going to have to either lay people off, we're going to have to
cut people's salary, we're going to have to drop their health care
insurance.
And so in the bill, you've got a provision that if you're considered
not a small business, meaning less than 50 workers, then you've got a
choice: you either provide the mandated health insurance at the level
required or you pay a $2,000 fine. There's a little gimmick in there.
You deduct 30 from the number of employees, so if you've got 50, then
you deduct 30 and you pay 20 times $2,000, or $40,000, or you buy
health insurance for all 50 employees. $40,000, less than a thousand
dollars per employee, or health insurance for 50.
Well, it's a no-brainer. So many businesses with the added taxes that
are in this bill are already saying, We've got to make cuts somewhere.
If we can get away with only paying $40,000 instead of paying many
times that for health insurance for our 50 employees, that's what we're
going to have to do so we can keep them employed. That doesn't insure
the 30 million that we were told was the whole purpose of this bill. In
fact, it will ultimately throw more than that off of their own health
insurance.
``If you like your health insurance, you'll keep it.'' People all
across America heard that over and over. Apparently it simply was not
true. The only question is, did the person making those statements know
that they were not true when they were made? Or did it become a matter
of convenience to strip everybody's health insurance at a later date?
Either way, it was grossly unfair to all the people who did like their
health insurance.
Reforms needed to be made, there's no question. We all agree on that.
We could have worked together to provide those reforms. Instead, we had
a monstrosity of a bill that simply got crammed down everybody's
throat. That is what's most troubling.
I've already gotten the calls, I've gotten emails, I'm hearing people
say they've been laid off, a family member has been laid off, they've
been told they're going to have to cut their salaries. Why? Because we
rushed this health care bill and rammed it through without most of the
people in this body bothering to read it. I read all I could in the
short period of time and I read enough to know that this is a disaster
for America.
But if you're into government controlling everything, then you've got
to love it, because it's sure going to have more government: 17,000
more IRS agents monitoring everybody monthly to make sure they're
complying with the insurance requirements. How amazing, though. We hear
from our friends across the aisle, We're concerned about the
hardworking poor in America.

Well, guess what: If you make under 133 percent of the poverty level
when this disaster kicks in in 2013, 2014, you're not going to have a
choice. When you need health care, you're going to be thrown into
Medicaid. I heard that Walgreens said they're not going to take any
more Medicaid prescriptions. Doctors are saying we can't

[[Page H2638]]

make enough money to pay for the care, much less make a profit, so
they're not taking Medicaid.
What a disaster for America. This needs our attention. But the
heartbreaking aspect I keep coming back to is, people didn't have to
lose their job, lose their insurance. Businesses didn't have to pay
this much more tax. But we rushed it through. And I come back to a
quote by George Washington, who said, ``Government is not reason, it is
not eloquence, it is force; like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a
fearful master.''
When this government was designed by our Founders, it was never
intended to be the master of people. The people were meant to be the
masters of this government; and this bill has thrown that all out of
whack just as George Washington and so many of our Founders
anticipated, and it requires the actions of Americans running to the
sound of legislation to help prevent any more from this fearful master,
as George Washington put it.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I very much thank my friend
from east Texas, the Aggie, for coming to the floor this time of the
night. I know it's been a long day, sustainful of lots of energy in
rallies all across the city and the country and 700 plus of those.
We want a smaller government, not a larger government. We want a
constitutional government. The number one priority that's being asked
of us is to cite the sections of the Constitution that grant us the
authority in every bill we introduce in this Congress. I've never done
that, but I think it's a very good idea.
I'll say I have cited it when it comes to the time to pass a
constitutional amendment or to repeal. I'm going to continue to pay
attention to that. I think that's a very good idea. The thing that
seems to draw the most emotion and the most mindset and the most
thought is ObamaCare, the urge for the full repeal of ObamaCare,
because we know intuitively that ObamaCare is unconstitutional, as I
said; it's unfundable, it's unsustainable, and, Mr. Speaker, it's
unforgivable to do this to the American people. The American people
will not forget and they will not forgive and those that they do
support in this new majority that's being driven by the constitutional
conservatives, those that they do support had better keep their word.
And when they give their oath here on the floor of this Congress, the
new freshman class, which will be a large one, they better take their
oath seriously to the Constitution. I continue to stand with it. I know
the gentleman from Texas does. Many of my colleagues do the same. It's
a serious oath.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the attention that you've given us this
evening and the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the
House. We covered a little bit of the subject matter that's important
and imperative to this country.
I would yield back the balance of my time.

____________________