[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 58 (Thursday, April 22, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H2834-H2840]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           BIG GOVERNMENT AND THE WILL OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Driehaus). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to 
address you here on the floor of the House. And I remind you, Mr. 
Speaker, that these deliberations here represent the most deliberative 
body in the world. And that's the argument that we've made for years. 
And even though it's not as deliberative as it was before Speaker 
Pelosi took the gavel, we still have some discussion time down here. We 
still have Special Orders. We still have 60 minutes and alternating 
hours between Democrats and Republicans when both sides do show up for 
those alternating hours.
  But tonight that's not the case. This is the wrap-up and the finish 
of the week, Mr. Speaker. And many have gone to the airport and caught 
a plane and gone home to their district or wherever they might go.
  But I don't think enough has been said yet this week. It's been a 
relatively short week, and not a particularly trying or testing week 
with anything that stands out here as significant accomplishment.
  But I'm watching still as policy moves in America. And the policy 
that has been shoehorned through this House of Representatives and 
become the law of the land has caused the American people to fill up my 
town hall meetings.
  We were not here on Monday. We didn't gavel in until, well, we 
gaveled in on Tuesday, and the first votes were sometime about 6:30 on 
Tuesday evening, so the work week is Tuesday evening for two or three 
votes. We call it naming post offices. That was the level of the 
significant suspension calendar. And then we had some debate on 
Wednesday and some committee activity. And today is Thursday. It's been 
low key. Last votes took place maybe 2 hours ago, something like that. 
So our work week is all day Wednesday, finishing the night on Tuesday 
and the early part of the day on Thursday and then going, a lot of 
people going home, Mr. Speaker.
  That's okay with me because I don't support the agenda that's being 
driven here out of the Speaker's Office. I don't support the process 
that has been developed.
  I do support the Constitution, liberty, freedom, fiscal 
responsibility, limited government, and I support the people that have 
been coming here to petition the government for redress of grievances. 
That's a constitutional right that we all have. And I've seen tens of 
thousands come here to say, don't take away my freedom, don't take away 
my liberty. Let me have the right to manage the health care of my own 
body, for example.
  And the people across this country that have said over and over again 
that the fiscal irresponsibility with the profligate spending that's 
been going on for the last 3 years-plus in this Congress is more than 
they can abide.
  And my town hall meetings on Tuesday, or excuse me, on Monday of this 
week, one in Council Bluffs and one in Sioux City, we're not jam-packed 
to the walls with people standing outside looking in the doorway, as 
they were during August of last year, when people believed that they 
had a chance to put the brakes on what we now know and the President 
refers himself to as ObamaCare. That packed our town hall meetings in 
my district, all over my district, all over the State of Iowa, all over 
the United States of America, hundreds and hundreds of town hall 
meetings with hundreds of thousands of Americans that came in to 
express that they did not want the government to take over the 
management of our health care.
  And I have never seen an issue that brought this much intensity and 
this many people out. And still the leadership in this Congress was 
determined to shoehorn a bill through here. And that happened maybe 3 
weeks ago or a little more, early in the wee hours of a Monday morning, 
just a little after midnight, as I recall. The final vote was on a 
Sunday night.
  The Speaker could not have allowed the Members of Congress to go 
home, let alone for an Easter break period of time, because she knew 
that if the Democrats in this Congress went home to listen to their 
constituents, that their congressional offices would be jammed full of 
people that said they were there to petition their Members of Congress 
for redress of the grievance of a government takeover of health care. 
And they would have filled the streets by the tens and hundreds of 
thousands. They would have demonstrated at congressional offices. They 
would have filled any town hall meetings. There would have been an 
outpouring of rejection of that policy like this country has never 
seen.
  And so the Speaker kept her own Democrat Members here on the Hill and 
insulated from their own constituents, even to the extent that, as the 
phone lines either jammed or they were shut down, I don't know which, 
but the last 3 days I couldn't call my own office. And I know that 
there weren't that many people calling my office. They were busy 
calling the offices of Democrats who were determined to vote for 
ObamaCare.
  But I couldn't get through because the switchboard was jammed, at 
least the last 3 days here in the House. While you had Members that 
couldn't even be heard, their constituents could not call them. They 
couldn't get through to send them a fax. Yes, they could send an email, 
presumably. And we don't know whether those emails went on an automatic 
dump or whether there was an answer. Only their constituents can know 
that.
  We know that there was a difficulty verifying if the Senate, during 
their period of time that this was an important issue, up till 
Christmas Eve, if in the Senate actually Members were answering their 
telephones.

                              {time}  1515

  But here they couldn't get through to call my office. I couldn't call 
my own office from my cell phone. And my own staff that I had to 
communicate with around the Hill, we had to call on our own cell lines 
to each other's cell phones.
  That's not such a particularly great handicap, but on top of that, 
Mr. Speaker, the cell phones were jammed. The signal was so jammed with 
so many calls that we couldn't connect either by cell phone sometimes 
for hours.
  Now, that's an awful lot of rejection focusing itself on an issue 
here that America had had the opportunity to debate since last July all 
the way into nearly--well, nearly into April. That's what's happened 
with ObamaCare.
  And now, after the bill has passed--and I would remind you, Mr. 
Speaker, that if we would have had the bill go to the Senate for a vote 
and then to the House for a vote in order to qualify it to go to the 
President's desk for signature that turns it into the law of the land, 
ObamaCare could not have passed this Congress on the day that it was 
messaged to the President because the votes didn't exist in the United 
States Senate to support the bill. That was voted by other people.
  And the ones that the folks voted to represent themselves, 
Massachusetts in particular, Scott Brown was elected by generally the 
liberal people in Massachusetts to block ObamaCare. And there he was 
following through on his word to do that, except it was circumvented. 
And they used a rescissions policy that had never been used in a piece 
of policy like this before to enable that to happen. And on top of 
that, a promise from the President of the United States that he would 
sign an executive order that he would have liked to have had the pro-
life people in America believe that the President of the United States 
can sign an executive order that would amend a bill that the Congress 
had just passed. That's the executive order that deals with the Stupak 
amendment, which was designed to shut off Federal funding for abortion 
that might be enabled by ObamaCare.
  Now, think about what this means. Here we have a Constitution that 
sets

[[Page H2835]]

up the structure. Article I, section 1 says all legislative powers will 
be vested in a Congress of the United States comprised of a House of 
Representatives and a United States Senate. It even prescribes that all 
spending will start in the House, not in the Senate. But this is an 
authorization bill, not an appropriations bill. So ObamaCare could have 
started in the Senate or in the House.
  Well, we got a Senate version that was taken up by the House. But the 
Constitution establishes that all legislative powers are vested here in 
the House or in the Senate, but House and Senate collectively. We are 
the legislative branch of government. And the President of the United 
States, who wrote the book ``The Audacity of Hope'' had the audacity to 
offer to Bart Stupak that he would sign an executive order that would 
effectively amend Bart Stupak's pro-life language into the legislation 
that was here on the floor of the House at the time messaged from the 
Senate.
  Now imagine, a man that taught constitutional law as an adjunct 
professor at the University of Chicago would believe as President of 
the United States that his executive order can effectively amend 
legislation that is presumably the majority opinion of the elected 
Members of the United States Congress.
  If the President can amend legislation by executive order, then can't 
the President also just write the legislation by executive order and do 
what he will without having to consult Congress? That would be a two 
branches of government instead of a three branches of government. Maybe 
the President would argue that there is something that Congress can do 
that he can't, like appropriate money, for example. Well, that would be 
a very narrow role, and that would be turning his back on the 
constitutional responsibility that is vested in the United States 
Congress. And we should always reject the idea that a President can 
sign an executive order that has an effect on changing the legislation 
that the Congress has passed.
  In fact, I may be the number one most authoritative voice in the 
United States Congress on this subject matter because, I would point 
out, Mr. Speaker, that on a State level when I was in the State 
legislature as a State senator, we had then our Governor, Tom Vilsack, 
filed an executive order. He was a fresh governor of maybe a little bit 
fresher than the President has been during this period of time. I think 
it was in the first couple, 3 months of his office, Governor Vilsack 
signed an executive order known as executive order number seven. I 
looked at it and concluded that he had violated the separation of 
powers and legislated by executive order. And when I raised an 
objection, of course it was refused and denied. The executive office 
didn't want to respond to a legislative office.
  And so I went to court, and we filed the case of King v. Vilsack. 
Now, this is now our Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, whom we had 
a good exchange in the Ag Committee. I think it was just yesterday. But 
in this issue we disagreed. He believed that he could amend the code of 
Iowa by executive order and sought to do so with that executive order. 
I believed that the legislative powers are vested within the 
legislative branch of government. And most of our State Constitutions, 
including Iowa's, are modeled off of our United States Constitution.
  And so our State legislators across the land will take an oath to 
uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of 
the State of, fill-in-the-blank. For me it's Iowa. That oath is an oath 
that you can only take to uphold the Constitution as it reads, as you 
understand it, as it was understood to mean at the time of the 
ratification of the Constitution itself, or the subsequent amendments. 
There isn't any other alternative.
  None of us can take an oath to uphold a Constitution as it might be 
amended by, what, the President's executive order? Or even a decision 
of the United States Supreme Court? Now, I put that list at 10 now, as 
the 10 last people that should be allowed to amend the Constitution of 
the United States. That should be the nine Supreme Court Justices and 
the President of the United States. Those 10 are the last people on the 
planet that should be engaged in seeking to amend the Constitution.
  The Constitution sets up a framework for us to amend it when we don't 
like the results. We are required to adhere to it and live by it. And 
for a President of the United States to sign an executive order that's 
got companies that deal, that supposedly buys a dozen votes to support 
ObamaCare here and the President would exchange an executive order that 
was designed to assure those Stupak dozen that there wouldn't be 
Federal funding of abortion because his executive order would alter the 
language and the meaning of the bill. The smallest and tiniest of fig 
leafs was offered to Congressman Stupak. That executive order no one 
takes seriously today. It was simply a tool of utility to put the votes 
together to force this ObamaCare off the floor of the House and send it 
to the President for his signature, which he did. And now ObamaCare is 
the law of the land.
  I was, I believe, Mr. Speaker, the last Member of Congress to leave 
the House of Representatives and leave the Capitol that night. It took 
me perhaps an hour to wind myself down and come to a point where I 
thought I could leave this place where such a cataclysmic offense to 
our Constitution, our budget, our freedom, and our liberty had taken 
place in such a shameful fashion. The shameful fashion includes the 
antics in the United States Senate, where they cut deal after deal 
after deal, including the Cornhusker kickback. Yes, and I know there 
was a successful effort made to peel the Cornhusker kickback out of 
there. It leaves in the Louisiana purchase, it leaves in the Florida 
gator aid, it leaves in seven or eight other special deals that were 
cooked up in the Senate so that they could produce enough votes 
temporarily to push that bill through on Christmas Eve. And then of 
course we had the Massachusetts election, which changed the dynamics 
over there.

  Here deal after deal was made. And one day I hope to hold hearings in 
the United States Congress to find out what actually went on behind 
those closed doors. And I believe the American people have a right to 
learn what went on behind those closed doors. I want to hold hearings 
and investigations and bring people under oath and stand them up and 
let them take that oath and then testify before a congressional 
hearing, What were you offered by Rahm Emanuel? What were you offered 
by the President of the United States?
  If you're AARP and your job is to represent the senior citizens that 
are your members, I want those representatives of AARP to come in and 
tell us, was the offer that you can sell insurance to the AARP members 
so good and so high that you decided to sell out your own members? What 
was it that the SEIU got? What was it that Big Pharma got? What 
happened to the $165 million that they promised that they would commit 
in an ad campaign in order to sell ObamaCare to America so that Big 
Pharma could have a larger market that was mandated by the Federal 
Government? What were the deals that were made? We need to know that.
  If we can drag CEOs of private American corporations before the 
United States Congress, and if Henry Waxman can threaten to--actually, 
yesterday was the day he was going to do that and he cancelled it. I 
think he thought better of it. But if Henry Waxman, the chair of Energy 
and Commerce, can bring CEOs before the United States Congress and 
allege that they're making too much money, or he wants to see into 
their books and their records, or if Ed Markey, the subcommittee 
chairman, can hand a letter to David Sokol that is an intimidating 
letter because the president of Mid-American Energy, who testified 
against cap-and-tax, can be intimidated with the threat of the chairman 
of an important Energy and Commerce subcommittee at the request of that 
chairman to investigate the company that he represents. Witness 
intimidation, plain and simple, straight up front. It's documented. 
It's in public documents now. Along with the other activities that have 
to do with the President of the United States now nearly a year ago 
firing the CEO of General Motors.
  Just simply summarily fired the CEO of General Motors. Didn't try to 
take his fingerprints off. Didn't imply that it was a decision that 
came about some other way. Didn't try to hide it. He proudly accepted, 
some will call it credit, I will call it blame for reaching

[[Page H2836]]

across the line between the public and the private sector and firing 
the CEO of General Motors and deciding who would be the new CEO of 
General Motors. He sent his car czar to make some of those deals. The 
President of the United States replaced and named all but two of the 
board members of General Motors. And he wasn't quite as engaged in 
Chrysler, but those same activities took place.
  And the White House, and when it's the White House it's the President 
of the United States, Mr. Speaker, dictated to the bankruptcy court 
exactly the terms that emerged from the bankruptcy court, General 
Motors and Chrysler. That situation is appalling and breathtaking when 
you think of the nationalization that has taken place.
  And Mr. Speaker, when you look at the beginning of this is at the end 
of the Bush administration, Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, 
came here to the Capitol, September 19, 2008, and asked for $700 
billion in bailout money that he would deal out the way he saw fit in 
an attempt to stop what he believed was a potential or maybe even an 
impending meltdown of the world's credit. He thought it could have all 
come crashing down. He couldn't guarantee there would be a fix, but he 
said if you try to give me any new ideas they won't be as good as his 
own.
  So he ended up with $350 billion in the beginning of this, in about 
October of 2008, and then another $350 billion that was approved by a 
Congress that was elected later and by a President who was elected 
later. And that was President Barack Obama, who supported and approved 
all of the TARP funding, all of the nationalization beginnings. And he 
followed through on the balance of that and the takeovers of three 
large investment banks: AIG, the large insurance company to the tune of 
around $180 billion, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, culminated by executive 
order right before Christmas of last year that hardly made the news.
  You know, if we just went in and looked what happened on late Friday 
night after the news cycle and the press goes off to their golf game or 
home to their family, we would find all kinds of, I mentioned earlier, 
cataclysmic things that have happened in the United States on late 
Friday night.
  I would like to go back and just amend something here to the power in 
Congress. Give me the right to veto and put back in place anything that 
happened after, say, 2 o'clock on a Friday before the press comes to 
work at around 9 o'clock on a Monday morning. Let me go back and fix 
those things that happened. We would have a lot better country today 
that wouldn't have reverted. But Friday night, this is when the 
President pulls those moves because that is when there is the lowest 
news cycle. So that's what happens.
  Three large investment banks taken over by the Federal Government 
with the approval or the active involvement of President Barack Obama. 
AIG the insurance company taken over and bailed out, $180 billion. 
President Obama approved or enacted that. The takeover of Fannie Mae 
and Freddie Mac that the chairman of the Financial Services Committee 
pledged he would never vote to support or bail out. And I remember the 
date that I heard that the first time and the most clearly was October 
26, 2005, right over there from that microphone, when Barney Frank 
said, ``I won't vote to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And if you 
think so and you're investing in them, don't count on me doing that.''
  Well, we might not have had the starkest and clearest and cleanest of 
votes, but we have had a persistent and a relentless defense of Fannie 
Mae and Freddie Mac's irresponsible financial practices going through 
many years prior to 2005. But I stood here on this floor and engaged in 
that process. And the amendments that came to put capital requirements 
and regulatory requirements on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were shot 
down and voted down and fought against. The most aggressive opposition 
came directly from the Democrats, who were in the minority at the time. 
But Fannie and Freddie had worked the lobby and had a broader 
bipartisan support than they might have otherwise had.
  So three large investment banks nationalized, AIG nationalized, 
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac nationalized. And now, Mr. Speaker, I say you 
and the American people share the liability of $5.5 trillion in 
contingent liability of Fannie and Freddie. And before I go to the car 
companies' nationalization, I would remind you and all who may be 
overhearing this dialogue that of all of the financial reform that has 
Wall Street under the focus and under the spotlight and under the 
magnifying glass, of all of the tactics that have been used, and the 
President going back up to Wall Street to give his speech today, of all 
of that, the President didn't mention Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. There 
is nothing in the financial reform bill that reforms Fannie Mae or 
Freddie Mac.

                              {time}  1530

  What's in the financial reform bill is a $50 billion slush fund to 
let the administration decide which businesses are too big to be 
allowed to fail and to go in and implement a government takeover of the 
private sector. And what are the criteria? The judgment of the 
executive branch. Yes, there are some guidelines, but not many 
constraints. And it gives the Federal Government the power and the 
authority to look over every credit transaction in America. Every 
credit transaction in America.
  And so presumably that means that if you're in a small, little rural 
area, it used to work this way: you go in and maybe pick up some 
grocery items or buy some gas, they'd put it on your tab. You'd come 
around and pay the bill at a later date. They'd want to look that one 
over.
  If you go in--and someone mentioned this, and I thought it was a 
pretty descriptive way. If you go into a furniture store and they have 
a special on mattresses and so you can buy the mattress and come pay 
for it 30 days later, nothing down, that's a credit transaction the 
Federal Government would look in on and have to approve.
  It would give them the ability to look in on your credit card, Mr. 
Speaker. Not necessarily take it out of your pocket, but electronically 
look in on those credit records. And that would give the Federal 
Government the authority to examine everybody's transactions. All of 
your credit card transactions, all of your debit card transactions. 
Presumably, if you have credit involved with your bank accounts, to 
look at those loans in the bank accounts. Maybe technically not your 
checking account because that's not a credit account.
  But a Federal Government going that far and that deep and having that 
kind of authority, let alone looking into all of the Wall Street 
transactions that take place--the investment banking transactions, the 
derivatives, the credit default swaps--all of the components that come 
along that have to do with higher finance, the mortgage transactions 
that take place and to track them all the way through. And some of this 
is good. Looking at high finance and being able to track that and being 
able to identify is primarily a good thing as long as that oppressive 
thumb of the Federal Government doesn't go in the middle of our back 
down to individuals in this fashion, and as long as we don't leave it 
to the discretionary judgment of the Federal Government on which 
businesses are too big to be allowed to fail.
  If the Federal Government can come in and take over three large 
investment banks and AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and if we have 
a President of the United States who seems to be following through on 
the playbook that is on the Web site of the Democratic Socialists of 
America--DSAUSA.org, Mr. Speaker. I hope everybody is paying attention 
to it, or you can Google ``Democratic Socialists of America'' and hit 
the button and there will be a Web site. And that Web site changes a 
little bit each time that I speak about the DSAUSA.org.
  But on the Web site--I saved all of those pages so you can run but 
you can't hide. Things never die in cyberspace, Mr. Speaker. But on 
their Web site is now or has been the language that starts out with 
this. It says, We are socialists. We are not communists--which doesn't 
give me a lot of comfort. There's a marginal difference, and they tell 
you what the difference is.
  Communists want to nationalize everything. They want to own all real

[[Page H2837]]

property. They want to take over everybody's house, all real estate, 
and they want to tell everybody where they have to work, what they will 
pay for goods, and what they'll be paid for the work that they are told 
to do. That is more the pure form of communism. From each according to 
his ability, to each according to his need.
  Well, that also seems to fit the socialists, doesn't it, because they 
want to do the wealth transfer. They want to share the wealth. That's 
what the President told Joe the Plumber. Funny. That's what is also the 
mission statement of ACORN: Share the wealth. The exact language comes 
right out of the mission statement of ACORN. And the SEIU linked in so 
closely to ACORN that it's just the funding streams are a little bit 
different but they are commingled, and often they are trading shirts 
with each other. Whether it's a purple SEIU shirt or a red ACORN shirt, 
there are a few more wearing the purple SEIU shirts today than there 
are ACORN.
  By the way, at the risk of digressing, Mr. Speaker, I would point out 
that even though ACORN announced that on April Fools' Day they would be 
shutting down ACORN National, I carry this acorn around in my pocket 
every day to remind me that they have not gone away. It actually may 
have been an April Fools joke on us that ACORN was going to shut down 
ACORN National. They could have done that.
  But now it's the same people, the same faces, the same boards of 
directors, a little mixing and matching, changing the names, changing 
the titles. Funding streams have been shrunk significantly, thanks to 
Hannah and James and the work that went on behind that. But the same 
structure is in place. It's the same people, the same problems.
  In fact, it reminds me of what happened after the wall went down on 
November 9 of 1989, and it appeared to be the end of the cold war. The 
Soviet Union thereafter imploded. A little more than a year after that, 
the Soviet Union was wound down, and there were those who got together 
to celebrate the end of the cold war. It was worthy of celebration. A 
45-year cold war had looked like it had come to an end, but it didn't 
convince the communists that they had lost it philosophically.
  They didn't believe that our free enterprise capitalism and the vigor 
that comes from being an American was what had defeated them. They 
thought they just maybe needed better managers that were more pure in 
their ideology. And so even though they had to scatter from the light, 
they went back and reformed new alliances and new allegiances, and they 
come back at us again and again and again, even more insidious and even 
harder to find and harder to identify. But philosophical enemies of the 
liberty and freedom of the United States and western civilization, they 
remained.
  ACORN remains an entity out there that has spent millions of dollars 
undermining the integrity of the legitimate ballot system here in the 
United States of America. They produced and admitted to over 400,000 
false or fraudulent voter registration forms, and they argue that it 
didn't result in a single fraudulent vote--which is completely, I 
think, a specious argument. Why would you spend millions to produce 
false or fraudulent voter registrations if you didn't think that was 
going to result in some kind of favorable result for you in the ballot 
box?
  And I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that even though there were major 
problems with ACORN in Ohio, if that election would have been closer 
and we would have scrutinized it more closely, we would have found out 
more about what could have been happening in the ballot box in places 
like Ohio and Minnesota. When we go to court, who wins in the end in 
the close elections?
  And what if all of those false or fraudulent voter registrations had 
been kicked out at the beginning and no one had walked in? And that 
doesn't mean that the ones that were discovered were all of those that 
actually happened. I have to believe that the voter registration list 
was significantly corrupted in all of the States where ACORN was 
carrying out this practice and has significantly corrupted voter 
registration lists, and opens things up for more and more corruption.

  And this United States of America, built upon the foundation of our 
Constitution itself, that Constitution, one might think, is the 
framework for law, and it's what we have to preserve if we're going to 
be a healthy and a viable country. And I agree.
  But the very foundation underneath the Constitution itself is 
legitimate elections. And when elections are delegitimized by 
organizations like ACORN, and if the American people lose the 
confidence that we have legitimate elections, there the Constitution 
falls because the foundation for the Constitution itself is legitimate 
elections and the people's confidence in those legitimate elections as 
well.
  So ACORN went right at the very component of America that is 
essential. And that is not that we just have clean, legitimate 
elections. We must do that if we're going to uphold our Constitution; 
but we also have to have the American people that believe that we've 
conducted ourselves in a legitimate fashion, that their vote was not 
undermined by an illegitimate vote.
  That's the ACORN side of this.
  ACORN, by the way, another place that I want to do investigations--
the other side of the great election divide--and hold hearings in this 
Congress and subpoena witnesses and go in and drill down and 
investigate them completely. And I believe that many of those 
investigative lines, when we follow the money, will lead to the White 
House itself, Mr. Speaker.
  So we have financial reform that's up in front of us. We have ACORN 
that has dispersed itself to some degree but are reforming under the 
same managers, same faces, and some of the same funding streams.
  I have raised the issue of how ObamaCare was pushed through this 
Congress and how it takes over another chunk of our private sector. I 
will summarize and add up: The three large investment banks that were 
taken over by the Federal Government; AIG, the insurance company, taken 
over by the Federal Government; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taken over 
by the Federal Government; and now we have General Motors and Chrysler 
taken over by the Federal Government; $700 billion in TARP spending at 
the beginning of that; $787 billion in the stimulus package at the tail 
end of that. And we have all of 6 percent of the American population 
that believes that the stimulus package actually worked and stimulated 
jobs.
  Well, the data shows the exact opposite. Unemployment went up, not 
down, while that was going on. The promise was we wouldn't see 
unemployment go over 8 percent under the stimulus package, but what 
really happened is unemployment went to 10 percent. And it's hanging in 
that zone, 9.7 percent in unemployment.
  The vision of borrowing money from the Chinese and the Saudis and 
pouring it in to projects here in America, extending jobs for the 
public sector, creating government jobs--and calling creation of 
government jobs economic development, I don't think we've ever had a 
President that believed that in the history of America until we get to 
here, this point in our history.
  I don't even believe Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the great Keynesian 
economist that he was, and he embraced John Maynard Keynes' 
philosophy--not quite to the extent that Keynes would have liked to 
have had him do, but in a substantial way--didn't believe that 
government jobs were a replacement for private sector jobs even though 
he created a lot of them. And we did a lot of make-work projects across 
the country, and the evidence of that is still out there.
  But our President has said to us a little more than a year ago that 
he believed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost his nerve and that he 
should have spent a lot more money in the thirties, and if he had done 
so, that would have brought about a recovery instead of waiting for 
World War II to come along to become and I quote--well, I better not 
quote that--but the general language is that World War II came along; 
it was the greatest economic stimulus plan ever. That's close to a 
quote. I know I've got the philosophy exactly right. And I don't 
actually disagree with that statement about the stimulus plan with what 
the Second World War happened to be.
  But I would argue that we didn't recover from the Great Depression in 
the Second World War even. When the stock market crashed in October of 
1929, and as it spiraled downwards and

[[Page H2838]]

it hiccuped its way up and down and we went through that vast spending 
era of the Great Depression, and we saw unemployment go up and then 
come back down and go up again, and when we got to World War II, 
December 7, 1941, we were still in the Depression. And unemployment was 
a number that was approaching 20 percent for part of that time, and we 
had 25 percent unemployment, I think, at the peak.
  And we got into the Second World War and we began to manufacture 
everything as fast as we could. A lot of the women that had not worked 
before went to work. Rosy the Riveters. And my mother among them who 
tied parachute knots in Omaha is what she did every day. Tied knots in 
parachutes. That was part of her war efforts. And, God bless her, she 
turned 90 years old yesterday. And I honor my mother with all of the 
love that I have. She did her part of the war effort, as my father did 
his 2\1/2\ years in the South Pacific.
  But the economy didn't recover in the Second World War back to where 
it was. It wasn't the Second World War that was the complete recovery 
package that one would think the President, according to his words, 
would be the recovery.
  I would just look at what are the indexes. Some of the indexes would 
be what did the stock market look like and when did it get back to 
where it was in October of 1929. One might think that Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt's New Deal and his Keynesian spending was what brought us out 
of that. That's what my history people taught me. My teachers taught me 
that.

                              {time}  1545

  I went back and looked at the records and found out that wasn't the 
case. We still had high unemployment, and we still had low and stagnant 
growth and some reduction of growth in the thirties.
  What we saw during World War II was that unemployment rates went way 
down because we needed everybody to do the work. We saw unemployment 
rates go to the lowest they've been in history, 1.2 percent. Now that's 
almost unheard of today, but unemployment was 1.2 percent. It was 25 
percent as a high ratcheted down to 15, 10, on down to 1.2 percent near 
the end of World War II. Still, still we did not recover from the Great 
Depression from the 1929 stock market crash. It wasn't World War II. It 
wasn't even the Korean War. In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been 
dead for 9 years before the stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial 
Average, came back to where it was in October of 1929. That happened in 
1954, Mr. Speaker.
  So one can't, I don't think, legitimately argue that the World War II 
stimulus plan even brought us out of it. We increased our production 
and stabilized our economy and put people to work. The unemployment 
component of this got a lot better, but the growth and equities that 
had to do at least at a minimum with the Dow Jones Industrial Average 
didn't get back to where it was until 1954, from October of 1929. 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead for 9 years before the stock 
market got back to where it was when it crashed in 1929. This was a 
long, long, long painful recovery that America went through, and we 
went through not just the Great Depression of the thirties looking for 
a recovery, but we went through the Second World War looking for a 
recovery, we went through the Korean War looking for a recovery, and 
finally limped our way back.
  I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that a big reason for that is, when you 
over leverage a country or a company, you have to pay and service the 
debt. That means that you have to pay the interest on the borrowed 
money. And by the way, that borrowed money came from Americans back 
then instead of the Chinese and the Saudis now. But you have to service 
the interest on the debt. The war bonds had to be paid off as well. So 
that has to come out of the tax revenue that's coming in. The tax 
revenue that comes in comes from--not government--it comes from the 
private sector. The private sector has to be viable. It has to be 
vigorous. There has to be profitability there in order to attract more 
capital investment. Capital investment necessarily increases--wise 
capital investment necessarily increases our productivity. Increased 
productivity increases our gross domestic product, which allows us to 
buy sell, trade, make, gain, produce more goods, sell more goods, cash 
in at the cash register more, whether it's the factory or the retail. 
And when that happens, this private sector economic growth then pays 
its share of taxes. And in the end, it's the people in America that pay 
the taxes, not the corporations, not the businesses, and it certainly 
isn't the government.
  So what we have going on here now is, the government is swallowed up 
with those eight huge entities that I talked about. Three large 
investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors and 
Chrysler, those eight entities that are swallowed up by the Federal 
Government represent, according to an economics professor at the 
University of Arizona as far back as last August, one-third of the 
private sector activity in the United States swallowed up by those 
eight huge entities nationalized and taken over by the Federal 
Government. And behind that came what? ObamaCare swallowing up another 
18 percent of our economy.
  Now if you want to add 18 percent to--one-third is 33 percent, 
correct, Mr. Speaker? Yes, I know. You're nodding, and I appreciate 
your math is correct--that's 51 percent. So 33 percent and 18 percent 
adds up to 51 percent of our private sector economy. This now taken 
over and managed or dictated the terms of its business contracts, every 
bit of health care in America will be, according to this term of 
ObamaCare, signed into law a couple weeks ago or three, will be 
directed by the Federal Government.
  And some people--let me say some people without the largest of 
minds--are arguing that because we still have a surviving private 
sector health insurance industry, that the health care in America 
hasn't been nationalized. I would challenge them, Mr. Speaker, point to 
me--point for me to a sector or a component or an activity within 
health care in America that is not slated to be changed, altered or 
directed by ObamaCare. There isn't a single health insurance policy in 
America that the President can tell anyone, You get to keep that 
policy, that it isn't going to increase the premiums dramatically or 
perhaps reduce them marginally. That's going to happen. The premiums 
change for everybody in America unless there's somebody who happens to 
sit exactly on the dividing line. Young people will pay a lot more in 
premiums because they're a lower risk. We went from a 7-1 community 
rating that's out there now, which means that the most extreme cases--
the lowest premium compared to the highest premium--are 7-1, which 
means that if we have a young healthy person paying $100 a month on a 
similar policy, an older person that may not be completely healthy 
could be paying $700 a month on a similar policy or even an identical 
policy. Now this has been pulled back to a 3-1 community rating which 
means that now that--just say we've got two people. They're both 
insured. The youth at $100 a month. The older person, say my age, who 
is a greater risk, at $700 a month. That's $800 between the two of us. 
Now when you go to a 3-1 community rating, that means that there can't 
be that much disparity. So you dial that thing back down. And you 
charge the young person then $200 a month and the older person $600 a 
month. Now we're dealing with $800 again. But the $800 comes $200 from 
the young person at doubling their premium and a reduction in the older 
person at $700 down to $600. Now you've got the $800 that comes 
together for that monthly premium of the two insured. That's how that 
works.
  So health insurance premiums change because they changed the rules 
for everybody, and they'll have to be approved by the Health Choices 
Administration czar or whomever that happens to be who has that title, 
and what was the Senate version of the bill. That part I didn't commit 
to memory, Mr. Speaker. Everybody's health insurance changes in 
America, and this government effectively cancels every policy subject 
to the approval of the new rules that will be written that aren't 
written yet. Nobody knows where they are. The health insurance 
underwriters are pulling their hair out, trying to figure out what 
happens and how do they do business. The Federal Government's dictating 
completely every health insurance policy in America. Can we find a 
health care provider that doesn't have

[[Page H2839]]

their way of doing business altered by this bill? Certainly the funding 
stream that comes in is altered. There's $500 billion cut in Medicare 
for our senior citizens, $523.5 billion--over $500 billion cut out of 
Medicare reimbursement rates.
  I represent the most senior congressional district in America. Iowa 
has the highest percentage of its population over the age of 85 of any 
of the States. We're the oldest two or three over the age of 65. There 
is good longevity there, I like that, and healthy practices, 
presumably. But the district I represent, out of the 99 counties in 
Iowa, 10 of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa. And I hear the 
President say there's waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare so we're going 
to slash $500 billion out of there to pay for ObamaCare. And has the 
President pointed his finger to a single bit of waste, fraud and abuse 
that is in Medicare that he would fix? The promise is that's what he 
will do. But if he can't identify it or won't identify it, or if he's 
holding the access to that information hostage to the passage of his 
ObamaCare bill--he's got the bill. He signed it. It's now the law of 
the land.

  Now it's time for the President of the United States to turn over all 
of those magic cards to show us, where is the waste, fraud and abuse in 
Medicare? I don't say it doesn't happen. I hear those cases, too. But 
what's the solution to fix it? And do we really have to pass a bill in 
order to have legitimate clean government? If there's corruption, let's 
go find it. Let's go root it out, root and branch, pull it out, and 
let's legitimize all of Medicare in the country. But we don't need to 
be going in there and arguing that--if there's $500 billion worth of 
waste, fraud and abuse, how do you arrive at that number if you haven't 
found the waste, fraud and abuse yet?
  So now I'm going to tell you, seniors will be penalized or they won't 
keep their word, and we'll be borrowing more from the Chinese to fund 
ObamaCare because--I'm going on record here in the Congressional Record 
on this day, April 22, 2010, to say that we will not see $500 billion 
in cuts in Medicare. They were never sincere about that. That's only a 
number that they needed to reach so they could argue that ObamaCare 
doesn't cost over $1 trillion over 10 years. Remember the argument now 
became, CBO scored this at $132 billion in savings over 10 years. 
That's $13.2 billion per year, the 10-year budget window that we're 
talking about. That is not loose change to American taxpayers. But to 
the overall budget, it's very marginal as to whether it's a savings or 
whether it's an increase in spending. But that includes and is 
predicated upon the cut to the spending which is a punishment to our 
seniors of $523.5 billion. It's also predicated upon a tax increase of 
$569.2 billion, and it was predicated upon the avoidance of the 
doctors' fix which is in the change of $360 billion. All of that 
distorts this to the tune of about $1.4 trillion that with an honest 
accounting would get added back into this ObamaCare bill.
  So you take $1.4 trillion in costs that are distorted, and you would 
subtract $132 billion from that, and you're down in the neighborhood 
of--let me get that number here right--subtract $132 billion from the 
$1.4 trillion. Now you are down about $1.27 trillion in increased 
costs. Now remember what the President said. I have to refresh you, Mr. 
Speaker, because I'm wondering if any Democrats would actually be able 
to pass this test.
  A couple little questions about history: Why did we go into ObamaCare 
in the first place? What was the argument from the beginning? What 
happened during the campaign that presumably gave the President of the 
United States a mandate to impose ObamaCare on America? And I remember 
this discussion, but I suspect that Madam Speaker Pelosi does not 
choose to remember this. Barack Obama--then Senator and candidate Obama 
said, We are spending too much money on health care. We've got to solve 
the problem of spending too much money on health care. And so he argued 
that the solution for that apparently is to spend a lot more on health 
care.
  Now that doesn't pass the first little bit of third grade logic test. 
I could go to my little granddaughter, who is now 5, had her first 
little loose tooth here over the weekend, and say to her, If we're 
spending too much money, does it solve the problem if we spend more 
money? And she would give me that quizzical look like, How could you 
say something so irrational, Grampa? It's not rational to argue that 
spending too much money is solved by spending more money. But that's 
the argument that came. It's a matter of fact in public record. We're 
spending too much money. We have to solve that problem. And lo and 
behold, ObamaCare spends a lot more money, and somehow they still argue 
that they're solving the problem of spending too much money.
  The second thing is that we have not enough competition in the 
insurance companies, not enough choices. We have 1,300 health insurance 
companies in America--or we did until a month ago when ObamaCare was 
signed into the law of the land. We have 1,300 health insurance 
companies, 100,000 possible policy varieties, and the President wants 
another one to compete with. Now he didn't get that. But he got the 
exchange, and the exchange will decide who are the winners and who are 
the losers, and they will write the mandates for every single policy in 
America. And let's just say, if you don't cover contraception, then 
there is going to be a requirement to cover contraception; if you don't 
cover Viagra, there's going to be a requirement to cover Viagra; if 
your policy doesn't cover mental health, there will be requirements to 
cover mental health.
  Mandate after mandate after mandate, when we only have a couple--
three of those in law prior to ObamaCare--will come raining down out of 
the Federal Government. And whenever there is a mandate, it makes an 
argument for four or five or six more health care mandates, and every 
mandate increases the costs over the premium and takes away our liberty 
and takes away our freedom.

                              {time}  1600

  All of these things that I have talked about pale in comparison to 
the part that knots up my innards more than any other, and that is 
this: since 1973, the people generally on the left side of the aisle in 
America have made the argument with regard to Roe v. Wade, Doe v. 
Bolton, and abortion in America, the people on the other side of the 
aisle have argued long and hard that the Federal Government has no 
business telling a person what they can or can't do with their body. 
That's the argument. So they argue that the Federal Government can't 
regulate nor diminish nor make it more restrictive for a woman who 
seeks an abortion to get that abortion because it's not our business 
what a woman does with her body. That is their argument. Men and women 
made that argument.
  Over here on this side of the aisle, over and over and over again 
they made that argument. Now the same people, Mr. Speaker, are making 
the argument--and have made the argument and the President has signed 
it into the law of the land--that the Federal Government has no 
business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body, but 
instead, now the same people are arguing that the Federal Government 
has every right to tell everybody in America what they can or can't do 
with their body.
  The President of the United States, with the iron fist of the 
leadership within the House and the Senate and the complicity of a bare 
majority of the Members of the House, has imposed and nationalized our 
very bodies. The most sovereign thing that we have is our own personal 
self, our skin and what is inside our skin; the management of same has 
been taken over by the Federal Government. Now they tell all of us, you 
shall buy a health insurance policy; and if you can't afford it, we're 
going to tax somebody else and send you a refundable tax credit and 
you, by golly, are going to pay for that policy.
  And if you are working and making enough money and you don't have a 
policy, if you happen to be working for a business that has less than 
50 employees, then we are going to fine you a percentage of your 
income. The IRS is going to come in and do the audits, first 
electronically and then personally, to impose that health insurance 
policy on you. And it won't be the one that you could buy last month. 
It will be the one that you can buy next year or the year after, after 
they write the

[[Page H2840]]

new rules. The Federal Government's nationalization of our bodies.
  So they have nationalized eight huge entities, a third of the private 
sector activity, and another 18 percent of our economy, health care, 
and nationalized and taken over the most sovereign thing we have, our 
skin and what is inside our skin, and taken away our ability, as 
individual free people that exercise the rights that come from God, 
clearly identified by the Founding Fathers and delineated in the 
Declaration of Independence, which is the foundation for the 
Constitution, the sovereignty of man, the right to life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness.
  By the way, Mr. Speaker, I would point out that you and everyone in 
this Congress and those who aspire to come to this Congress should know 
that the Founding Fathers understood that those rights are prioritized 
rights--life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness--not just a grab bag of 
rights that they pulled out of the sky or randomly put into a package, 
but set there in an order of priority, a priority that the thing most 
paramount is our lives, the management of our lives as well; and that 
liberty, as a secondary right, is subordinate to the right to life.
  The pursuit of happiness was not the pursuit of happiness as it is 
envisioned in the minds of a lot of people today. Pursuit of happiness, 
by the way, is subordinated to liberty and to life so that no one in 
their pursuit of happiness--and by the way, pursuit of happiness meant 
to our Founding Fathers more the Greek understanding, the word 
``eudaimonia,'' which means pursuit of truth, pursuit of knowledge, 
pursuit of perfection in both body and mind. That is what pursuit of 
happiness was understood to mean when the Declaration of Independence 
was signed and they pledged their lives, their fortune, and their 
sacred honor.
  The pursuit of happiness was the pursuit of truth and purity. That 
pursuit of happiness, though, is still subordinate and cannot--in 
anyone's pursuit of happiness can they infringe upon the liberty of 
another because our liberties are established in the Bill of Rights, 
for example, now--we understand them more clearly.
  And they are also enshrined in title VII of the Civil Rights Act: You 
shall not discriminate against people based upon race, creed, color, 
ethnicity, now and a lot of times it's age and disability. Those are 
real rights. They are the rights that are protected. And the rights to 
freedom of speech, religion, the press, the right to keep and bear 
arms, the rights to property that come in the Fifth Amendment, the 
right to be protected against double jeopardy, to be judged by a jury 
of our peers, all of them, those are all rights. These rights are our 
liberties.
  Our liberties that are guaranteed to us cannot be taken over by 
someone else in their pursuit of their happiness. They have to honor 
and respect that as our liberties are always subordinated to the right 
to life being the most paramount right. These things are all taken away 
by ObamaCare: right to life itself, because it puts people in line to 
take the health care that the Federal Government prescribes and it's 
unconstitutional in a lot of ways, at least four ways.
  First, there is nothing there in the enumerated powers that grants 
this Congress or the President of the United States to join together 
and impose a product on us that is neither produced nor approved by the 
Federal Government. Never in the history of this country has that ever 
happened. That is a constitutional violation. There is nothing in the 
commerce clause that allows such a broad definition that people that 
would not engage in commerce whatsoever would have to buy a product 
produced or approved by the Federal Government. It is a violation of 
the equal protection clause for the reasons that I have said, the 
Louisiana Purchase, Florida Gator Aid, and the list goes on.
  Some Americans are treated different than others in the bill. It is a 
violation of the Ninth and 10th Amendments, the States' rights 
component of this as well. I encourage the 20 States attorneys general 
to go forward with their lawsuits. I am working for a repeal of 100 
percent of ObamaCare. Pull it out root and branch; I don't want one DNA 
vestige left behind. Let's get it out. Let's pull it out all the way, 
Mr. Speaker, so there is none of it left. And then we can start putting 
components in place as individual stand-alone bills so the American 
people can clearly see that their voice is being heard in this United 
States Congress. And we can do it, we must do it, and we can do it in a 
reasonable time frame. We can put a discharge petition down here on the 
floor now for signatures of these Members of Congress.
  The second thing we can do is seek to get that vote on the floor. The 
Senate is doing the same thing. And when we have the other side of the 
election, we can shut off funding for the implementation of ObamaCare. 
We can do that. In 2011 and 2012 we can elect a new President who will 
sign the repeal on his first order of business January 20, 2013. And 
then we start the reform process.
  That is where we need to go, Mr. Speaker. And for those who think 
that it can't be done, it can't be accomplished, I have a survey on my 
Web site that asks the question: Do you believe that it's more likely 
that ObamaCare will be repealed than the Cubs will win the World Series 
this year? And the last number I saw, 58 percent believed it is more 
likely we will repeal ObamaCare and 42 percent thought it was more 
likely the Cubs would win the World Series. They went to spring 
training; they're playing ball. We are going to play ball all the way 
to 2013 and beyond. We are going to get this job done, Mr. Speaker. One 
hundred percent repeal of ObamaCare it must be to preserve the liberty 
that Americans had last month that they deserve every month in the 
lives of our children and grandchildren.
  So with that, Mr. Speaker, I would express my gratitude for your 
indulgence and your attention, and especially that little nod of the 
head, and I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________