[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 80 (Tuesday, May 25, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H3807-H3810]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
WHAT HAVE THE DEMOCRATS DONE WHILE IN CHARGE?
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Owens). 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. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the honor to
be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. I
appreciate the opportunity to listen to the speakers in the previous
hour and the opportunity to do a bit of rebuttal even though I've been
a little more attentive in previous presentations.
Looking at the decline in the economy that they show in their bar
graph, it seems as though it could be that when President Bush was no
longer President, things got better a lot faster. As I watched that,
the graph doesn't go back quite so far enough to really understand what
happened during the 8 years of the Bush administration. But I remember
what they said.
Remember what they said when they stood here on this floor night
after night, hour after hour, year after year, the 30-Something Group
and others that would stand here and tell America, Mr. Speaker, through
this microphone and project it out across the C-SPAN cameras that, if
they were just in the majority, they'd fix America. If you would just
give them the gavels, they'll solve all of the problems in America. And
they made that case over and over again night after night.
And lo and behold, what happened? I don't think it was intentional or
willful. I think it was a matter of circumstance--race by race,
circumstance by circumstance, district by district--that the majority
changed from Republicans to Democrats.
And the problem that you have when you find yourself in the majority
is you're responsible for governing. And even though they claimed the
mantle of responsibility in all of those years, those 12 years leading
up to the 2006 election when the majority in this House shifted, they
claimed the mantle of responsibility. But when it was passed to them by
the voters in November of 2006, and when Speaker Pelosi was passed the
gavel here--I believe the date was January 3, 2007, Mr. Speaker, and
you can correct me if I
[[Page H3808]]
am wrong on that date--then they'd achieved the goal that they'd called
for for all of that time.
And I watched what happened. The election returns came in in November
in 2006. It was apparent that the Democrats had won the majority in
2006, that there was going to be a new Democrat Speaker. It was most
likely going to be Nancy Pelosi. And the incoming most likely chairman
of the Ways and Means Committee would be Charlie Rangel, who became the
chair of the Ways and Means Committee.
And he did the national talk show circuit from November, December,
January, and February, all the way across every network. And they asked
him over and over again, Tell us about the Bush tax cuts. Which ones of
those tax cuts would you want to keep, which ones do you want to let
expire? The questions came out over and over and over again. And, Mr.
Speaker, I don't want to allege that Charlie Rangel never gave a
straight answer. I just don't remember one. But I do know that by
February of 2007, the SmartMoney had analyzed the answers and the voids
in those answers of Charlie Rangel and concluded there wasn't a single
Bush tax cut that he would like to keep.
And here we are today in this year of May 2010, and it's obvious the
Bush tax cuts will expire at the end of this year. And it will be
obvious that the conclusions that SmartMoney drew in November and
December of 2006 and January and February of 2007 were accurate.
And we saw, in the beginning of 2007, a dramatic drop in industrial
investments because SmartMoney in America understood that the cost of
capital was going to go up because taxes were going to go up, and that
burden was going to come down on those who invested in, yes, their
future profits and also creating jobs. Jobs get created by the private
sector, not the public sector, unless you punish the private sector and
take the money and you drop it into the public sector. That's the only
way the public sector creates jobs.
So we saw this happen in 2006 and 2007. Lo and behold, the dog that
had chased the car for 12 years finally caught it. And what happened?
What happened was industrial investment dropped off. The economy began
to decline, and they pushed the economy down because they were
punishing business every month of all of those years beginning in 2007
with Pelosi. She had the Speakership of the United States House of
Representatives, 2007, 2008, 2009, and now into 2010.
And furthermore, the argument was, well, they couldn't do enough
because we had a President Bush who would veto the crazy anticapitalist
ideas. The people who were opposed to free enterprise were in charge of
the House of Representatives, but occasionally the President of the
United States, President Bush, would veto a bad idea. And it would come
back here to the House and we'd uphold his veto, and so they were
restrained.
And during that period of time, Speaker Pelosi pushed and promoted
and supported 44 votes in the House of Representatives that were
designed to unfund, underfund, or undermine our troops, 44 votes. And
I'm not pulling that out of my head or out of my hat, Mr. Speaker. I
have the data. I have the Excel spreadsheet, and I have it all linked
to each one of those issues that were pushed.
The effort was to attack President Bush and undermine the support for
President Bush by challenging his position as Commander in Chief. And
in doing so, it undermined our military in a time of war when their
lives are on the line.
And I asked the question, When someone in this House of
Representatives--let alone the Speaker of the House of
Representatives--speaks against a military operation, when they argue
that we ought to all sack up our bats and go home from Iraq and from
Afghanistan, when they make that argument, what happens to some al
Qaeda terrorist that's sitting in a mud hut somewhere in Iraq and
Afghanistan?
{time} 2100
He has got the satellite dish on top. I mean, I have flown over
those, those mud huts, and added up--I don't remember the exact number
now, but it was over 50 percent of those huts had a satellite dish
sitting on top of them. They are sitting there watching satellite TV.
And these terrorists are making bombs, IEDs, and they are planning to
set these bombs up to detonate them against Americans.
When Americans are victims of this, we need to ask this question,
what happens in the mind of that al Qaeda terrorist that's sitting in
that mud hut making his bomb, watching Al Jazeera TV, when he sees the
Speaker of the House come out on the floor and speak up and oppose the
war in Iraq or Afghanistan?
What happens when there is a debate on the floor that goes on over
and over and over again, and the left-wing radical liberals in this
Congress that call themselves progressives that are identified by the
socialists in America as their candidates say that we should pull out
of those countries without any hesitation, just do the best we can to
keep from getting shot in the back.
Do you think, Mr. Speaker--and this is a rhetorical question--but do
you think that that terrorist is more likely to build more bombs or
less, plant more bombs or less, detonate more bombs or less, are there
more Americans lost or fewer Americans lost, because the enemy has been
encouraged by 44 votes on the floor of the House of Representatives in
2007 and 2008 in that Congress.
That's what's happened here, Mr. Speaker. President Bush was going to
retire regardless of what happened and the actions on the part of the
Speaker Pelosi, and this country was going to move forward. And even
though the President of the United States now, our Commander in Chief,
as in the spring of 2008, took the position that he wanted to pull the
troops out of Iraq immediately, without any hesitation, just simply try
to keep from being shot in the back on the way out of Iraq.
That was his position. And I argued that if that was his position,
then if he is elected President, the enemy will be dancing in the
streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11, 2001.
Now, we don't know if that turned out to be a true prediction,
because now President Obama, then candidate and Senator Obama, changed
his position. From the spring of 2008 until election day in November of
2008, he walked a line of changing his position from being for
immediate withdrawal to being for a slower withdrawal from Iraq.
What we have seen also happen is, now, President Obama has adopted
the exact position in Iraq that President Bush negotiated. It's called
the Status of Forces Agreement, Mr. Speaker, the SOFA agreement. That
agreement was negotiated by the Bush administration and it was with the
Iraqis, and it was signed on November 17, 2008, by Ambassador to Iraq
Ryan Crocker, and just a very impressive public servant who never
received his due respect for the job that he did for all of us in that
country for the time that he was there, Ryan Crocker.
I want to say a few more good things about Ryan Crocker. I met with
him very late in the night, I have sat there in those hot and
uncomfortable places in Iraq with the top officers, with Admiral
Mullen, for example, Ryan Crocker, General Petraeus, a number of other
very top leaders in our military and our State Department personnel.
Ryan Crocker understands the Middle East. Ryan Crocker served well
there. He was instrumental in the negotiations of the Status of Forces
Agreement. He was the one who put that hand to that agreement on
November 17, 2008. And today, the letter of the Status of Forces
Agreement is being followed by President Obama. Good for him. I
appreciate that. I support it. It's something I called for.
If it were President Bush doing that, I would be for that. I just
don't think the American people see it the same way because he is not
as proud of that decision as perhaps he would be of a different posture
that we have in that part of the country.
Mr. Speaker, we have a number of interests in America. Our national
security interests are paramount. Those are constitutional. The
responsibility of the President of the United States and the Federal
Government is to defend us, to defend our shores, to defend the
American people.
And our military and our troops, and those people that put on
uniforms, day after day after day, are the ones that deserve our
gratitude and our respect.
[[Page H3809]]
And we need to do them just duty here on the floor of the House, and
not back up from those responsibilities just to provide them with the
resources that they need.
And that means a consistent message from the Commander in Chief on
down and a strategy that we believe that we can win, and it means to
say to the leftwing radicals in the United States of America, Don't
tell me you are for the troops and tell me you are also against their
mission. You have to support the troops and their mission.
What's interesting is that when George Bush was the Commander in
Chief, you said you supported the troops but not their mission. Now
that Barack Obama is the Commander in Chief, you don't really answer to
that at all, except for the most part, you left wing radicals, you say
support the troops out of a level of pandering to the, let me say, the
mission of patriotism, but you don't support their mission. We cannot,
Mr. Speaker, ask our military to put their lives on the line on a
mission that we don't believe in.
No. We have got to ask them to put their lives on the line for the
cause of liberty and a mission that we believe in. If we don't believe
in the mission, we should not send them, they should not go. But it's
up to the call of the Commander in Chief to do so. After all, he is
Commander in Chief.
He orders our Armed Forces, he sets the foreign policy, and if we
don't like what the President of the United States does when it comes
to that, we have got about two choices. One is elect a new President
and the other is look into the Constitution for another solution. I am
not ready to do that because I don't believe there is just cause at
this point to look in the Constitution for another solution.
In fact, I believe that the President of the United States has
eclipsed my anticipation for what he might have been doing in Iraq. In
Afghanistan, it's relatively stable; it's not been extraordinarily
brilliant. He did send only 75 percent of the minimum number of troops
that were requested by General McChrystal, and they have a very
difficult task.
But the prospects of being successful in that task, I believe, are
greater than the prospects of the State Department being successful in
setting up institutions that never existed before in parts of the
country of Afghanistan that don't have a history of those institutions
of centralized government reaching out.
We have the foreign policy question that's before us, Mr. Speaker,
and we have the question of the United States economy. And we have a
bunch of people that are self-professed experts that come here to this
floor that never signed the front of a paycheck. They don't have the
first idea what it takes for a free market economy to thrive or
prosper.
They believe that if you raise taxes it's just taking a little more
out of the pot of the greedy capitalists. And if you raise regulations,
they have got plenty of time to fill out all the paperwork because,
after all, what else are they going to do with those resources? It
creates jobs when you create more paperwork for the private sector do.
Why would you want these people to be in charge of our economy? They
demagogue Republicans and say that we are in support of Wall Street.
It's Democrats that are cashing checks from Wall Street. And it's big
banking and international banks and investment banking, large interests
that are sending the biggest checks to Democrats all the while they are
hedging their bets.
And if you are a big business interest and you have a crony
relationship with the United States Congress, you have got a pretty
good deal going because you can have the United States Congress raise
the regulations and raise the burden of government to keep your
competition out. You want to drive out your competition, what's the
simple solution to that complex problem? Raise the regulations, raise
the taxes, you are only competing against fewer people.
I have seen this happen in my lifetime over and over again. I spent
my life in the contracting business as a small contractor. I started
out as this tiny little old guy that bought a old beaten-up bulldozer.
Then I worked it for a while and fixed it a lot. And then I bought
another machine and hired another man and after a while we had enough
machines we could go out and do a job like grade a road or something.
When I was looking at building State highways, I began to look
around, and I realized there were only a handful of contractors that
were big enough to bid these projects. So I went to the State and said
break these projects up, will you? I would like to bid some projects
that are under a million dollars.
They said, well, we don't like to do that because it takes a lot of
administrative hassle to deal with too many contractors. We would
rather deal with this half a dozen we have got that we are comfortable
working with. So I had to run for the State Senate to get that changed.
When we lowered that standard down, we were able to bring more
competition in.
It's not enough. It's a small part of the solution, but it
illustrates a problem, Mr. Speaker. Big business will always try to
promote regulation to keep their competition out. It's how it works.
Think of it this way. I will take it down to the lowest common
denominator, a simple thing that metaphorically can explain this to
everyone that's listening, Mr. Speaker. Just imagine that they hadn't
yet discovered gold in Colorado. So some miner out there with a pan is
panning his way up the stream, and he finds a nugget of gold. He pans
his way in, and he goes around and he finds that vein. Then he gets out
his pick axe and he starts to chop out this rock, and here is this gold
in this rock.
{time} 2110
Son of a gun, gold in Colorado. There's no settlements around there.
So he breaks out his gold and processes it and takes it down and sells
it, and pretty soon the rumor goes like wildfire: there's gold in
Colorado. The gold rush is on. People come rushing in. Everybody gets
their pickaxe, and they start to mine for gold.
Now, you may think that this doesn't connect, Mr. Speaker, but it
does because the miners then set up their tents and they're there and
they are working away. And now that they're making a little bit of
money and they're selling their gold, they need some things. Somebody's
got to bring them some food, somebody will open up a bar, somebody will
start a band so they've got some entertainment to draw the stress down
at night.
And these miners would be out there, and after a while their hair
gets so long that they have to climb up into a tree to get a haircut.
And sooner or later one of those miners is going to get out the
clippers and cut somebody's hair. When that happens, Mr. Speaker, then
somebody else will line up and decide, that's a pretty good haircut for
what I need out here. So he'll get in the line and climb into the
chair, and there will be a second haircut, then a third haircut. And
after a while, this fellow that's pretty good cutting hair will be so
busy being a barber he doesn't have time to pick up his pickaxe and
mine for gold.
And then he decides, I'm going to have to charge you guys; you're
taking me out of my cash-flow endeavor. And so he begins to charge the
people that he's cutting their hair maybe a dime for a haircut. Now
he's making a little bit of money, and pretty soon, eventually,
somebody else will see that and decide, I can get into this business.
That guy is making a dime for every haircut. He can cut 10 heads a day,
that's a buck a day--that's pretty good wages in those days--and he'll
set up a barber shop and he'll do it for a nickel. Now that first
barber is thinking, I would have been better off to keep out there with
a pickaxe mining gold.
And so we've got two barbers that are competing, then a third barber,
and a fourth, and a fifth. And pretty soon the first barber that got
in, he decides that it isn't fair because he has all of this
technological equipment. He's got the electric clippers and he's got
the nice clean sheet to put around their neck and he's better at taking
care of those ingrown hairs and he does a little antiseptic while he's
at it. And his equipment is clean and well maintained and the other guy
has a pair of scissors and a comb.
So he'll go to the State legislature and argue that barbers should be
licensed so that there is a standard quality of care for haircuts. It
isn't because
[[Page H3810]]
he believes so much in that standard quality of care. It's because he
knows that he can regulate some of his competition out of business.
That's what goes on in the barbershops in the gold mining towns in
Colorado 150 years ago, but that's also what goes on in big business in
the United States of America today.
That's what is going on, Mr. Speaker. Big business says, Come and
regulate me because it's a cost of doing business at big-business
level, the multibillion dollar level. And by the way, those people that
can only do business down in the few millions, they're not going to be
able to compete.
So we should not accept big business as the purest form of free
enterprise capitalism. We should look at big business as coming here to
this Capitol, ask us to level the playing field, all the while they're
looking to turn into a playing field that it's often difficult for a
small business to climb into.
So, Mr. Speaker, that is the status of big business regulation versus
small business regulation, and it sets the tone for I think what we're
about to take up next. Although I recognize that in a moment we will be
asked to yield for the esteemed chair of the Rules Committee as soon as
she gets prepared. But in the meantime, I see that the gentleman from
Texas is about to get prepared.
I would suggest that, Mr. Speaker, we need to take a look at this
regulation that's coming in from the Senate and the regulation of the
financial services industry and the credit industry in America. This
idea that here in the United States of America we would establish
government entities that would look in on every business in America,
anybody that's got a credit transaction, whether it would be AIG doing
business with a large investment bank or some smaller entity--Mr.
Speaker, I will pick that up in a moment, but I would be so happy to
yield so that the gentlelady who chairs the Rules Committee can conduct
business.
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