[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 80 (Tuesday, May 25, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H3810-H3814]
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. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from
Iowa.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, as I watch this regulation that's
coming through in the financial services component of this, it's a
regulation that sets up Tim Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, to
decide which businesses are too big to be allowed to fail, which
businesses would be deemed to fail, and all he needs is the agreement
of the FDIC and the agreement of the Chairman of the Fed. Those things
concern me a great deal. But this conversation could go almost in any
direction, Mr. Speaker, because I am prepared to yield to my good
friend, the gentleman and the judge from Texas, Louie Gohmert.
Mr. GOHMERT. Well, I appreciate my friend for yielding, but I want to
follow up on that very point.
We're told that there is going to be a financial ``reform'' bill that
sounds more like a financial ``deform'' bill. All these reforms end up
being deformities. But this in particular, financial reform? To get us
out of the mess that had been building through the nineties and through
this past decade, for the last 20 years?
And nonetheless, as I understand, in this bill we're going to take
up, it still has the Systemic Risk Council that is going to pick the
winners and losers in America. That is so grossly un-American; it has
no place in our law coming out of this body. That's the kind of thing
that the Revolution was started over, that some King was going to get
to tell them who would be the business that would stand and who would
fall, because the Americans here wanted to be able to let the market
decide that.
Now, one thing we've seen, and it has been accentuated, is you do
need a government that will ensure that people play fairly and play
right. We saw that down on the coast as President Obama expressed that
we have gotten a relationship too cozy between his administration and
the Big Oil companies. Now we've heard people say on television that
Republicans took contributions, Democrats take contributions; but it
was the Department of the Interior in 1998 and 1999, some of the
Clinton administration people, that pulled the language from the
offshore leases that would allow the oil companies, ultimately, to make
millions and millions and millions at the expense of the government and
the taxpayer getting full value for the leases for those offshore oil
and gas developments.
When we had the Inspector General in front of us in the Natural
Resources hearing a couple years ago, I asked why he had not talked to
the couple of people that the Inspector General said were apparently
responsible for that language being pulled out of the leases that hurt
the revenue of the government and helped the massive oil companies at
the time. He said, Well, they've left government service; we can't talk
to them. Well, certainly you can at least try to talk to them, but the
Inspector General indicated that they left government service.
{time} 2120
Well, after I'd heard the President announce that we had to end this
cozy relationship between people in his administration and the big oil
company, I wondered: Whatever happened to those two people?
Well, it turns out one of the people with whom, apparently, the
inspector general did not talk but felt probably had the best
information on why that language was left out--when she was not working
for the government, she went and worked for a company called British
Petroleum. Perhaps my friend has heard of British Petroleum. In fact,
after the inspector general said he couldn't talk to her about why that
language was pulled--the language that helped the oil companies so much
during 1998 and 1999--and why she would pull language that hurt our
government, it turns out she has now returned to government service. In
fact, she did last summer. This administration hired her to be the
Deputy Assistant Secretary of MMS, the Minerals Management Service,
which is the agency of this administration that is supposed to ensure
that blowout preventers work properly.
Well, we've got people here in the House who had asked for the
results of the tests that were done by MMS within 2 weeks of the
blowout preventer's failing. Apparently, the information has come back
from this administration's MMS: We are not providing that information
to you, maybe to a Democratic chairman of the committee but not to you
guys.
You would think that this would be public information, that MMS would
want to be as transparent as they're demanding the CIA be, but
apparently, they're not willing to be as transparent as they want the
CIA to be. They're more in the nature of obscurity like the Federal
Reserve continues to try to be and is. So they won't release the
information of how badly bungled the tests were. You have to figure
they didn't go well or they would have released that information to
show that they were exonerated, that they did proper tests.
In fact, as a trial judge back in my days in the courtroom,
oftentimes, one side would produce evidence to show that the fact that
there is no evidence indicates a fact. I think here the fact that they
won't produce those test results indicates that the MMS of this
administration is too cozy with British Petroleum because of the
interactive business that has gone on here. It must not have gone well.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. GOHMERT. Certainly, I'll yield to my friend.
[[Page H3811]]
Mr. KING of Iowa. Just remind me. I'm standing here thinking we're
drawing a rational conclusion that the Minerals Management Service
would not release the information that showed the results of the
testing of the blowout preventer.
Mr. GOHMERT. If they had even done the testing, actually, yes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. If they'd done the testing.
There are reports out there that there is testing that had failed
some 10 days or so before the well, itself, had failed. Now, I don't
know if that's true or not. I don't want to start a rumor.
Mr. GOHMERT. They won't release the records.
Mr. KING of Iowa. But are we drawing a rational conclusion here that
we could have a government that we could draw conclusions from based
upon their response or lack of response and not the answer to the
question?
I would yield.
Mr. GOHMERT. Well, yes, it would certainly appear that that's exactly
right. If the MMS of this administration will not produce the records
to show exactly what testing was done and exactly what the results
were, which should be public record for heaven's sake--they're public
waters controlled by our government--then you've got to pretty well
figure it would not make this administration look very good.
I yield.
Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentleman from Texas, we've got an open
government. This is the most open, the most honest government in
history, and we are drawing conclusions based upon not getting an
answer as opposed to the answer that we might get if they would just
simply give us the information. I mean, this really saddens my heart to
hear this. I'm not that surprised, but it saddens my heart, Mr.
Gohmert.
Mr. GOHMERT. Well, that also brings us back to this problem with the
Federal Reserve and with the Secretary of the Treasury. Yes, we had
some people saying we've got to confirm Timothy Geithner as the
Secretary of the Treasury because he worked with Paulson in the early
days of TARP. He knows the plan. Well, that tells me he should never
have been confirmed if he'd worked with Paulson on the original plan,
because it was a disaster, and it should never have been allowed to
have happened as it did; but now we've got these guys--the head of the
Federal Reserve and the head of the Treasury--who are going to pick the
winners and losers in the country.
I yield.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Would we choose some mainline IV drug users off the
streets to go in and take IVs in hospitals because they happen to have
had the kind of experience that they're good at even though it's
illegal?
If somebody were proficient in how he operated Turbo Tax and were
able to avoid paying his taxes, would that mean he'd be a good person
to have as the head of the IRS so that he could probably set up a
system to prevent other people from avoiding paying their taxes?
Mr. GOHMERT. Well, that's an interesting issue.
You know, obviously, Secretary Geithner had great problems complying
with his certification 4 years in a row. He swore that he would pay the
tax that was shown on the form, and he certified, if they would just
pay him that money, he would pay it. Then he didn't pay it.
In answer to the question, I guess an analogy comes to mind, which is
the FBI. For example, there was a movie about a gentleman who was so
good at forging and acting as someone else, and he could create a
forged document out of anything. Well, the FBI ended up hiring him
because he was so good at forging checks and making fraudulent checks.
The FBI hired him because he knew more about ways to cheat other people
and to cheat the government. They felt like he could be an immense
help, and apparently he was. As I understand, he has helped prepare
more secure documents and more secure institutions because he was so
good at cheating those very institutions and the government.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Who best to catch tax cheats.
Mr. GOHMERT. So perhaps that was the thinking, that this is somebody
who would be an expert in not paying taxes. Maybe that's who we want in
charge of the tax entity, the IRS. It's an interesting point.
It still cuts to my core to think that the land of the free and the
home of the brave is being converted into a land of the unfree where
liberties are taken away because people have decided that the Secretary
of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Chairman get to pick and choose
what entities or what banks get to stand when the smoke clears.
I mean, what happened to competition? Why not let people play and
play fairly and just enforce fair rules?
That's what is needed here. We don't need the Federal Government
saying what companies they're going to support and will never let fail,
because as soon as the Federal Government says they're not going to
ever let this bank or this company fail, then that's going to be the
last one standing, because it knows it can operate in the red and that
its competition cannot do that. At the end of the day, that government-
supported entity or bank will end up being the one left.
That is outrageous. It is un-American. Anybody who would stand for
that proposition that we're not going to let these companies compete
fairly, that we're going to come in and pick the winners and losers,
needs to start wearing a name tag that reads, ``King George III
wannabe.''
I want to pick the winners and losers. I want to tell you who
prevails and who doesn't. I will tell you who ends up getting to be the
dominant force in America instead of letting people live in freedom and
in liberty and letting them pursue happiness and pursue opportunity.
The Constitution never guaranteed equality of outcome. It guaranteed
equality of opportunity, and that's what ought to be done.
Anybody who says they support a systemic risk council that gets to
pick the winners and losers--these are too big to fail, and we can't
let them fail--are enemies of this country as it was founded.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, in reclaiming my time then, I have to pose
the question:
If you're in business, if you're an investment banker, for example,
if you have a large credit operation going on and if you've watched the
Barney Frank bill and the Chris Dodd bill and now your knees are
knocking on what might be going on in a future conference committee
that's going to produce a bill that likely spills out over here in the
House for passage, that's sent over to the Senate and rammed through
there and that's put on the President's desk, we know the President
will sign the bill.
{time} 2130
But what is your business model? Let's just say you are providing
credit transactions, Mr. Speaker, to a large portion of America,
whether it is credit cards or whether it is the toxic assets of
mortgage-backed securities, the subprime loans that might be out there.
Whatever that might be.
Now, if you are sitting there with billions of dollars in those kind
of assets and you are making your profit off of those margins of those
assets going through, I am going to suggest that if you don't already
have a lobbyist, you had better hire a bunch of them. Bring them into
this Congress and start to convince people like chairman of the
Financial Services Committee Barney Frank, a majority of the members on
that committee and others, perhaps through the Ways and Means
Committee, start to work your angle. Because your business model, Mr.
Speaker, is no longer the business model of providing the most
competitive, the most service-oriented, the most customer-focused
service that there is.
Your business model is do what you have to do out here on the streets
in the business world in America, treat customers fine, that is good,
come here into Washington and get that playing field not leveled, but
tipped in your favor, because you can't do business without, so that
you have those kind of chips when the time comes that the regulators
would come in and take a look at your balance sheet and determine,
well, you weren't quite big enough to be allowed to fail, so we are
going to shove you into receivership and we will chop you up and deal
you out to our preferred companies.
I know the model, I know the pattern, even though it is done in a
pretty good fashion with the FDIC when a
[[Page H3812]]
bank has to go under. We have had too many of them go under. In the
farm crisis years in the eighties we had 3,000 banks that went under,
and those banks were split up sometimes and dealt out and sold to other
investors that had a better track record with managing banks.
All right. Well, that looks good and it works well in the micro
version. But when you get into the macro version of big business and
you have Tim Geithner as the Secretary of the Treasury making the
decision on a business that is too big to be allowed to fail, and
calling in Sheila Bair and calling in Ben Bernanke and saying, well,
don't you agree? They are too big to be allowed to fail, so let's go
prop these people up. And, by the way, what would help is if we go in
and shove this company into receivership and we deal the assets of that
company over into the company that is too big to fail.
You pick the winners and you pick the losers out of government. And
who wins? The people that pay the lobbyists. The people that have paid
for the most political influence. Government cannot make rational
decisions on business. They make political decisions on business.
Peter Wallison spoke today on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the
American Enterprise Institute scholar, one of the brightest minds we
have on free enterprise economics in America, a very solid man. Many
times I have listened to him illuminate the issue for me in a way that
helps me understand it even better.
He spoke today about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his sense is
that they aren't yet nationalized, that they are still quasi-
government. My position is they are nationalized, because the Federal
Government calls all their shots, and we have got roughly $50 billion
each dumped into either one of them and roughly another $30 billion
rolled on top of that $100 billion. So we are around the $130 billion
range.
Peter thinks that there is not $360 billion, but $400 billion in
losses that will have to be swallowed up by the American taxpayers. And
we knew and we know now that we were looking at $5.5 trillion in
contingent liabilities that the Federal taxpayers would have to swallow
if Fannie and Freddie were flushed down completely the way the markets
might drive them.
Concluding my statement and then yielding, that was an example,
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are an example of how government can't set
values, neither can they evaluate risk, because they are doing
political calculations based on political pressure, not economical
calculations based upon the risk of success and failure.
I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
Mr. GOHMERT. I was just asking if the gentleman would yield for a
question, if he would.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I would.
Mr. GOHMERT. With regard to the financial deform package that
apparently is going to be coming to the House, is the gentleman aware
of whether or not these two entities, Fannie and Freddie, that kicked
us into the spiral downward in the fall of '08, whether they are
included in this reform package? Is there any reform of these two
entities that nearly brought our economic house of cards down?
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, in scouring the financial
reform package and the Barney Frank bill or the Chris Dodd bill and
setting up the word search and chasing it through there, Mr. Speaker, I
don't find anything in either one of those bills that addresses the
necessary reform for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are completely
insulated.
I recall a debate here on the floor of the House on October 26, 2005,
that the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank, was
very much engaged in. He came to the floor to vigorously oppose an
amendment that was offered by Mr. Leach of Iowa that would have
established higher levels of collateralization for Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, higher standards for underwriting in the secondary market,
and higher standards for capitalization for Fannie and Freddie.
The vigorous opposition of Mr. Frank flowed out that day. And the
gentleman from Texas remembers the exchange that took place on the
Thursday before Easter in 2009 here on this floor. The gentleman from
Texas was there, the gentleman from Massachusetts was there, and I
think me up there somewhere. Because we talked about what had happened
with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In that debate on October 26, 2005, the gentleman from Massachusetts,
Mr. Frank said, If you are going to invest in shares of Fannie and
Freddie, don't do so believing that he would ever vote to bail out
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because he would never do that. He would
let them go down instead. That is the core and the essence of the
statement made by the gentleman from Massachusetts, who now is the
chairman of the Financial Services Committee.
Well, we know what has happened. Fannie and Freddie have been bailed
out. And on that day, the gentleman from Massachusetts said that he
wasn't biased in favor of or against Fannie or Freddie because the man
whom he had had an intimate relationship with was not a senior
executive. It is in the Congressional Record. I don't pull this out of
thin air. I suggest, Mr. Speaker, that you check the Record. For me,
that is an astonishing confession. To draw a fine line between the
reason for bias and not bias is because this individual was not a
senior, but more apparently a junior executive for Fannie Mae.
So that is a little too intimate for me, Mr. Speaker. I don't choose
to go there any further, except to point out that there are a lot of
things going on in this United States Government that are not what
meets the eye. There are undercurrents here that threaten to swallow up
the United States of America. There is a driven philosophy on this side
of the aisle that wants to swallow up free enterprise capitalism, that
abhors the words of capitalism.
There is a driven philosophy that is reflected by 77 members of the
Progressive Caucus who come to this floor with their blue charts and
say come visit our Web site. Well, not that long ago, a few years ago,
the progressives' Web site was hosted by, managed by and taken care of
by the socialists in America. But when they took a little bit of heat,
they decided they would manage their own Web site so they didn't have
to take the criticism. So the socialists ran the progressives' Web
site.
Now, dsausa.org, that is the socialist Web site, it stands for
Democratic Socialists of America, dsausa.org. Mr. Speaker, you should
go visit that Web site and understand who your colleagues are. Seventy-
seven of them are self-professed progressives.
The progressives, according to the socialist Web site, are their
legislative arm. They write that they are not Communists; they are
socialists. That is a step above a Communist. They don't want to
nationalize everything, they just want to nationalize the Fortune 500
companies in America. And they have got a big start on it.
They don't run candidates on the banner or under the political party
called the socialists, because there is a stigma attached to being a
socialist in America. So what do they do, Mr. Speaker? They push the
candidates that are self-professed progressives.
Progressives are not distinct from socialists. They are one and the
same. They are just wearing a little bit different-colored jersey. And
they are the people here who have driven the idea that we should
nationalize the Fortune 500 companies, nationalize the oil refinery
industry. Mr. Hinchey in New York, take over the oil industry. Maxine
Waters from Los Angeles, operate these Fortune 500 companies, and I
quote, ``for the benefit of the people affected by them.'' That is the
unions.
The Speaker is a member. The Speaker advocated and said that she
would not give, in the case of the car companies, a bargaining
advantage of the auto makers over that of the unions. Right off of the
Web page of the socialists, and she followed through on it.
{time} 2140
And today, 17\1/2\ percent of General Motors is owned by the unions,
without a cash outlay, without a concession of any kind. The President
of the United States, who voted to the left of self-professed Senator
Bernie Sanders, crammed that down the throats of the investors, the
secured investors in General Motors; and now we have the unions owning
17\1/2\ percent, the Federal Government owning 61 percent, and the
[[Page H3813]]
Canadian Government owning 12\1/2\ percent of General Motors, exactly
off of the playbook of the socialist Web site.
Mr. Speaker, the American people need to go visit the Web site. They
need to understand the playbook is written. It's being carried out by
the progressives in this Congress; 77 of them are the core driving
force here. When you add to that the Congressional Black Caucus, the
Hispanic Caucus, a whole lot of these people that are self-segregating
caucuses, instead of integrated caucuses, you understand who's running
America today, Mr. Speaker.
I'd yield to the gentleman from Texas.
Mr. GOHMERT. Well, if we go back to the day that the Wall Street
bailout passed, that first week in October of 2008, I made the
statement that when the Federal Government buys private assets and
holds them in order to try to make money, or the Federal Government
decides it's going to start trying to make money for the taxpayer, it's
called socialism. And I was belittled by colleagues that serve here in
this body for saying that it was socialist. One person even said, well,
I only know three Socialists in America, and they're all against the
Wall Street bailout.
Well, I was pretty depressed and devastated when the Wall Street
bailout passed. The next morning, Saturday morning, I was watching Neil
Cavuto, and he had the Presidential nominee of the Socialist Party, and
the Socialist candidate for President being interviewed by Neil Cavuto
was asked, basically, what's the deal? I thought you guys were against
the TARP bailout, the Wall Street bailout? And now this morning you're
saying it was a good thing. And in essence, the Presidential nominee of
the Socialist Party said, well, yes, they were against the TARP, Wall
Street bailout.
In essence, they didn't feel like the government should pay anything
to take over the assets they were taking over. But once it passed and
was signed into law, they realized this is probably the greatest day
for socialists in American history because the Federal Government has
begun the takeover, in a substantial way, of private assets.
And of course he went on to say now that they've made this wonderful
great step of taking over, socializing, nationalizing private assets
from the financial sector, the government just needs to go ahead and
finish taking over the rest of the financial sector because, he said,
because we know then the government takeover of all of that area would
not be done out of greed, and so they would do a much better job of
spreading the wealth around the country, and that under the present
system, greed rules the day, and that just that great, wonderful step
of the TARP bailout, socializing America, as he saw it, just needed to
be followed by the final step of completing the takeover of the
financial sector.
So the gentleman from Iowa is exactly right: according to the
Presidential candidate of the Socialist Party in 2008, this is a
socialist move to nationalize more and more of the assets, just as the
Presidential nominee of the Socialists had hoped would happen.
I yield back.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming and thanking the gentleman from Texas,
I'd point out into the Record, Mr. Speaker, that some months ago the
Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, came before a couple of
committees, Financial Services and Ag. And the question that I posed to
him, and he was bound to answer that question under oath, was I made
the point that President Obama was elected at least in part because he
had declared and effectively made an argument, however it might have
been true or untrue, that President Bush had gone into Iraq without an
exit strategy. So I made the point in my question that President Obama
had engaged in, supported, and participated in the nationalization of
about half of our private sector, and that is the three large
investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors,
Chrysler, I didn't go on into the nationalization of our skin and
everything inside it which is ObamaCare. But in that letter that he was
obligated to answer under oath, 2 months later I got a response back.
And I do want to give Secretary Geithner credit. There are some
members of this Cabinet that simply don't answer my letters. They
apparently don't think they're accountable to Members of Congress, and
they don't think that we might decide to send them a little less money
when it's time to do the budget. But Geithner did answer the letter. It
was seven pages long. It took 2 months to get it back, and that's not a
particular complaint of mine because I know that it's difficult to make
the machinery of government work. But in those seven pages of answering
the question, What is your exit strategy for taking over all of these
huge chunks of the private sector, his answer was, well, it's not a
written strategy, and he would know when the time was right, and he
would execute that when the time is right. In other words, don't you be
asking me. I'm the Secretary of the Treasury, and I don't need to
answer to you or to anybody else.
I'm going to submit this, Mr. Speaker: there is no plan; there is no
exit strategy. The President of the United States is delighted to see
these companies taken over by the Federal Government and managed by the
Federal Government, as is the Secretary of the Treasury and most or all
of the members of the United States Cabinet because it fits in with the
Web site of the Democratic Socialists of America.
You know, there used to be a little bit of resistance that came up
over here on this side of the aisle when someone might imply that the
President of the United States is a Socialist. But I've made the
argument I think so effectively that they don't try to rebut me
anymore; and if any of you choose to do so, I'd be happy to yield.
But the President of the United States as a United States Senator
voted to the left of Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is in the Senate
still today, self-professed Socialist. And no one argues with him. But
there were three Senators that voted to his left. Barack Obama was one
of them, and he is the chief nationalizer.
And when I saw the picture of Barack Obama standing next to Hugo
Chavez, and he's doing the double grip glad hand handshake with that
great nationalizer from Venezuela, the Marxist Hugo Chavez, I thought,
you know what? Hugo Chavez is a piker when it comes to nationalizing.
Barack Obama has way outdone him. And I don't think that he would have
been a man that could have done that on his own. He surrounded himself
with people that had for years worked toward this vision.
Had I been assigned the task of writing the screenplay to turn
America into a Socialist state, and if they would have even created for
me a charismatic figure that matches that of the President and started
me down the path of my imagination, and with 3 years to get ready to do
it, could not have unfolded a scenario even close to what is reality
today for the businesses that have been taken over by the Federal
Government. Neither could have been anticipated some of the things that
they're seeking to do now.
But when you add these up, and you add up the takeover of three large
investment banks, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, and when
you see that AIG, for $180 billion swallowed up by the Federal
Government, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for the tune of $130
billion and perhaps another $400 billion piled on top of that, and
still remaining at $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities, and the
takeover of General Motors and Chrysler, both of them now under the
control or influence of the Federal Government, being managed now,
exactly off the Socialist Web site, ``run for the benefit of the people
affected by them,'' the unions, who made no concession whatsoever,
except to concede future claims that they think are going to be paid
anyway by ObamaCare.
And the student loan program taken over completely, exactly within
the mold of what happened when we had Federal flood insurance that came
in to provide one more competitor for the private market back in 1963.
Now there is no private market. Now the Federal Government runs it all.
When the Federal Government stepped in to compete on student loans,
people said, well, you know, we need to keep these people honest.
Somebody's making money off these students. Now the Federal Government
runs it all.
[[Page H3814]]
And the President's idea was that he would set up one more insurance
company to provide health insurance for Americans to compete against
these insurance companies whom he demagogued relentlessly, for getting
one more company, correct?
{time} 2150
But there existed, up until ObamaCare passed, 1,300 health insurance
companies in America, 1,300 companies that produced a variety of
policies numbering to 100,000 policies. So who can imagine that one
more company and a handful more policies was going to provide more
options for people that would help with the competition and take some
of the profits out of the industry? If these 1,300 companies competing
against each other, Mr. Speaker, couldn't take the profit out of the
industry, how could the Federal Government do that? Regulate and
subsidize. And that's what governments do. They regulate and they
subsidize their competition out of existence like they did on the flood
insurance programs from 1963 and the student loan programs culminated
this year.
And now here we are, ObamaCare, the law of the land, the law of the
land that has not just nationalized three large investment banks, and
Fannie and Freddie, and General Motors and Chrysler, and the student
loans, now they have nationalized our very bodies, the most sovereign
thing that we have. The Federal Government has taken over the
management of our skin and everything inside it and decided who will
buy what policy and what the premium will be.
And now they're trying to decide our diet. And now they have decided
a mission across the country that the retailers need to cut 1.5
trillion calories out of the products that are going to these kids.
Because one-third of our kids are obese, they want to cut the calories
down on a bag of Doritos. I didn't ask them how to do that. I think
they just take a few chips out of the bag of Doritos.
But I know what they do to a PowerBar. A 150-calorie PowerBar gets
reduced to 90 calories because some fat kids will eat too many and they
will get a little heavier. But I don't know what we do with those two-
thirds of the kids that are probably too skinny, that need more than
the 150 calories that are in the PowerBar. And I don't know what we do
with the fat kid that hoards three PowerBars now for 270 calories as
opposed to maybe one at 150 calories. But we cannot put a one-size-
fits-all regulation in and reduce calories going into kids that need
them for energy and need them for growth.
More kids need more food rather than all kids need less food. And so
those kids that are overweight, they need more exercise. And maybe they
need to watch their diet a little bit, and that's education and that's
parents, yes. But don't starve the hungry kids so that those that are
eating too much have to work a little harder to keep getting too much.
The super nanny state. The recycling of all of these components. Here
the Speaker of the House in the House of Representatives has decreed
that you can't go to the cafe over here and eat an omelet unless the
eggs that are broken are from a free range hen. I think that the
chicken that you eat is probably not free range because it's pretty
tender and good. I didn't check on that, but I'd like to know. Doesn't
taste like free range to me. But the eggs are from a free range hen.
The paper, the napkins that we have around this Capitol, most of them
are brown because they are recycled paper. And when I go look at my
coffee filters, I wonder why they're running over, they're recycled
paper. So we have these decrees that come down from on high. And the
light bulbs themselves are regulated by the Speaker of the House. How
much nanny state does this country need? And how much nanny state can
we stand?
I want American people making their own decisions. It's a free market
economy. I want them to be able to exercise all of their constitutional
rights. I want them to be able to own guns and defend themselves and
hunt and target shoot and be in a position to defend us against
tyranny. And if we do not, you know, there is something about
constitutional rights and liberty. It's use it or lose it. If you don't
use it, you lose it.
You've got to use your freedom of speech, religion, assembly, press,
second amendment rights. You've got to exercise those rights. We must
do so. Mr. Speaker, we have to take this country back.
I yield back the balance of my time and thank the gentleman from
Texas for joining me tonight.
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