[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 24 (Tuesday, February 14, 2012)]
[House]
[Pages H709-H715]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    ADDRESSING THE ISSUES OF OUR DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege and honor to be 
recognized by you to address you here on the floor of the United States 
House of Representatives and to take up some of the issues of our day.
  First I'd like to address the situation that we are in with regard to 
the payroll tax extension and the unemployment extension and the 
components that are being deliberated now as a conference committee is 
trying to get to a final solution.
  I'd take you back, Mr. Speaker, to the lame duck session a year ago 
last December when, within, oh, 30 to 45 days of the election of this 
112th Congress, the legitimized now-112th Congress, the lame duck 
session negotiations took place, initiated by the minority leader of 
the United States Senate, Mitch McConnell, and the President, President 
Obama, to deal with a way of extending the Bush tax brackets to avoid 
the automatic imposition of a 55 percent death tax at midnight on New 
Year's, beginning on the first minute of 2011. It was the payroll tax 
holiday, and it was also the refundable tax credits, unemployment 
benefits extended, and the list went on.
  Mr. Speaker, I'd just make the point that we had 87 freshman 
Republicans waiting in the wings during that lame duck session. They 
were the legitimate representatives of the American people. And when 
the United States Congress makes a decision to move forward on large 
pieces of legislation, any large piece of legislation, in a lame duck 
session, then it must be something that is urgent and mandatory that we 
take that kind of action. Our Founding Fathers did not imagine that we 
would--well, first of all, Thomas Jefferson said, large initiatives 
should not be advanced on slender majorities.

                              {time}  1920

  Large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities, but, 
Mr. Speaker, also large initiatives should not be advanced by lame duck 
sessions of the United States Congress. When that happens, you have a 
lot of people that are going home: 87 freshman Republicans, 9 freshman 
Democrats, they replaced all of them, people that were going home. So 
there's your math.
  Ninety-six Members of this Congress today, and there have been 
several others that have been added, but 96 were waiting in the wings 
to be sworn into office here in the first week in January so they could 
do their just constitutional duty, and while that was going on, 
negotiations were taking place for a lame duck session, a large 
initiative lame duck session to address Bush tax bracket extensions, 
unemployment benefit extensions, and for the first time, the severance 
of the 50-50 relationship between employer and employee in the 
contributions to the Social Security trust fund.
  Now, I've watched that Social Security trust fund since I came here 
to this Congress, and it was at about a plus of $1.74 trillion. It's 
grown to $2.34 trillion, one of the times I looked. It's moving quickly 
now because the higher the unemployment, the more damage it does to our 
Social Security trust fund because the contributions slow down.
  As we're seeing baby boomers retire and qualify for Social Security 
and Medicare, there are more and more demands on the Social Security 
trust fund.
  But the payroll tax holiday that was passed--and that's what it was 
called--but it actually created a $130 billion hole in the Social 
Security trust fund. Now, you can charge it against the general fund, 
and when the time comes to pay the bill, it will have to come out of 
the general fund because the Social Security trust fund is borrowed 
from by the Federal Government anyway.
  But the accounting created a $130 billion hole. You can count that up 
proportionately and round $10 billion, $11 billion a month, each month 
that there is an extension of the suspension of the 2 percent 
contribution of the employee into the Social Security trust fund.
  Now, that was one of the components from the lame duck session. We 
never should have, Mr. Speaker, severed the 50-50 bond between equal 
contribution to the Social Security trust fund out of the employer and 
the employee. As soon as that happens, it opens the door for class 
envy. It already had discriminated against the employer in benefit of 
the employee.

[[Page H710]]

  Now, if it had been a reduction of 1 percent from the employer and 1 
percent from the employee, at least then the 50-50 bond would have been 
withheld. We have, in the past, adjusted the Social Security 
contribution rate so that we have a viable fund. But we have not in the 
past broken that 50-50 equal contribution, employer-employee. That 
happened in the lame duck session. It was one of those things that was 
agreed to in order to be able to extend the Bush tax brackets. 
Extending the Bush tax brackets at that time gets us just until 
December 31 of this year, and then all of the game changes again.
  Now, it is a way to avoid having that be a debate while President 
Obama is up for reelection, just like the debt ceiling was timed so 
that the President can essentially direct a debt ceiling increase and 
avoid having a fight here on the floor of the House or the Senate to 
approve another debt ceiling increase. It looks as though we've 
negotiated some agreement to keep the President off the hook for 
holding him accountable coming into this Presidential election.
  But to add into that agreement--the lame duck deal, I will call it, 
Mr. Speaker, when you add to that agreement the payroll tax situation 
that suspended 2 percent from the employee and didn't suspend any from 
the employer and broke that bond, we also had the extension of the Bush 
tax brackets, and we had an adjustment to the death tax, which was zero 
on the day that this was voted upon, but it jumped to 35 percent. It 
was automatically going to go to 55.
  We also had an extension of unemployment benefits out to 99 weeks, 
Mr. Speaker. So 99 weeks of unemployment benefits are, as far as the 
charts that I have looked at and my memory, unprecedented in the 
history of this country. So the 99 weeks of unemployment, that and 
extension of refundable tax credits and a few other smaller programs, 
totaled $212 billion in outlays just for the duration of that bill, 
that bill that was negotiated by people who were anxious to make a 
deal.
  Why? I have a little trouble figuring out why the Republicans were 
anxious to make a deal, Mr. Speaker, because we had 87 new freshmen 
waiting in the wings. The legitimate voices of the American people, the 
shock troops that they sent here, they sent them here for fiscal 
responsibility. Every single one of them ran on the 100 percent repeal 
of ObamaCare. They ran on fiscal responsibility. They ran on a balanced 
budget. And $212 billion went out the window with the lame duck deal 
without hardly any debate, $212 billion, most of it to extend 
unemployment benefits for 99 weeks, but some of it for refundable tax 
credits. That did not include the $130 billion created by the 
suspension of 2 percent of the contribution rate into the Social 
Security trust fund, that hole that was created
  All of this so the Bush tax brackets could be extended beyond the 
reelection of the President of the United States.
  That agreement, Mr. Speaker, in my opinion, and it's a strong 
conviction, should never have been negotiated in a lame duck session. 
We should have allowed the new Members of this Congress, the 87 
freshman Republicans, the nine freshman Democrats, to weigh in, to have 
a chance to debate, to configure a policy and to vote.
  But meanwhile, they were waiting in the wings going through 
orientation while this vote was taking place. By the time they were 
actually seated here in this Congress, that horse was out of the barn. 
That plane had already left the runway.
  The horse was out of the barn, the payroll tax was what it was, and 
it was set to expire at the first day of this year as we know. Now it's 
been extended for 2 months, and we're in the negotiations to see what 
to do with the rest of it.

  But the problem is rooted back in a bad deal, the lame duck deal, and 
now this freshman class is being asked to address it, to solve the 
problem, and to not necessarily reach in their pockets and pay the 
price but to pay the political price to try to resolve this issue, 
which is going to go on and on and on until we put the pieces back 
together, Mr. Speaker.
  We've got to put the pieces back together, and to get there 
politically, no one can paint that picture for me, no one can draw that 
map. And since I couldn't have drawn that map either, I wouldn't have 
gone there in the first place.
  But we are where we are. It's $212 billion in outlays to extend 
unemployment benefits from the lame duck session a year ago last 
December, and it's $130 billion in the hole in the Social Security 
trust fund until you find it some other way, but that's what it is.
  The result of extending unemployment benefits out to 99 weeks was 
that we had a lot of workers in America that were 63 years old that 
amazingly found themselves unemployed with unemployment benefits 
guaranteed with no obligation on their part except to sign up, out for 
the duration of their working career. So it amounted to an early 
retirement for 63-year-old employees or 64-year-old employees in 
America, unmeasured in its impact on our economy.
  Meanwhile, the measure of what happens when you pay people not to 
work for 2 years is that their skills atrophy, they're out of the 
workforce, technology moves on. Not only are they not getting caught up 
with and staying caught up with technological changes and the modern 
shifts within our very nimble economy that we must have, but the skills 
that they had on that day are atrophying.
  Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have unemployment. We should 
have. The consistent duration of unemployment has been 26 weeks. That's 
a half a year. If you look at the data, when unemployment runs out 
people are far more likely to go to work than they are the week before 
it runs out. It is a fact; it is not an opinion. It's a fact, Mr. 
Speaker.
  But my point here is that we're in this discussion today with a 
pretty difficult decision that's being made by the conference 
committee, by the Speaker, the majority leader, and others, but this 
difficulty we have now is rooted in what I consider to be a mistake in 
the lame duck deal.
  Oh, Mr. Speaker, how I wonder how much different it might have been 
if we had waited and seated the freshman class, consulted with them, 
asked them if they wanted to sever that 50-50 equal contribution rate 
between employers and employees. Ask them if they were willing to 
accept on their conscience a $130 billion hole in the Social Security 
trust fund. Ask them if they were ready to face extending the payroll 
tax reduction, and doing so in perpetuity. As long as the other side is 
willing to play class envy, are we going to be willing to continue to 
dig a hole in the Social Security trust fund?

                              {time}  1930

  That is one question in front of us.
  Another one that's in front of us--and one I'd like to ask the 
freshman class also--is:
  Did you ever really think that 99 weeks of unemployment was the 
appropriate thing to do? How did you intend to fund that? Would you 
have found a pay-for if you'd thought 99 weeks were the appropriate way 
to deal with an unsettled employment situation in America? Do you have 
compassion for the employers who are looking to build their businesses 
with employees when it's difficult to hire them off of the unemployment 
rolls?
  We had a hearing before the Small Business Committee, Mr. Speaker. 
Before that committee, we had four or five small business employers--
there might have actually been six--but I asked them going down the 
line:
  Have you had any kind of luck hiring from the unemployment? They 
invariably said: Once the unemployment expires, I can hire them just 
fine. One employer out of the list said that she had hired off of the 
unemployment rolls on one occasion.
  That's fairly typical. I will tell you that I know of businesses in 
my neighborhood that look around the neighborhood, and they see that 
there are employees they'd like to hire. They know, when their 
unemployment benefits run out, they'll be knocking on their doors 1 
week or 2 weeks before the unemployment benefits run out so that 
they're in line to hire them. We have employers who are lining up to 
hire the unemployed, but they know they can't get that done as long as 
unemployment is being paid.
  Now, yes, there are people who are unfortunate; there are people who 
can't find jobs; there are especially people in parts of the country 
who have an economy that's far worse than that which I

[[Page H711]]

represent in northwest Iowa, Mr. Speaker; but we need a logical 
unemployment plan, perhaps one that ratchets those benefits in an 
incremental way so that it slowly provides more of an incentive for 
people to go to work. It's not just that you as an unemployed can't 
find a job in the community you live in and in the profession that you 
happened to have been practicing before you were laid off. No, Mr. 
Speaker. There are many more aspects to this.
  There is such a thing as travel: Go and get a job where you can get 
one. Relocate there if the job is good enough. Go check it out. Call 
for your family if that's good enough. That has happened throughout the 
history of this country. Yet our Federal Government is essentially 
saying to people, You're not going to be obligated to relocate. Some of 
the people over on this side of the aisle think that somehow we ought 
to take the jobs to where people live.
  It puts me in mind of an article that was researched and written--I 
happened to have read it in the Des Moines Register some years ago, 
more than a decade ago, I'm certain, Mr. Speaker. They had gone into a 
neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, into a residential neighborhood, 
and interviewed every household there--all the residences in a six-
block-by-six-block area, 36 square blocks. As they interviewed the 
families and--I guess I can't say the word--analyzed the families and 
identified the characteristics of the families, they didn't find a 
single male employed head of household in all 36 square blocks of the 
residential area in Milwaukee.
  The history of that area was that the people in that neighborhood had 
predominantly been descended from those who had moved up to Milwaukee, 
right after prohibition ended, in order to take on the brewery jobs, 
the good brewery jobs in Milwaukee. They brewed a lot of beer in 
Milwaukee, and they created good jobs there right at the end of the 
prohibition era, and people were willing to move from the Gulf States 
up into those neighborhoods to go to work in the breweries. So that 
would be the thirties, from the thirties to the nineties, a 60-year 
period of time so to speak. Thomas Jefferson would call that three 
generations. I'd say probably so. One generation arrived in Milwaukee 
at the dawn of the aftermath of prohibition. Another generation was 
born and raised, and the grandchildren were still living there, but 
they didn't have a single employed male head of household in 36 square 
blocks.
  The story was about the lament, Mr. Speaker, in that we couldn't 
bring jobs to the people in that neighborhood; but, truthfully, their 
ancestors--their parents or grandparents--had moved to Milwaukee from 
the Gulf States for the jobs. Yet it didn't occur to the person writing 
the article that people could also move for jobs in the modern era. 
That is what you must do. If we're going to have a flexible, mobile 
economy, we've got to go to where the work is.
  But the disincentive is there from the Federal Government that 
discourages such things, and we don't ask very much the question about 
why is it that not a single male head of household is employed in this 
entire six-block-by-six-block area of Milwaukee. The biggest answer to 
that is that the 72 different means-tested welfare programs that we 
have are disincentives for people to find jobs. Now, that sounds 
shocking to the hyperventilating liberal left, Mr. Speaker, but it's 
just a fact. It's a fact of human nature. So the discouragement from 
finding a job has created neighborhoods of people who don't have a 
tradition of working anymore.
  America was built on high productivity and on the efficiency we have, 
and the intuitive nature, the instinctive, innovative nature of 
Americans, has been what has made our economy so strong; and it's a 
very sad thing to think that here we sit with this discussion about 
whether or not unemployment should be 99 weeks or 79 weeks or 69 weeks. 
Mr. Speaker, 26 weeks have been long enough for almost all of the 
history of this country. We are not in an economic situation that 
matches that of the Great Depression's at this point, although the debt 
that has been accumulated does match that of the Great Depression's and 
then some.
  I recall the President coming before our Republican Conference on 
February 10 of 2009, shortly after he'd been inaugurated as President, 
to make the case that we should advance his economic stimulus plan--his 
$787.5 billion, grown into $825 billion, shovel-ready, spend-now, pay-
interest, and pay-principal-later plan. He said to us that FDR's New 
Deal actually did work. It worked, but FDR lost his nerve. He got 
worried about spending too much money, so he pulled back. When he 
pulled back in the second half of the thirties, it brought about a 
recession within a depression. These are President Obama's words. In 
this recession within a depression, unemployment went up, and then 
before the economy could recover, along came World War II, which was 
the greatest economic stimulus plan ever. That was the President's 
presentation to us.

  President Obama convinced me and, I think, everybody who was 
listening that day that he will not lose the nerve that he believes FDR 
lost. President Obama is the lead Keynesian economist on steroids in 
the history of the country and, I believe, of the world in that he 
believes that borrowing money and spending money will stimulate the 
economy and that, as that economy rolls, the benefits of it will create 
jobs. He believes if you borrow money and hand it to people, not in 
exchange for a good or a service that has been produced but just get it 
in their hands one way or another--if they'll work for it, fine. Then 
give them something for working. If they won't or if you can't give 
them something--because they can surely be busy spending as they've got 
more time do that if they're not working after all, and spending money 
stimulates the economy; and, Mr. Speaker, Keynesian economists believe 
that: that spending money stimulates the economy.
  I believe this, that we here in America have to produce goods and 
services that have a marketable value and that can be sold 
competitively here and abroad. We need to produce our way out of this 
economic doldrums that we're in, not spend our way out of it. They 
believe that if you spend billions of dollars--and in the President's 
case, I have to give him his due of trillions of dollars, of 4 or 5 or 
more trillions of extra dollars of debt that have been piled upon us--
that that comes back to you severalfold.
  In fact, the statement was made by our Secretary of Agriculture that, 
for every dollar in food stamps that gets spent, it stimulates $1.84 in 
economic activity. Now, if that's the case, why don't we give out a lot 
more food stamps. That's because people have to produce the food and 
because they have to deliver it, stock it, shelve it, and those things. 
Well, if that's such a good economic stimulator, why don't we just do 
all of that, throw the food away, and then we can stimulate the 
economy, too. But who's going to pay the debt?
  Here is what I do believe, Mr. Speaker. If we borrow money and if we 
hand it to people and say, Spend it, spend it, spend it--it's your 
patriotic duty--it may stimulate the economy for a short while. I call 
it a sugar high. It may be just for a little while that you can get 
that little bump--very, very temporary. The trade-off is that the 
trough that you might otherwise be falling into may not--not will not 
but may not--be as deep as it would be otherwise.

                              {time}  1940

  But the result will be, you have to recover, and you have to pay off 
the interest and the principal. So even though you might not fall as 
far, you have a much broader trough to recover from.
  We have to pay the interest, and we have to pay the principal on all 
of this debt that's been accumulated over the last 3-plus years. And it 
doesn't mean that the Bush administration is somehow forgiven for the 
debt that's been driven up. But during the height of the Iraq war, the 
Bush administration came within $160 billion of balancing the budget. 
Now $160 billion sounds like loose change today compared to the 
President's budget that he rolled out, which is minus $1.33 trillion. 
You run up a deficit of $1.33 trillion, and you increase taxes by more 
than $1.5 trillion in that process, you can see what happens, Mr. 
Speaker.
  This budget that the President has offered should be the news of the 
day.

[[Page H712]]

And maybe we ought to be looking at what's in it. But what we really 
hear instead is that it's dead on arrival, that his budget will not be 
brought up--certainly it will not be brought up here in the House. At 
least I don't think so here in the House, unless it's to illustrate its 
lack of support.
  Last year, President Obama's budget was brought up on the floor of 
the Senate. And of all the talk about giving the President his due and 
working with the President on his budget, his budget was voted on in 
the Senate and voted down 97-0. Mr. Speaker, I don't know that I've had 
a piece of legislation come to the floor of this Congress that had that 
kind of unanimous--well, I guess I can't say ``support''--unanimous 
rejection. That would be tough on my ego if I couldn't get anybody to 
agree with me after I had all that staff put that big budget together. 
But they didn't want to be held accountable for what the President's 
budget said.
  The President now has a political document--not a fiscal management 
document--that he'll run around the country, talking about his budget. 
He will use it to beat up on Republicans that don't support his budget. 
And maybe he'll realize that it isn't just Republicans; that last time 
it was Harry Reid and all of the Democrats who voted on the budget over 
in the Senate. We didn't support it over on this side either.
  We had a couple of budgets come to the floor here in the House of 
Representatives last year, Mr. Speaker. One of them was the RSC budget 
that balanced in 8 to 9 years. And the other one was what we call the 
Ryan budget, the Republican Conference budget. That's the one that 
actually passed here on the floor of the House. And even though that 
budget had a level of austerity to it, and even though it was ground-
breaking in the boldness with which it addressed a path to prosperity, 
it wasn't strong enough, Mr. Speaker. It went in the right direction. 
And it was bold by historical standards, but not particularly bold by 
the standards that we need to envision the future.
  Yesterday we had the chairman of the Budget Committee make the 
statement that we have 2 to 3 years, and we have the potential of 
becoming one huge Greece. I have been making a similar statement over 
the last year and a half or so. And what I believe is that--by the way, 
Greece is relatively easy to bail out, if you wanted to do that, 
because their economy is only 2 percent of the EU's GDP. And that's the 
EU's gross domestic product, just in case the acronyms are bothering 
people, Mr. Speaker. So 2 percent of the EU's GDP, not that hard to 
fix.
  Here in the United States, we have a different kind of difficulty. 
The Ryan budget a year ago, though, didn't balance for 26 years and 
left us with a national debt at the end of 10 years of $23 trillion. We 
walked into it with $14.3 trillion in national debt and ended up 10 
years down the road with $23 trillion in national debt. But when the 
debt ceiling deal was made last August, it broke faith with the Ryan 
budget, which projected $23 trillion in national debt, and became $26 
trillion in national debt. But in fairness, without applying the Ryan 
budget, we were looking at $28 trillion in national debt 10 years from 
now. From $14.3 trillion to $28 trillion. The Ryan budget dialed the 
$28 trillion down to $23 trillion. The debt ceiling deal dialed it back 
up to $26 trillion in national debt in 10 years.
  It's hard to declare a victory over a $1.2 trillion cut on a debt 
ceiling deal if you're reducing the projected national debt from $28 
trillion down to $26 trillion. And if you are dealing with a budget 
that no longer is binding, having broken faith with at least the big 
numbers within that Republican Conference/Ryan budget, on a budget that 
didn't balance for 26 years--I have to go back and look at my three 
sons who are grown--they're in their thirties right now--and say to 
them, Sorry we didn't have a balanced budget in the previous decade. We 
haven't had an effective balanced budget, I don't believe, passed in 
this millennium. And in 26 years, if all goes well--and we've already 
said it's probably not going to--we might see a balanced budget. But 
you will, my sons, be eligible for that Social Security that will be 
paid for out of the trust fund that has, by then, hundreds of billions 
of dollars, if not trillions of dollars in holes created in it by 
paying for things now that make us feel good or we avoid the political 
confrontation of it.
  And you'll never have worked and paid taxes in the United States of 
America for an entire career and known that a balanced budget is passed 
out of the United States Congress.
  Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, those sons in their thirties that have 
been working for well over a decade going through an entire career, 
knocking on the door of Medicare eligibility, Social Security 
eligibility, having watched a hole created and expanded bigger and 
bigger in the Social Security trust fund every year while they're 
closer and closer to being able to finally qualify for Social Security 
and Medicare, and we can't fix this problem now? And the Federal 
Government is running a deficit for all of those years: 26, 28, 38, add 
10, 12,--40 years, 40 years of deficits are what are staring us in the 
face now, before we can get to the point of paying off the first dollar 
on our national debt. And that's if we would stick with Ryan's budget 
of last year. And I'm hopeful we'll do better this year.

  But the President, who spoke in his State of the Union address in 
front of where you are seated right now, Mr. Speaker, when he came for 
this much anticipated State of the Union address a couple of weeks ago, 
he made no mention whatsoever of a balanced budget. He didn't make 
mention of fiscal responsibility, let alone austerity. He laid out his 
agenda of spending. And I guess I know now why he didn't address the 
promise that he made 3 years ago in which he said he was going to cut 
the deficit in half by the end of his term. Well, no, that hasn't 
happened. That would require a deficit proposal by his budget of 
roughly a half-trillion dollars, somewhere in that neighborhood. He has 
got red ink in his own budget of $1.33 trillion. And he says, This is 
not the time for us to tighten our belts. This isn't the time for 
austerity. The economy can't stand it now. Well, the creditors are not 
going to be able to take this much longer either.
  As I sat asking a series of questions over in the German finance 
minister's office not that long ago, we went through the national debt 
of the countries that are in trouble, those who have had their bond 
ratings just lowered by the news that I saw today. And if you add up 
the national debt of those countries--and I will name them: Greece, 
Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, those countries. If you take 
the national debt of those countries, not including France, for 
example, but just the countries that have been, for months now, hanging 
in the balance of facing the fear of default, their total cumulative 
national debt, if they paid off everything that they owed as a country, 
the sovereign debt of those countries that I have mentioned totals $4.5 
trillion.
  Now the President already met that. Running up the debt within the 
first 3 years of his office, he had already arrived at a little over $4 
trillion. So we're in the same neighborhood. The red ink spent under 
this administration was enough red ink to pay off the sovereign debt of 
the nations in the EU that are having trouble. I'm not suggesting that 
we should have done that. But look at the austerity that Greece is 
having to accept and the fires in the streets, when the streets of 
Athens go aflame when they find out that about 15,000 government jobs 
have been cut in order to meet the budgetary guidelines that they must 
meet if they're going to be able to borrow money from--who are the 
players in the European Union? It really comes down to Germany now 
today.

                              {time}  1950

  Fifteen thousand government jobs cut in Greece alone, a little old 
country that is 2 percent of the GDP of the EU. And we're here, and we 
cannot tighten our belt. We have a President that puts a budget out 
that will not even speak of moving toward balance. He will not speak 
about tightening our belt. But he will demagogue people who will 
propose such things, and that includes Paul Ryan.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I'm suggesting that we call upon the Presidential 
candidates who are seeking the Oval Office and ask them, renew your 
efforts. Declare and ask for the support of the American people; that 
if you are elected to the highest elected office in this

[[Page H713]]

land as President of the United States, call for a mandate from the 
American people for this Congress to pass a balanced budget out of the 
House and out of the Senate and message it to the States to begin the 
ordeal of the ratification of a balanced budget amendment in the 38 
States that are necessary in order to implement an amendment to our 
United States Constitution.
  And the balanced budget amendment must have a GDP cap. I'll stand on 
18 percent. That's the historic take-out of the GDP for the Federal 
Government, 18 percent. And it must require a supermajority in order to 
raise taxes.
  Mr. Speaker, this country will not survive in the long run with less. 
The will to balance the budget does not exist in this Congress today. 
It doesn't exist in the House. It surely doesn't exist in the Senate. 
The push from the President for deficit spending is one of the factors. 
But if you remove the President of the United States and put a new 
individual in there who is fiscally responsible, we still have the 
problem of the tendency to overspend and the unwillingness to tighten 
the belt and the unwillingness to listen to the American people that 
insist that we balance this budget.
  And so, Mr. Speaker, I want to see the Presidential candidates call 
for a balanced budget amendment. I want that to be actually the second 
plank in their platform. The first plank needs to be the full, 100 
percent repeal of ObamaCare. That's an essential component for us to 
get our liberty back, and it is an essential component to balance the 
budget.
  We can't afford ObamaCare. It takes away our liberty. It takes away 
our freedom. It takes away our choices. And we're dealing now with the 
national debate over right to conscience.
  Never in the history of this country have we seen a President that 
had the level of audacity to believe that he could sit in the Oval 
Office and dictate the terms of health insurance policies to every 
American. And the President did so. Make no mistake, Mr. Speaker. It 
wasn't Kathleen Sebelius sitting in her office with some of her trusted 
advisers over at HHS that decided they were going to compel, especially 
the Catholic but the faith-based institutions who were providing health 
care services, to provide also for their employees health insurance 
policies that 100 percent of them would cover birth control pills, 
other contraceptives, that 100 percent of them would cover 
sterilizations, tubal ligations--vasectomies in particular.
  That 100 percent of the health insurance policies would cover the 
morning-after pill or the Plan B pill that comes in after the morning-
after pill, the ella pill; the ella pill that is prescribed to bring 
about an abortion up to 5 days but is effective up to 22 days. That 
would be 4 days after the baby's heart starts beating, I might add, Mr. 
Speaker.
  To compel any religious institution, any person of faith, let alone 
the Catholic Church, which is the largest single institution standing 
for life and marriage in the United States of America, the White House 
understands that if they can plow through the Catholic Church on life 
and marriage and matters of conscience, then there is no institution 
left that can stand up to the President of the United States and his 
radical, social, transformative agenda would have no serious impediment 
from that point forward.
  Thankfully, Mr. Speaker, the American bishops understood what was 
taking place when Kathleen Sebelius made the announcement, which was 
actually the order of the President of the United States to compel 
religious institutions, in particular Catholic institutions, to fund, 
provide and pay for birth control pills, sterilization, and 
abortifacients.
  That was a violation of the right to privacy. It was a violation of 
the religious right to conscience, a right to conscience which is 
guaranteed in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, 
freedom of religion.
  But for the Federal Government, and I should probably not use that 
term quite so benignly because this is, for the President of the United 
States to issue such an order, tells us how radical and aggressive his 
agenda is, maybe how out of touch he is with the faith community in 
America.
  But I compliment the American bishops for taking such a bold stand, 
Mr. Speaker. And the stand needed to be taken. When you think about the 
martyrs of history, it's not a hard stand to take here in the United 
States of America. You're not going to be crucified. You're not going 
to lose your head. You're not going to be stoned to death for taking a 
stand like this. You might be ridiculed, but when you stand on 
principle, how can that hurt. It doesn't. If you believe in the 
principle, it doesn't.
  And so, Mr. Speaker, the American Catholic bishops took this 
position. They said it was a violation of a right to conscience. And 
they wrote: We cannot, we will not, obey this unjust law. The strongest 
language that I have heard read from the pulpit in my years as a 
faithful Catholic. We cannot, we will not obey this unjust law.
  A bold position, a bright line, uncompromising. And I know the 
question was posed that the delay of 12 months in implementing the rule 
was to give the religious institutions an opportunity to make 
accommodations and adjust to the imposition of the Federal Government 
in requiring them to violate their conscience.
  Mr. Speaker, I'd submit that one does not violate their conscience. 
If it is a conscience clause that protects you, that's one thing, but 
it is your conscience that prohibits you from crossing the line.

  The lives of babies are ended by morning-after pills, by the ella 
pill; and it is a direct violation of the teachings of the Church and 
no government can compel a church to violate its conscience. Nor can a 
government compel individuals to violate their conscience. This rule 
that was imposed was designed to do that, and I believe the President 
calculated that he could fracture the Catholic Church in doing so. And 
if he were successful in doing that, then there would be not an 
impediment in the way with the other components of the radical social 
agenda.
  But, Mr. Speaker, that didn't happen. It's not going to happen. The 
bishops listened to the President's ``accommodation'' and bought a 
little bit of time and said we're going to study this and deliberate 
and we'll give you an answer. And they did. They studied it, 
deliberated, and they came back with an answer in a short period of 
time. It was less than 48 hours, as I recall, and rejected the 
President's accommodation because it still violates conscience, and it 
violates the conscience of many faithful Americans and Americans of all 
religious denominations. Particularly, it runs directly against the 
principles of the Catholic Church.
  And so, Mr. Speaker, we now have a bright line drawn along the line 
of conscience protection, and we're having a good American debate on 
conscience protection, and I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get that 
established. But I would caution this body, Mr. Speaker, if I were 
addressing them instead of yourself, that we should not accept the idea 
that we can go into ObamaCare. All this power and authority is rooted 
in ObamaCare. ObamaCare grants this authority to the executive branch. 
The President assumes the authority because he makes the appointments 
within the Department, such as Kathleen Sebelius.
  But to make changes in ObamaCare that essentially lower the pressure, 
the 1099 squeal forms component, well, this House passed a bill to 
repeal it. And you've got other components of ObamaCare that have been 
egregious and efforts made to repeal a little piece here, a little 
piece there. The medical equipment tax would be one of those. And now 
we have the violation of conscience that imposes that everybody in 
America pay for everybody else's contraceptives and their 
sterilizations and their abortifacients. My conscience won't let me do 
that, Mr. Speaker.

                              {time}  2000

  But yet the President of the United States believes he has the power 
built into ObamaCare; and every time we come to this floor and pass a 
piece of legislation, it takes some of the pressure off from a 
legislation that would amend out the most egregious aspects of 
ObamaCare. I remember some of the language back when ObamaCare was 
passed, and some of the leaders within this Congress--and I count you 
all as leaders here, as I address you, Mr. Speaker--have said, We will 
repeal the most egregious aspects of ObamaCare.

[[Page H714]]

The most egregious aspect? Mr. Speaker, every aspect of ObamaCare is 
egregious. It is because it's a violation of our American liberty. And 
if we repeal one egregious aspect after another after another after 
another, each time we do that, we take the lid off the pressure cooker, 
and we lose that opportunity for the heat to come up where we can solve 
the whole mess.
  So I have argued since the beginning, we need to hold the lid on, 
keep the pressure on and let the heat increase until such time as we 
are all ready to pass a repeal of ObamaCare and send it to the next 
President. This President, we have an idea what he would do with it, 
but the next President will sign the repeal.
  And so I've worked on that relentlessly over the last couple of years 
and worked with each of the Presidential candidates on this, and every 
Republican candidate has taken a pledge or an oath multiple times for a 
100 percent full repeal of ObamaCare. Almost all but one of them have 
pledged to rip it out by the roots, to repeal 100 percent of ObamaCare 
and not leave one particle of it left behind.
  It's what we must do if we're going to keep faith with our Founding 
Fathers. It's what we must do if we're going to protect, preserve, and 
refurbish the liberty that is God given to us as Americans. It's what 
we must do if we hope to have an economic future in this country with 
an unsustainable ObamaCare staring at us. It's what we must do if we're 
going to have research and development in the health care industry and 
if we're going to continue to lead the world in providing health care. 
It's what we must do if we're going to preserve and protect the 
Constitution of the United States, which we've all taken an oath to 
uphold.
  All of these are reasons for the full 100 percent repeal of 
ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker. It needs to happen. It needs to happen in the 
first weeks of the next Congress, and the repeal needs to be set upon 
the podium on the west portico of the Capitol, prepared there for the 
next President of the United States so, when he takes the oath of 
office, his first act of office can be to sign the repeal of ObamaCare 
right there at the podium, the west portico of the Capitol. I hope to 
have a good seat for that glorious occasion, Mr. Speaker, and I'll 
intend to do my share of the work to continue this argument to position 
us so that this Congress is prepared to pass that repeal.
  I believe that we should just go through a warm-up drill here fairly 
soon. Now, this is St. Valentine's Day, February 14. Sometime in the 
next 30 to 60 days would be appropriate, Mr. Speaker, for the House of 
Representatives to renew and refresh our vote to repeal ObamaCare 
again. Perhaps the people over in the Senate have understood how 
important it is and have changed their mind, but I believe that this 
Congress should remind the American people that we are still--100 
percent of the Republicans--in a bipartisan way in favor of the full 
100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. That's an important message to send.
  Mr. Speaker, I'd also submit that the repeal of Dodd-Frank is an 
essential component, too. We've got to do a lot of undoing of this 
administration before we can get turned around to doing what we need to 
do to start the reform process over again. We will have lost 2 or 3 or 
more years before President Obama, and being locked up in a Congress 
that's led by Nancy Pelosi then and Harry Reid on the floor of the 
Senate, and we'll have lost 4 years of the Obama Presidency. We've got 
to make some progress. We've got to make some progress, and that can't 
come as long as ObamaCare sits in the way. It can't come as long as 
Dodd-Frank sits in the way.
  The decisions that were made by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to 
presumably reform the financial world, the solutions came from some of 
the people that contributed to the problem. And I would suggest that we 
do this as a financial package, Mr. Speaker, and that would be in the 
early days of the 113th Congress to pass the repeal of Dodd-Frank, to 
pass the repeal of the Community Reinvestment Act, and to move Fannie 
and Freddie even more boldly towards privatization. And some of those, 
I understand, are in the agreements that are being negotiated right 
now. But it won't be bold enough or strong enough, I'm convinced of 
that.
  And, by the way, let's repeal Sarbanes-Oxley while we are at it. If 
we do that--running the table is what I would say--repeal Dodd-Frank, 
Sarbanes-Oxley, the Community Reinvestment Act, and move Fannie and 
Freddie toward privatization, all of these things will lay a foundation 
where we can write some reasonable regulations in on our financial 
institutions and open this country back up to do business again, Mr. 
Speaker.
  I think it would be appropriate of this Congress to move the repeal 
of Dodd-Frank that Michele Bachmann has introduced. She has carried 
that legislation with her around on the Presidential campaign trail. 
She is the lead on repeal of Dodd-Frank. And I think a great way to 
welcome her back to the conference after a brilliant run for the 
Presidency would be to bring her repeal bill forward here on the floor, 
the repeal Dodd-Frank. And it sends a message, Mr. Speaker. The message 
that it sends is the House is for repeal of Dodd-Frank. The 
Presidential candidates are for repeal of Dodd-Frank. Send it over 
there to the Senate and see what they want to do about it. But getting 
that marker down helps encourage the Presidential candidates that this 
Congress is in and will be in lockstep with the Republican nominee.
  Those principles that are universal among all Republican candidates 
at this point should be moved by the Republican majority in the House 
of Representatives. For example, passing official English. Eighty-seven 
percent of the people in this country support English as the official 
language. It sits there as a dormant issue because it seems as though 
the only agenda that this Congress has is jobs, jobs, jobs. Well, 
people earn better pay and better benefits in their jobs when they have 
English skills.

  We burn billions of dollars--and that means ``consume'' or ``waste.'' 
That was a hyperbole, so to speak. We waste billions of dollars in 
multilingualism, when the strongest and most powerful unifying force 
known to humanity throughout all of history is having a common 
language. It's more powerful than a common religion, a common 
background, a common race or ethnicity. It's more powerful than a 
common sex. It is the most powerful unifying source in the world.
  When God looked down at the Tower of Babel and He said, Behold, they 
are one people, they speak all one language, and they are building the 
tower to the Heavens with the arrogance that we remember. He said, 
Behold, they are one people, they speak all one language and nothing 
they propose to do will now be impossible for them because of having a 
common language to bind them together. So God scrambled their language, 
and that's where the Tower of Babel came from, and they began to 
babble. They couldn't understand each other, and they split up to the 
four winds. And that's the Old Testament story about how we ended up 
with so many different nations.
  We also know historically what has happened. People move into 
enclaves and live in those enclaves. They communicate with each other. 
If they do that and don't have a language, they'll create their own. 
But even if they go there with a language, the language morphs into 
something else if it doesn't interrelate with the other communications 
in the region, in the neighborhood, and in the world.
  So we have encouragement going on in this culture of encouraging 
language enclaves instead of the success of assimilation. And I think 
we should move the H.R. 997, the English Language Unity Act, here right 
away. It's an 87 percent issue. I know nothing more popular than that. 
If I've got an agenda here, Mr. Speaker, that is as popular as 87 
percent among the American people and I can't get a vote, meanwhile, 
the President can offer his budget and 97 Senators reject it and he 
gets a vote, there's something really wrong with that. There's a lot of 
disparity between the two.
  So I think that's another thing that needs to happen. Let's move 
English, and let's move the repeal of Dodd-Frank. Let's move the repeal 
of ObamaCare. Those pieces would be good messages to send to the 
American people. They're good pieces of policy to be established to lay 
on the desk of Harry Reid that can join the cordwood of the jobs 
creation legislation that

[[Page H715]]

this House has sent over to the Senate and help set the stage for the 
next President of the United States who needs to come in with a strong 
mandate from the American people, from the United States Congress, with 
a clear vision that Americans support our new President to take us 
where we need to go as a people.

                              {time}  2010

  But the components of the agenda of the next President need to 
include a balanced budget--a balanced budget amendment, a commitment to 
that balanced budget amendment, and a mandate from the American people 
to get that balanced budget amendment passed. It's the only way that I 
can see that we get that accomplished, Mr. Speaker. We need to call for 
the Presidential candidates to call for a balanced budget amendment.
  So I will go through these issues again: pass a balanced budget 
amendment, one that has an 18 percent cap on spending of GDP, one that 
requires a supermajority to raise taxes, that has legitimate exemptions 
for a declared war or a case of a serious national emergency. Balanced 
budget amendment, repeal ObamaCare, repeal Dodd-Frank and the other 
financial components that I said, and let's move forward with a country 
that's based upon freedom, upon liberty, upon free enterprise. If we do 
all that, Mr. Speaker, the American people will take care of the rest.
  We still have interest that we've got to pay and principal that's got 
to be paid down before we can get rid of the interest bill. This is a 
huge credit card that has been run up. The debt of the countries in 
trouble in the EU is $4.5 trillion. And now President Obama's $1.33 
trillion added on to his $4-plus trillion threaten to take his term of 
the Presidency well over $5 trillion, knocking on the door of $6 
trillion in accumulated debt in his time in office.
  Whatever we do that's good, we still have to pay the interest and 
have to pay the principal on that debt. So the recovery time, the depth 
which we might have otherwise fallen a little bit further, it takes a 
lot longer to recover when you borrow the money to do so. That's the 
nature of the free enterprise system. That's the nature of capital and 
investment and risk. That's the nature of Keynesian economics that the 
President has embraced.
  I am a supply-sider. I don't believe that borrowing money, handing it 
to people, telling them it's their patriotic duty to go out and spend 
that money is how we're going to recover from this economy. We're going 
to recover from this downward economy by producing those goods and 
services that have a marketable value here and abroad. We do that, 
we'll sell, we'll compete, we'll rebalance our trade deficit, we'll 
make American industry strong again, and we will again be the 
powerhouse of the world. When that happens, we are strong culturally, 
politically, we are strong militarily, we are strong economically, and 
we will continue to be looked up at by the rest of the world.
  If we fail economically, if we become one huge Greece--as Chairman 
Ryan is concerned, and as I am and many others--if we become one huge 
Greece, there is no one to bail us out. There's no one there. We can 
hold our tin cup out, but no economy will be big enough to put enough 
in the tin cup that we can get a meal. We would be in a situation of 
default. It would be a sad, sad day in America. It would take 
generations to build our credit back again. It would take generations 
to recover. In fact, the trajectory of this country would be so altered 
that we could never recover.
  Power abhors a vacuum; it fills it. If America has an economic 
crisis, as I'm suggesting looms in our future, that power, that global 
vacuum will be filled by our competitors. Much of that power that is 
projected around the world has been paid for in treasure and blood, Mr. 
Speaker. We must maintain that for the future destiny of our country. 
We must maintain it out of honor for those who have sacrificed so much 
to protect freedom and liberty around the world.
  We are a great country. We're the unchallenged greatest Nation in the 
world. We derive our strength from Judeo-Christianity, western 
civilization, and free enterprise capitalism. We need to understand 
those underpinnings of American exceptionalism, those pillars of 
American exceptionalism. We need to celebrate them. We need to teach 
them. We need every child to understand the pillars of American 
exceptionalism and be able to recite them in the same fashion that the 
seven sacraments are recited in the very Catholic Church that's 
standing up for our constitutional rights today, along with the other 
faith-based organizations.
  It's a big picture we have going on in this country, Mr. Speaker. 
It's a great country that we are. It's a great country filled with 
great people, people with individual spirits, individual sense of self-
sacrifice, willing to tighten their belt, willing to carry their share 
of the load.
  And what do they want out of it? An opportunity to work, prosper, 
raise their family, live free without an oppressive government reaching 
in and regulating every aspect of their very lives. They want to be 
able to utilize the God-given liberty that was articulated by our 
Founding Fathers, and promote that kind of liberty to all humanity 
throughout the world, wherever they may be.
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention to the discussion that I've 
had with you this evening, and I would yield back the balance of my 
time.

                          ____________________