[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 7037-7038]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




INTRODUCTION OF H.R. 3499, RETURNING CONTROL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION TO THE 
                                 STATES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Culberson) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. CULBERSON. Mr. Speaker, I am proud to follow my good friend from 
Utah and join with my colleagues from New Jersey and North Carolina 
tonight to speak in support of Federal legislation to restore the 
single most important part of our Constitution, the 10th amendment.
  We all know from English class the beginning and the end of a 
document are the most important, and why our Constitution begins with, 
``We, the People,'' and why the Founders wrote at the very end of the 
Constitution a declaration that they believed was as self-evident as 
saying the sky is blue: That all power not specifically delegated to 
the Federal Government in the Constitution was reserved to the People 
and the States.
  The 10th amendment has been forgotten largely, and all of us as 
Republicans are committed to doing everything that we can to try to 
preserve and protect the power of the States and individuals. The way I 
often express it to my constituents is, I am a Republican because I 
want to get the Federal Government out of our lives and free us from 
the income tax, the most intrusive possible tax, to go to a national 
consumption tax to restore local control over public education, which 
is what we are here to talk about tonight, legislation that I filed 
with my colleague from Utah (Mr. Bishop), with other colleagues here 
tonight from New Jersey and North Carolina.
  H.R. 3499 will return control over public education to the States 
using a very simple concept that I can really actually best illustrate 
by using these three glasses of water.
  If you imagine that this first glass represents we the people and the 
water within it all the rights, powers, and privileges given to us as 
individuals directly from the hand of God, the way our constitutional 
system works is that we the people, and I will use Texas as the 
example. When we the people of Texas created the Republic of Texas, we 
only agreed in the creation of the Republic of Texas in our 
constitution to give the Republic of Texas maybe that much power and 
reserve the rest to we the people.
  When the Republic of Texas became a State at midnight December 29, 
1845, and this is true of every other State in the Union, when Texas 
joined the Union in 1845, the State of Texas only agreed to give the 
Federal Government maybe about that much power. Very limited and 
specific.
  But as a result of the war between the States, the assassination of 
Abraham Lincoln, the Radical Reconstruction Congress, the concentration 
of power in Washington, Congressmen who love to pass bills that are 
tough on crime and who want to protect the schools and the little 
children, and FDR and the New Deal, and judges like William Wayne 
Justice in Texas, who took over our prison system, all power today is 
concentrated in Washington.

[[Page 7038]]

There is really very little, if anything, left in the States; and 
certainly we wonder how much individual freedom we have left.
  However, what Congress can take away by statute we can restore by 
statute. And there is so much Federal law governing the way our public 
schools work that these two books, Mr. Speaker, represent the two 
public education titles, Title XX of the U.S. Code, and that is the 
other half of Title XX. Those Federal statutes that send about $13 
billion out to the States in Federal education grants are sent to the 
States primarily through the education bureaucracies.
  I, like Mr. Bishop, came to the State legislature. We would meet in 
Texas every other year. And when we would return, we would discover 
that the Texas Education Agency had signed us up for some new Federal 
education grant program that we knew nothing about. But we now, as 
State legislators, had the responsibility to pay for that program. And 
often it was an underfunded or completely unfunded Federal mandate 
which we then had to come up with new money, like Mr. Bishop mentioned 
for the computer.
  I have been looking for a way to design a Federal law that operated 
automatically, like a computer virus, transferring authority over 
public education over these Federal grant programs automatically back 
to the States, transferring, and using the water glasses again, the 
Federal glass, by statute, control back to the States over public 
education automatically.
  H.R. 3499 does that. It states very simply that all Federal education 
grant programs, other than IDEA, the Individuals with Disability 
Education Act, and Federal grants, for example, to Indian nations or 
military bases, that all other Federal education grant programs, about 
$13 billion worth, go away in your State unless the State legislature 
passes a law and says, yes, we want the money with all the strings 
attached and we surrender State sovereignty or State control over 
public education to the extent that State law is inconsistent with 
Federal law.
  This would do several things: First of all, obviously, it would save 
a lot of money, for the money that the States walk away from saying 
that there are too many strings. But H.R. 3499 is in the Education 
Committee, and I deeply appreciate the support of my colleagues in 
helping to bring it to the floor for a vote to restore 10th amendment 
control over our schools.

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