[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13594-13595]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




             PARTISAN POLITICS IN AUTO DEALERSHIP CLOSURES?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, just south of Houston, there is a town 
called Alvin, Texas, where a Chrysler dealership called Rogers Dodge is 
making a lot of money selling Chryslers; but on June 9, they are going 
to close down because the auto task force gang has notified them that 
they have to close.
  Rogers Dodge is on the list of 789 Chrysler dealerships around the 
country that are being closed down under questionable circumstances. 
There are five in the Houston area alone. The question remains: What 
are the criteria for closing down these dealerships?
  The auto task force gang picks winners and losers, but they refuse to 
tell America how those decisions are made. Well, neither they nor the 
administration is talking. The blissful silence makes us wonder what's 
going on. Some of these Chrysler dealerships being ordered to close are 
profitable--others are not--but according to some news reports, there's 
one thing they all have in common except for one single exception found 
so far: they all have connections in some manner to making campaign 
contributions to Republicans.
  Chrysler, an American institution, is no longer being run as a 
private-sector company. It has been taken over by the auto task force 
tyrants appointed personally by the administration. These individuals 
tell Chrysler what to do, and they have to do it because Chrysler took 
all that bailout money before they went into bankruptcy. Now the auto 
task force gang gets to run the company.

[[Page 13595]]

  By the way, Mr. Speaker, we still don't know where that wasted 
bailout money went.
  According to the Federal Election Commission Web site, there are 
reporters and bloggers around the country who have been digging through 
lists of donations. They have been comparing donor names on the lists 
with the names of owners of the Chrysler dealerships that have been 
forced to close. Some of these reports say that campaign contributions 
went to GOP candidates or to political action committees from the 
Chrysler dealerships that are being forcibly shut down.
  Did this group of auto task force individuals discriminate against 
Republican dealerships in Chrysler-style or in Chicago-style paybacks? 
We don't know. How in the world can we square that with the reports 
that only one dealership being ordered to close down so far contributed 
to the administration's campaign--and that was only for $200? Campaign 
contributions appear to be the common thread in all of these ordered 
closures. That's some coincidence.
  Rogers Dodge in Alvin, Texas, is one of the more profitable 
dealerships. Newspaper reports say they have increased their new car 
sales by 50 percent in just the last 4 months. That's a big 
accomplishment in this economy. They paid cash for their brand-new $3.7 
million building 3 years ago. Along with many other dealerships, they 
bought millions of dollars of inventory after being pressured by 
Chrysler to help the company's financial situation so that Chrysler 
wouldn't go bankrupt. Now all of these assets paid for by these 
dealerships will be worth mere pennies on the dollar. One report in the 
Houston Chronicle said this inventory of cars that the dealerships were 
pressured to buy now will have to be sold as used cars.

                              {time}  1945

  Some of these dealerships are fighting back against the Auto Task 
Force with a lawsuit of their own. According to the Houston Chronicle 
article, Nicholas Parks, the president of Rogers Dodge and a lawyer, 
says he's fighting the closure because he doesn't think the bankruptcy 
court should be used to close these vendors, especially those that are 
making money. How can you use the bankruptcy laws to shut down a vendor 
who is making a profit for Chrysler? This is very interesting. The 
American people are starting to ask a few questions on their own.
  Are these Auto Task Force tyrants picking the winners and losers 
based on campaign contributions? Does the administration have a Nixon-
style enemies list? All these questions because the Auto Task Force 
guys aren't talking and aren't telling us why they closed down certain 
dealerships and why they let others remain open.
  We are now living in a time where the government controls both 
Chrysler and GM, which we should call Government Motors. And the 
government alone, not the free market, decides who wins, who loses, who 
stays in business and who must be forcibly closed down. Meanwhile, 
100,000-plus Chrysler workers at auto dealerships who did nothing wrong 
will be out of work on June 9 thanks to government control. So much for 
the promise of new jobs.
  And that's just the way it is.

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