[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16950-16956]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    DRAINING THE SWAMP OF CORRUPTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. As always, I appreciate the privilege to be 
recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives. We have 
had a little bit of a break here, a hiatus to go back home and spend 
some time on the 4th of July to celebrate the birth of our great 
country--233 years of freedom.
  A lot of that freedom has been debated, deliberated, and argued over 
here on the floor of the House of Representatives in this world's 
greatest deliberative body. The most costly freedom was fought for and 
lives and blood were sacrificed for on this soil and in foreign lands 
as well for this Nation to emerge at what has been and had become a 
strong and vibrant constitutional Republic. Part of the requirements to 
maintain that strong and vibrant constitutional Republic are that we 
engage in debate here and that we bring together and aggregate the best 
ideas of the 300 million Americans that elect the 435 Members of the 
House of Representatives and the 100 Senators.

                              {time}  2000

  It's essential that we maintain that kind of vibrant dialogue in this 
deliberative democracy, as some would call it. It's essential that we 
maintain the highest levels of integrity in order that this great 
Republic can continue on the path that has been charted for it by so 
many of our Founding Fathers and our predecessors. However difficult 
the process that they were in might have been, they emerged and led 
this Nation clearly along a path, a higher road; and that higher road 
has been a road that held our own Members accountable for the highest 
standards of ethics. We have an Ethics Committee here in the House. I 
recall much of the debate that took place here on the floor back during 
the 108th and the 109th Congresses when allegations were made about 
Members and their levels of integrity. I remember prior to my arrival 
here many charges being filed in the Ethics Committee against Members 
of Congress who, it seemed to be, their only transgression was that 
they were effective in advancing the conservative cause. I recall, 
Madam Speaker, that when Nancy Pelosi was the leader and not the 
Speaker, she gave many speeches herself and alleged over and over 
again, Elect us into the majority, and we will come in, and we will 
drain the swamp, Madam Speaker. Well, here we are now. The majority has 
changed. The promise apparently is drifting away, and there are 
questions that continue to emerge and questions about the standards 
that are being adhered to, or not being adhered to, by certain Members 
of this body. Questions that are raised by publications that have a 
strong affinity for the majority party in this Congress, those who made 
a living out of attacking and criticizing Republicans when they were in 
the majority and Republicans when they were in the minority now are 
raising ethics questions about the activities of the Members of this 
new Democrat majority who is now halfway through their third year. So 
2\1/2\ years into this majority, we're starting to see that the 
allegation about draining the swamp was only an allegation about using 
ethics charges to attack Republicans. I'm not seeing this same level of 
leadership, regardless of the promise made by the Speaker, to 
scrutinize the Members that are under the public's scrutiny now, and 
some who are reportedly under investigation by the FBI. Now I'm going 
to be a little gentle about how I discuss some of these issues, Madam 
Speaker, because it is a delicate subject. But it's essential that the 
subject be raised and that we have this debate and this dialogue here 
on this floor because in the end, it's not going to be the conscience 
of the people that are crossing the line or allegedly crossing the 
line. They aren't going to wake up in the night and have an attack of 
conscience or an epiphany and come down here and say, I'm going to 
clean up my act. I've gone too far. I slipped into some things that I 
shouldn't have been involved in. That is not going to happen. That is 
not what human nature does except in very, very rare circumstances. No. 
What will happen is, if this is to be cleaned up, and if it's to be 
addressed, the ethics questions, the cloud that hangs over Member after 
Member after Member here, influential Members, members of the 
Appropriations Committee, Chairs of the Appropriations Subcommittees 
that exert significant influence over where taxpayer dollars go, this 
cloud that hangs over is only going to be cleared if the Speaker of the 
House follows through on her promise to drain her swamp--or if the 
public becomes so outraged that they demand that the situation be 
cleaned up.
  Now we have had for a long time in this House--and I can think back 
at least 2\1/2\ years--we've had a dysfunctional Ethics Committee, a 
committee that was a black hole, that if there was a charge that was 
filed, it went in, and it was never acted upon. And they could 
investigate in complete confidentiality so no one could look over their 
shoulder, a committee that was balanced and nonpartisan in such a way 
that it was immobilized and couldn't take action at all. I cannot 
remember the last action of the Ethics Committee that had any effect in 
a constructive way of providing more cleanliness here in the House of 
Representatives.
  Now if I get to these posters, I am going to go through some of the 
things that are constantly in the news. This summary comes out to be 
this: This is the ``draining the swamp'' leadership

[[Page 16951]]

hour of the Republican leadership, and we have a pattern of ignoring 
the corruption. There is a pattern of practice for Speaker Pelosi. We 
have eight appropriators who, it's reported, are now under 
investigation for potential conflict of interest violations. With the 
Nation's spending out of control and trillions going to special 
interest, we have questions and challenges that are coming up, flowing 
throughout the media. Let me say that new allegations of these defense 
millions are funneled to aides and relatives; contractors are now 
charged with kickbacks. We have seen thousands in defense contractor 
dollars go through PMA, and out of there came donations to the 
Appropriations Chair of the Armed Services Committee. Then we've seen 
$250 million in earmarks go back through that lobbying firm, PMA, 
which, it's reported, is clearly under investigation. A lobbying firm 
that has been closed down because of the investigation and those 
activities that are the subject of FBI investigations have shut down 
the lobbying firm PMA, a defense contractor lobbying firm, and have 
implicated a significant number of Nancy Pelosi's chosen Chairs, people 
whom she has handed the gavel to. This list is long, and I think it's 
expressive of what is going on. We had one of the Appropriations Chairs 
step down from the Ethics Committee because of reports of an ethics 
investigation but found himself chairing the Justice Appropriations 
Committee--the people that were reportedly investigating him, holding 
onto the gavel in one hand to control the Appropriations and Justice 
approps, at the same time holding the purse strings of the FBI, who is 
reportedly investigating the chairman of Justice approps. This goes on 
in the United States Congress, and the American people are not 
outraged? I think they are. I think they just have so many things to be 
outraged about that they can't bring their focus on one subject or 
another because it comes at them over and over again like a trip-
hammer. These allegations that are documented--the same Member, the 
chairman of Justice approps, received a $70,000 donation to his 
family's foundation. At the same time millions were earmarked to the 
West Virginia High Tech Consortium. That's just a touch of what's going 
on there, Madam Speaker. And as I've watched this for 4 to 5 years, it 
just gets worse. When we see a chairman of Justice approps, for 
example, with 50 earmarks in a bill, and the people that are on the 
committee are afraid to challenge him for fear that their district will 
be punished, a certain culture grows up within the appropriators in 
this Congress, when their fear that they will lose their leverage and 
not be considered to be a loyal member of that committee, might be 
considered ineffective, if they are to raise the issues that they know 
should be raised. What happened to the altruism that I read about in 
our history books, the altruism that I was convinced existed and burned 
within the heart of all of our predecessors as they shaped this 
country? Yes, they disagree on policy; but I didn't think that they 
disagreed on ethics. That's the chairman of the Justice approps. We 
know about the Appropriations Chair of Armed Services and his 
connection with the earmark to the unused airport. I think we ought to 
take a CODEL to that airport. We have here a situation that has to do 
with the CBC. As we call it here, the Congressional Black Caucus, Madam 
Speaker, for those who are not on a day-to-day basis dealing with the 
acronyms of this House and, let me say, a separatist group that has 
formed themselves in a way that if it were any other group of people, 
they wouldn't be allowed to have an organization like this. But it's a 
matter of record that the Congressional Black Caucus took some trips 
down into St. Martin, Antigua and Barbuda. That was in 2007. And the 
question is: Were there corporate funds that sponsored these trips? And 
if so, it would be a clear violation of House rules. There is 
videotape, I'm advised, that shows the banners of the corporations hung 
up across the area where it's presented, and Members are thanking the 
corporations for sponsoring their trip. And who would be dealing with 
the investigation? Representative G.K. Butterfield, Democrat, North 
Carolina, member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and one who had 
gone on a previous trip into that same part of the world with the same 
group of people. So we would ask the same people who are being, let me 
say, evaluated for a potential ethics violations to investigate 
essentially themselves. So maybe they want to get back together and 
have a little reunion and decide if they did anything wrong. We don't 
have answers to the public. We simply have a black hole of ethics that 
hangs over their head. They also argue that it's improper for someone--
and I'll argue this. It's improper for someone who attended the 
Caribbean conference to lead an investigation into it as to whether it 
violated House rules. What a contradiction. But the same gentleman 
who's leading the investigation, Mr. Butterfield of North Carolina 
said, You cannot completely divorce yourself from relationships. Yet he 
would be willing to recuse himself if he got the sense that there was a 
contradiction. We shall see.
  And what do we hear from the Congressional Black Caucus when the 
issue was raised and the press asked them the question, Did you go on a 
corporate-funded trip to the Caribbean? Or was it two or three? Their 
response was--well, they complained about a lack of minorities in the 
office that was taking a look at this issue, the Office of 
Congressional Ethics, which was set up by Nancy Pelosi. So Speaker 
Pelosi's Office of Congressional Ethics is looking into the activities 
of the Congressional Black Caucus and their trips to the Caribbean, 
potentially funded by corporations. And what does the Congressional 
Black Caucus have to say? They don't think that the committee looking 
into them has enough minorities. The first question asked, and they 
have to play the race card. That doesn't speak to me as an issue that 
they have a very strong defense for. That's the knee-jerk response, 
Play the race card. That's why they are the Congressional Black Caucus, 
after all, the liberal Congressional Black Caucus. And we have Peter 
Flaherty, the president of a conservative watchdog group, and upon 
uncovering evidence of the trip's corporate sponsors, he said he was 
disappointed with the appointment of Mr. Butterfield to head up the 
investigative group. His answer was, the Congressional Black Caucus 
really sticks together. You can see their solidarity in the face of 
these ethics charges. To put one of their own members in charge of the 
investigation just shows that nothing has changed. The ethics process 
is still a complete mockery. Peter Flaherty.
  And Mr. McGee also questioned whether the Congressional Black Caucus 
members should be leading the probe. He said, In this case, this is a 
trip that is publicly connected to the CBC, and only CBC members were 
participants. To have a CBC member lead the investigation is not the 
best way to ensure a publicly credible and acceptable result. Mr. 
McGee, I agree.
  We could go on and on. But here is the quote from Speaker Pelosi when 
she said that she's making a commitment to ``draining the swamp of 
corruption.'' I don't see activity on that commitment, and it is time. 
It is time we raised the issue. It's time the American people look into 
these allegations. It's time that this Congress form an effective 
Ethics Committee, an Ethics Committee that can clean this up and drain 
this swamp, as defined by the Speaker, who I think eventually is going 
to have to respond to this. She's going to have to keep her word. She 
has created the organization, the evaluation organization, and now it's 
time to use it. And the name of the organization that she shaped 
escapes me for the moment, but it was formed by the Speaker of the 
House for the purposes of--in her words, ``draining the swamp,'' and 
what do we get from the Congressional Black Caucus but a complaint that 
there weren't enough minorities on the committee that were appointed by 
the Speaker. Now, I'd like to think that ethics is completely 
independent of ethnicity. I'd like to think that morality is 
independent of ethnicity or race or gender or whatever one happens to 
be oriented.

[[Page 16952]]



                              {time}  2015

  I would like to think right is right and wrong is wrong, that truth 
is truth, that fiction is fiction, that the Constitution is what it is, 
that the Bible says what it says, that the Declaration says what it 
says, and that every Member here would speak the truth.
  I would like to think that every Member of this Congress carries with 
them, internally, an ethical conscience that we owe a duty to the 
American people, that we owe a duty to the American people to live here 
at the highest standards and that we will not be drawn down into the 
low standards, and that we owe a duty to them to stop and to evaluate 
ourselves. That is what the Ethics Committee is about.
  The working group that is designed to enhance the Ethics Committee 
apparently is not functioning, but we do have a Member of the 
Congressional Black Caucus investigating the Congressional Black Caucus 
under the auspices of the organization that is formed by the Speaker to 
do just that. I don't think it is quite the fox guarding the henhouse 
because I don't know what goes on in the mind of Mr. Butterfield. But I 
will say it raises questions. This Congress needs to raise questions.
  We are watching favoritism here on the floor of the House. A week ago 
last Friday, the cap-and-trade bill, cap-and-tax bill, I call it, 
passed off the floor of this House. There were dozens of Members of 
this Congress, Democrats in the dozens, who had made the public 
statement that they were opposed to this cap-and-tax bill. But what we 
saw happen was as they needed the votes to get it passed, Member after 
Member would walk down in a lineup. They would queue up back here 
behind the microphone. And they would have in their hand their little 
script. They would carry that script down to the microphone. And the 
chairman who was managing the time would yield to them. They would read 
from the script. And the script would say something to the effect of 
``I took a position against the bill because I was concerned about the 
interests of my constituents,'' which really means ``because I know it 
will cost my district a lot of money, it will transfer our jobs 
overseas, and it is a bad idea.'' This is what they said before the 
bill came to the floor.
  An amendment was dropped in at 3 o'clock in the morning. It was 309 
pages. No one had a chance to read it. But still they read from their 
script, and it said, on balance, I think that we have mitigated some of 
the disaster created by this--they wouldn't say it quite that plainly, 
of course--but I think we've mitigated some of the problems in this 
bill and I think we're working on this and we're going in the right 
direction. I think my constituents are going to be adequately covered.
  Then they would pause while the committee chairman would read from 
his script. And he would say, I appreciate working with the gentleman. 
We've made progress on this bill. And even though we haven't had a 
chance to change any more language in this amendment that came in, 309 
pages at 3 o'clock in the morning, to accommodate for this component 
that this Member would like to have, still, the fact that we read this 
colloquy into the Record changes the meaning of the bill.
  And now the Member that was there and had read off the script, ``So 
therefore I'm going to vote for the bill because I've worked with the 
chairman and we each agree we've done our duty to God and country and 
the bill is not as bad as it would have been otherwise.''
  Really? The bill changes because one Member won't vote for it unless 
he gets some cover? So he walks down here, reads from the script, the 
chairman reads from the script, the Member reads from the conclusion of 
the script, and now we have changed the meaning of the bill? And it is 
enough to turn a vote around 180 degrees and deliver to America a cap-
and-tax bill by a vote of 219-212 which, by all appearances, is this: 
They're wrong on the science, they're wrong on the global warming 
argument, and the idea that you can set the Earth's thermostat simply 
by controlling CO2 emissions, only CO2 emissions, 
and by doing so from American industry is going to lower the 
temperature of the Earth, and that by lowering the temperature of the 
Earth, we are going to have a higher quality of life. That is the 
undercurrent of this.
  I will say they are wrong on the science. They can't make a 
scientific argument. They are completely wrong on the economics. The 
idea that we are going to create green jobs by taxing energy, specific 
kinds of energy, CO2-emitting energy, is completely wrong.
  What solution was the best solution if you accept the premise of Mr. 
Waxman? It would be a lot of nuclear-generated power, for which we have 
no provision that opens it up so that we can build more nuclear-
generating plants. It has become virtually impossible to build new 
coal-fired generating plants before this bill passed the floor of the 
House. The development of electrical generation in America is now 
frozen, suspended until we can figure out what is going to take place, 
what the Senate will do, if they take up the bill at all, and how they 
might amend it. But when you take something that is bad and you amend 
it marginally, it is still bad.
  I have watched this unfold here on the floor of the House. I have 
watched it unfold behind the scenes. I have watched it unfold in 
committee. And I have yet to hear a legitimate dialogue in debate. I 
have yet to hear one Member of this Congress come here and raise the 
argument that scientifically they are right, that they can dial the 
temperature of the Earth down by reducing the CO2 emissions 
in the United States and by raising the cost of energy.
  This bill is an energy tax. It taxes all the energy in America. If 
you get in a car or on a bus and ride a half a block, you have used 
energy. If you throw on a light switch, you have used energy. If you 
pick up a cup of coffee, it took energy to heat the coffee and make it. 
It took energy to make the cup. Whenever you move, you are using 
something that took energy to produce. All of our components are 
intricately tied to energy.
  A nation that has expensive energy will be uncompetitive against the 
nations that have cheap energy and lots of it. One of the strengths of 
this Nation has been that we have had a sound and good, competitive, 
multi-sourced energy policy in the United States. We pioneered the oil 
drilling in the world. We led with this. It started in Pennsylvania. It 
developed in Texas and Oklahoma and other places around the country. It 
went up to the North Slope of Alaska. It went offshore.
  America has developed much of the technology that produces the oil 
and natural gas for the world today. That has been a core of the 
strength of America's vibrant and huge global economy that we drive. 
The percentage of it that we have is so significant. We have had almost 
unlimited natural resources for most of this term of 233 years. We have 
had a lot of cheap energy of many different varieties. We have had 
constitutional rights, especially property rights, the rule of law, a 
work ethic and a morality that has tied this country together. These 
are the pillars of American exceptionalism.
  We had ideas for energy just a year ago. A year and a month ago, some 
of us were here on the floor of the House, and we had been debating 
energy for I will say about 6 weeks, when we got up to the August 
break. Now as the energy debate got turned up, the Speaker of the House 
decided she didn't want to hear any more discussion about energy. So 
they abruptly adjourned and shut this process down. We kept debating 
anyway as the microphones were shut off and eventually the lights were 
shut off. We kept debating anyway. And we went out into the Capitol 
Building and brought people in to the seats, people off the streets, 
and set them in the seats here on the floor of the House of 
Representatives. People sat in Charlie Rangel's seat. They sat over 
here in Barney Frank's seat. They sat in Mr. Dingell's seat. They sat 
in Republican seats too. They sat this close, right here, tourists off 
the streets of Washington, D.C., off the Capitol Building in

[[Page 16953]]

here on the floor of the House of Representatives so we would have 
somebody to talk to because the TV cameras were shut off and turned to 
the side. The microphones were shut off. And the lights were shut down 
in here because the Speaker didn't want to hear any more energy debate. 
But the delivery we gave then and the delivery that we continued on up 
until nearly the election last fall was all energy all the time, as our 
leader says, ``all of the above.''
  I put a chart here on the floor that showed all of the sources of 
energy that we consume in the United States. It is a pie chart with 
color code, how much is coal, how much is natural gas, how much is 
petroleum products, gas and diesel fuel, jet fuel, heating oil, how 
much is ethanol, biodiesel, wind, nuclear, geothermal, solar, and coal. 
The list goes on. We were consuming 101.4 quadrillion Btus of energy in 
the United States and producing about 72 quadrillion Btus of energy. So 
roughly speaking, we are producing only 72 percent of the overall 
energy that we are consuming in the United States. And yet we are an 
energy-rich nation. We are an energy-rich nation that should be able to 
shape an energy policy, an energy policy that will keep our energy 
cheap so that our economy can be competitive, so that Americans can 
make things here in the United States, and America will be where the 
jobs are. Jobs are going to be where it is competitive.
  It is pretty obvious from looking at what is happening to General 
Motors and Chrysler that we have had a lot of trouble being competitive 
on labor. If we can't be competitive on labor, at least we can be 
competitive on our natural resources and at least we can be competitive 
on our energy prices. Instead, the Speaker of the House has embarked 
upon a path of making energy more expensive in this country under this 
viewpoint of trying to save the planet. Do you remember the quote from 
last year? ``I'm trying to save the planet. I'm trying to save the 
planet.'' She is trying to save the planet by increasing the cost of 
all of the energy in America and driving up the cost of electricity.
  We had a witness before an Energy and Commerce Subcommittee chaired 
by Mr. Markey. This gentleman's name is David Sokol, who is the 
chairman of the board at MidAmerican Energy. Mr. Sokol testified as to 
the costs in increased electricity, the costs to the, I think the 
number is 6.9 million, ratepayers that MidAmerican has. They have a 
balanced portfolio of energy sources. They said they can meet the 
carbon caps that are being imposed on them in this cap-and-tax bill. 
But what will happen is the customers will have to pay. They will have 
to pay twice, once for the cap-and-tax, and again to change, to 
renovate the means by which they deliver that energy. He testified that 
the cost, just for the additional cost annually per household, was $110 
a month, which maths out to be $1,320 a year just for the electricity. 
Add on to that the extra cost for gas for all of the costs on consumers 
because of diesel fuel in trucks and the extra energy that it takes to 
produce anything. Let's just say you're in the business of mining iron 
ore and shipping that over and melting it down and turning it into 
steel. All of the energy that is required there to mine it, to heat it, 
to convert it, all of that makes it almost prohibitive when you see 
costs that are going up for energy costs, in many cases a doubling of 
certain kinds of energy costs.
  Also, when you look at the map of the United States, you will see 
that the States that have the credits, that have a surplus of 
hydroelectric power, a lot of the people in those States would like to 
put our rivers back where they were. I'm not among them. I think we can 
improve upon Mother Nature. I think hydroelectric power is a wonderful 
thing. I would be happy to have more of it. But the States that have it 
are the States that get carbon credits to trade back, to sell back to 
the States that are generating a lot of their electricity with coal.
  So that amounts to a transfer of wealth from the States that are 
short on hydroelectric and other forms of renewable energy production 
to those that are long on the nongreenhouse-gas-emitting-generating 
systems. So you would see almost all of the country transferring their 
wealth to the Northeast, to the full West and the entire western 
seaboard. South Dakota would be a recipient State because they have a 
series of hydroelectric dams in South Dakota and not a lot of people to 
use the electricity. That is what happens. It pits Americans against 
Americans. It punishes some, and it benefits others. It punishes all of 
agriculture.
  This is all taking place because an idea was generated 30 or so years 
ago and was pushed by Al Gore who received a Pulitzer Prize and made a 
movie. And they don't have to be factual. They don't have to prove 
anything. They just simply make an allegation that the Earth is getting 
warmer, and if the Earth is getting warmer, then we must do something 
because things are horrible. And so the only thing we can do is the 
thing that they present to us, of course.
  It reminds me a lot of the stimulus package.

                              {time}  2030

  The stimulus package was put together by President Obama. He came to 
our conference and said it is one leg of a multilegged stool that we 
have to construct to get us out of this economic crisis we are in. It 
was all one leg at that time. It was about a $2 trillion leg. It was 
$787 billion, and they throw in some more from some other bailouts, and 
it is about $2 trillion.
  So we went down this path. We were all pressured to vote for that 
$787 billion stimulus package because, after all, we were in an 
economic crisis and we must do something. Those of us who opposed the 
stimulus package were accused of being against doing anything. They 
just want to do nothing, they said, as if their idea was the only thing 
we could do.
  I wrote legislation, introduced it, argued for it, and got the back 
of the hand from the people who thought government should own 
everything because they didn't want free market solutions. It looks to 
me like they wanted government intervention.
  And so we have a stimulus plan and we have the nationalization that 
has taken place of Bank of America, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Merrill 
Lynch, is incorporated into that. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that used 
to be private became quasi-government, and now they are completely 
government, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Federal Government. And 
roughly, there is a $5.5 trillion outside potential liability of Fannie 
Mae and Freddie Mac, and that is if it all melts down.
  General Motors and Chrysler, there are about eight huge national 
entities that have been nationalized, formerly private, now 
nationalized under President Obama, the President Obama who said: I 
don't want to do this. I am not interested in taking over corporations. 
I don't want to be involved in the day-to-day operations of these 
corporations. He is a reluctant nationalizer of private businesses. He 
didn't want to be involved in the day-to-day operations.
  There are other solutions out there. One would have been to take AIG, 
this huge insurance company which had such a large share of the market 
that no one could check its balance sheet, no one could evaluate the 
premiums they were charging because no one understood the scope of the 
business that they were in. And they guaranteed the return, the 
performance of these mortgage-backed securities, this toxic debt, this 
toxic paper that these investment bankers had. No one could evaluate 
AIG. But they could pour hundreds of millions of dollars into AIG, and 
we couldn't even have a discussion about splitting them up, dividing 
them up and throwing away the bad components and letting them compete 
against each other, or sending them into bankruptcy and letting them go 
that route and let the emerging insurance companies fill that market. 
That could have been a solution, too.
  I argued this way. Look at AIG as if it were an apple, and you take 
that tool off the kitchen counter and it takes the core out and slices 
it up into six pieces. That could have happened

[[Page 16954]]

with AIG like it happened to Ma Bell, and they could have competed with 
each other. But instead, hundreds of billions of dollars poured into 
AIG and our investment banks, propping them up, carrying them on, and 
then effectively nationalizing them, refusing to allow some of the 
lending institutions to pay the money back so they could be out from 
underneath the thumb of the White House, a White House that claims to 
not want to operate any of these companies, a White House that fired 
the CEO of General Motors and hired a new CEO of General Motors and 
named all but two of the board members of General Motors and dictated 
to the bankruptcy court the terms of the Chapter 11 before the court 
made the decision, dictated by the White House. By the way, the White 
House that says, as a matter of fact a President that says I don't want 
to be involved in the day-to-day operations of General Motors appointed 
a car czar who had never sold a car nor made one, and probably never 
even fixed one but probably has driven several, to call the shots on 
General Motors and on Chrysler, a car czar who is on the phone on a 
regular basis at the report of Fritz Henderson, the new Obama-appointed 
CEO of General Motors.
  We are at the point where we have eight huge entities that are 
nationalized by the White House in a breathtaking fashion that many of 
us would have claimed would not have been a legal activity, or would 
have taken the authorization of Congress or resources that were not 
available to the White House to spend without congressional 
authorization, all happening so fast with the operation here that has 
shut down the kind of criticism that might have produced some free 
market results.
  So the White House is involved in day-to-day operations of General 
Motors. The White House dictated who would be buying up what is left of 
Chrysler, appointed the new CEO of General Motors and all but two of 
the board members, and all of this works under the auspices of the car 
czar, who is one of 22 czars appointed by the President. There are 22 
czars; more czars than the Romanovs, as Senator McCain famously said. 
One of them is the payroll czar. The payroll czar looks around to 
determine whether the CEOs of the companies that have been nationalized 
or received TARP funds or Federal funds by the White House, to 
determine if the CEOs and their executives are making too much money 
performing the service that they are performing. In America? The 
President appoints someone to decide who is making too much money while 
they advocate the class envy that was part of the campaign and 
nationalize eight huge formerly private sector entities and invest our 
tax dollars in them and hold back shares now of common stock as if they 
were an outside investor, as if they were Warren Buffett riding to the 
rescue.
  Madam Speaker, America has gone down the line. When I take us to the 
point of these hugely nationalized formerly private companies, all of 
that can be reversed at this point. All can be overturned in a saner 
time by a more prudent Congress and an administration that either sees 
the light or is replaced by one that does. All of it can be.
  But this line of the cap-and-tax bill is the Rubicon. It is the 
stream that we have crossed here in the House that if they cross it in 
the Senate, it will be an irrevocable policy that forever burdens the 
economy of the United States of America to our detriment and hands over 
an advantage in global competitiveness to China and India and other 
emerging industrializing countries. And if that happens, there is no 
going back.
  I talked about the culture of corruption and the promise of the 
Speaker to drain the swamp. There is new corruption on the horizon. The 
cap-and-tax bill lays the foundation for a massive amount of 
corruption.
  When President Obama said look across to Spain for an example, an 
example of a country that gets it right, an example of a country that 
has already gone through the green revolution and created the green 
jobs and now they are in this new green economy, we can do that in the 
United States, too.
  The President and many others make the argument that taxing energy in 
America and trading carbon credits will create these green jobs and we 
will have this new green economy that will be apparently healthy and 
vibrant, and they guarantee that they will create green jobs.
  But what they don't do is talk about this in the context of, similar 
to the same philosophy we are going to create or save, and I don't 
remember the first number now, maybe 4.5 million jobs. I know it got 
down to 3.5 million or 3 million jobs this stimulus plan was going to 
create or save. Let's say 3 million jobs. That is on the low side. It 
has been lowered a little since then.
  Create or save. Now the instant I heard that, it just hit me, create 
or save. If it is going to be 3 million jobs that you create or save 
with the stimulus plan, as long as there are 3 million jobs left in the 
United States of America, the President can always claim those jobs 
were the jobs I saved. You would have lost them all if it hadn't been 
for the stimulus plan. That's the logic of the ``create or save'' kind 
of phrase.
  Those are slippery phrases, calculated ambiguities. They 
intentionally, I believe, give a dual meaning so people can listen and 
they hear something. What do they want to hear? They want to hear that 
the stimulus package is going to create 3 million jobs and so they grab 
ahold of that, and they are not listening to the words ``or save.'' 
Create or save. They are not thinking that there is no way that anyone 
can quantify a job that is saved.
  You can save a job if it is already lost and you put it back. I 
remember a company that was getting shut down, in the neighborhood of 
40 jobs, and we engaged with the bureaucrats and entreated that they 
look at it more objectively and stick with their rules but not be so 
hasty. And out of that, those jobs remained. I would quantify we saved 
about 40 jobs.
  But you can't deal with a national policy that can take credit for 
creating or saving jobs in the same category.
  So what's the net increase or decrease in jobs? The stimulus plan 
hasn't created net new jobs. It has not lived up to the standards set 
by the White House which predicted we would see unemployment as high as 
8 percent, maybe even 8.5 percent. Now it is at 9.4 or 9.5 percent, and 
the numbers are 14.5 million Americans unemployed and another 6 million 
who are looking for work. So let's just say 20 million, 20 million 
unemployed in the United States of America. None of those were jobs 
that were saved. None of those were jobs that were created, and the 
White House hasn't defined a single one yet of the jobs that were 
created, nor the ones that are saved.
  So cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, what does it do to the culture of 
corruption? What does it do to the ethics challenge that is before 
these many Members of Congress of which I have a list? Let me see. One, 
two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine that are being 
scrutinized and are in the public eye.
  Even under this environment of getting to the cap-and-tax, and I will 
share with you what happened in Spain as they lurched into their green 
economy to create their green jobs.
  Spain drew a conclusion 7 or 8 years ago that they wanted to be a 
world leader in green jobs, a world leader in this green revolution, 
and they wanted to reduce the amount of CO2 being emitted 
into the atmosphere and get themselves in line with the Kyoto treaty. 
So they set about replacing their normal generation in Spain with a lot 
of wind power generators; other means, too, but wind power in 
particular. When you get involved in issuing permits and who gets to 
put up and where you are going to locate a wind generator, that means 
bureaucrats and politicians are involved and favorites get chosen, just 
like the favorite dealership in Massachusetts that lost his franchise, 
but at the pleadings of the chairman of the Financial Services 
Committee had his franchise reinstated even though others did lose 
their franchise.
  Favorites get played in politics. It happened in Spain. In the case 
of

[[Page 16955]]

Spain, they were going to create these green jobs. Here is what they 
learned. This is the data that comes out of 7 to 8 years of experience, 
of going down this path that cap-and-tax takes the United States of 
America if the Senate passes it and the President has promised that he 
will veto it. They did create jobs. They created green jobs. And for 
every green job that they created, they had a net loss of 2.2 private 
sector jobs because it drew capital out of the private sector and out 
of the Spanish economy. They lost the two largest companies in Spain. 
One of them was British Petroleum, or BP as they are known now, that 
pulled out of Spain because their costs have gone too high.
  They created a new green job here and there at the cost of, for every 
one, 2.2 lost jobs in the private sector. It took Spain up to the 
highest unemployment rate in the industrialized world, 17.5 percent 
unemployment and rising. The cost per green job created was $770,000 
per job.
  So they spent $770,000, created a green job and lost 2.2 jobs in the 
private sector. And they saw their electrical bills skyrocket. I think 
that was the phrase used by President Obama. You would see coal-fired 
generating plants, the cost of that electricity skyrocket under his 
cap-and-tax plan.
  Well, electricity skyrocketed under a very similar plan, a plan that 
has been identified by President Obama as a model to follow, the 
Spanish model. In 3 years' time, the electrical bills for the residents 
in Spain increased 20 percent. Now that is not quite so shocking, I 
don't suppose, Madam Speaker, but industrial electricity costs in the 
same period of time went up 100 percent.

                              {time}  2045

  So residential electricity up 20 percent; industrial electrical costs 
100 percent. Now, we already see the picture of why they've lost so 
many large companies out of Spain. They've driven up the electrical 
costs where they can't compete any longer. And with electrical costs 
doubling in industrial in 3 years and up 20 percent in residential, 
they actually just hit the political threshold.
  It wasn't that that covered all the additional costs of generating 
electricity. The real truth is, Madam Speaker, that they took the cost 
of electricity up to the political threshold where they couldn't 
sustain it any longer, held it at a 20 percent increase for residents 
and a doubling, a 100 percent increase in industrial, and then, to pay 
for the rest of the cost of the electricity, went out on the financial 
market and borrowed the money to pay the electrical bills, borrowed the 
money from the international financial markets to pay the electrical 
bills in Spain at costs above the doubling of industrial and the 20 
percent increase in the residential. And in order to borrow the money, 
they had to pledge the full faith and credit of the Spanish Government, 
which means children yet to be born and the children and the 
grandchildren and likely the great-grandchildren of those using 
electricity in Spain today will be paying the interest and the 
principal on the electrical bills of their parents, their grandparents 
and their great-grandparents--should the economy hold together long 
enough that they would even have the opportunity to do that--while the 
competitiveness of Spain digresses in the world.
  And if this isn't bad enough, high electrical costs, borrowing on the 
international financial market to pay the electrical bill, 17.5 
unemployment, $770,000 per green job created, and for every time they 
created a green job they lost 2.2 jobs in the private sector. All of 
this going on, you still had the Sicilian Mafia involved in the 
politics of Spain, greasing the palms, so to speak, making sure that 
the right people received the right cash favors in the right 
denominations because politicians, business people are brokering who 
gets to put up the wind charger, who's going to issue the permit--well, 
they have that determined--who gets the permit issued to put the wind 
charger up on which land. And the Sicilian Mafia was involved in that 
and remains involved in that, according to the speaker we had for a 
breakfast I hosted a couple months ago. Not only were they involved in 
the politics of the permitting process, but also involved in the 
politics of determining who would be the contractors, the 
subcontractors, and the suppliers.
  So add Sicilian Mafia to this web, this web of corruption, this web 
of political favoritism, this ethical snarl that's there in Spain that 
contributes to dragging down their economy--the green economy that they 
set up with the idea they were going to create green jobs.
  There is no empirical data, no quantifiable way that one can look at 
Spain and declare that Spain is a model that the United States should 
emulate, but the President has declared that we should do that and 
doesn't seem to be accountable for that flawed judgment.
  So when I asked the question, of all of these things that are wrong 
in the Spanish green economy--the high unemployment, the high 
electrical bills, borrowing money to pay your electrical bills, the 
Sicilian Mafia wrapped up in the politics that's contributing to 
political corruption--of which there are many indicators here in this 
swamp that the Speaker has declared she wants to drain but taken no 
move to do so when it's her own Democratic Members--all of this going 
on in Spain, and here in the House of Representatives we pass a cap-
and-tax bill that is a tax on all of our energy, that sets up carbon 
credits that will be traded--not just in the United States, but around 
the world.
  And so somehow, with a bill in the House, we are going to pay 
somebody to plant trees in Brazil, thinking that that's going to 
sequester some carbon so we can burn some more natural gas to generate 
some electricity in Florida. How about that?
  And I would just ask the question, aside from this snarled mess and 
the open door for confusion and corruption and favoritism and people 
getting rich off of credits, aside from all of that, aside from the 
extra cost in electricity of $1,320 a year just for the households in 
my district--according to Mid-American Energy, who hasn't seen a rate 
increase in over 10 years--aside from all of that, where are we going?
  If we could take the 25 or the 50 or the 100 smartest people in 
America, or the world, erase from their minds any of the last 25 or 30 
years of this global warming fear that has been perpetrated--and now 
has had to morph itself into ``climate change'' because we don't have 
evidence that the globe has been warming since 2002 so they had to 
change it to climate change--but if we could put the smartest people 
together, send them off on a retreat somewhere--send them down to the 
Caribbean where the Congressional Black Caucus had their little codel 
that's being looked at--set them up on an island, erase from their 
memory anything that they've heard about this global warming allegation 
or the proposed solutions, and first ask the question on the science, 
do you really believe that the Earth is getting warmer? Well, maybe.
  And there are some trend lines prior to 2002 that would indicate 
that. That's not so much the point, but we should ask that question. Do 
you believe it is? And if you conclude that it is--smartest people in 
the world with great training in all of the fields that they need, then 
the next question would be, do you believe that the emissions from the 
industrial era, the industrial revolution are contributing to it? How 
much, and what could we do about that?
  Now, remember that if you would take the atmosphere--and we're 
dealing only with CO2 emissions in the United States of 
America, the cumulative total--and I've got to go a little bit from 
memory, but I'm going to get the scale of this exactly right, and if 
you take the entire atmosphere of the Earth--I know all this air has a 
volume to it, it's measured in metric tons, and that number is 105.5 
million metric tons--I believe that's the number, that's the right 
decimal anyway--all of that Earth's atmosphere and draw it out and 
represent it proportionately in a circle, let's say a circle 8 feet in 
diameter, two 4 by 8 sheets of drywall side to side, draw a circle 8 
feet in diameter, a foot higher than my hand

[[Page 16956]]

around, draw that circle, think of that circle in your mind's eye, 
Madam Speaker, and that represents all the Earth's atmosphere.
  Now, the cumulative total of the CO2 suspended in the 
Earth's atmosphere over the last 205 years, since the dawn of the 
industrial revolution, all of that CO2 that's gone in and 
that's now suspended in the atmosphere, if you would draw it on a 
circle, in the middle of that 8-foot circle--which is all of the 
Earth's atmosphere--that circle would be how big: 5 foot, 4 foot, 3 
foot, 2 foot, 1 foot in diameter, perhaps, in the middle of that 8-foot 
circle? Or 6 inches, or 3 inches, or 1 inch--we're still going, Madam 
Speaker. About the diameter of my little finger; .56 inches would be 
all that would represent all of the CO2 that is suspended in 
the Earth's atmosphere that has been emitted by the United States of 
America in the last 205 years, the dawn of the industrial revolution. 
And we're talking about that half-inch diameter circle in the middle of 
the 8-foot circle and reducing those emissions by 17 percent in the 
near term, as much as 83 percent per year in the long term.
  Now, where does that get us? And how can anyone think that you can 
put a drop into an ocean and change the temperature of the ocean, or 
think that you could microscopically alter the dimension of that center 
little circle that represents all of the suspended CO2 from 
the United States and somehow magically that's the key to adjust the 
Earth's thermostat. It is utter vanity, Madam Speaker. And you can put 
the smartest people in the world off on an island somewhere, erase all 
of the things that have been pumped out in their brain, start them out 
with fresh data, scientific data, empirical data, put some physicists 
there, put some meteorologists out there, some mathematicians there 
while we're at it, and by the way, let all of those people churn around 
on this climate change model--and let's put some economists out there 
also to churn around on what happens--and I would just be about willing 
to guarantee that 50 or 100 of the smartest people in the world, if you 
erase their institutional memory of all of the information that has 
been pounded into this country over the last 30 years since we made the 
transition from the impending ice age--which some of us remember, and 
at least one scientist made the switch himself, said it was certain 
that there was a near-term ice age that was going to come down and 
freeze us off of the North American continent. Now he's a global 
warming enthusiast. He was right one time maybe, and he will never live 
to see if he was right or wrong.
  But all of those smart people that we could put on an island and 
erase their institutional memory and start them with an objective 
analysis, very well trained physicists, meteorologists, economists, 
mathematicians, chemists, put them on that island and ask them, 
evaluate the data that we have today and look at the science that we 
have, if the Earth is getting warmer and if you think that's a problem, 
what would you do about it, I can't imagine that 25 or 50 or 100 
smartest people in the world coming up with such a concoction as a 
proposed solution as passed off the floor of this House in the form of 
the bill that's called Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax--or 
whatever the other acronyms are for this bill. I can't imagine that 
really smart people could ever cook something like that up.
  Because this bill that passed the House, it was never a product of, 
let me say, sound science, peer-reviewed analysis, sound economics. It 
was never a product that ever laid this thing out down through the 
continuum and gamed it out to the end. No, Madam Speaker. It's a 
political concoction that's put together in a hodgepodge. It's--what 
shall I call it--liberal genetic engineering of policy. And we are 
stuck with it coming out of this House.
  I think that this House made the single most colossal mistake made in 
the history of the United States Congress a week ago last Friday when 
they passed the cap-and-tax bill. I think they're wrong on the science, 
and I think they're really, really wrong on the economics. And if 
they're right on the science, they hand over the economy of the United 
States and put us at a disadvantage and allow India and China and other 
developing countries to continue to belch crud into the atmosphere and 
out-compete us economically. And more and more companies will be moving 
to those countries while those economies prosper and pollute the 
atmosphere, even to the extent of producing or developing an average of 
one new coal-fire generating plant per week without the emissions 
controls that we have here in the United States of America, pouring 
this all forth out of the smoke stacks in Asia and shipping us more and 
more of our goods.
  So what's happening is we're buying plenty from Asia already, and 
that contributes to our trade imbalance. And then, in order to meet 
these budget shortfalls that are driven by the President and the 
liberals in Congress--trillions of dollars, a $9.3 trillion deficit in 
the budget offered by President Obama on top of an $11.3 trillion 
existing deficit, over $20 trillion--and what do we do to deal with 
that? We buy everything we can that we don't want to make here in the 
United States anymore, and then we borrow the money from the Chinese to 
buy things from the Chinese. So it's the equivalent of going to the car 
dealer, I suppose, and borrowing the money from him to buy the car that 
he makes.
  And you keep doing that over and over again, but you've got to build 
something that has value. You've got to make things. You've got to 
provide goods and services that can be competitive. And we need to be 
competitive globally.
  The very idea that this country is a giant chain letter, a giant ATM 
to be cashed into and that we can create a government economy is false. 
It has to have value, and it has to have value in the private sector. 
The private sector is the productive sector of the economy; the 
government sector is the parasitic sector of the economy. And you 
cannot grow the parasitic sector of the economy at the expense of the 
productive sector of the economy and think that you can compete 
indefinitely in this world while you're borrowing money from the 
Chinese to pay the bills that you're creating by having the Chinese 
make the things that we can't be competitive anymore and buying it from 
them.
  And I get along fine with the Chinese, but you've got to build things 
that have value and you've got to have a sound economy. We've got to 
have an ethical Congress. We've got to stand on free markets. And we've 
got to reverse the nationalization of our privatized industries. And I 
urge that we do so with all haste.

                          ____________________