[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 18152-18159]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

  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.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be 
recognized here on the floor of the House. I would remark that the 
common courtesy here is to yield. And I'm happy to yield to the 
gentlemen who are here if we could carry on this dialogue with or 
without that particular yielding. I know it is only four to one, so it 
would be an interesting engagement that could take place.
  I have to correct a few things on the Record. One of them is, as the 
gentleman from Ohio challenged the mendacity of the Republicans, who 
had said that there is a $4,000 increase on a payroll, that is exactly 
the number you get if the payroll is $50,000 and you tax it at 8 
percent. That is in the bill, Mr. Speaker, and that is a precise 
number, and that is what I sought to offer that could have been 
injected in for an open dialogue.
  But we do deal with the facts. It is hard to get those facts when you 
have a bill that is drafted and a bill that has to be drafted to match 
a CBO number. The Congressional Budget Office came out with an estimate 
of a $1 trillion health care plan, and we found out that the 
Congressional Budget Office came out with that number without having 
read the bill, Mr. Speaker.
  So we are poised to go down a path by tying a blindfold around our 
eyes and charging off into the abyss of socialized medicine with a $1 
trillion price tag, a little less than that, that is slapped upon a 
bill that nobody has yet, well, I suppose some now have completely 
read, but the Congressional Budget Office did an estimate on the cost 
of this socialized medicine policy over the telephone with the staff of 
the committee of the Democrats, not even a bipartisan staff.
  And that is how we make policy in the United States of America? And 
it is adequate to stand here on the floor and utter platitudes about 
what your political philosophy might be?
  I think it is interesting that I get to hear the quotes from 
Republicans, John McCain, on cap-and-trade. Well, I can think of the 
time pretty recently that would have been after this particular quote 
that we saw a few moments ago, the time I most emphatically agreed with 
John McCain, and that is when he said that President Obama has more 
czars than the Romanovs. That was something that I think illustrated 
part of the big picture that we should be talking about.

[[Page 18153]]

  This is a government that is out of control. It is overreaching. It 
is creating the nationalization of industry after industry in this 
country. It is breathtaking, the scope of the reach of this White House 
that is supported by the Democrats in the House and in the Senate. And 
who would have thought--let's just say if we just roll back in our 
memory and our mind's eye back to election day in November of 2008, 
what if somebody would have said, now you're ready to go to the polls, 
think about what you're going to do. Because if you elect President 
Obama, he is going to go in and nationalize three huge investment 
banks, the large insurance company, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 
General Motors and Chrysler. All of these huge eight entities all 
wrapped up together will all be controlled, if not controlling 
interest, in the hands of and in control of the White House.
  Then he is going to manage those by appointing 32 czars, and this 
will be hundreds of billions of dollars. And the idea will be that the 
economic stimulus plan is going to be FDR's New Deal on steroids.

                              {time}  2300

  And now, never mind that if one goes back and reads the data from the 
1930s from that Great Depression--there was nothing great about what 
people had to go through during that decade of the 1930s. But if one 
goes back and reads the data and tries to index it back to the actions 
of the New Deal and this Keynesian economics of borrowing money and 
trying to actually replace private sector jobs with government jobs is 
what was going on in the New Deal--the CCC camps, the WPA, and the list 
of these acronyms went on. But what it did was it created a lot of 
debt, and it delayed the recovery that would have come from the private 
sector of the economy. It competed directly with the private sector.
  One of those examples would be the Tennessee Valley Association where 
there was private-sector investment that was prepared to go in and 
develop just what the TVA turned out to be. And FDR went in and stomped 
on the private sector and grew a government instead.
  This is what was the model for President Obama.
  So he set forth--and he told us on a day on or about February 10, 
2009, he said that FDR didn't go far enough, that he lost his nerve. He 
got worried about spending too much money. If he hadn't gotten worried 
about spending too much money, the economy would have recovered. But he 
didn't spend enough money and, therefore, along came World War II first 
and became the largest stimulus plan ever.
  I don't take issue with the last part of that statement. I just take 
issue with the prediction that the New Deal would have worked if FDR 
would have spent a lot more money.
  This President hasn't lost his nerve. He is spending a lot more 
money. And if there is any doubt in anybody's mind about whether 
Keynesian economics and spending borrowed money to dump it in and grow 
government at a time of economic crisis actually heals up the economy--
there isn't any doubt in my mind because I've read the data. In fact, I 
went through every newspaper from the crash of the stock market in 1929 
until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, reading 
for the economic news so I could understand what people were living 
through during those days of the stock market crash and the deep, long 
trough of the Great Depression and then the shock of the attack on 
Pearl Harbor that launched us into a world war.
  I wanted to understand what that was like for the people that lived 
during that period of time. But I couldn't find evidence that the New 
Deal was a good deal on any kind of a broad scale, small little place 
as it was. It bought some friends, sure, but I couldn't find evidence 
that the New Deal worked. And economists that have gone back and 
studied that era can't show you the data that indicates the New Deal 
worked.
  But if anybody wonders, they can study this era 25 years from now 
when it will be clear--there won't be any question about, no more 
arguments can be brought up. No future President will be able to say of 
President Obama, Well, his stimulus plan would have worked but he just 
lost his nerve and didn't spend enough money.
  This President has not lost his nerve. He has spent way too much 
money, and he has nationalized eight huge entities. He's landed blow 
after blow against the private sector, the free-market economy that is 
the engine that drives this economy, and it sets the economy for the 
world, blow after blow.
  And they'll look back at this and they will say, $700 billion in 
TARP, $787 billion in the stimulus plan, untold hundreds of billions of 
dollars shoveled out the door of the U.S. Treasury to prop up 
businesses that don't necessarily go through the appropriations process 
here in Congress, the blank check of Tim Geithner is being spent. And 
all of that going on, and this President has the audacity--remember, he 
wrote a book with ``audacity'' in the title. This is a President with a 
lot of audacity. And the audacity now to float the trial balloon to 
call for another economic stimulus plan when this one is only partly 
spent and less than half of it--and we don't really know what those 
numbers are. It's being trickled out and it doesn't impact on our 
economy, and sometimes strung out over a number of years.
  But yet it was an act of desperation to get it before this Congress 
and pass it quickly because they had to have it to save us from a 
financial meltdown. But they didn't really use the bill in the fashion 
they said. Neither did they use the TARP bill in the fashion that they 
said.
  And so this urgency to prevent a meltdown was more what I see in the 
pattern of legislation brought through this Congress. It's the urgency 
of bringing this thing through this Congress before the American people 
figure out what's going on, pass it quickly and get it out of the way 
so it comes out of the public eye. And while that's going on, load up 
another one, put another round in the chamber and fire another one down 
through the floor of the House of Representatives and on over to the 
Senate, another destructive missile that brings down the economy in 
this country, the culture in this country, the spirit of the people in 
this country. This has been an all-out assault on Americanism that I 
have seen in the months that we have had here.
  The statements made on this floor that need to be corrected, other 
than the erroneous statement that a Republican had made a--just implied 
at least a willful misstatement. This President's plan and the health 
care, health insurance plan that's being debated in this Congress today 
and tomorrow, has in it an 8 percent tax on payroll, on the employer, 
on the employer's payroll, if he doesn't provide health insurance for 
his employees.
  So, an 8 percent tax. When you just think about how that works, let's 
just say there is an employee that's making $50,000 a year and there is 
not a health insurance policy. You can talk about the question of 
whether that's right or wrong. But in any case, there is not a health 
insurance policy.
  Under the Obama plan, there would be an 8 percent tax on that 
payroll, 8 percent of $50,000 is $4,000, precisely the number that the 
gentleman from Ohio objected to applies perfectly to a $50,000 payroll, 
which is not that unusual in the United States, and it's becoming far 
and far more common.
  So to take issue with a statement that's clearly factual I believe is 
misinformation itself.
  And the argument that we are sending--the other gentleman from Ohio, 
Mr. Ryan, said that $700 billion is going to those other countries. And 
the real number--and he's referring to the importing of petroleum 
products from foreign countries. And there were statements made last 
year that we were sending $700 billion to foreign countries to buy 
their petroleum.
  Well, those statements that were going out over the media caused me 
to be curious enough that I actually ran the numbers to find out, and 
the real number is this: that over that period of time, over--this was 
the middle of last summer in about July, and in fact July 11 would be 
the date that this statement was initially made. The actual

[[Page 18154]]

moneys expended to purchase imported petroleum, that's natural gas and 
oil and other products that come from oil wells, in their entirety, the 
actual money that we sent overseas during that period of time from July 
11 of 2009 to a year prior to that, that 12-month period of time, was 
$332 billion, Mr. Speaker. Not $700 billion. $332 billion.
  But we know July 11 was also the peak day for the highest price for 
oil and gas. That's when our gas hit the highest price at the pumps, 
and that's about the same time that crude oil by the barrel hit the 
highest price.
  So one could then, last July 11, a year ago July 11, extrapolate what 
we would import if we imported the same number of gallons: $700 
billion. If you work it out and take the gallons and multiply it times 
the highest prices we had, which was on July 11 of 2008, and carry that 
forward, you come with a number projected of $726 billion. But we never 
imported $726 billion because the oil prices plummeted some weeks after 
that and we saw our gas prices go from $4 and change a gallon and they 
dropped to nearly $2 a gallon in a short period of time. That was 
moving up to the election in November.
  So at this point, if you look at the most recent data, the number 
hasn't quite reached $400 billion in the amount of imported petroleum 
that we have paid for.
  It's still too much, Mr. Speaker, and we can be independent with our 
energy. And we should work in that direction and build the 
infrastructure that allows us to be independent. But we should also do 
it on real data and real facts.
  And as the other gentleman spoke about two wars going on--this is 
pretty interesting to me--the lament is still there that we're engaged 
in two wars. These are conflicts that were--let me say this: 
Afghanistan was certainly thrust upon us. And the Iraq situation is 
this: President Obama was elected--at least in part--because he 
aggressively criticized President Bush for going into Iraq and for not 
having an exit strategy.
  Well, Mr. Speaker, this House needs to know and the American people 
need to know that Bush had an exit strategy. It was a strategy that 
said we're going to provide victory and we're going to establish a 
stable government in Iraq that reflects the will of the Iraqi people. 
That's what's been achieved there. It really can't be argued today, Mr. 
Speaker, as to whether who won the war in Iraq. Al Qaeda is defeated in 
Iraq. They can't mount a military operation that's there.

                              {time}  2310

  American deaths in Iraq, as sad as they are, and every one of them is 
an individual tragedy and every one of them is an honorable patriot, 
and we need to keep them all in our prayers, as well as their families. 
It's been a high sacrifice, but it's also been a noble endeavor, and 
those that we have lost in Iraq in the last year through accidents have 
been almost exactly equal in number to those that we have lost to 
combat, which says that a soldier, sailor, airman, marine that's 
serving in Iraq today has roughly an equal risk of being injured or 
killed in the rollover of a Humvee on one of the Iraqi roads as they do 
at the hands of the enemy. And those numbers are getting--it's looking 
better and better each week that goes by, more stability in Iraq.
  And the exit strategy that President Bush devised in Iraq was what I 
said: win the war; establish a stable, moderate government in Iraq that 
reflects the will of the people. And so when we listened to the 
criticism that came from the other side of the aisle here and when 
Speaker Pelosi first was sworn in and received the gavel as Speaker of 
the House of Representatives, that was the 110th Congress. We're in the 
111th now. That took place in January of 2007.
  From that moment on, there commenced a series of votes here on the 
floor of the House that were designed to unfund, underfund or undermine 
our troops in Iraq. They, had they passed, and some of them singularly, 
but many of them in their aggregate portion would have brought about a 
defeat in Iraq as opposed to the victory that's been achieved.
  That's what's taken place in this Congress, efforts that undermine 
our troops. Still, our troops prevailed and still President Bush had 
the will to order the surge, and still after the surge was executed to 
the fashion that it brought about the result we see today. President 
Bush negotiated this so that we could not be giving up a victory that 
has been so costly and so nobly earned.
  And I did look him in the eye on this subject matter, and I know that 
he was preparing this country to sustain the victory that was being 
achieved at the time. And President Bush negotiated the SOFA agreement, 
the status of forces agreement, and it was signed last fall. The Bush 
status of forces agreement was signed last fall, and we find ourselves 
in the ironic situation today, Mr. Speaker, of having a President of 
the United States who was elected, at least in part, for criticizing 
his predecessor for not having an exit strategy in Iraq.
  But President Bush had an exit strategy, and it's on paper and the 
irony is President Obama is executing President Bush's exit strategy to 
the letter of the SOFA agreement. It's on paper. It's there. It's a 
matter of fact and a matter of action, and it can't be argued. It's 
just simply ignored because these are the people over here that 
wouldn't acknowledge that President Bush could do good unless they 
could put a quote up there that they might think would support their 
cause.
  So the quotes from John McCain come up in the same way. They 
criticized John McCain all last fall. Now they put his quote up here on 
the floor and they argue, why don't Republicans listen to John McCain. 
Well, Democrats wouldn't listen to John McCain. If they had, they would 
have voted for him and we'd have a different situation in the world 
today.
  Let's see, the Tehran situation and the nuclear endeavor of the 
Iranians is another thing that just befuddles me. As I listened to the 
debate in the previous hour, how it is that they're arguing that we 
have, let me see, we're on the cusp, as the gentleman from Virginia 
said, we're on the cusp of a great economic revolution. This economic 
revolution, the green revolution, I guess, all of these green jobs that 
are going to be created because they passed cap-and-tax on the American 
people out of the House of Representatives.
  And we think they're going to get their jobs back after the next 
election. The American people know better than this. They understand 
that when you call it cap-and-trade that it is truly cap-and-tax. What 
they do is cap the amount of energy that you're able to access in the 
United States and identify which forms you can and can't have, and they 
tax the living daylights out of what you do get.
  All energy in America will be more costly because of cap-and-tax that 
passed out of this House, and how anybody can think that we're on the 
cusp of a great economic revolution because we're taxing energy is way 
beyond me.
  The basic principles of business are things that I had to learn when 
I started a business, Mr. Speaker. And so just think of this as a legal 
pad, and you sit down with a little calculator and you draw a line 
through the middle of the paper, top to bottom. On one side, you list 
all of your expenses. On the other side, you list your income. You add 
up your expenses and you add up your income. You take the total income 
and you subtract the total expenses, and that's your profit. Probably 
never heard that described here on the floor of the House before, that 
simple accounting principle of total income minus total expenses is 
profit. On some of your expenses, of course, are taxes and the overhead 
and the things that people don't think about that people in business 
have to do.
  So if any business that you have, if you're running a flower shop, a 
barbershop, an ethanol plant, if you're manufacturing wind generators, 
if you're running a gas station, if you have an operation with a dozen 
carpenters working out of there with hammers and wheelbarrows, all of 
these things going on, this energy tax is going to make your business--
it's going to cost you more.

[[Page 18155]]

  So over on that column on the pad that you write down on your 
business expenses, when you see that they have passed cap-and-tax on 
you and you look at the cost of your electricity and your heating gas--
and let's see, the natural gas you might use in your manufacturing and 
your diesel fuel you put into your trucks and your heavy equipment and 
the fuel oil that you might heat with and the cost of the coal that 
might be generating the electricity, all of those things add up, and 
they're all part of the expenses of a business. And so if energy gets 
more expensive, so does the cost of running your business get more 
expensive; and the more energy intensive it is, the higher the increase 
as a percentage of your overall expenses and the harder it is to find 
some profit on the other side.
  And we are on the cusp of a great economic revolution because this 
Congress can increase the cost of our energy? It takes energy to do 
anything that we want to do. It takes energy to heat a cup of coffee. I 
go over to my office and push the button and make a pot of coffee, 
they're burning natural gas to generate some electricity to create 
enough heat that I can have a cup of coffee. It was coal, but Speaker 
Pelosi switched that around in our power plant here, and because there 
was a real concern that the coal that was burning was putting carbon 
dioxide up into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming and 
she became Speaker, she concluded that we would get away from that and 
we were going to be a carbon neutral Capitol complex.
  So Speaker Pelosi ordered that the power plant be converted over from 
coal to natural gas, and so that was done. And some reports show that 
it doubled the cost of our energy, and I haven't actually analyzed the 
numbers. I have to take that at face value. It's a summary report. It 
may or may not have been doubled. It could have been more or less. But 
the cost of our energy went up, we do know that; and still the 
calculation was that we were putting too many tons of CO2 in 
the air annually.
  So the Speaker, being true to her commitment to saving the planet, 
true to her commitment, she then went on the board of trade to purchase 
some carbon credits. These would be like, well, selling intentions I 
guess, or indulgences is a better word for it. So you could go on the 
board and buy carbon credits and they're indulgences for the carbon 
CO2 you put into the atmosphere, and it's supposed to be 
offset by somebody else's behavior because you've reached your limit of 
being able to limit the CO2 emissions you have here.
  So I tracked that; $89,000 spent on the board of trade to pay 
indulgences for the CO2 emissions that take care of this 
Capitol Building, and somebody had to go sequester some carbon that 
they weren't sequestering before, change their behavior to help the 
planet. This is the equation. Some of the money went to no-till farmers 
in North Dakota, farmers union farmers. In fact, I think that was the 
exchange that was used. Now, we don't have any evidence that these 
farmers just started a no-till because they got a check that was a 
contribution to encourage them to do that.

                              {time}  2320

  It's more likely they were with no-till farmers and they were just 
simply rewarded for something they were doing anyway. So we can't 
determine that there was any carbon that was sequestered out of that 
behavior.
  And then the balance of the money went to a coal-fired generating 
plant in Chillicothe, Iowa. Now that's a curious thing, Mr. Speaker. 
Think about how this works, that the Speaker of the House concludes 
that there is too much CO2 emitting in the atmosphere 
because of the coal-fired power plant that feeds this Capitol complex, 
and so she switches it over to natural gas because there's less 
emissions from natural gas.
  At the time, she said that because natural gas is not a hydrocarbon. 
Well, that didn't last but a day or so, and she finally discovered it 
was.
  So I'm not quibbling with her lack of technical understanding of how 
this works. Her conviction is clear; her understanding is not. The 
power plant was converted from coal to gas, and then still the 
emissions of CO2 continued, and we had to get to this zero 
emissions because we were going to be a model for the country.
  So that money went to Chicago, $89,000, and they brokered it through 
the exchange and paid some no-till farmers in North Dakota and the 
balance of the money went to Chillicothe, where we're really interested 
to find out what happens at a coal-fired generating plant that you can 
pay them to sequester some carbon, or let's say diminish the effect of 
carbon in the atmosphere.
  So I went to visit that plant. It's a well-run plant run by good 
people. It's an outstanding company. I've met with their CEO and had 
engaging conversations. When I visited that day, I stood in the shed 
that had big bails of switchgrass in it. And there was expensive 
equipment that was in there that was designed to pick up and put these 
big round bales--these are 1,500-pound bales--so that high in diameter, 
7 feet or so in diameter.
  And there was designed--I didn't see this actually happen: Put them 
on a conveyer belt, run them through a hammer mill, blow them out 
through a tube, and blend this ground-up switchgrass in with the coal 
that they were using to generate electricity.
  That was the plan. And what I saw was--well, switchgrass hay that had 
sat there for 2 years--and nobody had burned any switchgrass in 2 
years. They had tried it, experimented with it. They didn't have any 
data on what they'd learned from burning the switchgrass. But, in any 
case, they stopped doing it so it must not have been a particularly 
lucrative endeavor.
  But they got a check cut by the taxpayers and signed by Speaker 
Pelosi--this is figuratively, we understand--because they had 
diminished the CO2 in the atmosphere sometime a couple years 
earlier.
  That's what cap-and-trade is. That's brokering these imaginary 
credits that don't create anything exception imaginary sequestration of 
carbon, which in somebody's imagination turns a thermostat down on 
planet Earth.
  And of the people that advocate this, the aggressive, vocal 
proponents of cap-and-tax that think the Earth is going to be destroyed 
if we don't go through with their legislation, not one of them can 
explain the science. Not one of them can debate the science on the 
floor of the House. I'd be happy to do that. I have offered that many 
times. If somebody is convicted on the science and they want to come 
down, I'd be happy to yield. Schedule some Special Orders from now 
until the cows come home so we can talk about this science. But it is 
an embarrassment, the science that's underneath this.
  I don't take so much issue with the science as I do with the 
economics. They're wrong on the science. They're completely wrong on 
the economics. And people that can get it that wrong, it should be no 
surprise they could get it so wrong when it comes to a health care 
plan.
  But here's a couple of things I want to run through as I observe the 
gentleman from Texas has arrived to lend a hand with this endeavor.
  What do I have that's entertaining here? Let me just pull this one 
out. There's so much material in this Congress, it's amazing that one 
can get this done in a few short hours of Special Orders.
  This mouse has been kind of hard to hold down. He stands on his head 
once in a while.
  This is, Mr. Speaker, the saltwater marsh harvest mouse. He has been 
decreed to be a species that needs special help from the taxpayers of 
America. We need to have a stimulus plan that's going to jump us out of 
the deep hole we're in. So, of all the places that we could put money 
to grow this economy, where could it do the most good?
  I allege, and others alleged back during this process of the stimulus 
plan, that Speaker Pelosi had set up an earmark in there of $32 
million. Well, the allegations came back, No, that's not true. That 
can't be. There isn't any earmark there. The Speaker wouldn't do that. 
There's a statement that was put out by the Speaker's Office that said 
no.

[[Page 18156]]

  So what we really end up with now is, we find out yes, it is in 
there; it's just not $32 million. It's $16.1 million. The saltwater 
marsh harvest mouse.
  This little pet project right here, this cute little guy, has finally 
arrived to get his particularly special earmark.
  And if we look at what Speaker Pelosi said, she said, I don't want to 
have legislation that is used as an engine for people to put on things 
that are not going to do what we are setting out to do, which is to 
turn this economy around.
  I don't think I want to read the rest of that.
  You're going to turn the economy around by dumping $16.1 million into 
the salt water marsh harvest mouse, this pet project that everybody 
promised that I made this up. It wasn't in the bill. Now it's there and 
no one can refute it, this cute little earmark.
  So think of this little guy here. The least they could do is just 
notch his ear a little and put an earmark in that little pet project, 
that salt water marsh harvest mouse. It's going to get $16.1 million 
taxpayer dollars.
  That's not as wise an investment as the $89 million that was wasted 
buying the carbon credits to be the little microcosm model of what 
they're doing with the cap-and-tax bill on us. We've got a great big 
model on what they're going to do to us, all Americans, on this 
socialized medicine plan that looks to me like it took HillaryCare and 
wrote in large, in Technicolor, and in 3D.
  So, as I take a deep breath, I'd be very happy to yield to my good 
friend, the judge from Texas, Judge Gohmert, so much time as he may 
consume. I know he will use it wisely.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Well, in this body, wise is such a relative term. I 
appreciate my friend yielding. But wisdom seems to be in short supply. 
I may not have it, but I know it when I see it. I'm not seeing it being 
utilized in this House, in this Congress these days--not with the salt 
water harvest mouse.
  And I come bearing news. Of course, my friend from Iowa knows, Mr. 
Speaker knows, there are 14.7 million jobless Americans right now. If 
it weren't for the suffering that's going on right now in America, some 
of the things we were doing would just be comical.
  But we just had a job fair. I had a couple in my district. On the one 
hand, when you have a function and lots of people come, you're really 
excited people turn out. This is great. But when you realize each one 
of these represents somebody who has lost a job and they're hurting and 
their family is hurting, it breaks your heart.
  Then, when I saw cars line up for blocks, people coming to a job 
fair, looking for jobs, from people who do manual labor to airline 
pilots to engineers, I mean just the full spectrum looking for jobs, it 
breaks your heart because you know they're hurting, you know they're 
suffering.
  There are 14.7 million jobless Americans right now. The unemployment 
rate now climbing up over 9\1/2\ percent. We have got a trillion-dollar 
deficit, we find out this week. And there are some indications that we 
haven't gotten a report recently as we should have from the OMB because 
maybe somebody is trying to stifle it because it may be that we're way 
over a trillion-dollar deficit.
  We already set the record this year under this President and this 
Speaker with the kind of deficit that's been run. We know that there's 
been 2 million jobs lost since President Obama's stimulus package.
  I know people here will recall we weren't given a chance to read the 
stimulus bill because we were told that if we waited another day, more 
people would lose their jobs. So you guys can't read the stimulus bill. 
Some of us wanted to.
  Some of us, like me, read the bailout bill. And that's why we knew 
this was not something, no matter what kind of pressure was brought to 
bear, not something we could vote for. But we couldn't read the 
stimulus bill because everyday people were losing their jobs.

                              {time}  2330

  So you can't read it. Just pass it because we were told that this 
will start working immediately. So it was rushed through, passed 
through this House without our doing any kind of diligence, much less 
due diligence. Then the President sat on it for 4 days until he went to 
Colorado to have a photo-op to sign it.
  What happened to all of those people who would have lost their jobs 
every day if we had taken the time to read the stimulus bill?
  Now we hear much later, well, nobody expected it to work immediately. 
Well, that's what you said. You said it was going to work immediately. 
In fact, the President said, not only was it going to go to work 
immediately, but we've heard just in recent days that it has done its 
job. Now we find out it hasn't done its job. People are still losing 
their jobs every day. So 2 million jobs have been lost since that 
stimulus was passed, the stimulus that we were not allowed a chance to 
read or to amend. It was not done properly.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman will briefly yield.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Certainly.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, there is also a number out 
there of about 6.8 million people who no longer qualify for 
unemployment who are still looking for jobs. So, of that 14.7 million, 
we can add another 6.8 million to that. The number is well over 20 
million people who are looking for work in the United States of 
America. The direction is going the wrong way.
  I'd again yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate the gentleman's comment and for yielding 
back, but I come bearing news.
  I believe my friend from Iowa, Mr. Speaker, has seen the schedule for 
tomorrow. We got that tonight. Well, the schedule has a bill on it that 
is going to be taken up. Let's see. I'm looking for the formal name of 
the bill, but basically, it's welfare for wild horses. We're going to 
vote on that tomorrow.
  We've got people who are losing their jobs every day--devastating 
households, devastating people--and the bill coming to the floor 
tomorrow is welfare for wild horses. That's why I say, if it weren't 
for how serious this is in knowing that real Americans are out there 
hurting and are having problems with their own habitat, this would be 
comical. You're going to spend $700 million on welfare for wild horses. 
In fairness, there's an even late-breaking report that says, well, 
actually, we're thinking, by the time the smoke clears and by the time 
all is said and done, it may only be as much as $2 million in welfare 
for wild horses. This is what's in the bill.
  We will conduct a wild horse census every 2 years. Yes, the 
Constitution requires that we have a census for people every 10 years, 
but in the wisdom of this body or lack thereof, depending on your 
perspective, we've decided we need a 2-year census to deal with the 
wild horses.
  This bill will also provide enhanced contraception. Now there will be 
a fun job. We were told by this administration that there were going to 
be green jobs. I don't know if that will be a green job or just what 
color it will be, but we're going to provide enhanced contraception. 
That's in the bill, enhanced contraception, and there will be birth 
control for the wild horses.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I just can't go on further with 
this thought process until you can go into a little more detail on what 
that means. I am totally confused on that legal language in the bill.
  I would yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Well, ``enhanced contraception'' means we're going to 
help the horses control the process by which little horses are created. 
I know it's late, you know, 11:35 here on the east coast, but there 
could be little children watching out in California, and I'd rather not 
get more descriptive on the process of how those wild horses are 
created and on how this enhanced contraception will keep them from 
creating little wild horses.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, would there be a reason why 
just regular contraception wouldn't be adequate?
  I would yield.
  Mr. GOHMERT. As my friend from Iowa knows, we don't do things halfway 
in this Congress. If we're going to

[[Page 18157]]

provide contraception for wild horses, it will be enhanced. That's what 
we want to do.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Being from Texas, the gentleman has ``enhanced 
everything'' in Texas. Do they have enhanced contraception in Texas?
  Mr. GOHMERT. I was not aware of us in Texas having enhanced 
contraception, certainly not for wild horses.
  It doesn't stop there. It will be interesting to find out from the 
studies how many green-, brown-, whatever colored jobs these will be 
that will be created to help the horses with their little contraception 
issues.
  In addition, we are going to provide an additional 19 million acres 
of public and private land for wild horses, and we're going to have $5 
million within the bill for repairing horse damage to the land. So that 
will be interesting.
  Then also, before any Americans can adopt these wild horses, there 
are millions in this bill to allow for the home inspections of 
potential homes that may wish to adopt these wild horses. If you want a 
wild horse, we're not going to trust you to have a wild horse until we 
do a home inspection to allow us to check on you. You have to let Big 
Brother come into your home to see if yours is a fit place for these 
wild horses.
  Now, the thing that really gets me here--again, if it weren't so 
serious and if people weren't losing their jobs as we speak and if 
there weren't people hurting, this would be comical. I do know I'll get 
some nasty letters from people: How could you seem so insensitive about 
the wild horses and about their needs for enhanced contraception?
  The fact is that this is going to be voted on tomorrow. It will be 
debated on the floor. We haven't been allowed to read, to amend or to 
deal with some of the most pressing issues in this country with 
habitats for Americans. Americans are losing their habitats right and 
left in this country as they lose their jobs, and we're worried about 
the wild horses.
  The thing that came to my mind for people, Mr. Speaker, who may be 
listening is: when you get on an airplane, one of the first things they 
do is walk you through the safety instructions. One of the things they 
tell you is, in the event of an emergency and in the event of a loss of 
cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will drop down for each passenger. Then 
they tell you to put your own mask on first. You may have a small 
child, and you may want to first put it on your child, but unless you 
put your own mask on first, you may not be able to help the child. Put 
your own mask on first. Save yourself, and then you'll be able to save 
others around you.

                              {time}  2340

  So I thought about that example with application to what's been going 
on in Congress. You know, if we do not save Americans, save their jobs, 
save their habitats, then how in the world will there be an American 
government left to help the wild horses? You want to help the 
environment, you want to help wild horses? Save the country first. Once 
the country is saved, then we can get around to saving the wild horses 
and helping them with enhanced contraception. But until we save this 
country from bankruptcy and people from losing their homes, we are not 
going to be able to help anybody, not the wild horses and not their 
enhanced contraception needs. Those wild horses will be devastated when 
this country goes bankrupt, and we can't help anybody, much less a wild 
horse.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I'm adding to the cause 
here. There are some things that need to be known about the wild horses 
before we have the great wild horse debate here in Congress tomorrow. 
One is, I feel like it may not be a good idea to read these bills if it 
brings out this kind of thing, but we have to talk about it, and there 
is some data that we need to think about. That is, there's been a 
concerted effort to determine in a way that we couldn't sell any horses 
any longer in the United States of America that might end up on the 
dinner plate of somebody in Belgium or France. So what that does is, it 
took the price out of horses; and it took them from $500, $600 a head 
on down to them being essentially worthless. So the people that have 
horses that I know say, If you have three horses in your pasture, you'd 
better lock your gate because if you don't, you might have five in 
there tomorrow morning. People are dumping horses, turning them loose 
on the range. The population of horses are going up because there is 
not a market to cull those horses out of the herd to manage them. So 
you end up with hungry, starved horses wandering around; and it takes 
an act of Congress to deal with the horses because they wouldn't allow 
the horse owners to manage them. They took the asset value out of 
horses in a very large way. I did the math on this. I can't go back and 
memorize the whole formula; but I can tell you the conclusion of it, 
which would be extra horses are in this country because they have been 
barred from being sold and sent off for human use. Those numbers of 
horses, if you figure the half-life of a horse at about 10 years, it 
accumulates an extra million horses in America, a million horses 
running around here; and we're going to count them every 2 years, which 
seems really ridiculous to me. But if you calculate what a horse will 
eat and how many acres it takes to feed a horse--not everybody can have 
a horse. They don't have enough acres in order to do that--but it works 
out to be those extra million horses eat enough feed to consume what 
can be grown on enough acres that we could, instead, produce a billion 
gallons of ethanol on the acres that those million horses would be 
chewing the grass down to the nubbins on.
  So it is going to be an interesting debate tomorrow. I think I had 
better go back and read the bill tonight myself. I find it an 
incredulous piece of language that has been brought up. I've got myself 
vetted on--we've done horses. We've done the salt water marsh harvest 
mouse here, the $16.1 million earmark for the Speaker to take care of 
her neighbors by San Francisco with these little earmark pet projects.
  There is another project here that is a huge project, and that is 
this new health care plan that has emerged. I came prepared to talk 
about it a little bit. This big, huge health care plan that--it was too 
expensive when the first estimates came out, and so the Speaker was 
critical of the Congressional Budget Office's estimates, and those 
estimates miraculously were reduced somewhat, we think, because some 
language got changed in the bill. This $1.5 trillion or so CBO estimate 
went down to just a little under $1 trillion. Well, now we can afford 
this. You know, I always thought too, if I want to buy something, if I 
can get it down below $1 trillion, it's not so bad. It is like buying a 
loaf of bread. If it's $900-and-some billion, it isn't nearly as bad as 
$1-plus trillion. So I find out that that CBO estimate, made by the 
Congressional Budget Office, these professionals that calculate the 
costs of the legislation, they usually either do it for committee 
Chairs first and somebody else over months and months, if you can get 
it done. But the Congressional Budget Office had not read the bill 
either. We have a score on this massive growth of bureaucracy that 
takes over one-sixth or one-seventh of our economy, and the costs that 
are projected from it that come from the nonpartisan, highly 
professional Congressional Budget Office come out of there not with 
them reading the bill and analyzing it and a putting formulas in place 
that can be tracked back, but by being on the telephone with the 
Democrat committee staff to negotiate down to a number that would be 
low enough that they think they could fund the bill and sell it. We 
think that this bill is going to cost two or three or more times higher 
than the estimate that's there. But the part that hits me the hardest 
and the most is this piece down here.
  Now when you look at this flow chart, all of these that are white are 
existing bureaucracies. The colored ones are newly created by the bill 
that are linked in with existing bureaucracies. There is much to be 
said about each one of these because they are huge and intimidating. 
But this one here is the one I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that the 
American people focus on.

[[Page 18158]]

These are the traditional health insurance plans. They exist. And 
there's some number I saw the other day, it was around 1,300 different 
companies selling health insurance in America. That's a lot of 
competition. Those that survive the insurance czar--I don't know if he 
actually exists today, but there are 32 of them, and it doesn't take 
long to create another one--these existing insurance companies that 
have 70 percent of the people pleased with the health care plan that 
they have, these qualified health benefit plans would be the plans that 
are approved by Obama's insurance czar. So we wouldn't have the same 
competition that we have today, not the same policies we have today. We 
would only have the policies that are permitted under the bill, 
policies that would require that they fund abortion, policies that 
would require mental health, policies that would require little or no 
deductible and little or no copayment plan because they have to be 
written in such a way that the newly created government plan, this 
public health plan over here in the second purple circle, that the 
government could compete. So what we would have would be all of these 
private plans here that exist today. When President Obama says, ``If 
you like your current plan, don't worry. You get to keep it,'' well, 
you get to keep it for a little while; but if it doesn't exist any 
longer or if it changes because the government has said that these 
insurance companies can't write their preferred policy in the way they 
want, but they have to write it the way the insurance czar says it 
would be written, or if we subsidize this insurance plan over here, the 
newly created public health plan, if the government subsidizes that, 
the premiums will be lower than they will be in the private sector. The 
premiums won't reflect the risk, but it will push out and crowd out and 
kill the private insurance market. It's just a fact that that's what 
happens, Mr. Speaker. I can give the clearest example of how this will 
and can work. There was a time when people bought flood insurance in 
this country from a private provider, insurance companies created, in 
part, for the purposes of that property and casualty insurance. So if 
your home was flooded, you could be compensated, and you would pay the 
premium according to the risk. The government decided to get into the 
flood insurance business. Now they're in the flood insurance business. 
They sell flood insurance. They actually require you to buy flood 
insurance in some cases before you can get a mortgage on a property. 
The flood insurance program that exists now has a couple of unique 
things about it. First, it has crowded out all of the private sector. 
As near as I can determine, there is not a single company in America 
that's selling flood insurance. I asked the question today at a 
conference, What if I want to start out a company and sell flood 
insurance to the people that are out there in the lowlands that need 
that coverage? I asked the question rhetorically; and I got the answer, 
There is no prohibition towards starting a flood insurance company or 
an existing company from expanding their services into flood insurance. 
The prohibition is, the Federal Government is in the business. They 
have cornered 100 percent of the market. There isn't anybody competing 
against them, and we know that government can't do anything as 
efficiently as the private sector can--or hardly anything. So the 
circumstances are this: The flood insurance account is $18 billion in 
the red. That's a deficit that comes out of the taxpayers, and that 
represents how much below the cost of doing business the flood 
insurance is. That's what government does. So if we can have a viable 
and relatively healthy flood insurance program in the private sector 
that existed years ago and the Federal Government comes in and competes 
directly, like it did with crop insurance too, by the way, they crowd 
out the private providers, and they put in the government program, and 
pretty soon there's nobody there but government.

                              {time}  2350

  That is what will happen here. And if anybody thinks that the 
President's promise that if they like their insurance plan, their 
health care plan, they get to keep it, they just don't lose it the day 
the bill is signed. And they won't get to make that decision because 
the insurance company may have to fold up and sack up their bats that 
day or a month or a year later.
  Even those private providers that will last for a while will still 
have to adjust their premiums accordingly. And when they do that, they 
won't be able to compete with the federally subsidized plan, and you 
will see employers that will drop the private carrier here and adopt 
the public plan here because it will be cheaper.
  We saw Walmart take a position this past weekend that they supported 
an employer-mandated health insurance plan. Now, it doesn't necessarily 
mean they support this monstrosity here. But is President Obama going 
to tell Walmart thanks for the support of the concept that he is 
promoting, but you can't sign up on the public plan because some of 
your employees might want to keep the policy they have?
  The President can't make that promise, and we ought to know it, just 
like he couldn't promise that he was going to create or save X million 
jobs. The language about ``saving'' always was the word that let him 
slip away. You can never prove that somebody saved 3.5 million new jobs 
unless you get down below 3.5 million existing jobs, then he didn't 
save the 3.5 million anymore. This is a big crux in this problem.
  Also there is a tax that goes on the payroll of 8 percent. I spoke 
about that earlier. We need to understand what is in here and what this 
does. It tears asunder the private sector and replaces it with a public 
sector. It is socialized medicine. It is HillaryCare writ large.
  I will be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas if he is in a 
position to vent himself a little further in the next 5 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Absolutely, and I do appreciate my friend for yielding.
  The takeover of health care by the government will be not just 
figuratively, but literally, a death knell for so many in America, 
because the only way socialized medicine has been able to work ever is 
by putting people on lists, rationing health care, having more general 
practitioners, getting rid of so many specialists that have made such 
great strides forward, and then people dying on the list waiting to get 
health care.
  That is where we are headed. And it breaks my heart to know so 
clearly where this goes and what will happen.
  The way that some of this is being pushed is with class envy and 
creating this friction among Americans that used to be so much the 
antithesis of what being an American was. But that has been fracturing 
America. We are Americans. We need to get rid of being hyphenated 
Americans and go back to being Americans.
  Mark Levin was here on the Hill earlier today, and in his great book, 
``Liberty and Tyranny,'' he has a quote from Ronald Reagan. And it has 
so much application today. He said, and this was a quote from Reagan, 
``How can limited government and fiscal restraint be equated with lack 
of compassion for the poor? How can a tax break that puts a little more 
money in the weekly paychecks of working people be seen as an attack on 
the needy? Since when do we in America believe that our society is made 
up of two diametrically opposed classes--one rich, one poor--both in a 
permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the 
expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien and 
discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in 
America endorse the politics of envy and division?''
  That is what is being driven here. And as my friend knows, some 
months back I said instead of throwing money at Goldman Sachs, AIG and 
that kind of thing, how about letting people keep a little of their own 
money in their own paychecks, let them have their own withholding back 
for even a couple of months, and you'll see stimulus that was never 
seen. That wasn't listened to by this administration or this House 
majority. And we are paying a severe price. And I yield back.

[[Page 18159]]


  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas, and I thank the 
Speaker for his indulgence this evening and for recognizing us. I just 
point out that we disagree with the philosophy that is being driven by 
the White House. We are free-market people that believe in 
constitutional rights and the spirit of the American people. We will 
emerge triumphant, however long it takes.
  I thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________