[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 18546-18550]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2210
                               JOBS LOST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Carter) is recognized 
for half the remaining time until midnight.
  Mr. CARTER. I thank my friend Virginia Foxx for getting up here and 
kind of giving us some indication of what we mean by PAYGO. That's a 
very confusing word. Been hearing it a lot. I haven't seen anything, 
pay or go, since they've been talking about it. But we seem to be 
pretty good at spending money around here and don't seem to be very 
good at paying for it.
  Just a thought here. We had a stimulus package that was over a 
trillion dollars, and I believe that was borrowed money. We have a 
budget that increased our taxes by $1.4 trillion over the next 10 
years. So, that's money they're coming after to pay for it. But I don't 
think that pays for that $1 trillion.
  Their appropriations request increased all the nondefense spending by 
12 percent this year. The number of months that jobs have grown under 
the Democrats since we got started this year is a whopping zero.
  So they were talking about why were we asking today on the floor of 
the House, Where are the jobs? I get really excited about green jobs 
and green energy and the things that people talk about.
  I heard our colleagues in the previous conversation, one of them show 
us a map of the United States and he said this would create 250,000 new 
green jobs. I think that's fabulous. It's just unfortunate in the last 
month and a half we've lost 1.2 million jobs in the United States. So 
they've got to have a comparison.
  The conversation that was going on the previous hour was about energy 
independence. And I'm for energy independence. And any American that's 
got any sense at all is for energy independence.
  I once asked a man how big an array of solar panels would it take to 
power Austin, Texas. This man was a physicist at the University of 
Texas--to power Austin, Texas, for a period of time, and what would 
that period of time be. He said a proper-sized panel in a non-air 
conditioned time--and you know in Texas it's hot, so air conditioning 
is our biggest problem, not heat--in a non-air conditioned time, a 
properly sized panel could power Austin, Texas, for about an 18-hour 
period of time before the Sun went down and the power went away. And 
then you would have to have an alternative power to power it during the 
night, or storage capacity, which our friends were talking about.
  So I said, Well, that doesn't sound too big. How big would that panel 
be? He said, Approximately the size of the Panhandle of Texas, which is 
about 280, maybe 300 miles long and about 150 miles wide.
  I'm not saying solar is not a solution. But are you going to replace 
the coal-produced power in Pennsylvania with a solar panel in today's 
world--and do it economically? No. But it will help, and we can help on 
an individual basis and we can power businesses with it.
  Let's be realistic about energy, and let's go after every form of 
energy and clean up that energy. That's the solution to our problems. 
That's a real energy plan.
  You know, we in Texas have been having an abundance of natural gas 
for a long time. We're real proud of our natural gas. We think it's 
good stuff. Burns clean and we like it. A lot of our folks up here on 
the East Coast, they didn't like our natural gas until they found some. 
All of a sudden, guess what? They found some gas shale, a lot of gas 
shale in the State of Pennsylvania, and I'm hearing an awful lot of 
colleagues that a year and a half ago were bad mouthing natural gas 
saying, Natural gas sounds good. I'm with Boone Pickens. Let's power 
our automobiles with natural gas. Let's produce natural gas.
  And, rightfully so, they should be proud of their resources. I'm not 
knocking their resources. I'm proud they've got it. And I predict that 
there's shale gas that spreads from Pennsylvania all the way down to 
Fort Worth, Texas. And I think the geologists will prove it. There's a 
lot of natural gas in that shale. And we ought to use it. And that's 
how we free ourselves of foreign oil.
  We free ourselves by drilling offshore in a clean drilling procedure, 
which we have. And we haven't spilled a drop of oil in a drilling 
procedure in 15 years in the seas. All of our spills you read about are 
shipping spills, not drilling spills.
  So let's go out and seek our energy where it is, and let's create our 
alternative energy, wind and solar, and let's not forget nuclear, the 
cleanest energy out there.
  Ms. FOXX. Would the gentleman yield?
  Mr. CARTER. I certainly will.
  Ms. FOXX. In having this energy debate that we were having a few 
weeks ago before the Democrats passed their national energy tax, which 
they call cap-and-trade, that CBO predicts will levy $846 billion in 
new taxes on the American people, we talked a lot about this issue. We 
have been talking about different issues in the last couple of weeks.
  But I heard during that debate that during the last 18 months of 
President Bush's term, that his administration doubled the use of wind 
and solar and that they did that in 18 months. But they went from about 
1.5 percent to about 3 percent. Did the gentleman hear the same 
information I heard?
  Mr. CARTER. Yes, ma'am.
  Ms. FOXX. You know, President Obama has said he would double the use 
of solar and wind in his first 4 years. Yet, President Bush did it in 
18 months--the last 18 months of his term, he did it. So, going ahead 
and doubling it again, going from 3 percent to 6 percent, doesn't seem 
to me it's going to be a terribly difficult job.
  But I heard this also, and I'd like the gentleman to tell me--check 
my facts--that, at the most, we are going to be able to absorb 10 
percent of wind and solar in our electric grid because wind and solar 
are not as dependable as other forms of energy, and that to put more 
than 10 percent into the grid would jeopardize the Nation's energy 
source. Have you heard that figure too?
  Mr. CARTER. Yes. Reclaiming my time, I do not claim to be a 
physicist, but I have talked with people in the power industry, and 
because it is not a continuing flow of power but it is an alternating 
form of power, to make it effective over a 24-hour period, 365 days a 
year, the power has to be boosted. It's the only way it can be 
effectively done.
  I'm not saying it's not going to be a good source of power. Actually, 
what's kind of interesting is most projections as to what percentage of 
our overall national power, wind and solar combined--actually, wind, 
solar, and hydroelectric combined, would be between 6 and 10 percent.
  At maximum effectiveness--and, by the way, there's a lot of folks 
that have

[[Page 18547]]

a lot of Texas envy in this world, and they are always picking on us 
like we don't know anything but oil and gas. Let me make this very 
clear: We have the largest wind farm in America in the State of Texas. 
The city of Austin has the largest municipally-owned wind power farm of 
any municipality in the United States. And, by the way, they are very 
disappointed.

                              {time}  2220

  It was on the front page of the Austin American-Statesman less than 3 
or 4 days ago that the wind farm seems to be an unreliable source of 
power for them. Even though it's a green source and they've been very 
proud of being the greenest city in America because of that wind, but 
over liability and this same different flux of power issue, the only 
way it can be reliable is you put a gas-powered generator right side by 
side to keep the flow going. So that's not saying I'm not for it, but 
I'm saying the reality is we're a long way from replacing the massive 
amount of power that it takes to run this machine called America from 
wind and solar power.
  Ms. FOXX. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. CARTER. Yes, ma'am. I yield.
  Ms. FOXX. I think a lot of people don't realize one of the things 
that made us such a successful Nation has been the extremely reliable 
energy that we've had over the last 200 years. We developed energy and 
learned how to use it very, very well. I believe we are the smartest 
people and the most innovative people in the world, but what helped us 
become a manufacturing giant was not just our intelligence, not just 
our innovation, but our reliable sources of energy.
  I worry a great deal about the pie-in-the-sky promises that have been 
made about alternatives. I, like you, want to see us use every 
alternative that we can, including foot power and walking a lot more, 
but I do think that we have a problem because we are hearing these 
unrealistic expectations of how we could go to alternatives and simply 
abandon carbon. I don't think we can do that.
  You pointed out that our colleagues, who were here the hour before, 
talked about the creation of 250,000 new green jobs. I want to point 
out that I have heard that Spain, which went very much to green jobs 
and alternative energy, now has the highest unemployment rate in 
Europe. It appears that many of our colleagues have established Europe 
as the standard to which we should aspire, but when you start breaking 
down what the situation actually is there, you will see that simply 
making the goal of switching these jobs that we have now in 
manufacturing that are going to go away with this national energy tax, 
that are going to go away with the national health tax, all of these 
new taxes that they want to put on are going to throw jobs out of this 
country.
  We need to look a little bit deeper. I think that so much of what's 
happened, particularly in the last year and a half as promises were 
made, lots of promises were made--a lot of those promises were made in 
2006, which have also not been lived up to--the American people are 
beginning to see that it's easy in a campaign to make promises. It's a 
lot more difficult once you're in office to fulfill those promises. I 
think that's one of the things that we're seeing now.
  We've seen a tremendous change in our economy since the Democrats 
took control of the Congress. They keep talking about problems that 
they inherited, problems that President Obama inherited, but as I said 
earlier, they conveniently leave out the fact that in '07, '08 and up 
until this time, they have been in charge of the Congress, both Houses 
of the Congress. It's the Congress that establishes the budget. It's 
the Congress that appropriates the money, and much of the problems that 
we've had have come from the expenditure of money.
  I wanted to point out something. I know that we talked today, as you 
said earlier, about jobs, jobs, jobs and that 134 of us came to the 
floor today. I think we should have had magnifying glasses to say that 
we're looking for the jobs that have been promised to us. That's what 
was promised by President Obama, promised by the majority in the House, 
but that we ought to talk about the fact that during the month of June 
alone, the national debt increased by $223.7 billion, and as of June 
30, 2009, the national debt had increased $2.9 trillion since the 
Democrats took control of Congress on January 3, 2007. That works out 
to an increase of $9,342.83 per person.
  We know now that the American people are getting very, very concerned 
about that debt and about our deficit. And you pointed out the deficit 
earlier, but we have to keep pointing out to the American people who's 
in charge, who spends the money, and who's responsible for putting us 
into the situation that we're in.
  Mr. CARTER. That's a good point to look at this chart that another 
one of my colleagues prepared. He calls it, ``Oh, my,'' OMI, the Obama 
Misery Index. Those of us who have been around a while remember that 
the misery index was first created back during the Jimmy Carter 
administration and was about the misery that was coming upon people by 
the economic woes of the country. It's basically a combination of 
unemployment--that's the loss of jobs--and the accumulation of public 
debt.
  Now, as my colleague from North Carolina pointed out, there seems to 
be an overwhelming trend in this House to blame everything on the Bush 
administration. So let's just assume for the sake of assumption--
because remember, Obama got elected and sworn in as President in the 
latter part of January, and so we'll just make February the leftover 
Bush stuff because that's the next month, and I would say it's a 
carryover. So the misery index was 11.6 percent. The blue indicates the 
unemployment numbers, and the red indicates the public debt, how much 
we owe to other people or to ourselves.
  In March, the next month of the Obama administration, we see that our 
unemployment has risen to what looks to be about 13 percent and our 
public debt has increased by, I don't know, another 10 percent, 
something like that. So 21.7 percent in March, from 11.6 to 21.7. In 
April it jumps to 28 percent, and look at the public debt, and look at 
the unemployment that's there. The unemployment is the huge figure 
here. They wonder why we are saying, ``Where are the jobs?''
  Look. Wait a minute. Here is May. It has a 36.2 percent misery index. 
Look at the unemployment figures. They're getting off the page here. 
This month, 40.6 percent--oh, my, OMI, Obama Misery Index. And look at 
the unemployment figures, and look at the national public debt. This is 
just 5 months of the Obama administration. We have gone from a misery 
index of 11.6 to 40.6.
  So somebody says, Why are you asking the question, ``Where are the 
jobs?'' Well, because unemployment went from 9 percent--it looks like 
about 9, wouldn't you say--right there to 30 percent, roughly, 31 
percent on the index. That's not the percentage of unemployment, but 
that's the increase.
  Now, there's a real good reason because we're asking, ``Where are the 
jobs?'' I did a telephone town hall tonight, and I got to talk to some 
real fine people. I actually had kind of an unusual thing.
  Junction, Texas, is out west of San Antonio. It's not in my district. 
In fact, I believe it's in Congressman Ciro Rodriguez's district or 
it's in Lamar Smith's district, but it's not in my district. But the 
lady who was talking to me, her phone was registered in Temple, Texas, 
but she was calling from Junction. How that happened on my telephone 
town hall is anybody's guess. I don't know. I didn't try to figure it 
out. But I called a number in my district, and I got a lady in 
Junction. You go figure. I don't know how it worked; all right?

                              {time}  2230

  But the lady had something interesting to say. She said, by some 
people's analysis, we'd probably be one of those rich small businesses 
that are going to have to pay taxes under this new health care plan.
  But although we may handle a lot of livestock and a lot of cash 
temporarily, the reality is I'd say we're in the category of folks that 
are just barely

[[Page 18548]]

scratching through the drought to get by. And what we realize as 
something we can live on is very meager, along with me and my family 
and my boys, who are also in our ranching business with us. We get by 
on a meager amount.
  She said, sir, I'm worried that somebody thinks we're rich enough 
that they're going to put a 1 percent surtax on our small business, 
which is a ranch.
  Now, not everybody lives in Texas and lives in the Southwest, and 
they may hear the word ``drought'' and think they understand what 
drought means. But in Texas, we know what drought means because we've 
lived through a period of time, back in the late 1940s and early 1950s 
that they wrote a book about it, ``The Time It Never Rained.'' And, in 
fact, it didn't rain. And cows ate prickly pear cactus, and ranchers 
went out with burning torches and burned the thorns off the prickly 
pear cactus so that the cattle would have something to eat, because 
there was no grass.
  And the hard tack folks that settled west Texas and central Texas 
worked from sunup to sundown and into the night burning what we call 
burning pear, burning prickly pear so their cattle wouldn't get those 
thorns in their lips and get infected, and they wouldn't get screw 
worms and the other things that were the blight of the 1950s until we 
were able to eradicate that problem. We know what hard times is in 
Texas because we've been in hard times.
  And right now, we're going through a drought. Lake Travis, which is 
just about 40 miles as the crow flies from my house, is a huge lake. 
Right now it's a pond. We've got islands everywhere on it. It's the 
lowest it's ever been in memory, they tell me. I haven't been out to 
see it because I'm afraid I'd get too upset looking at it. But the LCRA 
tells me they're in terrible shape for water.
  That lady living out in Junction, Texas, she's in terrible shape for 
water. And so she says to me, sir, not only am I worried about them 
taking my health plan away from me, making me go on some government 
plan I don't want to be on, but they're talking about taxing me as if 
I'm rich, when I'm not. I've got a family, my family and my two boys, 
or three boys' families running out of this ranch operation, and we're 
fighting the drought, and we're short on water. And we're losing 
livestock.
  And I said, ma'am, I understand.
  She said, that's not all. What they're doing with the fuel of this 
country, what they're doing with their cap-and-tax scheme that they've 
got there, I think that's going to make the cost of my farm fuel and my 
ranch fuel go up, and I'm worried. We cannot survive our fertilizer 
going up and our fuel going up, all of which comes from the petroleum 
industry. We can't afford it. We just can't survive it.
  And why do they want to do that to us? What did we do to them?
  I said, ma'am, I hear you. I'm sorry. You know, all my life I've 
lived under a system that I believe in. I still believe in it. I think 
it's important that the rule of law prevail in a constitutional system 
of government. I think the rule of law is as sacred to democracy and to 
our Republic as the Constitution is to that Republic, and as the Holy 
Book is to the church.
  And it is imperative to every American that we support the rule of 
law. It should be sacred to us that says--we say this, I think it is 
the Rotary Club, but it may be another one of the clubs that says, 
before their club--we are a Nation of laws, not of men. I think that is 
extremely important for us to remember as Americans. We are a Nation of 
laws.
  These laws are created by this body and other bodies at the State 
level. Those laws are not to be circumvented; and no man, no matter how 
high a rate, how much of the population votes for him, how many people 
love him, or think he's the greatest, or her, and think they're the 
greatest thing since sliced bread, they don't have the right nor the 
ability, nor should we allow them to circumvent our laws because of 
their programs.
  It is our American responsibility to uphold the law. For 20 years I 
served as a judge of the highest trial court in Texas, at the State 
level. I did my best to uphold the law. Those laws were written in 
books, and they were passed by the Texas legislature and they're passed 
by the United States Congress, and we tried our best to uphold those 
laws.
  The Supreme Court and the court of criminal appeals told us, 
interpreted the laws for us in Texas and in the United States. And we, 
as a court, tried our best to follow that direction from our court 
system, because the rule of law has to prevail.
  I am very concerned, and I express this tonight, that procedures and 
rules are as important to an institution as anything else that there 
is, because they are the standard by which a group of free men and 
women decided to govern themselves by law.
  Thomas Jefferson, a man held in highest regard, and at least many 
Democrats call the Founder of their party, even though he called his 
party the Republican Party at the time. But times change. Thomas 
Jefferson wrote rules for this House. And one of the rules has been 
repeated by our President of the United States. We're going to give--
and I would point out, our Speaker of the House, when she came in and 
took her oath and told us how this Congress was going to operate, she 
said, We will give this Congress every time at least 72 hours to 
examine a piece of legislation.
  Thomas Jefferson said 3 days for any piece of legislation before it's 
voted on. It should be given to both sides for their examination and 
preparation for debate. And that 3 days did not include Saturday and 
Sunday. That's what he--when he wrote the rules for this House, which 
were followed religiously, I guess you'd say for years and years and 
years, decades, that's the tradition of this House. And it has been 
waived for every major piece of legislation since Barack Obama has been 
elected President.
  As was pointed out on the last piece of legislation we had by John 
Boehner right here on the floor of this House, they dropped 350 pages 
of amendments to the cap-and-tax bill at 2 o'clock in the morning to be 
voted on the next day. And that meant that we hadn't seen a completed 
bill, even at that point in time. And we voted on it the next day.
  I'm not here to cry about procedures. I play under the rules that 
their Rules Committee writes. But I want you to know, when your 
historical procedures, as American people, are circumvented by this 
House consistently, every time, you should be concerned about those who 
do not follow the established rule of law. This should be a concern of 
the American people.
  When the President of the United States and his White House friends 
go strong-arm the automobile companies into making a deal that 
circumvents the laws of this land, there's something wrong. And 
creditors' rights are established laws of this land. And yet the 
bankruptcy court was perfectly willing to let the parties make an 
agreement. But the parties were strong-armed by the politicians in the 
White House, strong-armed and threatened to the point that preferred 
creditors gave up their rights under the law out of fear, and the 
preferred creditors became, their rights went to the unpreferred 
creditors, the labor unions.

                              {time}  2240

  Now we have the Government Motors--we used to call it General 
Motors--that is owned by the Federal Government and by the labor 
unions, and those people who loaned money as secured creditors for 
years to General Motors had to take pennies on the dollar because they 
were strong-armed beyond the rule of law.
  I'm sorry. That's not right. If we don't stand for anything in this 
House, if we let our people down on every vote, if we don't try our 
best to stand up for the rule of law, then we ought to be ashamed of 
ourselves. I don't care what party you're in. I respect my colleagues 
on the other side of the aisle, and in fact, many of them stand up and 
speak out for many of the things that I stand up and speak out for. I'm 
not saying this to point the finger at politics. Let's throw politics 
out the door right now. Let's talk about what our Founding Fathers 
intended for us to do

[[Page 18549]]

if we are going to keep this Republic together.
  They expect us to set rules and to follow them. They expect us to 
honor contracts between people. Now, you say to yourself, Well, sure, 
we honor contracts between people, but I don't know about those big 
corporations. You know, they're so evil. Maybe we shouldn't have to 
respect those people.
  So, if at a time when the price of oil was $6 a barrel, if the 
Clinton administration had said, We need to get some money into these 
coffers here, so we're going to sell some offshore leases, and we 
really will give you a good deal on these offshore leases if you'll buy 
them, even though we know you're not going to produce them at $6 a 
barrel, oil companies would have said, Okay. We'll buy them. They'd buy 
these offshore leases, pay money for them, continue to pay money for 
them as the leases progress. Then, lo and behold, the price of oil goes 
to $100 a barrel or to $80 a barrel. Guess what? They start producing 
oil out there, and we have those people in this House who say that's an 
excess in profit, although the Federal Government got what it 
contracted for, and the oil companies got what they contracted for.
  We believe in the sanctity of contracts whether they be between 
corporations, governments or people. It's what keeps the glue together 
in our society. Yet we are willing to say we don't care what the 
contract says; we want it renegotiated, and we're going to put economic 
pressure on you to do it. That's not the way we are supposed to act. We 
are supposed to hold the contract sacred, because, in reality, what 
created our Nation was a contract, a contract called the Constitution 
of the United States, where the States got together and said we will 
surrender our sovereignty in a bargain to protect us in our national 
defense, to work out our disputes of commerce and to make this country 
one Nation, gathered together from 13 colonies, from 13 States.
  That contract is sacred, and every contract that comes therefrom is 
sacred. Now, if we don't like it, change the law. That's fine. We can 
do that. But I am concerned when we use the power of political might to 
strong-arm people out of their rights and out of the laws of our 
country. If the Republicans do it, I'm going to be just as mad at them 
as I am at anybody else. It's not a political thing. It's about what is 
right and what is wrong.
  If we don't have rules, if we don't have rules we hold sacred, we are 
bound for destruction. We've got plenty of issues to keep us busy in 
worrying about our country without trying to change the rules of the 
game. Maybe people think that guy's half crazy, standing up there, 
talking about that stuff, but you know, I believe in this stuff. I 
believe passionately in the American people, in the Constitution and in 
the history of this country. You can rewrite it all you want to. It is 
what it is, and what makes us noble, what makes us fine, what makes us 
exceptional is that we are willing, for the good of the Nation, to hold 
certain things important, and I would say the rule of law is what 
separates us.
  I'll tell you a story. I had the opportunity to go with the Foreign 
Operations Committee down to a very lovely country, to Nicaragua in 
Central America. When I grew up, and in my college days, I lived with a 
bunch of ranching boys out in West Texas, and visited several of their 
operations out there. Being a native Texan, you know, we're all kind of 
caught up in the magic of ranch life, so I learned a little bit about 
what good-looking country looks like and what grass looks like and the 
cattle elite. I looked for how much water is out there that's available 
for livestock. I looked at Nicaragua and the part of Nicaragua that I 
went to, and I thought, man, this is some good-looking cattle country. 
Boy, a fellow could really raise a lot of nice cattle in this country. 
There's plenty of water. You could even irrigate because they've got 
water that's less than 18 feet under the ground. Now, you don't drink 
that water, but you could irrigate with it.
  So I started asking the question: Why are these poor folks having 
such a hard time economically? Do you know why? Because they've never 
quite established the rule of law. In fact, they don't even have land 
titles in Nicaragua.
  One of the things that they're trying to do with our foreign aid is 
to somehow establish a method of land titles, a method of saying you 
bought it; here is your title; you own it, and you can sell it to the 
next guy. Instead, they have to worry which regime is in power in 
Nicaragua as to whether or not they get to keep their land. So, after a 
while, after 100 years of a system like that, people start to not 
really invest too much in their land because you never know whose land 
it's going to be next year.
  We have the rule of law. We have land titles. We know when we buy our 
homes, when we pay for them, when they're free and clear, and when our 
debts are off of them that we own that piece of ground and whatever's 
on top of it, and we can pass that on to our children. That can be part 
of our accumulated wealth, which makes the next generation healthier, 
richer and more prosperous. They don't have that ability, and yet 
they've got a beautiful place and the potential. What's missing? The 
rule of law.
  It's sad. It's sad to think that a bunch of nice people who need to 
make that country work are limited by the fact that men and their 
political strengths are overpowering what they should have, which is 
the rule of law. I do not mean this as any criticism of the country of 
Nicaragua, and I hope it's our goal as Americans to try to help them 
establish the rule of law, especially the rule of land titles. I think 
it's important. My point is, our forefathers gave us that blessing. 
When we count our blessings, sometimes we forget that some of it is 
right there in that constitutional document that we have.

                              {time}  2250

  You know, I had somebody from Dell Computer tell me that they--what 
they have to sell is what's in their minds, what they have created from 
their brains. Guess whose country wrote it into their founding document 
that your intellectual property belongs to you? The United States of 
America. It is in our Constitution that what you create with your 
creativity belongs to you and you have an ownership right in it and you 
can enforce it in a courtroom. The rest of the world is coming around 
to that.
  But what we have been given are so many blessings by forward-thinking 
people in our past, and I'm here tonight, as we talk about all of these 
issues of the economy and what's going on, don't let us forget that 
that is not a country of men. This is a country of laws. And the way we 
operate on this floor of this House and the way we operate at the 
courthouse and the way we operate as human beings is governed by the 
rule of law. And if we ever lose that, we lose our country.
  We've got lots of issues going on right now. We've got health care. 
We've got this cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax bill that's supposed to be 
protecting the environment. We've got runaway spending. We've got 
mounds of debt that's mounting up in every direction. The debt figure 
is unbelievable. And all of these things should be dealt with through 
this body and its democracy and its democratic principles. That's the 
way it should be dealt with, the rule of law. And if we do that, we 
will have met our obligations to the people who sent us here. And I 
challenge both sides to let the rule of law reign here. Let's don't 
change the rules. Let's don't stop debate. Let's talk.
  Everybody says we need bipartisanship. How can you have 
bipartisanship if one side writes a 2,000-page bill and the other side 
doesn't get to do anything but say, ``Yes, I like it'' or ``No, I 
don't''? How in the world is that bipartisan?
  I think our Founding Fathers really thought that you are going to 
have liberals over here and conservatives over here and you're going to 
try to address an issue and you're going to sit down at a table and 
you're going to talk about what you can and can't do, and you're going 
to come up with a solution. I think that's what they thought

[[Page 18550]]

we were going to do. We're not doing it right now. And I do honestly 
believe it would work, and I think there are an awful lot of people 
that sit in this room every day that feel the same way.
  Let's have the courage to do that. Let's follow the direction of our 
Forefathers. Let's remember our history, and let's start talking to 
each other instead of imposing our will, one group of men and women 
imposing their will on another group of men and women. I really don't 
think that's what we intended when this House was created.
  We like to say this is the greatest deliberative body in the world. 
It is the cradle of the democracy. It's the cradle of freedom, that 
liberty was born here and thrives here. Well, if liberty's born here 
and thrives here, it's up to us to continue to keep her breathing and 
keep her thriving. And I don't believe we do it by ignoring the rules 
or changing the rules. I believe we do it by working together to come 
up with solutions.
  And probably kind of like the good verdict you get in the courtroom, 
if you give a verdict in the courtroom and both sides are not 
completely happy, you've probably got the best verdict you ever could 
create. But if you've got a verdict that only one side gets everything 
and the other side gets nothing, it probably wasn't the right thing, 
nine times out of ten. I was always happy if both sides walked out mad 
at me. I figured we did a pretty good job because at least both sides 
had some give-and-take in what happened in the courtroom.
  That's where we ought to be in here. When it's over with, both sides 
ought to say, We didn't get all our way but at least we got something 
done and we didn't impose the will of man over the rule of law.
  I guess I just felt like preaching this late at night. And that's 
probably enough of all of that.
  I do ask that the people back home--I know we're not supposed to 
address the people back home, but I will say that every man and woman 
in this House are addressing life-changing issues now and will be in 
the very near future, that the amount of accumulated job loss and debt 
is getting critical for all of us whether we are in this House or 
whether we are at home, and let's all try to work together to come up 
with something that will work.
  And with that, Mr. Speaker, I will yield back the balance of my time.

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