[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 19]
[House]
[Pages 26606-26613]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2220
             A TIME FOR AMERICANS TO RECLAIM THEIR FREEDOM

  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. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate being 
recognized to address you here on the floor of the House.
  This is a big night for a lot of Republicans across the country, and 
as we're watching things unfold, the American people have come out to 
the polls today across the eastern part of the United States, and their 
voices are being heard. As our voice has been heard sometimes in the 
echo chamber in the House of Representatives, now the real voices of 
the people have been heard through the ballot boxes in places like 
Virginia and in New Jersey, and we wait to see how it unfolds above and 
beyond that.
  This is, Mr. Speaker, a time for choosing. This is a time for the 
American people to step up and to reclaim their freedom.
  The American people understand what has happened in the last year, in 
a little more than the last year. They understand that there was a 
Secretary of the Treasury who came to this Capitol and who demanded a 
$700 billion TARP fund. A lot of us said ``no,'' and everybody here on 
the floor, I believe who I'm looking at, said ``no.'' Then along came 
the nationalization of three large investment banks--AIG, Fannie Mae, 
and Freddie Mac--and then General Motors and Chrysler. Then behind that 
came a $750 billion economic stimulus package that may have saved some 
government jobs but that hasn't created anything that has to do with 
the way you create wealth in a free enterprise society.
  Right behind that came the very ill-thought-out, worst piece of 
economic burden that has ever passed the House of Representatives--cap-
and-trade. The American people saw that go through them like a freight 
train--one car after another, after another, after another. At about 
the time they lifted their heads up to see what happened, another car 
hit them.
  Then they looked around, and we had an August break, and this 
Congress went home to get away from the humidity and the heat in 
Washington, DC. When we went out, we had hundreds and hundreds of town 
hall meetings, and tens of thousands--in fact, hundreds of thousands--
of Americans came out for their voices to be heard.
  At the core of all of that--of all the squabble, of all the tension 
that we saw and heard and that a lot of us looked right directly in the 
eye--was the American people who wanted to preserve and protect their 
freedom--our freedom, Mr. Speaker.
  They continually said, What can I do? What can I do?
  I said, Come to town hall meetings. Pick up the telephone. Write 
letters. Go see your Member of Congress. Look him in the eye. Tell him 
that you want to hang onto your freedom.
  If there was anything that I said in a town hall meeting that 
resonated with the people in the Fifth District of Iowa was that I will 
oppose any bill that diminishes our freedom. Well, we have a bill that 
looks like it's coming to this Congress very soon that diminishes our 
freedom. It's 1,990 pages.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. 
Hoekstra).
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank my colleague from Iowa for yielding.
  I think you've laid out very well at a macro level what we've seen 
happen over the last 9\1/2\ to 10 months as we've had a new 
administration, a new Senate, and a new House come into session. That's 
at the macro level.
  I think the other thing that's really connecting with people is what 
they see happening at a grassroots level after Chrysler and General 
Motors went bankrupt and then after Chrysler and General Motors used 
the protection of bankruptcy to take away private property rights--to 
go into a whole range of dealerships without any transparency to their 
customers or to even the dealers, themselves.
  They all of a sudden said, In 3 weeks, 5 weeks, you're no longer 
going to be a dealer for Chrysler.
  GM had a nicer word for it. They said, You're going to be in a wind-
down.
  Well, I was just in one of those wind-down dealers last week. It's 
not a wind-down. They're out of business. It was a loss of freedom. You 
know, many of these individuals had invested millions of dollars into 
the business, some of them within the last couple of years, believing 
that, when they were investing in the contracts that they had with 
these folks, the contracts protected their freedoms and that they 
protected their business relationships. All of a sudden, through 
bankruptcy, that freedom and that protection, under bankruptcy law and 
franchise laws, were gone.
  That's exactly, I think, one of the reasons we're here tonight. We're 
talking now about the freedom, about the responsibility and about the 
opportunities that those car dealers lost when GM and Chrysler went 
through bankruptcy. It's the type of freedom that each and every one of 
us faces. We're going to lose that same kind of opportunity if we pass 
this massive health care bill because, when I look at it--you and I--we 
know what's wrong with health care. We've got to fix preexisting 
conditions. We've got to have more competition. We need to do some of 
those things.
  This is all about power and where that power will be. I started 
reading this health care bill over the weekend. I read 300 pages. Then 
you start going through it, and you start trying to figure it out, and 
you realize that what the Speaker and others have done is not what's 
going to be in health care. That health care bill simply says that it's 
no longer your decision and that it's not my decision. It's not your 
decision. It's not my decision. Those health care decisions are now 
going to be the decisions of the House of Representatives and of the 
Senate. More importantly, they're going to be the decisions of those 
buildings down the street--down Independence Avenue and down 
Constitution Avenue--which we call the ``Federal bureaucracy.'' We'll 
have a bureaucrat standing between you and me and our doctors and our 
health care decisions.
  I think one of the things we're going to talk about tonight is the 
opportunity that the American people are going to have to come to 
Washington on Thursday to voice their opposition to this massive 
takeover through the Pelosi health care bill or to go to their 
congressional offices in their districts or to start calling 
Washington--to call those Members who are going to make a difference as 
to whether this Pelosi health care bill becomes law or as to whether we 
stop it dead in its tracks and we have a vote for freedom.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from 
Michigan, Mr. Speaker, I want to reiterate this: that the dye has been 
cast in this Congress for some time. The Speaker has been leveraging 
votes on this 1,990-page bill that may see a several-hundred-page 
manager's amendment drop in on us at any time. Even as we speak, it 
could happen.
  With all that leverage that has been taking place behind the scenes 
and with all the negotiations that have taken place in the White House, 
in the Speaker's office and in Harry Reid's office, there has been no 
Republican at the table, not one.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Excuse me. Does the gentleman mean that this has not 
been a transparent process?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. It has been completely opaque. It is not a 
transparent process, and it is not consistent with the word, with the 
pledged oath of the President of the United States, which was that 
there would be an open, transparent process that would be negotiated on 
C-SPAN.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Exactly how much of the economy are we going to 
reshape?

[[Page 26607]]


  Mr. KING of Iowa. We're looking at 17.5 percent--round it up to 18 
percent--of the economy swallowed up by the Federal Government--and the 
gentleman from Michigan didn't say it--under the thumb of the health 
choices czar, who is the guy who would write all the rules after the 
legislation would be drafted. The rules would be written after that, 
and he would then set the terms for every health insurance policy and 
company in America.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. How many times in this bill does it say the health care 
commissioner shall, will or must? Those are all decisions that will not 
be made here through the legislative process.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I happen to know the answer: 3,425 times.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. How many times?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. It says ``shall'' 3,425 times, but the one time 
that it says ``may'' is quite interesting, which is that the Members 
may enroll in the Federal policy. It's not Members of Congress shall 
live under the laws they pass. They may if they choose.
  The gentleman from Missouri.
  Mr. AKIN. So the Members of Congress may, but everything else is 
``shall.'' There are 3,400 ``shalls''----
  Mr. KING of Iowa. And 25.
  Mr. AKIN. Packed into a 2,000-page bill.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Those are decisions that the health care administrator, 
commissioner or czar will make. We transfer that authority. We've taken 
it from the American people. We've put it into Congress.
  We've said, Those are no longer your decisions. We shall make those 
decisions. Then we say, No. Wait a minute. We shall not. We shall 
transfer that over to a commissioner because we sure don't want to have 
responsibility for it.
  So it's kind of like a framework of health care reform, saying, 
You'll know the details later on as some appointed but not elected and 
not accountable commissioner makes those decisions.
  Mr. AKIN. So, in coming back to the theme of freedom, every ``shall'' 
is just like another death bell which is tolling for a little freedom 
that just died. Every ``shall'' is one more little freedom that just 
died. It is one person with one's doctor who's making a health care 
decision but who won't make it anymore because there's not going to be 
an insurance person there, second-guessing. No. It's going to be worse 
than that. It's going to be a government bureaucrat saying, I'm sorry, 
Steve. You're just a little too old.
  Just having a moment to join my friends here, I think that I would be 
derelict in my duty if I didn't recognize my good friends, Congressman 
Hoekstra and Steve King.

                              {time}  2230

  You have been one of the people that's called, it's called a House 
call, it's like a doctor going to a house call, except we are asking 
for the people who aren't sick to come to Washington D.C. and try to 
straighten things out on Thursday at 12 o'clock. You are one of the 
people organizing that, and Pete has been working on it too.
  This is really kind of a grass-roots thing, isn't it. I mean, this is 
not something that the leadership has been pushing particularly or 
anybody said to do. This is just a sense that we want to allow the many 
people we know that love this country and love freedom to have a chance 
to in some way express their opinion about this subject, because this 
is like some train that's lost any kind of way to talk to it on the 
telephone; and it is just going with the Governors off of it, full 
steam, full throttle down a track that's disappearing in empty space. 
We are just going to jump into this abyss of the government can run it 
somehow.
  When I think of the beginning of this country and I think about 
freedom, such a special place America is. You know, there are all of 
these crazy people that came to America.
  One of my favorites is this group of pilgrims, 100 of them. They came 
over with a dream. People say they came for religious freedom. They 
didn't come for religious freedom; they had religious freedom in good 
old Holland.
  No, they came here because they wanted to build a new civilization 
unlike anything history had ever seen before. These people were nuts. 
Within the first couple of months, half of them died. When the 
Mayflower captain said it's time to go back to England in the spring, 
half of his crew was dead and he told his bosun to wind in that anchor 
cable and set the yardarm square to the wind, and that Mayflower sailed 
over the horizon and disappeared as a speck.
  There are these 50 people or so standing on the shore, on the rocky 
shore line of cold, old Massachusetts, New England, because they had a 
dream in their heart. They had a dream of building a new nation. A 
number of years later you have Bradford writing that perhaps we have 
kindled a candle that will light up even as a candle could light other 
candles, can light up even a light to a new nation.
  All these other crazy people, this one guy started building light 
bulbs and he built a couple hundred of them and nothing worked. He was 
just crazy enough to keep on doing it until Thomas Edison built it. 
America has been built, one idea at a time, by the people who had 
freedom.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. It's the vitality in America that we want to 
preserve here. There is something unique about being an American. We 
aren't just an extension of Europe; we aren't just an amalgam of all 
the donor cultures that are here. We got the cream off the crop of 
every one that sent people to America.
  That vitality that comes from having a dream, that gave them the 
vision to find a way to get on a ship to come here, and they didn't all 
stay here. Some of them couldn't cut it in this competitive meritocracy 
that we have created. Some of them went back, not very many. But the 
ones that stayed were the best that any of the donor countries had to 
offer.
  That dream of freedom, founded upon the rule of law, the right to 
property, the constitutional foundation, the pillars of American 
exceptionalism, is what is at stake here in this Congress this week in 
the biggest way that I can remember in my lifetime.
  That's why, Mr. Speaker, we have called for the American people to 
come to this city, come to this Capitol. We are gathering together at 
noon on Thursday, and we are asking everybody in America that can get 
here, if you are close enough to drive, they need to drive.
  If they need to get on a plane, do that, and join us at noon, in the 
afternoon and thereafter go find Members of Congress, look them in the 
eye. Let them see the whites of your eyes. Let them look into your 
pupils and look into your soul.
  Tell them don't take away our freedom with this 1,990-page bill, the 
one that there is no one can understand; but it's noon on Thursday. 
Those that can't make it here need to go to the district offices as 
close to their home as they can or into the districts of the people 
that are sitting on the fence and tell them, save my freedom, or I will 
take your job. That's the message that needs to come.
  Those that can't go out that day need to pick up the phone and jam 
the phone lines. This can be done. This bill can be killed. It needs to 
be killed for the sake of freedom, for the freedom that was found with 
the pilgrims when they came here, for the freedom that was fought for 
with every generation of Americans, for those that are buried out at 
Arlington and around the world. We can't be turning America into a 
socialist state.
  Those companies that I mentioned at the beginning that have been 
nationalized, that's one-third of our private sector. If that 18 
percent of the health care industry, one-sixth of our economy is added 
to that, we are at or over half of the private sector nationalized in 
the last year. We can't stand that.
  By the way, there are flash cards that are there, that are put out by 
USCIS, Citizenship and Immigration Services. In those flash cards you 
will have to learn this if you want to become an American. One will be 
Who is the Father of our Country? ``George Washington'' on the other 
side.
  You can go down through the list. But there is one that has a 
question that says, What is the economic system of the United States? 
Back side,

[[Page 26608]]

``free enterprise capitalism.'' I would like to see if many of those in 
the administration today could actually pass that test.
  I am convinced they don't believe in it. This is about freedom, and 
we need to gather here in this Capitol Building on Thursday, at noon, 
at the building, around the building, around the grounds, in the 
congressional offices. The call needs to go out to everybody in 
America.
  For 2 months they said, what can I do? What can I do? The answer is, 
Come to this city. Help us all out.
  The gentleman from Missouri.
  Mr. AKIN. You know, there are different sorts of levels of threats 
that we run into in Congress. You are an expert on the intelligence 
community. You take a look in the Midwest, you have these big towering 
cumulus that come across in June and July and you say is this something 
that's dangerous or whatever it is, and you take a look, Do we have 
threats from terrorists? Is that a problem? Is North Korea a problem? 
We sort of weigh these things.
  I would have to say that so many people back in my district and so 
many of the people that I respect here in the floor would rate where we 
are right now, Steve, they would rate this as probably the biggest 
internal threat to America since the Civil War. That's kind of where I 
have come down. I mean, if you want to talk about American danger, I 
might say go back to the Cold War and Ronald Reagan and whether the 
Soviets are going to push the button.
  But if you talk about internal threats to America, this idea of the 
government taking over these sectors, one of the things, there is a 
couple of things chilling about it. One of the things is tell me any 
time in the history of America when the Federal Government has taken 
something over that we have ever backed up from it. We never go 
backwards.
  As soon as something gets socialized, it's permanently built into our 
culture. We can never get rid of it.
  If we ever allow the Federal Government to run that sixth of the 
economy that's health care, how are we ever going to get back from 
that?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think you have got three examples here exactly 
building off of your point: 1956, the country and Congress decides that 
we are going to do the interstate highway system. You know what? I 
think that actually worked. We now have an interstate highway system 
that works for the country.
  But over the last 53 years, the system has become corrupted. Why? 
Because it's now Washington getting in.
  In my district, with Michigan's money, they say, oh, by the way, on 
average for the last 53 years, we are going to take a dollar of your 
money, and we are going to give you 83 cents back.
  Mr. AKIN. Bargain.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. What a great bargain. It's a great bargain for West 
Virginia because they are getting $1.74 back, but that's our money.
  Now they are coming into Michigan and they are saying we are not 
building interstate highway systems any more. We are telling you to 
build bike paths; we are telling you to do this. So in the last couple 
of years what have we had to build, a crumbling infrastructure, we have 
had to build a turtle fence, rest areas.
  Mr. AKIN. Wait, there has got to be a story here. A turtle fence. I 
assume this is to keep stampedes of turtles off the roads?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. It's to keep stampedes from crossing the interstate. 
Like I said, our infrastructure in Michigan is not that great. We need 
to rebuild it.
  Mr. AKIN. Is it environmentally acceptable to have a turtle fence, do 
you think?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. We allow them to get to the creeks and the rivers, but 
again it's this loss of freedom. It's Michigan's money coming to 
Washington, then coming back and saying you are going to get less of 
what you sent, and then we are going to tell you how to spend it. We 
are now building a bicycle path, a bike path over an expressway; and 
it's kind of like, that's nice to have, but it's not an essential.
  The second example is, and you and I are here, you like this one--
  Mr. AKIN. The turtle fence, was the bridge for turtles too or not?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. No. The bridge was for bicyclists, and I have not seen 
a lot of bikes on that road.
  Mr. AKIN. The reason I am hung up on this is because I keep a record 
in my mind of some of the dumbest ideas that I see legislatively. This 
health care bill has got one, actually. It's the wheelchair tax. Now, 
what person that ran for public office would want to do a wheelchair 
tax?
  We will get to the turtle fence.

                              {time}  2240

  Mr. HOEKSTRA. That is a bad idea. So we found a system that worked 
for the interstate highway system, but over 53 years it has grown into 
this bureaucracy that no longer works to build what it was intended to 
do.
  The second example, as you and I were here, 2001, it is kind of the 
same debate we had on health care. We had a President who came in and 
said, My number one priority is what? Education. No Child Left Behind. 
And who could argue with that? Who wants to leave any child left 
behind?
  Some of us had a vision that said, you know, the most effective way 
to make sure we don't leave a child behind is not to give the 
authority, but to return the authority that is inherent with parents to 
raise and educate their kids. But we had a President who had another 
idea.
  He said, well, the way we are going to make sure we are not going to 
leave any child behind is that we are going to take that authority from 
parents, we are going to take that authority away from local school 
districts, we are going to take that authority away from the States, 
and we are going to move it all here to Washington.
  I think about 390 people voted for it, because how could you vote 
against No Child Left Behind? Everybody was scared, you know. We are 
going to have to go home and people are going to say he voted to leave 
a kid behind. You and I voted ``no.''
  Mr. KING of Iowa. When you name it ``No Child Left Behind,'' then it 
gives it momentum. But what could you possibly name a 1,990-page 
socialized medicine bill to convince the American people it is a good 
idea?
  Mr. AKIN. I can tell you what it was named by the Democrat Governor 
of Tennessee, because his State has tried this whole idea of the 
government running health care. So this is the Democrat Governor of 
Tennessee called it ``the monster of unfunded mandates.''
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Which is exactly what we found with No Child Left 
Behind. It became a huge power grab to Washington, a huge unfunded 
mandate, and, most importantly, it didn't work. And this is the exact 
model that we are now following with health care, except we now have a 
new President who says, My legacy is I am going to do health care.
  Again, he is not enabling people to exercise the freedom and 
authority that the Constitution has given them. He is taking that 
freedom and authority from them, just like No Child Left Behind, moving 
it to Washington, and saying, Don't worry, Washington will take care of 
your health care. Everything will be fine.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. It is pretty hard to take this President seriously 
when you look at a quote like this. This is a quote from the President. 
``Here is what you need to know. First, I will not sign a plan that 
adds one dime to our deficits, either now nor the future. Period.'' 
Date, August 9, 2009. I was watching the town hall meeting.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Actually, he was right. This plan will not add a dime. 
It will add $1.2 trillion. I am not sure to the deficit, but it is $1.2 
trillion of new spending. He is right. It is not a dime; it is a whole 
lot more than that.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentleman from Michigan could be completely in 
tune and understand political speak so precisely. Not one dime. It 
could be 11 cents, 9 cents, or $1.2 trillion, but not a dime.
  Mr. AKIN. The question I have for my good friend from Iowa, how many 
dimes do you have to stack up to get to $1.2 trillion? Could you get to 
the Moon?

[[Page 26609]]


  Mr. KING of Iowa. I could tell you how much corn.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. He can tell you how many bushels of corn it will take, 
but don't ask him about dimes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Here is the corn. One trillion dollars of corn is 
this. We will raise about $10 billion of corn in Iowa this year. If we 
can get it out of the field, we will have $10 billion worth. One 
hundred years is $1 trillion worth. One hundred years, all the corn we 
can raise, is $1 trillion. The Obama deficit is $9.7 trillion. That is 
all of the corn we can raise in 1,000 years.
  So you can look at it this way: The deficit created by this bill, the 
$1.2 trillion, would be about 120 years of all of the corn that we 
could raise in Iowa if we committed the entire amount, at today's 
market prices, marked up just a little because they have gone down over 
the last few weeks. That is what $1.2 trillion is. We could pay this 
thing off in 120 years in Iowa if we gave you all the proceeds from our 
corn crop.
  To put it into that kind of magnitude, for the national debt, the 
Obama deficit is 1,000 years of all of the corn we can raise in Iowa. 
And the overall national debt, national deficit added to the Obama 
deficit, is over $20 trillion. That is all the corn we can raise from 
the time of Christ until today if we had today's yields and today's 
market prices.
  That is what we are looking at. We are looking at something that is 
unsustainable, and the children and grandchildren yet to be born will 
be paying the interest, and maybe their children will start to pay the 
principal on this debt that is created.
  Mr. AKIN. First of all, though, you've got to remember the Governor 
of Tennessee said this is a monster of unfunded mandates. So it is 
really not $1.2 trillion, is it, because a lot is going to be passed on 
to the States. So it is really more than $1.2 trillion. Then we are 
going to collect that with taxes, isn't that right? Like the wheelchair 
tax. I am still marveling at the political audacity.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. A tax on oxygen bottles and all the medical 
equipment is there, but the tax on small businesses approaches half a 
trillion dollars too.
  Mr. AKIN. $500 billion on small business. And, of course, we are 
going to do that at a time when employment is strong, right?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. We are doing this at a time when the economy is as 
wobbly as it has been in our adult lifetimes, and we have been adults 
for a while, the three of us.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. We have to put this, again, in focus. What taxes are we 
already looking at? They have said we are not going to extend the tax 
cuts that were done in 2001 that led to economic prosperity. Those are 
going to expire. There is a whole range of taxes that will go up for 
all Americans when those expire at the end of 2010-2011. We then have 
all of these taxes that they have put together.
  Mr. AKIN. Is that dividends and capital gains? Are you talking about 
dividends and capital gains?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Dividends. I think the marriage penalty comes back. The 
adoption tax credit goes away. This is Adoption Awareness Month. We 
have wisely put in tax policy that encourages and facilitates and 
provides a financial assist for families who want to adopt. That goes 
away, because that is a bad tax cut, according to folks, because 
everything that was done from 2001 through 2008, any type of tax 
adjustment was a terrible tax. So they want to get rid of that.
  Then you put that with cap-and-trade, the carbon tax that has created 
a tremendous amount of uncertainty on business. Then, like you said, 
you put this new health care tax on top of small and medium-size 
business, and you put all the other taxes in place, there is no wonder 
why the economy is in such turmoil today, because every business person 
today, if they are taking a look at whether they are going to invest or 
hire someone, they are going to be very, very reluctant to do it 
because they are seeing all of these taxes on the horizon and there is 
so much uncertainty.
  Again, what is every tax? The same thing as in health care. Every tax 
is taking freedom away from the three of us, from our constituents, and 
moving it to Washington, because we then can no longer direct that 
spending. Washington politicians can.
  Mr. AKIN. Now, Congressman, you are talking to a guy who made his 
whole life as a small businessman, Congressman King. Let's just take a 
look at what we are piling on him in 10 months.
  First of all, as you say, we are having all of these different taxes 
that had been cut are all going to be raised, but particularly for 
small businesses, dividends and capital gains. So if you are a small 
business man, you have to have some cash to run your business, 
especially if you want to add any new jobs. You have to be able to 
afford a new piece of heavy equipment. That is what you were doing, 
Congressman King.
  Now, what we are going to do is we are going to slam them with what--
you call it cap-and-trade, I call it cap-and-tax, but it is one of the 
biggest tax hikes in the history of the country. But also included with 
it are all of these regulations about the carbon footprint of your 
building.
  So now you have got all of the tax things that are expiring. You get 
cap-and-tax coming. So energy, you are going to get hammered on that. 
We say, but don't you worry about anything, because we have got some 
more taxes in this government-run health care system.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, to take us back and put this in 
a perspective, in 2006, Speaker Pelosi became the Speaker with a 
Democrat majority in this Congress. Charlie Rangel became the chairman 
of the Ways and Means Committee. We had this whole series of Bush tax 
cuts that went into law May 28, 2003, that stimulated the economy, and 
they were the right thing to do to bring us out of the downward decline 
that we were in.
  And the chairman, Charlie Rangel, went before news media after news 
media, pundit after pundit, and they asked him a whole series of 
questions: Which one of the Bush tax cuts will you save? Which ones do 
you want to eliminate? Which ones do you like? How would you configure 
these taxes?
  There never was a straight answer out of the whole bunch. But in the 
process of elimination, over a period of about 5 weeks, it was 
determined that Charlie Rangel didn't support any of these taxes. And 
in that period of time, by February, we saw industrial investment drop 
in this country dramatically, and that, I believe, was the first 
indicator of what was going to happen to our economy.
  Since that period of time, capital is smart. It will always do the 
rational thing. Well, when capital sees that it gets a tax increase, it 
invests less, takes less risk, because there is less return on that 
investment.
  That started in 2007, February 2007, and it has been in a decline 
ever since, until such time as we end up with the Henry Paulsen $700 
billion TARP money in this government that decided they want to borrow 
trillions of dollars and buy up the private sector of the United 
States.

                              {time}  2250

  By the way, one can go to the Web site, the socialist Web site, 
dsausa.org, the Democratic Socialists of America, and there's the 
playbook for much that's happened, and that's been posted and hanging 
out there for some years now. But they'll argue that, first, they're 
not communists. There's a difference. Socialists don't want to 
nationalize the barbershop. They just want to nationalize the Fortune 
500 companies, the oil industry, the refinery industry, and the energy 
industry. And they don't need to do it all in one fell swoop. They can 
do it incrementally. A lot of Americans think it's happening almost in 
one fell swoop. But the playbook's there on that Web site.
  The people that are running this country do not believe in free 
enterprise. They believe in a managed economy that's run, and it's on 
the Web site of the socialists, companies run for the benefit of the 
people affected by them. Guess who that is? That's the workers or the 
customers, not the investors. That's why the investors got aced out

[[Page 26610]]

in the car companies, as we heard from Mr. Hoekstra earlier.
  That's the backdrop, Mr. Akin.
  Mr. AKIN. Just going back to what I'm saying about some poor guy 
that's a small businessman out there in this environment, and you see 
this wave after wave of tax increases, and you don't know when the 
waves are going to stop, and you don't know what's going on and how 
you're going to run your company. It reminds me of an expression from a 
State right next door to yours. You're from Iowa. We're just a little 
bit east over in the State of Missouri. But we have an expression that 
I think adequately expresses if I were a small businessman in that 
Missouri. We say, ``hunker down like a toad in a hailstorm.'' And I 
think that's where our small business people are. They're not thinking 
about building that addition or adding that extra machine tool or 
coming up with an innovative new process. They're thinking about how am 
I going to survive this storm?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Speaking of the turtle and the toad, the fence for 
the turtle, there's a reason and we've seen the film on why you can't 
supposedly put a fence on our southern border, and that's a little 
video of this toad that hops along and hops up and bumps his little 
nose on a fence, and, therefore, we surely couldn't have one to protect 
America because this toad can't figure out how to hop around it.
  So hunker down like a turtle in a what?
  Mr. AKIN. ``Hunker down like a toad in a hailstorm.''
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Or a turtle that's lying up against a fence.
  The gentleman from Michigan.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. You put it all together, and I think this is what we 
started seeing in August. In August we had people who were frustrated 
about programs that had been around like No Child Left Behind, massive 
amounts of money but also massive amounts of unfunded mandates that 
weren't working, and parents recognizing that, wow, now Washington's 
telling me which schools are good, which ones are bad, which teachers 
are good, which ones are bad. It's kind of like I knew that before. I 
didn't need Washington to tell me that.
  Then they saw what you articulated, Mr. King, so eloquently earlier 
where we did this massive stimulus bill that's not creating jobs. 
You've got cap-and-trade. You've got this health care. And I think this 
is why they came out in droves during August and saying stop, we want 
our freedom.
  And this is why we need people to do one of three things or four 
things on Thursday at noon. Number one, if you can be in Washington and 
join us, come here and stand up and express your vote for freedom. And 
I think it's happening tonight in Virginia, and it happened in New 
Jersey, and I'm not should exactly what happened in New York, but in 
those two States that's exactly what people did. This Tuesday they 
stood up for freedom in Virginia, and they stood up for freedom in New 
Jersey.
  Join us here on Thursday. If you can't come here, go visit your 
Congressman's district office and express in person your vote for 
freedom. And if you can't go there, then get on the phone and, you're 
right, target those Members who are on the fence and say we need your 
vote for freedom and not for massive new government bureaucracy.
  And I think as we were talking and organizing this session for 
Thursday, someone came up and they gave us the fourth idea that says if 
you can't do one of those three and you're driving, and we don't want 
you to get on your cell phone and call your Congressman, then at least 
what you can do at noon on Thursday is start honking your horn for 
freedom. So do one of those four things on Thursday afternoon, and 
people will start getting the message.
  But it's not only Thursday. This vote may happen Friday. It may 
happen Saturday. We're not sure exactly when. But keep that effort 
going and build the momentum that we started in August, that you 
started in August at the grass-roots level. It has been reinvigorated. 
It's been going on for the last couple of months, but now we need to 
accelerate it back up. Get it going again on Thursday, Friday, 
Saturday, and Sunday until we come back and we do a sensible, 
commonsense reform of health care that says for the 85 percent of us 
who have health care and are relatively happy with it, we're really not 
going to mess with that. We're going to focus on those problems that we 
have identified in health care for those 10 to 15 percent of the 
American people who can't get health care. We're going to address those 
problems. But we're not going to mess with the rest of the system.
  Mr. AKIN. It just seems like the problem is just like the cap-and-
tax. I mean, that was the one that had the 300 pages of amendments 
passed at 3 o'clock in the morning. And I remember from this very 
podium that I'm speaking from our colleague, Congressman Gohmert from 
Texas, with his droll sense of humor inquiring of the Chair. He said, 
Madam Chairman--there was a lady in the Chair at that time--is it 
customary that there be a copy of the bill in the Chamber when we're 
debating it and discussing it? So there was a discussion with the 
Parliamentarian who said, yes, there is, it's common that there is. He 
came back about four times and said, Could you tell me whether to go 
north, south, east, or west? I can't find a copy of the bill here. And, 
of course, the bill was still being collated at the time.
  Now, that was another example of we have got a solution and we're 
just going to use the excuse----
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I'd like to----
  Mr. AKIN. But this is the same thing. This is just like that. If 
really CO2 were the problem, we could have fixed the problem 
easily.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I don't think it really does 
justice to what actually happened on this floor. It has to be brought 
to a close, and that is to give full credit to the gentleman from Texas 
(Mr. Gohmert). He took that Parliamentary inquiry with the Speaker to 
the point where he said, Madam Speaker, if the House of Representatives 
passes a bill that doesn't exist, then is it possible to message a bill 
that doesn't exist to the United States Senate? And apparently it was, 
because that is what happened. A bill that didn't exist was passed. 
That was cap-and-trade. It was messaged to the United States Senate. 
Not one person in this Congress read that bill, let alone understood 
it. I know. I don't have to ask because it didn't exist at the time it 
was passed on the floor of the House of Representatives.
  Now I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, I guess my point was the objective was already 
predetermined. It's a massive takeover of all kinds of basically 
building code stuff, telling you you've got to have an electric outlet 
in your garage. You know, this sort of incredibly detailed stuff that 
the Federal Government thinks we much better know how you ought to 
build your garage and have an electrical outlet in it. But the 
objective was all of this controlling stuff and a huge tax increase, 
which was the objective all along.
  This health care situation strikes me as the same thing. The 
objective from the beginning is get the government to run it, and we'll 
use any excuse that we can to justify the fact, but we already know the 
solution and the destination, and that is we just believe in the 
government running this thing.
  And there are a lot of people on the Democrat side that are 
completely open and honest and say that's their objective, and there 
are other people that are trying to obscure the fact that that's where 
they're going. We'll do it in some incremental steps, or we'll make it 
so that you can opt out. You can't opt out of the taxes, but you can 
opt out of the health care or whatever. But the bottom line is we want 
the government to run it.
  That kind of reminds me of something. And I know that a couple of you 
are historians. There was a country that believed, and we heard it 
argued on this floor, that health care is a right, and there was a 
country that took a look and said, you know, you ought to have a right 
to shelter because in the cold, harsh climate of this

[[Page 26611]]

country, if you don't have shelter, you will die. And you ought to have 
a right to food because you'll starve to death if you don't have food. 
And you ought to have a right to health care and you ought to have a 
right also to education. So that country, because they thought those 
were fundamental rights, had the government providing those things for 
their citizens.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Was there a right to escargot?
  Mr. AKIN. I don't know whether that might kill you or not, but the 
point is that country is out of business. It was called the Union of 
Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. But that was their basic 
philosophy, that the government should do housing and food and health 
care and education. And here we are going along after we laughed at 
them and watched that complete mess that they made of their country, 
the poverty it left people in, and we say, well, now we want the 
government not to do just food stamps and housing but we want the 
government to do all, all of medicine in America.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. The thing that's forgotten by the other side is 
that they're creating a dependency society, a society that the more 
dependent people can be, the more government can grow, the stronger 
their political power is, Mr. Speaker. That's a piece over here.

                              {time}  2300

  We are about independence and the vitality of that. You can't beat 
the guy that has a vested interest. The entrepreneur who started a 
business, who risked their capital. Like me, I had a negative net worth 
of $5,000. There was a way to go down from there. I had to make it 
work. I made no provision for failure. A lot of nights I worked all 
night and the next day to hold it together. When that happens, you 
can't beat that person that is determined that way. But if government 
replaces all of the needs and all of the wants and sets the safety net 
out there and turns the safety net into a hammock, the vitality of a 
nation is diminished.
  We have, if this bill should pass, it takes away another incentive 
for personal responsibility and it says to the person who is not 
responsible, you don't need to figure out how to climb up from here 
because we will deliver. We will do a delivery of anything it is that 
you want.
  It reminds me of FDR's ``Four Freedoms'' speech, and that is cut into 
the wall down at his monument, and I don't go there very often. And he 
got it a little wrong, four freedoms: Freedom of religion, freedom of 
speech. They are freedoms. They are constitutional freedoms. But the 
other two were freedom from want and freedom from fear. Freedom from 
want and freedom from fear, and some of America has been duped into 
thinking somehow those are rights. They are not rights at all; those 
are wants. Now we have gone to the point where we have catered so much 
to the people of this country and the lust for political power that we 
have said to people, You should have a constitutional right to freedom 
from fear of want. So don't worry, we'll give you everything you want. 
You don't have to fear not having what you want, a complete nanny state 
being created in this great gulp of socialism of one-sixth of our 
economy, 17.5 percent of our economy, and the freedom not just from 
cradle to grave, from conception to the grave. That is because this 
bill funds abortion. I don't think there is any way that the Speaker 
allows an amendment to come to this floor that will pass because you 
can't create a whole national health care act and make this thing work 
the way things are scenarioed today.
  This bill funds abortion. This bill funds illegals, gives them a 
health insurance policy, and it takes care from the time people are 
conceived, if they are fortunate enough to be allowed to be born, even 
though the subsidy will be there to promote abortion, it takes care all 
of the way up and makes children out of us all. A great diminishment of 
American freedom.
  And it would, if the Founding Fathers could stand in here tonight, 
the tears would be running down their cheeks thinking of what is staged 
to happen in this Congress. That is why we need the American people to 
come to this city and be here by noon on Thursday, gather together, 
come to the Capitol, surround this place, bring your passion and your 
love for this country, bring your patriotism, and bring your signs 
while you are at it.
  Mr. Speaker, the American people need to come here, to this Capitol, 
and we do the press conference at noon on Thursday. It will have a list 
of people that have migrated from across this country. People are 
coming from the Pacific Ocean. There are buses are coming in from State 
after State, converging on this city. People are dropping what is 
important. It is as if Paul Revere had ridden across America and said, 
Here is the call. Here is the call of your country.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. The gentleman was with us in one of our colleague's 
office's an hour ago, and one of the other Members answered the phone 
and said, You know what? That was two people from Oregon and they 
thought they got the wrong office because they were calling at 9:30 at 
night and someone actually answered.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. And it was a Member of Congress.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. And it was a Member of Congress. And they said, We were 
talking about this House call on Thursday, and we are coming. We think 
it is important to be there. Where do we need to be?
  So I think you are absolutely right. We have heard about people 
coming from New Jersey. We know there are people coming from the area 
here. As people start thinking about this--and it is encouraging that 
people in Oregon are getting the message. They are going to take the 
time. They will probably have to leave Wednesday. They will have to 
leave tomorrow to be here Thursday at noon. They will be out there on 
the east front. I guess we have to call a press conference, although 
some might call it a rally, although I guess the speech police here on 
Capitol Hill and the House of Representatives forbid us to use the term 
``rally''; is that correct?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. There has been a little bit of that PC speech 
police effort, but I submit that this is a free country and we do have 
First Amendment rights. If we want to call it a rally, we can call it a 
rally.
  We can call the American people to come to this city and listen to 
the model of the people from Oregon who are willing to drop everything 
and head to the sound of the microphone, some would say head to the 
sound of the call to this mission to save freedom.
  At the core of everything that we have said here tonight is the 
threat to American freedom, and it can be saved by the American people 
and no one else. And nothing that we say in the debate, no Member of 
Congress can come up with a new argument that is going to sway the 
people that have gravitated towards their power and their political 
base, or their fear perhaps of maybe losing a chairmanship, or their 
desire to get a gavel and be a Chair, or somebody who needs a project 
in their district, all of those things have to be taking place.
  But what can happen is real American people can let these Members of 
Congress know that they want to hang onto their freedom. If they are 
willing to come from the Pacific Ocean, from the Midwest, from 
Michigan, across, up and down the Atlantic seaboard, to come into this 
city, the Members of Congress are going to have to hear and they are 
going to listen.
  And, by the way, I don't believe it will be something that a bill 
comes to the floor with the American people all around the outside of 
this Capitol and that the bill gets voted down on this floor. It 
doesn't really work that way. It would be more likely the majority 
leader coming to the microphone and saying, We have a few 
technicalities to work out on this bill, please stay tuned, and he will 
walk off the floor.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would yield, the real sign of success 
is that the bill doesn't come to the floor. The real statement of 
success is that we do have a bill that comes to the floor.
  Mr. AKIN. A good bill.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. A good bill that recognizes the ultimate and the 
necessity

[[Page 26612]]

that we give freedom and power back to the American people and that we 
don't take it from them.
  If you are doing 1,900 pages, that is saying we are taking your 
freedom. You don't need 1,990 pages to say, You know what, we are going 
to make it easier for you to exercise your freedom in these areas.
  Mr. AKIN. Would it be okay, I would like to come back to that call 
just an hour or two ago from the people in Oregon.
  I am thinking, you know, there are not that many people out there 
that can afford to just drop whatever they are doing, cancel their 
plans, buy an expensive airplane ticket, come to a strange city, figure 
out if you are going to get a rental car and survive the traffic.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Take the subway.
  Mr. AKIN. You know, that is a pretty high threshold. And yet the 
thing that I love about this country is all across America when you fly 
back at night in those airplanes and you see those lights across the 
countryside, all of those lights of people who love freedom in this 
country, and they are willing to just do that and say, Stop. And they 
come down here and they feel powerless and they feel small, and yet 
they come down here and they want to say, Don't you guys remember about 
freedom? And don't you remember what this country is about? Why is it 
that you have this absolute, instinctive desire to always build more 
government and take our freedom away? When has that ever produced good 
results?
  I just think that is why Ronald Reagan loved this country, because he 
saw all of those different people that were Americans that loved 
freedom. He didn't see all of the political shenanigans, the false 
promises. I won't spend a dime more, I will spend $1.2 trillion more 
instead. He didn't see that. He just saw all those freedom-loving 
people out there just chasing the dream that was in their hearts.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. The other thing that they are telling us, they are 
saying before you take on health care, why don't you fix what you have 
already taken and figure out, you know, No Child Left Behind, the way 
it was designed and implemented, after 8 years, more people here 
believe it doesn't work, but a whole lot of people in the grass roots 
America are saying, That doesn't work.
  It is kind of like why don't you go back and maybe devolve the 
authority of No Child Left Behind and let's take a different approach 
and do some of the things with some of these other programs. You know, 
before you take on this massive responsibility, fix what you have 
already put into place.
  Mr. AKIN. But government never gives up power, though.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. That is the problem. And before you take this on, why 
don't you get back to a balanced budget.
  You know, it is the commonsense things that people, it gets to be a 
phrase that is overused, but it is the things that people are doing 
around their kitchen table.

                              {time}  2310

  Today, I ran into some friends of mine from the company where I used 
to work, and there the industry is down about 30 percent, the office 
furniture industry. What they have done is the workers at the company, 
they have all had to sacrifice. They work 9 out of 10 days, and the 
10th day is a day off. It's a day that they don't get paid for. That is 
an automatic 10 percent reduction in their pay. At the same time, they 
are also not getting the same level of profit sharing, contributions to 
401(k)s, their health care premiums or their deductibles have gone up. 
They're figuring that they maybe have lost 15 to 20 percent of their 
discretionary income over the last year. Do you see that in Washington? 
We haven't made those decisions to get back to a balanced budget.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. We have grown government instead.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. We have grown government. We are a growing industry, 
and we're growing it on the backs of our kids and grandkids.
  So my constituents are saying--and all across the State, because we 
tried this in Michigan, we tried to grow Michigan's economy and make us 
more competitive by increasing taxes, increasing regulations and all 
those types of things. And guess what? Mr. President, you don't have to 
go talk to your economist to figure out if your strategy is going to 
work. All you need to do is look at Michigan. It doesn't work.
  What we now need to do is we need to get back to the basics here, 
that's what my constituents are telling me, get back to the basics, 
don't try to take on more, because you can't even handle what you've 
got.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I just went in and looked at a Web site, 
Constitution Daily, and it has on it this: 682 Federal agencies. Now, 
think about what that means. You have subagencies, departments of 682 
regulators. And one thing that you will never see is a single company, 
not one company, a Fortune 500 company, a small little business, not 
one company in America would be foolish enough to put on their Web site 
or announce that they are in compliance with all the regulations that 
can be generated by 682 Federal agencies, let alone the State agencies 
that are there, plus the taxes that are on top of that and all the 
bureaucrats that have to be paid for out of the profit of the private 
sector companies.
  There are two sectors to this economy. There is the private sector 
that produces goods and services that have value. And the way you 
determine that value is, are people willing to pay for that service and 
it is essentially rooted in the necessities of life. And then the 
surplus income goes to recreational and those kinds of investments. 
That's the private sector.
  The other sector, the government sector, is--and that's where I am 
not very charitable--I say that's the parasitic sector. It drains the 
vitality off the private sector. And this government has been growing 
and growing the public sector, the government part, increasing taxes, 
hiring more regulators for the 682 agencies, and they want to create 
new agencies. There are 111 new agencies. So our 682, what would that 
be, 793 agencies? I have the list here of 111 new Federal bureaucracies 
created by the Pelosi health care bill. It's on both sides.
  Mr. AKIN. Is that a record?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. The Committee for the Establishment of the Native 
American Health and Wellness Foundation, that's the last one.
  Mr. AKIN. I've got to believe that's a record, isn't it? Have we ever 
passed a bill that created 1,100----
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I would submit that no one has ever conceived of a 
number this big before or a bill this big before. I think it's not only 
a record; it's beyond the imagination of anybody at this point.
  Mr. AKIN. On Thursday at 12 o'clock, Congressman King, are you going 
to be out there on the steps of the Capitol?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I will be on the steps of the Capitol at noon on 
Thursday. I will be there with a large group of patriots, yourselves, 
gentlemen--Mr. Hoekstra and Mr. Akin--myself, Michele Bachmann and 
others. We will be there standing up for freedom, Mr. Speaker, and so 
will the American people, and so will Jon Voight and so will Mark 
Levin. We are going to see a gathering of patriots that speak up and 
speak out to preserve and protect the freedom that our Founding Fathers 
and everyone who has put on a uniform to defend this country has 
defended in one way or another, and many patriots that didn't put on a 
uniform that stood up for America.
  And I can imagine blue collar people, white collar people, retired 
people, young people looking across at Washington, D.C. that have been 
wondering, what can I do, what can I do, and deciding, I'm going to 
climb in my car, my Detroit-made car or Michigan-made car----
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. We hope so.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. And drive that across the countryside, whatever it 
takes, park here and take the Metro in because parking is going to be 
hard, but join these people coming here to the Capitol here in 
Washington, D.C. And some of them will decide they can't quite afford 
the time and they

[[Page 26613]]

will go to district offices, inside the offices, out on the streets. I 
know that there is going to be a ceremonial reading of the bill in at 
least one location outside a district office. That will take at least 
48 hours for anyone to fast read through this 1,990-page bill.
  Mr. AKIN. But if you do, there are a lot of interesting trap doors, 
smoke and mirrors in that bill, a lot of very interesting things. One 
of them that I thought was absolutely amazing, we talk about tort 
reform, that is, limiting the punitive damages. Different States have 
passed that and have the effect of dropping their medical insurance 
costs in the State by as much as 20 percent is my understanding. At 
least Texas had a very good effect by dropping that.
  This bill has a different kind of tort reform. It says any State that 
has done tort reform, you can't have any of the medical benefits that 
your taxes are going to go for. So it's a reverse tort----
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, furthermore, if I could just briefly, and 
then yield back to the gentleman from Michigan, but it also says in 
tort reform that if States are going to try any of these pilot 
projects, they can't limit attorneys' fees or impose caps on damages. 
So how are you going to reform tort if you can't limit attorneys' fees 
or impose caps on damages? It is: you can fly, but we're going to cut 
your wings off.
  The gentleman from Michigan.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. One interesting thing, they talk about this being a 
national health care bill, and we know all the gyrations that the 
Speaker is going through right now to get those last few votes. Can the 
gentleman from Iowa tell me how they got the votes of the Congress 
persons from Hawaii?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I do not know, and I would be happy to yield.
  Mr. AKIN. That sounds like a good--you got me. What's the story?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. The bill doesn't apply to Hawaii.
  Mr. AKIN. It doesn't apply to Hawaii?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. It doesn't apply to Hawaii. Hawaii is exempt.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Hawaii is exempt from 1,990 pages?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. It is within the first couple of hundred pages because 
Hawaii has done kind of their own thing. But go to the bill, I believe 
it's in the first 300 pages. I read it over the weekend.
  Mr. AKIN. I wonder what Hawaii real estate is going to do if this 
thing were to pass?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. You know, I may just go to Hawaii if this thing 
passes.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Remember, they may have done some bad things at the 
State level, but Hawaii is exempt.
  Mr. AKIN. So the only people exempt from the bill then is Congress 
and Hawaii.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. That would be it, Mr. Akin. I mean, I don't know if 
that's all the answers; but that comes to mind for me, too.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. But these are the kinds of surprises that you will find 
as you read through 1,990 pages. Because, again, this is not about the 
quality and quantity of health care; this is about getting the votes to 
grab that from the American people.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. But is Hawaii also then exempt from the tax 
increases? And are they exempt from the lack of tort reform and exempt 
from all of these pieces that are bad?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think that's on page 492, and I haven't gotten there 
yet.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Are they exempt from funding for abortions? Are 
they exempt from funding for illegal aliens? Are they exempt from 
lawsuit abuse, tax increases, or Medicare cuts?
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. The commissioner shall decide that.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. The commissioner shall decide, one of 3,425.
  Mr. AKIN. Is it commissioner or czar? Did they change that? Is it a 
czar or a commissar or a commissioner? What are they calling this one?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I call him a commissarissioner. I think that's the 
appropriate name for someone like that.
  Mr. AKIN. That covers them all, yes.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank our colleagues for doing this and remind the 
American people, this is the opportunity on Thursday on a number of 
different levels to make their voices heard.
  I thank my colleague for yielding and leading this Special Order 
tonight.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlemen from Michigan and Missouri.
  Mr. AKIN. And also, Congressman King, thank you for being part of 
calling the invitation, taking the initiative just as a Member of 
Congress to call the people of America to come to their Capitol 
Building and express their opinion.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, we stand together in our call for freedom and 
the call for the American people to exercise that freedom and come to 
this Capitol. And that is Thursday at noon, day after tomorrow. Let 
your voices be heard. And if thousands of Americans come to this city, 
we will be able to save our freedom and be able to own the health 
insurance policy that you choose and keep the government's hands off 
our health care. And those that can't come to this city, we ask them to 
come to district offices or pick up the phone. The American people shut 
down comprehensive amnesty 3 years ago twice; we can shut down 
socialized medicine. We can do it, and it starts on Thursday.
  Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I thank the gentlemen that have 
joined me tonight, and I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________