[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 23]
[House]
[Pages 31738-31746]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              HEALTH CARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's my privilege to be 
recognized and address you here on the floor of the House and pick up--
I think, transition from the discussion that has taken place in the 
previous hour by the gentlelady from Ohio--and I appreciate the 
presentation that's been made here--and to fit the breast cancer issue 
in with the larger health care debate is what I will seek to do, Mr. 
Speaker.
  And that is this: that the question about how breast cancer is 
treated and how it's tested fits back into the broader question of what 
happens if we end up with a national health care act. What happens if 
we end up with socialized medicine? Do we get more of this or less of 
this? Do we get more government agencies that are laying out guidelines 
that are, as I believe--and I agree with the gentlelady from Wyoming 
and with the doctor from Texas--that do we get more government 
guidelines that cut down on the costs of the tests but raise the costs 
in lives? And do we get that in breast cancer, and do we get that on 
nearly every other aspect of health care?
  This debate has gone on and on here on health care, and it reached 
its crescendo during the month of August in the aftermath of the cap-
and-trade bill,

[[Page 31739]]

the bill that no one read, not one single person read, not one Member 
of Congress read. I know that no one read the bill--I don't have to ask 
everyone here--because the bill was not available. When the bill was 
passed, it was not available in a form that resembled final form.
  And I remember Congressman Louie Gohmert come to the floor, Mr. 
Speaker, and raising the question, parliamentary inquiry, Is there a 
bill in the well? Is there a copy of the final bill, the one that we're 
debating and the one that we're voting on? But it's not in the well. 
Not an integrated bill, not with the amendments that were included in 
that.
  And so the final question he asked after a series of them, Can we 
message a bill that doesn't exist to the United States Senate? 
Apparently that is what we could do, and that is what happened. That 
bill, cap-and-trade, sits over there now before the United States 
Senate, as does a national health care bill. And they are, of course, 
taking it up and debating it and fitting it around some of these things 
that they're doing. And it looks like this is the week that the United 
States Senate turns the focus on their national health care act.
  Now, we have taken this argument, policy-by-policy, ideology-by-
ideology through this House, but it comes down to this just as a 
refresher, Mr. Speaker, what brought this all about: increasing costs 
in health care in the United States and, around the world, a growing 
focus on health care.
  But I think that a lot of it emerged during the Democrat primary for 
President when Hillary Clinton looked at one point like she would win 
the nomination. She's the one that led the argument and led the 
meetings--both open and closed door--for what a lot of America still 
remembers as HillaryCare back in 1993, 1994, in that era. And since 
Hillary Clinton knew a lot about health care and that was the 
centerpiece of her campaign, she brought that to the debate and used 
that in the primary campaign.
  And as the contest for the nomination on the Democrat side for the 
President shook down to one of two people, Barack Obama or Hillary 
Clinton, the pressure that Hillary brought into that campaign to raise 
the issue of health care made it a central issue in the Democrat 
primary. And it forced, in my opinion, Barack Obama--then-Senator 
Obama--to run a health care agenda of his own, something to match up to 
and counteract with and seek to win the debate on the Democrat side of 
the primary voting aisle. And I believe that the urgency that America 
has is not reflected exactly off of the data that's out there and the 
economics of it and the need.
  But it's more reflected because there was a political gain to be had 
in the nomination process for President, especially on the Democrat 
side, and as that debate emerged, and Barack Obama was successful in 
winning the nomination and then ultimately the presidency, he carried 
that mantle of health care reform through the entire process--inspired 
by Hillary Clinton, I believe--and pushed to a high level of a 
priority, which I'm convinced, Mr. Speaker, that they believe that it 
is the highest priority in America. They have made it that. They must 
believe that, and I'm not challenging that approach. I'm just 
suggesting that because it was a primary issue in the nominating 
process for President on the Democrat side, it gained some momentum 
that it wouldn't have had if we were going to step back and look at the 
health care issue.
  And so it became something that the President, when he was elected, 
saw as a mandate, a mandate to go in and pass some kind of a national 
health care act.
  Well, you would think that you could go right down through the logic 
line and flip the toggle switches and get down to something that makes 
sense. And the principles that were laid out by Barack Obama as a 
candidate--and later as a President--came down to this. Health care 
costs too much money. The economy is in a mess, and it's in a downward 
spiral. We have to fix the economy--this is the President's philosophy, 
and we can't fix the economy unless we first fix health care that costs 
too much money. That's the rationale. It's threaded through a number of 
his speeches.
  It never seemed rational to me. I couldn't follow the logic of ``the 
economy's in a mess; we have to fix health care to straighten out the 
economy; we spend too much on health care, therefore we're going to fix 
it.'' I can get maybe that far, but then the rationale on my side of 
the aisle, among Republicans, would be, Well, if we spend too much 
money on health care, where are we spending it that we don't need to?
  The President concludes it's a half-trillion dollars in Medicare, 
which would inappropriately punish many of the senior citizens in 
America--some of whom are being led by AARP, who will apparently make 
more money selling insurance if a bill is passed than they will serving 
their membership if it's not passed. So they have come out to support 
this bill.
  But the President said, We're spending too much money; let's spend 
more. And he wants to keep the bill down under $900,000 but the doc fix 
throws another $243 billion, is the original number, at this and it 
takes it over a trillion. And if you look at some of the other numbers, 
if you evaluate this as Judd Gregg did, Senator Judd Gregg from New 
Hampshire, that they're doing the math on this bill in this fashion: 
5\1/2\ or so years of expenses, 10 years of tax increase and income. So 
it shows up to only be a number that at some place around or a little 
bit under a trillion dollars, Mr. Speaker, in extra costs.
  Judd Gregg says it's $2\1/2\ trillion once you take an objective look 
at the math and at the accounting. If you look at actually 10 years of 
expenses and 10 years of revenue, it is about a $2\1/2\ trillion dollar 
bill.

                              {time}  2210

  So if the President's statement is that we spend too much money on 
health care, about 14\1/2\, and some will even say 16 or more percent 
of our GDP on health care, we spend too much money on health care, 
therefore we have to solve the problem by spending a lot more. This 
diabolical, Orwellian logic is something that the American people are 
still breathlessly amazed that a President and leaders in this country 
can get by with such statements. Health care costs too much money, so 
we will spend 1 or 2 or maybe even approaching $3 trillion more, that 
will solve the problem, Mr. Speaker. If we spend too much money, let's 
spend a lot more.
  Another one of the points is there are too many uninsured in America. 
Now, over the last 3 or so years, there has been an intentional effort 
to conflate the two words of ``health care'' and ``health insurance,'' 
and the effort has been on the part of the people on the left to blur 
the subject matter of the difference between health care and health 
insurance. They will say we have too many people that don't have health 
care in America. But they don't take into account that what health care 
really means is, do you get treated by doctors and nurses in clinics, 
hospitals and emergency rooms or don't you? If you get sick or get 
injured, can you get treatment? The answer to that is yes, everywhere. 
That's essentially what the law says.
  So, according to statute and practice, the health care providers 
provide everyone access to health care. What we don't have are 
everybody in America that has their own personal insurance policy. And 
a lot of people on this side of the aisle have conflated the two terms 
and said, ``people don't have health care'' when they really mean, 
``people don't own their own health insurance policy.'' And so it has 
been morphed and blended into this idea that somehow there is a right, 
and some would even argue that within the Constitution there is some 
kind of a right that everyone would own their own health insurance 
policy.
  And so they set about to grant or provide a health insurance policy 
to every American, legal or illegally, lawfully present or not, people 
that will take care of their own responsibilities and people even that 
have refused to take care of their own responsibilities,

[[Page 31740]]

and impose a health insurance policy on them all. And if they are not 
willing to write a check and pay for the premium or go to work for 
somebody that will do that or sign up for Medicaid, or, of course, 
those that are eligible for Medicare, if they are not willing to do 
that, the IRS will come in and audit them and levy a fine for not 
having health insurance.
  And if this gets bad enough, you can end up in jail for the first 
time in the history of this country. The Federal Government is putting 
together a product called a health insurance exchange and approved 
health insurance policies or the public option, government-run health 
insurance plan, and if you fail to buy a policy within the statutory 
guidelines, those that are approved by the Health Choices 
Administration Commissioner, the czar, the IRS can come in and levy a 
fee against you, and eventually one could go to jail for tax evasion 
technically, but not buying a government-imposed health insurance 
policy actually. It would be the first time in the history of America 
that the government has produced a product, compelled its citizens to 
buy the product, and if they refused or failed to, then levy a fine, 
eventually lock them up in jail. It is the equivalent of debtors' 
prison for not buying the government-approved version of health 
insurance. It will be the first time in America.
  And the President has said, and this is out of the House version, Mr. 
Speaker, and I understand the Senate has tweaked that a little bit and 
maybe taken the jail time out, so now they just put a lien on your 
house and sell your house. Never fear, though. There is a special way 
you can get a cheap mortgage in America that has been set up to take 
care of those people. The government has their fingers in everything.
  This has been the most giant leap into socialism that we've had ever 
since the preparations for the transition that began on the 20th of 
January of this year. And the President has said, we have too many 
uninsured. And when you go through the list, they use the number 47 
million uninsured. So from that 47 million, I begin to subtract the 
numbers of people who are eligible under their own employer but just 
don't opt in, or opt out; and those who are eligible under a government 
program like Medicaid, and subtract from that number those who are 
unlawfully present in the United States, where if ICE or the Department 
of Homeland Security had to deliver them their health insurance policy, 
they would be compelled to deport them to a foreign country, or those 
who are lawfully present in the United States but by law are barred for 
5 years from having public benefits, and we keep subtracting out of 
that list those who make over $75,000 a year and don't have their own 
health insurance. And now with that list, we take the 47 million and we 
subtract all those in that list that I talked about, those eligible 
under their employer without it, those eligible for the government, 
those that make over $75,000 a year, and those who are ineligible 
because they are illegal aliens or immigrants, and now that 47 million 
magically becomes 12.1 million, Mr. Speaker; and this 12.1 million 
Americans without affordable options for health insurance now isn't 
this massive number that tells us we have a national problem. What it 
really is, is less than 4 percent of the American population. And we 
are down to 4 percent of the American population, and the proposal is 
to change 100 percent of America's health insurance program and 
America's health care delivery, all of that to try to reduce this 
number of less than 4 percent down to something that may approach 2 
percent after it takes over 100 percent of the program.
  With the insurance competition that the President has called for, he 
said, well, the insurance companies are greedy. He always has to have a 
straw man to kick over. The insurance companies are greedy. Was it 
today or yesterday he said, the fat cat bankers, and then sat down and 
had a meeting with them today. Somebody has to be demonized before we 
can move forward here. We can't just simply have people with divergent 
interests that can be brought together that are altruistic and want to 
engage in the economy and help people. We have 1,300 health insurance 
companies in America and about 100,000 different policy varieties that 
can be purchased in the various 50 States, and that isn't exactly that 
many different companies and policies available to every American 
because we don't allow Americans, at this point, to buy health 
insurance across State lines.
  It is an easy fix, we tweak that here, John Shadegg's bill that's 
been out here for about 4 or more years to allow people to buy health 
insurance across State lines, and magically all 1,300 companies compete 
against each other, unless they happen to be the same company that's 
operating in different States, and when that happens, and magically 
these 100,000 policy varieties become available to everybody in the 
United States.
  And so the idea the President proposes of creating a government-run 
health insurance company and government-approved health insurance 
policies to produce more competition for the health insurance 
companies, if you want more competition, just let people buy insurance 
across State lines. Magically you've got 1,300 companies competing, 
100,000 policies to choose from, and it is far more effective from a 
competition standpoint than it is to put the government involved and 
have the government limit, write, regulate and control every health 
insurance policy in America. And when the President says, Don't worry, 
if you like your health insurance policy you get to keep it, have you 
noticed that he hasn't said that in a long time? It has been weeks and 
weeks, at least by my recollection, that the President has reiterated, 
if you like your health insurance policy, you get to keep it. The truth 
is, get ready to lose it. If you have a policy today, under the House 
version of the bill or anything that I understand under the Senate 
version of the bill, that policy would have to be cancelled some time 
between 2011, by 2011 or 2013. It would be cancelled, and there would 
be a new policy that would have to be issued that met the Federal 
guidelines. There is no policy in America that the President of the 
United States with confidence can look at and point to and say, you, 
Joe the plumber, or you, Sally the doctor, are going to be able to keep 
the health insurance policy that you have, that you love, that you paid 
for, because the government may decide that it doesn't have the right 
benefits to it, it doesn't have the right mandates, and maybe it 
doesn't cover all the things that they think government should cover.
  And so that is just some of the basis for this, Mr. Speaker. There is 
so much more. And as this debate ensues down on the Senate side of the 
aisle, right down through those doors, straight across through the 
Capitol, we are watching a dramatic, and I think a titanic, colossal 
clash taking place in the Senate right now, and I mean in this period 
this week. As this unfolds, we need the American people to rise up. We 
need the American people to speak up. We need the American people to 
pick up their telephones. We need them to come to this Capitol 
building. We need them to fill up the Senate. We need them to surround 
this place and stand here and call out for freedom, call out for 
liberty, call out for the rights that are in the Constitution and not 
somebody else's idea of transferring wealth across America and putting 
it into the pockets of others and taking away the benefits of the 
people that have been industrious and have been personally responsible.
  We take care of everybody in America. Jimmy Carter once said that the 
people that work should live better than those that don't. I caught 
that. When he said that, it seemed a little odd to hear that from him. 
And I don't know that he really ever lived by it, but he said it, and I 
believe that as well.

                              {time}  2220

  This bill is another class level, or it's another take from the rich 
and give to the poor. It's a class-envy bill. It's born out of spite 
and born out of class envy and it's driven by ideology and it's driven 
by the idea of socialized medicine.

[[Page 31741]]

  Today I was asked to answer a series of questions that were requested 
by a publication here on the Hill, and it was, What is the biggest 
problem Republicans have? Mr. Speaker, my answer is fighting off 
Marxists and socialists that masquerade as liberals and progressives. 
That's the biggest problem Republicans have now. This is a Marxist and 
socialist agenda, and that's one of the reasons why the Blue Dogs have 
gone underground and become groundhogs. The shadow of socialism has 
pushed them underground. And they're not out here fighting for truth, 
justice, the American way and a balanced budget and personal 
responsibility and constitutionalism. They seem to have disappeared 
from the scene. But 40 or so of them will get a pass from the Speaker 
of the House and be able to vote ``no'' on this bill if it comes back 
to this House because there are enough votes stacked up on the Democrat 
side that about that many will get a pass.
  I see that my good friend, Dr. Burgess, who took a small hiatus from 
the previous Special Order, is here with a brain full of information, 
Mr. Speaker, for you to absorb and pass along to our colleagues.
  I would be very happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the 
gentleman from Texas, Dr. Burgess.
  Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  The gentleman has done an excellent job at delineating where we've 
been, what's been happening, and perhaps where we're going. You know, 
this summer was truly a remarkable time in this country when the beauty 
of participatory democracy was on display literally from sea to shining 
sea, from border to border. I certainly felt it in my district. I know 
it was felt in a number of congressional districts. We've seen the 
results of that.
  The gentleman is quite correct, the Blue Dogs, who were so active 
during the summer months leading up to the August recess, have really 
been under enormous pressure by their leadership on their side. And now 
we've seen, in the past several days, I think by my count, four 
retirements from that group. I don't know whether we will be seeing 
more, but it certainly is something that you cannot fail to notice.
  Now, the gentleman from Iowa has correctly identified this to be a 
fight about ideology. You will notice through the discussions going on 
in the other body right now, there is really very little that's going 
on about health care, per se. There is very little talked about as far 
as health care policy. It is all a question about, well, let's get the 
numbers right. Let's get the Congressional Budget Office. Let's get the 
actuaries over at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Let's 
get these numbers right so we can then present this to the American 
people and stay within the President's prescription of delivering 
health care for all for under $1 trillion.
  Now, we know that to be a fantasy. The gentleman outlined the reasons 
why that is a fantasy. There are a number of things that have been 
taken out of this bill that will have to be added back at some point in 
the future, but this has become a fight about ideology just as the 
energy bill has been a fight about ideology. Cap-and-trade is no longer 
about the number of molecules of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This 
is about ideology. This is about holding the United States to $3 
trillion in ransom to the rest of the world and, oh, by the way, you've 
got to give up your ability to be in charge of our own future. You've 
got to give up your sovereignty along the way to Copenhagen. This is a 
fight about ideology.
  The Financial Services bill that we passed on the floor of this House 
last week had nothing to do to prevent future problems with meltdowns 
in the financial industry. If it had, we would have seen something that 
would actually have made a difference. Instead, we got big carve-outs 
for big companies. The smaller community banks are still going to have 
to pay into a fund to bail out the big guys if they get in trouble 
again in the future. In fact, we've institutionalized the failure of 
those institutions who are too big to fail by this bill that we passed 
last week.
  But again, it's not about what you know about financial policy; it's 
about ideology. That is where we are today over in the other body with 
this health care debate. Nobody is really interested in whether or not 
there is the right vaccine policy involved. No one is really interested 
in what the United States Preventive Services Task Force does. It's all 
about control of every facet of your life. And if we can control your 
health care, we can control more about you than we've ever been able to 
control in the past.
  That is why it is so important that this be stopped. It's not because 
we want to prevent anyone from having health insurance. It's not that 
we want to prevent anyone from having health care, but we want to 
prevent this type of power grab that is going on at the level of the 
Federal Government over the lives of honest American citizens.
  If we lose, if we are not successful in stopping this, ultimately 
it's not a Democratic win or a Republican loss. Ultimately, it's the 
American people who will lose in this transaction. It is transactional 
politics at its worst, and we've all seen that on display.
  One year ago, we were faced, on our side, with the very stark 
realization that we had lost the White House, lost 20 seats in the 
House, lost a number of seats in the Senate, and in fact, when the 
eventual Senator from Minnesota was seated, the Democrats had a 
proverbial unstoppable majority of 60 votes over on the Senate side. 
This all happened very early in the calendar year 2009.
  I would have thought, facing that kind of harsh reality, that many of 
these things that we've talked about tonight--energy policy, health 
care policy, financial services policy--many of those things would have 
already been done; after all, what was to stop them? Were Republicans 
going to be able to stop much of anything? No. We didn't have the 
leadership, the money, or the ideas to put a stop to much of anything. 
In fact, I still believe to this day, had the President put health care 
ahead of the pork barrel spending that was present in the stimulus bill 
that they passed in February, if the President pushed health care to 
the front of that agenda, that would have been done in February. It 
would be the law of the land today, and there would have been nothing 
that anyone could have done to stop it. But they didn't. They didn't.
  In fact, I still puzzle over why cap-and-trade was suddenly thrown 
into the mix at the end of June, sort of all at once. We passed it out 
of committee a month before and it sort of languished there. Everyone 
was uncomfortable about it, but it was never coming to the floor, after 
all, so we really didn't need to worry about it. Then suddenly, the 
last week of June, boom, here it is and it's going to pass, and 
Democrats' arms were twisted and hair was pulled and eyes were gouged 
in order to get this thing passed.
  I don't know if the gentleman from Iowa recalls, but there was the 
instance where a Democratic Member from Florida sold his vote for $30 
million here on the floor of this House. The Democrats were going to 
usher in a new era of transparency. That was about as transparently 
transactional as I have ever seen on the floor of the House, but they 
got the bill passed.
  And then what happened? We went home for 4th of July recess, marched 
in that 4th of July parade right behind the American Legion, just in 
front of the Cub Scouts. And from both sides of the parade route, 
people were yelling at their Member of Congress, What in the world were 
you thinking? Next time, read the bill. On and on it went along the 
parade route. By the end of the 4th of July parades, Members of 
Congress, both sides, Republicans and Democrats, were saying, Oh, my 
God, what have we done? What are we up against?
  So we came back in July and said, We're not so anxious to pass this 
health care bill. In fact, the Blue Dogs, to their credit, ground 
things to a halt, starting about the 15th of July, when we finally got 
the bill--and remember, we got this 1,000-page bill and we were 
supposed to pass it before the August recess and go home and deal with 
the

[[Page 31742]]

consequences, but not so fast. The Blue Dogs did slow things down. We 
did not have a bill passed by the August recess.
  And then, it was a beautiful thing to watch, the participatory 
democracy that we saw again across this country came to bear and 
brought pressure to every Member of Congress, whether conservative, 
liberal, Republican, Democrat. Every Member of Congress heard from 
their constituents.
  Now, to be sure, the Speaker of the House labeled these individuals 
as Astroturf or rent-a-mob, but I've got to tell you, I had 2,000 
people show up for a town hall in Denton, Texas, on a hot Saturday 
morning in August, and these were my friends and neighbors, a town 
where I grew up. I know most of the people in the town. And it was not 
an imported crowd to give grief to the poor Member of Congress. These 
were people who were legitimately concerned.
  Just as the gentleman from Iowa accurately points out, we're trying 
to fix a problem for less than 5 percent of the American population and 
disrupt what 65, 70, or 73 percent of the American population sees as 
something that is working relatively well for them. Sure, they're 
concerned about costs for the future. Sure, they're concerned about 
what happens if they lose their job to their employer-sponsored 
insurance. But by and large, those that have insurance do want to keep 
it. That's why we don't hear that brought up anymore.

                              {time}  2230

  I thought we'd come back in September and hit the reset button--the 
pause, the replay. No. We hit the fast-forward button, and we pushed 
this thing through. Don't check the weather. We're going to fly anyway. 
The Speaker pushed it through in the early part of November, again, 
purely on a party-line vote, and now it's over in the Senate.
  The people are asking, Well, what are you going to do to fix this? 
Sixty percent of the people do not want this to happen. So, Mr. Member 
of Congress, what are you going to do to stop this?
  I do have to say that I am, once again, going to ask, going to call 
on, going to cajole, going to plead with Americans across the country 
who are looking at this happening right now: It's not hard to figure 
out who your Senators are as every State has got two. Most of the time, 
if you go to a search engine of choice and type in ``Who is my United 
States Senator for the State of Iowa or Texas?'' it will come back, and 
it will tell you. You can go to Senate.gov and can put the name of your 
State in, and it will tell you who your Senators are. It will, in fact, 
tell you how to contact them. It will give you their Washington 
telephone numbers and their phone numbers back home in the State. Your 
Senators need to hear from you in these coming days that are 
immediately ahead of us.
  You know, if you think back to the days in May of 2005, there were a 
couple of Senators who decided they were going to do something that 
fundamentally would have changed the way this country dealt with 
problems surrounding immigration. The American people rose up as one 
and said, Not so fast. Not so fast. We have a voice in this. We have a 
say in this. They stopped the Senate cold in its tracks.
  The Senate, true to form, decided maybe that was a misnomer. Maybe 
they didn't really mean ``not so fast.'' So they tried again. Once 
again, they heard ``not so fast.'' Their switchboards shut down. Their 
servers crashed because of the volumes of information that were coming 
in, telling them ``not so fast.''
  Well, I would submit to the gentleman from Iowa that he and I are 
going to be hard-pressed to stop this thing on the floor of the Senate 
in the days ahead. It is going to require participatory democracy on a 
level that we saw this summer, and then some, in order to bring this 
thing back to the realm of where, perhaps, we can actually deal with 
the problems that we're required to deal with.
  Remember, it's all about ideology right now. It's about a hard left 
turn that has been taken by the administration and by the Democratic 
leadership in the House and in the Senate. That's where they want to go 
with this thing. If that's okay with you, stay silent. Have a nice 
Christmas. We'll see you next year. If that's not okay with you, if you 
feel like the gentleman from Iowa and I feel about this, your Senators 
do need to hear from you. Your Members in the other body need to hear 
from you. They need to hear from you straightaway.
  I've got some other ideas which I'll be happy to share with the 
gentleman, but I've taken up enough of his time, and I'll yield back 
the time to the gentleman from Iowa.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from 
Texas. He had me paying attention to those ideas.
  From that standpoint on the immigration debate--and that's one that 
I've been engaged in for a long time--the effort that went out across 
this Nation to shut down the switchboard and to shut down the servers 
of the United States Senate sent a message. Yet, as the gentleman from 
Texas said, about 3 months later, they decided to try it again. They 
just didn't believe what the American people had told them, and they 
took another run at it.
  On the immigration side of this, this was a bipartisan effort. It had 
the President of the United States--then President Bush--and 
significant numbers on the Republican and on the Democrat sides of the 
aisle. There were more Democrats than Republicans significantly, but 
this was a bipartisan effort, and it was something that was 
strategically driven by the White House. It still failed in the face of 
that effort because the American people rose up.
  There isn't any reason, Mr. Speaker, for anybody to believe that the 
American people can't kill this socialized medicine bill. If they can 
kill comprehensive amnesty and do so twice in 1 year and do so in the 
United States Senate, as difficult as it may seem and as determined as 
the President seems to be, this scenario is doable.
  They have learned a few things, too, over there, down that hallway in 
the United States Senate and off into their office buildings on the 
side. They've learned how to shut their phones off, and they've learned 
how to shut down their fax machines, and they've learned how to, 
essentially, plug their ears and wait for the noise of the American 
people to settle down, and then we'll try to pass something.
  I'm suggesting this, that the Senators need to have a personal 
experience. They and their staffs need to have a personal experience--a 
respectful, polite and nonthreatening personal experience. Especially 
if you're a Senator, you probably have your finger on the political 
barometer, and have a real sense of what the public's mood is. You can 
run a poll, and you can hire a pollster to find out where the American 
people are or you can make a lot of phone calls and can send out emails 
and can send out letters. You can listen to people or you can put the 
data together, but you also have to measure the intensity. The 
intensity is the other part.
  If we have an issue out here that I'm ambivalent about--and I really 
haven't found that issue yet, Mr. Speaker, on which I am. 
Hypothetically, if I'm ambivalent about an issue and if, on the one 
hand, I'm for it and if, on the other hand, I'm against it and if half 
of the public is for it and if half of them is against it, how would 
one decide then which side of the issue to come down on?
  You have to pay attention to the people who have intensity. I pay 
attention to the people in this Congress who come in who have 
intensity--to people like Dr. Burgess who have intensity and to the 
people who have been elected to this Congress who are vocal and 
aggressive and who know what they believe because they've lived it. I 
pay attention to that level of intensity.
  As to the level of intensity that needs to come from the American 
people, this is the week. This is the week for that intensity. So, if 
you're ambivalent, fine. You can sit home and send an email. If you 
care, you can make a phone call. If you care more, you can go down to 
your Senators' district offices. If you care more yet, you can

[[Page 31743]]

come to Washington, D.C. At 1:30 tomorrow, there will be a large 
gathering in the park just north of the Senate Chamber. From there, we 
are going to see how much the American people care.
  They've been called to rally to defend their liberty a number of 
times this year. We saw it on April 15 in a big way. We saw it on 
September 12 in a big way. We saw it here on November 5 and on November 
7. On November 5, there were 20,000 to 50,000 or more people here 
outside this Capitol building, who came here and said, Don't take my 
liberty. Let me own my own health insurance policy. Don't tell me the 
standards by which I can buy it. Let me have my own freedom, my own 
liberty. I don't need government-run health care in America.
  That was the message. Of that whole group of people who was there--
tens of thousands--any one of them would have fit just perfectly at my 
own church picnic. They are salt-of-the-Earth, American, liberty-
loving, constitutionalist, fiscally responsible, family people from 
across America. They are the people who are this American family who 
don't want to see a socialized America. They understand we are a unique 
people and that we are not social democracy Europe.
  The socialists, for the most part, stayed in Europe. Freedom-loving 
people came here. There is a certain vitality in Americans which is 
unique to the rest of the world. It was hard to get here. You had to 
take a chance and maybe be an indentured servant; but earn your way 
across the Atlantic, and you could settle in and maybe drive a stake in 
Iowa and homestead 160 acres. One of my great-grandparents was an 
indentured servant who worked in a stable in Baltimore for 7 years 
before he got his passage worked off. These were people with a dream, 
who just wanted to have a start because we had economic opportunity. We 
had liberty, and they could shape their own lives.
  So we got the vitality from every donor civilization in the world. As 
for everybody who sends people here--every country--whatever would be 
the particular characteristics of their cultures, there is always that 
skim off the top, the cream off the top, which is the vitality of a 
culture, the vitality of a civilization.
  One of the reasons America has such vitality is that we skimmed the 
cream, and they came here. They arrived in America with almost 
unlimited natural resources, low-income or no taxation, no regulation, 
manifest destiny, a Protestant work ethic--and Catholics got with it 
pretty good--and with a foundation rooted in Christian morality and 
work ethic. That giant petri dish created this teeming America that 
settled the continent from sea to shining sea in the blink of a 
historical eye.
  We are not anybody else in the world. We are a unique people. We live 
in the unchallenged greatest nation on Earth, that the Earth has ever 
seen. I'm watching it be torn apart by people who don't understand what 
I've just said, by people who get out of bed every day and look around. 
They see these beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism, and 
they can't wait to get out their jackhammers and chisel away at those 
pillars of American exceptionalism, which are the foundation that made 
this a great nation.
  So now we've seen eight huge entities nationalized, most of it under 
this administration but not all of it. There are three large investment 
banks; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, AIG, all 
of that was nationalized. According to a Wall Street Journal article, 
one-third of the private sector profits have been nationalized, mostly 
by this administration, without an exit strategy.

                              {time}  2240

  Right away they set up the payroll czar to go in and tell the banks 
and the other institutions that they are paying too much to their 
executives. Now we have Barney Frank's Financial Services bill, which 
is about ideology, as the gentleman from Texas said, as much as 
socialized medicine is about ideology and not about a practical 
application. In that bill it looks like they are going to be able to 
regulate all the financial institutions they take an interest in--with 
a little carve-out there--and tell those institutions what they are 
going to pay their people probably right on down to the person that 
scrubs the floor at night.
  This freedom in this country has been dramatically diminished by the 
Pelosi Congress and the Obama presidency. This liberty that America 
needs to maintain our vitality is being quashed by the socialization, 
the nationalization of our economy, and the intentional creation of a 
dependency class of people that are designed to be the political base 
that will support those who will continue to do class-envy politics, 
share the wealth, so to speak.
  By the way, that ``share the wealth'' phrase that came out of 
President Obama's mouth as a candidate in speaking to Joe the Plumber 
is in the mission statement of ACORN.
  I am happy yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. BURGESS. Well, I think the gentleman has summed things up very 
well. I cannot be nearly as eloquent as he is, delineating the history 
and what created greatness in this country. All I know is the people 
who seem to be making the decisions today are the people who have never 
held a job in the private sector. For those of us who signed more 
paychecks on the front than on the back, it is a startling thing to 
watch as we see, once again, the administration is going to lurch 
forward with a jobs-creation strategy when a jobs-creation strategy 
exists right before our eyes.
  It's the small businessmen and women in America who have the 
capabilities of creating those jobs that we desire. What's happened to 
them today? They are scared to death. They are scared to death of this 
8 percent payroll tax that we are going to slap on them for health 
care. They don't know what we are going to do in energy.
  This Financial Services bill, they are going to be another several 
weeks trying to figure out what we just did to them last Friday night, 
late. Is it any wonder why small businesses across this country are 
holding back. They know about taking risk. That's what brought them to 
where they are now.
  But when so many things are in flux, tax policy, health care, energy, 
financial service regulation, when so many things were in flux, what's 
in it for them to go out on a limb and go out and hire that extra one 
or two people that they might hire.
  The problem is, not those one or two jobs in that one business, it's 
the vast number of jobs across the greater and broader economy that 
that one or two job hold-back that small business is making right now--
that's where the jobs are. That's why this has been a jobless recovery, 
and why it will remain a jobless recovery until Congress, until 
Congress and the administration, stop making the environment and the 
prospects for the future seem so threatening that small businesses 
again feel comfortable in taking on the role of being the leader of job 
creation.
  We don't need another Federal program to stimulate jobs. We just need 
to get out of the way.
  I just have to reference an exchange I had with the Secretary of the 
Treasury a few weeks ago on our Joint Economic Committee when I asked 
him that very question. Wouldn't it be better if we, instead of making 
it a more challenging economic environment, brought some stability for 
small businesses in America, allowed them the freedom to do what they 
have done every time in the past with every other recession, which is 
create the jobs which provided the prosperity which allowed us to get 
out of the recession? Wouldn't it be better to do that?
  The Secretary of the Treasury looked at me and said, That is the same 
broad economic philosophy that brought this country to the brink of 
ruin. Mr. Secretary, I just described market capitalism to you, and I 
am just a simple country doctor. You are the Secretary of the Treasury, 
you are supposed to know this stuff.
  I was dumbfounded by the Secretary's response, the Secretary not 
understanding what it is that made this country great in the first 
place, has no clue, then, about how to do, how

[[Page 31744]]

to set the tone and set the environment so this country can, indeed, 
recover from this economic downturn.
  Of course, very famously, in that exchange earlier the other 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Brady) had encouraged the Secretary to resign 
for the sake of our jobs. I said I didn't think he should resign; I 
didn't think he ever should have been hired in the first place. It was 
a mistake a year ago. It was apparently a mistake today. Not only does 
he not know how to fill out his tax form, he doesn't know what creates 
jobs and wealth in economy and what makes this country great.
  I appreciate the gentleman from Iowa letting me be here. I appreciate 
him doing this hour. I think it is so important to set the tone. These 
next couple of days are going to be extremely important in this country 
and the American people do need to be engaged. They do need to be 
paying attention. They do need to be responding to the cues that are 
being given to them by the gentleman in the other body.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas.
  It strikes me that the Secretary of the Treasury, I believe, is a 
natural-born citizen, not a naturalized citizen. Had he been a 
naturalized citizen, he would have had to pass the test. There are 
flash cards that are made available by USCIS, United States Citizenship 
Immigration Services. It's a stack of these glossy flash cards to train 
with so you can learn to pass a naturalization test.
  In these flash cards it will be, for example on one side, when was 
the Declaration of Independence signed? Flip it over to the other side, 
July 4, 1776.
  Who is the Father of our country? Flip it over. George Washington.
  What is the economic system of the United States? Flip it over. Free 
enterprise capitalism.
  You can't even be naturalized as a citizen of the United States 
unless you can pass that test. Apparently the Secretary of the Treasury 
says that free enterprise capitalism is what brought us to the brink of 
ruin.
  It's an astonishing, breathtaking thing. It's no wonder we can't get 
this economy sorted out. I sent a letter to the Secretary of the 
Treasury after a hearing that we had, a joint hearing between Financial 
Services and the Department of Agriculture to deal with derivatives and 
credit default swaps. His question was this, that President Obama has 
been elected at least in part because he criticized President Bush for 
not having an exit strategy in Iraq.
  Now, here is a list of the companies that have been nationalized by 
this administration and initiated in the previous administration, to be 
fair. I would like to know with each of these companies, Mr. Secretary, 
what is your exit strategy? How do you go about divesting the 
taxpayers' investment in these companies that were formerly private and 
get them, they are now managed and controlled, with influence control, 
if not majority control, how do you get them back into the private 
sector so that they can be allowed to succeed and fail?
  It was a long time getting the answer back, and it took a long time 
to analyze the answer, but it boiled down to well, there really isn't a 
plan, but the Secretary will know when the time is right and take those 
steps when it's appropriate. That, I think, Mr. Speaker, tells us 
what's going on here.
  If the Secretary of the Treasury believes that free enterprise 
capitalism brought us to the brink of ruin, I can't believe that he 
would be willing then to divest the Federal Government from the private 
sector, of their shares of investment in these formerly private-sector 
companies. That is, it is the socialization of our economy.
  The 33 and so percent, as The Wall Street Journal said of the 
private-sector profits, and if they take on this health care industry, 
that's going to be another, another one-sixth of our economy. If that, 
if that goes on, that's going to take us up to or greater than half of 
the private sector that we had in the past.
  Mr. Speaker, I think it's important that we understand that there are 
a couple of different sectors to the economy. One of them is the 
private sector. It's the growth sector. It's where people produce goods 
and services that have value. There are about three different levels of 
the value that an economy needs to produce. First, the economy needs to 
produce things that people must have for survival. I mean, we have 
talked about it for more than 50 years and called it food, clothing, 
and shelter, the things that are necessary for the survival of mankind; 
you have to have food, clothing and shelter. They come from generally 
out of the Earth, one way or another. So that's the number one level of 
our economy, those necessities for survival.
  The second level, and that's private sector. Government produces 
hardly anything that's necessary for survival. They regulate, and they 
slow down the actual efficient production of those things that we need 
for survival.
  The second level, those things that improve our efficiency, 
technology, for example, information technology, industrial technology, 
that caused us to be more efficient. Those efficiencies help us produce 
more of the necessities of life. The second part of the economy that's 
gotten the most important value is the second level that produces the 
efficiencies in our economy.
  The third level of the private-sector economy is the disposable 
income. That's the income that we use to go do the things that we 
enjoy, to give our life relaxation and travel on vacation, do those 
things, or we buy the things that we don't have to have, not 
necessities, but the extras in life.
  Those three levels, all private sector, all rooted back in, if you 
chase them back, you cannot go on vacation, and you can pass up buying 
that fancy pair of shoes or that nice car or the cabin at the lake or 
the boat or whatever it might be, and then those are eliminating the 
things that are not necessities of life.
  .

                              {time}  2250

  And you can actually sacrifice some of the things out of the second 
level of our economy that help with our efficiency, but when get down 
to the necessities, it's life itself. All of this is rooted in the 
private sector. The other side of this economy, the public sector of 
the economy, is where government comes in and they decide that they're 
going to redistribute wealth and they're going to provide services that 
they think that people need, and for some degree people have decided 
they would like to have government provide some of those services. But 
government regulates, government slows down and intimidates private 
sector commerce, and once you get to a certain place over the things 
that are necessary for government. For example, we build roads with 
user fees and less so with general fund tax fees. So if you drive on 
the road, you pay the tax for your gallon of gas that goes in the tank 
and you help build the road. That's a user fee. But things that 
government provides that are necessary, military, for example, 
Department of Defense, that provides our safety and our security. 
Without it, we can't function. We can't have legitimate forms of 
government. Government provides other things that are legitimate; the 
judicial branch of government, for example, so that we can have law and 
order. And law enforcement, while I'm on the subject matter.
  As we look down through government, the list becomes less and less of 
a necessity and more and more of a redistribution of wealth. At a 
certain point when your safety and security are there and they're 
secured and a line goes across to providing government services so we 
don't have to worry about them ourselves, every time we pay a tax 
dollar, we also give up a measure of our liberty, a measure of our 
freedom, because government makes the decision and the people that are 
producing in the private sector make less of a decision.
  So I'll say these two sectors of the economy, the private sector, 
from which all new wealth emanates, and the public sector--when I'm in 
a crankier mood, I call it the parasitic sector--of government, the 
sector of government that sucks the lifeblood out of the private sector 
economy. The public sector--the parasitic sector--is

[[Page 31745]]

growing and it's growing by leaps and bounds, by the trillions of 
dollars, and there are less and less decisions made by capital which 
always is rational and more and more decisions made by government. We 
had a car czar that had neither made a car nor sold one. I don't even 
know that he owned one. He's not with us anymore. But we have a 
government of people that haven't written out paychecks, that have not 
started a business, have not operated a business. If they've operated 
in the private sector, they started in up near the top of a department 
and never saw the inner workings of the bottom of what small business 
is like that we've got to have to grow us into the larger businesses.
  We need to have the underpinnings of American exceptionalism put back 
underneath us again. We've got to refurbish those beautiful marble 
pillars of American exceptionalism. We've got to promote liberty and 
encourage the freedom that's necessary; and people have to be willing 
to take risks. Capital has got to be able to make a rational decision 
but capital also has to know--that's investors' money, Mr. Speaker--has 
to know that they will also, if they fail, they're going to lose their 
investment, and someone else will pick up a bargain and build it on 
what was left of the company that went under. I've stared that in the 
eye. I went through the eighties with my construction company. We had 
our ups and downs. I know what it's like to live with a knot in my gut 
for 3\1/2\ years, to hold the company together. And we succeeded. 
Others around me did not. Some people got drug down and the load was 
heavy. And others succeeded significantly beyond a level where I did; 
and I'm glad that everybody had the opportunity to do that. And if the 
government comes in and then appoints an overseer, which is what the 
Barney Frank Financial Services bill does, and they go in and look at 
capital investments and business management and they decide who's going 
to make how much money with another regulator for our financial 
institutions, we have given up a big piece of our liberty, a big piece 
of our freedom.
  But what we're focused on, Mr. Speaker, we're focused on this week, 
this national health care act, this socialized medicine act that barely 
passed out of the House of Representatives, that is down there now 
being debated in the United States Senate, and the issues as set before 
the Senate seem to be a couple of big ones:
  One of them is the pro-life amendment. Here it was the Stupak 
amendment where 64 Democrats had the opportunity to vote, to put up a 
pro-life vote that they didn't believe that the taxpayers of America 
should be compelled to fund abortions through money that is extracted 
from them unwillingly. So, therefore, the Stupak amendment came up, and 
64 Democrats voted for it. Sixty-four Democrats and, I believe, every 
Republican are on record saying I am pro-life and I don't believe, or 
at least we should not compel American taxpayers to fund abortion when 
they're funding a socialized medicine program. That was what the Stupak 
amendment actually was. Even though it made exceptions for rape and 
incest, even though it doesn't fit with the tenets of the Catholic 
Church, it was a subject that was raised and pushed through here.
  Now with the Stupak amendment passing, now these 64 Democrats have 
cover. Now if a bill comes back down this hallway through the center of 
the Capitol, it's had that language, not necessarily stripped out. When 
Senator Ben Nelson offered similar and some said identical language to 
the Stupak pro-life amendment, it was defeated in the Senate. And so 
the Senate bill doesn't have a pro-life amendment in it. And if it 
comes back to this House, we will see, I think, a conference committee 
that is appointed and stacked by Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid and I 
think they are likely to strip the Stupak amendment out and drop it 
back in here to the House; and what I think will happen will be some of 
those 64 Democrats that said, I'm pro-life, here's my vote for the 
Stupak amendment, I think they'll roll over and they'll say, I voted 
for the Stupak amendment, but on balance I think this bill is good, 
even though we're going to compel Americans to fund abortions in the 
United States. That's what they're set up to do and that's the 
dynamics; and we need people in the Senate to kill this bill, so that 
this scenario doesn't play out here in the House.
  Another piece is this public option, the public option that seems to 
be, or the government option that seems to be rejected by the Senate, 
but the liberals in the House insist that there be a government health 
care option; so they're trying to configure a way that they can define 
something that isn't necessarily a government option that can come to 
conference and be merged together. And right now the staff in the House 
and the staff in the Senate are merging these two bills, trying to get 
ready to drop something on and give America a Christmas that will be 
the least merry of anything in my lifetime. It will be something that 
dramatically erodes the liberty in America.
  But those are the two big issues: Is it going to be a pro-life bill? 
And is it going to have in it a government option? I suggest that they 
will put together and construct a scenario by which they will be trying 
to compel taxpayers to fund abortions and compel taxpayers to buy 
government insurance because, as the gentleman from Texas said, it is 
about ideology, it's not about policy, it's not about producing the 
best result because if they did that, if they were for that, they would 
be for reforming medical malpractice abuse in America, lawsuit abuse 
reform, they would be for selling insurance across State lines, 
providing full deductibility for everybody's health insurance, 
transparency in billing.
  The list of things that we can do that are constructive, that don't 
cost money, is long indeed. But tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, and every day 
this week until somebody loses their nerve, the United States Senate 
needs to be jammed, it needs to be filled up with people that come here 
respectfully and politely and follow the rules and follow the law. But 
give the Senators and their staff in Washington, D.C., in their 
district offices at home and their offices here a personal experience. 
It needs to happen this way, Mr. Speaker--the American people need to 
let these Senators know that there will be a reckoning if their liberty 
is taken from them and this socialized medicine bill is imposed upon 
them. I don't want to see it, I don't want to see it for my children, I 
don't want to see it for my grandchildren. I don't want to see it for 
America's destiny. I don't want to see America's destiny, the vitality 
of America's destiny stripped away piece by piece as we leap off the 
abyss into socialism and embrace the European version of a social 
democracy and more, a managed economy, managed health care, very 
limited freedom. The only budget that they didn't grow was the 
Department of Defense budget. Everything else has to have a 10 percent 
or more up. The idea that you can borrow from your grandchildren that 
have not yet been born and compel them to pay debts today and spend 
money without any sense of responsibility, believing that that grows 
the economy, when we've established that even the Secretary of the 
Treasury believes that free enterprise capitalism is what brought this 
economy to the brink of ruin.

                              {time}  2300

  Mr. Speaker, we need new people with clear thought and a respect for 
America and the strength of America. We need the right people in charge 
in this country, because, as I have often said, you don't take a poodle 
to a coon hunt. You want to take a registered coonhound along. He's got 
it in his blood, he understands it. You can train a poodle to bark 
treed, but his heart's not in it. These people won't even bark treed, 
and we need the right people in charge. And tomorrow we're going to see 
the American people step up to this Capitol, and they're going to 
demand that we preserve their liberty.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your attention, and I yield 
back the balance of my time.

[[Page 31746]]



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