[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 17801-17808]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




       THE ECONOMY, UNEMPLOYMENT, AND THE ADVENT OF THANKSGIVING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Polis). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Good evening.
  I would like to talk about several different topics today. One, I 
think, is on the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. I want to 
talk a little bit about unemployment. I want to talk about the economy 
and what the solutions are to this problem. This isn't very 
complicated, but people try to make it more complicated than it needs 
to be.
  When we get done with that subject, I'm going to change gears and do 
something that's a little bit more topical for the Thanksgiving season. 
I'd like to tell you the actual story, a great adventure story, about 
the Pilgrims, about the Thanksgiving that they celebrated and about the 
many other ways that they have blessed our country.
  First things first, let's talk a little bit, though, about something 
that's on everybody's minds--the problem of unemployment and the 
problem of the continuous and rapid growth of the Federal Government, 
which stifles our freedoms and liberties, which buries us in red tape 
and bureaucracy, which raises our cost of living, and which makes life 
more and more miserable for Americans as they lose their freedoms, and 
the Federal Government's out-of-control spending that accompanies that.
  These are problems we've talked about, and these are problems that 
the voters have voted on. The voters seem to think that this is a 
problem in spite of the fact that we're going to try and shove 
socialized medicine down the throats of Americans and in spite of the 
fact they don't want it. We're not dealing with unemployment. We're not 
dealing with the causes for unemployment, but I think we need to talk 
about it a little bit because it isn't as complicated as some of my 
colleagues seem to make it out to be. It's not a matter of class 
warfare. It has nothing to do with that. It's just simple economics.
  Now, if you want to talk to anybody who is a small business man and 
ask him what are the things that kill jobs and ask him what are the job 
killers, I would bet you he's going to be talking about things on this 
list right here.
  The first thing is excessive taxation. The second is insufficient 
liquidity. What does that mean? It means it's hard for businessmen to 
get money from banks.
  Economic uncertainty. People don't want to take risks when they don't 
know what's going to happen next. Then, of course, there is a whole lot 
of red tape and government mandates. All of those things are enemies to 
jobs and job creation.
  Now let's go into this just a little bit because this isn't so 
difficult. It's not a matter of class warfare. It's not a matter of 
rich people not paying enough. In fact, there is an interesting 
statistic or two. What percent of the overall tax burden do you think 
the top 1 percent of Americans carry? What percent do you think the top 
10 percent of Americans carry? Well, the top 10 percent of Americans 
carry about 70 percent of the tax burden in this country. How about the 
bottom 50 percent of Americans? What percentage do they carry? Less 
than 10 percent. So I guess we've got a pretty graduated income tax. If 
that were the solution, we'd already be in great shape, but let's get 
back to the basics about jobs.
  First of all, why is it that excessive taxation kills jobs? Well, the 
reason is that the people who own small businesses create most of those 
jobs. Small businesses--maybe we should say medium and small 
businesses, which have 500 or fewer employees, are the businesses that 
hire 80 percent of Americans.
  Now, my Democrat friends can't seem to make this connection. If you 
kill the business, you're not going to have the jobs. If you tax the 
businessman's hide off, he's not going to hire people because he's not 
going to have the money to buy new equipment, to put up new buildings, 
to invent new technologies, and to expand his business. So the 
connection is pretty straightforward. If you want to kill jobs, you tax 
the guys who own those businesses. A lot of those business owners don't 
really think of themselves as wealthy, because they've started some 
little businesses that have grown and grown and grown, and as they 
grow, they keep putting more and more money back in the businesses. 
They haven't stopped to consider the fact that they may be 
multimillionaires, but they keep putting the money into the businesses 
and the businesses grow and they hire more people.
  If you're just so hung up on the fact that somebody is filthy rich 
and if you're so hung up on the fact that they may be having more fun 
than you are and that you've got to tax them into the dirt, well, then 
you're not going to have any jobs. You just can't have it both ways. If 
you want jobs, you have to have healthy businesses, and you can't have 
healthy businesses if you tax them out of existence. So excessive 
taxation is just going to be a job killer.
  Insufficient liquidity. That is, if you run your banks and if you 
have bank regulators all over the banks so they can't make any loans, 
it's hard for the businessman to get money to invest in new things.
  Obviously, economic uncertainty. Let's say you own a business, and 
you've got lots of money tied up in it. Are you going to take a great 
big gamble when you don't have any idea what next goofy policy the 
administration is going to come up with or what kind of additional 
taxes and red tape and bureaucracy you're going to face? No. You're 
going to hunker down. You're going to say, Wait a minute. I'm not going 
to take any risks in this environment. Business is off.
  A lot of people are boarding up their businesses. A lot of businesses 
are

[[Page 17802]]

shutting down. A lot of jobs are being shipped overseas. We create such 
a hostile environment for business that the big businesses say, Okay. 
You show us the rules. If you don't want to have your jobs in this 
country, we'll take the jobs somewhere else. The small businesses just 
close their doors, and the jobs are gone forever. So the economic 
uncertainty is a job killer.
  Of course there is red tape and government mandates. There is one 
that should be on this list, and that is excessive government spending. 
That is also something that has always, historically, been a problem.
  Now, on top of the unemployment problem, on top of the runaway 
Federal Government that is no longer a servant but has taken on the 
effect of master and is bossing Americans around and taxing them out of 
house and home and ruining the economy--if that's not bad enough, we've 
got another problem that's coming, and it's something that we need to 
deal with in the near future.

                              {time}  2100

  That's the problem of a huge tax increase that's just around the 
corner at the beginning of the year.
  So, if we're already in trouble with close to 10 percent unemployment 
and we know that excessive taxation is one of the things that is a job 
killer, do we want to then apply a whole bunch more, another huge tax 
increase to the economy? Most people would say you have to be crazy to 
do something like that. Most people, when they look at history, say 
that's the dumbest thing in the world to have a huge tax increase right 
when the economy is having a hard time, and yet, that's precisely what 
is going to happen next year if the Congress doesn't take action.
  What's happening is, because of some rules in the Senate, the Bush 
tax cuts, a series of Bush tax cuts are going to expire, and when they 
do, you can see some of the jumps here from 2010 to 2011. This ordinary 
income tax, a bracket of 35 percent, is going to jump to 39.6 percent; 
capital gains going from 15 to 20. You know, the capital gains, that's 
an important one because that's a place where people who invest in 
businesses have money. If this tax is low enough, they can plow it back 
into business. As you raise it up, there's less money going back into 
businesses. And these are different kinds of dividends, going from 15 
to almost 40 percent.
  And the death tax, wow, is that ever taking a jump. Everybody who 
needs to die, you need to die this year, that's for sure, because death 
tax is zero. It's jumping to 55 percent. So when you get beyond the 
first million or two that are protected from the death tax, what's 
happening is, your dad owns a farm and he has a lot of fields and he's 
got a lot of pieces of equipment, and your plan is to follow in your 
dad's footsteps and be a farmer, and your dad dies and you find out 
you're going to have to sell 55 percent of your farm to pay the taxes 
that your dad owes on his death. Isn't good enough to tax him when he's 
alive. You tax him when he's dead. So we have a death tax. Well, by the 
time you get rid of selling half the fields and half the pieces of 
equipment you say, well, I can't run the farm. Well, that's really 
smart tax policy, isn't it, that we shut down a small business by 
jumping the death tax from 0 to 55 percent.
  We have child tax credits here that are going up, marriage penalty, 
lowest tax brackets going from 10 to 15 percent. So, these taxes are 
coming. Most people would say, that studied economics a little bit, 
would say this is not what you should be doing during a recession. In 
fact, regardless if you're a Republican or Democrat, history says this 
is not what we should be doing.
  You could learn--and I'm kind of surprised that the Democrats haven't 
taken a lesson from Kennedy because he had a recession when he was 
President. He cut taxes and the economy sprung right back, and of 
course Ronald Reagan did it. I don't expect the Democrats to learn from 
Ronald Reagan, even though he used to be a Democrat, but JFK, you think 
they could learn from him.
  You think maybe they could have learned from FDR even. FDR had a guy 
who was Secretary of the Treasury who was Henry Morgenthau. Henry 
Morgenthau came up with the same idea that Obama and company came up 
with a couple years ago, said we're going to stimulate the economy by 
spending tons of money. It's a little bit like grabbing your bootstraps 
and pulling and hoping to fly around the room. You know, they're going 
to spend a lot of money, spend enough money that will get the economy 
going. That's the idea.
  Now, no normal rational person that's not been smoking those funny 
cigarettes can come up with such an idea. If you came home and your 
husband or wife said to you, hey, we've got too much credit card debt 
here, or I'm not making enough money, you know, things aren't going 
right economically, what do you think we should do? Oh, let's spend 
money like mad. You would think somebody was crazy. That's what people 
have tried. Henry Morgenthau tried it. He tried it for 8 years. He came 
and appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee. His words were, 
We have tried spending money. We're spending money, more than we have 
ever spent before and it does not work, I say, after 8 years of the 
administration. We have just as much unemployment as when we started 
and enormous debt to boot.
  Now, I would hope that we could learn something from history. This is 
FDR. This is World War II vintage-type stuff. We should have learned 
from this. We could have learned from JFK. No. Could have learned from 
Bush. We could have learned from Reagan. When you're in trouble like 
this, what you want to do is you want to back off on the taxes and back 
off on the Federal spending. We're going the exact opposite direction. 
It doesn't make any sense to be raising taxes. We know that taxing 
small business is a job killer, and yet, we're forging ahead, trying to 
get everybody paying attention to the fact that, oh, the rich's guy got 
too many cigars or too many cars or something like that.
  But the trouble is the rich guy, who owns that company, is the one 
who's hiring people. He's the one making the decision to add a wing on 
the building, put a new machine tool under the wing, to invest money in 
new processes, to come up with a better way to do things, to be more 
competitive than a foreign competitor and put Americans back to work. 
Those are the kinds of people that you need to have taking your money 
and plowing it back into the economy.
  Now, there's some people think through this idea of Federal 
Government spending money that you can put people to work by the 
Federal Government hiring them. That seems on the surface like a bright 
enough idea. Certainly if you take some tax money and you go out and 
hire some people, those people have a job. Doesn't that put people back 
to work? Well, yes and no. The people you hire do get a job. The 
trouble is for everyone you hire, there are two people in the private 
sector that lose their job because the government's sucking that money 
for those salaries out of the private sector. The private sector then 
becomes less efficient, and economists will say that you lose about two 
jobs out of the private sector for everybody you put on the government 
payroll. I mean, if putting people on the government payroll worked, 
we'd all work for the government. They tried that in the Soviet Union. 
It wasn't such a hot idea.
  So, what's the danger? Why am I talking about this stuff? It should 
be a day when politics is over, the elections are over, we could get 
back to work and do the right thing. Well, the right thing here is 
paying attention to the fact that America is in trouble with a 10 
percent unemployment rate. It's actually more than that because I don't 
know if you know it or not, but anybody who's been unemployed for a 
certain period of time, they don't count them anymore. So they're not 
unemployed, even though they don't have a job. That's sort of an 
interesting way to count, isn't it?
  But anyway, here's what happened a number of years ago. I actually 
was here in Congress when this happened, and these charts go back a few 
years, but I think it's kind of interesting. This is the gross domestic 
product. So

[[Page 17803]]

these vertical lines are America's GDP, and this is before and after a 
tax relief which occurred in 2003 about the first or second quarter of 
2003.
  And so the tax decrease we're talking about here is the very tax 
that's going to expire. So when we cut this tax in 2003, what happened 
to GDP? Well, here's GDP going along like this before. We do the tax 
cut and take a look at what happens to GDP afterwards. Now, that 
suggests that if there's any causal relationship at all that the tax 
cuts gave us a better GDP.
  Let's take a look at the same tax cut not applied to gross domestic 
product, but let's take a look at it applied to jobs. These lines are 
job creation. The ones that go down mean that we are losing jobs. The 
ones that go up mean that we're creating jobs. This is what the economy 
is doing. Now, this, again, is this May 2003 when these tax relief 
measures went into effect. Look at all the jobs we're losing here, and 
look at the snappy turnaround right here when you let the small 
businessman keep some of what he earns. My goodness, what a turnaround.
  Now, here's a very unpleasant thought. If these tax cuts had this 
positive effect when the tax cuts went into effect on jobs and on gross 
domestic product, if these tax cuts had that positive an effect, what 
happens when we reverse that same thing? What happens when we turn it 
upside down? What happens when the tax cuts expire? Are they not likely 
to exert the exact opposite force on our gross domestic product on our 
already high unemployment? Now, we're not in this situation.

                              {time}  2110

  Right now we're having trouble with unemployment, but why do we want 
to put a force on it that's going to make it even worse. If these 
things did some good when they went into effect, why do we want to let 
them expire? It's bad enough the way it is. If we extend the tax cuts, 
it may not fix the 10 percent, but it may not go to 15 percent anyway. 
So this is what happened when the tax cuts went into effect to job 
creation, and that's why the economy took off.
  Now, one of the things, it seems to me, that my dear socialist 
friends don't quite understand is that if you are a happy socialist, 
what you want is, you want the government to be doing well, you want to 
have lots of money that you can slop around and spend on different 
programs. And of course we've been doing too much of that, spending 
more than we have. But you would think you would want a strong economy 
because what a lot of people don't realize is, if that economy isn't 
strong, not only are individuals hurting, not only are States that have 
to balance their budgets hurting economically, the Federal Government 
revenues are also way down.
  I was surprised during this time period when people wanted to say 
that the tax cuts had cost us a whole lot of money, that when you took 
the money they claimed the tax cuts cost in lost taxes and added it to 
the war in Iraq and Afghanistan that the amount of money total was less 
than what it cost us to have the economy in the tank in these first 
couple of years. So when the economy is bad in your home, it's bad in 
your State. It also is lousy in the Federal Government. So you put all 
of these tax cuts in place. You think, Oh, that's fiscally 
irresponsible because then the government is going to go into debt more 
and more. Oh, is that really so? The fact is not so.
  Let's take a look at what happened. Here are Federal revenues. This 
is the year. That is the tax cut. So Federal revenues are coming down 
here. We cut taxes, and the Federal revenues actually go up. Now that 
seems like making water run uphill. Why is it possible that the Federal 
Government would get more money when we reduce taxes? It is known to 
some people as a Laffer Curve. But what this is, it's the effect that 
when the economy gets going, we collect more tax revenues.
  Let's look at it this way: let's say that you are made king for the 
year, and your job is to collect as much revenue as you can collect in 
the selling of loaves of bread. So you start to think. You say to 
yourself, Well, I could put a one-penny tax on a loaf of bread and 
people would eat a whole lot of bread because we're not taxing it very 
much, and we'd raise a certain amount of money. And then you think, 
Wow, but if I could do that with a penny, I could move that decimal 
over and charge a dollar a loaf of bread. Then I would get much more 
money. How about $10 a loaf? You say, Well, wait a minute. So $10 a 
loaf, I could get $10 every time. But people wouldn't buy bread 
anymore. It would be too expensive. It would go on the black market, or 
they would buy cake or something else.
  So common sense would tell you that if you are king for the year and 
you are taxing bread, that there is some point between a penny and $10 
perhaps, there is some point where there is an optimum amount of tax 
where people will still pay it and still buy bread. And if you raise 
the tax, what, in fact, happens is the revenue that the government 
collects goes down rather than up. In other words, it's not possible to 
just keep taxing too much because if you do, it basically drives the 
amount of money you collect down. So there's an optimum point.
  And my point here is that if you are a happy socialist, you want the 
economy strong, and the way to do it is to let the people that run the 
businesses have enough money to make those investments so that the 
economy is strong, and we have more Federal revenue coming in. This is 
what happened '04, '05, '06, '07. The Federal revenues start going up 
even though we did these tax cuts. Now what we want to do is to reverse 
this. We're going to get rid of the tax cuts which is then going to 
have more effect to drive the economy down. It's going to create more 
job loss, and it's going to make the GDP worse.
  We are having trouble learning some very basic lessons from history 
where we are at a point where we are overtaxing the economy. And if we 
want to get this economy going, we have to learn from JFK, we have to 
learn from Ronald Reagan, we have to learn from Bush II that the way to 
deal with this thing is to cut government spending and to cut taxes. 
It's a very straightforward answer. But we also have to realize that if 
we don't deal with the tax increase that's coming up, we are going to 
add significantly to the already existing economic problems of our 
country.
  So what's the solution? It's not complicated. Make the Bush tax cuts 
permanent. Now we, Republicans, have proposed that for years. The 
Senate Democrats have opposed it. The Democrats in the House have 
opposed it. They say all of these tax cuts are for rich people, and 
they talk about the classes of society in America. And the one thing 
they can't seem to remember is the fact that if you don't have a strong 
business, you're not going to have jobs, and you're just going to have 
to get used to it.
  In America, some people get stinking rich; and it's okay; and it's 
all right for them to have their money because a lot of times, if they 
get enough money, they start spending it on other people anyway. And so 
what you've got to do is let those businesses have some money to work 
with because the government is not going to create the jobs. And by 
letting these tax cuts expire, you are just going to further damage the 
economy and increase the suffering of Americans all across our country.
  So the solution is straightforward, at least to what we should be 
doing with these tax cuts. What we should be doing is keeping the tax 
cuts and voting to make them permanent and not letting them all expire. 
That's the commonsense way to approach the thing. It's not going to 
necessarily get us out of all the problems we're in right now, but it's 
going to prevent them from getting a lot worse.
  And what we have to do then obviously is to get back into the 
business of cutting back on Federal spending, and we're going to have 
to cut back on government red tape, and we're going to have to 
dismantle some of the complicated and redundant different Departments 
that we don't need to be paying for. We have to start looking at the 
Federal Government and say, What does the Federal Government have to do 
and all of the stuff that it would be

[[Page 17804]]

nice if the Federal Government did that cost money, we're going to have 
to just stop doing that. We're not going to get it out of waste, fraud, 
and abuse because there isn't a budget line item that says that. What 
we're going to have to do is we're going to have to reform the system.
  The one thing I believe the Republicans are looking at very closely--
I'm certainly very interested in it and am trying to sell it to my 
Republican colleagues--is the idea that we have an opportunity, though 
we can't pass legislation through the Senate and even if we did, it's 
unlikely that President Obama would sign it. But what we can do is we 
can send bills to the Senate, and the public can watch and see that 
we've heard the message. We understand. We want less taxes. We want 
more affordable government. We want to shrink and reduce the Federal 
Government in places where it doesn't really need to be putting money, 
and we can do that.
  But there is one thing we can do and that is in the House here, we 
can change the rules. We can change the system. The House, with 
Democrat and Republican leadership through many, many years, is really 
a series of fiefdoms, as different committees gain lots of power.
  And if we take a look at that system and we design a system which is 
not so much designed to spend money but to make it hard to spend money, 
then we can start making some progress to develop the tools here in the 
House to try to reduce a government that is literally a runaway 
government that is no longer the servant of the people but is 
increasingly becoming a fearful master.
  That is our task; and we will be evaluated by the American public, I 
have no doubt, on our ability to perform the task. And to the degree we 
have a majority in the House, we can at least start in the House by 
saying, Let's change the whole committee structure. Let's take a look 
at how we do the budgeting process. Let's take a look at how these 
earmarks fit into who spends the money, who makes money, and how do we 
hold the committees accountable for reducing the size of the Federal 
Government.
  All of these things are ahead of us, but we need to stop this train 
wreck coming, and we need to make these tax cuts permanent. That's the 
quick answer to something that we need to be doing.
  Now I'm going to turn to perhaps a little bit lighter topic, a 
completely different topic, and that is the advent of Thanksgiving 
coming along next week. The Thanksgiving story is one that, as I have 
gotten older, I get to love the story more and more. It's a fantastic 
adventure story. It's a story of people of tremendous courage, 
tremendous vision who took very great risks and gambles and blessed you 
and I and all true Americans, blessed in ways that we've forgotten and 
in ways that we need to remember. I'm going to grab a picture, if you 
will excuse me a second.

                              {time}  2120

  Last year, I had this picture on a larger format. Unfortunately, I 
just had this framed copy. The picture that is by my side, some of you 
may recognize, is a small version of the picture that is in the Rotunda 
here not so far from where I am standing.
  The picture is called ``The Pilgrims at Prayer,'' and I would like to 
talk to you about this little group of Pilgrims that came over and gave 
us our Thanksgiving, the particularly famous Thanksgiving that took 
place in Plymouth, Massachusetts. There was an earlier Thanksgiving in 
Virginia, but this particular group of Pilgrims, though, gave us a lot, 
lot more than Thanksgiving. So while it is the Thanksgiving season, I 
think it is appropriate to think a little bit about their great example 
to us, because it is the principles and ideas of people like this that 
we need to reproduce and we need to follow their example as we move 
America forward in the days ahead.
  So let me start by saying, first of all, who were these Pilgrims that 
we talk about that were at Plymouth and that gave us Thanksgiving? Who 
were the Pilgrims? They were really a couple of groups of people, but 
about half of them, and some of the very influential ones, were called 
Separatists. They were what you might call in their day sort of the 
evangelical Christian types of England, except that they were a little 
bit of a weird subset in this regard.
  They had listened to the writing of a Scottish theologian that 
followed Knox in about the 1580s or so, and he started finding in his 
Bible this interesting idea that the Bible, particularly the Old 
Testament, or, for Jewish people, the Torah, there seemed to be a 
distinction between civil government and church government.
  Now, that may seem very obvious to us today, but in those days, if 
you recall, there was a king half the time running the church and a 
church half the time running the kingdoms, and the two were very much 
interconnected and very much intermixed dating back to the time of 
Charlemagne.
  But they came up with this idea that the Bible seemed to indicate 
that there was a difference between church government and civil 
government, and they got that from looking at the story about Moses. 
Moses was like the civil authority, but he had a brother who was 
running the worship service, Aaron. And so he saw that example, but 
then there were other examples that were less known.
  There was a guy, Uzziah, who was a king, and he went into the temple 
and started burning incense because he thought he was able to do 
anything he wanted. A couple of courageous priests stood up to confront 
him, and he started to stick his finger at them and give them a lecture 
and say, Off with their heads, and he looked and his hand was covered 
with leprosy.
  So there were these stories, particularly the story of Saul, the 
first king, where he offered the sacrifice and Samuel read him the riot 
act and said, You've really have blown it now, buddy.
  So you have these examples in the Old Testament where civil and 
church government were separate. So these guys, the Separatists, had 
learned from their Scripture and had decided in their day that they 
didn't want their church to be run by the King of England. This was 
following old Henry VIII, who had separated the English church from the 
church in Rome, and so the church was being run by the King of England. 
These guys decided what they were going to do in Scrooby, England. They 
decided that they would get this manor house. They would all get 
together and worship and start their own little church, and the church 
wasn't under the King and it wasn't under the King's thumb. Well, as 
you can imagine, that did not meet with the approval of the King, and 
he said, I am going to harry them out of England.
  And so these Separatists were given all kinds of very tough 
treatment--fines and taxes. Their wives were put in the stocks and made 
fun of and all kinds of difficult things so that these Separatists 
couldn't really live in England and they couldn't have their little 
church that they had started or their series of churches. And so, as 
you know the story, they moved to Holland where they could have freedom 
to start their own church.
  So they lived in Holland for some time. It was a difficult existence. 
They had to work 7 days a week and many, many hours a day; very, very 
difficult economically for them. But they didn't complain, and they 
were able to have their church worship service the way they wanted. 
That lasted for some period of time as these Separatists were in 
Holland, but a couple things happened that convinced them to look 
around at something else, and the main thing was that their children 
were picking up some bad habits from the Dutch kids and they didn't 
like that. They had come there because they had some very strong 
theological beliefs about what was right and wrong. They were worried 
about their children and the culture in which they were living, and so 
they cast about for what God would have them do.
  So the picture that is printed, it is a wonderful painting. It is 
about 10-by-20 feet in the Rotunda. This picture depicts the key 
turning point for a bunch

[[Page 17805]]

of these Separatists, and this is in the town of Delfthshaven. And if 
you take a look closely at the picture, certainly you can't see it here 
in the camera, but it says ``Speedwell.'' That is the name of the ship. 
And these are the Separatists gathering together at Delfthshaven in a 
farewell to their pastor, John Robinson, who they loved dearly.
  John Robinson was a very even-tempered, peace-loving man. He had 
risked his life a number of times trying to separate groups of 
different Christians that were fighting each other, and his 
parishioners said he had the wisdom to see trouble coming and to steer 
his little flock away from the trouble. So they loved John Robinson.
  He is now preaching his last sermon, because he will not go with the 
Pilgrims to America but, instead, will stay behind with the members of 
his church that were still going to be back in Holland.
  And so, as you can imagine, if this is your last time and you have 
all of these friends who are going on this absolutely incredible 
expedition to plant a plantation in the middle of the wilderness all 
the way across the ocean, you are going to give them your best shot. 
You are going to talk to them about the things that you think are most 
important.
  So we have a recording of what he was preaching about. And he, first 
of all, bewailed the state of the Calvanists and the Lutherans. And he 
said, ``For though Luther and Calvin were bright lights in their own 
day, yet were they living today they would readily embrace the 
additional truth that God is breaking forth from his word.''
  What he was saying, in effect, was that our understanding that we get 
from the Bible is not static; it is something that moves over time. And 
as people learn lessons from history, we should learn from them, and we 
should continue to learn the additional things that God is going to 
teach us in practical sense from his Bible.
  In a sense, his idea of the Bible was it was a gold mine. It was full 
of truth. And as men over time read it and understood it, they could 
improve the lot of civilizations. It turns out that this was a pretty 
good theory in all practical sense. Whether you happen to have any 
interest in theology or not, it turned out to be a pretty good theory, 
and you will see why in just a few minutes as we follow this little 
group of people on this incredible adventure story.
  You have to think about this. When people came to America in 
Jamestown and other places, it was men. They came here, to some degree, 
to say they were going to spread the light of Christ to the heathen, 
but mostly they were looking for gold. That is what the history books 
show us.
  But this little group of people were different. They were going to 
take their wives and their children on a one-way trip across the North 
Atlantic to try to plant a civilization. And they were doing it not as 
a bunch of dogs that had their tails tucked between their legs because 
they had been chased out of one place and chased out of another place, 
but with a vibrant vision of a challenge to build a new civilization 
based on new principles and new ideas. They wanted a change from the 
European civilization because, Robinson goes on and says: Now, when you 
go to this new land, be very careful what you adopt as truth, sayeth 
he, for it is unlikely essentially that a Christian civilization can 
spring so rapidly out of such thick anti-Christian darkness.
  He was talking about Europe, and how Europe was very resistant to 
ideas that the Bible would suggest were a good way to do things. So he 
was saying: Now, when you go over on this great expedition, be really 
careful what you do, because how you set things up is going to be very, 
very important. And you don't want to set it up just the way they did 
in Europe, but continue to use the Bible as the blueprint.
  So this group of people are going to leave Delfthshaven here and they 
are going to go across and rendezvous in England with the ship 
Mayflower.
  Now, it turns out this old Speedwell was a leaky bucket. They tried 
to take a couple of attempts to start from England to go over to 
America, and the seams on the Speedwell opened up and it started to 
leak so badly they had to turn around and come back, and then they had 
to take some of the different passengers off and some of their supplies 
off. They had to leave the Speedwell behind. It got to be kind of 
complicated and expensive.
  Eventually, like a family getting off on a vacation late, they 
eventually get in the Mayflower everybody they could fit in there with 
what supplies they could and started across the North Atlantic. Well, 
that delay put them in the North Atlantic in the fall, which is a rough 
time to be crossing the North Atlantic.
  Well, the old Mayflower started getting beaten by storms. In the 
beginning, the Pilgrims--and let me maybe clarify this point now. The 
people in the Mayflower at this point are really two groups. About half 
of them are these Separatists, which you see here, and the other half 
were just jolly old blokes off the streets of England that were part of 
the merchant adventurers financing this trip to plant a colony over in 
the New World.

                              {time}  2130

  The idea of the colony, of course, was it was going to make money for 
the people that were financing this undertaking, and they were hoping 
they would get rich from it. So you have really a little over 100 
people, about 50-50 between these Separatists that have a vision for a 
new civilization and other people that are just there mostly hoping to 
make a good living and to turn a page in their lives.
  So they come across the North Atlantic, and in the beginning the 
sailors all start making fun of them because they are all seasick. It 
is pretty miserable to be seasick. You almost feel it would be better 
to die when you turn green. So the sailors would call them ``puke 
socks.'' That was what one of the boatswains called them, ``you puke 
socks,'' because everybody was sick and feeling pretty bad.
  But the storms intensified as they crossed, and after awhile the poor 
old Pilgrims noticed that the sailors weren't joking so much about it. 
They looked a little bit upset too, because the storms got really 
severe. And in spite of their prayers and everything else, the 
Mayflower was just beaten by storms.
  One time in the middle of the night they heard a groaning and a crack 
as though they had run into a rock or something, and it turned out one 
of those great big huge oak beams that was supporting the main mast had 
started to sag and break under the weight of the mast and the 
tremendous pressure of the wind and the rigging and the sails.
  So they were almost thinking they had to turn the Mayflower around 
and go back to England, when one of these passengers, one of the 
Separatists, remembered there was a big printing press screw jack in 
the hold, which they fought out of the hold and managed to get it in 
position and cranked it up to support the oak beam so it would not be 
sagging.
  They continued the trip across the ocean, and because of the storms 
were blown significantly off course and landed the first time out in 
Massachusetts, which, of course, is not Virginia. Virginia in those 
days went as far north as New York, but they were headed much further 
south. They weren't surprised. They knew they had been blown north by 
the storms.
  So there they are after a couple of attempts to try to come south 
down the outside of Cape Cod. The winds were very unfavorable, it is 
late in the season, the storms are rough. These old square riggers, the 
Mayflower, they were not great technological wonders at being able to 
sail into the wind, so consequently they didn't want to get with a hard 
wind to be driven on to the sandy beach, because the ship would break 
up and that would be the end of the deal.
  So they are anchored out at Provincetown, and it is getting I guess 
into about the November timeframe, getting pretty chilly up in 
Massachusetts. They realized that they are not in Virginia and so their 
charter didn't

[[Page 17806]]

apply. So now we get the first real lesson in civil government from the 
Pilgrims, and, boy, what a great lesson for all of us it is today.
  Because the charter didn't apply, the two groups that were in the 
Pilgrims were known as the saints and the strangers. The saints were 
the Separatists, that is the saints here at prayer, and the strangers 
were the ones that were strangers to God. And the strangers are saying, 
hey, it is like Australia, you know. No rules, mate. Everybody for 
himself. We get to shore, we can do whatever we want to do.
  It had quite a smell of anarchy about it, and it was then that the 
saints said, no, we kind of need to pull things together. So they 
exercised some leadership, took a piece of paper and wrote a document. 
It is called the Mayflower Compact, one of the greatest American 
documents produced. We don't have a copy of it. We have copies, but we 
don't have the original. It was viewed by the Pilgrims as not really an 
astounding thing, but subsequently we have considered it of great 
import.
  So it starts ``In the name of God, amen.'' It goes on to say, ``We do 
covenant and combine ourselves together in a civil body politic for the 
glory of God, the advancement of the Christian faith, and to frame such 
just and equal laws as may seem good.''
  And so what is it that is so special about this Mayflower Compact? 
Well, as far as I know, it is the first time in human history where you 
have a group of free people under God creating a civil government to be 
their servant. Does that sound like a familiar pattern? Of course. It 
is very similar to what our Declaration of Independence is saying.
  You have to understand in the context of history how innovative what 
they had done really was, because in Europe, the model for civil 
government was the divine right of kings. If you are a politician, it 
was a great deal. You say ``God put me here as king. When I say jump, 
you are supposed to say `how high?'''
  So Europe had been dominated by the divine right of kings, and each 
king felt like they weren't a servant, they were the boss. God put them 
there, and they tell you what to do. That is how Europe did things.
  But these Separatists when they came across the ocean had the concept 
that we are trying to infuse in the Republican Party as we deliberate 
very soberly about changing the system, that we are going to change the 
system from Europe and the divine right of kings to the system that the 
government would be the servant of the people and that individual 
citizens had God-given rights and it was the responsibility of the 
government to protect your God-given rights.
  That is what the Mayflower Compact was all about, and that is why 
this very first moment, as they are at the great big oak table in the 
great room of the Mayflower, why this moment is so significant to all 
of us, because the Pilgrims gave us the model of American civil 
government.
  Now, to them it was sort of a straightforward idea, because they had 
already struggled with this question in the context of their church 
government. In Scrooby, England, they had decided to separate 
themselves from little old King James. He was a little bit of a weird 
fellow. He had some very strange social habits. They didn't want him 
running their church.
  So a group of free people under God had covenanted together to create 
a New Testament church, and they took that model of the New Testament 
church and simply picked it up and applied it to civil government. A 
group of free people under God created a civil government, not a church 
government, to be their servant.
  Now, they believed those two were separate, so they didn't tangle up 
the church with their civil government, but they used the same pattern. 
So the Mayflower Compact is really to our knowledge the first written 
constitution pulling these elements together; that under God, free 
people are creating a civil government to be their servant. That is the 
basic pattern. It is called the covenantal view of civil government. It 
is the first written Constitution in America that is on that same 
pattern. That was 1620.
  Now, I will continue with the story of the Pilgrims, but just to jump 
forward, it is not so long after that, 1620 to 1634, you have a more 
advanced constitution for Boston, and then a very highly advanced 
constitution called the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, only 18 
years later. So that is 1638, very early.
  The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut has basically the whole model 
for the whole U.S. Constitution. It has federalism, separate branches 
of government, a lot of the technical sophistication of the U.S. 
Constitution just 18 years after these Pilgrims had started with the 
Mayflower Compact. So you have a tremendous period of the development 
of the concept of American civil government very early.
  Well, I told you this group of Pilgrims here had blessed us in a lot 
of ways. It should be obvious, two of the ways they blessed us--these 
are ideas that just completely undergird America. The first is 
separating civil government from church government. That is something 
they took from the Bible. It is amusing, isn't it?
  The second thing they did was give us our model of civil government, 
which is the fact that the government is to be the servant, not a 
fearful master. So those were pretty good ideas.
  They also came, and I think this is a pretty important concept, they 
came with the belief that they could learn things from the Bible and 
should use the Bible as a blueprint to guide how they did things. And 
that same concept was picked up later by the people who would follow 
after the Pilgrims.
  So let's finish the story a little bit and get to Thanksgiving. The 
Pilgrims, they are on Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, and they do 
the Mayflower Compact. Then they take pieces of a prefabricated boat 
called a shallop that was stored in their holds and they put that 
together. It had been damaged some by the storms coming across. It took 
them a number of weeks to build it up. But a shallop is a pretty good 
size rowboat. It would carry more than a dozen people, it had a sail 
and a rudder.
  They took the shallop up in the shallow water around the inside of 
Cape Cod, and they had their first encounter at Eastham beach, there 
just about sunrise. A whole bunch of Indians screaming and yelling shot 
arrows at them. It wasn't exactly a warm welcome. They shot some of 
their muzzle loaders off and nobody got hurt. And they continued around 
the inside of Cape Cod.
  They were looking for a place, and Cape Cod, I have a chance to go 
there in the summer times, it is known as Barnstable Harbor. 
Translated, that means Barnstable Harbor.
  They were out in the surf, the sand is shallow there, they are out in 
the shallop and it got to be dark, and they are trying to figure out, 
the wind is coming up, it is starting to snow, they are getting ice all 
over their clothes. They try to make a run in to where they thought the 
entrance to Barnstable Harbor was, and they were mistaken. It was not. 
It was just a sandy beach, and the surf was starting to pile in on the 
beach. And right when they are in the waves, the guy by the name of 
Clark says--grabs the steering oar, and he swings the shallop around in 
a desperate maneuver. He says, ``If ye be men, pull for your lives.''

                              {time}  2140

  And they laid into the oars and were able to snatch the shallop out 
of the waves and out into the deep water. Again, the snow. It's dark 
and the snow is coming down. Ice is freezing on their clothes. And 
eventually, eventually they manage to find something where they can 
pull into the lee of this piece of land where they got out of the heavy 
blowing wind and were able to pull their boat up on the shore where 
there weren't any waves, and they spent a waterlogged Sunday on this 
island. It turned out when they got up in the morning, it was an island 
in the middle of a beautiful harbor, which we now know as Plymouth, 
Massachusetts. The island was named after the seaman Clarke, who said, 
If ye be men, pull for your lives.
  And so they start making rapid discoveries. They find that there's an 
area

[[Page 17807]]

of land that's clear where they can plant crops. There's beautiful 
fresh water coming down from a hillside and a high area that they can 
fortify to try to protect themselves, defend themselves from whatever 
problems there might be. Particularly, they were concerned about the 
Indians that were in those parts. They didn't see any Indians, but they 
were worried that there might be some because the other Indians over in 
Eastham had not been too friendly. Of course, there's a reason they 
hadn't been too friendly. It's because there had been some ships that 
had come by and stolen some of them and sold them off into slavery. It 
put the Indians in a bad mood, you might say.
  And so you have the Pilgrims now late in the season, in fact, about 
Christmas Day, starting to build their first shelters in Plymouth. As 
you can imagine, the trip had been tough. Their supplies were limited. 
And the people that were getting in and out of the wet boats and trying 
to work on building shelters there started to get sick. And over a 
period of the next couple of months, more and more of them died, to the 
point that in some days as many as four Pilgrims at a time would die. 
There was a time, a day or two, when everybody was so sick there were 
only two or three that were able to get up and feed everybody else and 
sort of show themselves on the palisades of the little fortification 
they'd made just in case the Indians made some sort of attack.
  But they were in rough shape. In the middle of the night sometimes a 
man would take his dead wife, would drag her out across the frozen 
ground and bury her under leaves and rocks. And it was very tough. 
There were children, wives, and adults. By the time that March came 
around, half of the Pilgrims--almost half the Pilgrims had died.
  Now you might ask yourself, these are people that came with a vision. 
They had a vision that God was calling them to found a new Nation based 
on new principles, new ideas, ideas that they took from the Bible. And 
you'd say, Well, where was their God? He blew them off course by the 
storm and now half of them died. You'd think they might get 
discouraged. It's easy to be discouraged, as you can imagine, in those 
conditions. Very few families didn't have someone who died in that 
first couple of months.
  And so the captain of the Mayflower, who had anchored the Mayflower 
there in Plymouth Harbor for the winter to try to give them some 
protection, in the spring decided he had lost half his crew, decided he 
had to sail back to England. And so he prevailed on the Pilgrims. He 
said, Now, you need to go back with me to England because this little 
adventure hasn't worked too well. Half of you are dead; half my crew is 
dead.
  And so you can picture standing on the shore, Plymouth, and the wind 
is blowing through the pine trees behind you and you're looking across 
to the harbor. There's the Mayflower and the boatswain is giving the 
call. Sails are being squared to the wind. The sail is being raised. 
Men are walking or actually turning a big crank. It wasn't quite a 
capstan. It was a different type of arrangement to lift the old 
seaweed-covered line that held the anchor to the bottom of the harbor. 
And first large, then small, the Mayflower disappears over the horizon 
and there's just the sound of the wind in the trees. And every one of 
the Pilgrims stayed there on that beach because they believed that God 
had called them to a mission, to the beginning of something that was 
going to be great that He would bless, in spite of the fact that half 
of them had died.
  It wasn't too long after that that they had their first Indian 
sighting. The lookout said, Indian coming. You mean Indians? No. 
Indian. They look out and here's this tall brave dressed in a loincloth 
walking boldly down the street. He looks at them and in perfect English 
says, Do you have any beer? Quite a reception from their first Indian 
guest.
  It turned out he was an Indian that was a chief of a tribe up in 
Maine. He liked hitchhiking down the coast. And he could speak English. 
He'd actually gotten to know English pretty well and developed a taste 
for smoked duck and for beer and things. Until he had eaten a good 
supply of the Pilgrim's food, he wouldn't tell them too much. After he 
had a good meal, he told them about the Indians in the parts. He told 
them about the fact that the land where they were living had been 
considered cursed by the Indians because the Patuxets that had lived 
there had died of a plague. And so God in his providence took the 
Pilgrims to probably one of the only places on the eastern seaboard 
where they could stay where there weren't hostile Indians.
  It turned out they made a good alliance with Massasoit, who was a 
good Indian chief and had became a friend of the Pilgrims. Massasoit 
talked to them about the last of the Patuxets that was living by 
himself, alone and lonely. And when Tisquantum understood the plight of 
the English settlers in Plymouth, he decided to join them because he 
knew something about it. He had been shanghaied, sold into slavery, 
bought out of slavery by some monks, traveled to England, learned to 
speak English, and gotten a trip back in a ship to go back to the 
Patuxets. He got there and the Patuxet tribe was wiped out, I assume by 
small pox or something. And so he's living by himself.
  Now he joins the Pilgrims and helps them and teaches them all kind of 
useful lessons. He told them that in a short period of time that the 
streams would be full of little fish and they could use that to plant 
corn. He taught them important things like taking your moccasins off 
and wiggling your toes in the mud so you can catch eels, which they 
could fry up for food. All sorts of useful things Tisquantum taught 
them. Of course, we know him as Squanto, friend of the white man.
  Squanto lived with them some time and helped the settlers there. They 
were living under the conditions of the contract that the merchant 
adventurers had set up. And one of the things that they had set up was 
it was going to be a socialistic society. Everybody was going to pitch 
into the common store. They had common land. They're going to grow food 
on the land. Everybody had to work the field. Everybody had to wash 
everybody else's laundry. And that wasn't working too well. In fact, 
Governor Bradford--he was elected Governor soon after Governor Carver 
had died, probably of cerebral hemorrhage--Governor Bradford said in 
his diary of Plymouth Plantation, as though men were wiser than God, he 
said this idea of socialism--he didn't use the word socialism--taking 
everything in common may have been a good idea to Plato and other 
ancients as though they were wiser than God.
  But he basically pitched out socialism and said every man can have 
his own field, could grow his own corn, and his diary said that it made 
hands very industrious. People who would feign to be sick or too weak 
to work now were out busy in the cornfield growing corn for their 
family and the women didn't complain about washing other people's 
clothes.
  Anyway, they got rid of socialism. Eventually, after about a year or 
so, decided to celebrate a day of thanksgiving. And so they invited a 
couple of Indian chiefs to join them for thanksgiving. The trouble is 
the Indian chiefs, Massasoit, brought along about 90 braves. So when 
the Pilgrims saw this massive number of Indians they were going to feed 
for a meal, they're thinking, Oh my goodness, this isn't going to work 
very well.
  Fortunately, the Indians did some hunting. They brought deer and 
turkey and a number of other things, berries that they had collected. 
And they had a wonderful Thanksgiving. The Indians didn't know they had 
just been invited for one Thanksgiving dinner. They stayed 3 days and 
enjoyed Thanksgiving over and over again. In the meantime, they had 
footraces and contests and shooting with bows and arrows and all kinds 
of other things that they did that was a lot of fun. It was a great 
couple-day celebration of thanksgiving in Plymouth Plantation.
  Thanksgiving became a very popular holiday in the colonies up and 
down the eastern seaboard. And the first national day of thanksgiving 
was called by George Washington to celebrate the

[[Page 17808]]

adoption of the U.S. Constitution. It was later set at a particular 
time in November--I think it was the third Thursday in November as I 
recall--and it has stayed there to this time.

                              {time}  2150

  So we have the story now of the Pilgrims. As you celebrate your 
Thanksgiving this year, it might be helpful to think back and say there 
is more than Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims. They were a group of 
people who were willing to change the system, to think of different 
ideas. They came here and separated civil and church governments. They 
came here and created the model of a written constitution, the idea 
that the government is to be the servant of the people, that people 
have God-given rights and that it is the job of government to protect 
those rights, as we stated another 150 years later in our Declaration 
of Independence. They came here with the idea that, after trying 
socialism, it wasn't going to work. They realized that it was not 
biblical, that it was a form of theft, so they kicked socialism out. 
They learned that in the early 1620s.
  So we can thank these people because of the fact that they were 
innovative and had that spirit and desire. Even when half of them died 
and the Mayflower was going back, they clung to their vision. They had 
the courage to create a new civilization. In the words of Bradford 
Prince, as written in his diary, they felt that perhaps they'd lit a 
candle on a dark shore. They felt that perhaps they could be 
steppingstones for people who would come after them to found a great 
Nation. So the dream that they had of coming here to do something new, 
unlike what Europe had done, was very much in their hearts. It was very 
much a part of their thinking as they scratched that existence on that 
lonely, rock-strewn Massachusetts shoreline. To this day, as we 
celebrate Thanksgiving, we can remember their first Thanksgiving when 
they put a few kernels of corn on a plate to remind them of how close 
to starving to death they had been at one time.
  It's a beautiful story. There's a lot more to it, a lot more 
adventure to it. There were knife fights in cabins. I haven't had time 
to cover all of that with you, but the basics are there. This is a 
great bunch of Americans, a wonderful adventure story and a time for us 
to give consideration to the fact that we also have been given a 
challenge, a challenge of a beautiful land that was established on a 
firm foundation. It's our job to keep it that way and to pass it on to 
our children--a government that is the servant of the people and not 
the master.
  God bless you all. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________