[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 2905-2909]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              RULE OF LAW

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Carter) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. CARTER. I'm honored to be here. I think some might remember in 
this body that for the last about year, year and a half, I've been 
getting up here and talking about the rule of law and how the basic 
foundation of American society is based upon a set of rules, a set of 
laws. Without that foundation, that surrender of sovereignty of the 
American people to pieces of paper that describe how we will behave in 
this world, we would be an uncivilized Nation and we would not be the 
great Nation of liberty and freedom that we are today. I've talked 
about the fact that when we talk about the rule of law, we're not just 
talking about abiding by the laws of this country. We're talking about 
abiding by the rules that we set to operate whatever we operate in this 
country.
  I'm reminded to tell a story. When my oldest son was, I believe, in 
the seventh or the eighth grade; he played football. He was the best 
punter. He was also the center. So the one time he didn't snap the ball 
was when he was the punter. He punted the ball. He did a pretty good 
job of it. We played a team--I won't mention where it is, but if he's 
listening, he'll know what I'm talking about--where the first time he 
kicked the ball, a guy came through and knocked him flat, and they 
didn't throw a flag. It's young kids playing and not, I guess, the most 
professional referees. So he took it and I took it and there was no 
problem.
  The second time he punted the ball, somebody came in and knocked him 
flat again. At this point in time, I was really concerned about it. The 
third time he punted the ball, somebody came in and knocked him flat 
again. He turned to the referee as I was climbing the fence, I was so 
mad, and asked him, What does it take to get a ``roughing the kicker'' 
call? And he said, In this town, you better just shut up and play the 
game.

                              {time}  2000

  My son is now a coach at a major school in Texas, but I would almost 
assure you that he has never forgotten that person who refused to 
enforce the rules, and we were just lucky that he didn't get injured 
because he was a little kid still. He was in the seventh grade. And I 
have never forgotten it, and most people don't forget when people break 
rules that they expect to be played by. If their team is playing on 
Saturday or on Sunday and they see a blatant violation of the rules, 
most Americans get infuriated by people who violate rules.
  I take the position--and I think the position is easily defended--
that the United States of America cannot run without the laws that we 
create both in this body and our State legislatures around the country 
and those laws that the courts have interpreted correctly. Those things 
keep us on that foundation of operational procedures that we have that 
allows us to know that when we do something, we follow the rules, and 
others are expected to follow the rules, and if they don't follow the 
rules, we have recourse to make them follow the rules.
  I have been talking about that for a year. I have been talking about 
that,

[[Page 2906]]

about Members of this body that I have said, you know, that there were 
ethics violations filed against them, that the Ethics Committee needed 
to resolve those because there were allegations that they had broken 
the rules. Some of those things have come to fruition, and without any 
animosity towards anyone, I am glad at least one of those issues has 
been slightly resolved. But there are others, and it would seem to me 
that as we talk about and as we look at each other in this body--and 
all of us are Members and all of us agree to a set of rules when we 
come here.
  What's interesting is that in the history of the United States, there 
are some people that are highly respected by both political parties, by 
all Americans. I think Abraham Lincoln falls in that category. I think 
George Washington falls in that category. I believe Thomas Jefferson, 
Benjamin Franklin, and many, many others of those who are either our 
Founding Fathers or people who have done such extraordinary things for 
freedom and for liberty in this country that we remember them, and we 
remember and we honor what they did.
  Thomas Jefferson wrote the rules for operation of this House and of 
the Senate. I take that back. I don't know if he wrote it for the 
Senate. I know he wrote it for the House. I think he wrote it for both 
bodies. But whatever that may be, when our Founding Fathers were 
sitting around on those hot days in the summer trying to put together a 
constitution, trying to resolve the issues and deciding what kind of 
functioning government they wanted to have, they had a concept of 
creating a republic--not a parliamentary democracy but a republic--
where you had a representative form of government, where you had two 
bodies, the House and the Senate. The House would be the people's 
House, and it would have the opportunity to change every 2 years. The 
Senate, at that time, would be appointed by the legislatures of the 
various States. The Senators would represent States, and they would 
change after a 6-year term, with alternating terms, so every 2 years a 
certain body but never all that body would change.
  And when they looked at how they wanted these two Houses to operate, 
they set up that this House would be the rapid-solution-to-the-problem 
House. This House goes and moves, compared to the Senate, at light 
speed, and it was intended that way by our Founders. They intended it 
because they wanted the people's business taken care of and addressed 
first, and they wanted it addressed in an important manner by this 
House. But they also realized that sometime in the heat of debates that 
can go on in this place, that level heads needed to calm things down 
for a bit and ponder it before it's passed so things aren't rushed to 
judgment and mistakes aren't made. We have the same kind of procedures 
in the courtroom today. Just, for example, in a capital murder case, we 
spend an inordinate amount of time and slow things down so that we can 
try our very best to make sure that mistakes are not being made, 
because it's life or death, what occurs in that courtroom.
  So our Founding Fathers wanted our legislation to go to the Senate 
and give the Senate the ability to slow the process down, take a hard 
look at each of the elements, and try to come up with a resolution in 
the Senate that was more philosophical and more pondered than the 
House. It was intended that way. And for that reason, they set up a 
means by which the Members of the Senate could do what's called 
filibuster the Senate. And that means that they can start talking, and 
one person could hold up the whole operation until everybody agreed to 
calm down and get certain points resolved at a slower rate.
  This has evolved, but the rules have been following that various 
trend and with that concept since the creation by our Founding Fathers. 
Today, we have a process that takes place over in the Senate which is 
sort of, if you will--imagine that there is someone standing up talking 
until you get 60 votes to shut him up. But there is not really somebody 
standing up and talking. We have a rule called ``cloture,'' and that 
rule says that until you can vote on an up-or-down vote on any issue in 
the Senate of the United States, you have to have 60 Members of that 
body to agree to bring that to the floor of the Senate for a vote. And 
that's an issue that it should be--if it's not in the minds of all the 
American people today, it should be in the minds of the American 
people, because one-sixth of our economy teeters on the verge of change 
based upon whether or not the Senate rule of cloture will be maintained 
as a rule which has been in existence and the concept since the 
founding of the body that is over on the other side of this building.
  Now, whenever there's a rule, there is always someone who will try to 
come up with a way to get around the rule. That's human nature. 
Sometimes people can get around it by breaking the rule, and sometimes 
people can get around it by adjusting the rule. The rule was adjusted 
slightly back in, I think it was, 1974, and they came up with a concept 
called reconciliation. And what they were finding was that in the 
budgetary process, when you have to reconcile revenues with 
expenditures to balance your checkbook, balance the budget, whatever 
you do at your home--don't use the kind of accounting we use around 
this place. But to make those two things reconcile, they put up the 
process of reconciliation, which for reconciling those numbers--for 
reconciling those two numbers to make them work, you could use a 
reconciliation process if you had put it in the rule prior to the 
passage of the budget or the addressing of the budget so that you could 
reconcile the numbers, and it didn't take 60 votes to get that vote. 
And reconciliation has been used for budgetary and number balancing 
ever since in a very limited manner.
  It comes up maybe once or twice a Presidential term for a President, 
to make sure that when new things are being done in the way of 
expenditures or taxation or whatever it is, to make things reconciled. 
Sometimes that's done by reconciliation. But it never was designed to 
take a whole body and battery of laws and just change the rule to make 
51 votes a win in the Senate. It was always intended that that was just 
for balancing your checkbook and not for creating your job and paying 
your bills. So, in other words, it wasn't for the big ideas. It was for 
the little tweaks to make things work. I don't think everybody 
understands that, but that's what it was for. That's what it's been 
used for.
  I have some examples on this page. This was written by a man named 
John Dalton about the process. It's a good explanation. He points out--
and there may be others, but he has got a list of the names of the 
bills that have used reconciliation. Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1980 
under Jimmy Carter, Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 under 
Ronald Reagan, Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1982 under Ronald 
Reagan, Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act 1982 under Reagan, 
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. Notice the names ``budget,'' 
``taxes,'' ``fiscal'' under Reagan. Deficit Reduction Act under Reagan. 
All of those took place in the eighties. All of those, you hear the 
word ``budget'' or you hear the word ``tax'' or ``expenditures.'' 
That's what it was for.
  Today we have been debating now for over a year President Obama's 
concept of health care for the United States. I hesitate to say 
President Obama's bill because, at least to my knowledge, President 
Obama has never himself, nor the White House, written a bill and 
presented it to this body for deliberation.
  So the bill that we're talking about right now--we had a House bill 
pass this body by one vote, and we had a Senate bill pass the Senate on 
Christmas Eve. Both of those were contentious, and both of those were 
hard fought, and both of those barely squeaked by. And normally, 
because the Senate bill is drastically different from the House bill, 
those would go to a conference committee where they would work out the 
differences and try to come up with solutions. That's the normal 
process for bills in this House. But the normal process doesn't seem to 
be wanting to go on in this House right

[[Page 2907]]

now, so we're not going to a conference committee. And the only other 
alternative would be that either the Senate take the House bill without 
any changes and pass it, which they said ``no,'' or now that they've 
passed their bill, they send it over here to the House, and the House 
has to pass that bill without any changes. And if there are any 
changes, it's got to go to a conference committee, because you can't 
change it. You either accept it or you haven't accepted it. If you 
haven't accepted it, then you've got to reconcile between the House and 
the Senate bill.
  The proposal on health care, which is being strong-armed in this 
House right now is to get this done by Easter, and they're going to do 
it by strong-arming the elements in this House on the Democratic side 
of the aisle because the Republicans are not going to vote for this 
bill, to ask them to give up their conscience--both our liberal Members 
and our conservative Members--to give up what they stand for and pass 
the Senate bill, even if they don't agree with it, and then to trust 
the leadership of this House to put together a reconciliation package 
that will fix things like abortion, which has nothing to do with 
anything to do with reconciliation, and do a reconciliation bill to 
address the issues concerning abortion in this bill, or do a 
reconciliation bill to address a government option, which is the far 
left liberals' concept--and you heard it talked about here tonight--of 
what's missing here in this bill.
  The leadership here is asking them to not mess with the Senate bill; 
pass it, even though they don't agree with it. And they don't think it 
should pass the way it is. Pass it and trust it that it will be 
changed. And it will be changed through a process which is not for 
changing these types of life-changing issues, but for tweaking your 
checkbook, if you will. And that means that we are going to change over 
200 years of history in order to get a health care bill passed that, by 
the best poll out there, 57 percent of the American people don't want. 
And there are polls that say as many as 60 and 70 percent of the 
American people don't want this health care bill. They want us to start 
over and try again. They think we can do better than to create 
hundreds--not hundreds. That's an exaggeration. Let's get it right--
about 35 or 40 new agencies and bureaus in this country that will have 
people overseeing everything to do with health care in this Nation and 
that will put people who operate in Washington, D.C., between you and 
your doctor in making health care decisions.
  The American people have said, We don't like it. Tens of thousands of 
them took to the streets in August and said, Go back and do it right. 
Both you Democrats and you Republicans, get together. We want to see 
you work together on this bill, and we want you to come up with the 
kind of solutions we're looking for that deal with costs, deal with 
accessibility, deal with preexisting conditions. But they don't have to 
be in something that nobody--unless they've got a couple of months--can 
read through and digest and understand. Put it in a series of bills 
that we can understand as American people.
  If there is one thing we owe, as Members of this body, is that we owe 
it to the American people to pass bills that they can read. I mean, it 
is affecting one-sixth of their lives. One-sixth of their paycheck is 
going to be hit every time they think about health care.

                              {time}  2015

  And people are going to be ordered to take health care and mandated 
with penalties if they don't want to take health care. And there's some 
people that don't. So it's life-changing. But what I'm talking about 
today--that's an argument you've heard made for months now--I'm back to 
where I started. There are rules and there are laws that you run your 
operation by, and when you start violating, especially laws and rules 
that go to the basic tenet of the Constitution of this United States, 
that the Senate is the deliberative body, then you are basically 
changing not only a sixth of our economy but you're changing the way 
the government of the United States has operated for over 200 years. 
That's not the way it ought to be. It shouldn't be that way.
  And so I would argue that my issue about rule of law goes to the 
reconciliation process. And yet the leadership of this House, the 
Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi; Harry Reid, the majority leader of 
the Senate; and the President of the United States are all talking 
about fixing the disputes that are in this House about the Senate 
health care bill through reconciliation which would then be an abuse of 
the rules and violate what this country has stood for for over 200 
years.
  Now, what's wrong with that picture? Well, first off, it changes 
everything that happens in the future. Because if now we can turn over 
one-sixth of the economy to the government, again a portion of the 
economy will now be managed by the centrists, if you will, the people 
who want a central government here in Washington running everything, 
when they do that, then the next issue that comes before this House, 
there's no reason for anybody to honor the 60-vote rule in the Senate. 
There's no reason for anybody to honor it. Once you break it, that 
affects every human being that lives on this planet, inside the United 
States, once you fix it and violate the rules to suit yourself against 
those people, what can we bring before this House that would require 
that rule ever again? And I think an argument could very well be made 
that that will be the end of the cloture rule in the Senate. And when 
you end the cloture rule in the Senate, we'll either go back to the old 
filibuster or, quite frankly, we'll go back to a different Senate 
that's not operating the way our Founding Fathers intended it to 
operate.
  These are issues that I think as we vote about this, we need to 
realize that our concept, that we should go by a set of rules and we 
should operate by that set of rules. To violate those rules, there are 
consequences. I'm not saying we're going to put anybody in jail. I'm 
saying the consequences are right now you might have a win. But when 
you're in the minority, which this 60-vote rule is done to protect the 
minority, whoever it may be, Democrat or Republican, if you once give 
up the power to protect the minority, or at least give them a voice, 
then down the road someone's going to wake up, it's something that 
breaks their heart to see it passed into law, and there won't be a 
cloture rule to protect them.
  Breaking rules has consequences. I don't know if what I'm saying here 
has any effect on those folks, but I can tell you that, for instance, 
the health care bill calls for $1 billion in budget savings over a 5-
year period of time of deficit spending totaling about, estimated, $8 
trillion. This impact is about one one-thousandth of a percent, which 
indisputably reaches the ``incidental'' definition of budgetary impact 
under the Byrd rule.
  Senator Byrd wrote a rule that said you can't use this idea of 
reconciliation for just incidental effects. There is nothing more 
incidental than that. When you're talking about $8 trillion versus $1 
billion, that's pretty incidental. And yet it is one-sixth of the 
economy.
  The reason we have rules is for people to follow the rules. I 
encourage and I hope and I pray that every one of the American people 
will now understand, and this is difficult to talk about, and it's not 
easy for anybody to understand. And if anybody tells you that John 
Carter's an expert on it, you tell them they don't know what they're 
talking about. I'm not an expert on it. I'm just here to tell you that 
I do understand what common sense means and I understand what's right 
and wrong. And when Thomas Jefferson writes the rules and everybody 
abides by them for over 200 years of history of the United States and 
all of a sudden to get your way you decide not to abide by the rules, 
that's wrong. And I think the American people are going to know it's 
wrong. And I hope the American people will rise up and say it's wrong.
  If they can pass it with 60 votes in the Senate, that's the blessing 
of the American people. That's the way the deal operates. That's 
playing within the rules. That's following the rules that make the 
playing field, I consider,

[[Page 2908]]

level because we all play by those rules. And that's fine. But if you 
can't, don't play tricks and don't change rules that you're not 
supposed to change, because if you do, the consequences to the American 
people are going to be awful. There's a lot of anger in this country 
right now, and I believe that anger will be increased six-fold or more 
if they find out, the same bunch of Americans who watch basketball or 
football or baseball, who know the rules of the game and watch somebody 
break the rules, they expect a foul to be called, they expect a penalty 
to be set, they expect a man to be called out or a man to be called 
safe, they expect the rules to be played by; and if they expect that on 
the baseball field, the football field and the basketball court, why 
wouldn't they expect it when people are changing their life? When 
people are writing rules to change their life, why wouldn't they expect 
that?
  Health care reform has been on our plate now for quite a while. 
Meanwhile, we're losing jobs. We've got issues that we really need to 
be dealing with about people that are out of work and trying to figure 
out a way to get them back to work. We've got companies that are 
confused about the future. By that confusion, they're not willing to 
make investments either by expanding their businesses or hiring people, 
so they're just sitting on the sidelines right now and waiting. We've 
got small businesses that are frightened because they don't know 
whether they're going to be mandated to do health care or not, or 
whether they can do what they're doing now or what they need to do, or 
where they can go to make it better for their employees so maybe I 
don't want to hire any more employees. We've got millions of people 
that need a job. And we're happy when only 30 or 40,000 lost a job this 
month. That's supposed to be happy? I think we should be happy when 30 
or 40,000 got a job this month, not when only 40,000 or 30,000 or 
20,000 lost. That's not our goal. Our goal is to be able to say, we're 
happy to announce on the floor of this House that 40,000 people got a 
job this month.
  But instead, we've been debating health care. We have been like 
people who say, I'm going to take my football and go home, demanding 
the game be played by their rules, not by the rules of the game, and 
demanding that their way be taken even when the American people tell 
them they don't want that way. That's what I think this debate is 
about.
  I have a whole bunch of posters here that a lot of people went to a 
lot of work on, and I will go through some of them. Robert Byrd, who's 
still alive and still working over in the Senate, here is what he said 
about reconciliation:
  ``I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health 
care reform and climate change legislation. Such a proposal would 
violate the intent and spirit of the budget process and do serious 
injury to the constitutional role of the Senate.
  ``As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you 
that reconciliation was intended to adjust revenue and spending levels 
in order to reduce deficits. It was not designed to create a new 
climate and energy regime and certainly not to restructure the entire 
health care system.''
  This was said by Senator Robert Byrd, 4/2/09. He was one of the 
authors of the reconciliation process in 1974. And that's what I've 
just been telling you. The Senator agrees with what I've just been 
saying, and I think really important things that we have to be 
concerned about is what he said about the Constitution: ``serious 
injury to the constitutional role of the Senate,'' just what I've been 
talking about with you.
  Let me point out, all these chairs that you see in this room have 
somebody that sits in them. They're not assigned seats, we sit where we 
want to, but we all tend to sit somewhere. Every one of us stands up on 
the first day of this House and we swear an oath. We raise our right 
hand and we swear an oath. And the nature of that oath is pretty darn 
simple. We don't swear to be loyal to our party, Republican or 
Democrat; we don't swear to be loyal to a man or a Speaker or a 
majority leader or a President. We swear one thing. We don't swear to 
provide for everybody and give a free ride to everybody in the country. 
We swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United 
States. That's what we swear to. That's our job here. Our job is to 
make sure that piece of work that created this simple but intricate 
system of rules that we've all accepted and has caused us all to 
prosper, our job is to defend that and the President's got the same 
oath. Our job is not other things; it's preserve what's in the 
Constitution and the way the Constitution is supposed to operate.
  Senator Byrd points out as I did, we're looking at something that 
will be in violation if not of the nature but at least of the spirit of 
the Constitution of the United States. This is more serious than some 
people may be thinking about.
  Here's some stuff about reconciliation:
  It gives the Congress the ability to change current law to bring 
spending and revenues in line.
  Uses numerical targets and not program-specific.
  Debate is limited to 20 hours, non-germane amendments are not in 
order, a vote is guaranteed and requires 51 votes to pass rather than 
60 as normal.
  The Byrd rule. Legislation cannot be added to a reconciliation bill 
if it has a budgetary impact which is merely incidental to the policy 
components of the provision. As I've told you, the bill that we're 
talking about is $1 billion versus $8 trillion. That's pretty 
incidental.
  Now you may not think so until you realize what a billion is, and 
then you realize what a trillion is. A trillion is a number that's so 
hard to understand that if you stacked thousand-dollar bills 4 inches 
high, they're brand new, they don't have any wrinkles, they perfectly 
fit together and they're 4 inches high, that's a million dollars. A 
trillion dollars, 67 miles high.
  So you can see, that's a whole lot of money we're talking about. A 
billion to $8 trillion is pretty incidental.
  Health care reform is not fiscal policy. That means it's not about 
money. That's what we're talking about. When you change a rule to do 
something that you can't do, that you shouldn't be doing in the first 
place, and so you're going to change the rule just to get your way and 
change the constitutional history of our country, something's real 
wrong with all that, and something that people ought to think about, 
because someday somebody might be rolling over you and something you 
care about by breaking the rules, and I don't think you will be very 
happy about that, because we are a group of people that play by the 
rules.

                              {time}  2030

  Been picking on these two guys for a long time for the last 2 months 
about tax evasion with no penalties: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner 
and Mr. Rangel, who is the former Chairman of the Ways and Means 
Committee. But it is not fair to have spent the time picking on these 
two guys when this whole House is fixing to break rules that are going 
to affect everyone sitting in this Chamber, and in fact everyone 
drawing a breath in this country, and they are going to break rules and 
change rules and avoid rules.
  I am almost embarrassed to have picked on these two individuals for 
the rules that they broke concerning taxes and other things. Although 
it is the right thing to say, and if they break the rules you ought to 
talk about it. Well, the Congress is about to break the rules, and we 
ought to talk about it.
  Finally, and I am going to quit now, I would hope that everybody 
realizes that everybody in this Congress wants to make health care 
work. And they want to make health care work for everybody and give 
everybody equal opportunity under health care. And there are many 
people on both sides of the aisle that think we can do better than 
these 2,000- and 3,000- and 4,000-page bills that seem to hit that 
table once in a while. And health care is one of them. So I am 
appealing to my colleagues in the House of Representatives to encourage 
everybody, when it

[[Page 2909]]

comes to this important one-sixth of our economy, to play by the rules.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________