[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13440-13443]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        HOW IT ALL FITS TOGETHER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gowdy). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is 
recognized for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, this is a tough time in our American 
history. I was a history major at Texas A&M. I knew I owed the Army 4 
years for the scholarship I had. I had been really inspired by American 
history in high school by Sam Parker, my teacher, my Scoutmaster. So I 
know a little bit about our history. I know a lot about world history 
as well. And it's important to take things in perspective, especially 
speeches here in Washington and take them from the perspective of how 
it all fits together.
  Now, we have been in this Chamber, and I was sitting right back there 
on the aisle, and we had the President of the United States standing 
right there. I was on a direct line of sight to eye-to-eye with the 
President, except his eyes cut right into the teleprompter each time he 
looked my way so I don't think we ever made eye contact. But he kept 
telling us over and over, 16, 17 times, I didn't count them, I've been 
told, but he said we've got to pass this bill right now, right now. 
This bill, right now.
  Well, unfortunately, last Thursday, when the President was saying 
we've got to pass this bill right now, there was no bill. There was no 
plan. He talked about his plan. He talked about his bill. They didn't 
have it quite ready yesterday until later. And we kept harassing the 
White House, saying we want to get a copy of the bill. We need a copy 
of the bill. You've said pass the bill now. Do we not get to even have 
a copy of the bill before we have to pass it, or would it be okay if we 
could, you know, see it before we pass it? You know, it might be a good 
idea to file it at some point if we're going to pass a bill. That's 
just my thinking.
  And so the White House was kind enough, late yesterday, to e-mail a 
copy of the bill. We got it up on our Web site at gohmert.house.gov. 
For others who are intrigued by the promises that have been made and 
what it actually does, let's see. It's called Saving Obama's Job. No, 
I'm sorry. American Jobs Act is the name of it.
  It's interesting to hear somebody talk about their bill and then get 
it and dig through. I think I finished about 5 this morning going 
through all 155 pages of the bill. And it's most interesting. Some of 
these things I'm going to have to talk to people who have more 
expertise in particular areas. Some things it's pretty obvious what 
they say.
  Page 6, he gets right into payroll tax relief. And again, as the 
person who came up with the idea for a tax holiday as a way to 
stimulate the economy back nearly 3 years ago, and as a person who, in 
January of 2009, told the President personally about my idea for a tax 
holiday. Moody's rated a tax holiday as increasing the GDP. It looks 
like more than other stimulus proposals. That was back in 2009, before 
this President squandered $4.5 trillion above and beyond the amount 
around $2.2 trillion or so a year that was coming in. It's shocking 
that we could go through that much money.

                              {time}  1620

  Of course we had 2 years, the first 2 years with the same party in 
power in the House and Senate as is in the White House. And as I found 
in my first term in 2005 and 2006, sometimes when you have the same 
party in the White House and in the House and Senate, if the people in 
Congress are not adequately restrained and cannot adequately restrain 
themselves, there ends up being a big spending frenzy.
  In 2006, again, my second year in Congress, we spent over $160 
billion more than we took in. Democrats across the aisle rightfully 
tore after Republicans. How could you spend $160 billion more than what 
we had coming into the Treasury? And they were right to do so. We 
should not have spent $160 billion more than we had coming in.
  Ironically, President Bush in 2008 had a bill passed by the 
Democratic-controlled House and Senate, a stimulus bill that opened the 
door a bit to these stimulus frenzies. And $40 billion of that $160 
billion, as I recall, was going to be going to people who didn't pay 
any income taxes, as a rebate, which caused me to ask the President 
down here on the floor after the State of the

[[Page 13441]]

Union, How do you give a rebate to people that didn't put any `bate' 
in?
  Then after that we had TARP. President George W. Bush is a good man. 
He is smarter than most of the people in this town wanted to give him 
credit for. One of the wittiest people you'll ever want to be around. 
But he made the mistake of listening to, until now, the worst Treasury 
Secretary in the history of the country, Hank Paulson. And Paulson 
said, Look, give me $750 billion; I can fix things.
  Well, that was a mistake. Anybody that read that bill would 
understand that was not a bill that should have ever passed; and if 
more people on the House floor had read the bill, I am confident, I 
know they couldn't have brought themselves to vote for it; but they 
didn't read it, many didn't.
  Well, that's why I spent most of last night going through the 
President's jobs bill. He does have some payroll tax relief. But 
compared to the payroll tax relief I was proposing, we were told it 
would be close to--if you just gave people all of their tax money in 
their check, it didn't need to come back from Washington. It would be 
in the check. If we passed it and the President had signed it on a 
Thursday, it would have been in their Friday check. All of the money, 
all of the taxes they paid.
  That would have stimulated the economy, and we wouldn't have needed 
the government to say, Hey, let's bail out GM and let's bail out 
Chrysler, because if people had had their own money, they could have 
gone down and bought a car from the car manufacturer and dealer that 
they wanted to buy from instead of just throwing money at the car 
industry.
  I appreciated the GM commercial saying, We paid our money back. 
Unfortunately, that was not true. It was a misrepresentation. Still 
money owed. Anyway, I guess he would do well in Washington with that 
kind of mentality.
  The payroll tax relief provided here is just a fraction of what I was 
suggesting in late 2008, 2009. The President, in fact, when I told him 
the idea in January of 2009, said, That's a great idea. Have you talked 
to Larry? Talking about Larry Summers, who was right behind him at the 
time. I said, I'd love to talk to Larry Summers about it.
  Summers reached around and gave me a card. The card said, Give me a 
call. He never took my calls. I waited a week, and then he didn't call 
me. I felt hurt, you know, like high school days when you're trying to 
ask somebody on a date, and they say, Let me get back to you. Well, I 
was snubbed. He didn't get back to me. Okay. Well, not the first time.
  So I relentlessly called, and I was given eventually to some young 
man who sounded like his voice was still changing, telling me to leave 
a message, and I didn't leave messages. And ``Larry,'' as the President 
referred to him, never got back to me. And I understand he's not over 
there now.
  But they called a tax holiday back in those days that got just a few 
bucks in people's pocket. Nothing like the stimulus would have been if 
people had been able to keep their own money, all of it, for a couple 
of months.
  Now, this wasn't my motive. My motive was to stimulate. But there was 
a secondary occurrence that would have happened had we had a real tax 
holiday, even for 2 or 3 months. It would have been that workers across 
America, including union workers, would notice, many of them for the 
first time it would really come home, how much money they're sending to 
Washington every month and how much better their lives would be if they 
didn't send that much money to Washington every month, if they had 
their own money to give to their own charitable causes, they had their 
own money to bail themselves out, their own money to stimulate their 
own household. Everybody would have been better off.
  But that's not the tack the President chose. He got what was 
originally touted to be an $800 billion stimulus, and he also had about 
$450 billion of the original TARP that he and Secretary Geithner were 
able to find ways to squander.
  We were told if we did not pass the President's stimulus package back 
in early 2009, he said the unemployment rate, Mr. Speaker, might go as 
high as 8\1/2\ percent. That 8\1/2\ percent sounds pretty good. People 
remember him saying, Well, gee, if you'll pass this, unemployment will 
be around 8 percent at the worst. Wrong. But if you don't pass it, it 
could go as high as 8\1/2\ percent. I'd take that 8\1/2\ percent right 
now and have everybody that got that money give it back because it was, 
for the most part, wasted.
  Now, people back then were told by the President, It's a stimulus 
bill. It's all about infrastructure. We're going to have this money go 
to infrastructure. Well, there was only a tiny pittance of what may 
have been more like a trillion dollars that went to infrastructure. 
That goes through page 16 with that part.
  We get into first responder stabilization, and there is $5 billion 
for one program, $4 billion for another program, $1 billion for the 
Attorney General first responder stabilization fund. Oh, I guess $4 
billion's for the Attorney General to carry out the competitive grant 
program.
  It keeps being lost on people here that America's better off if you 
don't force people at the point of imprisonment, and IRS persecution, 
to give all of this money to Washington and then we'll dole it out as 
we see fit. The economy does better when you let people keep their own 
money and only bring just as much as necessary. Don't try to run 
everybody's lives.
  But at page 17, we're going to give all of this money to the Attorney 
General's Office and let them dole it out as they see fit. And we've 
seen that if you're a friend of the administration, you're going to do 
well. If you're not, they're going to sic on you all of the power of 
the bureaucratic, whether it's EPA, all of these administration's tools 
and you'll pay a price. We're finding that out in Texas.
  Now, you go to the next page, page 18. You've got elementary and 
secondary schools. They're supposed to get money. But, of course, it's 
going to come through Washington because we know best. And we're going 
to dole some money to the States. We're going to dole some to State and 
local applications as indicated on page 19.
  But you can't miss this. It's throughout the bill. Page 20, here we 
go again.

                              {time}  1630

  We saw it with the Solyndra fiasco in California and this 
administration giving away $500 million that can't be accounted for 
now--just squandered. Well, we're going to do that some more. Maybe if 
we keep throwing money at a bad idea it will somehow, someday, in some 
way get a little better. So page 20 has got us prioritizing green 
practices kind of like a bankrupt Spain has done.
  Now, there is money in here, page 21. This is nice--money even for 
private schools, but only if they have a child poverty rate of at least 
40 percent. Then we've got community college modernization and more 
green jobs within the colleges, Page 23, and you go on and on. I mean, 
I went through this. It does go on and on.
  Then we're told we're going to invest. This time we really, really 
mean it. We said we really meant it back in January of '09 that we're 
going to have infrastructure, and that's going to bring us up. We said 
it. We didn't spend it on infrastructure. We squandered it on ACORN and 
all these different groups, but this time we really, really, really 
mean it. Let's see. That looks like it's $2 billion for that program, 
and on and on.
  It's interesting. We've got all this money we're going to put toward 
highways and whatnot. Now, anyone, Mr. Speaker, who believed this was 
all going to go straight to infrastructure missed the point, because 
then we get over to page 40, and you get to the real jobs. This is 
where the jobs are really created. It starts on page 40. It's called 
the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. If you love Fannie and 
Freddie, you're going to love the American Infrastructure Financing 
Authority.
  On page 41, you'll find out there are seven voting members appointed 
by the President. Well, he's good at creating

[[Page 13442]]

jobs--look at all the government jobs he has added--so that's who I 
want having appointed. I mean, he has appointed all these people from 
universities who have never created jobs in their lives, so they're 
perplexed as to why their programs aren't working. He does have the 
head of GE who's helping him with that jobs program. China is grateful. 
China is very grateful to the head of GE because he has created lots of 
jobs--they're just in China and not here. Maybe he'll get to be on this 
board as well. But it's another government program.
  Let's see. I want to make sure I get this right. The board of 
directors' first appointees will be deemed the incorporators of AIFA--
that's the American Infrastructure Financing Authority--but that will 
make for some good reading. I wouldn't read it right before going to 
bed because you might not be able to go to sleep.
  Then we get over to page 56. This talks about the funding of the 
American Infrastructure Financing Authority and the administrative 
fees, which is section 257. Then we get into that it has hereby 
appropriated AIFA to carry out this act for the cost of direct loans 
and loan guarantees except for the limitations under section 253 and 
for administrative costs of $10 billion that remain available until 
expended. Then you've got some other moneys there, but that's good news 
because you can spend that for administrative costs. Fortunately, in 
Washington, we don't run up much in the way of administrative costs.
  Now, one thing that some people have talked about to raise a little 
bit of revenue is to sell some of our broadband spectrum. Then we also 
know that there are those in Washington who are not happy that the FCC 
has not been able to have a Fairness Doctrine so they can dictate what 
goes on the air. Well, not to worry because people, it seems, are going 
more and more to broadband than to radio waves and television waves. 
We're getting more and more broadband stuff. So we have the answer to 
the lack of a Fairness Doctrine that the FCC has wanted under this 
administration, but we've been able to avoid it so far.
  There is nothing about a Fairness Doctrine in here, but fortunately, 
you get to page 75, and you find out we're going to establish--I love 
this name--a Public Safety Broadband Corporation. On the next page, 76, 
you find out it has established a private, nonprofit corporation, and 
you're going to have some members who know how to run a government 
operation and create government jobs. Of course it killed jobs in the 
private sector, but it's creating government jobs. That's down here. 
You've got the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Homeland 
Security, the Attorney General--we're talking real job creators here--
and others who will be on that board. So people can feel better about 
that. If you don't think we have enough government control of things, 
well, this bill, you're going to love it: more government control, more 
government corporations.
  The thing that many missed--and it jumped out at me as I sat back 
there and the President spoke--is when he said we want to work side by 
side with business. For people who have ears and can hear, that means 
this President wants to be your business partner. That scares some 
folks, and that's why I think you saw the market go down the next day. 
People who understand how real jobs in the real world are created know 
that the government being partners with people trying to generate jobs 
is a job killer. We don't need a government to be partners, side by 
side, working with business. The government, as designed by the 
Founders and as we're supposed to be carrying out, is supposed to be a 
referee to make sure people play fair. If the government had made sure 
people were playing fair instead of dictating every detail of their 
existence, then they would have noticed that Bernie Madoff was cheating 
people, but the government--our bureaucracy--was too concerned with 
dictating how people live, and they forgot about their job as referee.
  I highlighted so much stuff as I went through the night, but I won't 
bore you with all of this, Mr. Speaker. Let's see: Public Safety 
Roaming and Priority Access. The FCC is going to get the report on the 
efficient use of public safety spectrum. Oh, extended benefit 
provisions. There's good stuff there.
  I've been a fan of retraining people when there are jobs in one 
sector and people have lost jobs in another, and there are no jobs with 
the training they have. That's a good idea. It's better money than just 
throwing out unemployment reimbursement if you can train people to have 
real jobs. This bill spends billions of dollars. We've got the 
Reemployment NOW Program. That's a new Federal bureaucracy, a new 
Federal program. We've got the State Plan at page 98. We've got the 
Bridge to Work Program at page 99. We're going to retrain people for 
jobs. We don't have jobs that they can fill, but we're going to spend a 
lot of time training them for jobs that don't exist.
  Wouldn't we be better off encouraging the real job creators, the 
small business folks, to create jobs and then train them for that? But 
no. We're going to suck more capital out of the financial community and 
into the government so we can retrain people for jobs that don't exist.
  Then we have, on page 106, the Short-Time Compensation Program. The 
Short-Time Compensation Program means a program in which the 
participation of the employers is voluntary and the employer reduces 
the number of hours worked by employees in lieu of layoffs. Such 
employees whose workweeks have been reduced by at least 10 percent are 
then eligible for unemployment compensation. If you lose 10 percent of 
your work time, guess what? We're now opening up a new avenue for 
unemployment compensation. Ten percent reduced is all it takes.
  Employers--I've talked to so many--say, I don't want to fire anybody. 
I'm asking my employees to hang on. We're all reducing what we're 
taking in, and we're going to try to get through this without firing 
anybody, but everybody has had to take a cut.

                              {time}  1640

  Well, this will make them eligible for unemployment compensation, 
which raises their unemployment insurance rates they have to pay, which 
means they are going to have to lay off somebody in order to pay the 
additional unemployment insurance rates.
  Of course, then you have got temporary financing of short-term 
compensation agreements at page 109. Oh, we've got grants. We've got 
subsidized employment for unemployed low-income adults. You know, 
instead of sucking all this capital out of the private sector, it seems 
like we would want to help create more jobs.
  Well, if you're not satisfied with all the jobs that are created by 
the new government programs, new government agencies, wonderful that we 
have got something better than Fannie and Freddie for infrastructure 
financing, that's great, but I understand that lawsuit filing is down 
significantly around the country. Our Constitution tells you, and we 
know in our hearts that it's wrong to discriminate against people based 
on race, creed, color, national origin, gender, those things make 
sense. We shouldn't discriminate, and those are protected classes.
  We've also added, no matter what your sexual preference, your sexual 
orientation, no matter what you're oriented toward sexually, because 
the Democratic majority would not allow us to define sexual orientation 
to exclude illegal activity. We know sexual orientation is a protected 
class now. We are adding in this bill a new protected class called 
unemployed. The title, on page 129, ``Prohibition of Discrimination in 
Employment on the Basis of an Individual's Status As Unemployed.''
  It says right here in the findings that we ``find that denial of 
employment opportunities to individuals because of their status as 
unemployed is discriminatory and burdens commerce.'' It goes on and 
explains this in the preceding pages.
  So the good news is, if you're unemployed and you go to apply for a 
job, and you're not hired for that job, see a lawyer. You may be able 
to file a claim because you got discriminated against because you were 
unemployed.

[[Page 13443]]

  Now, some would point out, legitimately, that will discourage people 
from doing interviews of people unemployed, because if they do, they've 
got a claim or may have a claim to make against the employer for 
discrimination based on the fact that they were unemployed.
  I think that this will help trial lawyers who are not having enough 
work, because it can open the door. We heard from our friends across 
the aisle in the preceding hour, 14 million people out of work, that's 
14 million potential new clients that could go hire a lawyer and file a 
claim because they didn't get hired even though they were unemployed.
  We've heard the President demonizing billionaires and millionaires. 
You know, why are the Republicans so strong on trying to bail out their 
rich friends?
  Well, what we've learned here in this town in recent years is that if 
the very wealthy don't mind being called names, they will be enriched 
and even engorged. For example, we know that Wall Street executives 
have been called fat cats by this administration and demonized.
  Yet the little secret behind the scene's joke is, don't mind being 
called names; this administration has brought more profit to Wall 
Street than Goldman Sachs has ever seen in their history. Wall Street 
executives and their families gave to President Obama 4-to-1 over John 
McCain, so, of course, they've got a good little deal going on there. 
And also, demonize the oil and gas industry even though, you know, you 
love British Petroleum because they were going to endorse the cap-and-
trade bill, and you demonize them, and then you stick provisions in 
this bill that have no effect on the big major oil companies.
  They will only affect, these provisions at the back at pages 151, 
152, 153, they will not affect the big majors like British Petroleum 
except that because they will destroy the ability of independent 
producers that produce much or maybe most of the oil and gas in the 
continental U.S., it will drive them out of business. It will dry up 
investment.
  This is repeal of the oil and gas working interest exception, the 
passive activity, so there are things in here that are going to dry up 
the independent oil company's ability to function.
  And the pay-for--we were told over and over this is all paid for--is 
on page 155. Here it is, get ready: The Budget Control Act of 2011 is 
amended by striking $1.5 trillion that the supercommittee is going to 
have to find in cuts and inserting $1.95 trillion.
  He's saying, It's all paid for. It's all paid for. And the way it's 
all paid for is the new supercommittee is now ordered under the 
President's bill to find another $450 billion to pay for his bill. So 
it's all paid for, hallelujah, amen.
  Now, there are so many more problems I haven't had a chance to get 
to, and there are probably some things that I probably missed even as I 
went through this, but there is such bad news for America in here.
  Union workers, watch out: This may be the end of your jobs. But it's 
okay because the unions are growing by getting more government 
employees, not the hard-working folks in the regular unions. These are 
the government unions. It should say, instead of American jobs bill, 
saving the President's job bill, but this is a disaster for every other 
thinking person in America.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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