[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 16239-16245]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    A TEXAN LOOKS AT CURRENT EVENTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, for going on a couple months now, we've 
been hearing the President say we need to pass his jobs bill--pass his 
jobs bill right away, right now, pass his jobs bill. And it was so 
ironic to have a President of the United States, who says he wants to 
work with the Members of Congress, but Members of Congress won't work 
with him, and in his purported ``effort'' to work with Members of 
Congress, he doesn't ask to sit down with Congress in a private meeting 
and talk about these issues. Oh, no, that would really show an intent 
to work with Congress, to sit down in a room where we can visit about 
the issues. That would be really working with Congress. Instead, what 
we have from the President of the United States is a demand.
  Now, I'm not sure historically, Mr. Speaker, how many times a 
President of the United States has decided to just throw a little hissy 
fit and, I'm going to come talk to Congress. Well, we know that he was 
an instructor. He wasn't a professor, but an instructor. You can be an 
instructor in a law school if you practice law on the side or a 
community organizer on the side, or whatever; and they'll let you come 
teach a course or two. So anybody who has been involved in a law 
school, you would think, even as a low instructor, would know that the 
Constitution makes very clear that the President of the United States 
has no right, no moral authority to demand to come speak in the House.
  Now, the President would never give credit to the willingness of this 
Congress to vote unanimously to allow the President, after his little 
hissy fit, to come speak in the House, but we did. He demanded to come 
speak to the House. He has to have an invitation to do that. In social 
circles, if somebody demanded to come to someone's house--I demand an 
invitation to come lecture you in your house--most people would say 
forget it. But this House, controlled by Republican Members--

[[Page 16240]]

the majority here, Republican, Democrat majority down in the Senate--we 
voted unanimously. There were no objections to inviting the President 
to come lecture us rather than sit down and try to work with us.

                              {time}  1200

  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. GOHMERT. I certainly will yield to my friend from Texas.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. I just want to thank you for taking this time to 
speak on this subject. I think it's commendable that you would do that, 
and I think you're exactly right. I would encourage you to keep telling 
the truth as you know it.
  And how proud we are of you in the Texas delegation and certainly in 
east Texas, where you represent that part of the State so well. So keep 
up the good work.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Well, that's so unexpected and unnecessary, and it 
actually means a great deal. Thank you.
  Somebody that's been here slugging it out longer than I would ever be 
able to handle, Mr. Barton from Texas came as a young man, and he's 
been able to endure the slings and arrows through many, many years of 
being in the minority.
  And we're back to dealing with a White House who wants, he says, to 
negotiate, to work with Congress, and does so by demanding to come talk 
to Congress, and comes.
  Did we have a warm, friendly meeting here as the President stood here 
on the second level?
  Well, actually we got lectured. We were lectured that we needed to 
pass the President's jobs bill right away, right away, 16, 17 times. 
We've just got to do it now.
  During the speech, I don't recall the President ever saying, I really 
don't have a bill. I don't have a bill. And, in fact, if you want to 
sit down and work with me, you won't be able to because in the morning 
I'm getting on Air Force One, funded by the taxpayers, and basically 
hit the campaign trail. And I'm going to be beating up on you guys in 
the House of Representatives for not being willing to negotiate with 
me, even though I'm not around. And, by the way, I'm not going to 
negotiate even if we sat down because you've got to take my bill 
completely, pass the whole thing. I'm not going to compromise on 
anything.
  That was the message for a number of weeks. Take it; pass it as it 
is. Never mind the fact that he didn't have a bill when he hit the road 
and was condemning Congress for not passing his bill. That's just 
strange.
  You would think if somebody really wants to work with Congress, 
really wants to do something for the people of America that are 
hurting--I've had four job fairs in east Texas, and I've gone to each 
one, and it breaks your heart. There are people in their fifties and 
sixties, there's a lot of young people, a bigger percentage of young 
people, but there were older people, tremendous experience, tremendous 
education and training, been laid off because of the bad economy.
  And it's heartbreaking even more so because this Congress and this 
President have to take responsibility for continuing to put more and 
more laws, regulations, burdens on business that keep them from being 
able to retain jobs, keep them from being able to expand and create 
more jobs.
  And when you hear from people who've lost their job, and they're not 
only brokenhearted, but they're upset because then they find out that 
this administration has done things like throw $600 million at 
Solyndra, has spent millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of 
dollars, to create jobs. One giveaway program, seems like I read we 
spent $8 million per job that was created. Different amounts resulting 
in a different number of jobs.
  One of the things I've seen in talking to people in Texas who are 
involved in the education system is that when the President's so-called 
stimulus bill in January of 2009 was passed and it was done, rammed 
through like the ObamaCare bill was, it didn't have, it didn't seem, 
the full support of America. But it had a majority in the House, it had 
a majority in the Senate, and so it passed.
  I like to think I'm objective enough that I certainly acknowledge it 
didn't start in January of '09 with President Obama. A good man, a 
smart man--he's not given credit for that--made a major mistake when 
President Bush trusted Hank Paulson. Paulson says, we're about to have 
a catastrophe, give me $700 billion and I'll keep things on track, get 
things back on track.
  We don't give $700 billion to one man and say go fix things. You 
don't do that in America. That's not what the country was founded for. 
But it was done. And as I understand it, about $250 billion of the $700 
billion is around the amount that Hank Paulson squandered of the so-
called stimulus or the bail-out, TARP, whatever you want to call it.
  Ironically, if one wishes to look at things from a political 
standpoint, it was pretty amazing because a Republican administration 
provided $700 billion to mainly bail out people on Wall Street who had 
donated to Democrats 4-1 over Republicans. That's what's so amazing is 
to hear people constantly talk about these rotten Republicans on Wall 
Street, when the fact is they give to Democrats 4-1 over Republicans.
  So, not only was it absolutely, in my mind, an immoral thing to do, 
to take people's hard-earned money and add it to money we borrowed from 
China and others to bail people out on Wall Street. That's not the 
America that was founded, that so much blood and treasure has been 
spent to establish.
  Wall Street executives, I've got no problem, as long as they're 
playing by the rules, they're not cheating people, if they make $100 
million a year. I have no problem as long as they're playing fairly; 
but when they get greedy and end up being broke, I do think it's 
appropriate for them to do what Americans are supposed to do and what 
is set out in the Constitution to do, called bankruptcy.
  And AIG, it sounds like they were making money in every department 
except the credit default swaps. Well, gee, that's what happens when 
you sell what is, in effect, insurance against a catastrophic event, 
which would be the failure of the mortgage-backed securities to have 
the value that was paid for them. You ensure against that. You take 
what amounts to premiums. You put no money in reserve to ensure against 
the event you took money to ensure against; and then are shocked some 
day when people want to make a claim under that insurance, and you've 
done nothing but take profit.
  What a great business that was, selling insurance to ensure against 
mortgage-backed securities not having the value paid for them, and not 
having to set aside a dime of that in a reserve account so that if 
somebody ever makes a claim you've got to pay it back. Now, there had 
to be a fun business.
  But, again, it was immoral, it was irresponsible, and they should 
have been under the rules of insurance. If you're going to sell 
insurance, you've got to ensure against the event you took money to pay 
off for if it ever happens. It didn't happen, so AIG should have been 
allowed to go through bankruptcy. If they had enough assets, and 
thought they might, they were certainly making a lot of money, if they 
had enough assets, they could reorganize, get creditors to agree and 
come up with a plan for reorganization. The law is very clear. At least 
it used to be before the auto bailout. But that's what should have 
happened.

                              {time}  1210

  Goldman Sachs, even though those were the dear, close friends of Hank 
Paulson, the worst Secretary of the Treasury this country has ever had 
until we got Tim Geithner. Now it's a close call. I'm not sure who is 
worse. But he bailed out his buddies at Goldman Sachs. They should have 
been allowed to go through reorganization if they could, and, if not, 
then liquidation and bankruptcy. That is what the Constitution provides 
for. And it should have been allowed to happen. And I realize that if 
that had happened, then those massive donations that the Democratic 
Party and President Obama got from Wall Street wouldn't have come 
through for him. I realize

[[Page 16241]]

that. But this is more than about political parties and more than about 
political donations. It's about the life and the existence of this 
country.
  Nobody should be too big to fail. If you can get big enough that the 
failure of your company or your bank hurts a lot of people, then it's 
going to hurt a lot of people. But that is the problem when the 
government becomes a player. We start becoming the lending institution, 
we start becoming the player in insurance where we're going to be 
selling the insurance like we do flood insurance, and we're going to be 
guaranteeing all the home loans. Well, people have to be in the good 
graces of the Federal Government if they're going to be able to get 
what they want because the Federal Government becomes the player, 
selling the insurance, like flood insurance, or backing home mortgages, 
and then you have a catastrophe like we've witnessed for the last 3 
years. It didn't have to happen, but it is what happens when a country 
moves toward being more socialistic, where the government runs 
everything, the GRE, government running everything. That is what 
ObamaCare was about, the GRE. That's what the President's stimulus bill 
in January of 2009 was about. We were told it was $800 billion. It 
turned out to be maybe more like $1 trillion. It was about the GRE, the 
government running everything.
  We heard with the President's stimulus bill in 2009, January, that if 
we did not pass the President's stimulus bill--the President told us, 
he made very clear, if you don't pass this bill, I'm warning you, 
unemployment could go as high as 8\1/2\ percent. Well, 2\1/2\ years 
later, that 8\1/2\ percent looks pretty doggone good. That would have 
been nice. But it got up to 10, and we're back at 9.1 for months now.
  The numbers are bad, but what is worse is all those people that 
cannot find jobs, and the biggest reason is because we have a 
government that thinks it is the answer when it's the problem. It's not 
the answer. When the government becomes the player and tries to be the 
player and referee, it doesn't work. When the government is so busy 
being a player as well as referee, it can't do its referee job very 
well, and so you have people like Bernie Madoff who get away for years 
with bilking people out of billions of dollars--life savings. That 
should never have happened. If the Federal Government were more 
interested in being the referee and making sure people played fair, 
Madoff couldn't have gotten away with it for that long.
  When the government wants to run health care as we do with Medicare 
and Medicaid, it becomes the problem, not the solution. And now we have 
seniors who are scared to death because they see what's happening. The 
President gets his bill, ObamaCare health bill, passed, and it has a 
provision for $500 billion to be cut from Medicare. And then AARP, 
after supporting that bill that cut $500 billion from Medicare, has the 
unmitigated gall to encourage people that are sending AARP money to 
notify their Congressman that we don't want any cuts to Medicare. Well, 
I've gotten those petitions. And my response is that if you're part of 
AARP and you don't want cuts to Medicare, then I'm so glad you're now 
off the AARP team and you now support what I do. Because AARP sold the 
seniors down the road.
  Why would they do that? Well, let's look. Gee, they made, I believe 
it was in 2008, one big health insurance company made around $92 
million clear profit and another $112 million or so profit, and then 
you have AARP that made over $400 million in clear profit from the sale 
of their supplemental insurance. I had a proposal that would have given 
seniors a choice: you can stay on Medicare, or you can choose to have 
us buy you private insurance that covers everything. You won't need any 
supplemental insurance; it will cover everything, but it will have a 
high deductible. Thirty-five hundred dollars was the proposal, but I'm 
not married to that. If there were another figure that would end up 
being better from an accounting standpoint in the long run, you can do 
that. But the proposal was $3,500. And then for that, we will put the 
$3,500 cash in the seniors' health care account for each of those 30 
million or so homes that have people on Medicare, Medicaid. So then you 
have a debit card coded to only pay for health care, and the senior for 
the first time since the sixties will finally be in control of their 
own health care, making their own decisions, and we get the government 
out of the way of making decisions--oh, no, you can't have that 
medication; oh, no, you can't see that doctor; oh, no, you can't have 
that treatment. And what we're seeing are the early stages of what 
ultimately happens when the government controls health care. It's 
lists, and lists mean rationing.
  I've heard from people that live in Canada and England. The father of 
one man from Canada needed a heart bypass operation. They put him on 
the bypass list, and 2 years later he had not gotten his bypass, and so 
he died. If he had been in the United States, he would probably still 
be alive today. One secretary in my district told me about her mother 
getting breast cancer. But she had to get on a list in order to get the 
mammogram, had to get on a list to get the treatment, get on a list to 
have therapy, and get on a list for surgery, all those things that came 
with it. And as a result of all those lists, she said, ``my mother died 
because she was in England. I was found to have cancer, I had immediate 
treatment.'' She's a secretary. She got treatment. She got the surgery 
and treatment. And she says, ``I'm alive because I was in the United 
States. My mother died because she was in England.''
  Well, unfortunately, there are people who love people but think that 
by the government running health care--which will inevitably lead to 
rationing of health care--that somehow that's a better thing. Our 
health care system needs work. It needs to be fixed. But the thing we 
should be doing is not having the government become the ultimate, the 
biggest player and referee in health care. We need to get the 
government out of being the player and get them back into the business 
of being the referee.
  At the same time, we need to get the health insurance companies out 
of the business of being health managers and back in the business of 
selling insurance. And you do that, if we can move forward, with health 
savings accounts. The young people of today in their twenties and 
thirties start putting away money in their own health savings account, 
let that build--there shouldn't be any limits on how much you can put 
in, but it ought to be a requirement you can never take it out. You can 
give it to your kids, give it to charities for a health savings account 
for those who can't provide it themselves, but once it becomes health 
savings account cash, that's where it stays until it's spent on health 
care.

                              {time}  1220

  Leave it to your children when you die. Leave it to other charities 
that have people who need health care, and it could go in their health 
savings accounts.
  Once we do that, for the kids in their twenties and thirties, 
indications are, by the time they're 65, 70 years old, not only will 
they not want Medicare, they won't need it because they'll have enough 
money in their accounts that they can do whatever they want to and have 
whatever health care they need. But it's not the end-all solution. We 
don't have free market forces at work in health care. It's why costs 
keep going up. That's one of the reasons.
  Another reason is the tremendous advances that have been made in 
medicine that are now slowing down without the great people who have 
been attracted to health care--brilliant doctors and nurses. People in 
the health care industry are so smart, but we're already seeing the 
quality of people applying not at the level it once was. Why should it 
when this government intervenes and prevents people from being 
compensated properly?
  But until we get free market forces at work in health care, we're not 
going to fix health care, and you cannot have competition in health 
care as long as we have our existing system in which nobody knows what 
anything costs:
  You ask, What does an MRI cost? Well, it all depends, you're told.

[[Page 16242]]

  What does a room with a single bed in your hospital cost? Well, it 
all depends. We can't really say.
  You have Blue Cross. You have this and that. You have Medicaid. You 
have Medicare. Are you paying cash?
  It all depends. You can't fix health care when there's no 
competition.
  Growing up in Mount Pleasant, Texas, it was no secret that we went 
between two and, actually, eventually three different doctors' offices. 
We loved the doctors. They were great doctors. My mother passed away at 
91, and my dad is still alive. I recall, growing up, we'd go to one 
doctor when I thought we were going to this other doctor:
  Well, they raised their prices, and they're both great doctors.
  Well, yeah, they are. I love them both.
  So we would go. When one would raise his price, we'd go back to the 
other doctor. You can't do that now. You don't know what a doctor 
charges. I've talked to doctors who would love to tell people what they 
charge, but it all depends whether it's Medicare, Medicaid, what 
insurance.
  Then the most unfair cut of all is, if you come in and if you're too 
poor to have insurance and if you're not eligible for Medicare or 
Medicaid, then they're going to sit down with you and work out a 
payment plan for an amount that is normally many times more than the 
insurance companies would ever have agreed to pay. Well, that's not 
right. If somebody comes in with cash, they ought to be able to get it 
cheaper than Blue Cross or cheaper than other methods of payment. 
They're coming in with cash. In a good scenario, that's the way it 
would be.
  If everyone had a health savings account that covered the high amount 
of the deductible, of their catastrophic insurance, that's the way it 
would be because you would call up the doctor or the hospital and say, 
I need to come in. How much do you charge? Under a bill I've proposed, 
they'd have to tell you. You could find it online. It would have to be 
posted. ``This is how much we charge.'' They'd have to know before 
they'd come. Then you could get competition. You've got your debit card 
coded to only cover health care, and so you then care about how much 
things cost. You can't find a whole lot of people who care how much 
health care costs anymore because they're not paying it. What does it 
matter if the cost goes up 10 times?
  Then you've got seniors, many of whom are AARP members. They're 
paying their dues, and they've got their supplemental insurance. How 
tragic that AARP didn't mind the $500 billion cut to Medicare. Gee, 
let's think about that. If there's a massive cut to Medicare and if 
AARP sells supplemental insurance to cover what Medicare doesn't, I 
wonder if maybe they might think they would sell more insurance. Maybe 
that's why they would support a bill that cut Medicare by $500 billion.
  The games that have been played around this town really need to stop. 
We've gotten this country in trouble, but they're not going to stop 
with the President spending every day traveling around the country, 
demonizing Congress for not passing his bill, his law, when he doesn't 
even know what's in his bill. I do. I read the whole thing. I'm told 
there may not be anybody else in the House or Senate who has read every 
page of the President's bill like I did. Well, if the President would 
read it--he's obviously a smart enough man--he would see that a lot of 
his claims do not have the merit he thinks they do--or whoever is 
putting those words in his teleprompter thinks they do.
  On education, we have the stimulus bill. We were told it was going to 
create so many jobs, that it was going to build bridges and fix 
bridges. It didn't do those things. So now, 2\1/2\ years later, the 
President makes the same speeches. That's got to be good for the 
speechwriters because they could go back and take the same speeches 
that the President gave in January of 2009:
  You need to pass this bill. You've got to pass this bill right now, 
right away. Then it will build bridges; it will fix these bridges; it 
will hire people, get school teachers back and law enforcement.
  Those were all said in January of '09. I'm wondering if we shouldn't 
go back and compare those speeches and see if they haven't just cut 
some of those speeches and pasted them. Hey, it worked. They got 
Congress in January of '09 to pass the massive stimulus bill.
  As I've talked to educators around Texas, I found something that was 
deeply saddening and a bit maddening. There was some very limited 
amount of the trillion dollars in the President's so-called ``stimulus 
bill'' in January of '09 that went to hire teachers. I've met young 
people who were hired as teachers, and I'm thrilled when young people 
are able to get jobs. It's a good thing. Then I've talked to different 
educators who have said, It's so tragic. The stimulus money ran out, so 
we had to let teachers go. If you don't keep paying the stimulus money, 
then we don't get to keep those same teachers.
  That ought to tell us something. The stimulus money was not stimulus. 
If it had been stimulus, it would have stimulated things to the point 
that those teachers who were hired 2\1/2\ years ago would have 
stimulated enough in the economy that they would have been able to keep 
those jobs; but the stimulus bill in January of '09 was not nor was the 
stimulus bill in January of '08 under President Bush. They did not 
work. They don't work. That's not the way to stimulate.
  So then what really breaks my heart is when I find out people my age, 
who are in their fifties, and people in their forties who have been 
teaching for 20, 25, 30 years--and because they do and because of the 
payment structure in education, they make a little more and a little 
more as they go along. Lo and behold, the Federal Government comes in 
and says, Here's a bunch of stimulus money, not that much in the scheme 
of a trillion, but we'll give you a little bit to hire some new 
teachers. They hire new, young teachers. They're working for cheaper 
than the older, experienced, well-trained teachers.
  So what happens when the stimulus money that didn't stimulate 
anything runs out? It's rather tragic. People who have families, who 
have committed their lives to education, have lost their jobs.

                              {time}  1230

  I've heard from those people. Good teachers, good educators. But when 
they look at it, jeesh, if this stimulus has allowed us to hire these 
young, new teachers, these experienced teachers that have a heart for 
the students, well trained, well educated, they're costing a little 
more, let's let them go. How tragic that this body would pass a bill 
under Speaker Pelosi intending to help education; and as a result of 
the misguided attempt to help education, we have driven out many of our 
best, most experienced, most caring teachers.
  I have talked to young people who have gotten a job. They don't 
intend to stay teachers all that long. They're hoping they can find 
something else. So you have people who committed their lives to 
education losing their jobs because of a stimulus bill that wasn't for 
young teachers who don't plan to stay teachers. They don't like 
teaching; they want to do something else.
  This body needs to get back to the original purpose of the 
Constitution. The purpose of the Constitution was to have a limited 
government, and that government would be a referee. It would make sure 
people and businesses in America played fair. It would not guarantee 
equal results, but it would guarantee opportunity to be fair and equal. 
It was a long way from doing that until the wonderful works that were 
accomplished by the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr.
  So we were on track, more equality of opportunity; but now it's as if 
some people think, no, Dr. King wanted equal results. No, he didn't. He 
wanted people judged by the content of their character, not the color 
of their skin.
  We made great, tremendous strides, but when a government wants to 
guarantee equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity, it becomes a 
tyrannical government. It becomes the player and not the referee.

[[Page 16243]]

  The other thing we're supposed to do is provide for the common 
defense, and that means not checking in our brain before we come to 
work every day. That means in every executive agency charged with 
providing for defense, you don't suddenly declare that the only people 
who can advise us about that tiny percent of radical Islamists, tiny 
percentage of the overall Muslim population, the only ones that can 
advise us about those radicals are people that really understand that 
mentality.
  We want people from the Muslim Brotherhood who want to take over the 
county, take over the world, have a united caliphate under sharia law 
to be the ones to advise us on how we deal with radical Islam, although 
this administration has now made it extremely clear, Attorney General 
Holder has made it clear, Secretary Napolitano has made clear, we 
really don't want to offend those who want to kill us and destroy our 
way of life by referring to them as radical Islamists.
  Let's call them violent extremists. But when you look at what they've 
said, and you look at what they've done and want to do, it's because of 
their sick beliefs in what being a Muslim means.
  An even further tragedy is the fact that we have allowed people with 
organizations who have supported terrorism to be advisers to this 
administration, to this Justice Department, to this intelligence 
community, to this Department of State. We've got foxes in the hen 
house.
  We don't need to pass the President's so-called jobs bill. This will 
do more to drive up the cost of oil and gas because this President 
doesn't understand that the four pages of deductions that he repeals in 
here will put independent oil and gas producers out of business.
  He doesn't understand that 94 percent of the oil and gas wells that 
are drilled on the land in the continental U.S. are drilled by 
independent oil and gas producers. He doesn't understand that when you 
eliminate their ability to raise capital, those wells will no longer be 
drilled. The major oil companies that the President demonizes and says 
he's going after will not only not drill all of those wells and produce 
all of the oil and gas; they can produce the exact same amount and make 
massive amounts more in profit.
  So the one thing the President says he wants to do that's page 151 
through 154 of his bill has the exact opposite effect. It will increase 
revenues, profits, for major oil companies because it will drive out 
the independent oil and gas producers, not to mention the millions of 
jobs that we'll lose by doing that.
  Now, when I came to Congress 6\1/2\ years ago, I was concerned that 
there was not enough natural gas to continue to produce electricity 
with it, even though it is the most clean-burning thing that we've got. 
It would be wonderful, I thought, if you could do that. We just don't 
have enough because you've also got to have natural gas. It's a 
feedstock that you have to have in order to produce so many of the 
plastics, so many of the goods that are now so important to all 
Americans and to health care and to transportation. So if you're using 
natural gas to produce electricity, provide energy, then it's going to 
drive up those costs.
  Well, then science and necessity being the mother of invention, we 
hone our ability to horizontally drill. Hydraulic fracking allows us to 
get gas that we couldn't get otherwise. And now, depending on who you 
believe, we've got 100, 300 years of natural gas. Some of us have been 
told that possibly the largest deposit of natural gas just may be off 
the west coast of Florida, and nobody's allowed to drill there.
  We find out that the Marcellus shale up in the Northeast is producing 
jobs for people, unless our friends across the aisle are successful in 
killing those efforts to drill for that gas, Haynesville shale down in 
Louisiana, east Texas where I am; Barnett shale, north, northwest 
Texas. These other gas finds are so extraordinary I now fully support 
my Democrat friend, Dan Boren's, efforts to encourage people to convert 
cars to natural gas, to encourage manufacturers to produce cars that 
will run on natural gas. It will be cheaper than gasoline.
  Some people identify greatly with the tea parties. I think they've 
been demonized, the people I see at those tea parties, all races, all 
ages, but they seem to have one thing in common: They're all paying 
income tax. And we're down to about 50 percent of the country that's 
doing that. People that come out at the tea parties, that's the one 
commonality: They pay taxes, they pay income tax and, as a result of 
that, they'd like to see less government.

                              {time}  1240

  So some have been surprised that I would support something that's not 
free market totally because I'm a free market kind of guy. But the 
overriding concern for this body, the oath that we take should be to 
make sure that we provide for the common defense. We have been sending 
trillions of dollars overseas when so much of that money finds its way 
into the hands of those who hate us, want to destroy our way of life. 
They don't think that people should have freedom to choose because if 
you give freedom to choose they think, their religious beliefs are, 
you'll slip into degradation, and then you'll be part of a Nation that 
needs to be destroyed.
  Well, it happens. When you give people freedom of choice, just as I 
believe God did to start with, some are going to choose to do wrong. 
It's going to happen. We're all going to make mistakes, and some will 
do so intentionally. That's when you need a government to enforce rules 
of fair play to make sure that we provide for the common defense so 
that people can freely practice peaceful religious beliefs.
  But we've been sending all that money year after year, growing more 
and more dependent on overseas oil. When President Carter created this 
new monstrosity, a couple of them, one called the Department of 
Education and another called the Department of Energy, and every year 
the Department of Energy has existed, its goal has been to reduce the 
dependency on foreign oil. And every year they fail at their job more 
than they did the year before. Every year. No matter how many billions, 
hundreds of billions of dollars they throw at alternative energy rather 
than letting the free market play, it's not working.
  But the reason I would support encouraging people to convert cars to 
natural gas, I'd like to buy a car from a factory in the United States 
that runs off natural gas. We do need infrastructure where you can pull 
up to a gas station and get natural gas instead of gasoline. But I 
support it because if we do that, I now see we could be 100 percent 
energy independent. It would save the lives of our most treasured 
possessions in this country, the American people, the men and women who 
give their lives for their country, when we have funded terrorism, not 
intentionally, but by paying people who hate our own country for their 
oil when we could get off of it. And if we get on natural gas for 100 
years, there's going to be time to develop--and I know some people 
think it's not possible, I really do think we could eventually come up, 
somebody will, with a way to hold electricity. Some laugh at that. The 
late Ted Kennedy laughed about having a strategic defense shield of 
rockets, that's Star Wars. And lo and behold, it's happening. Well, 
until President Obama reneged on our agreement with Poland that cost so 
many their political lives in Poland, supported the missile defense 
that would stand between us and Iranian missiles, and we turned our 
backs on them, stabbed them in the back.
  Well, we're at risk, and it's time to quit sending money to countries 
that hate us. As I have often said, you don't have to pay people to 
hate you; they'll do it for free. You don't have to pay them. And yet 
we keep sending money to people who hate our guts, and it doesn't cause 
them to like us. It causes them to not only hate us but to have total 
contempt because of how stupid we are--that we know that they hate us 
and we still keep giving them money. Bullies on a playground who demand 
lunch money from another student don't develop admiration, love, and 
respect for students who give them their lunch money. They still hate 
them. They still don't think anything

[[Page 16244]]

of them. That's not the way to deal with bullies. The way to deal with 
bullies is to make sure that if you have to band together as a 
government, as an educational administration, and just decide we're not 
going to let bullies prevail, then you do that. You can do that in 
schools. You can do it in the world by having a government that is 
strong enough militarily that what it says, it can back up.
  You don't do that when you make contractual agreements, as we did 
with Mubarak. And I'm not a President Mubarak fan. I was not a Qadhafi 
fan. But this administration had agreements with both of those people. 
They turned their backs on them, and now it appears we have radical 
Islamists that are taking over in those countries, and they will hate 
us more than Qadhafi did because at least Qadhafi was afraid of us.
  And then, we had a hearing yesterday in the Judiciary Committee. 
Secretary Napolitano came here. It has not made the mainstream media. 
They'll probably never touch it, but it ought to rock people's lives 
when they see what's going on with this administration. You can't use 
the word radical Islam--that might offend the people that want to kill 
us--when the fact is if we address radical Islam, we will protect the 
moderate, the vast majority of Muslims who are moderate who want to 
live in peace. If the radicals take over, they could be the first ones 
they go after. As well as liberal reporters, they'll take them out. 
Gays, they'll take them out.
  You would think people for gay rights would be on the side of those 
of us who want to go after radical Islam. But instead, it seems to be 
strange bedfellows in combining against those who want to support and 
defend the Constitution of the United States.
  So we do some digging, a couple of sleepless nights doing research, 
and we find out the Homeland Security Department has people in its 
midst who are advising it. We find out, there's an article about it, it 
can be found on the Internet, we find out that there was a seminar by 
two of the leading experts on radical Islam that was going to be given 
to law enforcement. And CAIR--a named coconspirator supporting 
terrorism, named as a coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial 
that should have been prosecuted, but this administration says they're 
friends, we're not going after them--CAIR complains to the White House, 
to this administration, and they cancel the briefing. And the word 
we're reading is that, gee, apparently they're rewriting the rules so 
that people in our intelligence of this administration, people in 
Homeland Security, people in the Justice Department, people in the 
White House, can only be briefed. They are rewriting the rules, and 
what we are told they'll end up saying is, you can't do the briefing if 
you're part of the government. So if you're in the government and 
you're not Muslim and don't have sympathies for radical Islam, then 
you'll be prevented from briefing others despite the fact that you may 
have spent your whole adult life studying this terrorism since 1979, 
when we saw it first come after us in Iran after President Carter 
proclaimed this ``man of peace,'' Ayatollah Khomeini, was coming in, 
and he has done more to create hatred, to create violence, than any 
leader I'm aware of in the last 50 years.

                              {time}  1250

  President Carter thought he'd be a man of peace. Wrong. He wasn't. 
Nor is the present Khamenei. Nor is Ahmadinejad. And then you find out 
the president of ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, who has 
ready access to the White House, within the inner sanctum of the State 
Department.
  When the President gave his speech to try to upstage Netanyahu the 
day before Netanyahu was coming from Israel to the United States and 
ultimately to address this body, the president of ISNA, a named 
coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, 105 counts of 
conviction in which the named coconspirators should have been pursued 
after those initial convictions, he's advising the President on his 
speech about Israel. He's giving remarks on how the President is doing. 
He's got the President's ear. He's got the State Department's ear. He's 
got National Security's ear. In fact, we see from the Deputy National 
Security Advisor's own transcript of his own remarks that were on the 
White House Web site, the Deputy National Security Advisor commends the 
president of this named coconspirator to fund terrorism for leading 
prayers for the Iftar celebration last year at the White House.
  We haven't seen anybody in this mainstream media that wants to talk 
about the fact that al-Awlaki, who this administration killed with a 
drone just not that long ago, was leading prayers for Muslim staffers 
on Capitol Hill.
  Foxes are in the hen house. And they're given more and more 
authority.
  We found out yesterday that it was Homeland Security that gave a 
secret security clearance to Mohamed Elibiary, from all accounts, a 
very nice gentleman. But if you read his writings, he thinks the world 
of the Muslim philosopher on whom Osama bin Laden relied so heavily for 
being barbaric, for killing innocents. The man that is part of the 
inner circle and now has been elevated to the National Homeland 
Security Advisory Council of the Secretary of Homeland Security thinks 
that he was a man of peace. He was executed in the sixties, but his 
writings fully supported what Osama bin Laden was doing. They support 
what radical Islam is doing. And that's why they constantly point to 
his writings from the fifties and sixties.
  We also find--and I have got a flyer in my materials here--that 
Mohamed Elibiary was one of the featured speakers for the tribute to a 
man of vision, the Ayatollah Khomeini, just recent years ago. He's been 
given a secret security clearance. I find out 2 days ago he's also 
working with the ACLU to attack from the outside, to demand materials 
that will tell them about the sources and methods of how we try to get 
some intelligence on the people that want to destroy and kill us and 
ruin our way of life and create a one-world caliphate for some dictator 
like the Ayatollah Khomeini or Khamenei over there now in Iran. And 
we're giving people like that access.
  And then I find out this week--and it's written; it's now on the 
Internet and you can read the story--that the same man used his 
security clearance and is allowed to access security databases from his 
home computer; and he accesses a security database called the State and 
Local Intelligence Community database, called SLIC for short, and he 
pulled off some material that said on it ``For Official Use Only,'' and 
then was shopping that to mainstream media in this country to try to 
condemn people in Texas for being concerned, under Governor Perry, as 
being Islamaphobes.
  Then we find that the OIC that has been so powerful--57 states--that 
actually in 2007 they said that the most fearful terrorism that 
exists--and these are their words--is Islamaphobia. They created the 
term ``Islamaphobia.'' They're donating hundreds of thousands and 
millions to some of our best educational institutions to go after 
people who are concerned not about Islam, not about the 95, 99 percent, 
whatever it is of Muslims who are peace-loving, but if you want to go 
after the 1 percent that wants to kill us and make this country into a 
caliphate under sharia law, you're an Islamaphobe. And they're paying 
millions and millions to develop that terminology.
  So the mainstream media will buy into it and come after anybody that 
says, Look, there is a common thread that runs through those people who 
want to destroy our way of life, that want to take our young men and 
women in this country, radicalize them and have them help them destroy 
the greatest, most free country in the history of mankind. And this 
administration is bringing some of those foxes into the hen house.
  So not only does this administration give a man who admires the 
inspiration for Osama bin Laden, who is a featured speaker for the 
tribute to Ayatollah Khomeini, he's given secret security clearance and 
now is using that as a political weapon not just to go after

[[Page 16245]]

people concerned about radical Islam, but also to go after an opponent 
of this President politically.
  It's time to wake up. It's time to be a referee, not a player. It's 
time to let the free market system drive the economy, create jobs, 
while we do what we're supposed to do--provide for the common defense.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.


                Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. All Members are reminded to refrain from 
engaging in personalities toward the President.

                          ____________________