appropriations bill come to the floor. not one of 10, not one of 13. zero. because democrats didn't want to take a vote on bills to spend money and they didn't want to take a vote on the amendments that would be seeking to slow this massive growth in government so they stacked it all up and put it into one continuing resolution that kicked the can down the road until after the last election when they brought up an omnibus spending bill that put everything all into one bill. . and then that bill appeared on the internet after 11:00 at night and the following morning, 3,600 pages as i recall and around $450 billion in spending, all stacked up into one bill. that may not have been 3,600, but a lot of pages of legislation and it was overnight to read it. and we are held accountable for

everything that we vote for or against in this congress. we have to have an opportunity to read the legislation. no matter how good our staff is, we can't even delegate that we break the bill into pieces and tell our staff to read 100 pages. that's impossible. furthermore, no opportunity to tell what was in the bill, but even more difficult is to figure out what isn't in the bill. and that all has to be evaluated if we're going to be operating running the finest country that has ever had the privilege of being soverage o on this earth. our process has been broken. and because of the sense that power can dictate, then it has dictated. for two years, we haven't had a legitimate appropriation process in the united states congress, not until this week, not until the justice appropriations bill was offered.

and even then, it wasn't a legitimate process. it was offered under a rule that i had never seen before and i believe it is historically unprecedented, which is pre-print your amendments in the record and we'll make them in order. they can tell us in advance what the rules committee is going to decide in advance and we filed 127 of them or some number near that. and that allowed the majority to read our entire playbook. allowed the majority to evaluate the political implications and plan their strategy. and what was the strategy? the strategy was well he, we dare let them debate this, because they are going to bring up things that are embarrassing. we dare not allow votes because the members will be held accountable. who will hold them accountable? the voters. so in order to protect the vulnerable members of the united

states congress, the constitutional duty and the deep practice additions of this congress have been suspended by the majority party. and they were suspended with the structured rule that allowed for these 127 amendments, of which i had some, but even that, madam speaker, wasn't good enough. 20 some minutes into the debate on the first amendment, the majority party moved to recess to the call of the gavel and decided to go up to the rules committee and change the rules again. now, it is a very bad deal when you change the rules from the constitution and the tradition of this body from these 200 some years of this constitutional republic that we are. that is a very serious thing. but those changed rules are the ones we started out with. and once we got 20 minutes into the debate on the first republican amendment, then they decided to change the rules

again, madam speaker. and went up to the rules committee, which is the heart of the power of this congress. the people who decide what debate will take place on the floor are on the third floor that way. it is a tiny room and no television. no live feed that goes out of there. i brought up an amendment a couple of years ago when the chair of the rules committee said we're going to report every vote out and put it into the record, i brought an amendment up there that would require the rules committee to print every vote into the record. and the chair became -- let me just say to understate it, unreasonable and emotional that i would seek to codify a promise she had made. didn't i trust her? the answer is obviously. the rules got changed twice and the second time they decided to

only allow amendments to come to the floor of the house that they thought were good for them politically. so these 127 amendments got chopped down to 23 amendments. and the 23 amendments, 20 of them were comb spending and it surprises me but the democrats didn't mind voting for more spending and voting against reducing spending except the $100,000 on capitol bicycles, trillions of dollars spent, but they they can stop the spending on capitol bicycles. the rules were changed from tradition and then changed in the middle of the game. and this justice appropriations bill came to the floor and it was set up so it wouldn't be embarrassing votes. for example, the speaker of the house has declared the c.i.a. to be lying to the united states of

america and to her. and this issue is unanswered and unspoken to? and the security of the united states of america is hinged upon our ability to have a working and trusting relationship to fund the c.i.a. and the 14 other members of the intelligence community and our department of defense, i might add, and our domestic law enforcement, i might add. well, now, if there is no relationship between the speaker of the house and the intelligence community other than one of directly at odds against each other with the speaker declaring the c.i.a. up here in the secured room in the capitol to be lying to the person who is third in line to the presidency, the speaker of the house of representatives, said yes, they lied to me. they did it all the time. and they misled the congress of the united states of america. that's the statement. now i retracted, no evidence given, just an allege.

now when someone accuses someone else of lying outside these doors in the street, at the family, in the workplace, in private society, they had better have the evidence before they accuse somebody being a liar. that's the standard in america. if you think someone's not telling you the truth, you don't call them a liar until you have the facts. we have worse than that here in the congress, because there is a statute that has been passed that prohibits anyone lying to congress, especially about domestic or international terrorism. and that's what these briefings were about, about enhanced interrogation that most of america thinks took place down in gitmo, waterboarding among them. no waterboarding took place in gitmo or in this hemisphere. and i can't verify that there was any enhanced interrogation

techniques that took place even in this hemisphere, lit alone at gitmo, by united states forces. so that's a long subject, and i won't go into that, madam speaker, except to the extent that when that declaration was made by the speaker of the house, the declaration that the c.i.a. was lying, that was an allegations of willfully committing felonies against the united states. this is an untenable position. we cannot have a situation where the most powerful member of the house of representatives and the person third in line to the presidency can declare our intelligence community to be willful liars and in violation of federal statute and decide that because the speaker doesn't want to talk about it anymore, we aren't going to talk about it either. i'm bringing this up because this is the only forum that exists right now. we could not force a vote on it. we couldn't shut off funds. we could not direct the speaker.

we could not bring any language because it was shut down in the rules committee, but i will submit that the security clearance for the speaker of the house of representatives must be suspended until this matter is cleared up. and it's her responsibility to clear it up, not mine, not the partisan outside working group or fact-finding force, but the person who made the allegations. i ask you to reflect about when jesus stood in front of the high house and caiphus said, did you really say these things and preach in this fashion? and jesus said, it's you that said i did. ask them, you heard me. i was open. and the guard struck jesus. and jesus said to caiphus, if i have spoken wrongly, then you

must prove the wrong. but if i have spoken rightly, why do you strike me? that's the standard. when someone speaks rightly, you can't attack them, can't strike them, challenge them, beat them, call them liars. but if they speak wrongly, the one who makes the allegations of speaking wrongly must prove the wrong, that's the standard in the book of john and that's the standard in this american culture and that needs to be the standards here in the united states congress and we need to hold the speaker accountable for this, for the very sake of the integrity of the institution and the very sake of the security of the united states of america, which surely is put at risk when you think about the majority party all trying to work together and get along, follow the direction of the speaker, all of the staffs of all the committees, the committee chairs, the subcommittee chairs,

the rank and file members, the armed services people, the select committee on intelligence, which just had their markup in secret. that won't hit the press. you won't know what went on up there in the select committee on intelligence. you won't know the debates because that's in secret. you won't understand how partisan the select committee on intelligence is today, because the committee has been stacked with people who will support the speaker. madam speaker, the american people don't have any insight into what goes on within the intelligence zones here in this congress, nor do they have an opportunity to view it, because a lot of it is classified. but i can tell you when you have a partisan committee and partisan votes and partisan votes in secret on the committee on intelligence and all the intelligence agencies are now colored with the allegations from the speaker of the house that they willfully lied to the speaker of the house of representatives, does that produce more funding for on-the

ground intelligence? is america safer because of this tension, this conflict, are we less safe. more resources put to bear to gather this intelligence that we need to see with protect ourselves from terrorists borget foreign and domestic or is it less resources? when you send a brother and sister out to the kitchen to clean up the table after dinner at night, if they're fighting, does it get better or worse, quickeror sooner. when people are at odds with each other, that leads to less efficiency and a poorer product. one of the problems that we had that left us vulnerable for september 11 was the silos of intelligence when we didn't have our members of the intelligence community not sharing intelligence. they weren't communicating. that's the foundation for the

reason of establishing that director of national intelligence and putting it under one command. now i have concerns about the results of that as well, but that was the reason. and now we have a silo of politics here underneath of the speaker of the house who declares intelligence to be lying to congress and continues to go up to the fourth floor to receive intelligence briefings and intelligence community that is probably walking on egg shells, but the c.i.a. itself directed by leon panetta who has laid out that they have the documents and they have the documents and they have the proof in their notes that shows that the speaker was briefed and in line what had been taking place with the enhanced interrogation technique of three individuals and that it had already taken place prior to the briefing that she received on september 4 of 2002. this is an untenable position that must be rectified and can't

go on and this congress has been shut down so we don't have a debate in this issue. i'm talking about the open amendment process to appropriation bills -- another reason is, there's a partisan interest in protecting acorn, it can't be anything else. most everybody in america at this point has heard of acorn. the association for community reform action now or however that works. but acorn was in the news constantly throughout the election cycle last fall. and i have been watching acorn for four to five years. acorn has been involved from the beginning. and here's the series of things. and i'll lay them out and talk about them to the depth that i can, madam speaker. acorn's involvement early on way back in the community reinvestment act, this congress passed the community reinvestment act in 1977 and refreshed in the 1990's.

the act recognized something that was wrong and that was that we had lenders who looked at neighborhoods and concluded that the real estate value in those neighborhoods was declining because of violence, because of activities going on in those neighborhoods. and so they drew -- they did what they call redlining, drew a red line around the neighborhoods and concluded they weren't going to lend money for homes, real estate in those neighborhoods because tv value of that real estate was going down. . often it was african-americans in those inner city parts. some contributed to the decline of the value of the real estate. some were victims of the decline in value of the real estate. the community reinvestment act was passed to encourage lenders to, let me jus say in simplistic terms, make bad loans in bad neighborhoods.

to loan into the redline neighborhoods so they could improve the percentage of homeownership, get more people into their own homes, and the theory is they will take care of them, they'll have a nest egg to work with and they'll be more stable with everything that they dofment the families will be more stable, too. i don't disagree with the philosophy that passed the community reinvestment act. i disagree with the result of what came about. what came about was, acorn seizing on the community reinvestment act and learning they could go in and essentially intimidate lenders. if lenders wanted to expand or open up a branch office, they had to meet the standards of the community reinvestment act. vaguely written. but those standards were easier to prove if you had the approval of acorn. if you had the disapproval it was hard to get them approved because acorn established political connections. and supported political candidates and became a get-out-the-vote machine for

democrats. think in terms of chicago politics. i think chicago is the city in america that best illustrates the foundation that is acorn. so acorn intimidated lenders. they went up into, they got groups together. some would say gangs. i'm calling them groups. and they went into lenders' offices and sometimes shoved the banker's desk over to the wall and surrounded him and hollered at him and screamed at him and intimidated the lender into making bad loans and-n bad neighborhoods. they intimidated lenders and banking institutions to write nice big checks to acorn and then acorn used that money to operate. if they wrote a big enough check, acorn wouldn't be in there demonstrating or jamming the entryways to the banks and shutting down their commerce. these were intimidations shakedown tactics. acorn is one of the entities that did that. we know of a few others. i think the name jesse jackson comes to mind for most people when i raise this subject matter. there were other entities out there that did the same thing.

acorn was in the center of this and not only that, but acorn found themselves in a situation where they could go out and identify and broker the people who would qualify for these low interest loans, subprime loans, a lot of subprime loans were promoted by acorn, the lending institutions made those loans because then acorn would be offer of their back and allow their doors to stay open, and they kept this relationship going. acorn also found themselves in a position to be brokering these subprime loans through into the secondary market of fannie mae and freddie mac. i think already, madam speaker, you see the pattern here. community reinvestment act was the foundation that allowed acorn to go in and intimidate lenders and set themselves up where they became the broker for home mortgage loans that many times were subprime loans that were sold on the secondary market to fannie mae and freddie mac, and on up through the line to the investment banks where

these loans were sliced, diced, sorted, shuffled, cut, shacked. -- stacked. all went on to the point where you couldn't trace where the loans had gone anymore, but the collateral was attached to the mortgage loans. this became part of the core of the financial meltdown we have experienced in the last several months. than transgression number one for acorn. transgression number two is, acorn's pledge to go out to register, i think their goal was 1.3 million votes for the 2008 election cycle. they put their mignons -- minnons out in the street. there were investigation that is came up in 2006. 2006 election in the state of washington, acorn turned in in one sample, 1,800 voter registration forms and the number of legitimate registration forms out of 1800 was six.

only six were real. the rest were phony. i didn't do the percentage on that but i can tell you it's not very good. so they brought about a prosecution there. and got some kind of settlement. but that was 2006. there were other incidents scattered across the country. the focus of these incidents seemed to show up in swing states, swing states like ohio. states that they went into effect the effect of the result of the election of about five or six important swing states, acorn was the most active in them. this is also an organization that has received as a matter of fact more than 53 million of our tax dollars to fund them. to do what? well in part facilitate bad loans in bad neighborhoods sold up through fannie mae and freddie mac which has been nationalized because of the insolvency in pa created by some of those transactions. and get out the vote democrat

drive that took place in many of the cities, chicago, for example, and register hundreds of thousands of fraudulent voter registrations. and in fact by acorn's own admission over 400,000 fraudulent registrations were filed by acorn in that cycle leading up to the 2008 election. and i ask for investigations, i ask for congressional inquiries, i ask for the justice department to look into acorn. and i have no sympathy on this side of the aisle. temporarily had some sympathy from the chairman of the judiciary committee, mr. conyers, for about three weeks was on record as believing there was evidence there that may warrant that we take it up and investigate acorn. three weeks after he expressed the sentiment he concluded there wasn't enough evidence there. there's a lawsuit against acorn that has been won. and a settlement that's been

achieved. we have put hundreds of pages of data into the records here in this congress and still they conclude that there's not enough evidence there to bear looking into it. we have named hundreds -- i don't know if it's hundreds. we named dozens of office post offices this year. we debate these on the floor in suspension. we have time to name post offices, but we don't have time to look into acorn which is corrupting our election process and has undermined the financial integrity of the united states ever america? furthermore, madam speaker, we have to suspect that there's a real lack of enthusiasm on the part of the administration as well as the democrats in the congress in the house and senate. because when we look back through the history of the president of the united states, we find a consistent association with acorn on the part of barack obama. barack obama who was a lawyer for acorn. and argued for them in a motor

voter registration case. all be be it probono, still their employee, still representing acorn in court, and when someone does that probono, does that tell you they agree or disagree with the agenda of acorn? i think we all can agree if you are going to take a case for free and argue in court, that surely you must agree with the principles and the people that you're working for. you're not going to see me represent planned parenthood in court for free or for a check for that matter. because i disagree with the agenda of planned parenthood. barack obama clearly agreed with the agenda of acorn. he worked for them for free and represented them in court. that makes him their employee as their attorney. if that's not compelling enough, madam speaker, we'll take another component of this. barack obama headed up project vote. project vote is a subsidiary of acorn. that's not disputed.

they are the get out the vote machine in chicago. that's not disputed. the head of acorn in chicago hired at that time barack obama to train the people that were going to work under project vote to get out the vote and also those that would go into the banker's offices and encourage them to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. part of this enterprise that has all of the trappings of a criminal enterprise, headed up in chicago by, check the name, but i believe it's margaret talmadge, who hired barack obama o to head up project vote and he got paid. the canceled checks exist. he worked for project vote as an employee. hired by the head of acorn in chicago to work for their subsidiary to get out the vote and to train people in community organizing activities. and postures himself as if community organizing has a

highly virtuous endeavor. hardly anybody knows what a community organizer does. i suspect that it's different for community to community, county to county, state to state, nation to nation. when it comes to community organizing in chicago, clearly there are those who adhere to the mission of the great community organizer rules for radicals, who also hillary clinton studied under by the way directly, whom barack obama seems to be a philosophical protege. the rules for radicals clearly applied to acorn. they were activist. they did intimidate. it was part of their m.o. acorn project vote and dozens and dozens of other subsidiaries of acorn scattered across this country. acorn central headquarters is down in new orleans. it's been moved from downtown new orleans out to the outskirts of new orleans. at 26069 canal street.

a $2.5 million building, roughly, relatively new and modern. that houses many of the subsidiary corporations that one can connect. i filed the list a. list that is incomplete but is a list of 174 of the more than 250 corporation that is are affiliated with acorn. i filed them into the congressional record as part of the amendments that were to go on the justice appropriations bill. that was managed by mr. mollohan and concluded yesterday. of course those amendments were denied not quite in secret but up here where you can't hardly get six reporters in the room if there are going to be a dozen members of congress in there pleading to be heard here on the floor. so that's the record, that's the standard. 2609 canal street, acorn's building, one should go on google earth and take a look at that, zero in on it and see what

it looks like, madam speaker. and the corporations that are involved in subsidiaries, the interconnecting spider web of corporations, by the way louisiana is one of the easiest states in the union to incorporate in, i don't think it's a coincidence that kay corn -- acorn is there, but they have headquarters scattered across this country in 50 cities at least that they announced. i don't know how many states. and activities going on. and also they say over 100,000 members. that number is actually higher than that. around 175,000 families. annual dues for an individual whether you are poverty stricken or aren't i understand is around $120. so they raise some of that money from dues from people that may or may not be able to afford that. $53 million from our tax dollars, and now actually we don't know the whole picture because it takes a lot of work to unravel this spider web of corporations that exists that are anilated and part and parcel

of acorn -- affiliated and part and parcel of acorn and sometimes copy and pace boards ever director where if the board of project vote or one of the other subsidiaries happen to meet and then walk into another room and would you sit down with acorn and that board met, you might look around and not find any face that is are different. they might be the same. some these interconnecting corporations have identical boards of directors. an identical address, identical corporate filings with the exception of the name and the date they are filed. this is a copy and pace reproductive method that allows them to go out and take all kinds ever money in from every avenue, pour that through, commingle those funds, and spend them however they like, including getting out the vote for democrats registering hundreds of thousands of votes, and when acorn's asked about this, madam speaker, and that question came up in a little debate with acorn last night,

they say acorn's not under investigation or indictment. not true. they clearly are. absolutely in nevada they are. but they are alleging that it was only investigations or indictments of their employees. there were just a few not very well managed maybe rogue employees out there registered. well, it turns out to be a fact that acorn's policy in print was in some of the states to pay commissions for people to sign up voter registrations. clearly against the law in a number of the states across the country. many of the states across the country including nevada. we will see more of these investigations and convictions unfold. why am i concerned about this, madam speaker? the answer is, first, it is essential that we maintain a legitimate, reliable and honorable election process in america. if first you corrupt the voter registration roles