the people of haiti had made at the beginning of the 1800's. i thought that was an interesting comment to make. turns out that there were two devastating earthquakes in haiti before their innocence, -- independence, before their so-called pact with the devil, before their end to slavery and in the 200 years-plus since their so-called pact with the devil, haiti has actually been pretty much earthquake-free. compare that to the neighboring country, the dominican republic, in 1946, they had a devastating earthquake. it's hard to believe, more than 10 times more powerful than the earthquake haiti experienced two weeks ago. the dominican republic has no pact with the devil and therefore, if i can use the word therefore in this context, was laid low. so under pat robertson's logic, one would have to conclude that haiti has benefited

tremendously by what he has called this pact with a devil. i wonder in contrast how well pat robertson's followers have made out with their own pact with the devil? what i mean is this. path robertson ran for president in 1988. he did something in that year nobody has done before or since he brought three million volunteers to his campaign, got millions of people involved in the republican party all across the country. in the end he came in third but he activated the christian right and all those people joineded the republican party with something in mind, a couple of things in mind. one thing they wanted, an to end gay marriage. for years when the republican party was in charge of this country the house, the senate, the supreme court, the presidency, republican party did nothing to accomplish that for pat robertson's followers. similarly, they want an end to abortion in america.

i'm not going to say whether they're right or wrong but i'll point out, when the republicans were in charge, the senate, the house, the white house, the supreme court, once again, they did nothing to help pat robertson's followers accomplish what they wanted. tonight i ask those people, the christian right what about your own pact with the devil? how has that worked out with you -- out for you? i yield back the rest of my time. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields his time. the gentleman from nebraska. mr. fortenberry. the gentleman from california, mr. dreier. the gentleman from louisiana, mr. cao. five minutes. mr. cao: yes. the speaker pro tempore: without objection. mr. cao: thank you very much. mr. speaker, the new orleans saints are going to the super bowl for the first time in

franchise history. as their representative to congress, i want to congratulate them in an official manner by acknowledging words of encouragement from constituents on the house floor. sunday's historic win was an inspiration to the rest of new orleans who continue to struggle to rebuild their lives, four years after hurricane katrina. i'm proud to be their congressman and i look forward to an exciting super bowl in which they'll defeat the indianapolis colts. tonight, i will read several statements from my district in their honor. the first is from kay highen botham, a teacher at the academy of sacred hearts in new orleans. she writes, do the saints have an impact on education? as a skl school administrator, i believe it's immeasurable and far exceeds economics. it's more than an awareness of team colors.

students enjoy spirit days but they spend time discussing the job of a prfingsal athlete, what it means to stay focused, eat healthy food, get plenty of exercise and sleep, follow rules, work through pain and be a good sport, win or lose. teachers help students understand the report -- the importance of following parent and teacher directives and when following the saints, they link it to the attention each player must play to the coach's play calling and discuss the pride felt in a job well done, the discipline it takes to make a wise choice on and off the field and the consequences that ensue if one doesn't. if the job of -- if the job of a student is so different from a job of a new orleans saint? when interviewed, saints players talk about having faith in their team and giving back

to the community. they talk about developing self-confidence and leadership and overcoming adversity, values important in a game but even more important in life. past reports -- they report something incredible, dinner conversations that include the whole family. brothers -- brothers are amazed how much their sisters understand about first downs and touchdowns and sisters want to hear what their brothers know about drew brees and reggie bush. do the saints have an impact on education? yes, indeed. they give us lessons worth teaching and learning. the second statement is from cindy of new orleans who writes, we cannot calculate the impact of the saints on new orleans. citizens know that despite failures of federal, state and local governments after katrina and suggestions we don't merit

help, we are nevertheless deserving. we are deserving of a winning team, good skills, safe roads, bridges, and reliable levees. when the population does trickling back into new orleans that summer after katrina, when politicians an pundits urged the city to be abandoned, the sign on the superdome said, our team, our home. bumper stickers in the saints' black font said, faith. drew brees, who took a chance on the team and the city, had t-shirts that said, believe, new orleans. popular saints fans contend, this is the way we live. we are able to survive by clinging to our faith in this team. our devotion to the new orleans saints, win or lose, keeps our battered spirits alive. i want to close tonight with a

prayer by the saints delivered by archbishop hammond delivered at a banquet in 1968. our heavenly father has instructed us that saints evercame lions, grant our saints an increase of faith and strength so they will not only overcome the lions, but the bears, the ram the lions and the awesome people in green bay. may they continue to tame the redskins and the falcons and eagles. give our coaches the ability to be as wise as serpents and simple as doves so no good talent will donnell our draft. grant to fans perseverance in their devotion, tempered with a sense of cheer to all, including the referees. may it be a source of good fellowship and may the saints come in marching in be a

victory march for now and all eternity. thank you i yield back. the speaker pro tempore: mr. mcclintock of california. mr. mcclintock: for many month the republicans on the water and power subcommittee of the natural resources committee have implored the majority democrats to hold a hearing in the central valley of california to see and hear for themselves the damage that the federal government has caused by diverting $200 billion -- by diverting 200 billion gallons of watter from central valley farms in order to indulge the environmental left's pet cause, the delta smelt. we decided to hold a forum on our own auspices and invite all members of the california delegation and all members of the natural resources committee and representatives of the obama administration to come to

fresno and see firsthand what the policies had wrought. instead, the water and power subcommittee chairman decided to meet on the same day in southern california to extol the virtues of water conservation. congress has thus made clear its intention to sacrifice the people of the san joaquin valley on the alter of environmental extremism. despite heavy rains over the last month, the administration continues to blame a relatively wild -- mild drought for the fact that farmers will receive only 5% of think water they're entitled to. this does not explain how in far more severe droughts than this, farmers have received greater allocations nor does it explain how these massive water diversions can be justified to support the delta smelt if supplies are constrained. had the democrats of the subcommittee come to fresno, they would have heard and seen the anguish of the people of the central valley of

california. these water diversions have destroyed a half a million aches of the most productive farmland in america and they've thrown 30,000 central valley farm families into unemployment. they would have heard the stories of food lines and communities that once prided themselves of being the bread basket of the western united states. they would have heard about the frustration of seeing produce imported from china being handed out in these food lines to the very same american farmers who once applied the same produce to the -- supplied the same produce to the american world -- to the entire world. they would have seen the anger as the absent interior secretary's testimony to the committee was played back in which mr. salazar admitted that the obama administration has the authority to turn the pumps back on but chooses not to do so because that would be, quote, like admitting failure.

there is some good news this afternoon, the day after our forum in fresno, the interior secretary relented to the extent of releasing 350,000 to 400,000 acre-feet of already allocated water to the central valley, having demonstrated the authority to release water that central farmers already own he now needs to follow through and release the watter that is being held hostage to the delta smelt. meanwhile, mr. nunes of california has introduced h.r. 3105, the turn on the pumps act which does exactly the same thing congress did under far less severe circumstances several years ago for the farmers of new mexico. mr. nunes has filed a discharge petition to bypass the subcommittee and bring the bill directly to the house for a vote. it needs 218 signatures. so far, it has 105. 104 republicans and one democrat.

madam speaker, i assure you that it's not only the central valley suffering. the willful destruction of 500,000 acres of american farmland by these massive water diversions, all for the enjoyment and amusement of the three-inch-long delta smelt is reflected in rising prices for produce that families are feeling far beyond the congressionally created dust bowl of california's central valley. nor is the delta smelt doing any better despite the massive water diversions. the delta smelt population is well below the high points recorded in the 1970. how can anybody argue that the delta pump regular strixes are benefiting the delta smelt? i promise to carry the plea for the many americans who poured out their hearts to us in fresno on monday for congress to come to the central valley and see what their policies

have caused. i place that invitation before you and yield back the balance of my time. the speaker pro tempore: under the speaker's announced policy of january 6, 2009, the gentleman from virginia, mr. perriello, is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader. mr. perriello: i rise today as one of many freshmen who will be speaking in this hour because a little over a year ago we came in on a wave of change. many of us came into politics for the first time, certainly to the federal government for the first time because we believed this country needed a new kind of politics. not just a politics of right or left but a politics of right and wrong. for too long both parties failed to rise to the challenges of our time, energy independence, redefining our competitive advantage, there were so many challenges to take on. a year later, we are not satisfied. tomorrow night the president of the united states will come and join us here in this body to

speak and give us a report on the state of the nation. the nation is in pain. working and middle class families are in pain. we haven't done nearly enough to show people the results of standing up for the working and middle class. there are many things the change was about but certainly at the heart of it was a desire for a few era of accountability. accountability for the private sector, accountability for government, and even accountability for consumers in bad decisions that had been made but most importantly to this was a need to shift our economic policies from speculation on wall street to job creation on main street. changing the name plate on the door from hank paulson to tim geithner does not represent a change of economic ol policy. we need to understand what it will take to have actual economic accountability and job growth in the country. we believe in this house, the

people's house, we have taken tra dat -- dramatic steps to put working class and middle class people aed of the most powerful among us. but the pain continues. in my district over the last five years we have seen people's utility rates go up 93% by appalachian power and others, we get calls every day. 20% increases in health insurance premiums. bank fees, credit card fee, comcast 2350es, all going through the roof while the working and middle class pay the price. we have taken steps here to stand up and say, someone is going to stand up for main street demand, that accountability and that economic relief that we thought was part of the change. we hope tomorrow night to hear more about your willingness to lead in these areas. but we also must switch this focus to main street because we're in a jobs crisis. we need a war-time-like mentality of how serious this job crisis is. and we took dramatic efforts a year ago that have helped to stop the bleeding, to help turn

from some of the most dramatic job losses in american history, certainly modern american history, under the last administration, to stopping that bleeding so that we can begin the recovery. but we know much more needs to be done. we are not satisfied. i hear time and time again, the banks are still not lending. if we need to do direct lending, if we need to do more to get the lending going to small and medium sized businesses we have to understand that in america's economy today, 2/3 of job creation comes from small and medium sized business. they may not have the political power and control over both parties in this town, but small and medium sized business create that job growth. we need to get job creation on main street through direct lending. we also need to see the kind of investment in our infrastructure, not only because it puts people to work today, but because it rebuilds america's competitive advantage. the hardworking proud people of my district would rather collect a paycheck for building something than an unemployment

check for sitting home. people want to work. they don't want those holes in their resume. and we know we're being outcompeted. so this is a jobs crisis. but it also goes to the heart of restoring the capitalistic innovation in this country. we saw a policy under the last administration of rewarding failure with bailouts. many of us wanted a change in that policy, we are not satisfied with what we have seen. we cannot have the strength of our private sector when we continue to reward failure instead of innovation. the people's house has taken bold moves to ensure the kind of accountability that will restore the very heart of our capitalism. we know that the other side put in place many of the policies that created this problem, but it's not enough to point the finger. let us be judged not by what the other side did to get us here but what we did to get us out of this economic mess. many of us came here, we're working a double shift every day, and will not rest until we

see the kind of job creation and rewards for innovation that the american people deserve. that's why many of us came here and we are not satisfied. we want to continue being that change, demanding that kind of shift from speculation on wall street to job creation on main street. and with that i yield to the gentleman from ohio. >> i would thank, madam chair, the gentleman from virginia for leading this hour on our recovery. because we talk so much about the job loss that has been created by this great recession. but far too often we don't discuss the causes of that job loss and we don't discuss the direction we're heading in. and so i think it's important to remind viewers and to remind all americans just where we are. i was at a luncheon today in cincinnati, ohio, with johnson investment council. they refer to this as the great recession. and they refer to it as the great recession because it's the most significant recession that

has taken place since the 1930's in the united states. this recession has lasted for 18 months, longer than any other recession since the great depression. this recession has caused a loss of 3.8% of the gross domestic product here in the united states. a greater loss than any recession since the great depression. and this recession has caused the loss of 7.2 million jobs. 7.2 million jobs. the greatest job loss since the great depression. but i think it's important to understand when this recession started. this recession started in 2007. under the policies of the bush administration. and i know the other side doesn't like us to go back. they want to believe that the world began, that this recession began, in january of 2009, but

the facts just don't bear that out. so i brought this chart and brought this chart to explain the job loss that has occurred during this recession. and you can see that in the last three months of the bush administration this economy lost nearly two million jobs. in the last three months of the bush administration alone. as a matter of fact it is after president obama took the oath of office that we started turning things around. we're still losing jobs and i think we all hope that next quarter we will turn this around and see positive growth. we saw growth last quarter. but we are heading in the right direction and that's the important thing. also at the luncheon today i was struck by the analysis given and i'll just mention the first few points. first of all, the great

recession was over. the recovery has begun. and i think this is important. near-term growth has been bolstered by the stimulus and inventory building. there is no question in the mind of economists around the country that the stimulus is working and i would point you, mr. perriello, to just one comment made in the "cincinnati quirer" this week and it is by the realtors of cincinnati and the realtors of cincinnati were praising the stimulus and the headline reads this, "realtors, builders laud tax credit." they're praising the tax credit. because often times when we talk about the stimulus, this $800 billion package, we forget that $300 billion of it was tax credits. it was tax credits and tax breaks for moderate income

families. and an important credit was to stimulate first-time home buyers and to help people get back into the housing market. we have achieved that. realtors understand it, people around the country understand it because homes are starting it to sell and it's thanks to the efforts of this democratic caucus. and with that i'll yield back to my colleague from virginia. mr. perriello: let me yield to the gentleman from california. >> i thank you, madam speaker, it's a great honor to be here with the other freshmen. we are new to this system but we're not new to the problems in our district or in our nation. we often go home on weekends to spend time in our district and what i have found in the district that i represent in the east bay of california is a lot of pain. a lot of people that are suffering but are filled with hope with the possibility that things are indeed turning around. i met a carpenter two weekends ago, he's a member of the

carpenter's union, and he'd been out of work for about eight months and the how it'sing industry had literally shut down and he'd been thrown aside and he said to me, why can't those bankers make loans to my company? why can't they do that? they've been given hundreds of billions of dollars and yet they cannot make a loan. one of the things that we've been working on here is to force those bankers to make loans, to use our tax money not for the great bonuses that they're giving themselves this month but rather to use that tax money to put people to work, put loans to this home construction company that this carpenter was once employed by. another person that i met in the city of antioch, about eight months ago, was protesting the fact that the loan modification program that had been put forward was stalled once again by the bankers. we all know the statistics. a lot of talk but very few loan

modifications. this person had worked as a pager -- painter, painting houses. had two jobs to support their family and yet was unable to continue their mortgage when the great recession began. a third person just this last weekend was a heavrequest equipment operator at a groundbreaking ceremony for a tunnel. the heavy equipment operator said, thank god, thank god the stimulus is working for me. in that project alone, an over $300 million project, the state of california was unable to pay its share because of the downturn in the california economy, so it was the action of my colleagues here, the freshmen class plus the other democrats in this house, that voted to pass the stimulus bill and $197 million of direct stimulus money went into that project and 6,000 men and women will be employed

at a major commuting -- and a major computing -- commuting backlog will cease. the statistics clearly show that with the new administration coming into place, with the stimulus money that was put in place last january, the first vote supported unanimously by our caucus and opposed unanimously by the other side, that is working. the statistics are clear. we're seeing job declines slowing down and we will soon see it turn around. tomorrow the president will be here, speaking to all of us about what we need to do in the months ahead. we need that jobs for main street. the jobs for main street bill that passed in december, get it out there, get it passed, get people to work. we also need to make sure that wall street is properly disciplined. if they're going to get those big fat bonuses using our tax money then we ought to tax those bonuses and but the that -- put that money back to work with

small businesses. we can do these things and much has been done. we've seen the turnaround, we've seen the statistics showing that we're on the right track. we will continue that and for all of us, we have a choice. we can do nothing, people will be on welfare, people will get the unemployment checks, people will lose their insurance and we'll try to keep them going with cobra support. or we can do the jobs program, the stimulus program, the jobs for main street program and in doing that we will put people to work, they will not be tax takers, they will become taxpayers. i yield my time. mr. perriello: thank you very much. i think it's important to remember we have got to rebuild jobs in this country that are between $6 an hour and six figures there. still has to be a middle class and a working class in this country. we have to respect those jobs. remember we lost jobs in construction, we've lost jobs in places where people want to go back to work. the jobs bill we passed here was a good start. we need to be bold in our

willingness to both put people to work and recreate our competitive advantage. even before the great recession, even before some of the horrible fiscal decisions of the last administration, we have been getting outcompeted around the world. we have to make the investments in our infrastructure, in our small and medium sized business and education and work force development so that we can outcompete any country. we have more -- we are more innovative than any country on earth but we cannot do it when we have a corporate capture of this body that means we reward failure instead of rewarding innovation. that must be the key and with that i yield to the gentleman from vermont. mr. welch: i thank my colleagues and appreciate the opportunity to participate with you in the freshmen hour. i want to speak about two things. one is how do we get lending going for small businesses and two, what's the practical thing we can do to create 600,000 to 850,000 jobs? you recited well how we got here, why we needed the stimulus. but on lending, let's address

that. what happened? wall street went on strike after they made record profits and record bonuses by making record bets with taxpayer money. they put a gun to the head of the american economy and lost billions and billions of dollars and it was so threatening to the american economy that henry paulson, then the treasury secretary, and you conservative president, george bush, came to congress, had in hand, acknowledged that he was embarrassed, and asked for a $750 billion bailout. now i was on that conference call with mr. paulson and many of us were shocked that this former goldman sachs head was acknowledging failure but saying that if you don't help us out on the bets we made we will have an implosion that will have collateral consequences that are absolutely catastrophic for main street. congress gave him the money but it was after an assurance on his

part that wall street had learned its ways and they wouldn't do the same thing. it's 15 months later and what's happened? wall street is back to its old ways. in this past year wall street has made so much money that they have set aside a bonus pool of $140 billion to $160 billion. how did they make that money? they had the tarp money, the taxpayer bailout money, number one. number two, they had zero interest rate money from the federal open window and they did -- what they did before to get us there, they went and started trading in currencies, derivatives and commodities. now, with those profits they had three options, one, they could have lend -- lent that money out to our small businesses and they need it. by the way, i have a lot of folks in vermont, and i'm sure this is true in california, saying, if they're making so much money, why aren't they giving me a loan?

number two, they could have added it to their bottom line, to be strong in a balance sheet in the event of a downturn later or, three, they could have put it in their pocket and that's what they did 15 months after they stuck a gun to the head of the american economy, they went back to their old ways, made a ton of money, they're very good at what they do but what they do is not good for america, it's not good for building an economy and sustainable jobs and they're going to rake that in. we have legislation, many of us are on it, that would say to wall street, look, if you're not going to lend that money out, we're going to tax those bonuses, anything above $50,000 we're going to tax at 50%, and we're going to put it into lending smor small business. second, we can save 650,000 jobs by engaging in home retrofit programs. we've got carpenters, plumbers, electricians out of work because of a stagnant home industry.

but we have homeowners who need to save money and need help doing it. we put $20 billion into that we can create 620 million job, all local and use the materials made in the united states, 09% of the retrofit materials are made here we can save 3.3% for homeowners by lowering their energy bill and take the equivalent of three million cars off the road. thank you. >> one thing i want i want to add on that is to say, anyone who has run a business or household knows the difference between an expenditure or an investment. going out to dinner is different than investing in a solar panel for your home. now is the time to be investing we can do that through retrofitting through our commercial and residential stock, we can do that by our work forest development and getting the small and medium

size businesses. there's been a thought among the elite in this country that we can continue to prosper without building anything, at some point we have to be creating value in the system. our financial sector is important and it will be strong if there are good rules in place to allow for predictability. we also must remember the agricultural sector. these are not things of the bygone past, though sometimes that's forgotten they remain major drivers of gothe and employment. -- of growth and employment. some of the things that continue to change and set us back, i believe the gentleman from colorado needs to address, not just in this building but perhaps across the street. with that, i yield. mr. polis: taking us back to where we were before i was in this body, when president bush, secretary tallsen said we need

a black -- secretary paulsen said we need a blank check for a lot of money, they said, what are you going to do with that? we're going to take some bad debt from banks and improve their balance sheets. the congress said, well, ok. not $1 of that tarp money has gone to buying bad debt. instead, the bush administration started nationalizing companies left and right. they bought up bank, bought up automobile company, bought up insurance companies. they went on a shopping spree and nationalized the means of production in this country. now we're at a place where you have big government in league with big business. the worst of both worlds for this country. this is made worse by a recent supreme court decision that opened the channels for unregulated use of corporate

funds to influence political elections. that's right. congress in its wisdom had previously established regulations around this, they advertised they could say, call so and so to vote for, vote against, not within 30 days of election, supreme court threw that out. now you have a dangerous situation where, let's say the bush administration nationalized the big banks. say a member of congress didn't think they should. now you have that bank can spend an enormous amount of money trying to sop the -- stop the re-election of people they don't like and trying to elect the people they like. you have big government and big business working together in a bush-socialist economy to the detriment of the american people. we'll be looking at solutions of campaign finance reform in congress, a lot of it needs to start with that, for congress to take action and be willing to take on where big business and big government are operating in unholy alliance. we need to make sure the system

is influenced by the people of the country rather than the corporations with their dollars using home to confuse and trick people with their massive and misleading public relations attacks. i'm hopeful -- i'm a sponsor of the fair elections bill a campaign finance reform bill, many of my colleagues are as well. we need to look at disclosure requirements, shareholder approval requirement we need to make it more difficult, not easier, for corporations to influence the united states congress. i yield back to the gentleman from virginia. mr. perriello: we can't say enough about how disastrous this decision is, not just for the political system, in terms of corruption in the political system, but a threat to the private sector itself, when the biggest corporations are able to capture government as we've seen in the years past. what they do is they try to lock in the status quo that's the very an tit sess of saptalism which is about innovation and competition.

when you are able to buy the referees on the field, you no long ver a decent game. we'll compete on the fair battlefield and fair sports field but you cannot do it when they're buying the referees. anyone who thinks money has no influence in politics may need to have a little wakeup call. s that disastrous decision. it go this is a disastrous decision. it goes against precedent many who decry judicial activism, they're overthrowing not only precedent but a decision six years earlier, which looks dangerous in terms of what it means for our supreme court. i think you do a good job of pointing out what it means for our country. i'll go to the gentleman from new york. >> i thank the gentleman for bringing up this special hour. there can be no more important

issue than job creation and job retention and dealing with the nation's economy. i'm glad we're talking about a bit of a reality check this evening, too, to review history, what brought us here. there's no mistaking that this administration and we in congress this year have inhittered as freshmen a very difficult task because some irresponsible behavior guided the decision making. and we found we grew a deficit to record proportions, historically largest deficit handed to this administration. that was just a year ago. when we look at some of the stats that the stimulus package was responsible for minimally two million jobs, looking at a number of assessments and projections done out there, i think it's reassuring to know we have been able to speak to that gross number of at least minimally two million jobs. they came about through sound

stewardship and investment at a time when our recession was bleeding this economy and all telltale indicator suggest that that bleeding has stopped, that we have only placed a down payment upon the economy with the stimulus package in the pipeline are tremendous investments to come, areas that deal with communications work broad band opportunity for our neighborhoods, our communities, dealing with transportation projects that are coming, with a smart grid, investment in smart meters and all the delivery systems that brings the energy supply to our doorstep, be it a workplace or a home place. these are sound investments. so much so that the news we received just recently last month about the third quarter showed 2.2% growth. that came about because of a change in thinking a change of behavior, as witnessed over the last several months and years, we were dealing with what was a draining situation, in fact, i have to look at the fact that

we provided within the stimulus package a middle class tax cut, largest in its nature, in its history and what benefited our communities was that 95% of working families in this country realized the benefit that -- of some $37 billion in fax relief that came in their paychecks throughout 2009. that was important work. that was a way to help stretch the budgets for our american households. contrast that with the fact that tax cuts under the bush administration were provided by borrowing from china. now isn't it interesting that china was made strong with our kind of irresponsible behavior. we look now at the fact that china's clean energy budget surpasses her defense budget and we in this nation have an opportunity to enter into that clean energy global race in sound and practical manner, to prepare eourselves and to

invest in the american economy and in the american race in that global measure that will find us a leader, an innovator, one that will become the ultimate go-to nation for energy intellect and that's the juncture we find ourselveses in today. representative perriello, i would suggest that this clean energy economy that we try to create and representative welch toughened upon it a few moments ago, there's an awful lot of opportunities for us to invest. shy away, the banking community shide away from energy efficiency. some of the retrofits we can do for businesses and residences. we know that in this economy, it's much easier for them to grant a $20-year plan for a coal plant or a 30-year plan for a nuclear plant but we can't get the investment for energy efficiency as our fuel of choice.

it's been stated that we're writing annually about a $900 billion check to our competitors simply because of our gluttonous energy behavior and the price tag on our energy bills. if we could move forward and provide for energy service companies to go out into this country and retrofit our residential parcels and allow for us to reduce that demand that is worldwide gluttonous in nature if we could invest in the infrastructure, the human infrastructure, the work force, for every $1 billion in retrofitting, some 8 thourblings jobs are created. that's how we bring back this economy. it's been happening. we've been doing installments, we've been great stewards of that stimulus package, we've made sure they go to vital projects. i can see it happening, i can see the pipeline activities coming with high speed rail work communications opportunities, i think we're on the right course we need to invest heavily now in a green

energy, clean energy economy. that is our way in one sector of activity that can really produce a multitude of wins with reducing energy demand, enhancing job creation and reducing the carbon footprint of this nation and the globe. mr. per real roe lowe: what the gentleman talks about is so -- mr. perriello: what the gentleman talks about is so important. we have to talk about how do we thrive in the next century, and spending $1 billion every day on oil that goes overseas to some of the countries that hate us the most is one of the dumbest strategies imaginable. $1 billion every day out of this country. let me brag on southside, virginia, before i go on, we're at the cutting edge of the new economy. we work worked with one of the biggest dairy farmers in the state, going to turn cow manure into power. so instead of having the effluence go off into

chesapeake bay and annoy the neighbors with the smell, we're going to invest in a digester to turn that into power, not only fuel the entire farm but also much of the town around it. i say to farmers who say, how are my kids going to make it with the utility bills these monopoly utilities are jacking up on us, 93% increase in my area in five years, i say, i don't want you to have a power bill at all, i hope you sell power in the way you sell milk now. we have a truck stop own for the my district who said, i'm nothing but a front man for al qaeda, i'm selling their product. instead, i want to sell an american product. he worked with farmers in our area to use canola oil to sell a premium diesel fuel, a premium fuel, instead of three cents on every dollar staying in the county, which is what happens at a normal truck stop,

93 cents on every dollar is staying in our community, supporting farmers, support regular fining. one of the poorest communities in virginia, highest unemployment, working to turn their land fill, capture the meth thain, turn it into power, for low income residents and make it more attractive to business. this is what other countries are daring to do about we've always been better at it. with that, i yield to the gentleman from california. >> the gentleman couldn't be more correct. you're getting close to home with the discussion of methane and cow power, it's a reality, happening in large parts of california. methane is a greenhouse gas over 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. you're getting an energy source and methane actually is very similar no chemistry to natural gas, so it is a very, very important thing. it has all the win-win you talked about and takes care of a small environmental problem when you do this methane

production. so this is another example of the way in which this congress last year in the american recovery act instituted public policies that are a win-win for america. these are long-term investments, more than 100, almost $200 million of stimulus money goes into energy research. we're talking about jobs, researchers around laraer tos in the university cam us puses that are figuring out how to do these things in an efficient and effective way in california, we have major research under way in laboratories at the universities figuring out how can you use algae to produce fuel? it's actually happening. some of that fuel is now being used in gentleman airplanes and the department of defense is testing the use of that fuel, biofuels of all kinds. the other thing that's happening here is the notion that energy is a fundamental national security issue. you've leard, my colleagues,

you've already talked about the enormous expense that the energy consumption is bringing to us and the risk that it puts us in when we get the energy from the most dangerous places in the world. every step we take to conserve, every step we take to use alternative and renewable energy, is a step that enhances our national security. i want us all to keep in mind who was it that voted in the stimulus bill of last year, the american recovery act, for these critical investments? it was our side, the democratic side, that voted for it and who voted against it, voted no? it was our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. there's a very clear dichotomy here on philosophy on how to deal with this. yes, there is a deficit. more than half of that deficit actually occurred during the george w. bush era in which this congress was controlled by the other party. i'm being a bit partisan here but these are the facts.

now, what was left to us to clean up when president obama came in? the greatest recession since the great depression. the statistics are clear. look at the job losses, the way they accelerated during the bush era. and look what happened when obama and the stimulus package came into place, we saw a reversal of that. we're now building the american economy once again. one final point and this was brought you up by our colleagues here and -- brought up by our colleagues here and this is the investment in education. this is a long-term investment. before i took this job i was a regionent at the university of california and i watched the enormous decline in support to that university. 40,000 students are not at the state university and the university of california this year. those are the people that will need us in the future, they will not be available to us. the stimulus package also put a

lot of money into the education system and kept the schools open, kept the teachers working. thank you so very, very much. i yield my time. mr. perriello: thank you. biffer go to the gentleman from ohio i think it is important to note how serious fiscal responsibility is and how serious it is for those of us frankly who are some of the younger members of this body, who understand that this threat of fiscal irresponsibility is not coming due for our children and our grandchildren, it's not that far off. it's going to be within our lifetime that we see this and in order to fix a problem, sometimes you have to understand the root cause of that problem. with that i yield to the gentleman from ohio. mr. driehaus: i want to thank the gentleman from virginia. madam speaker, you know, i think it's important to look back and to determine where this deficit started. and when you look back, it's back in the clinton administration. when we began to turn around the budget here in the united states, when we began to go from deficits to surpluses and we were actually paying down on the

debt. at the beginning of the bush administration they had had a choice. they had a choice, should we continue paying off that debt, should we continue paying down the debt in order to support future generations or do we want to gain short-term political gain? and i think the republicans in congress and the bush administration chose that short-term political gain because we know what they did. they decided to pursue tax cuts for the wealthiest americans, we engaged in two different wars that were not paid for and we engaged in reckless spending and that led to what? the greatest deficits that we have ever seen in the united states. when we came in the numbers were off the charts, literally off the charts. americans had never seen deficits like this. they could have chosen a different course, they could have said, the not the fiscally responsible thing to do right

now, to pursue these massive tax cuts for the wealthy, they could have said, if we're going to engage in war, we're actually going to pay for it as we go. but they decided not to. and they engaged in reckless spending. so where has that left us? it required to us make an investment and to continue to spend in order to end this recession. because if we didn't make the expenditures in the stimulus, the recession would have gone longer and the recession would have been deeper. i already mentioned that this was the longest recession that we have experienced since the great depression. it would have been significantly longer were it not for the stimulus. we know this to be true. i gave an example earlier of the realtors just this weekend, the realtors and homebuilders who were praising the tax credits and the stimulus were finally getting first-time home buyers back on the market.

but we spent a lot of time here tonight talking about new energy technology and how we're going build this economy in the future and it is through investment in energy and manufacturing in clean technologies that we're going to move forward. just today ted strictland, the governor of the state of ohio, gave his state of the state address. and in that the governor said, i believe in ohio, because ohio will power the future. so i want to challenge the gentleman from virginia because ohio is poised, ohio is poised to lead this nation in manufacturing in clean energy technology and i'll give you one more story because it's a good one. several months ago i went out to a business in my district. now, this was a business that was really reliant upon the steel industry. they make steel rollers for the steel industry, they're made

from steel, they sell to the steel industry. i went there thinking, well, they're not going to particularly like the investments that beeric -- we're making in the stimulus in new energy technology. they're not going to like the direction that we're heading in terms of greenhouse gases. instead when i walked in they said, thanks, thanks for your support and thanks for the congress because we get it, you get it. they realized that they were one of the few manufacturers in all of the united states that has the ability to make the steel gears for wind mills. wind mills that are being built and going up across the country. now, we could allow european countries to build these parts. we could allow european countries to sell into the united states. but because of the investments we're making in new energy

technology, because the investments this congress is making to get us out of this recession, businesses this see a future where there was no future before. that's what the stimulus has meant. has it required additional spending? yes. but that additional spending has allowed to us reduce the size of the recession, the duration of the recess and put americans back to work -- recession and put americans back to work. i yield back. mr. perriello: i take the challenge from the gentleman from ohio and may remind him of the recent ncaa soccer championship in which i believe the university of virginia beat a team from your state, a very good team from your state. so -- mr. driehaus: they were very good. mr. perriello: i do want you to be warned that that challenge may not work out well for your state. but, he know, i think what we're talking about here is this issue. we cannot speculate our way to economic recovery. you know, sometimes when i'm meeting with the folks in my district just a couple of days

ago i was down in a town that has seen several plants close. the big plants closed back in the 1990's after nafta, a recent set had closed that had managed to cling on a lot longer. and they turned to me and they said, you know, do people up there know we exist? those of us that are making $15,000 -- $15, $20, 25 an hour? do they know we're out there? they know i'm fighting through the jobs caucus, through the jobs bill, by being a broken record about jobs, jobs, jobs, but there's a sense that sometimes those on wall street and as mr. poe has mentioned, that washington-wall street collusion, only think about the folks that are doing really well in the economy and forget about that working middle class, forget about advanced manufacturer manufacturing, forget about the next generation of farming and ag products and forestry, forget about the fact that 2/3 of job growth in this country comes from small and medium sized businesses. they may not get the same

headlines as the goldman sachs but they employ america, they treat their workers well, they're accountable and they produce real value in our community. those are the folks we have to remember. those are the people that are taking it on the chin from getting nickeled and dimed by credit card companies and bank fees and utility rate increases and everything across the board. those working in middle class folkses need a voice and we need to be that voice. i will say this, i've given the president a little grief tonight and certainly his secretary of the treasury, mr. geithner, for not being the change that i expected to see and not doing enough for main street. but when the president last came here he did say something that's so important for us to remember. he was talking about how big the challenges are that we face, whether it's health reform or energy independence or the great recession and he said, we're going to step up and face this because that's what americans do. we don't back down. we don't back away from a challenge. every generation of americans are faced with a challenge. some had destroying the -- had

to storm the beaches of normandy, some had to fight great wars. we are being asked to figure out how to compete against in the 21st centuryry and have a strong middle class and part that have is being willing to do the tough decisions on energy independence and other areas that are going to be the job creators. when we worry about something like the supreme court decision saying if corporations can spend unlimited money, that means the corporations that are competitive today will be able to lock in their monopolies through the washington-wall street collusion. what we have to have is the innovation and even the creative destruction to create the jobs and the competitive advantage of the future. the president asked us to have that courage as every generation of americans has, to not back down from the challenge. this is our challenge, whether it's how to get the budget balanced, how to shore up the middle class, how to be economically competitive in a global economy, how to create competitiveness and energy in health care and other sectors, this is our time and we will

step up and we will try to be worthy of the american people, we will not forget those working and middle class folks and with that i yield to the gentleman from new york. >> thank you for bringing us together this evening. the gentleman from ohio charted for us the recession and to use his phrase, it went off the charts literally. and i think what's important to recognize is that we stopped the bleeding, we stopped that drop off the charts with this stimulus package and the experts, economists, are suggesting that perhapses it would have been another one or two points higher percentagewise, the unemployment rate. well, that translates into billions of -- millions of people. millions of people who would have lost a job had it not been for this stimulus and stopping the bleeding. so i think this investment is wise and it also tells us, we've heard here this evening, that we're investing in a way that allows america's business

community and the manufacturing base to do it smarter. we give them the tools to do it smarter. i believe that that's how we sharpen the competitive edge for our business community. they compete with the global marketplace. if we give them a smarter outcome we will be victorious at that global marketplace. we may not even do it cheaper, but we'll do it smarter and that will be a thumbs up for the american worker. so this evening it was a pleasure to join with you to talk about what we can do with the clean energy economy, what we can do with the stimulus, the investment in the future of this country in a way that uses cutting edge tools is the important strategy here and i'm proud of the opportunity to be able to think outside the barrel when it comes to energy policy so that we can lift this nation to a new era of accomplishment and competitiveness and it starts with this stimulus and it will continue with legislation on jobs, job reform, health care reform, certainly with energy

independence. we need to multitask. every american worker i know multitasks. we here in this chamber need to multitask and get a host of legislative pieces done. these bills are essential to the rise of the american worker. mr. perriello: picking up on the point and i thank the gentleman from new york about multitasking and getting a host of things done. we haven't talked much tonight and i think it's important. visit honor of serving on the financial services committee and i think one of the most important thing we've done for the american people since we've been here is to make sure that we don't go back from where we came. and that is we don't recreate what created this recession in the first place. recently we passed regulatory reform here in the house. the senate now has that bill in front of them, in front of senator dodd's committee, and i hope they take it up and hope they take it up in short order because what we were able to do in the house version of regulatory reform was to say, you know, these mortgage-backed securities, these credit default

swaps, these crazy derivative products that no one was paying any attention to, that the republicans in congress said we didn't need to regulate, but we know led to the great recession, what we did for the first time we actually addressed it. we said, we're not going to allow this systemic risk to the system any long. we're going to protect the american people. it's the folks in our neighborhood, the folks in the community we represent that continue to pay the price. while the wall street barrens are doling -- barons are doling out bonuses on wall street, my constituents have a crisis. we have hundreds of thousands of homes that have been foreclosed on, it's the neighborhoods that have paid the price. i haven't seep the investments -- investment banks step up and

say they're creating a community fund to help alleviate some of the damage they've caused. instead, they're patting thems on their back. they're doling out bonuses. well the school systems in our urban core, the small businesses in our urban core, the neighborhoods themselves and families don't struggle and they continue to struggle because of the unregulated activity of wall street. so we stepped up and we took responsibility an we passed regulatory reform and we're going to hold them accountable so this doesn't happen again in the future. with that, i'll pass it back to the gentleman. mr. perriello: again, what we're doing is putting referees back on the field. we shouldn't be choosing sides as a government, we should be making sure the rules are there. nobody leaves a ballgame and says, i like the referees in that game, or the referees did a good job. you notice the referees when

things go wrong or they make a bad cull. but what's -- a bad call. but what's important is that we have referees on the field. we want predictability and accountability in the market so we can adjust to that. it's frustrating not only for middle class working folks asked to pay for the mistakes made on wall street in part because of mistakes made in washington, and the hardworking people in my district making $30,000 a year to pay for people making millions every year, but it's been frustrating for some investors to say, i made the smart investment. i didn't go for the crazy, exotic, mortgage-backed securities. i immediate smart, -- i made smart, reasonable risks and it was fine. however the people who made high-risk, high-return investments got to not only see the good side in the good years

and then when they lost, they'd get bailed out. if you go to las vegas and bet on 13 on the roulette well every time, that's salker's bet. but if you know you'll get bailed out every time you lose and then when you win you get to keep the money, you'll keep doing it. let's go to job creation on main street. these are good, common sense ideas that should be able to be pursued on a bipartisan basis. we need to get lending to small and medium sized businesses. if we need to do incentives, we need to do that. if we need direct lending, we need to do that people want to expand, want to hire, can't get the lending. consider capital gains freeze for two years for small business. infrastructure investment,

water infrastructure, broad band infrastructure. we talked about retrofits that make win-win sense in the economy. we can do this in the industrial sector, not on the scale of 100 homes here or 100 homes there. hundreds of thousands of people to work in retrofits. these are con creelt areas we can not only help us in these dramatic downturns, but to help on the upside. these are ways to investment in our competitiveness and with that, i yield to another member of our class. >> i wanted to come and join you in the sentiments you've expressed. as we look at our country and look where we have been and how we got to where we are, not just today but in the 00-plus years it's it's our ingenuity

and resourcementfulness and strong work ethic that has always made the united states a success. our prosperity is built on the american dream and the belief we can achieve extraordinary things in the future regardless of the problems in the present. s the vision of main street america. work hard, set high goals and be optimistic about the future. it's all too easy to choose cynicism. i think if we abandon the optimism of the american dream, we'll do nothing but delay our return to prosperity. i see in small businesses on my main street, throughout my district, who have taken these difficult times and really made chidges -- changes in their business and we need to be here in washington supporting those businesses. i've had people like john hall who lost his job in the textile industry, but that didn't stop him. he invented a new piece of fishing equipment and he's brought his invention to the

marketplace. in butler county, a company that produces electric beam medical serlization has announced plans to go toe -- to go to a local industrial park and create 200 new jobs. i find this hope around my district, it ties into what everyone is saying, we cannot listen to the skeptics. the proof is with the americans on main street. they have not lost their optimism. many of them drive to define our nation's character. our decision need not be act next week or next month or even next year, or even the election this year, it has to be about our future, the future for our children and our grandchildren and we have to investment in -- invest in that future. we've we did that last year, we'll continue to do it this year, it's the innovation that's going to make things

more positive, we've got to be in washington helping them with that investment. innovations which will lead to jobs, jobs, jobs. i thank the gentleman. mr. perriello: i thank the gentlelady for her comments. tomorrow, we're going to hear from the president and the president is going to challenge us. while we've seen a 60% increase in the stock market over the last year we know we're not to the point of creating jobs -- jobs. i think all of us are very worried that while we're entering into a recovery, we're fearful it's going to be a jobless recovery. we need to focus on creating jobs. the president is going to challenge us tomorrow night to control spending while at the same time making strategic investments in jobs and job growth across the united states. that's what we're trying to do in infrastructure, that's what we're doing in clean energy technology, that's what we're doing through our access to education, higher education, and the bills we passed earlier

in the year. that's the challenge before us. and i think the american people are really sick and tired, quite frankly. i've seen democrats and republicans fight against each other because they feel that they are the ones to pay the price for that. and i think they're right. we need to come together. we need to come together, accept the president's challenge and move forward to create jobs in the united states. so with that, i'll hand it back to the gentleman from virginia. mr. perriello: we stand here in the midst of a tremendous economic crisis. what we hear when we go home every weekend is the pain of people who have lost their jobs, the fear of those who think they might be next, the confusion and frustration of having seen one administration seem to wreck the economy and the next not do enough to fix it. like many americans, i'm not satisfied. we can sit here tonight and

blame the other side for letting the deficit go off the rails or helping to wreck the economy but i'm not satisfied being judged by what the other side did, i want us to be judged by whether we get this economy back on track or whether we step up to the challenges both parties failed to address in decades past. it's too easy in this town to focus on winning a debate or legislative fight or campaign by convincing people the other side is even worse. that's not a politics worthy of the american people. we've done a lot to stop the bleeding in the economy in the last year but i'm not satisfied with us merely stopping the bleeding. we must have the healing and rehabilitation not just to get us back to where we were but a stronger middle class than we've seen a more competitive american economy. a politics that doesn't just reward and lock in the status quo through corporate campaign

contribution bus rewards innovation and dares to think of what the next big thing can be that can unleash again the american competitiveness that's being choked out by so much of the washington-wall street co-lution that rewards what has been instead of what needs to be in this country. it's good to see that wall street is recovered and above 10,000. i'm not satisfied until we see that growth on main street. we see the job creation we see jobs between $6 and six figures. for that vibrant middle class that's always been at the heart of this country. i'm a big believer in this president and a big believer in hope but hope doesn't pay the mortgage. we have to deal with the banking crisis, the housing crisis, we have to look at the construction sector, education, and work force development. i'm not satisfied with solutions that simply stabilize where we are or offer something a little bit better than what came before. we promise something better than that. i believe tomorrow night the president has an opportunity to

give an address to this nation that gives an honest reading of the state of this union. both its unbelievable strength, its unprecedented hunger for innovation but also the reality of its economic suffering particularly with our middle class and working class families that continue to suffer under monopolies of electric utilities and credit card companies and the joblessness that we'll see a president who steps up and continues to say, we're not going to shirk away from the challenges of our time because that's not what americans do. we step up, we figure out a way to innovate to out-compete, and to give the american people a kind of politics they deserve. that's what brought many of us into politics for the first time like many of the freshmen who have been speaking tonight and we're not satisfied yet with the change but we still believe it's possible. we are looking for everyone to come together, congress and white house, republican and democrat, and all the american people throughout this country.

to dare to believe that that hunger we have for change and hope can translate to real results, including a reinvention of america's competitive advantage that helps restore the strength of that middle class that understands that 2/3 of our job grolte comes from small and medium-sized business, that gets lending going again that gets job creation going again and moves us from rewarding speculation on wall street to job creation on main street. i thank my colleagues for joining with us on the eve of the state of the union address and with that, i yield back. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back. the chair lays before the house the following enrolled bill. the clerk: senate 2949, an act to amend section 1113 of the social security act to provide authority for increased fiscal year 2010 payments for temporary assistance to united states citizens returning for foreign countries to provide

necessary funding to avoid shortfalls in the medicare cost sharing program for low-income, qualifying individuals and for other purposes. the speaker pro tempore: under the speaker's announced policy of january 6, 2009, the gentleman from virginia, mr. goodlatte, is recognized for 60 minutes as a designee of the minority leader. mr. goodlatte: thank you, mr. speaker. mr. speaker, thomas jefferson once wrote, to preserve the independence of the people, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. we must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. unfortunately, it increasingly appears congress has chosen the latter path of profusive spending and the servitude to big government that results therefrom. for the next 60 minutes, i and my colleagues are going to talk about the problems our country

faces from a very different perspective than you have heard during the last 60 minutes. i want to start by pointing out the nature of this problem in terms of government spending. this chart shows the deficit each year starting in 2000 and in 2000-2001, first a democratic president and a republican president, we had a balanced budget we had a surpluses, in fact the two years before that we generated a total of $500 billion in surpluses paid down against the national debt. then came the recession and september 11, 2001, and spending increases, many have, i think, fairly criticized the previous president and congress for spending too much money during this period of time when deficits rose as high as $400 billion.

in fact, this deficit in 2004 was the highest deficit in american history until we got to the very end of the republican majority when it went to $450 billion. staggering sums of money. too much money spent. but look what happened when the democrats took the majority in the congress in 2007. it skyrocketed. . last year, $1.4 trillion. this year projected to be close to $1.5 trillion. to give you an idea of how much money, this year's budget is projected to spend about $3.6 trillion, with revenues coming in of $2.2 trillion. we're going to spend 50% more

than we take in in revenues. what are we going to do? we are going to borrow every penny of that money against our children and grandchildren's future. now, if this were going to resolve the problem and some have argued on the other side of the aisle that the so-called stimulus which contributed to almost all of this deficit in this congress, if they are going to argue that that was going to solve the problem and we would get back to balanced budgets and wouldn't be borrowing against our children and grandchildren's future, woy listen to the argument. i still wouldn't agree with them. but their own budget belies against what they are doing in this so-called stimulus package. because this is the projected budget until 2019, for the next nine years. it never goes below $700 billion and is around $800 billion

ending at close to $900 billion in 2019. never does it go down. never does it even approach these numbers, which i and my colleagues who will speak with you tonight, will all agree are excessive, but nothing compared to what is being done right now since the democratic party became the majority party in in congress and speaker pelosi has pushed these budget deficits that are absolutely staggering. what does it mean? it means that in 1990, the total national debt, the aaccumulation of those deficits was $2.86 trillion. in 2007, when the democratic majority took over, it was $8.45 trillion. and just two more years, rising by the end of the term of our current president, six years into the democrats' control of

the congress to $16.36 trillion, nearly doubling and continuing toward that upward arc even more dramatically after that. this is the public debt outlook. this is the projection that says what the outlook was first in january of 2009 and then after the stimulus had taken effect, after they begun spending $1 trillion that was allegedly going to stimulate the economy and create jobs, they came back and revisited it in august. while they were projecting this gradual but still increase, it skyrocketed. why? because they have done nothing to control spending. they have done exactly the opposite. so now the president is going to come to the congress tomorrow night. and as the president of the

united states, we are all anxious to hear what he has to say about what we should be doing to address the problems of our country. and we are told by those who are in the know that the president will call for a spending freeze for three years. but what is he doing with the spending freeze, but locking in those higher spending increases that have been passed through the appropriations bills this year with up to 16% increases over the previous years, locking in those levels of spending, knowing what has to take place is to cut government spending. what has been the effect of the president's efforts? well, this is a chart showing job losses since the stimulus took effect in march of last year.

2.74 million more jobs have been lost in this country over the ensuing 10 months, notwithstanding the claim that this would create jobs and would halt the unemployment rate at 8%. instead, it is now over 10% and we have lost 2.74 million more jobs. well, what is the solution to this? a big part of it is something that 49 out of our 50-state governments have got to do and the congress should be required to do as well and that is to balance the budget each year except in times of war or national emergency. in the last 40 years, those four years in the late 1990's and early 2,000 are the years which the government balanced its budget and you can see how the deficit is adding to that national debt. it should be the reverse. in the last 40 years, there have

been economic cries sees like the one we are in now and there have been times of war when we might not balance thanking budget. but instead of four times out of 40 balancing it, it should be four times out of 40 not balancing the budget and we need a balanced budget amendment in the united states constitution. 49 out of 50 states have it. this congress came close to passing it in the contract with america. it passed the house of representatives with a strong bipartisan majority and was sent over to the united states senate and failed in the senate by one vote to get the 2/3 majority. requires a 2/3 majority in the house and 2/3 in the senate and three quarters of our state legislatures to ratify it. had that vote been provided to give us 2/3, it would be sent to

the states. the president doesn't have any say to an amendment to the constitution. it would have been sent directly to the states and i believe three-quarters of those states would have ratified that balanced budget amendment and we would be in a much different situation today if we had done that. the american people have never abandoned this idea even though the democratic congress long ago abandoned this idea. and that's union fortunate. but the american people, poll after poll, shows that 75% or 80% or more believe that the federal government should be required to balance its budget each and every year except in times of war or economic emergency. and that would require a super majority vote of the congress to declare that they would not balance the budget in a particular year. how popular is this? well, here's what our current majority leader had to say about a balanced budget when we had

that debate in 1995. the issue of balancing the budget is not a conservative or liberal one, nor is it an easy one, but it is an essential one for us in this house for the american people and most assuredly for future generation, representative steny hoyer, a member of the minority in 1995 voted for a balanced budget amendment. but we have not heard about that from this majority in this congress at all. and we are here tonight to urge the congress to bring up the balanced budget amendment that i introduced on the first day of this congress, house joint resolution number one, a balanced budget amendment to the united states constitution and we will keep pushing for that until we have leadership in this congress that will bring this bill to the floor for a vote so we can send it to the senate again and challenge them to provide those 2/3 votes needed

and send it to the states for ratification. it is never too late for the congress to do the responsible thing. but we have dug a much, much deeper hole as a result of the irresponsible budgets that have been passed by this democratic majority in each of the last three congresses and projected, as i pointed out, projected for the next decade huge deficits as far as the eye can see, far greater than anything we have seen in the history of our country. i am joined by several of my colleagues. and i want to recognize the gentleman from colorado, mr. coffman who has been working to organize support in the congress for support of the balanced budget amendment to the constitution. mr. coffman: i thank the gentleman from virginia as the

prime sponsor for that resolution for a balanced budget amendment and i want to work with you to get that passed. when we look at -- i think you mentioned, discretionary spending, nondefense zreagsary spending that now stands at $536 billion of -- up nearly 24% since the bush administration's last full budget -- in fiscal year 2008, which was 433.6 billion. so we have a $1.4 trillion deficit right now. and the president is expected to address joint session of congress tomorrow night and i think he's going to present two plans fwr what i understand, to -- from what i understand. first, he is going to freeze 1/6 of the budget that will be

domestic discretionary, nondefense spending, but only 1/6 of the budget and that over 10 years, the estimated savings, should that section of the budget not be allowed to increase is statemented to be $250 billion. but when we look at the extraordinary increases that this administration has done, i think we are looking at -- nondefense discretionary spending went up in fiscal year 2009, 12.3% is projected this year. with inflation being at an all-time low. and i think the other program that i believe he's going to be presenting to the congress is some sort of presidential

bipartisan commission controlled by his party to lower the deficit. and first of all, i think if we look at the first plan that's far too low, he needs to get spending down to where it was before he certainly got into office. and the second one i think is just going to be cover for a tax increase, to have some kind of bipartisan support. i want to rise in support to what i think the united states can do and that is a balanced budget amendment. and having been a former state legislator from a state that requires a balanced budget. you rise in debate where you are debating tradeoffs. where you can't have everything

and you can't run a deficit for your operating budget. you can go to the people or float bonds for certain capital improvement projects likes roads and bridges and things like that, but you cannot simply increase spending that is out of balance with revenues that are coming in. unlike the federal government. and this is my first year in the congress and i see that as the most significant problem facing the congress that you are in a situation where there are no tradeoffs that the administration can come in and really and try and have it all in terms of spending and put an extraordinary burden not simply on the economy in terms of inflation and high interest rates that can choke off this recovery, but to put a question,

debt on future generations yet unborn i think is extraordinarily unconscionable. so with that, i rise in support with the the gentleman from virginia and look forward to working with you on what i think is absolutely the most critical thing. if there is one thing we can do in the congress of the united states to save this country from financial ruin and without a strong economy we cannot have a strong defense to protect our national security interests, that the balanced budget is the most critical thing we can do for the future of this country in this congress. mr. goodlatte: i thank the gentleman. i hope you will remain because there are other things we want to discuss, but i would like to recognize the gentleman from texas, mr. conaway who is an outspoken member of this congress on fiscally responsible

budgets of this congress and i yield to the the gentleman from texas and we'll get to the the gentleman from florida who wants to say a few words and has to leave but i hope the gentleman from texas will remain. mr. conaway: i thank the gentleman from virginia and i look forward to working with you on this balanced budget amendment. there are several issues that are important but none more important than a balanced budget. if we only do one constitutional amendment in the next 10 years, let's do this one. think about those senators who voted no on the balanced budget amendment. any of them still in congress, if we could point to one of them, had you voted yes during 1995, during the surplus years

we experienced in the late 1990's, it's easy to pass a balanced budget. and all of the states would have ratified it. we would have avoided trillions and trillions of dollars in debt. let's see if they are still in the congress right now and would fess up to having a good slug of this problem. . my colleagues know anyone can start a diet tomorrow. the easiest diet is the one you start tomorrow. the single greatest threat to our country is not the islamic jihaddists or al qaeda, they'll get shove us, but not all of us, but the single biggest threat to this country in my view is the growth of the government as identified by the growth in spending. you look at that chart, the most insidious things about that chart is the 2010 deficit is supposed to be $210

trillion, and the out years are all increasing. the deficit goes up each year. they can't put together a set of numbers that at least gives the facade of showing that they're going to drop spending in the out years. mr. goodlatte: that's similar to the fact that three people got on television from the administration over the weekend that -- and claimed that the stimulus, which hasn't added jobs, said, well there would have been more jobs lost without the stimulus. irning the only accurate figure is reported by the bureau of labor statistics that says we lost more. mr. mr. conaway: they say, we lost x number of jobs but created so many jobs.

the problem is the net jobs lost because those people are out of work. the other thing about the chart, it assumes the bush tax cuts expire. hundreds of billions of new taxes are in those numbers and those numbers are still as bad as they look. with the trillions of dollars of deficit accumulating. the bad news about this is that we're not going to pay that debt off. i had a young fifth grade student in fredericksburg, texas, i was doing a town hall meeting for a school that was k-12, he said, what's the plan to pay off the national debt. i looked at him and said, what? that's a technique you use to think about your answer. he said, what's the plan to pay off the national debt. i said that's the single best question i've been asked. there's no plan to pay off the national debt this cumulative debt, america will pay the interest on this debt from now

until eternity. you're going to have to tax yourselves enough to pay the interest on the debt from now on. that's before you get to start thinking about national security, homeland security or anything else want to do with the world you inherit for us. you have to pay the debt because your parents and grandparents didn't have the fiscal discipline to just say no. i would love to stay around and visit with you but i know my colleague from florida wants to talk as well. i couldn't agree with my colleague from virginia -- from virginia more, you have, what h.r.j. 1? it should be number one in our hearts and number one on the docket for this congress. it should have been a year ago in january or it should be on the ballot tomorrow. there's nothing more important to our way of life than our profligate spending ways.

er look forward to more comments. mr. goodlatte: i thank him for his comments about house joint resolution 1, the same balanced budget amendment that passed the house as part of the contract with america, same language entirely, it has over 170 co-sponsors in the house right now, including many democrats. it's bipartisan. it needs to be bipartisan to get that 2/3 majority of the house to vote for it and pass it and be able to send it on to the senate. i'd now like to recognize the gentleman from florida, mr. buchanan who also has been a leader on this issue and has introduced a balanced budget amendment of his own and we are proud to work together in promoting fiscal responsibility here in the congress. the gentleman from florida. mr. buchanan: i'd like to thank the gentleman from virginia for his enormous leadership. everyone has a different reason

why they run for congress. i've been in business for 30 years. your first term, my second term, but that was my number one issue by far, the runaway deficits. since then, since i came in in 2006 we picked up another $2 trillion, another 20% we aed to the deficit for the last three years. the numbers today over $12 trillion in debt. and with the budget the democrats have presented in terms of going forward they're talking about close to $20 trillion in the next six or seven or eight years if you took 5% cost of money on $0 trillion if it's -- it's $1 trillion a year before you pay one dollar for social security, medicare or anything. it's unbelievable. this past year, the deficit was $1.4 trillion. as bad as it's been in the past, if you look at $300 billion or more is way too much, we should have been balancing the budget. but $1.4 trillion is

three-times larger plus than any other deaf silt from that standpoint. the last 50 years, what motivated me is why this has to be a bipartisan effort, in the last 50 years, i think, and you might know exactly the number, i think it's only been four, five, six times we balanced the budget. 44 times we haven't. we're incapable of balancing this budget, with the exception of getting the constitutional balanced budget amendment. 49 out of 50 governors have to balance their budget. our city in sarasota, florida, they've got to balance their budget. families have to balance their budget. businesses can't continue to spend. i grew up in detroit, down the street from general motors. if you look at most powerful, successful corporation in the world, made a lot of commitments to a lot of folks, my brother was there, when he was 18. many of them went 30 and out. now they've reneged on the benefits and irving else.

we've got to stop it, it's crazy. we've got to bring common sense to this whole process. that's why we've got to have a constitutional balanced budget amendment. as my colleague mentioned, we're one vote short, 94, we've got to go back in that effort. it defies logic why we don't do that the other thing, i came here and i want to be the best i can bipartisan. the kems -- democrats talked about pay-go. that's a joke. pay-go, it sounded good, you know, better than nothing, i thought, but we had our largest deficit ever, a $1.4 trillion pay-go. now we want to have a commission and talk about that on a bipartisan basis. again, they're -- they won't get it done. i have absolutely no confidence that that's going to get done. we need a constitutional balanced budget amendment that simply says if you take in $3 trillion, that's what we took in my first year in congress, you don't spend more than that.

$3 trillion. as we said, 49 of 50 governors can't spend more than they take in. the state of florida, our budget was $72 trillion a few years ago, it's down to $62 trillion. they've had to make the adjustments and find the efficiencies. we've got to do the same thing here. i tell people, i think it was roughly a year ago, you might remember we had a bill here, aid to africa. we were giving $15 billion a year. i think it was $15 billion. and the thought was this environment, same environment we're in now, tough year, families are making cuts, businesses are making cutses, you'd think they'd cut it 10%. they fwrent $15 billion to $50 billion. i think every democrat voted for it and half the republicans. my thought was, ok, here we go, we'll go borrow the money from china, taxpayers pay interest on that for a long time and our children and grandchildren and it's going to go to africa.

god only knows where it goes once it gets to after chasm i thought to myself, why don't they have china give to it africa? why do we have to be the middleman in that process? but the bottom line, we've got to recommit ourselves, i think what happened on tuesday, a week ago, massachusetts, spending and runaway spending has got so many people in my district and i think across the country, they realize that we defy common sense upper. -- up here. that's why they're so mad. i think they're concerned about what we leave our children and grandchildren. i was in florida at a town hall meeting, a gentleman stood up, 63 years old he said, congressman, i've never gone one of these, i don't get involved politically, but he said, i have five schirn, i think 13 grandchildren, the first time in my life, i've been a small businessman all my life, i'm very, very concerned about where we're at and where we're going.

i feel like we're heading toward bankruptcy. what i see, what i sense, my business background, he said we can't continue to keep spending and i share that feeling. i know that my colleagues all share that feeling today. and this is the most important issue, it's the reason i came in 2006, i have two children in their mid 20's. every generation is left -- has left it better for the next generation. i don't want our generation to be the first generation that doesn't do this. we need to come together on a bipartisan basis and do the best interest of not only americans but america and i yield back. thank you. mr. goodlatte: i thank the gentleman for miz comments, i'd like to talk about what the economic consequences are, not only for our children and grandchildren,, in a moment, i'll turn to the gentleman from texas and the gentleman from colorado to get the benefit of their thoughts about what the consequences are for these

deficits running as far as the eye can see if we don't pass a balanced budget amendment to the constitution and start living within our means like every family, every business large and small and even every state government, some of which are not managed very well. they have to come to terms with the consequences of their actions a lot more quickly than the federal government ever has because of the fact that they don't have this retirement -- this requirement to balance the budget. they say we can have it all, we'll borrow more money to pay for it. i've asked high school students when they've come to see me or when i've talked to their classes, i said, who do you think is going to bear the burden of this debt we're piling up? they know the answer to that. they know it's falling on their shoulders. they don't have an appreciation of how serious it is, how large a debt it is, and how dramatically it could affect the future of our clint in the long-term and the not too

distant future as well. i said, let me give you a starting point to think about that. how much is a $1 trillion? you know, the economic stimulus package, $1 trillion. chaching. the budget deficit, the $3.6 trillion spending at the beginning of the year, they projected $4.2 trillion in revenue, a $137b92 trillion deficit. we know, we're several month into that year, it's even greater than $1.2 trillion. but over $1 trillion. the health care bill, the monstrosity that brought people out to the polls in massachusetts last week. $1.1 trillion, according to the speaker's budget projections. in the senate, $800 billion. we all know when off bill that has 10 years' worth of taxes to pay for it and only six years of benefits that you're using smoke and mirrors and it costs way more than $800 billion over

a full 10 years of benefit. most economists say over $2 trillion over 10 years to pay for either the house or senate health care reform bill. so how much is $1 trillion? i said, let me give you a starting point. if you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills, nice, freshly printed, tightly packed, just four inches hirke you'd have $1 trillion. these students were pretty impressed with that most of them had never seen a thousand-dollar bill and to think that just four inches of them would be $1 trillion. i said, how high would that stack have to be to reach $1 trillion? one young lady said it would be about 12 inches? a fellow in the back of the room raised his hand and said, it would be more than that. about 20 feet. i said, well think about it this way. a billion is a thousand times a million. and a trillion is a thousand

times a billion, or a million times a million. and so that stack of thousand dollar bills that's four inches high to be $1 million, would have to be $4 million inches high to be $1 trillion. four million inchings is 63 miles high. reaches up into outer space. and that's just $1 trillion. that's just for the stimulus or just for the deficit for the coming year. double that for the new health care bill that they want to add in terms of overall spending that will cost either the taxpayers of this country or borrowed against the future of our country when you're talking about trillions of dollars, you're talking about a staggering amount of money. back in the 1960's, there was a very famous senator who was widely quoted as having said a billion dollars here a billion

dollars there, pretty soon you're talking about real money. but you know what, that's not what he said. . senator dirk son said, you're talking about real money and we moved from millions to billions to trillions because this congress doesn't have the fiscal responsibility that would be required by a balanced budget. and there are serious consequences for every american family and every job holder in this country. and i turn to the the gentleman from texas and the gentleman from colorado to get their perspective on what happens if we don't get this problem under control. mr. conaway: i thank the gentleman for yielding. it is stunning to think that a stack of 1,000 bills would be

four inches tall. another way to look at $1 trillion, if you were to try to spend it in one year, to do that, you would have to spend $32,000 per second, every second of the year in order to get to get your way to $1 trillion. the number does show on your charts, the unfunded promise ceases, about $62 trillion in unfunded promise cease that we have made. to pay that off, this federal government over the next 75 years would have to run a $62 trillion surplus and i don't think that is remotely possible to make that happen. the four years out of the last 40, that $17 billion in surpluses over that 40-plus year period and have added to that. the first quarter deficit for fiscal 2010 is the fourth --

would have been the fourth largest annual deficit ever. just to show you how fast we are running through this money. the doctor fix, i mentioned, starting the diet tomorrow. i hope the president says we have a problem with our doctors and congress gave it a two-month extension back in december and doctors get a 21% cut in our reimbursement rate. none of us don't want that to happen. but we don't want to take the fix and add that burden to future generations. put the first doctor fix which will expire and have that paid for by cuts in other spending so we don't take a difficult problem, but it's the most near term difficult problem and show the world that we can fix it. the other point i would like to

talk about in terms of what would happen. the democrats are talking about the economy this and jobs that and all those kinds of things. eye there is a single thing we could do more important to incentivizing american jobs than to seriously address this looming financial crisis of the federal government. if we are serious, i think the confidence that would instill in the market in small businesses and large businesses all over this country would do more than $787 billion stimulus that the house passed over that one republican vote in december, the $80 billion stimulus that is being con stem plated in the -- contemplated in the senate. nothing will have a dramatic effort than with an amendment that requires a balanced budget. i don't think there is anything

we could do to stimulate this economy any better than doing that. it would be palpable if we were to do that. mr. goodlatte: i yield to the the gentleman from colorado. mr. coffman: i thank the gentleman from virginia and appreciate the comments of the the gentleman from texas on this very crital issue about a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget to the u.s. constitution. let me say what is the impact as a former small business owner and as a former state treasurer for the state of colorado, what is the impact of this spending -- deficit spending on the economy as a whole. it's interesting that you hear rumblings around the world from other countries about given the fiscal policies, given the lack of fiscal discipline and how

that will impact the dollars in terms of the strength of the dollar. should the dollar be viewed as the international reserve currency. but i think the immediate effect that we're going to see is the weakened dollar and it will lead to higher inflation rates particularly as the economy and as the economy tries to expand you'll have private borrowing competing with public borrowing and that will create higher interest rates. but certainly the perception of a prolonged weakening of the dollar is going to cost us more to borrow and drive the interest rates. but if you look at just the extraordinary inflationary impacts of chronic deficit spending that it will have on this economy, i think those things are shorter. and i believe those things in

concert will choke off the ability for this economy to recover. if we do not control spending, it will choke off the ability of this economy to recover. we will never see, we will never see the prosperity that americans have experienced up until now and it has always been that the next generation had it better than the last and we are at a turning point now that unless congress changes its ways fairly soon the next generation will not have it better than the previous generation. and i yield back. mr. goodlatte: i agree with the gentleman. we are at great risk. and let's start with the stimulus that a group just before us were touting the benefits of the economic stimulus package of the during the time we have been in the process of spending this $1 trillion, all of which is

borrowed against our children and grandchildren, every penny is added to the national debt, but before we mentioned that we lost 2.74 million jobs since the stimulus program began, but the stimulus is founded on an economic theory and that is keynesia if there is an ecpkeynesian which says if ts an economic downturn the government will borrow money to spend on various programs to employ people and they will generate economic activity and spend the money they earn and will cause people to manufacture goods in response to that demand and the economy will start growing. and this is the last part and always left out when they talk about the economic stimulus package, the last part of keynes

' theory and there would be a growing economy and use those revenues to pay back the money they borrowed to get the process going. and every time there is one of these so-called economic stimulus programs do they pay the money back at the end? no it's very clear there is no such intention here when you have $800 million-plus deficits to say nothing about the unfunded liabilities that is far, far greater than what we are seeing here on this chart. so that is what really puts the lie to the idea that this stimulus is going to have any long-term good effect but the first concern i have is that at some point in time that the amount of money we borrowed when the economy starts to grow not only in this country but elsewhere in the world and some economies are growing at a

healthy pace like in countries like china and brazil, they will have increased demand to borrow money and our government will, too, and that means at some., that at some point because people are saving money and interest rates are very low and banks are afraid to lend money, therefore there is a lot of money in the banks and therefore interest rates are low, but in the not too distant future, we are going to see demand for that money rise and the point made by the gentleman from florida that if you have a $14 trillion, $18 trillion debt and incht rates go up to 5%, 6%, 7% and i remember when the prime rate went over 20% during the carter years, we face those interest rates with this amount of debt, the burden on our government is going to be

staggering and therefore the burden on our economy and our people and it's going to result in near term staggering problems in terms of high interest rates and hyper inflation and very weak dollar and then we're going to have what et seems like what we are going to get into, some evidence in some growth in our economy but continuing to lose jobs. and then behind that, you have inflation set in. then going to have the stagflation that people remember from the early 1980's. this is not a prescription for the future of our children and grandchildren but an economy that will go downhill and have a very, very different future for this country and the people of this country. and it's not too distant when that kind of impact could take

place. mr. conaway: i would like to add on. u.s. taxpayers have benefited from artificial low interest rates because when the world's economy went bad much of that money that was out there fled into u.s. treasuries and we have been warehousing that money for folks all over the world a near zero interest rates because they knew they would get it back from the american taxpayer. what is happening with these increased deficit, not only are we issuing debt to pay off maturing debt but to fund the deficits that are out there every year. you would expect an increasing demand would cost the price of whatever you are demanding, to go up. and that hasn't happened because the rest of the world has fled into u.s. treasuries. economies are rebounding and people are investing their money

at higher interest rates and maybe one of the first indicators that things are going awry you watch the weekly auctions of debt. we have to track lendedebt. we have to track lenders to our debt versus the opportunities they've got in the currencies. this fallacy that the stimulus bill worked is based on the premise that if the government spending will solve the economic problems of this country. if that's the case, this government spent more money in 2009, 2010 than has ever been spent in the history of man. if runaway government spending is the solution, why aren't we in the most vibrant economy than has ever been known. so it makes no sense that you can continue to borrow gaiter and greater levels of debt and continue to spend that on programs that quite frankly

aren't stimulus programs but are money transfers or transfers of wealth between one group of people to another. that cannot sustain itself but our colleagues across the aisle ignore the common sense that you can't spend your way out of this problem said. you can't stand in a bucket and grab the handles and lift yourself off the ground. and that's what we have been doing, this is a giant bucket with all of us standing in it. mr. goodlatte: if the gentleman would yield. the president tomorrow night will cause for a freeze on discretionary spending. we are pleased that he would want to stop the traject other upward in spending that we have seen from this congress but is

that enough? is that going to solve this problem if we lock in in the hire interest rates? mr. conaway: if the gentleman would yield. i would feel better if the president would say not only are we going to freeze spending but freeze it at 2008 levels and go back a couple of years because what has happened with the stimulus, much of that money went into existing programs and elevated the floor of current spending and on top of that, nine appropriation bills as our colleague from colorado said, double-digit increases on that. we are spending more in 2010 than we did in 2008. if the president would say let's reset the clock back to 2008, at those levels and then freeze it there, i would feel better about what he is trying to propose. it seems as if he is going to

freeze spending except the homeland security, v.a. and foreign affairs and then i heard today, well, even within the zreagsary spending it is going to be frozen. it will be interesting to see what the fine details are tomorrow night. . >> it would be wonderful if the president of the united states or any leader of our country would step forward and say, what we really need is to kind of discipline that requiring each and every year that we balance the budget would impose upon this congress. because we make tough decisions but most of the time when the going gets really tough they spend money on both. we talked about pay-go, the gentleman from florida mentioned that as well, and pointed out that the really meaningless and if you look at it, they impose these new rules after the adoption of this new health care bill and the enormous cost of

that and claim that it's being paid for but do so with smoke and mirrors by taxes for 10 years but only providing benefit for six and cut out of medicare at a time when people eligible for medicare is going to skyrocket. starting this year, 2010, those who turned 65 or born after world war ii, and for the next 15 years the number of people who are eligible for the medicare program is going to increase dramatically and during that time i think we're going to see he a need to have -- to see a need to have a significant reform for the medicare program but the money saved is going to be made available to have more people covered under the program, not to divert it to set up a whole new government spending scheme. we've been joined by the gentleman from iowa, and i'd like to yield to mr. king for his comments about the balance budget amendment. mr. king: i thank the gentleman from virginia, mr. goodlatte, for leading on this special order tonight and for leading on

fiscal responsibility here in the united states congress. this balanced budget amendment is something i'm proud to be an original co-sponsor of. i've done so every time that this has been offered since i've been here in congress and the dialogue that's here tonight adds so much to something that's been missing completely, i think, from the administration and from the white house. and we went from a point of republicans pushing towards a balanced budget in listening to the pay-go arguments of the blue dog democrats demagogue on the issue, i don't know where they've gone today, seems to me they've gone underground, i don't hear anything about them about balancing the budget anymore because they understand that in order to fund this kind of profligate spending that we have, this $1.4-plus trillion deficit created by this obama budget, that by their method we have to raise taxes dramatically. what i wanted to do is keep the taxes low, slow the growth in government and for years i said, slow the growth in government so that the economy can catch up.

i'm now to this point where i say it the other way, is that i don't believe the economy can catch up with the spending that we have. i think we actually have to shrink government in order to get it back in line. this is going to be a very big task. it isn't going to happen under speaker pelosi's watch, it isn't going to happen -- or if president obama has a veto pen to control our spending in this congress, but we do have an obligation to advance as much as we can this constitutional amendment. we have an obligation to offer a balanced budget which we did this year, republican study committee balanced budget, that's something i had pushed for some time and we will have a balanced budget offered this year. so i just encourage all of my colleagues, madam speaker, and everybody in the united states of america to step up to this level of responsibility. if we can do it with our family check book we must do it with our government check book. if we fail to do so our economy will continue in this downward spiral. we've got to get our capital, our money, our spending back underneath this and realize that

government cannot grow us out of this economic problem that we are in. it's got to be the private sector and the private sector cannot continue to pay the taxes to service the interests in the debt of the deficit that we've been spending under this administration and i'd point out also that speaker pelosi took the gavel at the end of november elections in 2006, january of 2007, at that time we saw industrial investment go significantly -- capital investment and industry go significantly downward and i watched the members here and the freshmen from the other side tonight talk about how this was all bush's problem. well, if they're taking responsibility for it if it urns good, they have to take the responsibility for when speaker pelosi took the gavel. all spending starts in the house of representatives. i yield back. mr. goodlatte: i thank the gentleman. the gentleman raise as very interesting point about how we grow this economy and what this does to it. because he correctly points out that we're going to grow this economy in the private sector.

people who go out and take the risk of creating a new business or expanding the business they have and creating new jobs as a result of that, by offering a product or a service that people want and are willing to pay for and can afford to pay for. but if the government is out there borrowing $1.3 trillion, $1.5 trillion, $900 billion and $800 billion-plus every year there after as far as the eye can see, what's that going to do to the amount of capital that's available in the private sector? especially if interest rates go up and the government is absorbing so much of the credit that may be available around the country and other countries and their growing economies are also competing for those same limited resources, we're going to find it very, very hard for free enterprise to survive if our government keeps spending more than it takes in and keeps growing in the enormous size, it's projected that if you

continue this rate of spending we're going to have government spending 28% of our grows domestic product. the federal government, -- gross domestic product. the federal government, not even counting local and state governments. it's rated 15% and 20% which is high in my mind and many others as well but it's nothing compared to having that shoot up to 28%. that's a huge additional amount of spending, more than $1 trillion each and every year, and as you can see from this chart, almost all of it borrowed, borrowed against the future, not only of our children and grandchildren, but of the jobs that people hold today and the jobs of 15 million americans who are out there looking for work hope to get if some employers will take the chance and can get the credit to allow them to start or expand their jobs -- their business. we have been joined by another member -- i want to point out, the gentleman from iowa, mr. king, and the gentleman from texas, mr. gohmert, are members of the house judiciary committee as am i. this is the committee that has

jurisdiction over all constitutional amendments and it is the place where we are pushing the hardest to try to get the democratic chairman of the committee to examine this legislation just as it was not that many years ago, when it passed the house of representatives on more than one occasion and on one occasion came within one vote of passing the united states senate. think of what a different country we'd have today if we'd been living under balanced budgets for the last decade instead of what we have seen. now i'd like to yield to my good friend, the gentleman from texas, mr. gohmert. mr. gohmert: i sure thank my friend from virginia for yielding. and, yes, we need a balanced budget amendment and that will do great things, it will strengthen the dollar, it will show the world that we are responsible when it comes to spending for a change. and also, of course, we know that takes ratification of the states and passing both houses and we just flat need to do that. in the meantime we understand

the president may come into this very chamber and stand right up there and actually suggest that perhaps we ought to freeze the budget of three departments. well, i am so glad that our president is coming around and getting onboard with some republican proposals. this is h.r. 4408, but rather than three departments this is -- and i'll read from the bill, filed last year, got lots of republicans on as co-sponsors, no democrats yet, hopefully they'll come onboard after the president starts talking about this kind of thing, but it says to amend the balanced budget and merging deficit control act of 1985, to eliminate automatic increases for discretionary appropriations and for other purposes. it will end the automatic increase in every discretionary

budget in the federal government. now we're talking about being responsible with our spending. no automatic increases every year. nobody i know of in america gets that kind of thing, if they're working, if they produce, perhaps they'll get an increase. well, the government shouldn't get automatic increases every year. if you're going to get an increase it has to be justified. and that has been lacking for so long. i'll read here, it says, this act may be cited as the, quote, within our means budget, womb, act of 2009, whereas from passage of this bill will come a new vote of freedom for america -- american taxpayers and an end to the automatic increases for each department that have been bankrupting america. there are all kinds of good solutions, so i'm proud the president's coming around and perhaps we purn him a little further, we can make him even a

little more responsible so we start reining in the greatest budget deficit in one year history that has just gone on thunderstorm president's watch. so -- on under this president's watch. i appreciate the gentleman from virginia yielding and i look forward to getting democrats now that the president's talking about some good republican ideas. mr. goodlatte: i thank the gentleman for his comments. you know, washington, d.c., has a spending addiction and it has proven to be an addiction that the congress cannot control without a balanced budget amendment requiring that it make the difficult decisions to balance it each and every year. we've gone in a few short years from a deficit of billions of dollars to a deficit of trillions of dollars and we're printing money at an unprecedented pace which presents risks of inflation the likes of which we've never seen. our debt is mounting rapidly and so is the waste associated with paying the interest on that debt. yet congress has so far refused to address these unsettling

problems. this is not a partisan addiction, it reaches across the aisle and afflicts both parties which is why neither party has been able to master it. we need outside help. we need pressure from outside congress to force us to rein in this out of control behavior. we need a balanced budget amendment to the united states constitution. families across our country understand what it means to make tough decisions each day about what they can and cannot afford. according to a recent zogby interactive survey, approximately 70% of americans said they have reduced spending on entertainment in the past year, 40% have limited or canceled vacation plans due to the economic environment, 40% have devees -- decreased spending on food or groceryings, almost 10% have either changed their education plans or chosen not to pursue education plans at all. most troubling, 16% have foregone medical treatment or prescription drugs. these numbers show how sobering our economic recession is. but they also show something

more. they demonstrate a basic principle that honest, hardworking american citizens understand, when your income drops, your spending must drop one way or the other. yet far too frequently this fundamental principle has been lost on a congress that is too busy spending to pay attention to the bottom line. if americans must exercise -- the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman's time has expired. mr. goodlatte: then government officials must be required to exercise the entire standard when spending other people's hard-earned income. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman's time has expired. mr. goodlatte: i urge my colleagues to support the balanced budget amendment to the united states constitution. house joint resolution 1, and i yield back the balance of my time. the speaker pro tempore: under the speaker's announced policy of january 6, 2009, the chair recognizes the gentleman from iowa, mr. king, for 60 minutes. mr. king: thank you, madam speaker. i appreciate the honor to be

recognized, to address you here on the floor of the house. and i appreciate the previous hour of the gentleman from virginia leading it, talking about the responsibility that we all have to provide a balanced budget here in this congress and recognizing that the political forces that are at play here in, let's say in congress and across the country, everybody wants their measure and it has been something where federal dollars have been distributed on down through the chain from the federal government to the state to the counties to the cities and other political subdivisions, parishes, other examples of that, individual organizations, appropriations, and it has been very, very difficult for this congress to find the discipline to produce a balanced budget. and that's one of the reasons why i believe strongly that we've got to amend the constitution so that we have real strict constraints because congress hasn't shown the discipline to balance the budget. and that would not be the case for the individuals that are

here on the floor tonight that are pushing so hard for this constitutional amendment. every one of us that are co-sponsors of the resolution led by mr. goodlatte would vote for a balanced budget, of course, and we would also -- and have supported a constitutional amendment. i want to transition the discussion just a little bit tonight, madam speaker, from this fiscal responsibility on over to the health care responsibility and first i'd take us back to the president's statements throughout the campaign and into his presidency and after he was inaugurated as president over here on the capitol building and that was january 20 of last year. that first anniversary just rolled around last wednesday, madam speaker. and the president of the united states, president obama, said that we are at an economic -- an economic problem, i don't want to overstate the language he used, that we couldn't fix the economy without fixing health

care, health care is apparently a contributor to -- too much health care spend something a contributor to the economic problems that we are in. so it didn't make sense to me and it didn't connect that when you have what was described as an economic meltdown, a chance, a chance that we might be losing the fiscal structure of currency and trade between the countries and the global financial structure, if we're risking a meltdown of the global financial structure, i don't know how we could think the problem is spending too much money on health care, solving that is going to solve the economic potential meltdown. . that was the position of the president. even though it didn't make sense, that was the position that president obama took. and here wer the average

industrialized country spends 9.5%. our numbers are 14% of g.d.p. some will say 16%. so the president's proposal is, we spend too much on health care, but his proposed solution is, spend more on health care, in fact, spevend a lot more on health care -- spend a lot more on health care. so the house wept through a lot of logical contortion nism and -- contortionism and sent it over to the senate when they went through a few more activities because the president said he didn't want to sign a bill that cost more than $900 billion. the gimmicks were so stark that they would have been laughed out of the economy 101 classroom if

they had 10 years of revenue to get down to a number. when you look at the first 10 years, senator gregg said the first real 10 years is $2.5 trillion. we have some other numbers out of the house side that shows $2.1 trillion in cost for the first 10 years. when you look at what john shadegg has put together, numbers go up to $6 trillion. so, the president's problem is we have an economic problem that he wants to solve by first fixing health care because we spend too much money and we are going to spend more money, trillions of dollars more, to maybe as much as $6 trillion more. illogical as i said. you would be laughed out of an

econ 101 classroom to show up coming up with five years of costs and 10 years of revenue. we know that is a flawed premise. flawed result. american people understood that even though the leadership here in the house and the senate didn't seem to understand that. second thing, president of the united states consistently said that we need more competition in health insurance, that there aren't -- the insurance companies aren't competing and don't have competition so in order to do that he proposed we create a federal health insurance program, a federal health insurance program that the federal government get in the business of competing against the health insurance industry. i wonder if he was briefed of how many health insurance companies we have in the united states. 1,300 health insurance companies

in the united states. that would seem to be a lot of competition to me to have 1,300 health insurance companies to have the federal government create one more company, the federal government, as big as it is, then we would have 1,301 companies in the united states selling health insurance. how many policy varieties do we have? well, madam speaker, that number falls in the area of 100,000 possible policy varieties out there in the market plates. 1,300 companies and 100,000 policies to choose from if you could buy from across state lines. that would be too much liberty for an american to have. so instead, he would want to impose a single payer and said he was for single payer plan which would be a federal health

insurance plan to supplant or replace all 1,300 companies and 100,000 companies with the beautiful federal government offerings that would be adequate for anybody in america and satisfy all of us if we just weren't enlightened yet seems to be the message we are hearing from the white house. we find out that we had two flawed premises. one was if we spend too much money on health care, spending more doesn't solve that problem. the second premise was if health insurance companies need more competition, the way to get it is not put the federal government in the business and try to drive them out of business but open up sales across state lines. that young man who is paying $600 thournings for health insurance in new jersey can buy from kentucky where a similar policy would cost him $1,000, not $6,000. if we took the house version of

the health care bill and a young couple in indiana, it turns out, a young han in indiana would see his health insurance premiums go up 300%. $84 a month would be $275 a month because of the mandates and the language that's in the house bill or in the senate bill. and so, the american people watched this and they watched it all across america. we watched the reaction to the rejection of the american people of this irresponsible spending that was discussed deeply in the previous hour. the nationalization of these huge entities that was discussed by the democrats in the hour before sounded to me like george bush nationalized these

companies and taken over the private sector and here wer president obama is stuck with all of that and they don't have any choice except to do a lot more except what they said george bush did was wrong. i'm not here to make a statement into the record that george bush got it all right, madam speaker. he got a lot of it right. a few things he didn't get quite as right. but what we have seen in the last 16 months and at least 12 of them have been under the obama presidency, we have seen the nationalization of a huge formerly private sector entities, entities that are making a profit and competing in the private sector, three large banks, freddie mac, fannie mae, a.i.g., general motors and chrysler and tarp and $787 billion worth of economic stimulus plan that looks like

maybe only about a third of that has been spent at this point. but they still want another $150 billion or more in stimulus two. this is key nesian economics on steroids. i doubt he will make the statement from this well tomorrow night. i have heard him say that franklin roosevelt's new deal did work but the problem he did have was in the second half is he failed to spend enough money. if he would have spent a lot more money, the new deal would have been a good deal but f.d.r. got nervous about spending too much money but he pulled back and what he had was a recession within a depression that was brought about by the federal government not spending enough money.

well, this wild program, these keynesian theory is on steroids driven by fralm. and every nickel and dime, every nationalization, every single move that was taken in the last months of the presidential campaign and in the last months of the bush presidency were all things that were approved and were approved by and supported by president obama. he voted for tarp. he spoke for tarp. he sat at the table in the white house and spoke in favor of tarp. that $700 billion that you can hardly say that is not president obama's responsibility what he spoke for when he negotiated for it, voted for it and took it over. and by the way that tarp was only -- i say only, madam speaker. the original tarp was $350

billion, half of what paulson asked for. the other had to be approved by the president elected later by a congress to be elected later, that's this congress, the pelosi congress, the reid senate and the obama presidency, all of this except 350 billion sm spending. it brings us to this point where the american people have seen that they thought they elected people that were responsible, that understood high finance and the whole big picture that a government has to do so well, that is this constitutional republic, this representative form of government, madam speaker. when we saw the tarp plan come through and the nationalization of a couple large banks and then a.i.g. and we watched some of those insider deals work out pretty good for those people on the independence, as we marched down this line, freddie mac and

freddie mac. american people were getting nervous of the government takeover of private business. when they got to the takeover of the car company, that for sure wasn't george bush. that was all president obama. and when that happened, the american people's light bulb came on because they know cars. when the car czar turned out to be a 31-year-old fellow that never sold or made a car. we don't know if he actually fixed one or what he drove, but he was note qualified to be the car czar and that was the universal opinion. but the american people saw with that example that they didn't know what they were doing inside the white house echo chamber and got ever closer to the civil type of a revolt that took place and we saw it happen in virginia and then we saw it happen again in new jersey and then in

massachusetts, a little over a week ago when scott brown was elected to the united states senate, the most improbable place. and when the exit polling was tabulated and they asked people why did you vote for scott brown, over 70% said, i did so because i want to kill the bill. i want to kill the socialized medicine bill. and madam speaker, that bill may be dead. and it i know it's a monster and might be a cold-blooded monster and on a cold day, you can't tell if a cold-blooded monster is alive or dead. i want to make sure the bill stays dead and the american people are glad that it is dead and don't want to see it come up again by the white house, by the speaker of the house, by the majority leader of the united states senate or anybody else. they believe that a shout of joy

went up all over america when massachusetts elected scott brown because people are going to be allowed to keep their liberty. and we are going to make sure they can keep their liberty and my colleague from texas is certainly in the middle of this put a declaration of health care independence. we want to put a marker down that we adhere to and keep our word on because people in government, i mean at least in congress who do give their word and keep their word as calf leer has been dealt with here in the last few months coming out of the white house, those that will sign on this declaration of health care independence. we will keep our word. i say that here and i haven't backed up on mine. i think i get long good in east texas. quite interesting the people

they send up heir. i would like to yield to my friend to the the gentleman from texas, judge gohmert. mr. gohmert: i know from having visited iowa it is composed of extraordinary people as well and i tell you just in the last month, we have seen extraordinary things across the country from massachusetts for one. when we had the senator -- basically hold up the health care bill. many of us hoped that it was going to be on good principle but it turned out it was just for money to take back to his state. but, here again, you have to love people in america's heartland. the gentleman knows where

nebraska is when he comes back and says i negotiated hundreds of millions of dollars for you in this state and what did the people of nebraska say? the vast majority said, we don't want that dirty money. it's not ours. we don't want extorted or dirty money. we just want fairness. and you just got to love folks who have that sense of equity and fairness and justice and understand where the country came from. . it's that spirit, that same spirit that started a revolution back in -- going back to 1775 and 1776 with the production, as we know in july, of the declaration of independence. and what a historic time that was, what a powerful time that was. and we know going back to those

days that -- we have the letter that james adam wrote abigail after the signing of the declaration of independence and the last part of the letter he says, talking about the celebration and the incredible event that occurred, the coming together, the first draft, of course, that jefferson did and of course the first person he showed it to was then john adams. they politically were at odds but they were friends at that time, very close friends, even though they argued over political issues. and then adams was just taken aback with how fantastic the document was. he may or may not have made some minor changes. and then second to see it was benjamin franklin and benjamin franklin made more changes, the editor and publisher that he was, and then that was brought to the body and they debated and

they came up with this -- the final declaration. and after they had come together they signed it. the last part of john adams' letter to his wife, abigail, was this, his words, i'm apt to believe that it, the signing of the declaration, would be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. we call it july fourth, independence day. it ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverans by solemn acts of devotion to god almighty. john adams wrote, it ought to be sol omized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, of course we use fireworks instead of guns, bells, bondfires, illume nation from one end of this con -- i lule

nation from one end of this continent to the other from this time forever more. then he went on very seriously, would you think me transported with enthusiasm but i am not. i am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration and to support and defend these states. yet through all the gloom i can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. i can see that the end is more than worth all the means. and that posterity will turn up in that base transaction which i trust in god we will not ruin. so basically that's the gist into the letter and that was quite an occasion. and in other correspondents he'd

said, you know, we have within our grasp the opportunity to govern ourselves that people have only dreamed about, that theologians have written and talked about but it's within our grasp to govern ourselves. but then we also know that one of thomas jefferson's great lines was, the normal course of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain. and that's what we've been seeing particularly for the last year or so. liberty has been yielding and government has been gaining. we know that government is where the jobs have been gained, not in the private sector, not in liberty jobs, not jobs of freedom, but government taking more and more away from the private sector and then we see this health care monstrosity,

2,000 pages not about health care, you know, we've heard people say, it's about the government taking over 1/6 of the economy. but i like the way our friend tom price put it, it's not about taking over 1/6 of the economy, it's about taking over 100% of of every individual. that's what it's about. and so as my friend from iowa knows, we've spent many, many hours with friends like michele bachmann and others, so many others up here on capitol hill, putting our heads together and working, giving and take, to come up with a document that really declares what we believe about health care. and i imagine my friend from iowa is as sick as i am of hearing people, even hear on -- here on the floor, come in and say, well, republicans, they don't want reform, they're the party of no, no, no.

we have over 40 bills that are good solutions to health care problems and i know as my friend from iowa agrees, we need reform, we want reform to health care, we cannot have the costs continue to skyrocket like nothing else in this country. we can't have that. we need reform but we don't need more government, we need health care reform. and it was in that spirit of coming together, not with something as dramatic as john adams and thomas jefferson and ben franklin and those incredible intellects came up with the original declaration of independence, but just a modicum of that great spirit of independence that they had and not wanting government to gain and liberty to yield but wanting liberty to triumph and yet -- and let everyone have the

opportunity for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. so in that spirit the declaration of health care independence was put together. no one got shot, no one lost their fortune as did so many of those 56 signers of the original declaration. we owe them so much. but we also owe them not to continue to allow liberty to yield and government to gain. they told us what would happen. read their writings, read their quotes. we owe them better than that and that's why it's going to be so great to have so many people coming together and say, i'm making this declaration, i am pledging that we are going to adhere to those principles of liberty and yet providing a better chance for health care

with affordable health care under patient control where the relationship between a doctor and patient doesn't have a government intermediary, doesn't have an insurance company get in between the patient and doctor, it gets us back to something that's been so desperately missing for so long, that is a regular doctor-patient relationship. and to think in that 2,000 pages one of the biggest parts of it is, we're going to bring all the health care records to washington and we're going to store them here for you because that way we'll know all of your deepest, darkest, private secrets. there is nothing your government won't know once we get hold of every one of your most private medical -- records. that was a big deal. you hear them say, we'll cut this out, we'll cut that out, because they know when they have every person's medical records

in washington, d.c., and in both the senate and house bill you make the internal revenue service the enforcement arm for a health care bill, the worst of all worlds, the government knowing all your most private secrets about your own body and the internal revenue service having access to them and to your finances to bring about, as tom price said, 100% control of your body. that is something that should be intolerable. that's why we need a declaration of health care independence and i know there are friends across the aisle who believe abortion is just fine, it's just tearing tissue out. i know we have other friends like batter stupak who know what abortion is, that it's taking a

life. but surely, surely we can get the vast majority in this body to agree that taxpayers should be protected from being forced to pay for abortion when they know and believe their hearts it is taking the life of our most vulnerable people. there's just so much that needs to be done to drive a stake through the heart of this terrible monstrosity called the health care reform bill and with that i yield back to my friend from iowa. thank you. mr. king: reclaiming my time, listening to the gentleman from texas recount the circumstances by which the declaration of independence was written, and i recall reading through a fair amount of that history and watching a movie or two, some of the frustration that thomas jefferson felt with john adams'

scrutiny of his language and later on ben franklin's and then the broader congress, i've never been in a position where i could sympathize with thomas jefferson as i do. but i also -- i so much more appreciate the artful work of the declaration of independence because it was a product of a lot of fruitful minds that had to come together and to be able to -- to be able to take all of the ideas and patch them together and then turn it into something that's beautifully eloquent at the same time is pretty hard to do, it's like a piece of sheet music and trying to patch in different stanzas here and there and have it come out and play it right before the orchestra. the declaration of independence has stood up before the test of time as one of the most beautifully written documents anywhere. but part of the recent is not just its eloquence but it speaks to the heart of humanity. we know -- we hold these truths to be self-evident. that we are endowed by our

creator with certain inalienable rights and i wonder what thomas jefferson would think if he could go down to the jefferson memorial and realize that of the four panels inside the memorial, three of them, the quotes of jefferson, three of them reference his belief in god, it's hard for the people on this side to argue that jefferson was a diest when three of his quotes referenced god, and by the way there are two typeows in there, madam speaker, that i would challenge the historians to go down there and check on. one of them comes to mind right away and the other one i'll think of when i go back down there myself to read it. but i wanted to take up this issue of our declaration of health care independence which will be rolled out tomorrow and we will weigh it out in a more of a clear and concise form, but it's laid out on these principles that you've heard mr. gohmert talk about, and the prediction of what would happen, let me say, what would have happened if that whole --

horrible socialized medicine bill would have been sent to the president's desk where if he could sign his name at all he certainly would have signed the bill. he had no reservations about anything that was coming out of the pelosi house and the reid senate. people in massachusetts did, the president did not. and the american people line up against this in any form, any of these forms that have been proposed, at least 70% in opposition. and so here's what -- why first the american people lined up against this socialized medicine proposal, either the house or the senate version or the obamacare as it's sometimes described. because we know that washington takeover and the american people know, madam speaker, that a washington takeover of our american health care would, it would deny fundamental personal and economic liberties and it would devalue -- it would devalue our individual liberties and it would reduce the principle of limited government as established by the constitution. that's number one. it would have increased costs

and taxes upon every entity that we could possibly mention. and it would have crippled our american economy and it would have created inescapable new taxes, mandates, when you require -- from the federal government were for the first time in the thriftry of the united states to produce or approval a product and then require every american to purchase that product, the people that couldn't afford it, send them a check and then say, you use this voucher to buy yourself some health insurance, or by the way, if your employer has 50 or more employees, they have to provide you health insurance for you, unless you're in the construction business, then it's five or more employees because of the exemption that was written in by the construction labor union. so all these construction companies that are sitting here with five and maybe tomorrow going to have six employees, are only going to have five, those who have six through 49 would be treated differently than every other employer because they were in the construction business because somebody in the

construction business had unions that were strong enough to leverage a piece of favetism into the legislation. . if there is a levy, you have to pay a tax and they go out and buy your insurance for you. the only difference is, who actually handles the transaction. you handle it yourself to handle the levy. a mandate to buy insurance to compel people to buy a product, first time in history that has ever been done is a new tax and on everybody who has to participate that wouldn't have otherwise been participating. that is one of the other bad things about this. it would institutionalize a massive, ever expanding federal bureaucracy that is impersonal

and inpractical and would devise new ways to grow and get new ways to diminish the american people. that is the nature of burst burr. and we put people in white shirts and ties and set them off and then they set about building empire and they'll write rules that we never see and those rules will have the full force and effect of law because this congress has and difficult indicated a lot of our responsibility when it comes to rules. the bureaucracy grows and the administration grows and it also would have and i say have because i believe this bill is dead would empower bureaucrats to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship and would undermine quality, limit choice and increase the costs. these are the down sides that would cause the american people to rise up and express

themselves in two governor races, nationalized races in virginia and in new jersey and when they had the opportunity to have a national election for a united states senator in massachusetts, they took it. but the american people appealed to the did he sensey of their elected majorities here in this congress without a response except to do more force feeding of liberal social-engineering policies that 3e78 don't want. the level of aleetism and arrogance is breathtaking and i don't think it has reached this high. the disregard for the constitution when one asks where do you see the constitutional authority to pass a national health care act such as you have done here on the floor of the house of representatives, a ca

valier attitude. people will take the oath and will do so with the havend on the bible and walk out with no other thought to it at all and there is a whole movement on this side of the congress that believes that the constitution doesn't mean what it says. they'll make that argument. i sit on the constitution subcommittee. i have heard it over and over again. back in the 1930's, the u.s. supreme court had language threaded into a document saying that the constitution is living and breathing. if it doesn't mean what it says, then i would ask the question, what is it for? who is protected by the "countdown" stution that is living, breathing and changing and can be amended by the federal judge in any courtroom in america.

i had a jury tell me if you give me a favorable judge and jury, i will amend the constitution. and that happens by precedents. but i take this stand, that's this. this constitution does mean what it says. the text means what it says and it means what it was understood to mean at the time of the ratification in the base document oral amendments as things flowed through. if it's something else then the constitution is no guarantee whatsoever. it simply is an art fact of history and they hold up and make the argument that you are a lay person and can't begin to understand what this constitution means. i don't think that a robe makes

a person exclusive when it comes to understanding the english language. i'm a ditch digger by trade and i understand what this means. we see a lot of people standing under american flags, don't tread on me flags with the constitution, they understand what it means better than someone who has taken the oath to the constitution in this house of representatives, madam speaker. but this constitution is threatened by socialized medicine, the bill that has to stay dead. and we also offer solutions and framework to go forward, solution and framework to go forward and we say we the people and representatives of the united states make this declaration that as a matter of principle, we want to protect the doctor-patient relationship which the gentleman from texas talked about and reject this national debt that is heaped on

us over and over again and was the subject of the previous hour and we want to improve quality of care and we want transparency in the negotiations and we want to treat every american citizen in the same fashion that we treat our public officials and vice versa. good enough for an american citizen, it ought to be good enough for an elected public official wherever they might be serving. and i appreciate the discussion about the funding for abortion. when there is a policy that is seeking to be advanced by this side of the aisle in the united states congress that would compel the taxpayers to fund abortions, something that is and hornt to the value system of america that is about egregious it can get, having that money extracted out of your pocket to go to the planned parenthood or

abortion clinic. when you think about the taxpayers, that is about as close as you can get to having a complete revolt on your hands. when i looked out last friday at the march for life, numbers in the mall here and standing on that stage, people as far as the eye can see as reported to be in the neighborhood of 200,000 pro-life people bused from all over this country and some flew in to come and stand up and march and pray and speak for life and as they do every day in the united states. that is the largest continuing demonstration in the history of this country. there's no movement that has brought those numbers of people here to washington, d.c. here year after year after year 37 years and think what they had to say and do if there was a socialized bill passed that

compels people to fund abortions or brokers policies that pays for abortions, those people that came, i among them, would have been greater number than 200,000 and some point they aren't going to be polite as this good group of people are. i'm glad that marker has been put down. the new mandates that are being proposed on patients, employers on states, we have heard from the states. that means exempt me from the cost of the new mandates. but in reality there was a moral position negotiated in that, too. and there was language that didn't hold up to the language of the stupak amendment. i supported it, but i would have to have done more and better but there was an eroded standard that was rejected by the pro-life organizations in the country. that was traded off by a

monetary one which is an exemption in paying the increases in medicaid that would come about from the increases in the socialized bill that brought about these special deals, special deals for -- let's go to maine. $11 billion for community health clinics in maine. $11 billion. there's a kickback there. the exemption from the elimination of the medicare advantage programs in florida for that senator nelson, the cornhusker kickback and louisiana purchase, the list goes on. those we do know about, those are all special deals, all those special deals are completely rejected by this declaration. and the mandates that came would be setting up health insurance

policies in the country that are funded by the taxpayer and compel employers to ensure their employees or individuals to buy the insurance if they're not working or have an employer that is not mandated to buy and within all of that we would fund illegals and give them their own health insurance policies so we can put another magnet out here, jobs magnet, welfare magnet and private health insurance policy magnet, argued and defended by representative did you ter res., mr. honda and many others that the american people that an individual health insurance policy to people who break into the united states illegally. what a reach that is from a justice standpoint. we cannot be expanding any

benefits to illegals in america. we provide emergency services by law and lot of times we don't backfill the bank accounts for health care providers. if you go down to arizona and a arizona, the most southerly trauma center is university of tucson. the rest of those hospitals have closed and can't provide health care services to illegals and the american america tares can't afford to pay them either. that is important for us to talk about. i would be happy to yield to the the gentleman from texas. mr. gohmert: i appreciate the gentleman pointing these things out. i do recall back in the president's address here in this very chamber here in september, i believe he said in that speech there would be no funding for

abortion. now, the trouble for us was that some people in this body actually read and had been reading the house bill. and there is one section there and i don't have the bill with me. i've got a copy all tabbed that i've gone through because i was reading the bill. and shockingly the president said the money wouldn't go for abortions, you turn the page and there is a title that says abortions for which federal funding are approved. and you go, whoa, i guess the president didn't know about that. and we heard the president say there's no money in this health care bill that's going to go for illegal aliens. and i think one of our friends hollered out about that time,

when the fact is, as we know in the house health care bill passed, one of the things that had been written up in the local papers, there were members across the aisle that said if you put a requirement in this bill that people show identification to show that they are legally here that they are legal residents and therefore getting the health care insurance benefits then we're voting against the bill. well, some of us think that should have been the motion to recommit and that would have either gotten the bill pulled or gone down to defeat if our friends across the aisle said no but voted in there and approved. but the way it stood, i think most everybody knew except for the president -- we know he