the rule being proposed here today is a grave mistake and undemocratic embarrassment. and i for one think this body can do better. we owe it to the american people to allow members, members of this body on both sides who have good ideas to be heard. especially the ideas to address the needs of rural and working class people who will see their incomes and choices slashed by this bill. instead of an inclusive debate on how to conserve our resources and provide clean affordable energy for american businesses and families, the democrats' answer to the worse recession in decades is a national energy tax. thinly disguised as a climate change bill. billions of dollars wasted on extra energy costs and millions of jobs lost is an extremely high price to pay for a bill that is estimated at best to slow the earth's temperature rises by 1/100 of a single degree by 2050 and no more than .2 of a degree by 2060. it's clear, nancy pelosi's national energy tax will kill american jobs, it will raise prices on hardworking american families and does almost nothing to clean up our environm

it sound fundamentally undemocratic that you don't have someone independently counting the ballots and the majority is not required. i keep coming back to mr. sullivan, the ceo of aig who had performance requirements for bonuses, he went to his board of directors and said we want you to waive the requirement for performance in this situation even though we just lost $6 billion and give the bonuses anyway and guess what the board did? they said yes! those bonuses are offered and he received $1 million a month after he was fired. it was extraordinary, it is wrong, the american public is on to it. my question to all of you is since you can always manipulate the system as mr. sullivan did, where he actually had performance requirements in place for purposes of giving bonuses, why not just require of all of the members of the board of directors a fiduciary duty to the shareholders? >> the problem is that in forcing this is difficult because there is -- courts are not going to second-guess the judgment of the elector. this is why the main remedy is to make directors accountable to the judgme

and the situation was very undemocratic. [laughter] because we were sitting very up -- up maybe higher than that. in a very -- and we were in what they call is position or positions, how we sit, how we talk to each other is very important. and it's important in dialog. but anyway, i am spoke to speak about the freedom to write. but is the freedom to write separated from other freedoms? economic freedom, political freedom, sexual freedom. here you have the freedom of everywhere, is the free market really free? because the word "freedom" sometimes very misleading. you know, you feel free but you are not free. it's like when i ask women who are veiled, why are you veiled? they say we are free. we choose the veil. i ask women who put makeup under the veil. i call it post-modern veil. i ask the women why you put the makeup. they say we are free or women who are naked and they show half their breasts i ask why are you naked, they say freedom, freedom to dress or freedom to undress, freedom to be veiled or not to be veiled or to be

lifetime appointment and guaranteed salaries are given the power to set policy, then that is an undemocratic act because we allowed them to set policy then they cease to be accountable to the american people. the supreme court hold extraordinary power over our lives. it takes only five justices to determine what the words of the constitution mean. you'd think it's 9. it's really just 5. 5 of the 9 agree that the constitution means this or that. it's as good -- hold your hats, it's as good as three fourth of the vote. this is a powerful thing, a supreme court justice the ability to interpret words of the constitution. when justices break from the ideal of modest and restrained practices as described by hamilton, they begin creating rights and destroying rights based on their personal views, which they were never empowered to do. the temptation to reinterpret the constitution leads judges sometimes, i think -- i say they succumb to the siren call using that opportunity they might possess given a point in time to enact something they'd like to see occur, maybe somebody will write in a law revie

looking back at some of the newspaper clippings from the various bills that presidents -- it was undemocraticor presidents to receive pensions that they were just another citizen toiling in the service of their country and that -- when they were done, finished with their presidential service that they would return to being just ordinary citizens. it's really quite a grand ideal but as harry discovered not a very realistic one. incidentally, congress has been a little more generous or was a little more generous with their own pensions. they began collecting pensions in 1946. unfortunately, for harry, that's the year after he left congress. harry's timing was not very good when it came to getting a pension. about a month after he left office, in february of 1953, it seemed like his money problems were solved when doubleday, the publisher gave harry an advance of $600,000 to write his memoirs. bear in mind, at the time the average worker made about $4,000 a year. it seemed like grant, his problems had been solved, his money problems had been solved by a book deal. but as anybody who's ever gotte