[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 109 (Monday, July 20, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H8401-H8408]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DEMOCRAT'S VERSION OF HEALTH CARE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for
60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be
recognized to address you here on the floor of the House and in the
aftermath of the previous Special Order that has discussed primarily
the health care and health insurance issue here in America.
I notice continually the expression ``health care'' gets substituted
for the expression ``health insurance.'' There is a distinction.
Everybody in America has access to health care, which means everybody
in America has health care. Everybody in America does not have health
insurance.
When we blend our verbiage, sometimes it's intentional and sometimes
it's not. I catch myself occasionally using the wrong expression
because our debates here blur the two. It's comparable to the situation
when people say ``immigrants.'' They sometimes
[[Page H8402]]
mean illegal immigrants and sometimes they mean legal immigrants.
Sometimes they mean legal and illegal immigrants. Well, health care and
health insurance have been blended the same way, but there are
distinctions.
We should remember, everybody in this country has access to health
care. Everybody in this country that needs service will get service.
We're talking about how we address those that are uninsured, not those
that don't have access to health care or that do not have health care.
I thought it was interesting that the gentlelady from Texas put up
the poster: Republicans' ideas on health care--or health insurance.
I've forgotten which that is. I look back on last week, the gentleman
from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) put up a poster that actually had about the same
title to it. The gentlelady from Texas' poster was blank on Republican
ideas and the gentleman from Ohio's poster was full of question marks
on Republican ideas, but they were both generated by the same people.
The Democrat majority caucus produces these posters that come here to
the floor.
{time} 2100
But we are full of all kinds of ideas. I am happy to talk about those
ideas, Mr. Speaker. Some will say that you can't beat something with
nothing, and I would submit that you can beat bad ideas with most
anything. And a really, really bad idea is socialized medicine,
national health care, HillaryCare, ObamaCare, United Kingdom Care,
Canadian Care, European Union Care. All of that is bad stuff. Freedom
is good stuff. I am all about freedom, and these proposals that are
coming from the Democrat majority are about diminishing our freedom,
about taking away our rights, about taking away our responsibilities
and in the process of doing so, devolving downward the American
vitality, the American Dream, the American can-do spirit.
What kind of American would sit around and wring their hands and say,
Woe is me, I can't figure out how to take care of myself? Did anybody
come to America and walk through the Great Hall at Ellis Island,
thinking, I'm so glad I am here now in this welfare state where I don't
have to worry about taking care of myself, woe is me no longer because
the United States of America will take care of me?
That kind of people didn't come through Ellis Island. Ellis Island
now is a tourist center. The United States of America is a welfare
state. Now they sneak into the United States, thinking, Yes, America
will take care of me. They think that they have now arrived at the
giant ATM of the Western Hemisphere that will provide for everyone's
wants and needs. And if they aren't so sure, they just have to listen
to Congress here for a while, and somebody over on this side of the
aisle, as a rule, will articulate some other defined want of some
people that's not a need. But even though it's just a want, not a need,
it will be declared to be a right and maybe even a constitutional
right.
We have got to understand what we're doing here. It's real people
that are working, real people that have jobs, real people that toil
away to produce goods and services that have a marketable value; and
they're being taxed day after day, month after month, tapping into the
sweat of the brow of the salt of the Earth people in America.
They're being told, Your taxes won't increase. It will just be
everybody else's taxes that increase and that ObamaCare is going to be
a better deal than whatever care you have. But if you like yours, then
you don't have to worry because if you like the health care you have,
you get to keep it. That's what the President said, correct? If you
like the health care or the health insurance--I'm not sure which phrase
he was actually talking about--if you like it, you get to keep it.
The problem is, it's not true. The President of the United States,
however powerful he is, cannot make that promise with any sense of
confidence that he can keep that promise because it will not be the
President that decides whether Wal-Mart, for example, keeps the health
insurance programs that they have in place for their employees. That
will be decided by the management of Wal-Mart who, a little over a week
ago, announced that they would support an employer-mandated program
that requires employers to provide health insurance for employees. Now
once they made that decision, it didn't necessarily mean that they
endorsed the Obama plan because it really isn't quite yet an Obama
plan. There are only concepts throughout and some language that is
moving through this House. But what it said was that they would endorse
an employer-mandated plan.
Now that opens the door for Wal-Mart to be in a position to make the
decision when the public option, the Federal Government-run health
insurance policy would be set up to compete directly against the many
hundreds of private health insurance policies that we have.
For the President to say, If you like your health insurance policy,
fine, you get to keep it, you only get to keep it until there is an
alternative there that might be a better alternative for your employer.
Your employer, like Wal-Mart or any other proud private sector company
that's there that is providing health insurance for a majority of their
employees, will be making a decision on whether they want to opt into
the public plan or they want to maintain the private plan; but also the
newly-to-be-named health insurance czar will be writing some new rules
for every single health insurance company in America.
Now that lays the backdrop for what was said over this last hour and
the way we need to be thinking about what transpired here within the
last hour. However, I've also come here to talk about a number of
different things.
One of them is that if we remember correctly, Speaker Pelosi came to
this Congress, and she said that she was going to drain the swamp. She
was going to drain the swamp of corruption and alleged that there was
corruption. Night after night a team would come down here for years--I
would say 2 or 3 or 4 years--and make allegations about certain Members
of Congress, allegations about the motives of certain Members of
Congress. The comments about the culture of corruption was fairly
baffling to me. You can point to examples on either side. But Nancy
Pelosi pledged that she would produce the most open Congress in history
and that there would be legitimate debate, and there wouldn't be
favorites being played.
Now here is an example of what Nancy Pelosi said. She said, ``I don't
want to have legislation that is used as an engine for people to put on
things that are not going to do what we are setting out to do, which is
to turn this economy around. I have the most to prove with this
package. The choices we are making are those that will work, that must
work. Our economy requires it. America's families need it. This is
urgent.'' That's Speaker Nancy Pelosi, January 25, 2009, this year, the
end of January.
That was her statement about how we were going to direct the
efficiency of the stimulus plan to doing what's good for our economy.
We're going to turn this economy around. Well, I came down to the floor
and put up this very same picture. This very same picture is of a
saltwater marsh harvest mouse. This is the saltwater marsh harvest
mouse. It's a mouse that Speaker Pelosi has been trying to get special
earmarks for for a long time. And as she has been resisted on that, I
pointed out that in the stimulus package, there were $32 million set
aside for the saltwater marsh harvest mouse. I came to the floor with a
picture of this mouse and the numbers up on top.
Of course, the spokespersons for the Speaker, the defenders of the
status quo, and the defenders of the person that was going to come here
and clean up this Congress, the one who has now established the most
draconian Congress, I believe, in history, the one that is the least
deliberative body in history, the one who has launched an all-out
assault on this deliberative democracy and said that she didn't have an
earmark in the stimulus bill for this saltwater marsh harvest mouse and
others in her defense said, Steve King made it up. He just pulled a
number out of the air and made an allegation that there was an earmark
in there for the saltwater marsh harvest mouse.
However, now here we are far enough down the road, here are the real
facts: the $32 million has been reduced to $16.1 million. Now the
saltwater marsh harvest mouse not only has his own special earmark
of $16.1 million, it sets aside his brackish little marsh down there by
San Francisco so that he can
[[Page H8403]]
hop around in it and sets aside a marsh down there near San Francisco
at the cost of $16.1 million, Madam Speaker, which is no economic
stimulus plan.
We're going to do the things that count. We're going to do the things
that do the most for the economy. The language here: turn this economy
around. We're going to do that by setting aside a hopping zone for a
pet project here. This little pet, the saltwater marsh harvest mouse,
he gets an earmark. You can't quite see it there, but he needs that ear
notched a little bit because now he is a $16.1 million earmark.
All this borrowing, expanding the debt to the American people, the
American taxpayers and Americans not yet born, to where the debt for
every man, woman and child in America today totals up to over $37,000
per individual. Still their hearts are hardened, and still they want to
raise the debt, and still they want to spend money on frivolous
projects that don't have a merit that affects the people that are
paying the taxes, nor could a project like that ever gain the support
of the majority of the people in this Congress.
This is like the little mouse bridge to nowhere, $16.1 million for
the little pet project, notched little earmark, the saltwater marsh
harvest mouse, the pet project of Speaker Pelosi. She said she came
here to clean up this process to make sure that there weren't
favorites, and President Obama went on at great length about how he
wasn't going to sign any bill that had any earmarks in it. Then he
signed a bill with about 9,000 earmarks in it, and then President Obama
made other remarks about the integrity of the process.
Yet we've seen earmark after earmark, billions and billions of
dollars that have been unfolded here going on our debt, stacking it up
against the American people. We've seen a process that has been shut
down where we get surprise bills that get dropped on us. The stimulus
package was a last-minute drop on us, and we could count not days but
hours of reading and understanding what's in a bill. Thinking in terms
of 1,000 or more pages with 8 or 10 hours to read the bill and then try
to analyze all that it means when bills reference other sections of
existing code, they reference definitions that exist in other places;
and then if you get something like that read through, you also have to
figure out what's not in it, what's missing, what's been omitted and,
furthermore, what are the implications of what is in it, and what are
the implications of what's missing.
That's why we need the public. There is no one person--in fact, all
435 Members of this House of Representatives do not have among them,
even if given enough time, the ability to analyze the implications of
big pieces of legislation on their own, not without our staff, not
without our constituents, not without people that have a direct
responsibility for the components of the legislation that affects them
the most.
Good legislation is written by Members of Congress that go out among
the districts and among the real people that are working for a living
and paying real taxes out of their income and their profits, taking a
look at the circumstances of what's right and what's wrong, listening
to the proposals that come from them and putting together careful
legislation that brings about a right result.
Once that's put together, and then you float that out to get the
input from Democrats and Republicans; and it isn't just the input from
the people that sit in these seats, Mr. Speaker. It's the input from
the American people that talk to the people that sit in these seats who
make the difference. When you short-circuit this process, when you take
this process and bypass the committee process or do a mock markup, a
sham markup in a committee process and pass a bill out and then do a
bait-and-switch and bring a different bill to the floor than passed out
of the committee--and it has happened at least three times this year, a
different bill came to the floor than was passed out of the committee
because they didn't like an amendment that actually passed in the
committee--they don't seem to understand that the job of the Speaker or
the job of the Chair of a committee is to bring out the will of the
group. That's the essential responsibility of someone who is the
Speaker or someone who is the Chair of a committee, bring out the will
of the group.
It's not to impose their will on the group but to bring out the will
of the group even when the Chair of the committee recognizes that there
are good ideas coming before the committee but maybe it doesn't exactly
fit the politics that they've been directed to bring about out of
committee, and when an amendment comes out of committee like, example
for, an amendment that would have blocked all funding to ACORN to have
the Chair afterwards change the language, send a different bill or a
different piece of substance to the floor of the House of
Representatives, and the Members here have a right to have full
confidence that the bill that comes to the floor reflects the product
of the committee, too often it does not.
The window for reading a bill and debate and deliberation has been so
short that on the cap-and-trade bill, that big bill of 1,100 pages that
we had a very short time to digest, was brought to the floor, was
filed, scheduled for debate; and at 3:09 a.m. there was a 316-page
amendment to an 1,100 page bill that was dropped into the Record at
3:09 a.m.; and that morning we took the bill up.
{time} 2115
And we are to debate and deliberate and understand and evaluate with
good judgment and due diligence the implications, ramifications and
factors that come out of one of the biggest, most important bills in
the history of this Congress? I believe Congress made, the House of
Representatives made the most colossal mistake ever made in the history
of this House. Three hundred sixteen pages at 3:09 a.m. on an 1,100-
page bill. If you wanted to read it, no one had a chance to read it. No
one had an opportunity to evaluate it. It was a surprise tactic.
Actually, it wasn't a surprise. We have gotten to the point where we
expect those kinds of tactics. But that is bad policy. If you are
passing legislation that cannot withstand the light of day, it should
be pretty clear that it must be bad legislation, and the American
people will reject it.
To read a bill and have time to read a bill, I would direct, Mr.
Speaker, your attention, and the public's attention, to section 108 of
the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 which reads in part, A
measure or matter reported by any subcommittee shall not be considered
in the House unless the report of that committee, upon that Member or
matter, has been available to the Members of the House for at least 3
calendar days. And that is 3 calendar days prior to the consideration
of that Member or matter in the House of Representatives.
We have a law, Mr. Speaker, we have a law that requires 3 calendar
days to read a bill. But Mr. Speaker, the ``saltwater marsh'' Speaker,
the ``personal earmark for brackish wetlands'' Speaker, insists that a
bill can come to the floor, and it can be a bill that no one has seen,
it can be one that is written in the Speaker's office, and it can have
an amendment right behind it written also in the Speaker's office just
as a surprise tactic, and before the public can understand what is
going on, actually before they can even believe someone would tear
asunder this deliberative body in the process, it is an act of the
House of Representatives messaged over to the Senate, and on the cap-
and-trade bill, the 1,100 pages sat down here, the 309 pages didn't.
And when the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) asked the question, do
we have a bill before us that is the subject of our debate? The answer
that came from the Speaker's chair was--I don't remember exactly, but I
remember the response: Well, we don't quite have it yet, but everyone
knows what we are talking about.
So after many exchanges, finally, we suspended the operation for
about 35 minutes while we went through this exchange of trying to
determine, what is the subject of our debate? Shouldn't the House of
Representatives have, even if no one else can get their hands on the
paperwork or the electronic version, shouldn't the United States House
of Representatives have at least one copy of the subject? Have got a
dictionary over here, a big unabridged dictionary. It is there if
someone were to argue about what the English language is. But we are
here arguing about a bill that no one can look up and read. No one can
verify if we are accurate. The
[[Page H8404]]
bill's amendment was not here. The bill was. The amendment wasn't.
Later they brought the amendment down and began to integrate it. It
takes a long time to integrate 316 pages into 1,100 and to get it
right.
And the question was asked, If this bill passes the House and it is
not available for inspection by any Members of the House, is it
possible for us to message over to the Senate if it doesn't exist at
the time of its passage? Well, somehow, we did. But it shouldn't be
possible. The process has to be right.
We should follow the law. We should follow this section of the law
that is section 108 of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970. That
is one of the laws we should follow. We should follow the law of common
decency and respect for each other and respect for the process and the
Founding Fathers and for the Constitution and do due diligence and not
put generational legislation up and pass it because there was a
political momentum to get it done before anybody can see what it is
that we are actually doing here and do it sometimes in the middle of
the night.
I would be really happy to yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota,
who I know has been very engaged in these issues and on top of helping
to clean up some of the open doors that are here for the culture of
corruption that exists under this leadership of the House of
Representatives.
I yield so much time as she may consume to the gentlelady of
Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann).
Mrs. BACHMANN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Iowa for this
moment just to be able to speak about what is happening here in
Washington, D.C. I don't think anyone has ever seen anything like what
we have seen in the recent months, and we can even trace it back to
last fall when the Democratic Congress could not wait to get passed the
TARP funding bill together with the former Bush administration.
They were in a hurry, just like the gentleman from Iowa has stated.
We are seeing that this is a Congress that is in a hurry, in a hurry
because they have got an agenda. They are on a steamroller path. They
are on a blitzkrieg path. They have to get everything done yesterday.
We can't have time to read bills. We can't take time to truly count the
costs, because we are in a hurry. There is an agenda that has to be
performed.
We heard the President of the United States tell the Democrat Caucus
just last week, We can't miss this opportunity for reform. We have got
to get it done. We have to do it now. We can't wait. We have got to do
everything now. That is what we were told last fall. We were told that
we would see economic Armageddon if we didn't pass the $700 billion
TARP bill.
What was that? That was a blank check. We were told, Just trust me.
It was a ``trust me'' defense. We were told, Just trust the Treasury
Secretary. They have to have $700 billion, or we will see an absolute
collapse of the financial world. And so we were all pushed into it. I
voted ``no'' on that bill. But the Democratic-controlled Congress
passed the $700 billion bailout for the banking system and also for the
foreclosure and the subprime mess that we are in.
Well, where are we at today with the subprime mess? We are seeing
foreclosures still at a record high. We are seeing unemployment still
at a record high. Did this help us, this $700 billion blank check that
went to the Secretary of the Treasury? What did that lead to?
Well, President Obama was all for the TARP bailout when it came, when
he was Senator Obama, and then we saw in December when he was
President-elect Obama, he prevailed upon the President. He said, We
can't wait, we have got to hurry. We can't wait until January until I'm
sworn in as President. I'm asking you, President Bush, to release to
the Automobile Task Force something like $17 billion so we can bail out
GM and so we can bail out Chrysler, because it has to be done today. We
can't wait until January when I'm sworn in. It has got to be done
today.
So President Bush gave that $17 billion to the Automobile Task Force
at President-elect Obama's request. And we all know what happened. We
saw what happened to Chrysler. It essentially collapsed in a shotgun
wedding to Fiat. A foreign car company was brought in and forced to
purchase and buy out Chrysler. We saw the bondholders, whose rights
were virtually stripped away from Chrysler, and we saw the UAW instead
jump in front of the bondholders and take advantage of that position,
and now the Federal Government and the UAW and Fiat own that company.
What happened to GM? We saw that UAW owns that company and the
Federal Government now, as of the Friday before last, is the 61 percent
shareholder. What did that get us? One hundred fifty thousand jobs
lost. Because we saw pink slips go to 3,400 dealers of Chrysler and GM
across the country, and 150,000 people, potentially, are out of work.
Well, then we had to get the stimulus passed, the largest spending
package in the history of our country, $1.1 trillion. Think of that:
$1.1 trillion. But it had to be done today. And we didn't have time to
read that bill, oh, no, sir. We can't read that bill because this is
too important. President Obama told us we had to pass that bill.
The bill was passed by Congress. I voted against it. Representative
King voted against the stimulus bill. But President Obama had to have
that bill. Well, did he sign it? No. He went to Chicago. He went to
play basketball. He took 4 days, rather than passing this bill he had
to have in his hands, because he had to have this $1.1 trillion
stimulus bill.
Well, we didn't get that bill very much ahead of time either, and it
was a little bit embarrassing because of all the earmarks that bill
contained. Oh, we weren't told they were earmarks, but they were
earmarks nonetheless. All sorts of special projects were in that bill.
Then we were told we had to pass the budget bill, an 8 percent
increase over the previous budget bill. We had to pass it right away.
We couldn't wait and have extra time for debate, no, no, no. We had to
pass that bill now because otherwise bad things might happen.
Well, what has happened? What happened as a result of the stimulus
bill? We were told if we didn't pass that stimulus bill, we could see 8
percent unemployment. Wouldn't that be terrible? What is unemployment
today? Nine point five percent. In the State of Michigan it is 15.2
percent. What about jobs? What about all the jobs that were created?
Two million jobs have been lost since the stimulus bill was put
forward. One hundred fifty thousand jobs were lost because the
government got involved in GM and Chrysler and handed out pink slips.
This isn't going real well for us.
Then cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, the ultimate authority that
government could have over every person's life in the United States.
Literally, every time we flick on a switch, it will be the government
telling us how much we are going to pay to flick on that switch, or if
we can even have the power to do that. Cap-and-trade, the mother of all
bills, and we got that bill 13 hours before we passed that bill.
Thirteen hours before, 1,100 pages, but don't worry, trust me. Trust
me. It will bring good things to this country. And what will that give
us? We already know. Two and one half million jobs a year leave the
United States. We might as well call it the ``China-India stimulus
plan'' because we are going to lose 2.5 million jobs, bye bye, away
they go, out of the United States.
And then what is the next bill we have in front of us? Well, an
article today in the newspaper says that on this health care bill that
we are looking at, that by the way, we have got to pass, it was
revealed last week, here it was, 1,018 pages long, that the next day
Members of Congress had to vote on it, and the House Ways and Means
Committee revealed to the public that the next day we need to be
prepared to vote on a 1,018-page bill.
Mr. Speaker, it isn't that Members of Congress are lazy. And it isn't
that Members of Congress are too stupid to be able to read these bills.
It is the fact that the Democrat leadership in this House is unwilling
to allow us to read the bills. We even had the majority leader, Steny
Hoyer, probably in an accident, admit that if many Members of this body
actually read the bills, there probably would be very few votes. As a
matter of fact, the gentleman from Iowa has the quote of the majority
leader, and it says ``If every Member pledged to not vote for the
health
[[Page H8405]]
care bill if they hadn't read it in its entirety, I think we would have
very few votes.''
I would agree with the leader. I think that there would be very few
votes if Members of Congress would read this bill. That is why the
Obama administration and the Democrat leadership are steamrolling these
bills through before anyone has time to be able to read it because they
know, as was written in the paper today, this is by Christina Romer,
President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers chairwoman, she said
that this bill will cost employers $300 billion. It will cost workers 5
million jobs. Well, let's think about that now. Five million jobs from
health care loss, and that doesn't include the taxes that would be put
on small businesses, so it is 5 million there, 2.5 million from cap-
and-trade, that is every year though, and then 2 million from the
stimulus, 150,000 from GM and Chrysler. I don't think we are going in
the right direction.
And this is from a President who said that he wouldn't be raising
taxes on 95 percent of the American people. Unfortunately, it appears
that that promise has already been broken.
I yield back to the gentleman from Iowa.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota. And I can't
help but reflect that the President's earliest promise on this stimulus
package was that he would create or save 3.5 million jobs and that got
lowered down to 2 million jobs altogether. But the instant those words
came out of his mouth, I thought, why would someone say ``create or
save?'' ``Create or save,'' what does that mean? What would be the
point of a promise that he would ``create or save'' 3.5 million jobs?
And the answer, of course, is that if you say, I will create 3.5
million jobs, then you have to identify which jobs it is that you have
created. Was it Caterpillar who he said had actually signed on with him
in his stimulus plan? Was that an assumption on the part of President
Obama? So where are these jobs that you would create? You would have to
point to them and get a CEO that said, Yes, because of this stimulus
plan, I have opened up this new production line, and here are 20,000
jobs here, and you add them all up, and you have to come up with 3.5
million. But if you say ``create or save'' jobs, you can always point
to existing jobs and claim that you have saved them.
So in the analysis of his rationale, if someone is going to create or
save 3.5 million jobs, if they are remaining, if they haven't been laid
off except for the last 3.5 million and you can say, Oh, yes, they are
the ones I saved. I saved the 3.5 million that were left, even though
we may have lost 137.5 million jobs in the process, and he would be
telling the truth.
This is a situation where we have the master of ambiguity. We do have
the master of mesmerization going on at the same time. People hear what
they want to hear because the language is crafted to speak to our
hearts instead of our heads.
{time} 2130
When he says I'll create or save 3\1/2\ million jobs, that is mostly
on the save side, not on the create side, because this has gone south
in a sad way. And we've seen our unemployment go from the promise that
it could go above 8 percent to 9.5 percent. How many people is that,
Mr. Speaker?
Well, the number is 14\1/2\ million unemployed. That's the ones on
the unemployment roll. Then there's another 5.8 million people that
don't qualify for unemployment that are looking for a job. So you add
the total up to that, and it isn't hard to get up in that number of
over 20 million.
And there was an article written just the other day. I believe it was
in National Review. I've forgotten the name of the author that had done
the calculation of this. And the projection was that it's closer to 25
million people unemployed, especially when you account for those that
are underemployed, those that have seen their hours reduced.
So we have had the data that shows that unemployment, the extended
period of time that people are claiming unemployment is longer than
it's been. I believe the number is the longest it's been in 48 years of
unemployment. And at the same time that was extended, the length of
unemployment benefits, we've also seen people who are working fewer
hours per week. So we have a lot of underemployed that don't qualify
yet as unemployed.
This economy that's here completely misunderstands what this economy
is about. This is the experiment of the Keynesian economists on
steroids; the people that believe that you can borrow money to no end,
grow government to no end, replace private sector jobs with government
jobs, and stimulate the economy with borrowed tax dollars, and buy
goods that are made in China and borrow money from the Chinese to buy
them.
This whole circle doesn't work. You have to produce things that have
value, and you have to lay out the truth when you do it.
I want to go back to this statement that I made earlier, and just
very briefly point out section 108 of the Legislative Reorganization
Act of 1970 that says this. And without reading all that language
through, it says, 3 days to read a bill or we're not going to take it
up on the floor. That's the law. That's the law, but apparently the
Speaker of the House isn't bound by the law, and I hope that there was
a way to enforce that. And I actually don't know how we enforce such a
law. Republicans are doing all they can do, everything they can do
procedurally.
This is the quote, of course, from the majority leader that said, if
every Member read the bill, well, there wouldn't be a bill because they
would come to grips with their senses or else the public would make
sure that they did.
This is a list of the bills that were rushed through to the floor,
and many of them were addressed by the gentlelady from Minnesota (Mrs.
Bachmann). But here in the 111th Congress, every controversial bill
passed by the House has been forced through in less than 3 days, in
violation of this section of the code here. In less than 3 days. Every
one has violated this section 108 of the code, every one of these
controversial bills.
And to take you through them, the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2000, the stimulus bill. I guess I didn't really know what the
real name was. The stimulus bill, $787 billion that was rammed through
in less than 3 days. Violation of public law 108, section 108.
Children's Health Insurance Program, SCHIP, rammed through, and this
violates the very principle that SCHIP was established on in the first
place, and it's designed to bring about, to close the gap so that we
end up with a mandatory national health care act. It's one of the
incremental changes that are there. They actually passed out of this
House a bill that was 400 percent of poverty, that would have paid
people's health insurance so that children in families making over
$102,000 in Iowa, and some of those families would have been paying the
alternative minimum tax, in fact, 70,000 families in America would have
been, well actually in the end, are paying the alternative minimum tax
even though their children's health insurance is paid for because SCHIP
is designed to pay health insurance on children whose families can't
afford it.
So, $102,000. Tax them some extra in the rich man's alternative
minimum tax. And we tax them so much they can't afford to provide
health insurance for their children, so we buy them health insurance,
and we rush the bill through. And by the way, in there it opens up the
door for Medicaid to provide health care for illegals under Medicaid.
That rule was also changed in this and the data that I put out holds up
to be fact.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007. That was the bill where
Lilly Ledbetter alleged that she was discriminated against in a job way
back some years ago. There was a statute of limitations on that bill,
on the legislation that she sought to sue her employers under. The
statute of limitations had expired, long past. And still Democrats
argued that, even though the Supreme Court upheld the statute, that
they thought it just wasn't fair. The old ``it ain't fair'' brothers
got at it again and decided that they wanted to change the rules after
the fact.
I'm okay with changing the rules after the fact, as long as it
doesn't affect the people that were living under the law at the time,
during the fact. But this was retroactive. This was like
[[Page H8406]]
double jeopardy for the taxpayers. And the Lilly Ledbetter Act rammed
through this Congress.
The Paycheck Fairness Act, rammed through Congress. Omnibus Public
Land Management Act of 2009, rammed through. Omnibus Appropriations Act
of 2009, the big stacked bill that runs the government when you're
afraid to do appropriations in a legitimate way, rammed through. No
amendments either, by the way.
Then, to impose an additional tax on bonuses received from the TARP's
AIG bonuses. So we had to ram through TARP, and then when the rules
weren't written in TARP with any oversight, then AIG decided to pay
millions of dollars of bonuses to people that worked for them,
retention bonuses they were. But 11 of the people no longer worked for
AIG. They got part of the millions in retention bonuses, too. That had
to be rammed through because Democrats were vulnerable to public
criticism because they had passed legislation that opened the door, and
they rammed legislation through quickly so there wasn't an opportunity
to evaluate, debate, amend or scrutinize. And the result was hundreds
of millions of dollars paid off to provide retention bonuses for AIG
executives, at least 11 of whom didn't work for AIG anymore. So we had
to pass some legislation to take the public's pressure off of the
people that opened up the door for that legislation. So that was that.
The Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009, rammed through. The
American Clean Energy and Security Act, which, I'm sure--yeah, here we
are. The cap-and-tax bill, rammed through. All of these major bills
rammed through in violation of public law section 108. Three days to
read the bill. That's the law.
You know, they've got the votes to repeal any piece of legislation
that's been passed by any previous Congress. When you've got the votes
to do that, you would think you have--remember the audacity of hope
that comes from the White House? You would think you'd at least have
the audacity to change the law instead of violate it. That's what I'm
seeing here in this Congress, and it really irks me to see people do
this to our Congress and to our system.
This is the President's promise. I spoke to it but not--I didn't
quote it. The President said, We need sunlight before signing bills.
Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the President before
the public has the opportunity to review them. As President, I will not
sign any nonemergency bill without giving the American public an
opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for 5
days. Barack Obama.
Does that sound like anything we've seen him do?
Mrs. BACHMANN. If the gentleman would yield.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I'd yield.
Mrs. BACHMANN. I'm wondering what he means by that, by 5 days. Does
that mean that once the bill gets to the President, he'll allow it just
to rest on his desk for 5 days? People would have a chance to comment?
But it also seems, the public law that the gentleman from Iowa
displayed, Members of Congress are supposed to be able to get a chance,
too. I think this is wonderful that the President wants the American
people to have 5 days to be able to read a bill, but I think it would
be wonderful if Members of Congress could have 5 days to read a bill
before we vote on it. After all, maybe we should all take an Evelyn
Wood speed reading course, because if we have to read over 1,000 pages
or 1,100 pages in a bill in 13 hours, we're going to need to have maybe
those recordings where they're sped up a little bit so it sounds like
Alvin and the Chipmunks reading a bill to us. I don't know what it's
going to take, but Members of Congress should also have the opportunity
to be able to read the bills, and to do that, we need to have time,
too. So this doesn't say much.
If President Obama says that a bill should just maybe be on his desk
for 5 days, if Members of Congress aren't also given that courtesy,
after all, we are the people's representatives. We're sent here on
behalf of the people back home to read these bills, talk about these
bills between Republicans and Democrats. Isn't that what we're supposed
to do, talk to each other, talk about what our ideas are, what the
ideas on the other side of the aisle are, make the bill a little bit
better, then put it on the floor?
Maybe part of the problem, I wonder, is the fact that we're just
trying to do things a little too fast. That's what it seems like to me,
that maybe this Congress is trying to rush through too much too fast.
Maybe that's why we have a greater deficit than we've ever seen before.
We ran out of money in April. Back in April, this Congress spent all
the money that it had in its budget already in April. So every day
we've been spending billions and billions and billions, every single
day that we don't have. And so now, today, it's July, we're already
over $1 trillion in deficit. We're going to be nearly $2 trillion in
deficit.
And here's something else I don't understand. The President is
supposed to release, in mid-July, the budget update. We have the
numbers already, but the President has said he's going to wait until
mid-August to release his budget update.
Now, this is a little concerning to me, a little fishy to me, because
we're being told, Mr. Speaker, that in less than 2 weeks' time the
President of the United States expects that we will pass legislation
that would allow the Federal Government to take over 17 percent of the
private economy.
Now, there was an economist from Arizona State University 2 weeks ago
on the front page of the Washington Times who wrote an article that
said, we now have the Federal Government, for the first time, having
control or owning 30 percent of all private business profits in this
country. Thirty percent of all private business profits in America are
owned or controlled by the Federal Government today.
If President Obama and if the Democrat-controlled Congress gets their
way, that will be an additional 17 percent.
Now, this President's only been in office for 6 months, and already
30 percent of the private business profits are owned or controlled by
the Federal Government. Now, by August 1st he wants to make that 47
percent? I certainly hope we can read these bills first before we're
asked to do that.
I yield to the gentleman from Iowa.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota. And as you
talk about that percentage, 30 percent, the private business profits in
the country, who would have been believed a year ago or 8 or 9 months
ago, who would have believed that eight huge private sector entities
would be nationalized by this administration?
We have three large investment banks nationalized by this
administration, one large company, AIG Insurance, nationalized. Fannie
and Freddie used to be private, became a government-sponsored
enterprise, and now they're wholly owned by the Federal Government,
with about $100 billion dropped into each and about $5.5 trillion in
contingent liabilities wrapped up in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And of
course we have General Motors, 61 percent, and Chrysler a smaller
percentage. I don't remember that exact number.
But then you've got, also, the Canadians that own about 12\1/2\
percent of General Motors and the unions that own 17\1/2\ percent of
General Motors. There's not a lot left out there for the bondholders,
the people that were the secured creditors, because they got aced out.
Who would have thought eight huge entities, hundreds of billions of
dollars, and taking these companies off, out of the private sector and
put them into the hands of government control?
And the President fires the CEO of General Motors and hires his guy,
Fritz. And the President cleans out the board of directors at General
Motors and appoints all but two of the board of directors of General
Motors.
And then he says, the President says, I'm not interested in the day-
to-day operations of General Motors. I don't think we should be running
the place. I don't want to do the nationalization of this. It is just
something that we have to do.
And here's the irony of it. President Obama was elected at least in
part because he attacked George Bush for going into Iraq and not having
an exit strategy. Now, President Obama has gone in and nationalized
these eight
[[Page H8407]]
huge private sector companies that I have listed here, and he says he
doesn't want to be nationalizing and he doesn't want to be in the day-
to-day operations, but he names the CEO, replaces the board of
directors. His car czar is on the phone every day with the chairman of
the board of General Motors, sometimes multiple times a day. Well, that
was the former car czar. We don't know what the future car czar is
going to be. We've got 32 czars.
{time} 2145
The President is in the formerly private sector. He got invested in
all of that. He found a crisis, capitalized on it: nationalized. Now, I
have read the Web page for the Democratic Socialists of America. That
is exactly their plan. It is in print. In fact, it's more aggressive
than on their own Web site. The President has nationalized proud
private-sector corporations, and he has done so without an exit
strategy.
All at the same time, he has been critical of President Bush for not
having an exit strategy in Iraq. President Bush's exit strategy in Iraq
is in print. It's called the SOFA Agreement, the Status of Forces
Agreement, negotiated and agreed to by President George W. Bush. The
exit strategy for Iraq was victory, victory with honor, victory and
leave a legacy of a self-governing democracy of a moderate country that
could govern themselves and that could control their own national
destiny.
All of that is in place today, and President Obama is carrying out
the exit strategy of George Bush to the letter, spelled out in the
Status of Forces Agreement, without a peep in the media about what's
going on over there. All they talk about is we're deploying out of
Iraq. No, we're deploying out of Iraq cities back to the bases because
the surge worked.
Now, President Bush had an exit strategy. He didn't talk about it
completely because he had to be a little flexible. He carried out his
exit strategy. He ordered the surge. He negotiated the SOFA Agreement.
He handed over an Iraq in a war that was won. The war was won on the
day that Barack Obama took the oath of office here just outside these
doors, and now it needs to be sustained and maintained. Afghanistan is
a lot harder, but there is an exit strategy in place set by George
Bush. There is no exit strategy for these eight private companies that
have been nationalized by President Obama.
When I see the picture of President Obama standing next to Hugo
Chavez and when they ask me what that tells me, I say, you know, the
chief nationalizer is our guy, not their guy. Our guy has nationalized
more companies and more billions of dollars' worth of privately held
assets than Hugo Chavez ever dreamed of doing--well, at least within
the last year. Chavez might have added a bit more companies over time,
but so far this year, he has only taken out one Cargill rice plant, and
has nationalized that in Venezuela.
It is a chilling thought to think of how fast this Nation has lurched
to the left. We've leaped off of the abyss, and we've got to figure out
how to fly to get back to where we are in the free markets again.
So I would be happy to yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota to pick
up from there.
Mrs. BACHMANN. I thank the gentleman from Iowa.
There is a lot to contemplate when we're talking about this national
takeover of health care. The gentleman has every reason to be concerned
because, when the government takes over an area of American national
life as we have seen, the American people are the ones who lose control
and who lose choice over their economic destinies.
Here is one thing we've been hearing about from the Speaker of the
House. She has been talking about how this nationalization of health
care will be paid for through prevention, that we'll have new
prevention in place that will keep Americans healthier and that we will
realize something like over $500 billion in savings in prevention.
Well, where is it? Itemize it. What is it that we aren't doing now
that we're going to see dramatically occur in prevention? It isn't
there.
It's not going to materialize because we know where the savings will
come from. It will come from the Federal bureaucracy, and we have the
Federal bureaucracy that's contained in the bill that the Democrats
have put forward. This big mess that's on this chart shows 32 new
Federal Government agencies. This is what will stand between any
American and his doctor. So think of an American standing on that side
of the paper with 32 bureaucracies. You've got to get through this
labyrinth, Mr. Speaker, before you can get to your physician.
Now, is this what Americans want?
A study was just completed that showed that 89 percent of Americans
today are happy with the health care that they receive. Another study
that was done said 77 percent of Americans are happy with the health
care that they receive. Now, that doesn't mean that our health care
system is perfect. It isn't. One of the greatest things that we can do
is to make all Americans' medical expenses deductible on their
insurance. That would be something great that we could do for the
American people because the biggest problem in health care today is not
access; it's the cost. Health care premiums are going through the roof.
Well, what can we do?
We could change the Tax Code, and we could allow Americans to
purchase their health care the same way they purchase their car
insurance--across State lines, buy in pools, bring down the price, have
true competition, and allow small clinics like the MinuteClinics, for
instance in Minnesota, to be set up all across the United States. Have
health savings accounts so that you control your own costs, and you
take it with you. The government doesn't own your health care. You do.
Mr. Speaker, this is the plan that President Obama wants for the
American people, a great labyrinth of bureaucracy. How are you ever
going to get your health care if you've got to go through this
bureaucracy?
One thing we know about bureaucracies is they justify their own
existences, and they all make a lot of money. The average Federal
employee today makes about $75,000 a year plus benefits. There are a
lot of people out there who would love to make $75,000 a year. Well,
we're creating 32 new bureaucratic agencies. This is nonsense. This is
about a government-created welfare bureaucracy. That's what this is
about. It's not about insuring more Americans, because even under the
Democrats' own forecast, not all Americans are even going to be
covered.
Potentially, about half of the people who are uninsured now can
afford to pay for that insurance. Of the other half who can't afford
it, we have a good amount of people who are under 35 who are in very
temporary situations. About a third of those people are illegal aliens.
Truly, only somewhere between 12 and 16 million people aren't insured.
That out of 305 million? Surely, we can find an answer for them.
Why wreck the health care that 89 percent of Americans say they like
so that we can give government control over 17 percent of the American
economy? Why do we want to do this?
This is President Obama's vision for American health care. It's not
what Americans want. There is no savings extracted out of prevention,
not to the level that they're talking about. We need to get real about
health care, and that's why the American people need to melt the phone
lines of their Members of Congress. They need to let them know what
they think about this plan before it's too late.
I yield back to the gentleman from Iowa.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota.
Having seen the Technicolor, modern version of the National Health
Care Act that has been delivered to us courtesy, so far, of a committee
or two here in the House of Representatives, I went back through the
archives and dusted off this scary concept here. Some will look at this
and will recognize what this is:
This is the 1993-1994 HillaryCare version. This is a copy of the
poster that is the precursor to the full color one that Mrs. Bachmann
put up. This poster was on my wall in my construction office back in
those years, and it actually hung there for years. I hung it there for
years as a reminder to me of what they could cook up if you put people
in a room and closed the door.
Remember, this was a secret process, too. It was driven about the
same way.
[[Page H8408]]
It's a process that they don't want the American people to weigh in on,
so they met in secret week after week with all of this intensity and
with all of these--Ira Magaziner, do you remember that name? Harold
Ickes was another one. These people were meeting in there. They were
smart people. They put smart people in a room. I can tell you what
happens when you put a whole lot of smart people together and you give
them an assignment, Mr. Speaker. Highly intelligent people will always
overcomplicate things. The reason they do that is, otherwise, there
wouldn't be any particular advantage to being highly intelligent.
So you could just go down to the simple solution to the complex
problems and let human nature take over, and all would go on just fine.
But, no, we put highly intelligent people in place, and these are
generally liberal elitists who are working to try to create this utopia
here on Earth because they do think that is the ``be all and end all''
for them. It is not for us.
So here is the HillaryCare version. I look down through this list,
and there are some things that concern me a lot: the Regional Health
Alliance, the ombudsman. Why do you need him? You need another
ombudsman here. The Accountability Health Plan, that sounds really
familiar. I think that might be different lingo there. The HMO provider
plan, I don't know that that's in there. HMOs were de rigueur then, but
now they have reached a little bit of criticism. Here is one, the
global budget. Why do you need a global budget to provide national
health care?
So of all of these things on this schematic, this schematic, this
scary flowchart, is, I think, the biggest thing that sunk HillaryCare
back in the '90s because the American people looked at that, and it
scared them that anyone could cook up such a schematic. This is the
black-and-white version that could be printed back then, which was just
shortly after the advent of the Internet.
Mrs. Bachmann has the full Technicolor version, and I would
appreciate it if the camera would turn there.
If the camera would focus on the colored chart, on the bottom are two
identical-sized purple circles. The one on the left is the qualified
health benefits plan, and the one on the right is the Obama plan, the
Obama health insurance plan. The white box to the left of the left
purple circle is the existing health insurance, the traditional health
insurance plans. None of them could qualify to sell insurance to any
American until the health insurance czar qualifies them to go into the
purple circle, the qualified health benefits plan circle. The health
insurance czar would be the guy who would make sure that the new public
health plan that was written could compete with the private plans.
So if you're going to write the rules for your guy, are you going to
make one size fits all? Are you going to put conditions on those
private insurance plans so that the public plan can compete? Or are you
going to take the public plan and try to get it to compete with the
private sector? I think it's the former, not the latter. I think we
will see a one size fits all.
Mrs. BACHMANN. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. KING of Iowa. I would be happy to yield.
Mrs. BACHMANN. That was the aspect of the Hillary plan. It was an
outlawing of all private insurance. The one thing we know from page 16
of the 1,018-page bill is that no more private insurance policies can
be written--never, nada. You can't write any more private insurance. Of
course, if the public option is subsidized by government at 30 to 40
percent less than the private insurance plans, what we know from the
Levin Group is that 113 million Americans will be collapsed out of
private insurance and will be put over into the government option, thus
collapsing the private insurance industry. It will all be government,
and that's within 5 years that we will see the end of private care in
the public.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence, and I
know I've convinced you deeply, and I would yield back the balance of
my time.
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