The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE RULE OF LAW” mentioning the Federal Reserve System was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H10056-H10062 on Sept. 29, 2009.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE RULE OF LAW
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Carter) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, to my hall mate, Mr. Kennedy, that was a moving tribute and well deserved. I am glad we could yield the time.
The subject of this hour that we have been talking about now for, I believe, about 14 or 15 weeks is we are talking about the rule of law and how the rule of law must prevail. It is the glue that holds our society together. And when we start to ignore rules or ignore others' laws, then we are ignoring what our Founding Fathers intended to rule us.
When we established this Nation, the people who established it came from a monarchy. Yet they felt that a much greater society would be a society which would pledge itself to the rules, not to the authority. So they didn't want a king. They didn't want some powerful dictator. They wanted the rules to prevail in the Nation. And that's one of the secret parts of the society that was created that nobody can see, that over time has developed the most important and most powerful Nation on the face of the Earth that has ever existed.
We cannot ignore that rule of law today. We cannot let personalities or concepts or attitudes change the fact that there are rules that you follow, and you must follow those rules. And there are laws, both civil and criminal laws, that have to be upheld. We as a society have created those laws. They have governed us in some instances since the beginning of the Republic. And to waive or to ignore those laws, we do it at our peril.
So tonight we're going to talk about some legislation that addresses the issue of ignoring or not following certain laws or bending laws.
We are going to start off with my good friend Roscoe Bartlett. I'm going to yield to him, and he's going to talk to us about a bill that he has, H.R. 2743, the Car Dealer Equity Act, in which he talks about the fact that he feels some laws, some contract laws, were either bent or ignored.
I yield to my colleague.
Mr. BARTLETT. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Before talking about this very interesting subject, I would like to spend just a few moments talking about why I think the rule of law is so important.
We are one person out of 22 in the world, and we have a fourth of all of the good things in the world. And I ask myself how come we are so darned fortunate that this one person out of 22 has a fourth of all the good things in the world?
I look around for people who are working, bending their back, and sweating. And I will tell you I don't see very many white faces, and I don't see an awful lot of black faces. I see Hispanics. So it's not hard work that's accountable for the fact that we're so lucky.
And then I look at education and technical education. We live in a technical world today. But most of our bright young people are going into careers of political science and law. This year the Chinese will graduate seven times as many engineers as we graduate, and about half of our engineers are Chinese and Indian students. So it's not our commitment to technical areas that makes us so fortunate.
Just what is it that is so different about this country that we are so fortunate, this one person in 22 that has a fourth of all the good things in the world?
Mr. Speaker, I think that it's our commitment to the rule of law and particularly our commitment to those laws that protect our civil liberties.
You see, there is no Constitution in the world, there is no bill of rights in the world that comes even close to ours in having so many civil liberties that are so protected. And I think this established an environment, a milieu in which creativity and entrepreneurship could flourish. And I think we put at risk who we are, and I think we put at risk this enormous privilege that we have, this one person out of 22 who has a fourth of all the good things in the world, if we in any way violate these very sacred rights which are given to us by God, which our Constitution, our government, is supposed to protect.
So I am very concerned about the rule of law because I will tell you if in one place you can rationalize that it's okay to violate the Constitution, what next? I think that our civil liberties could come tumbling down and I think with them our privileged status in the world today.
Now, the thing you asked me to talk about, and that is this bill, H.R. 2743.
Several months ago I was mystified by something that was happening in our country. We were shutting down auto dealerships. I thought at first, well, these are owned by the auto manufacturers and they're reducing their overhead, so this will benefit them. But then I learned not a single auto dealership in this country is owned by the manufacturers. Every auto dealership is an independent dealership hiring people, paying taxes, selling cars. And I looked at what they were doing. You know, in almost everything we do in life there are winners and losers, positives and negatives. And in this case I could see only losers. And I thought I must be missing something.
So we held a press conference out in Frederick, I think one of the first ones in the country. We had some of our biggest dealers there. Dar Cars was there, and Tammy Darvis is up in the gallery, and I want to thank her for coming. Jack Fitzgerald was there, one of the biggest auto dealers in the area. And I asked them the question, What am I missing? I seem to see that everybody in this is a loser. Why in the heck would we do something where everybody loses?
Clearly, the dealers that were put out of business lost, and clearly all the people that worked for them lost, and clearly all those secondary jobs that were created by those people were lost. And I couldn't understand how the auto dealers could benefit when there were fewer people selling their cars. It just made sense to me that the more people who are out there competing to sell your cars, the more cars you're going to sell and the better off you are.
And I asked these dealers, What am I missing? I've got to be missing something because Americans don't do really stupid things. And this appeared to me to be a really stupid thing where everybody lost. I couldn't see anybody who was winning in this.
So I came back to the Congress and I asked my colleagues, Who is the winner here? And from both sides of the aisle, and now this bill I think has 275 cosponsors, but from both sides of the aisle they said, We don't see any winners either. We really need to do something about this. We think that some fundamental laws were violated in this.
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We think that this needs to be fixed. There is a Web site you can go to. It is YouTube, www.YouTube.com/rejected dealers. And you're going to find more than 11,000 dealers that have logged on to that to tell you their story. Some very, very sad stories are told by these dealers. Enormous losses.
So I am very privileged to come here this evening to talk about this because I think that in the violation of some of these very simple, obvious, commonsense laws, that a great many people in our country have been hurt.
And I want to thank you for committing this hour to talk about the rule of law, because I think the rule of law is so important. And I hope that Americans will collectively call their Representatives, ``I know you probably signed on to that bill, but now make it happen. Bring it to the floor. Vote on it.'' You know, petition the Senate so they vote on it.
So let's get this fixed. It's really bad. It's really wrong.
Thank you for letting me have a few moments to talk about it.
Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, I thank you, Roscoe. You have hit on something that when that all happened to me, I just wondered what happened to the law of contract. Where did it go? When did our executive branch think it had the authority to just negate contracts in order for people to, through some threats that were made to settle a bankruptcy, to lose dealerships that--I talked to people in my district. It was not only did you lose your dealership, but your work product got handed to the people you'd been competing with. Just kind of free gratis. You get the win, and I get nothing. And of course, hopefully this will be resolved in the courts or something. I don't know what's going to happen.
But Roscoe is on the right road. We can do something about it here because if you can't contract, you don't have freedom, and especially freedom of commerce. If you can't make an honest contract with somebody and depend upon that and have it be enforceable in the courts of our country--because the rule of contract is sacred. If you don't have that, which we'd had for the history of our Nation, then the rules of commerce come tumbling down.
And we keep hearing people say, Do we want to be a Banana Republic? And nothing against our poor Banana Republic neighbors, but that's what happens when you don't have the rule of law. You can't make a deal that can be enforced and people become--go more and more to the dark side in their trading habits. And this is one of the issues that when we've got the world economy we've got to deal with.
We've got multiple subject matters, and we are going to start with one that's all over the front page. Roscoe is going to fix the auto dealers, and I am on that bill and proud to be there.
We've got a bill by Leader Boehner and Darrell Issa, Defunding ACORN Act, and my friend, Lynn Westmoreland from Georgia, is here to join me, and my friend Mr. King from Iowa is here to join me. And we've got a bunch of things to talk about here today.
Let's talk about ACORN.
I think those videos that the American public have now seen were a shocking wake-up when they had already heard about all of the ACORN violations. We'd already heard about this, and it didn't seem to be bothering anybody that there were all kinds of election law frauds, convictions, and so forth across the country. But then we saw advice being given to two people pretending to be into criminal activity, and you saw people that seemed to be encouraging child prostitution calling it a business, how to do your taxes, just like they weren't talking about criminal activity. And I think that shocked America into realizing that all of this was real, and that cheating on elections and cheating on voter registration and so forth was just as criminal and just led to further, more criminal activities. And now, all of a sudden, the folks at ACORN are all over the front page.
So I will yield to my friend, Mr. Westmoreland from Georgia, to let him make a few comments on this. And you've got a sign there. What have you got, Lynn?
Mr. WESTMORELAND. Thank you for yielding.
I did want to bring the substance. We were talking about the rule of law.
Speaker Pelosi, after the 2006 election, made a comment. She said, This leadership team will create the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history.
To my friend from Texas, we know we've been here many times talking about the Rangel rule where Chairman Rangel was found to not have paid his taxes and then had his accountant figure out what he felt like he did owe and sent it in without penalties and interest and other things.
Then we had Secretary Geithner who did not pay his self-employment taxes and some other taxes on more than one occasion. And this is something that the American people are wanting to know where this most honest, most ethical Congress, most open Congress is at.
I just wanted to kind of bring that up to remind the people that we are not special in this body right here. We need to be operating under the rule of law and be under the same consequences that every American is under.
Let's talk about ACORN and what the bill is that Leader Boehner and Ranking Member Issa have introduced.
We might want to remember that last week the House voted about 345-79 for an amendment to bar the Federal funding of ACORN, but we need to go further than that. We need to pass a stand-alone bill. And that's what this H.R. 3571 does, the Defund ACORN Act.
No Federal contract, grant, cooperative, or agreement or any other form of agreement may be awarded to or entered into with ACORN. No Federal funds may be given to ACORN. No Federal employee may promote ACORN, including some ACORN State chapters, organizations with financial stakes in ACORN, and organizations that shared directors or employees with ACORN.
And Judge, my friend from Texas, I am glad to announce the great Governor of the great State of Georgia has canceled the contract that the State had with ACORN.
So people are starting to understand that when you have an organization that not only these videos exposed, but even the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found ACORN had committed a list of offenses: voter fraud, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, aiding and abetting embezzlement, investment fraud, use of taxpayer funding for partisan political activity, Department of Labor violations.
You know, ACORN should not be allowed to get off with just an internal audit. They need to be looked at much deeper than that. An internal audit for ACORN is the same as asking Secretary Geithner to investigate Chairman Rangel. So we need to go further with that.
ACORN has received hundreds of millions of dollars. We should be more responsible to the people of this country, the hardworking people of this country that pay their taxes that we would want to give it away to organizations such as this.
Right now, I'll be glad to yield to our friend from--I'll yield back the time to you, Judge, and then you can yield. But thank you for giving me this time.
Mr. CARTER. I'll yield time to my friend from Iowa (Mr. King). And I guess we'll talk about ACORN and then we'll shift gears to something else.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas and the general from Georgia for their leadership on these issues. And once a week, at least, we see the judge from Texas down here laying out the conscience of the Congress. And this ACORN issue is something that has burned within me for several years.
I looked back through some of the Records, and I introduced an amendment to unfund ACORN in 2007. Back then, we couldn't get any traction. And as much as has been filled out on the case of ACORN, as much as we learned about ACORN during the last Presidential election--
and I think it was very useful because that was a time that America started to pay attention, Mr. Speaker. And we remember that ACORN announced that they had filed 1.3 million new voter registrations during the Presidential election cycle in 2008. And now they're advertising that people should send them a check and help fund their operation to go down there and demonstrate against Sheriff Judge Arpaio, the tent city, pink underwear Sheriff Arpaio. I think that that is a persecution that's going on. But they're trying to raise money to do that.
And the mailing that they have--and it's an Internet document. They still claim that they registered 1.3 million new voters. Well, the numbers are closer to 450,000 legitimate voter registrations. And ACORN has admitted to over 400,000 false or fraudulent voter registrations. Now, one is too many for me. And we've seen the hue and cry of somebody who was in 2000 driving to vote in Florida, and perhaps they were going to vote for Al Gore, and a mile and a half away they went through a checkpoint to see if they were sober and had a driver's license, and they claimed that to be voter intimidation.
If one person lost their nerve and didn't want to go through the police checkpoint because they were drunk or didn't have a license, that was a voter intimidation on the part of the folks that were on Al Gore's side back in the year 2000.
ACORN can produce over 400,000 false or fraudulent voter registrations, and America can't get up in arms until we see child prostitution promoted in five ACORN offices across this city, in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., in Brooklyn, in San Bernardino, and in San Diego, California, and more to come.
And now they're under a lawsuit. ACORN decides they're going to go out and punish people that have brought out the truth if they can and use the court to intimidate.
Now, when ACORN makes a statement that, well, we only produced over 400,000 false or fraudulent voter registration forms, never fear, it was all in the exercise of trying to get somebody's good vote in there, but no bad votes came out of that, no fraud came from that. Oh, really.
They're being investigated. You say 12 States, then 14 States. Today it came out 20 States.
Today the trial of ACORN started in the State of Nevada. ACORN, as an entity, has been indicted by the prosecution in Nevada, and they have their chief organizer in Nevada is testifying against ACORN saying, Here's our pamphlet, our policy. We were paying commissions and paying a bounty for voter registrations. And, additionally, it came out in the news that in Troy, New York, they have dozens of fraudulent votes that were cast on absentee ballot that were promoted by ACORN.
Now, if there's anything that chisels away and cuts off the underpinnings of our Constitution it is fraudulent election process. And when the American people lose their faith that we have a legitimate process, the result of that will be, then, nothing holds together. You can't expect the President, the United States Senate, the United States House, or any system of government to be consented to by the people if the people don't believe they've consented in a national, legitimate ballot. That is the Banana Republic measure. And there is no entity in America that has been more active or aggressive in the history of this country and undermining the underpinnings of our Constitution than ACORN, a criminal enterprise and an entity in and of itself in many other enterprises than the fraudulent votes.
But I think at that component of this, I would yield back to the gentleman from Texas. I have a little bit more to say about ACORN hopefully a little bit later.
Mr. CARTER. We've got a lot of things to talk about, but ACORN is now all over the front page. The trial started in Nevada, and quite frankly, I see a very aggressive prosecutor that was talking on television today, and it's going to be an interesting case. We should all watch it very closely because wrongdoing is being put before the American public, and it's going to be interesting to see how that comes out.
I want to shift gears now because our friend Dr. Ron Paul has introduced a bill which has been talked about now for years, and I think now the American public is starting to say we'd kind of like to know something about this.
We have had, as we talked about before, more money spent since last summer supposedly saving the economy than just about has been spent in the history of the Republic, certainly before 1930. It clearly surpasses what we spent then. It is in the trillions of dollars now.
The Federal Reserve, this mysterious thing that I would bet there is not one American in a hundred who can tell you even close to what the Federal Reserve system even does, where they come from, who sets them up. There is just very limited knowledge. Unless you get to graduate school, you don't even get taught it in universities as to what the Federal Reserve does. And yet the Federal Reserve, as Congressman Paul points out, is in charge of administering and keeping track of these billions and now trillions of dollars of money that we are going to have to pay back and our children, our grandchildren have to pay back.
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What Congressman Paul, Ron Paul, wants basically is that he would like to see an audit of the Federal Reserve so that we can know just what these guys do. And so I want to throw that out for discussion here, and I recognize my friend from Georgia.
Mr. WESTMORELAND. Well, thank you for yielding the time, and I don't know if we're going to get back to ACORN.
Mr. CARTER. We will.
Mr. WESTMORELAND. Then I will save this for later. Let me just say that the Federal Reserve, think about this for a minute. Under the TARP program, the Federal Reserve got $700 billion. We gave them $787 billion in the Obama stimulus package. As you mentioned, that's over $1 trillion. Judge, a lot of people don't realize how much $1 trillion is. If you took $1 trillion and converted it into seconds, 1 million seconds is 11 days, 1 billion seconds is 32 years, 1 trillion seconds is 32,000 years, 32,000 years is 1 trillion seconds. And so we've given them over
$1 trillion, and they don't want to be audited. I think that this is something that I hope that Chairman Frank, I'm assuming this is going through Financial Services on a hearing that they're going to have Friday, 290 cosponsors, that is enough to pass a piece of legislation here under suspension.
So I certainly hope that the Speaker and the Democratic leadership will once again kind of honor her statement here: ``We will create the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history'' by letting us have a vote on auditing the Federal Reserve.
The American public deserves the same independent audit accountability from the Fed that they expect from their local bank. The Feds are going out and auditing our local banks every day, Judge, putting a lot of them out of business, putting them on notice that they need to change the way that they're doing business. If they're going to go out and audit our local banks, we certainly need to audit them to make sure that they're doing things by the rule of law and in a commonsense way and in the way that the American people expect them to do with their hard-earned taxpayer dollars.
With that, I yield back to the gentleman.
Mr. CARTER. I will yield now to my friend from Iowa (Mr. King.)
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas.
I was thinking about the description of what is big money and what is
$1 trillion and how do you put that into a concept now. Some of us from the part of the country I come from, we think in terms of corn. So to put that into perspective, the State of Iowa, the lead State in corn production, is going to have a good crop this year. It's going to have the best average yields that we have ever had, probably a few less bushels than we have produced though in the past, and we are going to raise about $10 billion worth of corn, maybe a little less than that, but about $10 billion.
Now all the corn that Iowa raises, just the value of that $10 billion, if we do that for 10 years, that's $100 billion. We do that for an entire century, that's $1,000 billion, $1 trillion. So 100 years of all the corn we can raise in Iowa is $1 trillion. A full century of all the corn that we can raise in what it's worth today, or what it was worth when I figured this, the markets have gone down a little bit, that is $1 trillion.
Now to take care of Obama's deficit created by his budget this year, that is $9.7 trillion. You can just think, 970 years of all the corn that Iowa could raise committed just to taking care of the deficit created by his budget would be just about right. And if you want to look at the deficit that exists today, and you add that to Obama's budget, that's over $20 trillion between the existing national debt and the debt created by President Obama's budget. So that would be all the corn that Iowa could raise at today's production in market values from the birth of Christ until today, and you would fall a little bit short. That's how much money the United States Government owes as a result of this profligate spending that is going on.
And the Federal Reserve component of this, I am very happy to see there are 290 cosponsors of Ron Paul's bill, H.R. 1207. I am among them, and I'm confident that my colleagues on the floor are as well. There is a hearing coming up on Friday to dig into this. That is a step along the way. From my standpoint, I would be very happy to sign a discharge petition. I don't think that things move very quickly through this Congress. When you have the most ethical Congress in history, I don't know how that could be defined that way, but there's a lot that doesn't happen around here. There's a lot of deliberation that doesn't take place around here, a lot of debate that doesn't take place.
The rules are written in the Rules Committee up there in that tiny little old room that doesn't leave room even for our staff to come in. We have to go up there and genuflect before the Chair of the Rules Committee and ask if we can bring an amendment down here to debate it on the floor of the House. They will say ``yes'' if they think it embarrasses Republicans. That's the only way they will say ``yes.''
The deliberate destruction of the greatest debating body in the history of the world here in the United States Congress has taken place because of the rules that have been ripped asunder by the Speaker of the House after 221 years. And the gentleman from Georgia has a sign:
``This leadership team will create the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history, Nancy Pelosi, November 16, 2006.'' I don't know how you say that in Georgia, say what? This is the least deliberative body it has ever been.
An open rules process that we had for 221 years that allowed every Members of Congress to force a debate and a vote on a subject matter of their choice within the appropriations process has been utterly suspended since 2007.
The American people deserve better. We deserve, yes, a hearing on H.R. 1207, on the Federal Reserve. But we deserve also to have open debate and force votes so Members have to go on record, because the wisdom of America is processed through 435 congressional districts. And we all have our networks out there. If that debate is stifled here, if amendments are shut off by order of the Speaker, then the wisdom of America is shut off by order of the Speaker.
This country cannot reach the next level of its destiny if it denies the wisdom of its people, and that is the wisdom of its people as processed through this Congress is how it was envisioned by the Founding Fathers. I yield back to gentleman from Texas.
Mr. CARTER. To finish up this particular subject, let me just point out that I think most people know that the Fed has, as one of its things it does, it uses interest rates to micromanage our economy. It prints money. And the more money that it puts out there, the less value our dollar has. It has an affect on every part of our lives.
Now if you have never contracted with the Federal Government, back in the 1970s, I did a lot of work for people who built section 8 housing projects. And let me tell you, because you're dealing with large numbers, this is what you would hear, you had to be looked at and relooked at and relooked at, which is the right thing, to make sure nobody is doing something wrong. When you're dealing with $8 million or
$10 million, the government wants to look closely at how that money is being spent, are the subcontractors being paid, and so forth. Now, why do they do that? Because they know the nature of certain people is such that there can be wrongdoing.
We are talking about trillions of dollars. And we ought to at least know a little bit that an audit would tell us about what's going on at the Fed. So that's Ron Paul's bill.
I'm going to go to another bill. It's not really a bill, but just a comment. We've been talking about the Rangel rule. I've got a new one today. We are going to talk about Mr. Geithner again because he is back in the news because he says he has got this bank, UBS, over in Switzerland, to open their secret vaults and let him know what's over there. And he is being very magnanimous to the people he thinks have been hiding funds overseas. He is telling them that, I know you. I've made a successful raid. I know who you are. Now if you step up and pay your taxes, we're only going to give a maximum of a 20 percent penalty for your failing to pay taxes.
Wait a minute. What about the Geithner gesture here? When he talks to these people, he owed $17,230, no penalty. He owed another $25,960, no penalty. He used bad child credits. He filed additional taxes with interested infrastructure, he had a faulty retirement plan, an improper small business deduction, and he was expensing utility costs that went for personal use. All these things he was doing to no penalty. We call this the fox watching the hen house; he says they've cheated the government. And maybe they have.
Where I come from, if they cheated the government and there's penalties to be assessed, fine. Everybody ought to get the penalty. When I've been late on paying my taxes, and I have, I filed not on April 15 before, I filed on August 15 before, I filed on October 15 before. I paid my penalties, and I paid my interest because that's what you're supposed to do. I think it is curious that this is the subject of Mr. Geithner's conversation when he has not. He, the boss of the IRS, has not been assessed any penalties.
So I throw that out for quick discussion. I think it's interesting. The Geithner rule ought to be zero penalties on taxes paid back on unreported income until Mr. Geithner pays his.
Mr. WESTMORELAND. So if the gentleman would yield for just a second.
Mr. CARTER. I do.
Mr. WESTMORELAND. Are we going to introduce a new legislation called the Geithner rule?
Mr. CARTER. We're working on it.
Mr. WESTMORELAND. We've got the Rangel rule, and I wonder how many people have, when they returned their money to the IRS and said, I'm claiming the Rangel rule, the Geithner rule is one that definitely people should be concerned about.
Today in my office I had two of my dear friends, I had Coach Mike Pickett who came in and coached me in high school and another guy that I went to school with, Mike Sorrow that Coach Pickett coached, and they came in to talk to me just about some of the issues that we were facing up here.
One of the things that Coach Pickett said was he said, I'm mad as heck. He said, they're cutting my Social Security, and they've got a plan to cut $500 billion out of the Medicare, he said, and we've got people in Congress that is not even paying their taxes. And of course he was talking about Chairman Rangel. We didn't bring up Secretary Geithner, but I'm sure that would have made him double mad. That would have made his blood pressure even worse to think that the Secretary of the Treasury has got this kind of tax concerns.
I go back to this, what Speaker Pelosi said, you got to remember that the U.S. Senate approved this gentleman, confirmed him to be a member of the Cabinet.
This is the thing, Judge, that the American people are tired of. And I had one lady tell me the other day at a town hall meeting, she said, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. And I think the American people as a whole are sick and tired of being sick and tired of seeing how people in politics, in elected office feel that they're better than the average hardworking American person out there that is paying his taxes.
Now, I've had penalties assessed on me before. I think that probably most Americans have had penalties and interest assessed to them for some reason or another. This is unbelievable. In fact, we should be above even the least bit of doubt of what we're doing. He should have paid the penalties anyway. If he had been late, he should have paid the penalties and the interest.
Many people may not know this, that when they hear this name on TV, they don't understand that he is the Secretary of the Treasury. He is somebody that is over IRS. And with these findings and the fact that he has not been able to have to pay some of the penalties and the interests that most Americans would have to pay if they were delinquent on their taxes, and especially using your child's time at an overnight camp in three different years, surely he was made aware of that in 2001, but he did it again in 2004 and again in 2005. Surely somebody from the IRS must have told him in that 4-year period that that was not a legal deduction or either he didn't file his taxes.
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So, Judge, I appreciate you bringing this back up, and I look forward to being a cosponsor, as I was with the Rangel rule, on the Geithner rule.
Mr. CARTER. Do you wish to be heard on this, Mr. King?
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas.
I would submit this idea, I would rather call it the Geithner corollary than the Rangel rule because it gets deeper, and when you think about how much deeper it gets, it doesn't quite show on this poster. And I'm reaching back and dusting off my memory
But it strikes me that the employment that Tim Geithner was involved in reimbursed him for the taxes that he was going to have to pay from income tax liability, for the payroll tax, the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid taxes, for the several years that are listed there. The reports that I have read--I believe it will also include The Wall Street Journal report--that Tim Geithner was written a check by his employer to be reimbursed in advance for the tax liability he would incur and signed an agreement multiple years in a row that he understood that he had this tax liability.
So not only did he not pay the taxes until the pressure was on--and they waived the penalty which, apparently, they pre-applied the Rangel rule with Tim Geithner, but he had actually profited by not paying his taxes because he had been reimbursed by his employer in advance for the liabilities that you see on the poster that Judge Carter has put up.
So this is a bridge too far from my standpoint. If you have a tax liability and your employer's writing you a check to pay those taxes, you cash the check, put it in your kids' retirement fund--I'm going to presume that's what happened. That's any equity that we don't spend when we die goes into our kids' retirement fund. And so you profit from this and avoid the taxes; that's a double operation there.
So I will label that Geithner corollary to the Rangel rule, and that would be if you're nominated for a high position of, let me say, confirmation position before the United States Senate, and you find yourself, you have a tax problem, if you are able to settle this issue out of court and do so without interest or penalty--he owed $17,230 in taxes but they waived the penalty, so apparently he paid the interest, not the penalty, from that language. I want to make sure that is clear.
If you get that all done, and if America's patience and appetite will believe the idea that Tim Geithner is so smart that we can't get along without him regardless of whether he could remember to pay his taxes and regardless of whether it was an ethical decision or not, if we remember America's appetite for that was completely satiated by the time Tom Daschle was appointed and his tax problem emerged, then America said, Enough, I can't tolerate anymore of these appointments by the President that will be confirmed by the Senate that have people that have been avoiding taxes.
So now we have the lead tax writer in the United States Congress, Chairman Rangel, that has stimulated a bill that's been introduced by Congressman Carter, the Rangel rule, precedent that if any taxpayer admits their mistake and pays their back taxes, no penalty or interest should be assessed, especially if you're up for an appointed position to be confirmed by the United States Senate, especially if America can be convinced that your skills are so valuable that out of 306 million people there isn't a single soul that can match up to the job that you might do, regardless of the problem you might have of being paid in advance to pay your taxes, cashing the check, putting into the equity account for your kids' inheritance, and then along comes the old ``uh-
oh'' from Georgia, that is, the ``I guess I better pay my taxes'' Geithner corollary.
Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, it's kind of interesting that, back to our other subject, talking about holding the Federal Reserve accountable, one of the suggestions was that the Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner be able to review the books of the Fed. Probably the smartest thing the Fed said was, No, I don't think that's a good idea, and maybe there's something to that. That may be the smartest thing the Fed has done in a long time.
We have got another issue that's been an issue for many of us, and Greg Walden and John Culberson and Brian Baird have introduced a bill, House Res. 554, and they're asking that each bill have 72 hours before you take action. And this is not hard for us. We know what they're talking about because we have seen in this Congress bill after bill after bill spending billions and billions and billions of dollars that we get in the middle of the night to vote on the next day. And all they're saying is, let's do what, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the rules of this body, still follows. He said they need 3 days before voting. That's in Thomas Jefferson's rules, which he wrote for this House, and they're basically the same rules we follow now, with some changes that have been made.
All they're asking to do is let's do what Jefferson said we ought to do in this House, and what they did in this House for a century, well, let's do it.
I yield to Mr. Westmoreland.
Mr. WESTMORELAND. Well, I thank you and my congratulations go to Mr. Baird and to the Chair, Mr. Minnick, for pushing this, along with Greg Walden, the gentleman from Oregon, and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Culberson).
In full disclosure, my friend from Texas and Iowa, in full disclosure, when the Republicans were in charge, we did the same thing. We rushed things through, and Mr. Baird, the gentleman from Washington, I think has had this 72-hour resolution in before when we were in charge, and so my hat's off to him for continuing to do this. I think he now has about 178 signatures. Mr. Walden who has a discharge petition has got signatures. We need 218.
So if anyone were watching this, if anyone were watching this and if we could speak to them from this floor, I would say make sure your Congressperson has signed this, because I think this is very important that not only the people voting on this have 72 hours to look at it but the people that it's going to affect.
I think sometimes we lose sight in this body that when we pass a law, it doesn't just affect the Members in this Chamber. It affects all 300 million people in this country, and so we need to make sure that the people that are going to be affected by the legislation that we're passing has an opportunity to read it.
Is everybody going to read it? I doubt it very seriously. Are all the Members of this body going to read it? I doubt it very seriously, but at least they can be held accountable and we can be held accountable for our votes, and people saying, Well, you had 3 days to read it, don't tell me it was something you would rush through. They've got 3 days to read it, and so I commend the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Culberson).
I commend Mr. Walden for trying to do the discharge petition, and I think we have about five people from the minority party that has signed that discharge petition, and I want to commend them because that's a courageous act on their part because, as we know from being in the majority at one time, leadership does not like you signing those discharge petitions.
But this is something that needs to be brought to the floor. This is something that I think the American people are entitled to have some accountability for from their Members of Congress, and so this goes back to that I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.
And so we need to do this, and again, I hope that this is something that we can get the discharge petition through or, if not, that Speaker Pelosi would just bring this bill to the floor and let us vote on it.
Mr. CARTER. I yield to my friend from Iowa.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas.
If this is going to be the most open and ethical Congress in history, this Congress has got to have an opportunity to read the bills. This leadership team will create the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history: Nancy Pelosi, November 16, 2006.
I will say this: Yes, there were bills that were hustled through this Chamber when Republicans were in the majority, but I have never seen anything quite as egregious as the cap-and-trade bill that came through this House of Representatives. That bill was presented to the floor of the House, scheduled for debate the following day, and at 3:09 a.m., a 316-page amendment--
Mr. WESTMORELAND. A.m., a.m.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Did I say a.m.?
Mr. WESTMORELAND. No, you said p.m.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I'm sorry, I meant to say 3:09 a.m. I appreciate that correction. I must have had some kind of chronological dyslexia in order to come up with such a thing.
However, 3:09 a.m., 316-page amendment, and I can say with great confidence that no one read the bill. I don't have to ask anybody in this Chamber if they read the bill. I know no one read the bill. I was here on the floor engaging in the debate when Congressman Gohmert from Texas asked a parliamentary inquiry and he said, Madam Speaker, is there a copy of the enrolled bill in the Well? The answer was kind of, maybe, sort of. And we looked at the kind of, maybe, sort of stack of paper that was there, and there was a basic bill of around 1,100 pages, but the kind of, maybe, sort of didn't include the 316-page amendment.
And so after a few more inquiries, they pointed to another stack of paperwork, and Congressman Gohmert went down to look at that paperwork, and he came back and said, Madam Speaker, parliamentary inquiry, that is not even the amendment. It was a different stack of paper.
And so after 35 minutes of turning this thing around, the most significant question was again asked by Louie Gohmert of Texas, and there was a lot of dialogue going on. Joe Barton of Texas was engaged in this thing; I give him that. And anyway Louie Gohmert asked the question, after about 35 minutes of suspension of the debate on the cap-and-trade bill, he said, Madam Speaker, parliamentary inquiry: If the House of Representatives passes a bill that doesn't exist, is it possible to message a bill that doesn't exist to the United States Senate?
Well, today we know it must be possible because we passed cap-and-
trade, a bill that didn't exist, and it got messaged to the Senate, and I think it probably began to exist sometime after it was messaged to the Senate. It was an appalling thing that the American people would have to watch, and Thomas Jefferson has to be rolling over two or three times. He spoke about a lot of things, 72 hours, 3 days to read the bill.
I also put out a great big pat on the back for Congressman Brian Baird for leading on this, as well as Greg Walden and John Culberson, and I have signed the discharge petition and the bill, and I'm looking for the rest of the signatures on the discharge petition so it can come to this floor. That is a piece of bipartisanship that this Congress can pass that will leave a legacy for a long time to come.
And if we're so afraid of the legislation that might get passed that we can't give anybody an opportunity to read it and we wonder why people go to TEA parties in America, that's why. They're really uneasy about what they've seen: $700 billion in TARP; eight large private-
sector corporations nationalized; along with then a $787 billion stimulus package rushed through Congress--it had to happen right now--
and sat on the President's desk for 5 days before he signed it, and still most of it is not spent.
And with that, they watched cap-and-trade move through here in a hurry-up, rush job, when not one soul in this Congress or across this country read the bill before it passed. And then they see a hurry-up rush for a national health care act that takes away our freedom.
No wonder we have TEA parties. No wonder the American people come out. It's just a wonder that they could be so peaceful, and we've ended up with almost no, let me say, almost no violence of any kind in all the TEA parties that we had. Respectful people that exercised their right to freedom of speech and assembly and a right for redress of their grievances, and they did so in the traditional fashion envisioned by Thomas Jefferson himself.
So many generations have taken place since Thomas Jefferson, but his wisdom remains, and I certainly support H. Res. 554. Encourage everyone, including the Speaker, to sign that discharge petition. Let's get that thing out here on the floor, do the right thing for Democrats and Republicans.
Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, the previous discussion that took a little over an hour before we came to the floor commending Senator Kennedy and his legacy, it seems to me that when we're talking about civility, which is one of the things they talk about, if we can get back to civility, I think the 72-hour rule would have something to do with that.
Very quickly, I want to go to one more thing and then I want to come back and talk about ACORN.
We're the czar champions of the world. We have got more czars than the Romanovs had in the entire history of their dynasty, and our friend Steve Scalise, who was going to be here tonight but he got tied up and couldn't come, he's got a bill to sunset these czars.
{time} 2200
A czar is someone who heads a task force, a council, is appointed by the President without the consent of the Senate, is excepted from the competitive service and does not have an existing removal date. Appropriated funds can't be used to pay for salaries and expenses of task forces or councils established by the President and headed by a czar.
This is what he's trying to do. He's trying to put a sunset on the czar policy, because it seems to an awful lot of people in this country, the term ``czar'' means absolute power, and they've created these positions of absolute power without any oversight.
I will start with my friend from Georgia.
Mr. WESTMORELAND. I thank my friend from Texas for yielding.
A czar is something that I've been getting a lot of questions about lately. Everywhere I've been in Georgia's Third Congressional District, I'm starting to get questions about the czars. People are wondering who these 34 or 35 czars are. We have already had one exposed to the extent that he eventually resigned.
People are starting to understand more and more that these czars are being appointed by the President with no confirmation by the Senate. And they're beginning to say, hey, how is this happening? What's going on here? How long are they going to serve? Do they work directly for the President? Who are they accountable to? What if they have some type of job that's under Mrs. Napolitano or under Geithner, or whatever? Who do they report to? What's the deal? They would report directly to the President.
And so we need, really, sunshine on all the appointments, but especially, as the gentleman from Louisiana, H.R. 3569, at least a sunset on all these czars. This is something that the American people are very inquisitive about.
I think that because of the number of these czars and because of some of the really Communist views and really ultra left-wing views that some of these czars have that are being exposed is just bringing more and more attention to it. And I think the American people want some accountability. I'll go back to the statement, they're sick and tired of being sick and tired of more government being stacked on.
We've got 10 percent unemployment nationwide. We've got some areas with 15, 16, 17, 20 percent unemployment. The only jobs that are growing right now are in the Federal Government. That's the only thing that's growing.
With that, Judge, I hope that anybody who could be watching might encourage their Representative to look at H.R. 3569.
Mr. CARTER. We're just about to run out of time. We had a surprise guest come from the back of the room. Would you like to tell us about the czars? Did we stimulate you?
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. You sure did, Judge. I want to thank you for bringing this up. It's just not who these folks are that we don't know; it's what they step on. I look at this as sort of the fourth or the stealth branch of government.
I came here, I know all my colleagues here, certainly the freshmen, we came knowing that we have a serious responsibility to fulfill on the different committees of jurisdiction that we're appointed to. I bring up just one example, the car czar, and what has happened to the auto industry in this country.
As I could tell, I expected when we had these issues, that we have a committee, I believe it's called Energy and Commerce, that would have dealt with the issues surrounding that industry. And yet everything that has happened in the car industry, of firing an executive from a private organization, to taking over ownership of General Motors, to dictating winners and losers in terms of the auto dealerships, all directed under the leadership of a czar.
Frankly, I know that that's the responsibility of Congress. We have a responsibility to approach that carefully and judiciously and make those types of decisions. The Constitution provided us that authority and that responsibility, and the czars are just stepping all over the Constitution.
Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, thank you. We feel real good when we can call a colleague out of the dark. We're glad you're here. We are just about to wrap up our time.
Before we stop, I'm doing something different today. We've been talking about an awful lot. This is probably the most we've talked about in a single hour. As soon as this is over with, as soon as I walk across the street to my office, if you go to www.house.gov/carter, we're going to have a live Webcast for the next hour-and-a-half where you can ask questions and make comments about what we've talked about here, or anything else that's bothering you or that you're concerned about, I want to have it, so that you can tell Congress what you think. I've already started doing this. I enjoy it. I've already got 300 questions waiting right now. I'm going to advertise a little bit and welcome people to come to this Webcast.
Mr. Speaker, how much time have I got left?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. One minute.
Mr. CARTER. Thank you, everybody, for participating. It's most important you remember the subject of this conversation, and that is the rule of law that holds this society together. Never forget. We're all talking about rules and laws and how they seem to be stretched and violated. We've got to get back to the rule of law governing this Nation.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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