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Representative Steve A. King
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Current Office: U.S. House
Current District: 5
First Elected: 11/05/2002
Last Elected: 11/04/2008
Next Election: 2010
Party: Republican
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BiographicalVoting RecordIssue Positions
(Political Courage Test)Interest Group RatingsPosition PapersSpeeches and Public StatementsAdditional Biographical InformationCampaign Finances
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Title: Socialized Medicine
Date: 07/09/2009
Location: Washington, DC
Speech
SOCIALIZED MEDICINE -- (House of Representatives - July 09, 2009)
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker I appreciate the honor and privilege of addressing you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. As I gather here in my preparation for this discussion, I understood the remarks made by the gentleman from Minnesota that he would be glad if I would, perhaps, address the health insurance and the health care issue here in the country, and I would be glad to do that. And I believe also my friend from Texas would be glad to do that.
What stands out in my mind is this: That the President of the United States campaigned on a promise that he wanted to deliver. It looks to me like a national health care act. It's what I would call socialized medicine. That's what we called it when it was Hillary Care, and I think that's what we will call it if it becomes Obama Care.
But the American people are for the most part very satisfied with their health insurance program, and they are almost completely satisfied with the health care that they get when they do, when they do require that kind of care. The kind of care they get in clinics, the kind of care they get in hospitals, the kind of care that's provided by our doctors and our nurses and our various practitioners is number one in the world.
And, for example, the Canadian people that have an Obama Care plan come to the United States when they really need medical care. And I happen to notice that the people that have a socialized medicine program in the European Union, where sometimes their queue is longer in France than it is in Italy, longer in Germany than it is in Spain. And people that need care might have to move all around the European Union and get in the shorter queue to try to get in to get their hip replacement or their surgery or whatever it might be.
It's not the kind of care that I want to see in the United States of America. We don't have people waiting in line. We don't have people sitting outside the emergency room in a long queue, and we don't have people that are coming to the emergency room for care because it's more convenient to them--unless, of course, somebody else is paying the bill.
Because we have at least the incentive and a component of the free market system. Even though the Federal Government pays for a large share of health care, the reason our health care system in the United States is so good, and the biggest reason that our pharmaceuticals have raced so far ahead in their research and development of the rest of the world, and the reason that we have so much technology, and such high-quality health care, one of those reasons is because of the altruism of the practitioners that are there, they are in the business for the right reason. They want to help people. They want to provide good health care services.
But on top of that, there is at least an incentive for profit. And if you dial that out, if you take it away, it discourages people from going off to med school and discourages them from developing their skills and education, and it discourages the entrepreneurs and the innovators from producing more and more innovation when it comes to health care.
And so the rest of the world's opportunity to benefit from the innovativeness of the United States would be diminished if we adopted socialized medicine here in the United States.
And what are we trying to go fix. I would suggest this: The argument is that there are 44 to 47 million people in America that don't have health insurance. Now, no one should be very alarmed at that when they understand that everyone in America has access to health care. And, yes, it might be in the emergency room and it might not, and it's more often than not covered by somebody else's contribution, or there would be, through their workplace sometimes, or through some kind of government program or Medicare or Medicaid. But they all have access to health care. And a large percentage of us have health insurance.
And the number of 44 to 47 million that are uninsured, according to those who, on this side of the aisle who never come down here to ask me to yield and rebut my arguments, they just simply, apparently, are bewildered by the truth--so I would be happy to yield if any of you have an argument that you would like to make that would add some substance to this argument, but you don't--44 to 47 million uninsured by your numbers. But when you start carving out of that those who are illegally in the United States, if ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, were to deliver a voucher that were to provide for about half of these uninsured, pay for their insurance premium, they will be compelled by law to deport them rather than hand them the voucher check.
So you can cut that number down substantially, you know that to be true. Then if you take out of these 44 million, the numbers of people who are in transition from one health insurance policy to another, and if you take out of that also the young people that just haven't gotten into a program yet because partly because they don't want to pay the premiums for people who have higher health care costs, that 20-to-30, early 30s area, you are down to this number. They are chronically uninsured; according to a recent study, totals about 4 percent of the population.
Now, if we establish socialized medicine, we are going to maybe get covered 99 percent of the population, and we are at this point now where the chronically uninsured are only 4 percent of the population. So why would we upset and completely transform the best health care system in the world to try to narrow down the 4 percent chronically uninsured and maybe, if they would just sign up or participate, we could get them down to 1 percent.
For that 3 percent, we would upset the entire system. It does not make sense to me, and you cannot, you cannot save money in this health care program by turning it all into government unless you ration.
And what's happening now is Medicare is driving down the costs and pushing the costs over on the private carriers. That's the real circumstance.
And I want to also say, Mr. Speaker, to you, I want to make sure the American people hear this.
When President Obama says, don't worry if you like your health insurance program that you have, you get to keep it, he is only the President of the United States. He doesn't get to promise Americans they get to keep their policy. He is setting up and wants to set up a national health care act, a socialized medicine program, an insurance program that competes directly with the private sector.
And when you use taxpayer dollars to subsidize funding directly against the private sector, you necessarily will shrink and outcompete the private sector because it's going to be subsidized from--without the public--the government insurance program, will be subsidized by taxpayers.
And if it is, it can outcompete that of the private sector. It's just a matter of the formula.
And so if you are an insurance company that has to have your costs all added in, your administrative costs
added, a margin for the profit, always competing for the best kind of bargain that is out there, which adds to the efficiencies, I will add. And the government comes in, and they say we are going to take you head to head, but we are going to pump in 25 percent of our costs out of the taxpayers here to funnel this in. That means they will be able to lower the premiums down and take these private health insurers out.
I can tell you what happened in Germany. Otto von Bismarck established a national health care plan there more than 100 years ago, sometime in the late 1800s. And today 90 percent of Germans are covered by the public plan, the government plan, the taxpayer subsidized plan. Everybody is required to have a plan, about 99 percent do have a plan. But about 10 percent of them are covered by private insurance. That's all that's left.
They pushed out all of the private carriers except for about 10 percent. That 10 percent are for people who are self-employed who can opt into that, who want a little bit better health care program. That's what's kept that little 10 percent margin there. I don't think 10 percent is a legitimate competition.
And when the government owns and runs everything in the United States, what do you think happens to your prices and your efficiencies and your service? Price goes up, service goes down. Health care gets rationed. President Obama cannot promise the American people that you get to keep your health insurance plan because they are going to drive the health insurance companies out of business.
And even if they don't, the employers who control those policies and the employee providers of health insurance will be making that decision on whether they want to opt into the government plan or whether they want to maintain the same or a different private plan for their employees. Yes, you can weigh in with your employer, you can make a request with your employer, but your employer will have to make a decision on the bottom line. The bottom line will be, is it cheaper to use taxpayer-subsidized health insurance for the employees, or cheaper to provide for the unsubsidized health insurance premiums from the private insurance companies?
That decision will be made on a dollar-per-dollar basis in what looks like it's the best thing for the mid term, short term and long term. And it won't be a decision made by President Obama; it will be a decision made by the employer.
So if the government offers a government plan, and the government plan saves the employer money, and you are an employee that is covered by your employer-provided plan, you can kiss it goodbye. It will be a government plan. It will be a national health care plan. It will be socialized medicine, and you will have one-size-fits-all medicine in the United States of America eventually under President Obama's proposal.
That's a fact. It really is logically irrefutable. No matter how many times they repeat the same mantra over and over again, it comes back to the same conclusion, which is: The American people won't get to decide that they keep their own plan. Employers, if they provide that insurance, will decide. And the government will subsidize the competition to the point where it drives out the private sector providers, and then it's all one-size-fits-all, all one government plan, all socialized medicine, all Canadian model, all United Kingdom model, all European Union model.
And what a cruel thing to do to the Canadians, Mr. Speaker, what a cruel thing.
A good Canadian company today will hire people and promise them this: you have to accept the Canadian one-size-fits-all plan with its rationing and its long lines and its inefficiencies and people waiting in line, dying in line. You have to accept that because it is against the law in Canada to treat somebody without an order of processing. You have to get in the queue. They enforce it differently province to province, but the law exists.
So let's say you need a hip replacement. You get in line with the people who need hip replacements and there is written criteria on what the priorities are. So you are standing in line. No matter how badly you need the hip replacement, you can't cut in front of the line; you are just stuck in that line. So employers, they want to offer a good package to their employees, will package up with this a health insurance plan that flies them out of Canada into the United States so they can get American health care. Now that is a nice plum. Let's say you have two people of such tremendous skill that you want to hire them because that is what it takes to keep your company. That is what the President thought about Tim Geithner, by the way, who will be before our committee tomorrow, that he was such a valuable person, the fact that he had not paid his taxes was not a large enough factor to weigh against him. If you have those kind of people that you can hire in Canada, you offer them this nice package, which when it is convenient for you, use the Canadian plan. But when you need the health care, we will fly you to Houston and give you heart surgery. Your heart gives you trouble today, we will operate on you tomorrow. Maybe even today if it is early enough in the morning.
That is what happens in Canada: people are flown to the United States of America for their health care because it is rationed in Canada.
Now that is not enough, Mr. Speaker. Would anybody go out and go through the Web sites and the Yellow Pages in Canada and look at the travel companies that package up health care trips to the United States?
Hip replacement is easy to figure out. Let's say you live in British Columbia. No, how about Calgary in Alberta. You have a bad hip, and you finally get into the government doctor and he looks at you and says your socket is burned out, you have to have a hip replacement.
Yes, I stood in hours or days to have you tell me that. I want it fixed.
Well, we have a line over here. Let's say it is 400 long; we do a couple a week. So 52 weeks in a year, about 4 years or so. And I don't know that these are real numbers or hypothetical. But you understand you are in a long queue in Canada. So you understand you can go on the Internet, do a little search and come up with a nice little travel health care company, and there are a number of them in Canada who are in the business of packaging up the health care services.
They will say, you don't want to drive because we will do this surgery in Seattle. We will set this up. We will set up your transportation, fly you down to Seattle, and then here is your transportation.
You can get to the airport?
Yes, I will drive my car.
Park your car here; get on this plane. We will fly you from Calgary down to Seattle, and you can pick up the shuttle to the hotel, the hotel is next to the hospital, check into the hotel, go over to the clinic, the doctor will look you over and schedule you for surgery, which will be the following morning at 8 a.m. You go under the knife. You get your new hip socket. They give you a day and a half of therapy. We will bring you back to the hotel, and from the hotel they will shuttle you back to the airport and you can fly back to Calgary and you can go back home.
All of that for what, turn key. They will cut you a deal turn key so you know what it will cost you to pack it all up from transportation, hotel room, doctors' visits, surgery costs, all of things that you get, including the therapy, the physical therapy on the tail end, and get you back home again, write one check or put it on your credit card. There is a company for you. They are the entrepreneurs that have survived in Canada in the face of socialized medicine because it created a demand for people to come to the United States.
Do we shut that all off? Would we destroy the opportunities for the entrepreneurs in Canada that have so adeptly found and met a market demand? I say, no, we should not do that in this Congress. And I don't know if there is anybody in this Congress who knows that better than Judge, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert). I would be very happy to yield to my friend from Texas.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. And I would point out that, yes, Federal law is that a health care provider can't deny health care to illegals in their locale, and because of that there are no trauma centers in southern Arizona south of Tucson. They have all gone broke providing free health care for illegals that are flowing across our border. But it goes beyond that. We are even providing free health care for people who get injured in Mexico and are brought into the United States for free health care services.
And I point this out, it's not something that you see in any of the data that we have here in Congress, you find these things out by doing things like dropping in on a surprise visit down at Sasabe, Arizona, at the point of entry where I stopped a couple of years ago. I went in and I thought I would introduce myself, it was a surprise visit, but I said, I'm Congressman Steve King from Iowa. And the first officer said, I can't talk to you. So I went to the next officer and said, I'm Congressman Steve King from Iowa, just dropped in to see how things are going. Can't talk to you. Talk to Mike over there; he's the shift supervisor, and he's ready to retire and he has terminal cancer. He'll talk to you.
Okay. That much fear in place about simply divulging what's going on.
So I was standing there talking to Mike, whom I pray is still alive and doing well, but I'm not very confident that he is, and as he began to tell me what was going on at Sasabe at the port of entry, some of that discussion about how many illegal ports there are east and west of their crossing the border, he got a phone call and he said, Excuse me a moment. He went away for a minute or so and he came back and he said, Well, I got a call. There's been an emergency that has been created on the Mexican side of the border in this town where they stage illegals, and it looks like there was a fight there. He didn't know if it was a drug fight or a booze fight or both, but there was an individual that was knifed. So he said they'd be bringing him across the border pretty soon in a Mexican ambulance, and I have called the helicopter to come down from Tucson and U.S. ambulances to come in with oxygen because we can't really stabilize the patient with what's on a Mexican ambulance.
I happened to have a paramedic with me, so I asked him, Mike, will you take a look at this man when he comes? I want you to get in there and help save his life if you can, and I also want to know what's going on.
He went in and went to work. And actually the Mexican ambulance came over the border, and the paramedic with me jumped right to work to try to save the fellow who had been stabbed right underneath the ribcage, into his liver it turned out. There was no oxygen. There was nothing in the Mexican ambulance except a little bit of gauze and some surgical gloves. That was it. Nothing else. No other medical supplies. So it was an ambulance that looked like an ambulance, but on the inside it was just simply an empty chamber.
So he did what he could to stabilize him until the two U.S. ambulances showed up. Then they put him on oxygen. Then they stabilized him. Then we loaded him into the helicopter, and he flew off to Tucson University Hospital. Stabbed in the liver in Mexico, brought into Mexico in a Mexican ambulance, transferred out of that onto the care of two U.S. ambulances, and then put on a Life Flight to go up to Tucson where the next morning I stopped to visit to see how our guy was doing. And, by the way, he was covered with tattoos and all kinds of signs of being a bad hombre, and he'd been in a nasty fight and stabbed with something that looked like it was a knife about 3 1/2 inches wide, apparently, was the blade and deep enough to go into his liver.
I went to the hospital and asked to visit him. And as I went up there, I found out, and here's a short version of it, the net cost to the American taxpayers was $30,000, roughly, for the helicopter, for the medical care that he got. He was on parole into the United States to get health care, and he would be escorted back to the border when he was stabilized. All of that paid for by American people, American taxpayers, or American health care, health insurance premium payers, out of those pockets.
So I sat down while I was there with the chief financial officer of Tucson University Hospital. And there they rolled out some numbers where their annual cost was, and this is my recollection, around $14.5 million of health care that they provided to illegals. They told of a circumstance where there had been a bus full of illegals that had been in a wreck and about 25 in there that were injured, and 15 of them were so badly injured that they were brought into the intensive care unit. ICU was packed full of 15 illegals. No room for any people in Tucson who had been paying their health insurance premium to provide for that kind of emergency care. So they were Life Flighting the residents of Tucson up to Phoenix to go into the ICU in Phoenix, and then their families had to drive there to visit because the ICU in Tucson was full. And that is the only and the most southerly trauma center in Arizona.
Another situation where there was a mother that was pregnant with multiple babies, five of them. So in order to avoid the high cost of multiple births in Tucson, and she was from Mexico, lived in Mexico, but they found out about this. They had been sending people down there to train the health care providers in Mexico. They trained them on how to deal with a multiple birth, set it all up so they didn't have this high cost of these anchor babies coming into the United States. Five new American citizens created to go on the rolls of the burden to the taxpayers.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Himes). The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to extend the time for the duration.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman is recognized for an additional 25 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, the multiple births that were to take place in the home country of Mexico where they had sent American health care workers down to train Mexican health care workers, in spite of all of that investment to prevent the extra costs and five new anchor babies, as soon as she got ready to go into labor, she sneaked into the United States and they had her there anyway. That was $125,000 for that little turn.
This is a thing that's going on because of this law, and I wanted to inject that in. We aren't just providing health care for everybody in the United States, legal or illegal. We are also providing it occasionally for people who are injured in other countries and brought into the United States because we have such a good health care system here. And our taxpayers pay for it, our rate payers pay for it, and the people in the communities pay for it.
I yield back to the gentleman from Texas and ask him to carry on with the thought process that I interrupted
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and looking at the list of housekeeping that I have to do, I'd like to conclude this discussion on health care. I would just point out that Judge Gohmert from Texas anticipated the item that was on my mind and flowed into the transparency of the costs of health care. As far as I know, we're the only two people in this Congress that are talking about transparency on health care costs. How this works is this: If Medicare doesn't pay the costs of providing the services, if other providers don't pay or if other insurance companies, like the largest ones, they will drive that down, they'll track Medicare reimbursement rates down. That means that somebody else has to pay the difference. It's like pushing on a balloon one way or the other, and that's the transparency that's necessary.
I keep going back to the hip replacement because that's a simple one to understand. If a hip replacement costs somebody on Medicare--let's
put a number on it just to pull it out of the air. Let's say it costs somebody on Medicare $7,500, and it costs somebody that's going to write a check out of their billfold $10,000, and somebody who is covered by a good private health insurance company maybe is going to cost them $9,000. Why is that? It's because the government has pushed down the reimbursement rates under Medicare; and because of that, the losses have to be made up somewhere else.
I will go another step beyond the complete transparency that Mr. Gohmert calls for, and I will say this: If Bill Gates pulls into a gas station and the sign says $2.49 a gallon, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and the other rich people in the world buy their gas at $2.49 a gallon. The poorest person in the world has a rattle-trap old car, and they went out and scraped together enough money to go buy 10 gallons of gas to put in their rattle-trap car. They are going to pay $2.49 a gallon, sitting at the pump right there with Bill Gates in his Lexus or Mercedes or whatever it might be and Warren Buffett, who probably doesn't drive that nice of a car, actually. Well, why would a gallon of gas be the same price for the poor and the rich but have a hip replacement be different prices for people, depending on whether it's paid for by the taxpayers under Medicare or a private payer who is, let's say, self-insured who has a nice big checkbook and decides not to pay that premium or somebody who has a private health insurance premium? Why three or more different prices? The reason is because the government has pushed down those costs, and they get averaged out through balanced billing and cost shifting from the health care providers. That is one of the root causes of the problems we have with our health providers today. It's kind of like the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to talk about it because it's too hard to fix.
I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Texas. I say, but, Mr. Speaker, we have a stimulus plan. We have a $787 billion stimulus plan that is going to jump-start this economy and get us out of the doldrums and solve this problem with unemployment and put Americans back to work and get the Dow Jones back up above 8,200 or somewhere and make America feel good again and give confidence in the venture capitalists that are out there and in the markets and in the Dow and in the entrepreneurs.
Well, all of that was part of a stimulus plan. I came down on this floor while that was being debated, and I put up a poster that looks a lot like this. Only it didn't have $16.1 million on it. It had $32 million on it. And it had the quote from President Obama here rather than the quote from Speaker Pelosi. And the quote from President Obama was: ``We are not going to do earmarks. We are not going to do Member-sponsored initiatives. And I'm not going to sign any bill that has earmarks in it.'' Well, it depended on how you counted it. It seems to me that the number of earmarks in that bill came to around 9,000, maybe a little less, 8,500, depending on how you defined the earmarks.
This is a picture of this cute little guy. I don't know if it is a girl or a guy. Do you see how cute he is? He is a pet project. This is Speaker Pelosi's pet project, her pet mouse project. This is the not quite yet infamous--and here is what he is. He is the salt water marsh harvest mouse. Now that is SWMHM for short. This little mouse lives out there in the marsh near San Francisco. And he has been a special project of the Speaker. For years, she has tried to get earmarks for this mouse.
Now, take a close look there. You don't see it, but there is an earmark there. Even though I said that this stimulus plan had an earmark in it for the salt water marsh harvest mouse, everybody that spoke for the Speaker and the people on this side of the aisle said, oh, no, that is radical reactionism. There aren't any earmarks in this bill. And, furthermore, the salt water marsh harvest mouse is not going to be one of those earmarks, because that would be a pet project--a pet project--for the Speaker, and that would be inappropriate given that the President has ordered that there will not be pet projects.
Well, this is what the Speaker said on January 25, 2009. After the beginning of this 111th Congress, 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 most to prove. 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.
Well, the mouse family may need it. Maybe it is a good thing, $16.1 million for this little old mouse that couldn't quite rise high enough in the priority scale in any previous process of the United States Congress. But here in the desperate straits of 14 1/2 million unemployed and another 5.8 or 9 million looking for a job, 20 million people out there who would like to have an opportunity to fend for themselves, we are going to drop not $32 million any longer, it has been carved down, we are going to put $16.1 million into the salt water marsh harvest mouse earmarked in this little pet project. This little pet project is earmarked now for $16.1 million.
All the people over there that said, oh, STEVE KING is a reactionary and a radical. He is making up things that aren't in the bill. It isn't going to happen. We wouldn't do a thing like that, including the Speaker who has defined that she won't do a thing like that now has $16.1 million going into the marsh for the salt water marsh harvest mouse. His viability--I presume he is doing okay without this earmark. If we need jobs and an economy that works, we don't need to be dumping money into the salt water marsh harvest mouse.
By the way, that is an earmark. It is a pet project. His ears are notched. That is what we do. And that is where the name came from.
I wanted to point that out, Mr. Speaker, while this microphone is still alive here on this day, that this is the day that there was confirmation that the people who pointed this out back then in about this period in time in January or early February were right, and those who defended the Speaker and said it will never happen were wrong; $16.1 million was dropped in to the salt water marsh harvest mouse.
And that should give a person a little bit of pause.
Now I want to put something else into the Record here this evening, and that is you have had a couple of votes this week, one today and one the night before last, that I think are important. On the night before last, we had a vote on a resolution that would place a stone in the Capitol Visitor Center that honors the slaves that contributed to the construction of this Capitol Building. They did do that. They contributed to the construction. We ought to acknowledge that. But, you know, we had the huge room over in the Capitol Visitor Center that was designated as the Great Hall. Now the Great Hall brings to mind the Great Hall in Ellis Island. It would honor all of the immigrants that came to America, those that came voluntarily and those that came involuntarily. And it is an image that is very, very moving when you walk through the Great Hall in Ellis Island. I was very happy to name the room over in the visitor center the Great Hall.
But it had to be changed because of the objections of the Congressional Black Caucus that wanted a higher acknowledgment for slavery in this country. So the Great Hall's name was changed to Emancipation Hall.
Okay. No objection here. Emancipation was a big thing for the world when we put an end to slavery here in the United States. At great cost, however. A resolution to do so was traded off in a quid pro quo, and for those people who didn't go to law school like myself, I have to tell you, there was a deal made. The deal that was made was this: the Architect of the Capitol who has been trying to scrub every reference to faith from anything that's developed from this point forward around this Capitol complex and even refusing to allow when a flag is flown over this Capitol, the certificate that certifies that it was flown, if you want to say, July 10 in the year of our Lord, 2009, he wants to scrub ``the year of our Lord'' out of there because that's a reference to religion. Never mind above the Speaker's seat: it says, In God We Trust. It's been there for a long time, that is our national motto, and the Architect of the Capitol
sought to block our national motto from being displayed in the Congressional Visitor Center along with the Pledge of Allegiance.
So in order to require the Architect to recognize our national motto In God We Trust and ``one nation under God'' in our Pledge of Allegiance, there had
[Page: H7944]
to be a quid pro quo, a deal made, that in addition to Emancipation Hall, there would be an extra monument put up to recognize slavery.
All right. I'm fine with recognizing slavery. I would have been an abolitionist if I had been born back in those years prior to the Civil War. It's an article of faith, it's an article of Christian fundamentalism that slavery is a sin against God. And a good thing that happened when this country put an end to it, at great cost in blood. But if it's going to be the kind of devil's bargain that if you're going to have a reference to God in the Congressional Visitor Center you first have to pass another way to recognize slavery, in order to pacify the Congressional Black Caucus, a separatist organization in this Congress, in order to get a reference to God, the quid pro quo was, pass this resolution first and then we'll bring up the resolution that lets you vote on whether there's going to be In God We Trust in our visitor center. That took place today. The vote 2 days ago was 399-1. I voted ``no'' on the slavery marker because it was making a deal with requiring that to pass before the word God could go up in the Congressional Visitor Center, even though it's a direct replica of what's right behind me above the Speaker's chair right now. That resolution passed tonight with eight Members of Congress voting against putting our national motto up in the visitor center and against putting up the Pledge of Allegiance in the visitor center because there's a reference to God in each one. Eight voted no. Two voted present. Ten couldn't bring themselves to acknowledge that God's a great big part of what formed this country and those words will stand no matter who stands against it.
Mr. Speaker, I thank you for being recognized, and I yield back the balance of my time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
http://www.thomas.gov/
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