Republican Rebuttal

Republican Rebuttal

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Fortenberry). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) is recognized for 30 minutes.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I am very much aware that I am the only thing standing between everybody going home tonight, so while I have 30 minutes, I am not sure that I am going to use all of them. But I have been listening to some of the things being said tonight. I listened to them last week when I was in the Chair. And I get pretty wrought up about some of those things. And so I am going to talk a little bit about some of the comments that have been made tonight and present some facts.

Now, I don't have tonight with me our great poster that says ``The Truth Squad''. But I am going to leave this white chart up here for just a few minutes. So imagine that that says on it ``The Truth Squad''. I couldn't find the poster tonight. I am sort of filling in for someone else tonight.

But I want to say that, you know, I am a rather plainspoken person. I come from the mountains of North Carolina and generally am known as pretty plainspoken. And tonight, when I was listening to some of the rhetoric that was going on over here, I thought, one of the first things I want to say, if you believe that the Democrats will do a better job of providing for national security, then I have got some swamp land in New Mexico for sale for a great price for you.

I have not been a big watcher of C-SPAN before I came to the House of Representatives. I know we have got a lot of great folks who watch it, and I am grateful to you for doing that. But my guess is that there have been more untruths told in this Chamber in the past 15 months than maybe any other period of time in the history of this country. I have been watching it and I know other people have been too. That is what caused us to form the Truth Squad so that we could come out and set the facts straight.

I get very concerned when people play fast and loose with the truth and particularly when they play fast and loose with talking about national security. You see, I take that very, very seriously; and I think most of my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle do too. The role of the Federal Government is to provide for the national security of this Nation. We were savagely attacked on 9/11, and we have responded to that, I think, in an appropriate way. These are people that hate us, that hate our way of life, and that want to take us back to the 5th century and have us live the way they live.

I do not think the American people want to do that. I think the American people love their freedom and want to maintain that freedom, and we are interested in helping other people gain their freedom.

What I am curious about, the Democrats get up here and say, We could provide better for the national security. I just have a couple of questions to ask them: Where were they and their President when the World Trade Center was first hit? Where were they and their President when we got hit several other times and we could have had a response to that? My guess is if we had had a Democratic President when we were facing 9/11, we would still be negotiating at the U.N. somewhere and pretty soon we would be losing our freedoms in this country.

I do get a little upset about it. I think that they are absolutely ridiculous in the things that they say about how they would keep us safer than the Republicans have kept us safe. We are in a terrible time. We did not ask for the war. We are not imperialistic people, but we know how to protect ourselves when we are attacked, and we are going to continue to do that. The Democrats are Johnny-come-latelies on all of this stuff. They know that the American people see the Republican Party as the party that will protect us and protect our freedoms, and that is the number one role of the Federal Government and that is where our money should be spent. So I am very happy for us to be doing our job when it comes to national security. And we are going to be working on all of those things. Our budget will address that. Our budget has addressed that, and we will continue to do that.

I want to make another comment to sort of clear up the facts tonight, comments made about the fact that we did not pass President Bush's budget today and somehow or another that is terrible. Well, we have never passed President Bush's budget, and there is no intention of passing President Bush's budget now. The President does submit a budget. The Constitution requires him to do so. However, it is the Congress's responsibility to take that budget and to look at what is proposed and then to come up with our own budget. And we will do that. But to be so duplicitous as to say that we are going to rubber-stamp the President's budget is just unbelievable to me.

To talk about cutting student loans, as my colleague says here all the time, Representative Price of Georgia, you can have your opinions, but you cannot make up the facts. And there is no way that you can distort the facts in what we have done for the education budget and particularly the higher education budget.

They talk all the time about what they would do, what they would do, what they would do. Well, I want to show you what they would have done had we let the Democrats have their way in Appropriations Committee meetings and in Budget Committee meetings.

I am going to turn this chart around now. For all their rhetoric about cutting spending and doing something about the deficit, during the markup of the budget, they proposed new spending of $26.9 billion and new taxes of $19.3 billion. How much savings? Zero. Now, they can get up on the floor of the House and they can say lots of things, but when we bring out the facts, the comments that they make just do not hold true. They think people are just going to ignore what they really do and believe what they say.

I said this the other night: our motto in the State of North Carolina is to be, rather than to seem. Some day I am going to figure out a clever way to show how the Democrats want to seem, rather than to be, instead of reversing that. But that is what they want to do. They want the American people to believe that what they are saying is true when they live a totally different kind of life-style. And I think it is very important that every time this happens that we respond to it. It is very, very important that we do that and not let them get by with it.

I want to say a couple of things about the effect of what we have done in terms of cutting taxes. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that the Democrats think they know how to spend your money better than you do and the Republicans think that the American people know how to spend their money better than the Federal Government knows how to spend it. So we want the American people to keep more of their money than they have been. So the Republicans instituted tax cuts, and what we have done is we see that tax receipts rebound with record increases based on tax cuts.

They want you to believe that all the ills of the world have come as a result of tax cuts. Well, the good things that have happened in this economy, most of them have come as a result of our having cut taxes. We want to let you keep your money in your pocket and spend it the way you want to and not turn it over to bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. who waste a lot of it and then spend a little bit of it maybe on some good things. That is not the way it ought to be. We want you to keep your money.

Let me show one other chart here that I have to talk about the projected growth of revenue and what will happen. We need to make the tax cuts that were instituted permanent, and that is one of the things that we need to be able to do so that we can keep this economy going in the right direction. And this is what will happen with tax relief made permanent. And, yes, indeed, we can cut the deficit in half by 2009, which is when the President said that it would be cut in half, and there is another chart over there to show that.

They just very, very cavalierly leave out certain things when they are talking, like the President said that the deficit would be cut in half. The President did not say the deficit would be cut in half this year. He said very clearly in 2009. And it will be if we can make the tax cuts permanent. The biggest fight we are having around here is how do we make those tax cuts permanent and keep that money in your pocket instead of putting it into the hands of people who will not spend it nearly as well as you do.

And you notice again that the Democrats are very, very selective in the things that they tell you in terms of their own actions and the things that they have done. They are fond of quoting third sources, and I want to quote something for you too tonight that you probably will not hear about in the mainstream media, the best friend of the Democrats. But Roll Call, one of the local newspapers here in town that is read primarily inside the Beltway, April 6, states: ``House Democrats have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds over the past several years on the party's annual retreats. Democrats have used official money to pay for a portion of their retreats for at least a decade. And a review of disbursement reports from the chief administrative officer shows that the House Democratic Caucus has spent more than $200,000 directly out of the caucus's official budget since 2003 on chartered jets, rented buses, entertainers, brochures, staff travel, and a host of other retreat expenses.''

These are not allowed. The Republicans do not do that. We pay for our retreats ourselves. But you are never going to hear this again from the mainstream media because they do not want you to know about the way Democrats abuse taxpayer funds.

I want to talk just a little bit tonight about some of the good and great things that have been done in this session of the Congress. It is the ``do big things Congress.'' The Democrats would like you to believe that we have not accomplished a great deal. They are focused tonight on the budget. We did not get the budget passed. Well, we do not have any deadline for doing that until the end of the session, actually. But we set ourselves to task at doing that, and we will do that. And it will be a good budget when we do it, and it will cut spending, which is what we need to be doing. And it will rein in some of the spending that is on automatic pilot because programs set up under Democratic administrations are difficult to cut back.

We passed the energy bill, H.R. 6, which brings America's energy system into the 21st century, signed into law by the President. We passed the highway bill, which creates millions of new jobs and improves public transportation and highways and other things all across the country, public law. We passed the Deficit Reduction Act, which provides $39.732 billion in savings by reforming the government, reducing the deficit, and renewing our commitment to hardworking American taxpayers.

How many Democrats voted for reducing the deficit? Zero. None of them. They can stand up here again and talk all they want, but they have got to walk the walk. And when it comes to that, they just do not do it.

We have passed liability reform, several liability reform bills. We have passed class action reform legislation to reduce frivolous lawsuits, to reduce all this money going into the hands of the trial lawyers.

We have passed a Combat Meth Act. Methamphetamines are a terrible scourge on our country, and we are doing something about that.

We passed the PATRIOT Act, again, something that we need to do to protect Americans, to allow our government to do proper investigations of the people who may be harming us. What did the Democrats do? They bragged that they killed it.

We passed a United Nations Reform Act in the House with very little support from Democrats. We are mandating budget oversight, accountability, and ethics into U.N. reforms. You do not hear that coming out of the Democrats.

We passed the Health Act, making positive changes to the health care liability system.

We have extended the death tax repeal permanently. Help from the Democrats, very little.

We passed the Tax Relief Extension Act. We are going to extend the tax provisions expiring in 2005. No Democrats helping with that.

We passed the Job Training Improvement Act of 2005, enhancing the workforce investment system of the Nation.

We have passed lots and lots of bills. We passed in December the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act. Any help from the Democrats? No.

We are working hard to protect the American people in the way that they should be protected. And one of the ways that we need to be doing that is to be reducing the spending of the Federal Government and reducing the burden on hardworking Americans.

We also need to make sure that we maintain our freedom so that we can do all the other things that we want to do. That is what the Republicans are doing.

What you hear out of the Democrats is a lot of empty rhetoric, and I am afraid that it just won't wash anymore, because the Truth Squad is going to be around all the time calling their hand on the things that they are saying that are simply not true.

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