ACORN

Floor Speech

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Ms. FOXX. Well, I would.

I want to thank my two colleagues from Texas for beginning this hour, and I am glad to talk a little bit about this.

I think what you're bringing up in terms of the Committee on Oversight is extremely important in terms of what it has found out. I have found that people have been a little bit fooled in the last week about actions having been taken in the Congress, and I thought I might highlight that issue a little bit.

I know I heard several times on the news last week that the House has voted not to continue to fund ACORN, that the Senate has voted not to continue to fund ACORN and that Congress has voted not to continue to fund ACORN. So I think it's important that we explain exactly what happened last week because people don't have the full picture.

What really happened last week was our friend over in the Senate, Senator Coburn from Oklahoma, put an amendment on the Transportation and HUD appropriations bill. That's what I understand. If I don't get this exactly straight, I hope you two will help me get it straight if my memory is not as good as I'd like it to be. He put an amendment on that bill, an appropriations bill, that said that ACORN would get no more funding through the HUD appropriations bill.

What happened in the House is that we were dealing with a bill which I found extremely offensive--the bill that would do away with banks being able to make loans to students who were going to college and setting up the Department of Education as a banker for students who want to borrow money. What we did was to put an amendment on that bill to say funding would no longer go to ACORN. That bill passed with a large vote, so there are people out there thinking, Okay. Great. We're defunding ACORN. What has actually happened is the defunding of ACORN in one particular category in the Senate and the defunding of ACORN, period, out of the House. Now what has to happen is we have to have language that's exactly the same in both Houses.

So what I explained to some people on the radio show that I was on was, yes, it's an easy thing for Members of the House to vote to defund ACORN. They know that bill is going to go over to the Senate. They know that it's probably not going to be in the Senate version of that bill. If the Senate were to pass a bill related to loans for college students, it would most likely be very different from the bill that passed in the House. The two bills would go to conference. In the conference, very conveniently, the section on ACORN would simply disappear. As I explain to people, that happens all the time. The folks in charge over here let something pass, knowing full well it's never going to become law.

So those who thought that ACORN was going to be cut out of its continued funding from the Congress think that based on the news accounts from last week, but I think it's important that people know that that isn't the case. If they're interested in stopping funding to ACORN, what they need to do is to write their Members of Congress and say, ``I want you to vote to defund ACORN, and I want you to find a vehicle to do that,'' because we can pass lots of bills over here. Then people can go home and brag about it and say, ``I voted to defund ACORN,'' and then it never happens, and they're given credit for it, knowing full well it's never going to pass in a bill that would go to the President for his signature. So I think it's important.

I also want to say that I think ACORN is a symptom of the problems with the way Congress is now operating. The Federal Government was established to provide for the defense of this Nation, and that's what we are here for. What has happened, particularly since the mid-1960s, is, I guess, many Members of Congress, to justify their being here, thought that the Federal taxpayers were providing a giant piggy bank to the Members of Congress. They thought we could take their money and could spend it any way we wanted to. We've gotten way off target.

One of the reasons that ACORN can do what it has been doing for the last 15 years is that there is such inadequate oversight, because we're simply funding too many different kinds of projects. We need to pull this Congress from where it is now--funding lots of things we have no business funding--back to the essential job of the Congress, which is to focus on national defense. I know it won't be done in this session of Congress because there are too many people of a different philosophy than of the three of us, but I'm hoping that after the 2010 election that we will find more people of like mind with us who will understand the reason we have a Congress and who will say to their Members, You need to focus on national defense. If there are programs like ACORN, community organizations which need to be funded, let's let the local and State governments do that.

With that, I yield back to my colleague from Texas.

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