The Rule Of Law

Floor Speech

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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.

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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?

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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