ACORN

Floor Speech

Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, for about the last 3 to 5 months I have been down here pretty regularly talking about maintaining and restoring the rule of law to certain areas of our activities as a government. And I think this is important. I've stated it over and over and over. We created a Republic by creating a Constitution that set up that form of government.

But our Founding Fathers knew that the moral underpinnings of a Republic were required for that Republic to succeed. And they knew that there had to be implanted and instilled in the hearts and minds of Americans who would be--would maintain this Republic, a certain inbred understanding that there were rules that governed our society and our behavior and that there were morals and ethics which should be applied to what we do as we operate this Republic.

You will recall that when Benjamin Franklin was asked, when he walked outside of the Constitutional Congress, and they said, ``Mr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us?'' He said, ``We have given you a Republic.''

Now, God help us that we can keep it. And the whole purpose of that statement is to point out that he was fairly confident, as was every one of our Founding Fathers, that at that point in time in the United States of America there was a moral and ethical underpinning of society, and that if we would maintain that moral and ethical underpinning of society, we would be able to keep our Republic.

But I don't think any Founding Father envisioned a society in which individuals thought they would make the choices as to which rules applied to them and what rules did not apply to them, and they would not abide by the rules that society had set but rather the rules that they had chosen to govern their own lives. Because that's not a Republic; that's anarchy.

Now, we've been talking about some things that are going on in our society and in this Congress that have to concern everybody. And they have to concern them in a big way because they affect the attitudes of those who govern here in the Congress and those who are involved in this governmental process.

I've tried to raise and point out some things that I think are of dire concern, and I will continue to do this because I spent most of my entire adult life basically following as best I could and trying to enforce those rules that this society has established for itself to operate in.

And when I came to this Congress as a new Member of Congress almost 8 years ago now, I was told there were rules that govern this body--all of the people who serve in the United States Congress--and I very quickly tried to do my best--as I am sure every Member here has--to learn what those rules were. And they were not only just parliamentary rules, but they were fundraising rules, they were political rules, they were reporting rules, they were tax-paying rules. There's lots of rules that govern the activities in this body.

I had started talking about this because I see a trend, and I see things that are happening that make me concerned that there are those who don't think certain rules apply to them.

I am going to point out what the President of the United States said as he started out his term: ``I campaigned on changing Washington and bottom-up politics. I don't want to send a message to the American people that there are two sets of standards: one for the

powerful people and one for the ordinary folks who are working every day and paying their taxes.'' This was stated by Barack Obama to CNN February 3, 2009. And it's a noble statement by the President.

That's sort of what I am trying to talk about right now.

And I've got a laundry list that I went over last week, and this list is pretty much the same list but with some exceptions. I've added some things and taken up another subject.

But I want to start with something that's made the headlines here very recently, and that's this organization known as ACORN, which we discovered by watching television and seeing events on television, that people who were established to do certain things under the rules in fact forgot those rules and did others. And this House voted 345-75 for an amendment to bar the Federal funding to ACORN after these undercover investigators uncovered four ACORN offices engaged in blatant mortgage loan fraud and aiding and abetting prostitution.

In my opinion, that was the right vote. I am proud of my colleagues who voted for it, and I think we need a stand-alone bill--not a bill that's an amendment to another bill--that would restate the very obvious: That no Federal moneys should be distributed to those who would blatantly commit mortgage fraud and aiding and abetting prostitution. And many of us saw that, saw it live and in color on television.

But in addition to those videos, we have had our bodies here in this Congress out doing some investigations of ACORN, and they have found a lot to be concerned about.

They found a nationwide history of crime--most of it relating to the last election, but not all of it; some of it relating to mortgages and other things that they were supposedly there to advise the uneducated and the uninformed as to what was available for them, especially the poor and the underprivileged, so that they might attempt to prosper in our society. They sounded like a good cause.

But if you will examine with me this list for just a moment, these are things that our Oversight Committee has found and brought forward. There are things that have been brought forward by the press, and there are things that have been brought forward by court records.

In Colorado we had allegations of voter fraud with multiple counts with convictions. So people were convicted of that crime. In Florida, voter fraud with cases pending in the courts; in Michigan, vote fraud with multiple counts with convictions in the State of Michigan; Minnesota, vote fraud with multiple counts with convictions in Minnesota; Missouri, mail fraud and identity theft, multiple counts with convictions in Missouri; Nevada, vote fraud, multiple counts pending; Ohio, vote fraud, multiple counts with convictions; Pennsylvania, vote fraud, multiple counts with convictions; Washington State, vote fraud, multiple counts with convictions.

Notice how many times the words ``with convictions''--which means--I think everybody knows what that means. It means a finder of fact and a ruler of law made a judgment that these people had violated the law, and they convicted them of breaking that law, and I assume they assessed some form of punishment against them.

So this is a case, I would argue, of just what I was talking about when I started talking today, that someone--and I would argue a whole group of someones--have made a decision that certain laws don't apply to them and therefore, they blatantly--across the United States in a very short period of time, basically the last election cycle--they went out and violated these laws and these rules because they made their personal judgment that the law that we as a society established didn't apply to them.

This is moral relativism run amok, and it's done with $55-plus million of United States money because that's how much money we have heard that we have allocated and given to ACORN to do their business.

And by the way, we have bills that have passed this House that the Democrat majority have put in other funding mechanisms to the tune of $8 billion, and that's why when we address this very issue that we would no longer fund ACORN, we need to make sure that that includes those things already approved for sources of revenue for ACORN. Because if you're not going to follow the rules of law, there needs to be consequences in our society.

So we start off with this supposedly great helping organization called ACORN.

The next thing I want to address here tonight, and I see that I'm joined by one of my good colleagues, and if he would like to have some of the time, I would be sure glad to give him some, is the fact that Dr. Ron Paul has raised an issue before this body that I think we ought to be concerned about and that we ought to think about, and that issue that he has raised is that we have turned over an awful lot of money to the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve has independently of this body issued an awful lot of additional indebtedness and printed an awful lot of additional money, and we would like an accounting of what is going on.

I think it's kind of important, and I would venture to say that if anybody walks up to anybody who serves in this House of Representatives and says, Where is the money we put in the TARP bill? Can you account to me where that TARP money is? Can you tell me where the stimulus money is and what has happened to it? I have been asked the question all the time. How much have we spent? Well, what we know is that the press says we've spent this or the press says we've spent that, but we should know that. I mean, we are the people that were sent here by the American folks to take care of their business.

The Federal Reserve has been designed because it has an effect on our economy. The theory is you've got to keep their activities sort of off in a dark mist so nobody really knows what is happening so you don't cause a run on one part or the other of the economy. And I don't have a problem with that.

But it comes down to the fact that this Congress has turned over $1 trillion worth of American indebtedness, basically money we don't have, money we are borrowing from other nations like China and others that are buying our paper so that we can issue these huge amounts of money. And if you take the TARP and the stimulus bill, it's $1 trillion, well, you've got to ask--and there's more than that, you've got more than that--but we ought to know.

So Congressman Paul has introduced H.R. 1207, and he is asking that we look into what's going on with our money. He says that we've given the Fed $700 billion in Bush TARP funds, and the Congress has given $787 billion in Obama stimulus funds, so that's $1.4 trillion and some change that we've given to the Fed, and yet the taxpayers and the Members of Congress have no way to independently verify what in the world the Fed has done with this money or where it is or who it went to or anything.

Now, we read about it in the newspapers. I used to tell juries when they would come before me, I would say, now we've got a case on trial here today that may be in the newspapers or on television or on radio, or there may be something out there in the news about this case. But I don't want you to listen to any radio broadcast, view any television programs or read anything in print about this case because, believe it or not, they don't always get it right. And we want you to only base your opinion on the evidence you hear in this courtroom under the rules of evidence. I'm sure my friend, Mr. Gohmert, Judge Gohmert, has done exactly the same instruction. And the reason is, you don't really know if the newspapers know what they're talking about. I like to hear what they have to say, but you don't know.

So why should the people that sit in these chairs around this whole big room, why should those people not have an answer to that question, Where is my money? Who is spending it? Where is it going to? How much is left? I think the guy that owns the garage on the corner down the street from me, he pays his taxes, he is entitled to know. His children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren are inheriting the debt we have created for them. They ought to be able to know what we are doing with it today.

And do you know what? That kind of number is a potential for disaster if somebody is crooked. Because it's such a big number, how are you going to know? There can be people stealing billions of dollars, and we don't know. So we ought to know.

I think Dr. Paul has a good bill here. Let me ask my friend, Louie Gohmert from east Texas and a fellow judge, I will yield such time as he may wish to spend on this subject of the Federal Reserve and the fact that we probably ought to have an audit that is reported back to this Congress.

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Mr. CARTER. I thank my colleague for his passion. You know, it is very simple: We expect the Fed to look at our banks back home and make sure that they are handling our money right. I don't think anybody I know has close to a billion dollars in the bank, and yet we expect the people that we put in charge of our money to have somebody looking over their shoulder to make sure that they are doing the right thing.

This is the largest chunk of money on the face of the Earth right here, and I don't think it is too much to ask somebody to look over their shoulder and decide what is going on.

Mr. GOHMERT. If my friend would yield, this is such an important point.

Through the economic downturn over the last year or so, a lot of people across America have confused community banks and investment banks. They have just lumped them all in together, and there is a major difference. You have community banks who have to have complete transparency. They have Federal regulators who come in and check every dot and tittle. They have to make sure that everything is just the way the Federal regulators want it. Some of us have been concerned that over-aggressiveness by Federal regulators in the most stable of our financial institutions, the community banks, has helped dry up a great deal of the credit.

So imagine the hypocrisy to have Federal regulators just swarm in like locusts to community banks which are the most stable and have been the most careful in Federal banking, and they are being regulated by people who will not open their books to this Congress. That in itself is such an outrage that it alone ought to be a basis for getting Ron Paul's bill here to the floor, get it passed, and let's open them up. I love what Newt Gingrich said: If transparency is good enough for the CIA, it really ought to be good enough for the Federal Reserve.

Mr. CARTER. That is very good.

I am going to change gears here because I have serious business on the floor of this House tomorrow. For every week of this year, just about, I have come before this body and I have discussed with them the fact that we have serious allegations that have been made against the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel. I have asked repeatedly that Mr. Rangel do the right thing and resign his position as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee until such time as these allegations have been dealt with by the appropriate authorities. A lot of this is supposed to have been dealt with and we have been promised would be dealt with by Speaker Pelosi. She told us, by the end of 2008, the Ethics Committee would have resolved Mr. Rangel's issues.

So I am going to just go briefly over a few.

Mr. Rangel admits to underreporting income and assets for 2007 by more than half, including failure to report income from his Caribbean resort property again. By the way, I say ``again'' because that's the allegation that started all of this information about Mr. Rangel.

Mr. Rangel's aides have now also filed amended disclosure forms revealing similar underreporting by them.

The Committee on Standards is still investigating Mr. Rangel's lease of multi rent-controlled apartments in Harlem; his use of the House parking spot for long-term storage for his antique Mercedes; his failure to report and pay taxes on rental income on his resort villa in the Dominican Republic; an alleged quid pro quo trading legislative actions in exchange for donations to a center named for Mr. Rangel at City College of New York; a gift rule violation on trips to the Caribbean sponsored by the Carib News Foundation in 2007 and 2008; and now Mr. Rangel has the audacity to push through a bill in this body today increasing tax penalties on his fellow taxpayers on the heels of Secretary Geithner's crackdown on UBS depositors for failure to pay taxes.

So, you know, tomorrow I will be offering to this body a very important piece of legislation, a document called a privileged resolution, asking this body to consider what Mr. Rangel refuses to do, and that is the right thing.

We cannot have the chief taxing authority of this body with the allegations, and there are many more than these, these are just a few. There is another full page just like this of different allegations. We cannot have the chief of values over the IRS, the man who writes the tax laws for this House of Representatives, as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. It is a travesty of justice for him to serve as the chairman of that committee when the American citizens back home, they realize that he has been getting special treatment on his tax problems and those problems he has not faced, the onerous issues that they have to face when they have the IRS finding that they haven't paid their taxes, and he is doing, we are seeing just what President Obama said he didn't want to see, and that is people of power being treated differently than the ordinary American citizen. That is why I have raised this issue.

When I read what the President said, that gave me the incentive to do this. It does not please me at all to raise issues against any Member in this body, but I am telling you, this gives an appearance of wrongdoing and an appearance of impropriety at the least on behalf of Mr. Rangel, and good governance tell us he should not be in this position of power until the issues are resolved.

I will be the first to say if they are all resolved and concluded to be irrelevant and not any kind of wrongdoing or breaking of the rules, I will be the first to say Mr. Rangel ought to be the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He ought to be put back in there. But it is not right for him to be there.

So tomorrow, I will ask this body to remove him from that position.

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Mr. CARTER. I agree. There will be more about Mr. Rangel tomorrow.

I want to bring up something else. We have had a lot of issues to do with automobiles in this country, and now we have somebody at least that is trying to say, you know, the United States Constitution, section 10, says no State shall pass any ex post facto law or law impairing the obligation of contracts or grant any title of nobility.

This is the Auto Dealers Economic Rights Restoration Act, and this bill prohibits automakers in which the Federal Government has ownership interest or which receives loans from the Federal Government from depriving an auto dealer of its economic rights.

What they are talking about is it seems that these automobile dealerships when they were in the bailout position with the Federal Government--and, quite frankly, General Motors stands for ``Government Motors,'' as far as I am concerned, and Chrysler is sort of in the same boat. I understand Fiat was buying some of that. I am not sure that they made the purchase.

These people went out and made choices to break contracts with one auto dealer and award his customers to another auto dealer. There have been allegations made that these were political decisions. I have no evidence of that. But it is, you know, a right of contract, and they had a contract with these dealers, and because they were pressured, I would argue that they breached contracts with one group of dealers to put their sales into the hands of another dealer. For what reason is beyond my understanding.

But I think this is a good law because it says, this is a violation of the Constitution. This is not the way we do business in the United States. And you know what? We did the Cash For Clunkers, and oh, boy, the government was involved and the money was flowing and all's right with the world, although the government hasn't even started to pay for the clunkers yet. They're still out there processing the deals. And, you know, I think that's a great example, Cash For Clunkers is the perfect example. Do you really want the government running your health care if they can't even pay for junk cars on time? My Lord. I mean, but anyway, that's all part of another tangent.

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Mr. CARTER. And you know, reclaiming my time, the reports this week have been that the sales from our two bailed-out automobile firms that are now part of Government Motors, are tragically low, and there's a lot of talk that they don't know if General Motors can even pull this out. So it's important. Mr. Gohmert has hit upon something that's very important. It's important that we follow procedures and follow the rules. That's what we're talking about, the rule of law, follow the rules. We need to follow the rules of this House so we give a proper examination of every bill and every idea that passes through these halls.

And that's why we've got a bill by Greg Walden and John Culberson and Brian Baird that says how about us following the rules that are written into our book that was written by the Honorable Thomas Jefferson in the rules of this very House of Representatives, that says we're supposed to get three days to read a bill? And as Mr. Gohmert pointed out, just the Cash For Clunkers bill didn't go through any committees, rushed in here. We saw it when we were voting on it and, bam, it was out there. And has it done any good for the automobile industry?

Maybe there was an idea sitting in one of these chairs that would have been a little bit better than the idea that came from who knows where, because it didn't go through a committee system to get through floor, and none of us had time to read it or come up with an idea or amend it, because the rules didn't allow us to amend it.

And that's what's happened on every bill that's been offered this year of any importance. It is brought to us, crammed down our throat, and we're not given the chance to even read it. The American people have made an outcry, and they're making an outcry about bills that are hard to read. I'll admit they're hard to read. But they're saying, why don't you read the bill that's going to change health care in America permanently? And so many of us struggled through it and did. But we're not enforcing a rule that says we should have 3 days to read this bill. We should.

If Americans send us to Washington to be their voice and cast their vote in Washington, D.C., and we are handed a document that may be 2,000 pages long and spend $700 billion, and it gets to us at midnight and we're expected to vote on it at 10:00 the next morning and they drop in amendments after that, how in the world can we do the job the American people sent us to do here?

So this bill right here, the 3-day reading rule, is just ordinary good courtesy and common sense in a place where we spent, in the last year, in the last 6 months we've spent more than we spent in the history of the Republic. So maybe we should slow down. Maybe we should follow the rules and give us 3 days to read these bills.

Sorry, but that's kind of a passion, I think, Mr. GOHMERT. I'll yield.

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you. And the point about having time to read the bill could not be illustrated more clearly than on the stimulus bill that was basically crammed down this body's throat. We were promised by the President back when he was running for office that he was going to have, what is it, 4 or 5 days it would be up on the Internet, where all America could read these bills for days before we voted on them. But it gets a little hard to take the administration, the President, leaders of this body seriously when they all parroted that stuff and how they were going to do that.

And then on the stimulus bill we were told over and over, we didn't have time to read the bill. We just didn't. It was filed, I think, after midnight. We're voting on it, over 1,000 pages. There was no time for anybody to read it. We were told that there were thousands of people losing their jobs every day. It had to become law immediately. There's no time to read it; just do it. Just do it. Just vote on it. Well, some of us still wanted to see what was in it. We voted against it, and yet it passed on that Friday, and so because it was such an emergency, they said, and we didn't have time to read the bill, we passed it on Friday, and then Saturday came and went, and Sunday came and went, and Monday came and went, and Tuesday, when the photo op was set up in Colorado for the President to sign the bill, he finally got around to signing the bill.

Why couldn't we have had those 3 days and voted on it on Monday if it was such an important bill and if the President had been serious and the leadership of this House had been serious about the importance of reading bills? Why couldn't we have had Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then debated on Monday? But we were denied that, even though the President never had any intention of signing that bill for 4 days after it was signed. So it gets a little hard to take some of the acrimony on the floor seriously, as in that case, when we were just ridiculed for not being willing to sign it immediately and for wanting to read it when there just was no time to waste. Four days later, the President signed it.

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, I call that the Chicken Little syndrome. The sky is falling. We've had the sky falling in this Chamber on more than one piece of legislation. Oh, my God, the sky is falling; the banks are dropping off a cliff, the economy's going to hell in a handbasket, and you've got to vote now. Don't bother to read it. Don't ask any questions. Give us the money. Trust us. Sign the check.

Well, and I'm telling you this, the same thing happened in the last waning months of the Bush administration, and I didn't support that then, and I won't support it now, because the sky's not falling. We're sent here to do a job, and we ought to be given the chance to read these bills. And I think this is a good bill. And I hope our leadership will let us bring this up. I'm coming down to the last thing I want to talk about tonight, and that is, we are setting history, because we now have more czars by twofold than the Romanovs in all the history of Russia, Imperial Russia.

And so we have a couple of bills, both of them dealing with czars, which say that they want to--Mrs. Blackburn wants to deal with the czars. And we'll start with Mr. Scalise. Mr. Scalise defines czars. We have now, and I may be corrected by my friend, Judge Gohmert, but I believe we're at 34 czars, or maybe 36 czars have been created by this administration, which is like head and shoulders above any bunch of czars we've ever had. We've got czars for everything in the world.

In fact, the compensation czar today announced some compensation rules which were kind of interesting, and I think there's going to be some contract law matters that will probably come up on that. But we have a compensation czar. We have a czar probably, you know, furniture polish czar, for all I know. But sunset the czars. In other words, let's look at them, see what they're doing. If they're not doing anything worth having or they're duplicating efforts that are done by the people who've gone through the Senate appointment process and been vetted by the Senate, the secretaries of the various departments of this government, maybe we ought to just eliminates the czars.

Then our friend, MARSHA BLACKBURN, has a bill that the President is to report the responsibilities and qualifications that authorizes the special assistance of czars. The President will certify that the czars will not assert powers beyond those granted by the law to a commissioned officer on the President's staff, and Congress will hold hearings on the President's report and certification within 30 days.

In other words, Mr. President, tell us what those folks are going to do, how qualified they are to do the job. We're going to pay them somewhere between $175,000 and $200,000 a year to do the job. And the Congress ought to be able to see that report and have the ability to deal with it. Both of these are good laws, and both of these have to do with czars. My friend, LOUIE GOHMERT, has been here with me for almost the full hour. We're about 5 minutes from conclusion, so I'll yield a couple of minutes to my friend, LOUIE GOHMERT.

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Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, I agree with my friend and fellow judge from Texas. We don't need czars that don't answer to the people. We intentionally designed the executive department to stand with checks and balances over it, just like the legislative department is designed that way. We intended it. This is not the way our Founding Fathers intended this country to be run.

We've been talking tonight about the rule of law. It's about the rule of law. It's about following the rules. You know, if we don't hold each other to the standards that are required by this body, if we don't hold our colleagues to the standards that are required by this body, then why would we expect the American people to trust us? I will tell you, all of us need to be worried about the issue of trust. So I will continue to raise these issues, and I will be glad to be joined by anyone in this discussion to discuss following the rules and obeying the law.

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