Date: 2010-03-19
Speaker: DANIEL E. LUNGREN (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Cali

fornia. Madam Speaker. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Madam Speaker. once again. we have a bill which has a wonderful name with a wonderful purpose. but it appears that we are forgetting the fact that were broke. As I understand this bill. this will be a 10 percent increase per year for 5 years for this education program. I dont know any school district in my district that is going to be able to increase their funding by 10 percent per year for the next 5 years. My State of California. we are broke. I dont know where were going to get funding. At some point in time. the American people are going to ask us. do you ever connect your responsibilities with fiscal responsibility? And because this is a good idea that we want people to be educated on environmental matters. particularly dealing with the ocean. with the coastline and with watershed. do we just throw out the idea. throw off the table the idea that maybe we ought to be fiscally responsible. or do we ignore it? Similarly. we are probably going to deal with a bill this weekend that throws out the idea that we need to do something to fix some of the problems in our health care system. but apparently we just say. forget the costs. We also appear to be saying. forget the rules. And we are also apparently saying with respect to that. forget the Constitution. Oh. by the way. the bill that I understand we are going to be presented with later this weekend is entitled this: An act to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the firsttime home buyers credit in the case of Members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees. and for other purposes. Now. that doesnt sound like the health care bill. does it? And there is a reason for it. Once again. we have forgotten about transparency and. I would say. responsibility. because the Constitution of the United States says that all revenueraising measures must start with the House of Representatives. Now. why would the Founding Fathers say that? It is because they realized the tremendous power of reaching into the pocket of an individual citizen and taking their money by way of taxes for. presumably. good programs. But because that power is so immense. the Founding Fathers believed that that power should reside initially in the House of Representatives because we are to be more responsive to our constituency. by way of going before them once every 2 years for election or reelection. as opposed to the Senate. which only does onethird of their membership and Members have 6 years before they have to go back to their constituency. So what does that have to do with the bill that I just mentioned? Well. there was this bill dealing with the firsttime homebuyers credit. in the case of the Armed Forces. that started in the Ways and Means Committee. passed out of the House. went over to the Senate. And what they did was they took the title of the bill. andat least I can find nothing left of the bill that came from here over therethey gutted the bill and replaced it with this 2.000pluspage health care bill. Technically. they are complying with the Constitution. but they are violating the spirit of the Constitution. which said that revenueraising billsand this is a superrevenue -raising billshould start here. Now. to compound that. we used to talk about something in the criminal law called compounding a felony. I will call it compounding a political felony. We now are told that that bill that didnt originate in the House as the constitutional Founders thought it should will now come to the House. But we wont really vote on it. We will vote on some other animal called a rule and thereby deem it to be passed. So think what we are doing to the spirit of the Constitution. We are not starting this humongous bill in the House of Representatives. We have allowed it to be captured in a shell bill that went over to the Senate. and then. the additional indignity to our constituents is they will not have the opportunity for those of us duly elected to vote on the precise question that the Senate voted on. Now. I heard a lot of talk about transparency. I heard a lot of talk about regaining the trust of the American people and regaining the confidence of the American people in their institutions. a lot of talk about us reestablishing the confidence of the American people in their institutions of government.