Louie Gohmert

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, this is supposed to be our last day in formal session, actual session, of the year. There may be something coming up. I always worry about unanimous consent requests when nobody is here. I know the administration likes to brag that it has been a good year for enforcing the border, but this story from Brooke Singman says: The number of unaccompanied children crossing into the U.S. from Mexico nearly doubled this year citing from Border Patrol figures. Hopefully, we will get the Trump administration moving as quickly as they indicate they intend to. It is worth noting that this story came out from The Hill. Mark Hensch said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, says that in his view, immigration into the United States is al Qaeda's deadliest weapon against the United States. That is what he has apparently indicated. A witness said: From his perspective, the long war for Islamic domination wasn't going to be won in the streets with bombs and bullets and bloodshed. No, it would be won in the minds of the American people. This is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's thinking. Thank God--literally, thank God--that President Obama has not released the mastermind as he has so many others who have contributed to the deaths of Americans. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, said: The terror attacks were good, but the ``practical'' way to defeat America was through immigration and by out-breeding non-Muslims. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: Jihadi-minded brothers would immigrate into the United States, taking advantage of the welfare system to support themselves while they spread their jihadi message. They will wrap themselves in America's rights and laws for protection, ratchet up acceptance of sharia law, and then, only when they were strong enough, rise up and violently impose sharia from within. He said the brothers would relentlessly continue their attacks and the American people eventually would become so tired, so frightened and so weary of war they would just want it to end. According to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that is when radical Islam-- sharia law--would take over for the United States, and the Constitution of the United States would no longer have meaning here. It is rather interesting. When we find out exactly what the enemies of freedom have in the way of plans to destroy our liberty and freedom, it really should catch the attention of some of our United States Federal Government. We passed a bill today, and I love and respect the people that pushed for it, but I need to make further comment about it. This was H.R. 4919. It is a bill that was supposed to be just a reauthorization. Well, it has got a program, and people that start these kinds of things, knowing where they will end up, start with a small amount of money. If you start with just millions, then you can go later on from there. When you paint it as being simply to help families who have autistic or Alzheimer's patients, people with dementia, things that Americans like me understand because we have had family members who, because of organic problems, a very brilliant person can become confused, not know where they are and become lost. But life here in Congress would be so much easier if I simply would not read the bills. This bill creates a Federal tracking program, and it starts with Alzheimer's patients and autism patients, people with those disabilities. It also includes, according to the bill, developmental disabilities, and that is broad enough that you can start including all kinds of things now that the law has been passed. My understanding, it is told that in the Senate it was likewise breezed through. Somebody went on the Senate floor when other Senators weren't there, maybe two people or so, and said: I ask unanimous consent that this bill be passed; hearing no objection, so ordered. It was not much of a vote. We didn't even have a hearing in subcommittee or committee where we bring witnesses, talk to experts, talk to people involved, see what the problem is and see if the cure is worse than the problem. We didn't have that. We didn't have constitutional experts talk about the indications for our future freedom. Instead, we got this bill. I am grateful that proponents tried to fix things, but as I read through it, the fixes didn't really fix things. This program that is supposed to help people with mental health issues--confusion, getting lost, and dying. We know these things happen. There is nothing anywhere in the law that prevents a parent from having something that helps that parent track or keep track of their autistic child or child with, according to this bill, developmental disabilities--nothing. There is nothing that keeps a guardian from using some kind of tracking methodology to keep up with someone who has Alzheimer's. Yes, I know it is a serious issue; but why wasn't this left, then, to the Department of Health and Human Services if it is really just a mental health issue? The answer is it was left to the Attorney General and to the Department of Justice because the truth is, if it would need to expand, that is where they want it to expand. We were assured that this is strictly voluntary; but once you have a program in place, it is very easy for someone to file a petition and ask a judge, such as I once was back in Texas: Here are the indications. We need an order for the good of this person and the safety of the public so that this person can be tracked. It is not just a danger to themselves, the bill talks about, or an injury that could be caused by the patient. We know from the Department of Homeland Security that many in the Department of Homeland Security think the biggest threat for hate crimes, for destruction and death in America are from people who are veterans that may like the idea of the Second Amendment allowing them to keep guns. They are people who believe the Constitution should be literally followed, and the words that the Constitution actually says should be followed. The Founders of this country would be, of course--if they were around today--at the top of this administration's no-fly list because they wanted liberty above all, they wanted freedom. They did not want a government that interceded into their own personal private decisions and lives. Now we have this bill. The attorney general will tell us what the rules are because the bill says he or she will, and the attorney general will set up the best practices. I know that there is language added that says: Oh, no, the parent or guardian, they have to voluntarily use this program; it is not forceful. Well, no, the grants are not for anyone except voluntary, but I can guarantee you the program will ultimately be used to involuntarily place tracking information on people. Then, despite some of my friends in Congress saying, This is really not a danger, it is nothing to worry about, I get back to the office and my staff hands me an article regarding Japan. And, lo and behold, it is from Yahoo News. ``Japan Tags Dementia Sufferers With Barcodes.'' And the article goes on to point out that in Japan, where, until after World War II and the surrender in 1945, Japan had a history of submitting to whatever the emperor, the totalitarian leader, dictated. Well, now in Japan, they have come up with the best way of tracking people. It is by putting barcodes on fingers. All you need is a barcode on one finger, a barcode on one toe, and then the Japanese Government will be able to accurately and adequately track people they are concerned about. So I don't think anybody needs to be worried about the government having this Orwellian program unless, perhaps, they are Christian, because the Commission on Civil Rights thinks that people who talk about religious freedom, religious liberty, Christians that use words like ``evangelical,'' that those are the biggest threat, perhaps, for hate in America because of the ignorance in this administration. It is nothing against them personally. It is just all of us are ignorant in some areas. Apparently, in this administration, there is widespread ignorance over the fact that Christianity is the religion based on love; that God so loved the world, he would send his son, and that his son would so love the world, he would lay down his life for his friends, which he, Jesus, said was the greatest love. True Christians follow the teachings of Jesus just as most Muslims try to do; to follow the teachings of Jesus. Anyway, if you are a Christian, or you believe the Constitution should be literally followed, or you believe that you should have a right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment, or you believe the Tenth Amendment means what it says, that any power not specifically enumerated for the Federal Government, it is reserved to the States and people, anybody that believes those kind of things is really a threat, according to some in this administration and some in what has become more of a permanent government. Administrations come and go, but we have got liberals that are so tolerant, they want to take away the rights of anybody with whom they disagree. The blacklist experts. They talk about blacklists of the fifties, and they go beyond anything that the fifties may have had in store for those who wanted to bring down the United States Government. Anyway, there just was not enough attention paid to this bill. It breaks my heart--and I am not kidding, I am not being sarcastic--that there were some that were pushing for this bill that have some of the biggest hearts, that want to do more to help people--and I am afraid because of the bill's passage today, and I am sure the President will sign it into law, gee, we get to track people we are concerned about in America, maybe we will use a barcode. If we can have the attorney general, in his opinion, find that a subcutaneous chip implant is noninvasive, then we can do that. But maybe the barcode would be better than a chip. Anyway, we have passed the program. Someday, I am very afraid for my dear friends that push this bill that history will not so much remember the wonderful things they have fought for in this legislative body, the great moral issues they have stood for, but one day they will be remembered as the ones who quietly pushed this bill through that allowed a Federal Government to begin tracking for the first-time students--not students, but young people, whether they are students or not, people with disabilities. I am sure we will be seeing the attorney general add definition, since it is up to her, or someday him, perhaps, to determine what really is developmental disability. So those things are coming. People need to be aware of them. Perhaps someday we will have a Congress before it is too late that will back up and say: Wait a minute, we are not going to be funding with Federal taxpayer dollars a tracking system for American citizens. I had some colleague say: Well, I could have voted for it if it was only people who were known terrorists, but we don't want to track known terrorists. This bill would be considered an abomination if we tried to put a barcode or a chip into a known terrorist in the United States. No, this needs to be reserved for people who get confused, and so it goes. In the words of Billy Joel: So it goes, and you are the only one who knows. So also being as how this week included the 75th anniversary of the day of infamy when right at that level the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said--actually, 75 years ago today, he said: Yesterday, December 7, 1941--a date which will live in infamy--the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. He went on. It is about a page-and-a-half speech, double spaced. And he concludes by saying: With confidence in our own forces--with the unbounded determination of our people--we will gain the inevitable triumph--so help us God. It is interesting, Roosevelt so often referred to God. He is the only American President, which I am aware, who went on national radio, or TV, but he went on radio--that is what they had at the time--on D-day, when thousands of American troops were landing in France on the beaches, thousands were being killed, and he led the Nation in a Christian prayer on national radio. Why? Because he was a true leader of the United States. He knew our Nation was in great trouble. So the natural thing to do was lead the Nation in prayer. If we go back to the man who is called the Father of the Constitution, as I understand it, the Federal Government mandates a test to be taught in order for people to get a little bit of the money that they send from their States to Washington, D.C., to the Department of Education. The Department of Education, if you do what they tell you, will send you a little bit back of your own money. So they don't require that the statements of our constitutional Founders be learned. My understanding is the biggest thing the current folks want to be taught and learned about World War II is not that America was attacked. There was a day of infamy and that America was fighting and losing lives around the world, not as much for America, but for liberty, for freedom; that there would be places in the world where people could live and have opportunity and make their own decisions without the forces of radical Islam, which had joined forces with the Nazis and with the emperor in Japan. But if you go back to James Madison, he said: We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not on the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God. That is rather important. That is why if you go through the writings, the pronouncements, the proclamations, the laws of the United States for the first 100, 150 years or so, we finally got the Constitution to a place where people understood you can't have slavery legally exist under a constitution that grants freedom. Thank God, they finally got past the ridiculous decision in Dred Scott, and we got past the Civil War. In 1890, there was a case that the Supreme Court sat in on, 136 U.S. 1 (1890). The Supreme Court said this: It is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and the civilization, which Christianity has produced in the western world. Two years later, in the case of United States v. Church of the Holy Trinity, the Supreme Court went on for pages talking about the evidence of Christianity in America not so that Christianity would be forced or imposed on anyone, but as Madison understood, and as Adams understood, and as Washington understood, you could not maintain self-government, a democratic Republic where we will elect representatives as our servants. You can't maintain that if it is not a religious and a moral people. That cannot be a majority of religious and moral people who believe that the Constitution must totally be subjugated to a particular law, whether that be Sharia or others. So in the Declaration of Independence--this is the Supreme Court citing this in their 1892 decision: The Declaration of Independence recognizes the presence of the Divine in human affairs in these words: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions . . . And for the support of this Declaration, with firm reliance on Protection of Define Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.'' When I saw a copy of the original Treaty of Paris of 1783, in which we forced England to swear under something so important that they would not want to break the oath, what do you come up with to get Great Britain--the most powerful country in the world with the most powerful navy and army--to swear under that they would not willingly be wanting to break that oath? The big words--huge letters--starting the treaty that recognized our independence for the first time starts out: In the Name of the most Holy and undivided Trinity, that is Father, Son, Holy Ghost. The opinion goes on and cites so many examples of Christianity in America. They say: We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity and not upon the doctrines of worship of those impostors. It goes on and reads after many more recitations: These and many other matters which might be noticed add a volume of unofficial declaration to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation. We find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. The happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality. Not that we would ever force Christian beliefs on anyone, but as we find historically--and as even a Muslim leader and a descendant of Muhammad told General Jay Garner in Iraq when he was inquiring as to what kind of government we should have--he said it should be based on the teachings of Jesus because that descendant of Muhammad--that Muslim leader--understood that it is, really, only if you have a government that is under the teachings of Jesus where an atheist, a Buddhist, Hindu, Islam--any religion--can prosper without fear so long as they do not try to undo the Constitution of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt, so endeared to liberals in this Nation, on December 24, 1933, said: This year marks a greater national understanding of the significance in our modern lives of the teaching of Him whose birth we celebrate. To more and more of us, the words ``thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself'' have taken on a meaning that is showing itself and proving itself in our purposes and in our daily lives. May the practice of that high ideal grow in us all in the year to come. I give you and send you, one and all, old and young, a Merry Christmas and a truly happy new year. And so, for now and for always, God bless us, everyone. Another example is from Franklin Roosevelt on December 21, 2 short weeks after the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I won't read the whole thing, but it is deeply moving, and he finishes by saying: Our strongest weapon in this war is that conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of man, which Christmas Day signifies. Against enemies who preach the principles of hate and practice them, we set our faith in human love and in God's care for us and all men everywhere. Our strength, as the strength of all men everywhere, is of greater avail as God upholds us. In 1942, on Christmas Eve, he finished by saying: It is significant that tomorrow, Christmas Day, our plants and factories will be stilled. That is not true of the other holidays we have long been accustomed to celebrate. On all other holidays, work goes on--gladly for the winning of the war. So Christmas becomes the only holiday in all the year. I like to think this is so because Christmas is a holy day. John F. Kennedy, on December 17, 1962, said these words--and I won't read the whole thing--in the conclusion: This has been a year of peril where the peace has been sorely threatened, but it has been a year when peril was faced and when reason ruled. As a result, we may talk at this Christmas just a little bit more confidently of peace on Earth, goodwill to men; and, as a result, the hopes of the American people are, perhaps, a little higher. We have much yet to do. We still have to ask that God bless everyone. Then last for today, before we adjourn for Christmas, Ronald Reagan, on December 19, 1988, concluded his Christmas address by saying: Our compassion and concern this Christmas and all year long will mean much to the hospitalized, the homeless, the convalescent, the orphaned, and it will surely lead us on our way to the joy and peace of Bethlehem and the Christ Child who bids us come, for it is only in finding and living the eternal meaning of the Nativity that we can be truly happy, truly at peace, truly home. I conclude, Mr. Speaker, as Ronald Reagan did: Merry Christmas, and God bless you. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise, but I actually do so with a heavy heart. The level of respect I have for the people involved in this bill is really off the charts. These are wonderful people. I appreciate their mental clarity, their intellect, and their big hearts all involved in pushing this legislation in Congress. I can't attribute motive outside Congress, but in Congress, I know it is with the best of intentions and best of hearts. When we start a Federal program, things that will be only temporary-- things that were going to be only temporary come to mind like the income tax, and it was going to be small and temporary. Well, it is still going on, and it has gotten bigger. I have read the bill, and I want to thank the people involved. I have ultimate respect for both Chairman Goodlatte and my friend Chris Smith. I just couldn't have stronger feelings for people. And my friend across the aisle, it would surprise some people, but we get along quite well, and I appreciate the care she has for people. Though there have been provisions added--there have been changes made to try to deal with some of the concerns that people like me have had-- it is still a problem. If you look at page 21, the last page of the bill, it has this language added: ``Voluntary participation. Nothing in this Act may be construed to require that a parent or guardian use a tracking device to monitor the location of a child or adult under that parent or guardian's supervision if the parent or guardian does not believe the use of such device is necessary.'' Frankly, I looked at making a provision like that and asking that it be in the bill, and then I realized: Wait a minute. There are back doors. There are things the Attorney General could do that could satisfy the language we have for ``voluntary.'' Okay. No, the parent or guardian won't have to do that or monitor that, but we have the system in place. It is a Federal system. So now we have the capability to monitor and track people so, you know, gee, this person is a problem. The definition of who could have this procedure or implement used is, as we are told, people with Alzheimer's, people with autism, people who may wander off or, and the words are, a developmental disability. Well, developmental disability, that is a severe or chronic disability of an individual 5 years or older that is attributable to a mental or physical impairment or combination of those. And so then we get over into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and we have seen the evolution of the DSM through 1, 2, 3--major changes at 3--4, 5. Personality disorders like antisocial disorder were once called sociopath or psychopath, but there is an argument that they are a developmental disorder, and they are chronic for so many people. So then you begin to see, well, we don't have a very tight definition of what a developmentally disabled person is, and we look to the bill, and of course in trying to make this bill broader so it would include autism and other developmental disabilities, we see, on page 2, in the section header, we want to make clear this isn't just Alzheimer's disease patients so we insert the word ``Americans,'' which is a little broader than ``Alzheimer's disease patient.'' Again, that is in the header, so it is not necessarily language, and people like me that have had to review language as a judge or a chief justice and write opinions on what words mean, how they apply to these circumstances, I see where this goes. We will have a Federal tracking program, but it is only for people with Alzheimer's or autism that wander off. Well, yeah, or developmental disabilities, and that is pretty far reaching where we go with that. But it is just a mental health issue and it is a physical issue because we know--and I know this is what has driven my friend supporting this bill, we have had people wander off and be found dead. All of us have seen stories like that. The question is: Is it the job of the Federal Government to start a tracking program? And since it is mental disease, obviously the person who would be in charge of such a wonderful program that would help us track people with Alzheimer's, autism, or other developmental disability, it would be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But wait. The bill gives the authority to the Attorney General of the United States. We are talking Department of Justice. It does say a couple of places the AG will get with the Secretary of Health and Human Services and collaborate, but ultimately these decisions are the decisions of the Attorney General. The Attorney General will make the call. The bill specifically says that the Attorney General will also, basically, make all the rules and regulations with regard to this tracking system. And then it also says that the Attorney General will formulate the ``best practices.'' So maybe to me or someone in this body, developmental disability would mean one thing, and we do have definition in Federal law, but there, too, it is quite broad. I so much appreciate the insertion of the word ``noninvasive'' for the tracking device or system, and nonpermanent. Well, I know tattoos are nonpermanent if you go through what I understand is a pretty painful process. I had felony judge friends who would order people to have tattoos removed, so I guess you could say those were nonpermanent. But when you look at definitions of what noninvasive is--and I don't find it in the bill. Perhaps it is somewhere in Federal law. But even then, you have the word ``noninvasive'' subject to interpretation. Whose interpretation? The Attorney General, the Department of Justice's head, to make the determination of what is noninvasive. A definition in medicine, this or some similar are often used, that noninvasive would be a process that does not violate the integrity of the mucocutaneous barriers. Well, if you insert a chip just above the subcutaneous barriers, would that be noninvasive? If you go a little bit under the subcutaneous barriers, would that be noninvasive? Well, there is only one way to find out, and that is once the Attorney General formulates the regulations and the best practices, then we find out what is actually noninvasive. There is a procedure, and this indicates the people who prepared this bill--and I am not being sarcastic. They were really trying to figure out a way to protect an overoppressive government. You have to have a procedure of appeal, and the Attorney General will help set that up. If you have a complaint, you think something is not being done properly, well, the Attorney General is going to help create the rules that allow you to complain or appeal on that. Oh, and by the way, I never wanted to be in a football, basketball, or baseball game--and I love all those sports and played them all--but I never wanted to be in the game where the referee is the one that wrote the rules for our league, because they didn't yield and their opinion was better than the rules on the page, no matter what the page said. So the Attorney General can tell us what he really meant or she really meant. Voluntary, I appreciate that part, but we have a Federal tracking system and it says here in the bill it is to prevent violence or injury or even death to one's self, to the person, or injury to someone else. Now, why would this be a concern today, other than the fact that we have seen reports come out of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Department of Homeland Security who think that people who deny manmade climate change are committing, basically, a law against nature. They are violating a law against nature. We see now where there are people who just put in your search engine religious beliefs, mental disorders, and you will have all kinds of investigations come up. There are people in this government, like those in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, that think that those who claim to be Christians and use code words like `religious liberty,' that that is code for Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, not understanding that a true Christian is basing their beliefs and their trust in Jesus Christ, who is love incarnate. Nonetheless, we have government officials that think that religious beliefs are a problem, and that the even bigger problem is, if you are a veteran--that is what Homeland Security has said--and you believe in the strict interpretation of the words on the pages of the Constitution, that makes you a bigger threat. So when we are talking about terms that we have seen change over the years, we have seen the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual have massive change. Why? Sometimes it is because medicine, psychology, or psychiatry has made great discoveries and improvements, and sometimes it is because one group has a better lobbying group than others. Mr. Speaker, by the way, other good language here is that none of the money can be used for conferences that may cost more than $20,000, unless they do certain things. Another good provision is that none of the money may be used to create a Federal database, but the money will be used for State, local, nonprofit organizations. I can't find anything that says that we in the Federal Government cannot fund State and local databases of individuals that have developmental disabilities such as they are too religious and, therefore, they are deemed to have a developmental disability, antisocial personalities. It is just too open and there are too many loopholes. I like the idea; and the more I thought about it, the more I read the language, the more I saw the open loopholes that could result in a Federal tracking system that George Orwell would have been embarrassed about. So, with brotherly and appeared appreciation for those pursuing this bill out of the best of intentions--just wanting to stop death and harm to one's self because you have autism, Alzheimer's--Mr. Speaker, I humbly submit this is a dangerous door for any government to open, a door that Orwell would have warned about. People told me, well, gee, there is ink that you can use in a tattoo that can be tracked. I don't know. It is a door that we should not open at the Federal level to begin a program of tracking, no matter whether it is State or local officials that have the database and we get it and look at it or what. So I hope that the bill doesn't pass and we can work together to find ways to help those who cannot help themselves. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I will not bow to anyone who may think they have greater love or care or commitment to people who suffer from dementia or other developmental disabilities. I have spent an awful lot of time with people I love. But let me just tell you, Mr. Speaker--let me finish that. The people I love, I don't know if they knew where they were. I have spent time with family and people I love who struggle with these very issues. I know there is a danger of death. There is a danger of injury. Whether Franklin said it or not, those who will give up a little liberty to get security deserve neither. Whoever said it, I think it was Franklin, some say it wasn't, but it is true. We are told, this is strictly for all those people out there that have autistic kids or people with developmental disability. Well, they haven't used--nobody here has used developmental disability but me. But the truth is, the reason I heard about this bill, my staff tells me, is we just got a call from someone who has an autistic child, and they are scared to death that the Federal Government is going to start a tracking program for kids with autism. And yeah, they will provision in here that it is supposed to be voluntary, but once you have the system in place--I can guarantee you, I have seen programs like this get started. And when I am a judge and law officers come in and say, this person is a threat, they swear to it, the evidence is in the affidavit then, yes, I will give them a warrant to go use whatever they say they believe will be the best way to handle the situation. Once it is in place, it is going to be used by more than parents; you can count on it. And if you look at Page 17: The Attorney General shall determine the criteria. The Attorney General shall determine the criteria for determining who should have direct access to the tracking system and determine what is noninvasive, what is nonpermanent. The Attorney General shall make sure that the tracking device access to data is restricted to law enforcement and health agencies, but whoever the Attorney General determines. I am telling you, this is opening Pandora's box. And as a parent said to us, we can track our child using our own resources. And if we don't have the resources, there are charities that will help us. Please don't let the government start a tracking program because people in this room could end up being on the list of people who end up having developmental disabilities; and they are a threat, as Homeland Security says, so many of our veterans and our constitutionalists are today. This is about using resources that people have, and if they don't then let's use charitable money so that the government doesn't invade our privacy any more than it already has, already does. I care about the injuries. I have devoted so much of my life to punishing those who violate people's space; that harm others; that kill others. I have not backed away from that commitment. But the government's job is not to be a dictator or to be a big brother. We never do that well. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I am inquiring whether anyone is in opposition to the bill. If not, I would like to claim the time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. I thank the gentleman. And because of all of the glowing comments about Randy, I knew I should not share more than a couple minutes so that there is time at the end. We have heard the old saying that in Washington, D.C., if you want a friend, get a dog; but when I got here to Washington, D.C., as a Member of Congress, Randy Neugebauer was a friend, and he is a friend. He is a man of integrity. He is a man of honor. He does his best to live out the Beatitudes that Jesus talked about better than I have. He is not a man who has been afraid to ever stand up and call things the way he sees them. It is one of the many things I admire about him so much. Apostle Paul said three things about what he had accomplished. He said: I have fought the good fight. Then there was another clause, and then he said: I have finished the race. Well, Randy Neugebauer has not finished the race. The race has still yet to go. He has not finished the course. He is just taking a new course. But I know that, as a brother in Christ and as a man of integrity, he will continue to listen to the still, small voice that has guided him and his wife through the years and has made him someone who inspires me, encourages me, and someone that I would hope to emulate. I am grateful to Randy Neugebauer for his service and for all he has done for America.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I am a big fan of Chairman Royce's work, and I appreciate all the work of the committee in these difficult areas. Sometimes in trying to bring together a big authorization bill like this, language gets inserted that can be problematic. On page 105, for example, section 713, ``Recruitment and retention of individuals who have lived, worked, or studied in predominantly Muslim countries or communities,'' we know that one of our problems when we were trying to deal with radical Islam is, number one, our President doesn't recognize radical Islam, although some of the best experts who are radical Islamists say, yes, it exists, and Muslim friends like President el- Sisi acknowledge it is a problem. For example, here in subsection C, it says: ``The Secretary shall make every effort to recruit and retain individuals that have lived, worked, or studied in predominantly Muslim countries or communities, including individuals who have studied at Islamic institutions of higher learning.'' I know this was not submitted by a Muslim--far from it--but although we desperately need people who have lived and studied in this area, to tell the Secretary of State that the Secretary shall make every effort to get people like this is the way our enemies take advantage of us. We should not be telling the Secretary to make every effort. As a former chief justice, that is the kind of thing--you have to say, well, he didn't make every effort or she didn't make every effort. We should not be coercing the State Department to hire people who--if they are not appropriate or have Muslim ties, they should not be pushed into the State Department.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to be here, and, even after the voters have spoken, it is an honor to find when you and your positions actually don't make you special, they just make you completely in accord with over 70 percent of your constituents, not including newspapers. The people have spoken, and, as President Obama referenced a number of times, elections do have consequences. What he failed to remember was, yes, but we had elections to Congress that also should have consequences. When we are accountable every 2 years, the President is only accountable every 4 years. At this time, I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Graves), my friend. Louisiana's Tragic Floods

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate my friend, Mr. Graves, bringing up a real problem. We have seen it in Louisiana--and not just in southern Louisiana, but other parts of Louisiana--with massive flooding. I am not even talking about Katrina, but there was a massive amount of waste in Hurricane Katrina that also affected my district in east Texas. I have a 120-mile border that I share with Louisiana, and we have seen the same problems. We have had a massive flood of Caddo Lake, one time the largest freshwater natural lake besides the Great Lakes. A natural dam apparently was exploded years ago. It still is one of the great treasures of the State and our country. It had a massive flood. I was visiting in Karnack, Texas, last week with some of the local emergency people that are trying to take care of the issue. The local folks there in Harrison County are acting very responsibly, the local government is acting responsibly, but you have outrageous things like my friend, Mr. Graves, was talking about. One family got a loan to buy a new mobile home that wasn't destroyed like the last one. With the flood, it had too much water. So they got a new mobile home and got the loan. Well, as we have heard with FEMA, in this case there were requirements that the mobile home be lifted up much higher. The elevation had to be much higher where it was. In the process of lifting it up, the mobile home fell and was completely destroyed. They still have to make payments on their mobile home for the loan, and they have no home. They were doing everything within their power to comply with the governmental requirements. There are other bureaucratic nightmares. I was hearing stories about how some of the churches in east Texas banded together. The Baptist men came in and did amazing work. Yes, I understand women, too. I think they call themselves the Baptist men. Anyway, they came in and did extraordinary work. When people didn't have any plumbing, they had nothing, they brought in portable showers and restrooms and provided the help long before FEMA could get there and do what was needed. You hear people who were so affected by massive floods say: If we ever have another disaster like that, before we call FEMA, we are going to call the Baptist men. They come in and they get stuff done. They help people where it is, and they don't care who you are, all of your background information. They see who is hurting and they help them. Well, that is the way it used to be, but then we became too reliant on letting the government fix everything. There were people in the Federal Government that realized that if we can make the Federal Government the ultimate insurer of everything--your school loans, your home, your flood insurance--we will start small, but we will work up until maybe one day we can even have the government behind everyone's health insurance. If you really want to take away people's freedom and you really want to have Big Brother government dictating every aspect of your life, the way to do it is to have the government ensure all those aspects of your life. Once someone has the right to pay in the event that you are harmed, then they have the right to tell you how to avoid them having to pay, and there goes your freedom. So the power of more insurance has come to the Federal Government. Many of us thought we could give up our liberty just for a little more security, but Benjamin Franklin, with all the wisdom that man had, understood back then that basically those who are willing to give up liberty for security deserve neither. For too long in this country, people have been giving up their liberty in order to get security only to find that they are not even secure, just like Mr. Graves was talking about. We thought, Gee, if we set up a Federal Emergency Management Agency to help take care of emergencies, it will be fantastic. If we set up a Corps of Engineers to help with our water projects, it will be fantastic. If we set up an EPA, or Environmental Protection Agency, to protect the world, the environment, it will be a great thing. But the longer these agencies exist, the less sensitive they are to what they were supposed to do. We found it right here in the Capitol. About 7 years ago, the Architect of the Capitol, who works for the House and Senate, had decided that we all work for him and he started making demands, one of which was that I could not cook ribs and share them with other Members of Congress, as I had been doing once a quarter. Most of the networks wanted to do stories on my cooking ribs and I said: No, we are not going to do a TV thing on this. This is just between the Members. Well, I am grateful that Steve Scalise got involved and I got Paul Ryan to help. The Speaker was able to persuade the bureaucracies here on Capitol Hill that we can make this work and have it safe if we work with each other and are able to get people to work together. Many of my colleagues tell me it is the best meat they have ever tasted. Some say they are the best ribs they have ever tasted. I have enough of my late mother in me that I enjoy cooking and enjoy people enjoying what I cook. It is probably the only time here on Capitol Hill when I actually leave a good taste in people's mouths instead of a bitter taste. As we continue to see abuses by the Federal Government and we see abuses going on across the country, you think, Well, in the Federal Government, even though it has badly abused its authority, isn't it supposed to protect us from other abuses? The answer is: yes, if they are federally related. Well, when you have the electoral college and electors elected as part of that system, it is critical that that be a protected system of voting, just as the Constitution would require and as the law actually requires. This story by Hans von Spakovsky and Jennifer Matthes says: ``Before Donald Trump's stunning victory on November 8, liberals called for acceptance of election results. But since the election didn't go as they'd planned, some have taken to harassing and intimidating electors in an attempt to change the election results. Some of these threats may actually violate Federal law, yet the Justice Department acts strangely uninterested in investigating.'' This takes us back to having people armed with billy clubs standing and trying to intimidate voters at their place of voting, and the ``Department of Just Us,'' which was supposed to be ``Justice,'' said: No, no, no, that is fine for them to do it. There are no problems with them doing that. If anybody else were to do that, yeah, we would probably go after them; but these are the New Black Panther Party, or such as that, so, yeah, it is fine if they do it. We have got to get back to being a nation where the laws are enforced evenly across the board. If the laws don't make sense, like our own rules here on Capitol Hill, if things do not accommodate people fairly and equally, they are just arbitrary decisions like we got from the Architect of the Capitol when the Visitor Center was being built, or when people are just wanting to have a life up here, we should be stopping the bureaucrats and getting rules that apply across the board, fairly across the board. Yes, here we make the rules, and we should have rules that apply to everybody; but when you have an arbitrary dictator, they don't get applied quite so evenly. Here we have the Justice Department, and this report of electors that are going to be voting very soon in the electoral college to elect the President, and their very lives are being threatened. Some of them have had to move their families. This Justice Department is not interested in protecting the integrity of the election. That is the problem we have been suffering for quite some time around the country. They were not interested in enforcing the law fairly across the board, so we end up all the worse off for it. This article goes on to say, in Georgia and Idaho, the threats have become so extreme that the secretaries of state both released statements calling for the harassment to end. I absolutely know, without doubt, that if Hillary Clinton had won the election, as the rules set it up, with a republican form of government--little R. Not the Republican Party, but a republican form of government, just as Ben Franklin said when he was asked after the Constitution finally came together with what most of the members of the Constitutional Convention said was divine providence, or the finger of God. Without the finger of God being involved, they could never have come up with that Constitution. Franklin says: A republic, madam, if you can keep it. So we had found, and our Founders had wisely, so many of them, sought truth in Scripture, a Bible that they used to argue positions; and they realized probably a complete, perfect democracy is not best for governing people because, if it is a true democracy, then the law gets changed on whims. If someone becomes the object of scorn and it is a true democracy, they are not governed by laws that we currently have in our Constitution which indicate you can't have ex post facto laws. You can't make a law criminalizing things after the act has already occurred. Our Constitution guarantees against that. Well, in a perfect democracy, there is no such ex post facto law. A majority can make a decision to criminalize conduct that previously occurred so that, when the person committed the act, they were not violating the law. They were acting in accordance with the law, and it was later changed. Of course we have had people violate the ex post facto law, like President Clinton shoved through, in 1993, taxes on Social Security, taxes on money that had already been earned under different rules of taxation. That was a violation of the Constitution that was not thrown out, but it was clearly a violation of the Constitution. So those things do happen, even in a republic. But with a republic as the Founders gave us, this idea of liberty could take hold. It wasn't just might makes right, somebody powerful intimidate the rest into voting to string you up or to throw you out of the community. No, you had to abide by existing laws; and your conduct, if appropriate under the law at the time, could not be changed to punish you for something that happened before it was a crime. So much wisdom in the Constitution, and that wisdom is being cast aside. But that wisdom gave us the electoral college, without which you would never see the Presidential candidates going to all the different States. They would never go to all the different cities that they have because the elections would be decided by the big urban areas. And you can look on the map that shows, most of them have red for Republican, blue for Democrats. Years ago it was the other way around. Red depicted Democrats. But since so many of them were becoming socialists, they were offended that the red made it look like they are red Communists. So somewhere along the way--I can't find who decided to make the color change--but more started making red Republican and blue Democrat. Colors don't matter. But if you look at the counties that voted for Hillary Clinton, you quickly see that she was a fringe candidate. She was fringe on the West Coast, the big cities on the West Coast; a fringe candidate on the East Coast, the big cities on the fringe of the Nation; fringe up in the very north, the big cities in the very north; fringe along the southern border, and basically just a fringe candidate, which I guess would make the Democratic Party, when you look at who voted for the Democratic candidate, you would have to say this is now a fringe party in the United States. You have the Republican Party that, apparently, according to the votes of the majority, represents over 90 percent of the geographical United States, and you have this other party, this fringe party, that represents the fringes around the edge of the country, basically. There are a few larger in the middle, but they are a bit of an anomaly, because mostly what we see is a fringe candidate and a fringe party. So it will be interesting to see where we go from here. Obviously, we have a Justice Department that is not interested in protecting our Constitution, protecting the election process as they are mandated to do; and, frankly, when you have a Department of Justice that selectively enforces the law and so totally disregards other parts of the law, then they are really not a Department of Justice. If this administration had continued on, then we would seriously need to look to provide a more appropriate name for the Department of Justice because this is not--it has not been--a Department of Justice. When you look at what appear to have been crimes committed by IRS personnel, like Lois Lerner, perjury committed before Congress, crimes across America, as my friend, John Fund, wrote in his book about illegal voting, one of the--as I have heard John Fund say, perhaps the biggest fraud in America about our elections is the fraud that has been telling people that there is no illegal voting going on. There is certainly illegal voting going on, and many have chosen to look the other way. But a majority of the geographic and a majority of the electoral college, elected electors, indicate they want the law applied across the country fairly. Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act makes it a crime for anyone to ``intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote.'' While this has been applied in the past to ordinary, everyday voters in Federal elections, the language does not limit it only to such voters. Electors who are casting their votes for President and Vice President are also protected by section 11(b), since the electoral college is an essential part of the Federal voting process. This is supported by section 14(c) of the Voting Rights Act, which says that ``voting includes all action necessary to make a vote effective in any primary, special, or general election.'' Obviously, the votes cast by Americans on November 8 will not be effective if the electors they chose are intimidated from casting their votes in the electoral college. Federal law, which is 3 U.S.C., section 7, requires electors to cast their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December, which this year is December 19. These are recorded as certificates of votes, signed, sealed, and delivered by December 28 to the President of the Senate and the Archivist of the United States. Congress is required to meet on January 6 in joint session to count the electoral college votes. As we know from so much of the lame stream media, like CNN, MSNBC, there was outrage when Donald Trump said he wasn't sure. He couldn't say beforehand that he wouldn't have questions about the outcome of the election if there were indications of massive fraud in the election. But as we heard from the lame stream media, oh, that would threaten the very foundation of this country. It would destroy the basis for this country. It was just such a threat to our very existence. Well, now those same people that said those things are, according to they, themselves, risking this country. They are putting the very foundation of our country at risk. And we all know now--some raised this during the election, but it was not clear until a recount began to be demanded by a third-party candidate--we can now say, clearly, the evidence is in. I used to try felony cases as a judge, and before that, years before that, as a prosecutor. We can now rest our case. Jill Stein was nothing more than a sham candidate to help Hillary Clinton, to try to pull votes away from others to help Hillary Clinton win the election. Clearly, that is what she was. Some suspected that. Some raised that issue. And now, obviously, she has no chance of winning anything in a recount--nothing. She has no chance of winning anything after a recount. So, clearly, the only reason she is doing it is to continue her effort to help Hillary Clinton become President, despite the will of the American people, through the electoral college, through the law as it was designed and set up. Electors across the country should not be getting threatened. The Justice Department should be outraged, but they are not. They are not bothered in the least that the lives of the electors who will decide the Presidency are being threatened and that a constitutional crisis is at hand. And it shows, yet again, why over 90 percent of the--except for the fringes--Americans have said we want a change. We want an America that can actually move toward Dr. King's dream of people being judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I hope and continue to pray that we will get there. This quote in the article: ``The U.S. Justice Department, which is charged with protecting all voters, should act to quash this outrage immediately.'' Obviously, they are not interested in quashing an outrage. They have done more to stir up racial disharmony in this country. They have done more to supplant and subvert the intent of the Constitution and the clear meaning in the Constitution, and I cannot wait to have an administration that will at least make an overt effort to enforce the law as it exists. The President, in his first term, told people over 20 times: I can't just do amnesty; that has to be done by Congress. Somebody figured out--after his first term it appears to be when it really kicked up heavily--look, who will stop you? Sure, it is against the law. Sure, it is against the Constitution for you to do amnesty and to do executive orders that take away or rewrite laws that were passed by the House and Senate and signed by another President. You can just write them like any good monarch would. Who is going to stop you? Somebody figured out to present that to the President. It had to be what happened because he had said so many times that he didn't have the power to do what he ultimately started doing. You realize, gee, that is right. The soon-to-be-leaving Harry Reid will surely protect President Obama from the Senate allowing anything that follows the law coming out of the House to enforce the law, the Senate will be able to stop it. So if Congress wants to cut off funding for what the President is doing illegally, the Senate Democrats will protect the President and protect his illegal conduct. So you won't have to worry; you can do whatever you want. Amnesty was often granted by not even an executive order. It was granted by a series of memos by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson. He rewrote the law with memos. So it will be nice to get back to having enforcement of the law because this article yesterday from Paul Bedard says: ``A United Nations mix of illegal immigrants are now flooding through the U.S.-Mexico border, especially from Haiti and Pakistan, raising concerns of terrorism costing Americans billions, according to a new report and Senate testimony.'' They have a quote here from my friend, Representative Henry Cuellar from Texas, a Democrat, but a great man. He said: ``It is because people from different parts of the world, Africa, Middle East, other parts of the world are now realizing that all you have to do is get to the southern border of the United States and there's a process there you can claim a legal defense and you just get to come in. I mean, people, the smuggling organizations know exactly what they're doing.'' As the border patrolmen have told me during late hours and early mornings talking to them out on the border, the drug cartels control every inch of the Mexico-U.S. border. They do so from the Mexico side, but they control what happens on the U.S. side under this administration. We saw routinely that there were groups that came across who were not threats criminally, but they either wanted jobs or they wanted U.S. welfare, and they knew that under this administration we would not turn them back and say: No, you cannot come in illegally. They would not interdict and enforce the law. They would say: Come on in. We have some questions to ask you before we give you a slip of paper, send you on your way or house you or, as some of the border patrolmen said, We end up sending them wherever they want to go in the United States. They call the Border Patrol logistics. They get them to our side of the border, and we ship them anywhere they want to go. So it is no wonder that we would have a request for this administration asking for billions more money to process folks. Another $2.2 billion was mentioned. I saw another article where it lists the different components that the administration wanted to do. If you add up all the different requests and different ways that this administration wants to use the money from American taxpayers, and it is to take money away from Americans who are here legally who are working and who are struggling to provide for themselves and their family, take their money away and give that to people who are coming in illegally. There was a law I found out about in England visiting with some of their social security-type folks in their government. They have a law that you are supposed to be there for 5 years contributing to that social security-type system for 5 years before you can ever make a claim for a dime of it. Now, I hear there are abuses of that system because they may not have the best control over it, but it is a system that we have in this country and some other countries. You are taking money from people that earned it and giving it to people who are breaking the law. If you do that long enough, that place that at one time was a shining light on the hill goes broke. The light goes out. Once that happens in America, as friends from other parts of the world have said: If you lose your freedom in America, the rest of the world has no chance. You will realize historically a United States of America where people will go fight for freedom, they will create strength, a strong economy in their own country, strong enough because they enforce the rule of law across the board and become strong enough economically that they will go shed their blood and spend their money to get freedom for people who are suffering under the forces of evil. Every now and then you have a President like Jimmy Carter who will say: Let's get rid of the Shah. Then he welcomes the Ayatollah Khomeini who was, as he said, a man of peace which opened Pandora's box. Radical Islamists had been put in a box for many decades, but President Carter was complicit in helping because he is a well-intentioned man, a good man and well intentioned--yeah, maybe a little anti-Israel, but he wanted to help folks. Out of his ignorance on radical Islam, he, for the first time in many decades, placed radical Islamists in charge of a massive military and a whole country. Since then, the world has been paying a very heavy price for what happened. So we have a job to do. We took an oath in this body to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. As Donald Trump was saying yesterday in Ohio: our devotion and our oath is to one country. We say a pledge to a flag. That used to be true. It used to be that people learned enough history. I love history. People like coach Sam Parker inspired me to love history. We learned it, and we knew what it took to keep a republic, madam, if we could. Because of Federal intervention in education, we have not helped our kids in suffering schools. We have made them subjects to this master Federal Government: You do what we say or we don't send you any of the money you sent to us. We will fix up our offices, we will fix up a massive bureaucracy, and we will dictate to you from on high what we want done regardless of what Congress says. They are not as bad as the Corps of Engineers, the EPA, and the FDA have been recently; but they have really not helped. As I said to President Bush's Secretary of Education--a very nice person. She had helped, I think, Texas schools when she was in Austin, but then she came here and disregarded the 10th Amendment and the Constitution that did not enumerate education as a Federal power. It was reserved to the States and the people. She began acting unconstitutionally. As I explained to her, you ought to come to Gladewater, Texas. There is an amazing school there that helps between 120 and 130 special needs kids. One of them, if he touches something shiny, he has had a big day, and you mandate that they have to do a test for that child. They had a child at the Saint Louis School in Tyler. They told her she needed to come visit because they had a goal that by the end of the year this young man would be able to stick a fork in a piece of food and get it to his mouth. The goal they believed was reachable, but because the Federal Government was involved and they say, You don't get any of the money you sent us from Texas unless you do exactly what we say, that was not allowed. They allowed an alternative test that if he could point to a sticker that had a picture of food on it by the end of the year, then he would pass the test and that school would get back money from the Federal Government that those Texas taxpayers had sent to it to siphon off for whatever they wanted. So by the end of this year, that special needs young man--severe special needs--was able to point to a sticker that had a picture of food, but he could not feed himself. That is the kind of insanity that has only gotten worse over the last 8 years. I thought a silver lining to President Obama being elected President was at least he is going to end the No Child Left Behind Act because that would mean returning the power to the States and the people that knew what they were doing. A few years ago we were far higher in the studies of the capabilities of schoolchildren. We have dropped. We are not doing so well. There may be improvement in one year over another, but if you really want to leave no child behind, then you need to stop coddling the teachers' unions and coddle the teachers by letting them do what they know is best, subject to local control. If they are not doing their job, you don't have to go begging to Washington or a teachers' union, you can go to the school board. If the school board won't do the right thing, you can run against them, get elected, and then fix it yourself. When Sonny Bono in California ran up against a city manager that was so bigoted he would not let Sonny have the license to open his restaurant, that is how he got involved in politics. He found out who hired and fired the city manager--it was the mayor--so he ran for mayor, and the first thing he did was fire the abusive city manager. That is how a Republic system is supposed to work. It is a form of democracy, not a pure democracy, so that we can have ex post facto laws, and we can keep people from having their conduct criminalized after they committed it. But we have got to hit the ground running at the first of the year and start the process of trying to heal America. President Obama did not make the school system better; he made matters worst. We had a voucher program here in D.C. that minority kids--actually, it is the minorities are a majority here; minority elsewhere. These poor kids were suffering from a broken school system that had more than enough money to properly educate the kids, but kids were the victims of the bureaucracy. What else has this Justice Department done? Well, they have gone around and started up racial tensions where there shouldn't have been. They stirred up rumors that, for example, if you are a Black young man in America, you are 20 times more likely to be shot than if you are a White person in America of that same age, which is simply not true. We saw in different parts of the country when we had a Black mayor or a Black police chief, he was not a racist, was not out to harm Blacks in America, but try to do justice by them. They ultimately found in most cases that had been brought, actually, the police were justified in what they were doing. Since police are composed of human beings, there are going to be some rotten apples. When I was a judge, I saw one every now and then--very, very rarely. But every now and then you did. And I would contend, from my experience handling thousands of felony cases, that the law enforcement officers I dealt with have a much tinier percentage of problems than the general population of America. When we find a police officer who is abusive, who is problematic, he or she should be punished. But after 9/11, America was jarred awake for the first time in decades and really began again to appreciate the job law enforcement officers have done for us to keep the peace, to allow us not to be beat up by a bigger bully on our block, but allow the law to be enforced more equally and fairly. It is never perfect. There is always room for improvement. People began to appreciate our first responders without contempt because they were stopping traffic. And they began to appreciate our military more because it was willing to go lay down their lives for their friends, for the people in this country, which Jesus said was the greatest love. And he absolutely knew. He laid down his life for us. But in the last 8 years, we have become so racially divided. The regret I have from going back to Mount Pleasant is how choked up I got going back to my old high school that was so good to me, did such a great job--public-school educating me, my brothers, my sister. I loved Coach Willie Williams, and I saw him after so long and got a hug that just touched deeply. Somebody said: Did you take a picture? I didn't even think about a picture. I wasn't thinking picture. Here was a man that coached me, who would not put up with anybody using race. It didn't matter to Coach Williams. He expected us to perform. I wish I had gotten a picture. I have got to do that. What a great man. Well, unfortunately, we have other information. There was a damning Department of Homeland Security report that exposed the administration's claim that as many as 81 percent of people attempting to cross the border illegally were apprehended from the port. We found out that actually it is not anything like 81 percent. It may be more like 54 percent. Shockingly, the report's authors find that the estimated apprehension rate between ports of entry in 2005 was only 36 percent--and that was 2005. It has not gotten better, even though tricks of adjusting the statistics have gotten more multiplied. We have got to defend our Nation, we have got to enforce the law, we have got to get this country back to being a shining light on the hill, instead of one overwhelmed by people who want to violate our law. They don't want to do it, but failing to enforce our borders will eliminate our ability to be the most generous country when it comes to visas and legal entry. No other countries are massively larger in size--geographically in size or populationwise. No one awards more visas than we do--over 1 million. Yet, that will end up coming to an end with the failure to enforce the law. Particularly, there were problems in the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the Bush administration before that, but it has just gone exponentially crazy over this administration, and we have got to get it under control. One other thing: I continue to hear some in America say the days of the United States being a manufacturing powerhouse are over. Well, I know from history--and apparently Donald Trump knows from just his business instincts--that if a strong country cannot produce the things it needs to defend itself and defend freedom, it will cease being a free country after the next significant conflict. It is just a fact. The Battle of the Bulge, so many don't realize, even as late as that occurred in World War II, it had a good shot of prevailing and driving the Allied forces from the bulge in the middle out to the water's edge. But one of the most fundamental problems was they ran out of fuel. Well, east Texas was the largest known reserve when it was discovered, and it provided plenty of oil. Our tanks had fuel, but, as we became more dependent on other countries, that became a problem. American ingenuity has allowed us to find more natural gas and more oil. Now we find out in west Texas natural gas is far cleaner, and I hope and pray, under Donald Trump, we will move to use more of that. If we don't get back the factories--and we didn't just lose them from the Rust Belt. I lost a lot of steel plants like Lufkin Industries. It got bought up by GE. They didn't care about Lufkin. They weren't going to sponsor any little-league teams. They didn't care. They just bought them up, took their patents. They told me their headquarters for that operation was in Italy, over in the Mediterranean. This is a company that doesn't pay us taxes, but the head of it is close friends with the President. Well, it is time we got back to manufacturing steel in America, steel pipe in America, manufacturing what we need to make tanks, planes, cars, and buses. Do that here. It is time we got back jobs to make paper. We have renewable resources here we quit using. They are not sequoias. They are not redwoods. They are pine trees. They grow back every 20 years. You can find pictures of places in east Texas where there were no trees, and yet, after the timber industry came in, they became forested again. We can become great again, but we have got to be more responsible. We have got to protect our borders from those who want to do us harm and violate our laws. If we would do that, a 10-year-old little girl in my county would be alive today. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor and a pleasure to be in this somewhat hallowed Hall. The election is behind us. It is time to look ahead. But as everyone who studies history knows, those who fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it. And so we go. We continue too often to repeat the mistakes of the past, but it looks like the American people wanted a change--quite a change--and I know there are calls that we get rid of the electoral college, but when one looks at the map of the United States district-by-district within the States that voted for the different parties, candidates, one sees very clearly that you have the big cities that were voting Democrat and the 90 percent or so of the rest of the country voted Republican. It really is amazing to see just how distinctive that has become. South Texas is not highly populated, but is blue. Otherwise, most of the country that voted Democrat is just large cities, many of which are failing, many of which have become sanctuary cities, many of which have high crime rates. So I was a bit encouraged to continue to hear statements made by President-elect Trump. There is an article today--with regard to the government, that is-- from The Washington Examiner by Paul Bedard: ``$42 billion in Obama regulations are on Trump's chopping block. Nearly 50 massive and costly regulations that cost Americans and businesses 53 million more hours filing paperwork and that have already put a $42 billion hit on the U.S. economy are being teed up for President-elect Trump to cut in his first weeks in office.'' And you go through and you look and top on the list are Head Start performance standards. Really, education was doing pretty well in my home State. Back before President Carter created the Department of Education, between 70 and 75 percent of all employees in the education system in Texas were teachers; but when you create this big bureaucracy called the Department of Education, it means for every cubicle we put here in Washington, D.C., just down the street here at the Department of Education, every State has to hire additional people to work in cubicles. But some States are more generous than others. Some have very nice offices. But then, for every bureaucrat you put in a State capital office that is going to respond to the bureaucrats in the Department of Education here, you have to have additional clerical help, administrative help in each individual school district. That is people that could be helping our children. That is people that could be making students brighter than any other students. But what are they doing? They are filling out mountains of paperwork to send to the State capital so they can fill out mountains of paperwork and send it to the Department of Education. To see that just one item within the Department of Education could cut $42 billion in Obama regulations is incredible. At a time when we have skyrocketed over the last 7-plus years from $11 billion in debt to $20 billion in debt, it is just incredible. Incredible. Yet, there is so much we are costing America. I am excited about the coming year because the kind of things that are listed here is just government overregulation; government bureaucrats from here overregulating. I know most people are proud when they set new all-time records, which this administration did in new regulations for the years with regard to pages of regulations. I think it seems like the Bush administration may have hit 74,000 pages or so one year, but that didn't create a problem for the Obama administration. They have blown right past 74,000 pages of regulations. How is anyone in business in the United States supposed to stay in business if they have to go through 74,000 pages of new regulations in addition to the old regulations that may still be in effect? It is incredible. Like the Heritage Foundation has pointed out, more persons are committing three or four Federal crimes every day because we don't know what all the regulations are. I am very encouraged as we go into the new year that one of the things we want to accomplish--and Chairman Goodlatte in the Judiciary Committee has it on his list of things to get done--is really address the overcriminalization that has occurred over all these years. You slap a prison sentence on some vague crime or on some vague statute that says it is a crime if you violate any of the laws or regulations, and then bureaucrats sit around and dream up things that annoy them, and all of a sudden somebody can be going to prison for things none of us knew were crimes. One guy did know that a substance he was sending through the mail, since he was a scientist, required ground only. So he checked the box ``ground only.'' He didn't know that some bureaucrat had passed or created a regulation that said not only do you check the box, you have to put a little ticker with an airplane with a red line through it. And if you don't do that, you get arrested, drug to Alaska, where he was sending it--he didn't even live there, didn't have friends--and held up there for 18 months or so, I think. It is incredible. We have got to do right by the American people. I have been blessed to be able to travel all over the country in the past year or so. And everywhere I go, it just seems like the economy is ready to take off. If we can just get this massive, oppressive bureaucracy in Washington off of the neck of the economy, people will start having jobs again. I know some people are worried about the wall or fence, but as you see people out of work--some of them being paid, apparently, to riot or picket, the things they do. I remember one picketer out here on The Mall back during the shutdown said he was getting $15 an hour from Democratic sources to picket out there at the World War II Monument. Some of them get paid. Maybe that is all the work they can find. Well, how great would it be to take that picket sign out of their hand and say: My friend, we have productive work for you. You can help your country, you can help yourself by cutting down on potential terrorism coming across other southern border, by cutting down on people coming into the country illegally and getting welfare, food stamps, all these benefits that other Americans will have to pay for those who are here illegally. You can take this trowel, take this mortar, and go over to that brick pile by our border and just start helping us build the wall. We will pay you to do that. I don't know, if they get $15 an hour to come picket in Washington, they may want $16 or $17 to help build the wall or the fence down on our border, but we have certainly got plenty of people that can work, because you see them in the streets all over the country. They have come out of their safe spaces where their feelings were hurt because things didn't go like they wanted and nobody has told them, as my late mother, brilliant as she was, used to say: Well, nothing is fair, and the quicker you get used to it, the better off you will be. I would contend--and she would roll her eyes--yeah, but we can take care of our own little part to make it more fair. And that is what we are supposed to do. If things are not fair, then you get involved in government and you try to fix it. That is why I came to Washington. I saw that things weren't fair up here, that the Federal Government was luring people away from their God-given potential. I kept having young women come before me as a felony judge in Texas for welfare fraud. And the cases were nearly identical. They pour out their hearts, lay out their situation. They were bored with high school and somebody said: Well, the Federal Government will send you a check if you just drop out and have a baby. Then they find out after they have the child: I can't really live on this little bit. This is not enough to live on. So they have another child and another child. These are just the ones that came to my court, but I would imagine that there are other situations just like this all over the country. When I was teaching a joint sociology class at a predominantly African American school back in Tyler, Texas--a great school that has done so much good for so many--Texas College--but there were women there probably in their late twenties, and when we started talking about this, I was blown away with the intellectual level of these women and their commitment that we have to fix our Federal system that is destroying people and their potential. One lady in her older twenties, God bless her, she came back. She decided: I have had kids. I have been in debt. I am going to improve myself. I mean, that is the American Dream. That is what we hope for. She said, You have got to put that work requirement in and you have got to make it more forceful. Another lady said: You have got to put drug tests on there. Man, I was spending my money I was getting from the government not so much for my kid, but for my drugs. You need to have a drug test. Don't just give people money like that. You are ruining them. I am hearing people across the country that have figured out this massive welfare state that was created with the best of intentions in the mid-sixties has done more to pull people away from their God-given potential and put them into ruts or ditches from which they couldn't get out of. Yet, that is not supposed to ever be the role of government, whether you look to Biblical scripture, like I do. In Romans 13, the government is supposed to be an encourager of good conduct, help people, encourage them, direct them to reach their potential. Don't lure them away from their potential and make them beholden to this big master government. Encourage them. We need a safety net here and there, but encourage them. The sky is the limit and get out of the way. Like Edison said, I didn't fail however many hundreds of thousands of times. I tried to find the filament that would make a light bulb work. He didn't fail all those times. He just found that many ways that would not work in a light bulb, then he found the one that would. You encourage people to try. Failure shouldn't necessarily be a trophy, but it ought to get a slap on the back, Come on, you can keep going. You can do it. The government should not lure people away from trying. It was never intended to be anything but a safety net so you could rebound and get back on your feet. Instead, we take people off their feet and lead them away from being productive in the country for themselves. I have mentioned this before, but I, as a freshman here in Congress, 12 years ago, went to a conference at Harvard. One of the speakers, the dean there--I was surprised, dean at Harvard Business School--had these charts, and he showed single mothers' income in the United States, when adjusted for inflation, from the creation of welfare until welfare reform, from the mid-sixties to mid-nineties when Newt Gingrich and Republicans took the Congress in January 1995, did welfare reform. I know President Clinton now takes credit for it, but he vetoed it. It wasn't until they had enough votes, basically, to override his veto that they finally got him on board, and now he likes to take credit for it. It was the Republicans that drove them there. He likes to take credit for the balanced budget. He vetoed numerous things that would have made it balance, and once they had the votes that would override his veto, he would sign them, and we got to a balanced budget back in the late nineties. But that is what we are going to have to do come January, and we can't give away the farm when we come back. I am encouraged today to hear our Speaker and leader talking about what we are going to be doing. And wow, isn't it wonderful that now that Donald Trump is the President-elect, Republican leadership is now saying: You know what we are going to do is we need to take care of the military so we don't suffer there any more than we already have for 8 years. But maybe get that done for the rest of the year and then, basically, have a continuing resolution that gets us out maybe to March so that we can come in with the Congress the people of the United States have said they now want making the decisions. That makes sense. They have spoken: Let's let that Congress make the big calls then with the new President when he comes in in January. What is so great about that is some of us were talking about that back in September, and then we were told no, no; we have got to do it for the whole year, and we are going to have to add this and that. We can't just go to March because that will destroy the military. We have got to do everything for the whole year. A new President is elected named Trump, and all of a sudden, hey, let's just go to March. Sounds great to me. That sounds like a good idea. I would have been willing to do that in September as we were talking about then. It wasn't acceptable then. I am glad it is acceptable now for a new Congress. And when we talk about problems in the United States, our military has been deflated back to a pre-World War II position. We were not a superpower after World War I. We weren't the main defender of truth, justice, freedom. But as you travel around the world, like I have mentioned, in Africa, where Africans were saying, you know: We were so excited when you elected your first Black President, but since he has been in office, we have seen America get weaker and weaker. And you have got to go back to Washington and tell those people there to stop getting weaker. This was a group of African Christians. They said, you know: We all know where we are going when we die, but our only chance for peace in this life is if America is strong. Now, the world, so many countries like to deride us and take verbal shots. Some take other kinds of shots. But some like to fly planes closely, mocking our ships, and I am looking forward to that happening under President Trump. I suspect if it happens, it probably won't happen more than once, and they will learn not to mess with us. So it will be nice to have a reputation: You are not going to continue to bully the world. While this administration likes to talk about bullies in elementary school and send--they like to see little kids who were bullies in elementary school arrested, threatened. Well, I was a little bitty kid, and one of my best friends from elementary school was here yesterday. We were talking about old times. He and I were the same little bitty runt size, so we got picked on a lot. But we didn't want anybody to come get arrested, and we figured out ways that we made sure the biggest bully never bothered us again. But to give an elementary school kid an arrest, drag them in for being a bully? I mean, kids have to grow up, and that is why we are called adults. We are supposed to have learned and supposed to understand kids will be kids. Foolishness can be found in the heart of a child. But some say maybe Proverbs is encouraging a crime when it says: but the rod can drive it far from them. Nobody wants a child to be abused, but I know most of my friends in school, we got paddled at one time or another. I had friends I played football with, whether it was freshman year, junior varsity, or varsity, that if they had not been paddled, I had no doubt they were headed for prison. But they had coaches that cared about them. They didn't just want to win as coaches. They wanted these kids to be good adults, so they used discipline. We had some troubled folks after high school, but the coaches saved a lot of kids by caring. I mentioned before that I had some coaches that I loved, and they are more like friends, even though they were adults. My favorite year, my favorite coach was Willie Williams. It was interesting, you know. Conservatives are called bigots all the time. First time I mentioned that here in Washington, that my favorite high school coach was--happened to be Black, and I never noticed any racial problems on that team because he was rough on all of us. He was a very smart man, too, good coach. I love Coach Williams, and it was my great honor to be invited back to my hometown a couple of weeks ago when Mount Pleasant was playing Greenville. Greenville is a lot bigger city. Mount Pleasant had won two games. Coach Williams is now retired, but I was told Coach Williams was up in the press box, that he did some of the calling color for the games. There were so many thrills there, getting to know the kids and being with the team on the sideline and rejoicing at good plays. But they won. Apparently, it was the best game they played. Those kids have a lot of potential they didn't realize, but they gave me the game ball. Just so many things that thrilled me there, my hometown where I grew up, Mount Pleasant, but nothing more than when I got to hug Coach Williams up there at the press box. That was special. Although he is substantially older now and gray--and, fortunately, his memory has not waned at all--Coach Williams remarked: You had a great team, but it wasn't because you had good talent--that's how I know his memory had not failed him--but you guys played so well together. You gave it everything. You played well together, and that is how you were a winning team. I really had hopes that that is what would happen. I didn't support Barack Obama for President, but I really had hopes that we would be brought together as never before, just the way Coach Williams brought us together on that football team. I thought it was rather ironic, one of the liberal press immediately did a story on my favorite basketball coach in high school. Apparently, they figured, since they are liberal, well, he is Black, so I guess Blacks are only good at basketball, so he must have been his basketball coach. He was my football coach, JV football coach before I went to varsity the next year. But, ironic, who is the more bigoted, I wonder. But, nonetheless, it wasn't like our team under Coach Williams. We have become a very divided country. In this article from FOX News, Dakota Wood, just this week, points out our military is no longer large enough, strong enough, or modern enough to keep America safe, and that is why China is making moves in the South Sea. It is why Russia is rattling sabers and looking around them if they should possibly move before a more authoritative President, a more decisive President like President-elect Trump, comes into office. So I think the world is scared for the next couple of months. Are these countries like Iran, Russia, China, are they going to try to make a move in the next 2 months because they know this President may send some rockets or something, may send a SEAL team, but they are not going to really be final-type activities to really send a message. So we will see. Hopefully, the threat of President Trump coming in January will be sufficient to keep Iran from trying to make a move on Mecca, Russia from trying to make a move on Georgia, Ukraine, Crimea-- Crimea being part of Ukraine, of course, should be--but remains to be seen. And then after all of the trauma that has been created by--I just can't call it the Affordable Care Act because it is so costly. But the President was proud that it was called ObamaCare initially, and so that is a better term. People know what it means immediately, know what we are talking about. But this article from the Washington Free Beacon, Ali Meyer, says one-third of adults went without health care due to expensive costs. We were doing so much better. Most of the people I hear from in my district, over 700,000 people, were doing a lot better under--before ObamaCare kicked in. They are not going to be able to afford health care next year. That was one of the reasons that 90 percent of the geographical U.S. voted to change parties as President because they have seen the suffering they have had because their health care has suffered. This article says one-third of adults in the U.S. went without recommended health care due to expensive costs, according to a Commonwealth Fund survey. The survey actually was conducted in 11 countries--the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom--and this was all within this year, from March to June of this year, and that is what we find. A third of Americans, now that we have been under ObamaCare for 6 years, have really felt the pinch, and some have felt it to their demise or detriment. Another article from Elizabeth Harrington, ObamaCare premiums are to increase 27 percent. It points out that a new study obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows premium increases under ObamaCare will actually be higher than the Federal Government's projections, and it points out they will increase by 27 percent, according to the American Action Forum. It points out that the Department of Health and Human Services announced last month that premiums would increase an average of 22 percent in 2017. But premiums will actually increase as much as 145 percent in some States. ``The American Action Forum found that the average increase is likely to be higher than predicted because the agency did not factor in that nearly half of ObamaCare plans no longer exist, forcing enrollees to switch to costlier plans,'' if they have them at all. Then we have this from Lana Shadwick: ``DHS Sued for Ignoring Environmental Effects of Mass Immigration.'' There is so much damage that has come from our border not being secured. I heard one of my friends across the aisle say just this week in the press that our southern border is secure and that Mr. Trump should come down and see it. Mr. Trump has come down and seen it, and I have been down there many times. To be on the border as I was just in the last month, recent months, out there on the Rio Grande, it is pretty wide, and yet that is still where so many thousands and thousands and thousands cross. At 2, 3 in the morning, we were on a Texas Department of Public Safety boat because Texas, though they are not authorized by the Supreme Court to defend our borders, they are authorized under the Texas Constitution and required to protect our State. They spent millions of dollars. They have these fantastic boats. We had night vision on the boat. They have thermotechnology. They could see where people were hiding and what they were hiding behind. They have other technology. When they would see people, they would radio it to the Border Patrol. There were agents on the U.S. side along the riverbank, and we reported some in. We went down, turned off the engine and sat there for an hour or so. Finally, the U.S. Border Patrol asked if we would go back to the dock because those people that we had been watching, they were watching with their technology, and they weren't going to move. They knew our boats were there somewhere in the area, and so our boat went back. I thought that meant they were saying they know you are in the area so they are not going to make a move. We can't catch them redhanded until you make a move. I thought that meant they would interdict and protect the homeland. No. Homeland security doesn't protect the homeland. No. What they were saying is: We want you to get out of the way because there are people--oh, and then there were some we could see were clearly carrying stuff that was probably drugs. There were only two or three in those groups of people who were carrying drugs. There were 17 or 18 groups like that would be wanting to come across, and it didn't look like they were carrying anything, maybe they had a raft. So it turned out we leave, and we get radio transmission from Border Patrol: Okay, all of those folks who you had spotted, they have now all come across when you left the area, and we have got all of those in the big groups. But we didn't get those who were probably bringing in drugs, but we put somebody out at an intersection. They are going to watch for them. These people are not stupid. They knew the intersection they put them in. They weren't going through that intersection. If I had had any idea that our boat leaving that area of the river, the Rio Grande, was going to cause President Obama's Border Patrol to not protect our homeland but to keep welcoming drug dealers, massive drugs, and lots of folks we don't know what diseases they have--we don't know if there were any terrorists in there. We don't really know who they are. They don't carry proper identification. I have seen that time and time and time again on our border in the middle of the night. They are not carrying. I watched two guys. They looked at their own little xeroxed piece of paper they use for identification, and if they didn't like it, they switched. What kind of identification is that? It is a little piece of paper, it had some English on it, and they switched. They didn't like the identity they were bringing in. We don't know who these people were. So it will be nice come next year to know that our Border Patrol--and they are frustrated, I know. Most of them really have wanted to do their jobs. I hear from them. They are so tired of watching their homeland be assaulted. It just goes on and on, a wave every night, and we are not protecting our homeland. We are supposed to protect this place against all enemies foreign and domestic. Some of those folks aren't enemies. They want to come in for jobs. Some want to come in for welfare. Some want to come in for food stamps. Some want to come in, but they have made commitments through the drug cartels that pay the coyotes to bring them across. I have been out there at night when they have said: Well, no, I didn't have $7,000, but they are going to let me work it off in the city I am going to. How do they work it off in those cities for the drug cartels? They help them spread poison to American young people. They are bringing poison into our country. They come in with good motivation-- wanting jobs, wanting a better life. Yet we have allowed such a massive insurgence into this country. We need to take some kind of pause and kind of figure out who in the world is in this country. We know from FBI Director Comey--such as his testimony is worth--that there are terrorist cells in every State, and that they are investigating every State. So we need to figure out who all have we let in here. In the last 8 years--and, yes, it was going on during the Bush administration, but nothing like it has just amassed in the last 8 years. We have to figure out who is here. Even this administration had no idea who they have let in. Then when you see the article that indicates that the number of those wrongly given citizenship is much higher than initially reported--and this is from Jake Tapper with CNN--that the number of individuals who were supposed to have been deported but instead were granted citizenship is far higher than was initially reported by the media covering homeland security. This is from September: ``On Monday, the Inspector General reported that 858 individuals from `special interest countries'--meaning countries that are considered to be `of concern to the national security of the United States'--were supposed to have been deported but were instead granted U.S. citizenship. ``But the truth is the report is even worse than reported, with more than 1,800 individuals naturalized who should have been deported from the country. ``A reason for the underplaying of the number may have been the report's focus, which was whether the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was using digital fingerprints effectively.'' So it goes on to say that there might be 1,000 more--953 more--that they didn't realize they were supposed to deport because they are probably going to kill people and create havoc here. With all the rhetoric we have heard over and over, we don't need a fence, we don't need a wall, this campaign you don't need any fence or wall down on our border. WikiLeaks--and who knows where this stuff is coming from, but I never did hear outright denials to: Well, we are not sure where that is coming from. Yeah, but they are saying this was your email. Did you send this email? I just didn't hear people denying the facts that were in what was released. Anyway, they leaked an internal memo from Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, and it made very clear that then-Senator Obama believed that fencing at the U.S.-Mexico border could help cut down on illegal immigration. Of course, once he is in office, we hear his surrogate, Janet Napolitano, saying that if you build a 10-foot wall, then they will build a 12-foot ladder. So what do they do? They build a 10-foot fence around the White House. After she made fun of a 10-foot fence, they built a 10-foot fence to make it higher around the White House. I ask: Does that fence work? Because if it works, then we need to have something like that down on our border. If it doesn't work, then let's remove the fence from around the White House. But the Obama administration, though they clamored that fences would do no good, made their fence even stronger, bigger, taller, and more secure around the White House. So I know they said that fences didn't work, but their actions said pretty clearly: Yes, we know they work. That is why we are fixing ours up around the White House. In my own home county, November was a very, very sad time. A 10-year- old little girl, Kayla, was finally found as friends around the country were texting, emailing, and praying for Kayla. They finally found 10- year-old Kayla. Our Smith County sheriff, Larry Smith, reported that Kayla's body was found in a well next to a home rented by her relative 4 days after her disappearance. The Sheriff said: ``We assure you there will be no stone unturned as we enter the next phase of this investigation.'' That is what they did. They arrested Gustavo Zavala-Garcia. He was in the country illegally. He had been deported for a violent crime in 2014, but because this Federal Government refused to protect the United States of America from all enemies foreign, this guy comes back in and killed Kayla. That is the charge. We have seen this across the country. I know President-elect Trump has said he is going to do something about it, and, God help us, he needs to. In government we have a job. As an individual Christian, I am supposed to turn the other cheek; but when I am acting in the role of the government, my job is to make sure those who have religious beliefs can practice and keep their religious beliefs without worrying about some guy who has been deported five times coming in and shooting them. If we find here in Congress that the executive branch is not doing what they should, then we cut off the money. That is what is supposed to happen. Cut off the money to those who aren't doing the job and send it over to people that are doing the job. If nobody is doing the job, then create another department and eliminate that department, and get somebody until you do protect the country. There are so many across this country that are suffering and mourning the loss because the Federal Government did not protect them from some immigrant who was a criminal who was deported. We don't protect our borders. They came back, they killed, raped, and pillaged yet again. Then there are those who say: Well, let's just go ahead and do a complete amnesty. This report is from Robert Rector, a brilliant guy from the National Academy of Sciences. He says: ``The findings in the report indicate that if amnesty for illegal immigrants were enacted, the government would have to raise taxes immediately by $1.29 trillion and put that sum into a high-yield bank account to cover future fiscal losses generated by the amnesty recipients and their children. ``To cover the future cost, each U.S. household currently paying federal income tax would have to pay, on average, an immediate lump sum of over $15,000.'' Wouldn't it be better to just enforce our borders? Nobody lets in legally as many as we do in the United States. I don't know a single person in this Congress that is a xenophobe, whatever kind of phobe, but we want to do our job. There is an obligation to make sure that the over 1 million visas--more than any country in the world--that are handed out by your United States Government go to people that are not going to be a threat but are to be a blessing to this country. The U.N. General Secretary--the new one that just came in--said over a year ago that the reason there is such a tiny fraction of a fraction of Christians who are being brought out of the Middle East as refugees is because they are so historically important right where they are. We have already recognized there is a genocide of Christians going on right now in the Middle East. So what do we do with the Christians? The government said: Well, we want to leave most of them there. We like what the U.N. says. Let's leave them over there to be wiped out in a genocide of Christians. I am saying, Mr. Speaker, there will be a price to pay someday by this country for our callousness to Christians and Jews in the Middle East that have cried out for help. Instead of helping them, we have welcomed those who have tortured and created a living hell for them. And one from September 10: ``Suspect in Brutal Maryland Murder Deported Twice.'' ``Austin Sex Assault Suspect Previously Deported Five Times.'' Then this administration has sent billions of dollars, a lot of it cash--load up those pallets, put them on a plane, and send them to our enemy Iran. And we find out there was an IAEA report indicating that Iran had continued to violate the Iran executive agreement. It is really a treaty, but the Senate never confirmed it, never ratified it, so it can be wiped out as soon as Trump goes in. I know I saw a headline he doesn't think he will do that. I suggest he needs to do that. It was a rotten deal. There will be a lot of people in the Middle East and around the world, including America, who will die because this administration sent billions of dollars to Iran, a big hunk of it just pure cash. This article says: ``Iran Pressuring Palestinian Jihadists to Resume Terrorism Against Israel.'' But they didn't just do terrorism against Israel. They love to kill and do harm to Americans. It is time we stood up to our oath and protected this place, protected our Constitution, our way of life, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That is basically the oath I took when I went on Active Duty in the Army. We didn't know if we were going to be sent. We weren't sent anywhere. We were put on alert in 1979 when an act of war occurred in Iran, but President Carter wouldn't defend our people. He tried way too late and way too weakly to rescue. But even a successful rescue would have told the world we don't have a leader in America that will protect the American people because, if you harm us, then we will come back and get out of your country, but we will leave you alone. I mean, this was President Carter that called Ayatollah Khomeini--the biggest radical Islamist terrorist in modern history--a man of peace when he was welcoming him to the power of an entire country and its military. Radical Islamic caliphate had been out of business for many years, and Carter opened the box. Once Pandora's box was open, many thousands and thousands of our American military would die in the days to come because of it, not just military. But when a Taliban--radical Islamist terrorists--in Afghanistan get control of the country, there is going to be terrorism spread around the world. That is what happened. When a radical Islamic terrorist becomes the head of Iran, there is going to be terrorism spread around the world, and that happened. Now, this: ``Leaked FBI Data Reveal 7,700 Terrorist Encounters in USA in One Year; Border States Most Targeted.'' But Andrew McCarthy, a dear friend, wrote a great article: ``Deadliest Lie: Without `Lone Wolf' Lie, U.S. Could Have Stopped Nearly Every Attack.'' As my friend Patrick Poole has said, there are no lone wolves, there are known wolves. Each time we find out these people were on the radar of the FBI, of law enforcement, and they didn't know how to recognize a radical Islamist. So I hope and pray that, as a new administration comes in, we will finally put the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR and any of the groups with which it works, on a terrorist watch list. Stop them from giving advice to the State Department, the White House, the Justice Department, Homeland Security. Stop allowing them to come in and review material and tell us what we have to remove from our training material so that next time Russia says there is a Tsarnaev brother that has been radicalized and he is going to kill people, the FBI agents who want to stop terrorism will actually recognize it because they have been properly trained to do so instead of being treated with some politically correct garbage that keeps them from recognizing what a real radical Islamist is. You have got to know what they are reading. You have got to know what their beliefs are. When I talked to the FBI agent whose material was completely eliminated for a time because, apparently, CAIR, named as a coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, was bothered by some of that stuff, when I asked the FBI Director at that time, Mueller, ``You didn't even go to the mosques where the Tsarnaevs went and ask questions--What are they reading? What are they learning? What are they saying? How are they acting?--to determine if they had been radicalized?'' they didn't know what to look for. Mueller said they did go out there, but it was in their outreach program. Yeah, go out there and have a meal. Let's get together and be buddies, but not even investigate when the Russians tell you this guy is a radical, he is going to kill Americans. They sent somebody out. They talked to him and talked to his mom. He said, ``No, I am not a terrorist''; and Mom said, ``He is a good boy, not a terrorist.'' And then he goes and kills people in Boston at the marathon because they didn't know what they were looking for. It is time to get back to fulfilling our oath to the United States of America to protect this country, to get government out of the way, to create a level playing field across the country and then let people compete. Don't reward the losers. Encourage them to pick up and keep going when they fail because, like Edison, it is not a failure. You just found a way not to succeed on that, but you will find a way next time. We keep trying. It is time to wake up, protect the people within the United States so that we can continue to be the biggest, brightest beacon of light in the world where people will want to come instead of a place that was once great, was once free, was once safe, but now countries around the world have travel alerts out on our cities because we are not safe anymore. It is time to protect America and put America first, which is our oath and obligation. When we do that, we can do more good for the world than we have done since World War II. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, this is the 75th anniversary of National Bible Week. Isn't it interesting that National Bible Week was first proclaimed 2 weeks before World War II broke out? The Nation really rallied and rallied behind Franklin Roosevelt's call to pray together, the President that went on national radio on D- day and led the Nation in prayer. I am sure if he were to try to do that today if he were alive, then people would be freaking out that the President was leading in prayer like that. There are so many examples from World War II where we could say: Wow, wasn't that a coincidence? The Germans ran out of gas at just the right time. This German general or commander got confused at just the time they were about to get enough gasoline to refill and refuel and keep the Battle of the Bulge going. There are so many little things. A fellow in Iowa earlier this year had told me that coincidence is what we have when you don't notice God's at work. I am still chewing on that. In the first hundred years, about a hundred years after the founding, the U.S. Supreme Court had a case involving Trinity Church. They went through and reviewed all the evidence and declared this is a Christian nation. It didn't mean everybody in America was a Christian at all. Nobody has to be. They have the freedom to say God doesn't exist. The freedom that comes from a government based on Biblical word is a freedom that cannot be obtained under any other religious teaching. That is why, when I had a chance to meet Retired General Jay Garner again back in September, I asked him again: What happened? President George W. Bush sent him over into Iraq and asked him to find out what the Iraqi people felt like we should try to give them as a government. Now, I would say let them choose their own government. We shouldn't be trying to push anything. General Garner did a brilliant job, but he went with some other people--one was a reporter and he had people from the administration with him--and he was told: ``You have got to talk to this direct descendant of Muhammad and see what he says, because people really listen to him being a direct descendant of Muhammad.'' A black turban also is an indication apparently of being a direct descendant of Muhammad, from what we were told. Then he said: Look, I am going to tell you what I think we need here in Iraq. I will do that in my language, and then I will tell you in English since you are recording everything. And so he spoke for quite some time. And then he said: Okay, in a nutshell, what I have said is basically we need a government that is composed of Iraqis and that it is based on a constitution that Iraqis put together and that constitution is based on the teachings of Jesus. And General Garner, when he got outside, he turned to the reporter and everybody and asked: ``Did you guys all hear that? Did he really-- `` They all said ``yes.'' He said it should be based on the teachings of Jesus. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If you base a government on the teachings of anyone else, then ultimately there will not be true freedom in that nation. This is a New Testament that belonged to my uncle, and it has ``May the Lord be with you.'' It has this brass plate here on the front, and people were encouraged to put it in their pocket to see if it would save--it apparently saved some lives right over the heart. Inside the flyleaf at the top it says: ``The White House. Washington. As Commander in Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the Armed Forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries, men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength and now, as always, an aid in attaining the highest aspirations of the human soul.'' It is signed Franklin D. Roosevelt. If you look back at our history, the very first book authorized to be published by the U.S. Congress at government expense was the Bible. You had the Supreme Court in the first 50 years saying: of course the Bible should be taught; it is the best book for teaching our children. And now the government says: really, Christians are a big hate group that we need to worry about, and that their talk of Christianity is actually hate speech, homophobia, and Islamophobia. What these people who have become wise in their own eyes don't realize is that really this book, this Bible, is about love, that God so loved the world that He gave His Son, and that His Son so loved the world that He gave His life. That is a religion based on love. Jesus went on to say the two great commandments: love God, love each other. After I became a parent and my mother was about to die, and she said her favorite thing was her kids being there with her and loving each other, it made all the sense in the world. This Bible makes sense, from the prophecies Mr. Lamborn spoke of, when you read Psalm 22--``My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?''-- it is just verse after verse of prophecy of what was fulfilled by only one person in the history of man.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, if no one is claiming time in opposition, I would like to claim that time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. One thing that all three of us who have spoken on this bill tonight share is a desire to protect our homeland. I know that absolutely, completely to each of our cores we want our homeland protected. The issue comes in how we go about doing that and what lessons have been learned from prior mistakes and prior deaths and injuries. We continue to hear in the media about lone wolves. As Patrick Poole once said, They are not lone wolves. We keep finding that they are known wolves. It seems that, over and over, people who are killing in the name of Allah, killing in the name of the Islamic State and its leader, killing in the name of radical Islamic jihad have been questioned, have surfaced as a threat; yet, when they are investigated, they don't seem to be able to capture the fact that this is someone who has been radicalized and is going to go about killing people--killing Americans. If we look at Orlando and now at New York City, we are training law enforcement officers to spot nonexistent Islamophobes. That is an expression--a word--that was coined by the organization of the Islamic Council, which has 57 members--or states--or 50 states. I forget. With the United States or the OIC, one of us has 57 states and the other has 50. Anyway, they are the ones who coined the phrases ``Islamaphobe,'' ``Islamophobia,'' and that is what is being taught. As we have looked at how Homeland Security money has been spent in trying to prepare against radical Islamists--although they call it countering violent extremism, they don't want to say the words ``radical Islam.'' The gentleman from Texas has repeatedly said the phrase ``radical Islam'' because he understands that that is what it is. Unfortunately, the Homeland Security Department still can't quite grasp what radical Islam is. For those who wonder is it even possible that money that we would appropriate under this bill, which makes clear on page 4 of the bill that, when applying for the money, at a minimum, the application has to say how the applicant will work with community partners--``community partners.'' That is an interesting phrase in itself. Where have we found that before? We have found that with Homeland Security; we have found that with the FBI; and we have heard testimony in our Judiciary Committee from FBI Director Mueller on the community partnership that they have had with mosques and with different groups, like CAIR. In fact, CAIR, itself, and other Islamic groups have even been actually named as unindicted coconspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial in which the principals were convicted of supporting terrorism. There were numerous unindicted coconspirators. The only ones who objected to their listing as unindicted coconspirators brought their motion to be struck from the pleading before the Federal district judge in the case. He examined the evidence and indicated there was plenty of evidence to support them being named as coconspirators. They weren't satisfied with that; they appealed it to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals examined the evidence that was available and said, just on the evidence available, that these groups that are objecting to being listed as coconspirators, there is plenty of evidence to show that they are coconspirators. The names shall not be struck. Yet, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, and our intelligence agencies continue to follow the instructions of the White House and, that is, to be community partners with these groups that have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. As I have traveled in the Middle East and North Africa, repeatedly, I have been asked by leaders, once the cameras are out of the room: Why do you not understand the Muslim Brotherhood has been at war with you for decades? You keep helping the Muslim Brotherhood. You keep getting advice from the Muslim Brotherhood. When are you going to learn? In Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood was born, Egypt has understood what a threat the Muslim Brotherhood is to Western civilization. They don't want to recognize our Constitution; they want it supplanted and replaced with Sharia law. We can live in peace with the vast number of Muslims in the world, but we need to be sure we recognize radical Islamic jihadists. So how do we go about training? The Committee on Homeland Security is making a wonderful gesture: Here is money for law enforcement officers to be trained. What happens? Well, they are told they have got to reach out with community partners. And I know from personally questioning former-FBI Director Mueller--I was chastising him for the fact that the United States was notified twice that the older Tsarnaev brother, the Boston bomber, had been radicalized and was going to kill people in the United States--they didn't do an adequate investigation. The best that I can determine, from the information the FBI provided, they sent an agent to talk to Tsarnaev himself. Apparently, he indicated: Gee, I am not a terrorist. Well, to be sure they did an adequate investigation, they went and talked to his mother. And his mother said, in essence, that he is not a terrorist; that he is a good boy. And the FBI checked the box that he is not a terrorist. He was a terrorist. We also know, from our hearings from material that only a few of us in this Congress have examined that was purged from the FBI training material, they have purged information from the training that our FBI, our intelligence, our Homeland Security, and our Justice Department can have to learn about what radical Islam is. We know that Osama bin Laden, for example, said that he was radicalized, and it began with his reading the Muslim Brotherhood Qutb's booklet called Milestones. The reading of that booklet helped radicalize Osama bin Laden. I would bet that, of the FBI agents that have been trained under this administration, most of them have never heard of Qutb. So nobody would have known to ask Tsarnaev: Have you read Milestones? What do you think of Milestones? I challenged Mueller that they had not even gone to the mosque to ask questions: How is Tsarnaev acting? Is he becoming more stern, more religious? Has he talked about Qutb? Has he talked about Milestones? What is he reading? I chastised him for not going to the mosque, and the best our FBI director could say was: We did go to that mosque in our outreach program. Oh, yes, they took money that was appropriated to train and prevent terrorism, and they go out and have sit-down programs, probably have some meals. I don't know what all they do in their outreach program, but they are not learning to spot radical Islamists. The Committee on Homeland Security has their heart in the right place. They are wanting to do the right thing. They are hearing from our Department of Homeland Security. Block grants to these law enforcement will allow them to train to prevent--and the language is--they may use the grant to conduct training and exercises consistent with preventing. That is where our training so far is going to help people--whether New York, Orlando, San Bernardino--to spot Islamophobes. That is why when a complaint is made in San Bernardino about the person that would go on to kill so many lives there, take so many lives there--yeah, they investigated, but they thought it was just an Islamophobe because that is what they have been trained to look for. When the FBI got a heads-up on the Orlando shooter, they investigated, and they figured, oh, this is probably just Muslim haters. That is what they are spending their money to train for. In New Jersey, they actually investigated Mr. Rahami after his own father reported him as a terrorist after he stabbed his own brother. What does the FBI do? They didn't go to his social media. If so, they would have learned he had been radicalized. They didn't bother to look at his travel records, as best we can tell, to see where he traveled, who he saw, where he went, or where he might have been radicalized. No. No. They eventually got from the father a recanting, so they let it go. As a result, countless people were nearly killed. Why? It is not because law enforcement in New Jersey or New York don't want to do their jobs and do the best job they can and save lives. These are good law enforcement officers, just as they are in San Bernardino and Orlando. They want to do their job, but they haven't had the right training. I would direct my friends to August 10 through 12 of 2011, Steve Coughlin, who used to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff on radical Islam, along with some others who have spent their adult life studying radical Islam, was going to do a seminar for law enforcement training in the prevention of terrorist attacks or extremist attacks. Two days before law enforcement around the country were going to go to Langley to our intelligence agency and be trained on how to spot radical Islam, how to prevent these attacks--just like this money is going to be used here--someone with CAIR, the Council on American- Islamic Relations, from the story we got, called someone at the White House. Someone at the White House called Langley: Cancel that training. They changed the guidelines so that only people who were going to train about Islamophobia and minimize the training about true radical Islam and how to spot it are now allowed to teach our law enforcement as long as this administration is here in place. So my proposal was: Let's amend this language, and we could just say that none of this money can be used in correlation or coordinating with or to go to anyone who was named as a coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, or the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, or CAIR and its affiliates. This is a suspension bill; it cannot be amended. For that reason, I regretfully must oppose the bill and urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' until we can get a bill so law enforcement can be trained to spot radical Islamists and not dismiss those warnings of the radicals as nothing but a bunch of Islamophobes.

Mr. GOHMERT. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, there is nothing that I have said that impugns the integrity of any law enforcement officer. I have worked with law enforcement officers; I have been a prosecutor; I have been a judge. I know how tough their job is. There is nothing I have said that would impugn their integrity. There is nothing that is disgraceful except when a Congress refuses to learn from repeated killings, murders by radical Islamists. I understand the intent. It is going to train for active shooters. But when the language in the bill says ``such grant to conduct training and exercises consistent with preventing,'' then I can guarantee you because even though my friend says he knows more about this issue than anyone else, he doesn't know, apparently, what Homeland Security is doing with the money, doing with the training, didn't know about the changes that were made by this administration to who can teach about radical Islam. And so I would simply say, we really do need to help our law enforcement learn what radical Islam is about, and the way to do that is put it in the bill so this administration cannot change what is done with the money. That is what we should be doing. As far as community outreach, I know all about community outreach. I have been with Muslim friends at mosques. I know about community outreach. But I try to make sure I am not talking to the foxes that Homeland Security has brought into the henhouse. If you think I am wrong, look at the article published in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood, a pre-approved publication, that identified six Muslim brothers who were high consultants, including Elibiary. I warned about him for years in Homeland Security, and nobody in this body would help me on the committee to get Elibiary out. Finally, after Elibiary tweeted out that the international caliphate was inevitable, finally Homeland Security allowed him to rotate off of their advisory council. We have got foxes in the henhouse, and it is up to Congress to get them out. That is why I oppose the bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, since I know I have very little time left, let me respond. When you can't trust the people in the White House to train properly to recognize radical Islam, then it is incumbent upon the Congress to put the language in our bill so they don't have a choice. It is not my level of frustration with people circumventing the law. It is the fact that we have the power to put in the bills who does the training, who will get the training, exactly what kind of training, and we are leaving it to this administration. As a result, my frustration is that people are being killed and injured needlessly. Because, even as we stand here with the language in this bill, this administration has already shown that they will train-- in order to prepare for and to prevent a terrorist attack, yes, I know they can get training for active shooting--but they are being trained to prevent and prepare for. You have to learn about Islamophobia. Let's put the language in there so that this administration cannot prevent the true professors of radical Islam from teaching law enforcement on what to look for to know whether someone is radicalized. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to reclaim the balance of my time to respond to my remarks being disgraceful.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. We also have had mention tonight of efforts toward what some call sentencing reform. I was honored back in 2007 to get a call from a man that I think the world of, former Attorney General Ed Meese. Apparently he had heard of my concerns about some of the Federal criminal laws that needed to be changed; that we had too many people in America who were being harassed and their lives or their families destroyed by Federal criminal law that allowed people to be prosecuted for violating, not a law that Congress had passed, but some regulation that some cubicle-holder had decided would be a good thing to do. Unelected bureaucrats in Washington decided we will make this a regulation, and since Congress passed a law saying you have to follow all the laws and rules regarding this issue, we fall under the rules and regulations; therefore, they can go to prison for failing to do what we, as unelected bureaucrats in Washington, decided that someone somewhere we have never been must do. So I was greatly in favor and encouraged to hear of the interest from the Heritage Foundation, former Attorney General Ed Meese, to pursue criminal justice reform. We have had difficulty moving that forward, and I greatly appreciate the leadership of Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte. We have been able to get through some criminal justice reforms that I have been hoping to see passed since 2007. At times we made strange bedfellows, politically speaking, I guess, when we had Ed Meese and others from the Heritage Foundation, along with leaders from the ACLU, who had similar concerns that we did, and we were coming together to try to correct great injustices within the criminal justice laws. Unfortunately, the President, probably inspired by mentors like George Soros, they see that before criminal justice reform could be passed, at least contemporaneously, you have to pass sentencing reform. The Obama administration wants that to be a major part of the Obama legacy. And when you see how many people are being completely failed and harmed by ObamaCare, I can certainly understand why President Obama would rather have his legacy be that of something in the criminal justice area rather than ObamaCare. Without--and I have to say, this has certainly damaged in a bipartisan fashion people across America. There are people who have been helped by having government pay a good part of their health care. You look at the bottom line, especially, from the people I have heard from all over east Texas, we have vast numbers complaining they have lost their insurance they liked. They lost the doctor that was keeping them healthy or had gotten them cured, and now they were back in trouble. They lost the doctor or the insurance company, they lost the hospital they wanted to go to, all because of that around-2500-page monstrosity that is normally referred to as ObamaCare. It is easier to call it ObamaCare than the Affordable Care Act because it is not affordable. It has cost some people everything. So we have heard from people. They are clamoring for a change. Isn't there some way to let us get back the insurance we had before 2010, when the President and every Democrat, without a single Republican vote, rammed through, against the majority will of the American public, this monstrosity where the government took over their healthcare insurance, dictated requirements that would put many out of business, dictated requirements of doctors that have caused many to retire, as they have advised me? And I continue to hear, and we continue to lose hospitals especially in rural areas. But when you hear uncaring, big city folks say, ``We don't really care. Just tell them to move to the city,'' really? What? Like Chicago, where their chances of being murdered go up astronomically from where they are living now, where their standard of living can't possibly be where it is now? Do you despise these people so much and what many consider flyover territory that you would want to sentence them to such brutality? How about if we just let America be free again and we follow what so many have talked about? It is why I had the bill drafted back in 2009. CBO Director Elmendorf, no matter what he asked, I complied, and they still refused to ever score my bill. Newt Gingrich had said back in early 2009: If you can just get this in bill form and get it scored, they won't have a chance of passing ObamaCare; this will be too good. Because it appeared that the best numbers we could get back from 2008, it may well be cheaper to offer seniors: Okay, you want Medicare? You can have it. On the other hand, if you would like the very best health insurance policy that money can buy, we will buy it for you, but we will go ahead and set a high deductible. Back then, we were talking $5,000 or so. Maybe today it would be $7,500 or $10,000. We will have a high deductible, but above that deductible. You will have the best insurance money can buy, Mr. or Ms. Senior. To cover the deductible, we will give you a health savings account. We will put the cash in there. I made this proposal to a couple of folks that I had invited to come out and listen to the proposal from AARP. Since they cared about retired folks, I figured they will love this because this is going to be so good for retired people. They will never have to buy another wraparound or supplemental policy again. This is going to be unbelievable. So for Medicare and Medicaid, this will be fantastic, and we will give each one of them a health savings account debit card, and it will be coded only. Newt Gingrich was very helpful. He sent out some folks to meet with me that knew all about the different issues and encouraged some different things to be in the bill we got in there. Anyway, this was going to be great for seniors. I was shocked when AARP folks said: We will have to get back with you because we are not sure. I said: How could you not be sure? You care about retired people. My mother-in-law and father-in-law at the time were struggling to pay for a supplemental policy. This will be fantastic. I was so naive. I didn't know that AARP was making hundreds of millions of dollars clear profit for a nonprofit off selling the sale of supplemental health insurance. So, naturally, they couldn't sign on to that bill. It was going to be so good for seniors that AARP would never be making those hundreds of millions and billions of dollars that they would be able to make under ObamaCare. Of course, they signed on to ObamaCare. It was in their monetary best interest, just like it has been in the Clintons' best interests to have Secretary Clinton have a husband out there raking in the money while providing access to those who may have wanted a favor in the administration. Access was the favor. So we have had people across America so shocked. Money, as we were told, is not the root of all evil, but the love of money is a root of all evil--not necessarily ``the,'' but ``a'' root of evil. When we see what has happened to people's health care all over money and power and we see what has happened to the greed of entities that were just supposed to help the seniors, just supposed to help those less fortunate, well, they are making a fortune. When we look at what has happened to health care, the hospitals out of business, the doctors retired, people that can't get the help they used to have, it is heartbreaking to those who are actually paying attention. In the meantime, we have an investigation by the FBI into all this money, tens of millions--hundreds of millions--of dollars flowing into the Clinton Foundation. When people heard FBI Director James Comey stand up and basically spell out a lay-down case against Hillary Clinton for violating the law that ultimately came to the conclusion that there is nothing behind this curtain, so no good prosecutor would consider prosecuting this case, he failed to talk to good prosecutors who were prosecuting cases in which they had much less to go on than what had already been admitted. I was shocked when we heard that Hillary Clinton was going to be interviewed for 3 hours. Some people expected the FBI to give a statement opinion about the case the next week. I said that that won't happen because traditionally the FBI would get that statement, they would review sentence by sentence to see if there was anything that was false that was provided to them, and if she had a 3-hour interview, it will take time to go sentence by sentence through what she said. There is no way they are coming back that next week. Little did I know that--you know, you are left with the impression, what happened out there on the tarmac when this clandestine meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton met, it was before the statement was made. And as I pointed out, basically even to the Attorney General, it makes it look like that when President Clinton and Attorney General Lynch got together it was: Look, just tell your wife all we have got to do is check the box. We had a lengthy period of questioning. We won't even put her under oath. We won't even record it, so there is no way we can really effectively prosecute her because we won't have an accurate statement of what she said. Just tell her to come in. We will check the box. We can come out a few days later and announce there is nothing here, look the other way. It sounded like a wink and nod: Oh, by the way, Hillary says she would like to keep you on as Attorney General. Great. Let's get her in and get the statement so we can drop the case. That is basically what sounds like happened because of the way it unfolded. That is not the way the FBI normally works. There are so many incredible criminal investigators in our FBI despite all the good ones that Director Mueller ran off because he wanted new investigators--not any of the people that had been around and had wisdom and experience, but the new ones. They are there for proper reasons. They want to see justice done. And so people were shocked when the announcement came, hey, they laid out the elements of the case. Obviously, it sounded like they were proven. And then it says, so no good prosecutor, in effect, would pursue this. There was no evidence of intent when somebody has a software program that is actually purchased with the sole purpose of destroying any way to get back to the emails that, now, it appears, were destroyed after they were requested, after they were subpoenaed, and after they were being sought. So, obviously, that is a lay-down case for intent right there. Then we find out that phones were bashed perhaps with a hammer. Maybe if you were in some area of the country trying to prosecute where people are just going to acquit no matter what happens, okay, maybe, yeah, a prosecutor there might not pursue, but in most of this God- blessed country, if you show somebody that there was actual destruction with a hammer of cellphones to prevent anybody from ever finding out what was on there, you show them that software was actually purchased that would completely bleach and destroy any ability to go back and get those emails, most normal people would have no problem whatsoever finding an intent to deceive there and have no problem finding lies that were made. But we heard over and over, gee, FBI Director Comey would never do anything but absolutely perfectly aboveboard. But then this article by Patrick Howley, 10 September, came out. I was shocked. It said: ``A review of FBI Director James Comey's professional history and relationships shows that the Obama cabinet leader--now under fire for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton--is deeply entrenched in the big-money cronyism culture of Washington, D.C. His personal and professional relationships--all undisclosed as he announced the Bureau would not prosecute Clinton-- reinforce bipartisan concerns that he may have politicized the criminal probe. ``These concerns focus on millions of dollars that Comey accepted from a Clinton Foundation defense contractor, Comey's former membership on a Clinton Foundation corporate partner's board''--I had no idea-- ``and his surprising financial relationship with his brother Peter Comey, who works at the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation taxes.'' Who knew? Wow. Direct ties here with FBI Director James Comey's family and the Clinton Foundation. It is just amazing. I don't hold anybody's former employer against them. Fine, you are employed hopefully by somebody, so I wouldn't hold that against them. Certainly, Hank--I don't even want to say his name, but he used to be the Secretary of the Treasury, and--well, yeah, he deserves to be in the Congressional Record yet again. Hank Paulson, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs, he certainly did every favor he possibly could to Goldman Sachs, and they are still going on. But here are some holdings, HSBC Holdings the article mentioned. ``In 2013, Comey became a board member, a director, and a Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee member of the London bank HSBC Holdings. `Mr. Comey's appointment will be for an initial three-year term which, subject to re-election by shareholders, will expire at the conclusion of the 2016 Annual General Meeting,' according to HSBC company records. ``HSBC Holdings and its various philanthropic branches routinely partner with the Clinton Foundation. For instance, HSBC Holdings has partnered with Deutsche Bank through the Clinton Foundation to `retrofit 1,500 to 2,500 housing units, primarily in the low- to moderate-income sector' in `New York City.' '' Anyway, it goes on to talk about Peter Comey. ``When our source called the Chinatown offices of D.C. law firm DLA Piper and asked for `Peter Comey,' a receptionist immediately put him through to Comey's direct line. But Peter Comey is not featured on the DLA Piper website. ``Peter Comey serves as `Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas' for DLA Piper. ``James Comey was not questioned about his relationship with Peter Comey in his confirmation hearing. DLA Piper is the firm that performed the independent audit of the Clinton Foundation in November during Clinton-World's first big push to put the email scandal behind them. DLA Piper's employees taken as a whole represent a major Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign donation bloc and Clinton Foundation donation base. ``DLA Piper ranks number 5 on Hillary Clinton's all-time career Top Contributors list, just ahead of Goldman Sachs. And here is another thing: Peter Comey has a mortgage on his house that is owned by his brother'' James Comey, the FBI director. Peter Comey's financial records obtained by Breitbart News showed that he ``bought a $950,000 house in Vienna, Virginia, in June 2008. He needed a $712,500 mortgage from First Savings Mortgage Corporation. ``But on January 31, 2011, James Comey and his wife stepped in to become Private Party lenders. They granted a mortgage on the house for $711,000.'' Anyway, it is just rather interesting: Who had any idea that the Comey family had such ties to the Clinton Foundation? ``Peter Comey redesigned the FBI building.'' Well, that is interesting. ``FBI Director James Comey grew up in the New Jersey suburbs with his brother Peter.'' Anyway, interesting. How about that. Peter Comey redesigned the FBI building, according to the article. ``Procon Consulting's client list includes `FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C.' ``So what did Procon Consulting do for FBI headquarters? Quite a bit, apparently. According to the firm's records: Procon provided strategic project management for the consolidation of over 11,000 FBI personnel into one, high security, facility.'' Then it goes on. As the article ends, it says: ``This is not going to end well.'' Well, fortunately, for Hillary Clinton, the investigation with the Clinton Foundation ties to the FBI director has ended well for her. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is always an honor to appear here on the House floor, especially following colleagues giving an important address. I was saddened to see what seemed, in fact, to be a huge step backwards in racial relations. ``California State University Debuts Segregated Housing for Black Students.'' ``California State University Los Angeles recently debuted segregated housing for Black students, a move intended to protect them from `microaggressions,' according to the College Fix. ``Last year, Cal State L.A.'s Black Student Union wrote a letter to the university's president outlining a series of demands, including the `creation and financial support of a CSLA housing space delegated for Black students and a full time Resident Director who can cater to the needs of Black students.' `` `Many Black CSLA students cannot afford to live in Alhambra or the surrounding area with the high prices of rent. A CSLA housing space delegated for Black students would provide a cheaper alternative housing solution for Black students. This space would also serve as a safe space for Black CSLA students to congregate, connect and learn from each other,' the letter stated. Anyway, ``Robert Lopez, a spokesman for the university, confirmed to The College Fix that students' demand for housing specifically for Black students had been met, saying that the school's new Halisi Scholars Black Living-Learning Community `focuses on academic excellence and learning experiences that are inclusive and nondiscriminatory.' That seems to be a bit of anathema. But anyway, ``Lopez said the Black student housing is within the existing residential complex on campus. ``The College Fix noted that other universities, including the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Berkeley; and University of Connecticut offer similar housing arrangements.'' It just seems like we are going backwards with that kind of thing. I heard my colleagues mention the great dream--part of the great dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Christian, ordained Christian minister. As I have heard a Black minister explain recently, he was, first and foremost, above all a Christian minister. His belief in the Bible and his belief in Jesus Christ as a Savior was his guiding force, which brought him to the place that Jesus brought his disciples to, and that the Apostle Paul was brought to rather abruptly, and that is, Jesus did not discriminate against anyone and that we, who believe, as Christians, should follow those teachings and treat people equally, regardless of skin color. And that would help fulfill that part of Dr. King's dream, that people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. However, California has digressed, regressed to the point where no longer are they making progress toward racial harmony. They are going the other direction, saying that what we need is to segregate, like that great Democrat, George Wallace believed. So it is unbelievable. We have supposed liberals in California not pursuing the dream of Dr. King, where people would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; but we have these California universities that are now fulfilling the dream of the Democratic Party candidate, George Wallace, who felt like segregation in all things was the far better way to go. So congratulations to the University of California System for helping fulfill the dream of George Wallace. What a wonderful combination we have. Not a progressive, as they might claim the name, but of regressives who are going back and claiming the dream, not of Dr. King, but of Democrat Party activist, George Wallace. Congratulations. You make a great pair, California University System, and George Wallace's dream. Wow. Criminal Justice Reform

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is with tremendous joy, heartfelt satisfaction, and a humble appreciation that I once again rise and address this chamber in recognition of the Tyler Junior College Apaches Baseball Team. In securing a third straight win of the Division III NJCAA World Series baseball tournament, this championship team of accomplished athletes has shown the unflagging enthusiasm, grit, and moxie found in the best and most industrious individuals. You may remember that last year I undertook a similar endeavor when the TJC Apaches brought their second straight World Series win back to Tyler, remarking at that time that the 2015 champions were `doggedly tenacious' in their pursuit--and they most certainly were. But if 2015's champions were doggedly tenacious, the only appropriate characterization for the 2016 TJC Apaches has to be herculean. The TJC Apaches travelled to Kinston, North Carolina for this year's tournament. From the start, the odds were stacked against them. The TJC Apaches had lost all but 7 of their seasoned veterans from the 2014 and 2015 championship wins, and despite coming into the showdown with 38 wins and only 16 losses, managed to find themselves down 3 runs to 0 in the game that would decide it all. That didn't faze or discourage this team of young men in their quest for excellence, however. With their eyes trained toward the prize and the strength of their camaraderie uniting them, the TJC Apaches turned the game around and emerged the victors. The TJC Apaches were led by a top notch management team, including: Head Coach Doug Wren; Assistant Coaches Chad Sherman and Taylor White; Training Staff Brett Adams, Shelby Davis, Eddy McGuire, and Spenser Deeken; and Support Staff Colter Dosch and Justin Doelitsch. Accolades go, of course, to the young men who were on the baseball diamond, including Jace Cambell, Ryan Cheatham, Jonathan Groff, Hunter Haley, AbeRee Heibert, James Kuykendall, AJ Merkel, Chandler Muckleroy, Kyle Porter, Josh Raiborn, Adan Ross, Garin Shelton, Sam Sitton, Weston Smart, Travis Smith, J.P. Gorby, Austin Ballew, Mason Mallard, Brentten Schwaab, Tanner Arst, Luke Boyd, Nathan Methvin, Matt Mikusek, James Phillips, Payton Stokes, Jordan Trahan, Hunter Wells, Jarrod Wells, Colton Whitehouse, Beau Buesing, Austin Cernosek, Alex Masotto, Jared Pauley, Justin Roach, and Tanner Wisener. Once again, the students at Tyler Junior College have added another terrific chapter to their storied athletic history. Of course, great credit is owed not just to the students, but to the entire staff and leadership network at TJC, including: TJC President Dr. Mike Metke, Athletic Director Dr. Tim Drain, Vice President of Student Affairs Dr. Juan Mejia, Associate Athletic Director Chuck Smith, Assistant Athletic Director Kelsi Weeks, and Administrative Assistant Sherry Harwood. Naturally, none of the accomplishments of this team would have been possible if not for the supporting families, the terrific enthusiasm of the TJC Apaches' fans, and the positive encouragement of the east Texas community. The solid bedrock these folks provided to the TJC Apaches baseball team undoubtedly helped in their securing of a third World Series win. It is with great pride that I join the constituents of Texas' First District in extending heartfelt and sincere congratulations to the players and staff of the 2016 NJCAA Division III World Series National Champions, the Tyler Junior College Apaches Baseball Team. Their significant athletic achievement and incredibly laudable legacy is now, and will forever be, recorded in the Congressional Record that will endure as long as there is a United States of America.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. That is a great assumption when it comes to Phyllis. Well, she has fought the good fight, she has finished her course, and she has kept the faith. I will be there Saturday morning with her family, but the best memorial we can give to Phyllis Schlafly is to make sure the light of freedom and morality does not die in America.