Louie Gohmert

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I always appreciate my friend from Georgia's thoughts and observations. Mr. Speaker, it is really intriguing that our friends across the aisle have been joining with the President in demanding that we in Congress give this administration, with its abuses and unaccountability of the IRS, using it as a political weapon to help win an election, that used the ATF to sell weapons, 2,000 or so, to get them in the hands of criminals, and then tried to use that violence that came from the weapons they forced into the hands of people that shouldn't have had them as a reason to try to take away Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans. This administration is one of the most arbitrary and capricious administrations in history. Executive orders have been used for things that, from the top to the bottom of this administration, they have said they could not use executive orders for, including forms of amnesty. I think, over 20 times, the President himself said he did not have authority to just grant amnesty, and yet he turned around and did it anyway. This administration, with that kind of history over the last 7 years, of being so arbitrary and in some cases being very intentional in going after enemies, far beyond anything Nixon might have ever dreamed he might be able to do, the thought of giving this administration the power to just make a list of all the people that you don't want to ever fly or have a gun, just make a list, we don't know exactly how you are making this list. There is no due process in creating the no-fly list. There is no due process in getting oneself off the no-fly list once the name is on the no-fly list. Katie Pavlich with townhall.com, talking of the President's speech, said: ``President Obama called on Congress to pass legislation stripping anyone, including American citizens, on the terrorism no-fly list of the ability to purchase a firearm in the United States. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Nobody wants terrorists to have easy access to guns, and it certainly sounds bad when the argument is made that those currently on the terror watch list have the ability to do so. But here's the problem: The terror no-fly list is a mangled, bureaucratic mess of over 700,000 names. Yes, there are names on the list that are connected to terrorism, but nearly half of those names belong to people who have zero links'' to terrorism. Further down she said: ``That list, which contained 47,000 names at the end of George W. Bush's presidency, has grown to nearly 700,000 people on President Obama's watch. The fact that they are names, not identities, has led to misidentifications and confusion, ensnaring many innocent people. But surely those names are there for good reason, right? ``Not really. According to the technology website TechDirt.com, 40 percent of those on the FBI's watch list--280,000 people--are considered to have no affiliation with recognized terrorist groups. All it takes is for the government to declare it has `reasonable suspicion' that someone could be a terrorist. There is no hard evidence required, and the standard is notoriously vague and elastic. ``So who ends up on the list who shouldn't and why? Take for example Weekly Standard Senior Writer and Fox News Contributor Steve Hayes, who was put on the no-fly list after a cruise. ``Stephen Hayes, a senior writer at The Weekly Standard . . . was informed Tuesday that he had been placed on the Department of Homeland Security's Terrorist Watchlist. ``Hayes, who spoke to POLITICO by phone on Tuesday, suspects that the decision stems from U.S. concerns over Syria. Hayes and his wife recently booked a one-way trip to Istanbul for a cruise, and returned to the U.S., a few weeks later, via Athens.'' But the trouble is, nobody can say for sure why they are on the list, why they are not on the list, why they should not be on the list, the article says, but travel to certain regions isn't the only way you can get put on the list without due process. ``The Intercept published a 166-page document outlining the government's guidelines for placing people on an expansive network of terror watch lists.'' I just can't help but say, Mr. Speaker, it is hard to fathom that, once the wonderful American people think about what the President is proposing, they are going to realize you can't trust this administration with your health care, you can't trust this administration to keep their promises that if you like your health insurance policy you can keep it, because those promises from this administration weren't true. The promise: If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor wasn't true. It turns out people in the administration knew all along that it wasn't true, yet they promised people those things anyway. So there are issues of trust. We know, even when we are not talking about issues of intentional misrepresentation but just mismanagement and terrible policies, look at the rules of engagement of our military. Under President Bush, there were just over 500 precious American lives that were lost in the war in Afghanistan over 7\1/4\ years' time. Though the war had wound down, we were told by the President, basically, one, things were contained in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, during this wound-down war of the last less than 7 years, this President's rules of engagement have contributed, not intentionally, but the mismanagement has helped create an environment for our military members, men and women, where we have lost three to four times more lives under Commander Obama than were lost under Commander Bush, and more time that Commander Bush was over the operation. This is not the administration you want to trust to say: You just make out a list, even though the standards are vague; we don't know how somebody gets on; it is kind of up to you, judgment call on your part; and there is not a clear way to get off. I read an article where somebody had been trying for 8 years to get off of that list. Nonetheless, you just go ahead, Obama administration, bureaucrats in cubicles, people like Lois Lerner that hate conservatives, you just make out your list of people you don't want to ever be able to defend themselves or their homes or their loved ones with a weapon. You make out the list, and we will keep them from flying, and we won't let them have a gun. That would be a disaster, because when most Americans realized what the President was asking for, just carte blanche to put anybody he wanted to on the list and they could never get a gun, the American people are fair. The majority pull for an underdog, and they are not going to pull for an overly abusive, bureaucratic, Kafkaesque administration to take out its revenge on someone it doesn't like and prevent them from being able to defend themselves and their loved ones. Of course, The New York Times, never an organization to let hypocrisy get in the way of being hypocritical, this article from Breitbart by AWR Hawkins points out: ``On April 18, 2014, The New York Times published a scathing editorial on the no-fly list, describing it as `a violation of basic rights,' and a list unsuitable for a `democratic society premised on due process.' ``Moreover, The New York Times addressed the imprecision of the list by explaining that a 2007 audit showed that half the names on the list `were wrongly included.' Adding insult to injury, there were `71,000 names' on the list in 2007, which means 35,500 people were facing a denial of their constitutional rights for being on a list due to oversight or some similar mistake.'' That seems to be pretty clear. The New York Times got it right in 2014, got it wrong now. But it is interesting. I reflect on what my friend, former Member of Congress Barney Frank told me one day when we were on the same side of an issue. He shrugged and said: Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I know my friend Barney Frank could prove that. There was an article entitled, ``FBI Investigates If Terror Group Arranged California Killers' Marriage.'' It is by Marisa Schultz and Yaron Steinbuch, dated December 9, 2015. It pointed out: ``The FBI is investigating whether the online courtship of the future San Bernardino mass murderers was a match made in hell by a terror group--to set in motion the radicalized duo's evil plan, Director James Comey said on Wednesday. ``Comey told a Senate Judiciary Committee that investigators do not yet know if a group like ISIS hatched the love-and-hate match between jihadists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.'' Further down it says: ``The top G-man also said that Farook, 28, and Malik, 29, were radicalized at least 2 years ago and planned their evil martyrdom scheme long before they were engaged and before she applied for her visa. ``The couple--who lived in a two-bedroom townhouse with their 6- month-old daughter and Farook's mother--killed 14 people and wounded 21 during a holiday party December 2 at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. They were killed about 4 hours later in a shootout with police . . . `Our investigation to date shows that they were radicalized before they started courting or dating each other online, and as early as the end of 2013, were talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom before they became engaged and married and were living in the U.S.'. . . A U.S. Government source familiar with the shooting probe said Farook may have been plotting an attack in the U.S. as early as 2011.'' That is hard to believe, Mr. Speaker, because this administration was doing all these things, reaching out, not helping Christians who were being persecuted in greater numbers than ever in the history of the world. No, not reaching out to specifically help Christians and Jews, who were the primary targets of these radical Islamists, these people who perpetrate hate crimes that this administration won't even call hate crimes. This is the administration that, every time it seems that they reach out overseas or even, for heaven's sake, with our NASA space program, the President is directing that we have got to protect Muslims above all other things. This is the same administration who appointed an Attorney General who, after this mass murder spree in San Bernardino, came out--while others like local police and other good, clear-thinking people are saying, ``If you see something, say something,'' after knowing that neighbors saw suspicious activity by what they knew to be Muslims, apparently, in the garage, but they were afraid of saying something because it was politically incorrect, and now, Mr. Speaker, it has been made clear by the Attorney General that, if you are a neighbor in a position like those of Farook and Malik and you see something you think is suspicious that someone with an Islamic background is doing and you call that in, our Attorney General just may, according to what she said, decide not to go after the Islamist terrorists, but to come after you for being a bigot and for showing bias or prejudice. I can't imagine a more ridiculous thing to say after radical jihadists kill Christians and Jews. Yes, apparently, there was at least one Muslim shot, but the killing occurred because of the hate for Christians and Jews and the desire to create terror in the hearts of infidels. So no Muslims were actually targeted by these radical Islamists. They were collateral damage. They should never have been shot. Anybody that had anything to do with the shooting of a Muslim, Christian, Jew, atheist, Buddhist, or anything else, should be brought not just to justice. But when it is an act of war like this, they ought to be taken out. The Attorney General, on the other hand, in the immediate aftermath of this bloody massacre--tragic--at a Christmas party--threatens American citizens that, if you become--in effect, what she is saying-- not the words, but, in effect, she is saying, if you become suspicious of people who are acting in the same way that you have seen on television or in the news, acting as radical Islamists, and you report that, we will come after you because you are showing bigotry and prejudice. So, on the one hand, if you see something, say something, but if it is about a Muslim, then there is a good chance we will come after you, not the Islamists. There is a report from CNN's Zachary Cohen: ``Amnesty report: ISIS armed with U.S. weapons.'' This is dated today. ``A new report from a prominent human rights group has found that ISIS has built a substantial arsenal, including U.S.-made weapons obtained from the Iraqi army and Syrian opposition groups. ``Amnesty International's 44-page report, released late Monday, found that much of ISIS' equipment and munitions comes from stockpiles captured from the U.S.-allied Iraqi military and Syrian rebels.'' Further down: ``After analyzing thousands of videos and images taken in Iraq and Syria, Amnesty determined that a large proportion of ISIS' current military arsenal is made up of `weapons and equipment looted, captured or illicitly traded from poorly secured Iraqi military stocks.''' We saw over and over, Mr. Speaker, that this administration had this ridiculous idea--way too late after there were vetted moderate Syrian rebels that we could have helped--to get involved. Over and over they sent heavy equipment, heavy weapons, to these so- called vetted moderate Syrian rebels who said they feel a lot closer to those members of ISIS than they do the United States. And, lo and behold, those heavy weapons that are being used to kill the courageous Kurds that are fighting them are United States military weapons. To this administration's credit--I have got to give it to them--there was a period of about 4 or 5 months where, because the weapons they kept sending to the Syrians kept ending up in ISIS' hands, they decided to hold up shipping them more weapons because we just were equipping ISIS. But for some ridiculous, unknown reason--it has to be ridiculous--this administration began sending weapons back again. As far as I know, they are still doing so. I also think it is important to note that this administration has pointed to George W. Bush originally saying that this was not Islamic, and this administration has blamed the Bush administration--normally, it is quite unfairly--for every problem that has arisen. In fact, I believe it was in Iowa where someone told me that they understood that the President wanted to have the San Andreas Fault renamed for President George W. Bush so that it would be known as Bush's fault. That is what this administration has done. Yet, they try to blame him for them saying that ISIS--which wasn't around when President Bush was President. It was only created when this President created a vacuum in the Middle East--that these people who claim to be Islamic are not Islamic. I keep going back to the fact that one of the most internationally recognized experts on Islam, Islamic law, Islamic studies, and on the Koran, got his degrees, including a Ph.D., I read, from the University of Baghdad in Islamic studies. His name is al-Baghdadi. He is the head of ISIS. As head of ISIS, he claims that ISIS is indeed Islam. The President doesn't have any degrees in Islamic studies, although he did apparently study Islam quite clearly as a young child in Indonesia. Nonetheless, I think al-Baghdadi's credentials on what is Islam and what is not are superior to those of anybody in the White House. Caroline Glick, a writer for the Jerusalem Post, makes a great point in one of her articles from November 24, 2015. She says: ``An attempt is being made to assert that there is no pluralism in Islam. It is either entirely good or entirely evil.'' She is making a great point about pluralism because, as she says, ``This absolutist position is counterproductive for two reasons. First, it gets you nowhere good in the war against radical Islam. The fact is that Islam, per se, is none of the United States President's business. His business is to defeat those who attack the U.S. and to stand with America's allies against their common foes. ``Radical Islam may be a small component of Islam or a large one, but it certainly is a component of Islam. Its adherents believe they are good Muslims and they base their actions on their Islamic beliefs. ``American politicians, warfighters, and policymakers need to identify that form of Islam, study it, and base their strategies for fighting the radical Islamic forces on its teachings.'' That is why my friends like Muslims Massoud and Dostam and others who fought and initially defeated the Taliban within about 5 months in Afghanistan--courageous--don't want radical Islamists governing Afghanistan. In Egypt, a very fine, courageous man, President el-Sisi, stood up to imams and pointed out that you must take back Islam and denounce the radical Islamists that are destroying our religion. They recognize this is Islamic. They are claiming to be Islamic. And we have got to clean up our own religion. Judicial Watch released information today: ``ODNI Confirms Terrorists Tried to Enter U.S. As Syrian Refugees.'' They point out that, ``FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach has also conceded that the U.S. Government has no system to properly screen Syrian refugees. `The concern in Syria is that we don't have systems in place on the ground to collect information to vet. That would be the concern, is we would be vetting--databases don't hold the information on those individuals. You're talking about a country that is a failed state, that is, does not have any infrastructure, so to speak. So all of the data sets--the police, the intel services--that normally you would go to seek information don't exist.'' That is very important. Now I know that some people are trying to say that Donald Trump--and I did not endorse him. I endorsed Ted Cruz for President--but they are trying to vilify Trump because he perhaps overstated it, but he has made clear that we need to pause until we figure out our policy. Yet, Huma Abedin, wife of Anthony Weiner, our former colleague here, denounced Trump. She says Trump wants to literally write racism into our law books, his homophobia doesn't reflect our Nation's values, it goes far enough to damage our country's reputation, and could even threaten our national security. Mr. Speaker, I pointed out yesterday the information that we obtained after letters were sent to departments and just mentioning a couple of facts about her family. And then we find out that she has these direct ties to Abdullah Omar Naseef, who had ties to Osama bin Laden, and really serious issues not just through her mother, who started the Muslim Sisterhood, but her late father, deceased for many years now, but who is a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a brother who had ties--but she had ties herself--to Naseef and others. When you find out the contacts and close personal ties she herself had, you wonder how in the world a person like this could be attached to, at the time, First Lady Hillary Clinton in the Clinton years in the Clinton White House. How could that happen? Of course, over the years, she has become ingratiated to Hillary Clinton. She has been her closest confidante. Not much of anything happens, as we found from the emails, without Huma Abedin Weiner being in the middle of it. Wow. I just want to point out something else that has come out in recent years. I will just read this. I don't espouse that Wikipedia is all that reliable, but here is what they say about Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi: He is an American former Muslim activist known for founding the American Muslim Council. He was born in Eritrea, raised in Yemen, emigrated to the U.S. He formed the Council, whose aim was to inform and influence both Republicans and Democrats. In 1998, al-Amoudi was involved with the selection of Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military, and acted as a consultant to the Pentagon for over a decade. During this time, al-Amoudi served as an Islamic adviser to President Bill Clinton and a fundraiser for both the Republican and Democratic parties. More recently, al-Amoudi worked with leading conservatives such as Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. Al-Amoudi became a U.S. citizen in 1996. Al-Amoudi and other Muslim leaders met with the then-presidential candidate George W. Bush in Austin in July 2000, offering to support his bid for the White House in exchange for Bush's commitment to repeal antiterrorist laws. He even spoke at a service for the victims of 9/11. He is now doing 23 years in prison for supporting terrorism. He was helping the Clinton administration find people for different jobs. I am trying to find out, Mr. Speaker, could he have had anything to do, before he went to prison, with placing Huma Abedin as an intern with Hillary Clinton. Mr. Speaker, I can't get an answer. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry), my friend, and the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), my friend, for having a bill that would actually clean up some problems within Homeland Security. But, as I listen to the debate, including the last gentlewoman who moved for adjournment, I wonder if people who speak on this floor, Mr. Speaker, sometimes listen to themselves. As the gentlewoman pointed out--we could have the words read back, but she actually said that the Times Square bomber, the guy that was trying to blow up people with a bomb in Times Square, could have gone in and bought a gun. Obviously, he wasn't using a gun. We also know that, as our friends across the aisle have proposed more stringent background checks and more extensive gun control laws, that not one of the proposals of this administration would have stopped the killings in Colorado, in Oregon at the community college, or at San Bernardino. This body ought to be about doing things that make a difference, not doing things for show. As far as the no-fly list, when we have a process that is conducted behind closed doors, a process that was not formulated and voted on by the elected Members of Congress, that puts people on a no-fly list, my friends who support that idea are telling people around the country, including the 200,000 people buying guns in the last month, that we want an arbitrary process by a President, who a Muslim Brotherhood publication in Egypt says is advised by six of their top Muslim brothers, to formulate a list--it is not my words. That is the Egyptian publication back in December of 2012. They want that President formulating behind closed doors a list of Americans who can never buy a gun. This is the same administration that has gone after conservative organizations with the IRS. Let me also point out that, before you try to clean out the homes of honest, law-abiding Americans, including a general who is a constituent who keeps ending up on the no-fly list, why don't you get rid of the 72 Department of Homeland Security employees who were on the no-fly list before you try to take guns away from law-abiding Americans.

Mr. GOHMERT. May I have 30 more seconds?

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, there has been so much in the news, and our friends here on the floor have been raising questions about responsible, reasonable gun control. We want gun control that does not violate the Second Amendment of the Constitution, the purpose of which is to allow citizens to protect themselves. It is not just for hunting, but to allow citizens to protect themselves. The thing that I noticed, Mr. Speaker, in my decade as a judge, the criminals that came before me for crimes involving a gun, I can't remember any of them--I think I handled around 6,000 felony cases that went through our court. I can't remember any where they went down to a gun store and bought a gun. They stole them or they bought them from other criminals. With the 100 million guns that I understand have been purchased in recent years, it doesn't look like there will be any chance to remove guns from anyone except law-abiding citizens. Mr. Speaker, it has been interesting. We inquired, my Republican friends, my colleagues here, we inquired over and over, and still 7 years after President Obama took office, we know that shortly thereafter there was a scheme hatched within his administration to sell guns to criminals that would get to Mexico and fall into the hands of drug cartels. They didn't adequately monitor them. There was nothing put on the guns so they could be traced exactly where they were going. We know one of them was used to kill one of our own government agents. So whether it was intentional, reckless disregard for an American Government agent's life who was working for the President to have one of the President's subsidiaries or employees provide guns in such a way that they would end up killing one American agent and, apparently, hundreds of Mexicans--and we don't even know the full extent because we can't get answers from this administration. Eric Holder intentionally withheld evidence. He refused to provide information. I felt like he should have been impeached and thrown out of office. We never got answers about Fast and Furious, but we did see emails where, within this administration, even after they got caught, that this administration had facilitated weapons being provided and sold to people who would take them to the drug cartels of Mexico. Even after they got caught, they were still wondering if it might be possible to use the fact that these guns were being used to create violence to justify attacks on the Second Amendment and taking away Americans' gun rights. Apparently, November was a huge month for the sale of guns; and apparently, Black Friday, in the past week, has been a record for--not a record, but just a massive number of guns being sold. I believe I saw there were 185,000 requests for gun purchases on Friday after Thanksgiving. Regardless of what the number was--that is not completely accurate--it is staggering. How many people are now in fear for themselves and their families because of the policies of this administration? Now, because of Fast and Furious and how there were people in the administration that were contemplating the sale of guns to drug cartels that this administration facilitated as a reason to have more gun control, it does make you question the motivation of some of the administration's policies. We know that, especially in the last 5 years of George W. Bush's Presidency, his administration was vigorously prosecuting gun violations. But in 7 years, this administration has never prosecuted as vigorously as the Bush administration did in those times. Then we find out that not only were they not prosecuting as vigorously as they did in those last 5 years of the Bush administration, but in recent years, they have been cutting back on the prosecution of gun violations. So we find out that, in 2013, gun violation prosecutions by this administration diminished. Then we find out that in 2014, they diminished even further by this administration. Then we find out that in 2015, this administration set a record for the last 7 years of prosecuting fewer gun violation crimes than any administration--well, this was the lowest year, this year, any of his last 7 years. So, Mr. Speaker, the administration, as they have increased the demand for more gun control to take guns away from law-abiding citizens, they have been decreasing the number of gun violations they have prosecuted. In the wake of this administration's involvement in Fast and Furious and trying to use it to promote more gun control on law-abiding citizens, it makes you wonder what is the reason this administration continues to prosecute fewer and fewer gun crimes? It is as if this administration--and I am not saying, Mr. Parliamentarian, through the Speaker, I am not saying a specific person or the President. I am not violating the House rules. But I am saying this administration in bulk, which doesn't violate the House rules, somehow has had this policy of prosecuting fewer and fewer gun crimes at the same time they are increasing rhetoric to have more gun control. It is as if--and I am not alleging; I am just saying. It is as if they wanted gun violence to increase so that they could get more gun control, as it appears their motivation was in using what happened with gun violence as a result of the 2,000 weapons they forced gun dealers to sell to people they shouldn't have. Well, when I first heard the proposal, gee, nobody who is on the no- fly list, can't even fly on a plane, should be able to go buy a gun, seemed reasonable. I was talking to my friend, Tom Price from Georgia, back here earlier, Mr. Speaker, and he said the same thing, well, that seems reasonable, until you start considering how one gets on the no- fly list, who has been on the no-fly list, the massive abuses of individual constitutional rights by this administration, the abuses of the IRS of law-abiding citizens that Richard Nixon could have only dreamed of abusing the way this administration has. But the trouble is there is no due process for someone to be adjudicated to put on the no-fly list. There is no due process to get off the no-fly list. And, in fact, one of the men I respect as much as anybody I know--he is a constituent; he is an Army veteran; he is a retired general, lives in east Texas--we have had to help him a number of times, once again, to get off the no-fly list. And, unfortunately, we never can find out why he is ever put on the no-fly list in the first place. The only thing I know, he is a devout Christian. He is a supporter of mine. He would never knowingly violate the law of the United States. So, I don't know. Is it because he is a supporter of mine? I mean, a year ago, I was trying to fly back from London and an official there in London airport with their security said: Sir, I understand you are very sorry, but your homeland security says you are somebody that has to be personally, physically searched along with everything that you have. Gee, maybe somebody didn't like the way I cross-examined them in the judiciary hearing. But when you know that this administration has abused its power repeatedly and you find out that actually the no-fly list is so obscure, it is like something from a Kafka novel. I never really enjoyed his novels. But the trial, it makes you think of, wow, you mean this obscure government entity can charge you with something, but you can't--just like in a trial, you can't find out what you are charged with. You can't find out why you are on the no-fly list. You can't find out if it is part of an enemies list. You can't find out what is the best way to convince the government to get you off. Are there mistakes made? Well, gee, Mr. Speaker, could it be that a mistake was made when one of my constituent families from Lufkin was going to take their dream vacation to Disney World? They felt like the kids were old enough to enjoy it now. And when they tried to check their bags, they couldn't because, of their five children, their middle child was on the no-fly list. He was a potential terrorist. Now, I come from a family of four kids, and if I was going to pick one of my siblings, including me, to be a terrorist, I would say it is probably the young one. Well, this child was 5 years old. He was the middle child, not the youngest. They pulled him aside thinking: Well, gee, his name is on the no-fly list. He must be a terrorist. Well, thankfully, in Houston, they had some common sense and quickly figured out this is not a terrorist; this 5-year-old kid. He is not. Not so when they tried to leave Orlando to fly back home. He was pulled aside, the 5-year-old. He was separated from his parents. His parents were fit to be tied. They were threatened. They were not allowed to be with their child. They take him off to interrogate him, a 5-year-old child; but he is on the no-fly list, and they couldn't figure this out. They think he is a terrorist. They ask him his date of birth. He is freaking out. He is separated from his parents and his other siblings. He knows the month and day. He can't tell them the year. So now they think he is withholding information. They endured a lot of counseling and nightmares because of the abuses of this administration's policies. And yes, mistakes are made like that; and sometimes when people's names get put on the no-fly list, you don't know what it is for. Here is an article, and I sure don't read from these folks very often, but the Los Angeles Times says: ``It seems simple enough: If the Federal Government, based on intelligence or policing, puts a person on its watch list of suspected terrorists or decrees that he or she is too dangerous to be allowed on an airplane, then surely it would also be foolish to let that person buy a firearm in the United States. Makes sense, doesn't it?'' That was the thrust of a proposed law by Senator Dianne Feinstein. It goes on down: ``One problem is that the people on the no-fly list, as well as the broader terror watch list from which it is drawn, have not been convicted of doing anything wrong. They are merely suspected of having terror connections.'' I thought it was outrageous that Senator Ted Kennedy was on the no- fly list. I don't know. Maybe Homeland Security knew something the rest of America didn't know, but it seemed silly to me. Senator Ted Stevens, the late Senator's wife, Catherine Stevens, her name was on the no-fly list. She had those problems. So it could be that you are guilty of only having a name similar to somebody that was put on the list for who knows why. But that is not a good way to take people's guns away, to say: Yes, we want to pass a law so that this administration, behind closed doors, with the lowest learners of this administration, can put people's name on the list that can never buy a gun, can never fly on a plane. That is a scary proposition. And how about the 72 Department of Homeland Security employees that are on the no-fly list? And then we find out also, thanks to Senator Jeff Sessions, that we have had two--two--refugees in this country who, this year, have been either charged or convicted of terrorist activities. One worked around O'Hare airport and another one worked around here, I believe, as a cab driver working around Reagan airport. How about we take care of the people that we know for sure are a threat to America? Anyway, the article from The Washington Times says: ``According to the technology website TechDirt.com, 40 percent of those on the FBI's watch list--about 280,000 people--are considered to have no affiliation with recognized terrorist groups. All it takes is for the government to declare it has 'reasonable suspicion' that someone could be a terrorist. There is no hard evidence required, and the standard is notoriously vague and elastic.'' An article from Adam Kredo, from Free Beacon, about the 72 employees. A tip of the hat to Congressman Stephen Lynch for finding that information. This article from Neil Munro, Breitbart, ``California Shooting Shows Jihad Risk From Muslim Migrants' U.S.-Born Children'': ``The San Bernardino shooter who killed 14 Americans is yet another name on the growing list of U.S.-born children of Muslim migrants who grew up to embrace violent jihad.'' It seems like somebody has talked about that before. ``Before Syed Rizwan Farook, the most notorious example was Anwar al Awlaki, born in New Mexico in 1971 to accomplished, professional-class Yemeni parents. He subsequently embraced the violent commandments of Islam, complete with its many calls for attacks on kaffirs, or non- Muslims. His career as a jihadi adviser, recruiter cheerleader ended when he was killed by a U.S. missile strike in Yemen in September 2011. ``Another example is Nidal Malik Hasan, the Virginia-born son of Arab migrants, who murdered 13 Americans in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. That attack was downplayed by Federal officials as `workplace violence,' even though Hasan had described himself as a `Soldier of Allah' on his U.S. Army business cards . . . The problem is worse among Muslims, because Muslim culture and religion is hostile to integration, Spencer says. `Islamic law announces itself as a superior model for society and government so you've got no community-driven reason for Muslims to integrate or adopt American values, because their way is better,' he said.'' Now, that is what Spencer says. But I do know Muslims here in the United States that don't believe that they should adopt sharia law. I have got Muslim friends in Afghanistan and all over North Africa and the Middle East. They don't want radical Islam. And, in fact, in Egypt--so proud of the people of Egypt--they rose up and said: We don't want radical Islam. Of course, this President, this administration, wants to punish them for throwing out the Muslim Brother president. But this article--back to Neil Munro's article--he says: ``In August 2015, the FBI arrested the U.S.-born son of a supposedly moderate Imam as he began his journey to join ISIS in Syria. Mohammad Oda Dakhlalla was accompanied by his young, university-educated American wife, who was a convert to Islam. `That is the quintessential example of the risks involved because the father is supposed to be a moderate and we're supposed to think the son subscribes to a violent Islam completely different from the father . . . but there is no evidence of a rift between father and son,' Spencer said. ``In October 2014, two U.S.-born teenage girls were nabbed by the FBI as they began their journey to Syria. ``The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center lists at least five additional U.S.-born jihadis, or would-be jihadis, at its site, including James Elshafay who tried to detonate a bomb in 2004, Ehsanul Sadequee, Tarek Mehanna, Walli Mujahidh--his family name comes from the Arab term for `Holy Warrior'--and Naser Jason Abdo, who planned to attack Fort Hood in 2011.'' So I also would like a tip of the hat, Mr. Speaker, to Secretary Jeh Johnson that went back out to the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, ADAMS for short. I am sure John Adams appreciates that very much. I don't know if the President's friend, Imam Magid--oh, wait. Let's see. Well, this article mentions him. ``One of the `most meaningful discussions' on his `tour' ''--talking about Jeh Johnson--``he called it, was in June with the ADAMS Center imam, which began with a Boy Scout Troop leading meeting participants in the Pledge of Allegiance. That imam, Mohamed Magid, is a past president of the Islamic Society of North America, an organization linked to the Holy Land Foundation in its terror-financing trial and to the Muslim Brotherhood.'' And, by the way, it was listed as a co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial for supporting terrorism. And once they got the convictions of the five main people being prosecuted, ISNA, CAIR, and some other folks tried to get their names withdrawn from the pleadings being specifically named as co-conspirators in support of terrorism. But the Federal district judge and also the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, said: No, there is plenty of evidence to support that you are co-conspirators in supporting terrorism. I was told by a lawyer that the plan was, once they got those first five convictions, they would go after ISNA, Imam Magid, and all of these other people. Fortunately, for Imam Magid and ISNA and CAIR and all of these groups, President Obama got elected, and Eric Holder immediately made clear that nobody was going to prosecute the rest of those named coconspirators in supporting terrorism. There was also a headline in the news today from The Washington Times that reads: ``Huma Abedin taunts Donald Trump: `I'm a proud Muslim.' '' ``Huma Abedin, the longtime confident to Democratic Presidential front runner Hillary Clinton, took aim at Donald Trump's proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States in an email with the subject line: `I'm a proud Muslim.' `` `Donald Trump is leading in every national poll to be the Republican nominee for President; and earlier today, he released his latest policy proposal: to ban all Muslims from entering our country,' wrote Ms. Abedin--''or Ms. Weiner, anyway ``--in an email Monday evening to Mrs. Clinton's supporters. `I'm a proud Muslim, but you don't have to share my faith to share my disgust. Trump wants to literally write racism into our law books. His Islamophobia doesn't reflect our Nation's values.' '' Here is an article from July 27, 2012, by Andrew McCarthy in which he talks about Senator John McCain's claim that concerns about Huma Abedin are smear-based on a few unspecified, unsubstantiated associations. Actually, Michele Bachmann and I and three others signed letters in which we just said, Here are some things we know. Would you do an investigation to see the extent of the Muslim Brotherhood's influence in your department? There were five different departments that had five different specific letters, and there were not any vague allegations. We just said, We know these things are true. Would you investigate? We come to find out a lot in this article, which reads: ``The letter averred that Abedin `has three family members: her late father, her mother, and her brother, connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.' ``It turns out, however, that Abedin, herself, is directly connected to Abdullah Omar Naseef, a major Muslim Brotherhood figure.'' By the way, Mr. Speaker, the Muslim Brotherhood has been named as a terrorist organization by both Egypt and the UAE. They have asked officials in both of those countries when I have been over there: Why do you not recognize that the Muslim Brotherhood has been at war with you since 1979? You keep helping them. You have got people advising the President. They are all Muslim Brothers. Why do you keep doing that? I don't have an answer for them. The article goes on: ``It turns out Abedin, herself, is directly connected to Abdullah Omar Naseef, a major Muslim Brotherhood figure involved in the financing of al Qaeda. Abedin worked for a number of years at the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs as assistant editor of its journal. The IMMA was founded by Naseef, who remained active in it for decades, overlapping for several years with Abedin. Naseef was also secretary general of the Muslim World League in Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most significant Muslim Brotherhood organization in the world. In that connection, he founded the Rabita Trust, which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under American law due to its support of al Qaeda. ``You ought to be able to stop right there,'' but he doesn't. It goes on. Further down, it reads: ``In this instance, however, before you even start probing the extensive, disturbing Brotherhood ties of her family members, Huma Abedin should have been ineligible for any significant government position based on her own personal and longstanding connection to Naseef's organization. ``Specifically, Ms. Abedin was affiliated with the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, where she was assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. The journal was the IMMA's raison d'etre. Abedin held the position of assistant editor from 1996 through 2008, from when she began working as an intern in the Clinton White House until shortly before she took her current position as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff.'' Again, this article was written in 2012. ``The IMMA was founded in the late 1970s by Abdullah Omar Naseef, who was then the vice president of the prestigious King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia.'' It goes on to talk about all of his ties with civilization jihad and with the Muslim World League, over which he presided and with whom Huma Abedin had this relationship in this publication for all of those years that she worked with Hillary Clinton. ``The Muslim World League manages the `civilization jihad'--the Brotherhood's commitment to destroy the West from within and to `conquer' it by sharia proselytism, or dawa, as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Brotherhood's top sharia jurist, puts it. ``Nevertheless, the Muslim World League has a long history of deep involvement in violent jihad as well.'' Then we have this article today: `` `Spinning up as we speak': Email shows Pentagon was ready to roll as Benghazi attack occurred.'' We still don't know who stopped the military. The email shows they were ready to go help our people in Benghazi. Somebody stopped them. Was that advice Huma Abedin gave to Secretary Clinton? We don't know. Was this advice that reached the President? We don't know. We don't know whether he went to bed and said, ``You take care of it,'' or whether he went next-door, like was reported, until Osama bin Laden was taken out. He went in the next room and didn't watch and played cards. We don't know what they were doing. This report from Robert Windrem: ``The ISIS Trail of Death'' goes on to point out all that ISIS is doing. We know there are 1,000 cases being investigated right here. Look, I am not advocating we get rid of all Muslims in the United States, we have got Muslim friends here in the House, but we do need to take a look to see whether people want to replace our U.S. Constitution with sharia law. We need to take a harder look at who we allow to come into this country and have a child who they will take back to Yemen, or wherever, to teach their child to hate America. People can make fun of me still, but we know Americans have died because we have allowed this to happen. They come back as American citizens whenever they want, and it gets so bad that even President Obama has to take out an American citizen, who was born here, to parents who trained him to hate America after they went back to Yemen. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it was 2 years ago this week that a precious life was cut short tragically. Kari Renee Hunt, a resident of Marshall, Texas, was murdered by her estranged husband in a hotel. They were in the hotel room. While the estranged husband was assaulting Kari, her 9-year-old daughter, while witnessing the murder, did what most parents teach their kids to do in an emergency. She dialed 911--and got nothing. Because what this precious 9-year-old--and the family hasn't used her name publicly, so I will not either--what the precious girl didn't know is what a lot of folks dialing 911 in that situation wouldn't know, that you have to dial 9 before you can dial 911. In order to dial the 911, you need to dial the 9 prefix in order to get an outside line. Mr. Speaker, she didn't know that. She was desperately trying to get help to save her mother before the assault turned into murder. She never got help, not in time. Kari's father, Hank Hunt, has worked tirelessly to try to get something done. The State legislature in Texas has enacted a law, but from the Federal Government end, we can make it universal across the country. I do thank my friend Kevin Eltife for his work in the State legislature. Mr. Speaker, our bill is a little different. I was surprised to find out that, actually, most of the time, there is no cost whatsoever to requiring that a phone be furnished to a business or a home or anywhere where there might be a need to punch 9 to get an outside line--there is no cost to having a default that you can dial 911 without the prefix, and it will go straight to the emergency help. Once I learned that, it became clear there was no reason not to have a law that just tells providers, provide the phone so that the default when you dial 911 is to get emergency help, that you don't need a prefix to get an outside line. So, today, after a lot of help--again, I am thankful to Hank Hunt for his tireless work--a number of groups have made this easier to come together on language that was acceptable to most. There were a couple of objections, but this is the final language. So I want to thank Mark Fletcher with AH&LA, the American Hotel & Lodging Association; FCC Commissioner Pai; and the 911 Association. Mr. Speaker, the bill we filed today is H.R. 4167, and, as it says in the bill, the purpose is to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require multiline telephone systems to have a default configuration that permits users to directly initiate a call to 911 without dialing an additional digit, code, prefix, or postfix. That is the purpose. It is a short bill of three pages. If it had been the law 2 years ago, help would likely have gotten there before Kari's murder was final. So, while this legislation will not reverse the heartbreaking loss of Kari, Kari's law should prevent it from happening again. And when it doesn't cost anything, why not? Mr. Speaker, I thank all of those who have helped, and, actually, I want to thank the news media in east Texas for being so helpful in bringing attention to this issue and helping us get to the point where we are. Now we have to get through committee and get it to the floor. We have Senators, one in particular, looking at it to bring to the Senate floor so we can get this done and make it law. There has been no veto threat on this bill, so I would doubt the President would refuse to sign it if we would just pass it. Since the shootings in San Bernardino, I guess it shouldn't have been surprising that so many people would immediately call out for gun control even before they knew how Farouk--the defendants, the shooters, the evil shooters, acquired their guns. It is interesting that I believe there were 13 bombs already made, a number of bombs already made. So if guns were completely outlawed in the United States, it wouldn't change the evil in the hearts of radical Islamists who are bent on terrorizing and killing people. Mr. Speaker, it gets tiresome hearing people feel like they always have to say, ``All Muslims we know don't feel this way,'' yet they have no conviction and no compulsion, when they condemn Christians as being guilty of crusades, of saying, ``But we know all Christians don't feel this way.'' I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that the fact is I don't know whether that shooter in Colorado Springs was self-described as a Christian or not. He obviously was confused about his gender. Maybe the next thing we will hear is that--since he apparently checked off--or it is reported that he had filed a registration where he indicated he was an unaffiliated female, perhaps the next we will be told is that maybe, if he had been allowed to go into the little girl's restroom in elementary school, he wouldn't have later snapped and did those merciless killings. It has also been interesting--and, as a former prosecutor, a judge, also--I don't know if there is anybody else in this body of 435 representatives or anybody in the Senate--I don't know--who has ever been court-appointed to appeal a death penalty conviction as I was. Even though I begged the judge not to appoint me, he did. And I do believe in our adversarial system to the point like John Adams said after the Boston Massacre, for our system to work, it requires adversaries on both sides doing the best they can legally and ethically. When I got into it, it appeared clear he had not gotten a fair trial. I later convinced the highest court in Texas to reverse his capital murder conviction, which it did. I don't know how many others in this body or the Senate have appealed and reversed a capital murder conviction. People always think I am such a heartless guy, but I do believe in the rule of law and I do believe it should be followed. I don't believe it helps the lawlessness that is breaking out across our land to have an administration that picks and chooses the laws that it likes to enforce and have an IRS that abuses their positions in the law, that has Homeland Security that deletes thousands of documents that would help us identify terrorists and then go after the guy that preserved them on his own classified IronKey. He is a real hero, but he has now been forced out of Homeland Security. He resigned. But after they empanelled a grand jury to investigate him, became terrorists in the way that the government treated them, not with guns, but with the power of this administration. I mean, with somebody as law-abiding as some of our whistleblowers have been only to find that this administration will come after you if you try to stand up for truth and integrity, can we not expect lawlessness to break out? John Adams wrote: This government was intended for the governing of a moral and religious people. It is not fit to govern any others. I know the President and others keep saying there is nowhere in the world that has the frequency of shootings like this or mass murders like we do in the United States. But, as I have mentioned before, there was an article by Kyle Becker 4 months ago. He has a chart and says, if you don't compare apples and oranges, if you actually compare the number of rampage shooting fatalities to the number of people in the country, then Norway is first, 15.3 per million; 1.85 per million in Finland; 1.47 per million in Slovakia; 1.38 in Israel; .75 in Switzerland; and .72 per million in the United States. The trouble is the loss of even one life is unnecessary, and appropriate steps should be taken to prevent them. My friend John Lott has an article out today in National Review. He says--this is John Lott: ``On Sunday, Hillary Clinton slammed Republicans for not being serious about protecting Americans from terrorism. `How many more Americans need to die before we take action?' Clinton asked in response to Friday's shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. She believes that stopping such attacks involves `common-sense steps like comprehensive background checks, closing the loopholes that let guns fall into the wrong hands.' Within minutes of the attack in San Bernardino, California, yesterday, Clinton pushed again for more regulations. ``Clinton also wants to crack down on terrorism by prohibiting people on the no-fly list from buying guns. `If you are too dangerous to fly in America, you are too dangerous to buy a gun in America.' '' And I will insert parenthetically that I have got one of the most patriotic friends I know who is a highly decorated general in the United States Army who lived just outside Marshall, Texas. We have had a number of times tried to help the general, this patriotic freedom-loving American, who has put his life on the line repeatedly. We have had to repeatedly work to get his name off the no- fly list because, apparently, there is someone with a similar name. And whoever that person is, this patriot's name is on the list. Well, John Lott goes on: ``Are Republicans really putting Americans in danger by opposing new gun-control laws? ``After every mass shooting, Clinton and President Obama have called for `comprehensive' or `universal' background checks, which would apply not only to the purchase of guns from a dealer, but also to private transfers of guns. However, it wouldn't have stopped any of the mass shootings during Obama's tenure. Last weekend, Clinton, Obama, and other Democrats issued their calls for new legislation before anyone even knew how the Colorado shooter had obtained his rifle. ``Colorado already had expanded background checks two years ago. So had Oregon before the Umpqua Community College shooting in October. France also has a background-check system. So too does California, which experienced yesterday's attack. Yet, while the existing laws didn't stop shootings of the very kind Clinton claims that they will stop, she uses these failures to justify imposing similar laws on the rest of the country. ``The American background-check system is supposed to prevent the purchase of a gun by anyone who has been convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors. The Feinstein amendment would also ban the sale of guns to anyone who is on the terrorist watch list. Now, being on the watch list sure sounds bad, but it doesn't mean that a person has been convicted of anything. In fact, it is pretty easy to get on the watch list; you can be on it simply because the FBI wants to interview you about someone you might know. According to the TechDirt website, about 40 percent of the people on the watch list are considered to be under `reasonable suspicion' even though they have absolutely `no affiliation with known terrorist groups.' ``The number of people on the list has grown dramatically during the Obama administration; by 2013, there were about 700,000 people on the list. As of 2014, about 50,000 people were on the no-fly list. This is a ten-fold increase since Obama became president. ``Between February 2004 and December 2014, over 2,000 people on the watch list bought one or more guns. The government has not identified a single one of these people as using a gun in a crime. ``Should the government be able to deny you the right to protect yourself simply because it wants to ask you about someone you might know? And that isn't the only problem posed by the proposed expanded background checks. In New York, today's background checks add about $80 to the cost of transferring a gun. In Washington State, they add about $60. In Washington, D.C., they add $200. In effect, these laws put a tax on guns and can prevent less affluent Americans from purchasing them. This disproportionately affects poor minorities who live in high- crime urban areas. ``While some people on `no-fly' lists are there because they are suspected of terrorist activity, you can also get added because you are a suspect in a criminal case, made controversial statements or tweets unrelated to terrorism, are the victim of a clerical error, or refused to become a government informant.'' And I might add, last November, as I was leaving London, I had a security person tell me they realized I was a U.S. Congressman and, ``We are very sorry,'' but that our Homeland Security Department here in the United States said I was to be thoroughly personally searched along with my bags. I don't know. Maybe they didn't like my questioning of the Secretary of Homeland Security and were threatened by my questions trying to get truth out of them. ``Between February 2004 and December 2014, over 2,000 people on the watch list bought one or more guns.'' It is pretty amazing there. But not one of them--not a single one of those people have been accused of using a gun in a crime. So even if these people wanted this law to be changed, it would not have changed the outcome in Oregon, Colorado, or California. It seems as if my well-meaning friends proposing tougher and tougher laws to take away our Second Amendment rights mean well, but they are proposing things without even knowing whether they would save a single life. Certainly they will take away rights of law-abiding Americans, but they certainly would not have changed the outcome in Colorado or California. ``The error rate for identifying potential terror threats is probably similar to the error rate for background checks on gun purchases. Over 94 percent of `initial denials' for gun purchases are dropped after just a preliminary review. These cases were dropped either because the wrong person had been stopped or because the covered offenses were decades old and the government decided not to prosecute. The total error rate comes to about 99 percent. ``Putting people on a list and prohibiting them from legally purchasing guns doesn't really stop them from getting weapons. The fact that people are prohibited from buying certain drugs doesn't mean people can't get them. It's the same with guns. And, incidentally, drug gangs supply both illegal drugs and illegal guns. ``Indeed, since Clinton wants to make a comparison to last week's Paris attacks, we should point out that France's strict weapon bans didn't stop the terrorists from getting the AK-47s and explosive belts they used in the attacks. Strangely, the Oregon, Colorado, California, and Paris shootings are being used to push for additional gun-control laws of the sort that failed to prevent those attacks.'' That is John R. Lott, Jr., today writing. When I proposed and filed Kari's Law today, I had to be sure that it would make a difference and that the added burden would not cause any extra effort, cost money, hardly ever, just something that needed to be done. Kari's Law would be a great law for our country, whereas, the laws being hailed as something we must pass wouldn't have saved a single one of the lives that we will pause in silence and for whom most of us will pray. Mr. Speaker, I know that Christians are being reviled. Certainly, in the Middle East, they are being beheaded. Here, in the United States, after leaders talked about praying for the victims' families, there have been belittling comments made. But I look at the quote that Thomas Jefferson provided. It is inscribed in his memorial: ``God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? that they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.'' Jefferson, on March 4, 1805, in his second inaugural, said: ``. . . I shall, need to the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life.'' James Madison made many declarations and statements. On July 23, 1813, in the National Day of Public Humiliation and Prayer Proclamation, James Madison, who is given credit for being the most prolific author in the Constitution, said: ``If the public homage of a people can ever be worthy of the favorable regard of the Holy and Omniscient Being to whom it is addressed, it must be that in which those who join in it are guided only by their free choice, by the impulse of their hearts, and the dictates of their consciences; and such a spectacle must be interesting to all Christian nations as proving that religion, that gift of Heaven for the good of man, freed from all coercive edicts, from that unhallowed connection with the powers of this world which corrupts religion . . . and making no appeal but to reason, to the heart, and to the conscience, can spread its benign influence everywhere and can attract to the divine altar those freewill offerings of humble supplication, thanksgiving, and praise, which alone can be acceptable to Him . . . '' We have observed a time now in our country's history where we have gone from, not nine Supreme Court Justices--most of the time, it is just five--who have said, even though the Founders have been requiring every day to start with prayer since the beginning of the new Constitution, we don't think you should have prayer in public places. That was a shocker. It would have been a shocker to the Founders since they started with prayer in the very beginning and have continued through to this day. The Supreme Court goes on to say that they don't think you should talk about Jesus. You can talk about Mohammed, and you can talk all about Islam, but you can't talk about Jesus Christ. We have even had Federal judges say you can't mention the name ``God'' in your graduation ceremony. Our judicial system has a small group of judges who has run amuck, who has lost its way, and it has taken the country with them. Abraham Lincoln said: ``It is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.'' It is remarkable that this is 2 years and 40-something days before his assassination. Abraham Lincoln, with people dying all over the country, put this in print in his National Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer Proclamation. Abraham Lincoln said: ``We have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self- sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. ``It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.'' I will just share one more, Mr. Speaker. William Howard Taft is the only man in U.S. history to have been President and Chief Justice--or any Justice--on the Supreme Court. In 1908, William Howard Taft said: ``No man can study the movement of modern civilization from an impartial standpoint and not realize that Christianity and the spread of Christianity are the only basis for the hope of modern civilization and the growth of popular self-government. The spirit of Christianity is pure democracy. It is the equality of man before God, the equality of man before the law, which is, as I understand it, the most godlike manifestation that man has been able to make.'' Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is a great honor to recognize today an east Texas man and an east Texas family who have realized the American dream the old-fashioned way--through a lifetime of hard work with complete dedication to his family, to his community, and to his craft. Eric Atkinson is President of the company founded by his grandfather B.E. Atkinson Sr. in 1932. Atkinson Candy Company of Lufkin, Texas is not only a beloved landmark in Angelina County, it is a Texas tradition with a loyal following of candy lovers all over the world. The company still uses the original family recipes and machinery to make its iconic signature Chick-O-Stick, Peanut Butter Bar, Long Boy, and other legendary candies. In fact, his peppermint recipe uses ingredients of such phenomenal quality that exceptional strategic work was required in order to manufacture it in a way that keeps the costs from being astronomical. Eric is an active leader in the candy industry who has held a position on the board of the Convenience Distribution Association for more than fifteen years. For his commitment to the industry, Eric has received accolades from numerous trade groups, including the 1990 Candy Man of the Year from Southern Tobacco & Candy Association, the 1998 Dean Award and a 2013 Hall of Fame recognition from the Convenience Distribution Association, and the Doc Reed Silver Candy Dish Award from the National Confectioners' Association in 2008. He also received a 2010 nomination for the Kettle Award, which is the highest recognition an individual working within the U.S. confectionery industry can attain. Most recently, Eric Atkinson was honored by being inducted into the prestigious 2015 National Confectionery Sales Association's Candy Hall of Fame following in the footsteps of his father Dr. Basil E. Atkinson Jr., who was named to the Candy Hall of Fame in 2011. Away from the confection industry, Eric is an avid supporter of area athletic programs as well as our nation's military and regularly makes product donations to charitable events all over the region. His organization also extends its goodwill worldwide, shipping sweets from the legendary candy kitchen to American military personnel serving overseas. It is a distinct privilege to honor this remarkable man along with his organization, his family and their cumulative legacy of excellence, extraordinary leadership, exemplary character, boundless enthusiasm, and a work ethic that never ever quits. Eric Atkinson's commitment to time honored quality and the preservation of family values is now recorded in this Congressional Record which 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. Mr. Speaker, although there are apparently those in the media that think it is fun to belittle people who express their great sympathy, thoughts, and prayers for the victims and their families out in San Bernardino, California, right now, those of us who care do extend our thoughts and prayers for those people. We don't know quite yet who the perpetrators were. I think this is important, as we have been talking about Syrian refugees quite a bit the last few weeks, and the President's intention to bring Syrian refugees into this country. Our friend, Senator Jeff Sessions, provided a list of 12 vetted refugees from areas where we actually had material, where we had information. Unlike the Syrian refugees, the FBI and Homeland Security felt they had plenty of information to vet these individuals, did vet them, thoroughly checked them out, and then brought them into the country. This article from Neil Munro is dated November 24, 2015. He mentions: ``Senator Jeff Sessions is out with a list of 12 vetted refugees who quickly joined jihad plots to attack the United States. ``He's spotlighting the refugees-turned-jihadis because he's trying to prod GOP leaders into halting Congress' normal practice of giving the President huge leeway to import foreign migrants and refugees into the United States.'' It goes on: ``Obama says the new refugees will be vetted. But top security officials say the Syrians can't be vetted because the U.S. doesn't know what they were doing in Syria before they applied for refugee status.'' The article goes on: ``Besides, many of the jihad attempts in the United States are launched by the children of Muslim refugees and migrants. That list include the two Chechen brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon, and Anwar al-Awlaki who was killed by a U.S. missile strike when he fled to Yemen after the 9/11 atrocity. That means the Americans' federal government is actively importing national-security problems that will eventually cost billions of dollars to manage, but cannot be eliminated.'' And this list only covers 2015. There may be many more from 2015. There are certainly many more from prior years. But here are just some of the individuals that this administration completely vetted, made sure they were not a threat to the United States and our people, and, yet, brought them in only to find they were and are terrorists. On January 29, 2015, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a Federal warrant was unsealed for the arrest of Liban Haji Mohamed--a native of Somalia who sources indicate came to the United States as a refugee, adjusted to lawful permanent resident status, and subsequently and applied for and received citizenship. ``Mohamed is believed to have left the U.S. on July 5, 2012, with the intent to join Al-Shabaab in East Africa. Mohamed previously lived in the metro D.C. area and worked as a cab driver, and is believed to have snuck across the border to Mexico after being placed on the no-fly list. Carl Ghattas, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Washington, D.C. Field Office, emphasized the importance of locating Mohamed: `Because he has knowledge of the Washington, D.C., area's infrastructure such as shopping areas, Metro, airports, and government buildings, this makes him an asset to his terrorist associates who might plot attacks on U.S. soil.' '' One refugee. Second refugee: On February 5, 2015, a native of Somalia came to the United States as a refugee. And this was done under the Bush administration. Abdinassir Mohamud Ibrahim came at the age of 22, in 2007, and then was later adjusted to lawful permanent resident status. But, on February 5, he was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for conspiring to provide material support to Al-Shabaab, a designated foreign terrorist organization. He lied on his application for citizenship, lied on his request for refugee status, and falsely claimed--these are what he was convicted of and charged with--falsely claiming that he was a member of the minority Awer clan in Somalia and subject to persecution by the majority Hawiye clan. However, Ibrahim was actually a member of the clan that was the persecutor and not the persecuted. That was Mr. Abdinassir Mohamud Ibrahim. Also, in Missouri, Abdullah Ramo Pazara, a native of Bosnia, came to the United States as a refugee, completely vetted, adjusted to lawful permanent resident status, was made a citizen in 2013, 5 years into the President's administration. He has been named in an indictment with five other individuals as a terrorist. He is thought to be dead, but the others listed provided material support to Pazara who allegedly left the United States to go to Syria and fight with ISIS just 11 days after becoming a U.S. citizen. Then there is also Ramiz Zijad Hodzic. A native of Bosnia, he is a purported Bosnian war hero who came to the United States as a refugee. He is charged with conspiring to provide material support and resources to terrorists and providing material support to terrorists. You also have this year Sedina Unkic Hodzic, wife of Ramiz Zijad Hodzic, also a native of Bosnia. She came to the U.S. as a refugee. She is charged this year with conspiring to provide material support and resources to terrorists and providing support to terrorists. Then you have Armin Harcevic. He came to the United States as a refugee from Bosnia and subsequently had that adjusted to lawful permanent resident status. He is charged with providing material support to terrorists. He collected money from third parties and wired it and his own funds to terrorists. Then you also have Nihad Rosic, a native of Bosnia, who sources indicate came to the United States as a refugee. He applied for and was granted citizenship and has been charged with conspiring to provide material support and actually providing material support to terrorists. He is a truck driver and a former mixed martial arts fighter. He previously had been charged with endangering the welfare of a child after punching a woman in the face while she held a child. In a separate incident, he was charged with assault after allegedly beating his girlfriend. But, apparently, nothing came of those charges until he was charged with supporting terrorism. Mediha Medy Salkicevic, a native of Bosnia, came to the United States as a refugee, applied for and was granted citizenship, was also charged with conspiring to provide material support and resources to terrorists and providing that support to terrorists. Salkicevic was formerly an employee with a cargo company that deals with items coming in and out of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, another refugee alleged by this administration to now be a terrorist. Jasminka Ramic, a native of Bosnia, came as a refugee, applied for and was made a citizen, was charged with conspiring to provide material support and resources to terrorists and providing that support to terrorists by this administration. You have got Abdurahman Yasin Daud, born in a refugee camp in Kenya. He came to the United States as a refugee when he was a child and was subsequently adjusted to a lawful permanent resident, has been charged with conspiracy to attempt to provide material support to ISIS. He and another individual are alleged to have driven from Minnesota to San Diego to attempt to get passports, cross the border in Mexico, and fly to Syria. Also, this year you have Guled Ali Omar, born in a Kenyan refugee camp. He came to the United States as a refugee. The United States gave him citizenship. This administration has charged him with conspiracy and attempting to provide material support to ISIS. Another one of his brothers, Mohamed Ali Omar, was convicted in March of threatening Federal agents when they came to the residence to interview Guled Omar. The U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota said that Omar ``never stopped plotting'' and had previously attempted to leave the United States, another one of the refugees turned U.S. citizen, all the while, at least part of the time, a terrorist. And then also this year, in August, a native of Uzbekistan, Fazliddin Kurbanov, came as a refugee in 2009, was found guilty on charges he conspired and attempted to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization and possessed an unregistered destructive device. U.S. Assistant Attorney General John Carlin stated that he conspired to provide material support to the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan and procured bomb-making materials in the interest of perpetrating a terrorist attack on American soil. According to press reports, Kurbanov began his life as a Muslim, supposedly faced persecution when his family converted to Christianity and came to the United States with his family as a refugee, and, as it turned out, he is Islamic and radicalized. So it is interesting. This administration assures us we have nothing to fear, nothing to be concerned about. I am not afraid, but I am concerned about the oath that every one of us take. We are supposed to provide for the common defense in this country. It is an obligation we have. I think it is the most important obligation we have. We are supposed to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out this past week in one of his articles on National Review Online, it should be important not merely to check to see if we have any information about an individual wanting to come here as a refugee or gaining a visa, however they intend to come, illegally, as millions have, more are every day. It would be important to ask not simply is this person a terrorist right now, but it would also be important to ask: Are you one of the two-thirds or so that have been reported to be in the United States or wanting to come into the United States as a Muslim who believes that Shari'ah law should replace the Constitution? Because, if those reports are accurate, that two-thirds of the Muslims here believe Shari'ah should replace the Constitution, and they are immigrants and they become citizens, then it means that they absolutely perjured themselves in their oath. That should be grounds for revoking their citizenship. And if it can't be used as such, we need to make sure it is used as such by what we do here in Congress. In the meantime, we have heard Ben Rhodes and so many others say: Oh, yeah. No. The FBI, Homeland Security, are going to be able to vet everybody really well. FBI Director Comey has made clear publicly--regardless of what he said privately, that does not change anything he said publicly. Publicly he has made clear: Yeah. We will vet them. But when you tell us their names, we have nothing to either verify or disprove what they have said. We have got nothing. We don't have any records from Syria. We don't know if they are even from Syria. We don't know. We don't have the information to vet them. FBI had more information to vet people coming from Iraq, and we know that they missed a couple of terrorists that were in Kentucky that were allowed in. I think it was 2009. And it turns out they just missed that their fingerprints--at least one of them--was on an IED in Iraq. The guy is a terrorist. So despite what this administration tries to assuage, the borders are open. We have Syrian refugees that the President is bringing into the United States, even when Governors say: We understand you can't vet these people, so you are not bringing them into our States. I see this afternoon that the Governor of my State, Greg Abbott, has sued the administration because the administration has made clear: We don't care what you think, we don't care that you are Governor of your State, and we don't care about the 10th Amendment. We say we are putting Syrian refugees in Texas, and there is nothing you can do about that. Mr. Speaker, that kind of reminds me of the kind of things that King George and his bureaucrats used to say before the Revolution. When King George decided he would put his British soldiers anywhere he wanted to and there was nothing the people here could do about it, he would put them in their houses. He didn't care what it did to their property values. He didn't care anything about that. We don't need a revolution. We just need to have Congress hold the President accountable for his administration's lawlessness. Mr. Speaker, the President has got to secure our borders. He is putting American lives at risk every day. He is putting American lives further at risk since we know now we routinely have people that are completely vetted by the FBI, Homeland Security, and it turns out they are terrorists. The Tsarnaev brothers, even after Russia warned the CIA and the FBI that this guy, this older brother, has been radicalized, the FBI talked to him. He said: I am not radicalized. It is not his exact words. You talk to his mother, she said: No, he is a good boy. And then he went and killed people at the Boston Marathon with his brother. If we can't even stop people when we are alerted that they are terrorists, how in the world does this President and this administration think they are going to keep the American people safe? The report here, December 1, Tom LoBianco with CNN, said: ``President Barack Obama's former top military intelligence official said Tuesday that the White House ignored reports prefacing the rise of ISIS in 2011 and 2012 because they did not fit their reelection `narrative.' `` `I think they did not meet a narrative the White House needed. And I'll be very candid with you, they just didn't,' retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency . . . `I think the narrative was that al Qaeda was on the run, and Osama bin Laden was dead . . . they're dead and these guys are, we've beaten them,' Flynn said, but the problem was that despite how many terrorist leaders they killed they `continue to just multiply.' ``Obama has been criticized by opponents for referring to ISIS as the `JV squad' and apparently underestimating the group's threat.'' Well, Mr. Speaker, since we know the President has underestimated ISIS as a threat, clearly underestimated them, and there is no clear strategy to deal with them, what makes us think that this administration is going to do a better job of vetting potential terrorists coming into this country and underestimating them the way they have so many other refugees that have been brought into the country? Another article from Jim Hoft, December 2, 2015, quoting the President: ``Yes. He really said this. `` `You go down to Miami and when it's flooding in high tide on a sunny day, the fish are swimming through the middle of the streets.' '' The Wall Street Journal reported the same thing, the same quote. But The Wall Street Journal reported: ``We go down to Miami with some frequency and have never seen any such thing. And believe us, we know how to troll.'' But the President can find fish in the streets of Miami that nobody else seems to see, but he can't seem to notice how wide open our border is, what a threat to our security it is, and what a threat refugees are who we cannot determine who they are, where they came from, what they did, if they kill people, if they are terrorists. He didn't see any of that. There was a report from today, 4:20 actually, from Adam Kredo from freebeacon.com: ``More than 179,000 illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes, including violent ones, continue to roam free across the United States, with reports indicating that these illegal immigrants commit new crimes `every day,' according to lawmakers and the director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, also known as ICE. ``Sarah Saldana, ICE's director, disclosed to Congress on Wednesday that the agency is apprehending and removing fewer illegal immigrants than in past years. ``Somewhere around 179,029 `undocumented criminals with final orders of removal' from the United States currently remain at large across the country and are essentially untraceable, according to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who disclosed these numbers during a Wednesday hearing. ``The total number of criminal illegal immigrants in the United States is in the millions. ``Illegal immigrant criminals are known to be committing new crimes `every day,' according to Sen. Jeff Sessions, another member of the committee. ``Focus on the threat of criminal illegal aliens comes amid a wider national debate on immigration to the United States and the threat posed by potential terrorists and other criminals. ``The Washington Free Beacon disclosed in August that the Obama administration had been keeping secret the release of violent criminal illegal immigrants and only began notifying local law enforcement agencies about this within the last several months. ``The administration is continuing a policy of hiding information about this issue, as `several administration officials informed the committee they were unable to testify because the hearing wasn't ``in response to a particular crisis,' '' Grassley said. ``Saldana revealed at the hearing that somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 illegal immigrants previously convicted of crimes have been released from custody in recent years due to legal restrictions on how long the agency can detain an individual.'' Here is a quote from Saldana. She said: `` `Whether it's a result of protracted appeals or refusal of a country to accept its nationals back, this decision accounts for somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 convicted criminal alien releases in recent years' . . . noting that the number has dropped over time. ``Lawmakers remain concerned that the Obama administration is dragging its feet when it comes to taking action to deport criminal illegal immigrants. While President Obama has vowed that this would be a priority for his administration, these criminals continue to be released into the United States. `` `Many criminals remain in our communities,' Grassley said. `When will enough be enough? Even those with violent criminal histories aren't being removed as promised . . . American citizens are paying the price while law enforcement officers are instructed to look the other way.' ``There have been `thousands of victims' of crimes committed by illegal immigrants and `many of the agency's own officers are unable to do the job they signed up to do,' Grassley said. ``The Obama administration is removing fewer total illegal immigrants from the United States than it was just a few years ago, according to Senator Sessions. `` `Not only are total removals down, but the number of removals of criminal aliens from the interior of the United States, the so-called priority, has decreased significantly,' he said. `The reason for this decrease is not because there are fewer criminal aliens in the U.S. today than just a few years ago, there are hundreds of thousands of known criminal aliens in the United States.' `` `New crimes are committed every day by criminal aliens, so while we're not seeing a decrease in crimes committed across this country, we are seeing a decrease in removals of criminal aliens,' Sessions said. ``This cannot be blamed on a lack of financial resources, Sessions said, as Congress has increased funding. Still, deportations have plummeted and the administration is `doing substantially less with substantially more.' `` `Our goal should be to keep 100 percent of all criminal aliens out of the United States. . . . There's nothing wrong or controversial about such a policy.' ``Saldana confirmed that `overall apprehensions on the border are declining' and the agency's `removal numbers are lower than they have been in recent years.' ``However, she maintained that the administration is removing `at a greater proportion' dangerous criminals. ``Of the 235,000 deportations, 59 percent of them were convicted criminals, according to Saldana . . . Yet she said, `there are also times when despite our best efforts' criminal illegal immigrants `get released from our custody.' '' An article today from Dianne Solis, Tom Benning, and Brandi Grissom: ``The State of Texas is suing the federal government and the International Rescue Committee, after the New York-based aid agency announced plans to resettle Syrian refugees in Dallas later this week over the strong and repeated objections of Gov. Greg Abbott. ``The State Health and Human Services Commission, filed on Wednesday the suit in U.S. District Court, saying those groups worked to resettle `refugees in Texas without consulting with Texas or working in close cooperation with the Commission.' ``The agency, citing `reasonable concerns about the safety and security of the citizenry of the State of Texas' is seeking a temporary retraining order. `` `We have been working diligently with the International Rescue Committee to find a solution that ensures the safety and security for all Texans, but we have reached an impasse and will now let the courts decide.' '' That is Health and Human Services spokesman Bryan Black. Tonight at 6:30, I got this article from Tanya Somanader, President Obama on the shooting in San Bernardino. Here is the transcript of the President's comments. This is in an interview with CBS that President Obama spoke about the ongoing situation in California--going on right now--and the unacceptable pattern of mass shootings the U.S. is facing. Mr. Speaker, let me just parenthetically insert before reading his quote, we don't know who these shooters are yet. We don't know. We don't know their reason for doing what they did. I mean, some on the left have already tried to report that it was right by a Planned Parenthood facility when that was a mile away, trying to do whatever they can to try to avert responsibility--any responsibility--that the administration has. We have seen Kathryn's Law come about because Kathryn was shot in California in a sanctuary city that protected people who were illegally in this country and criminals like the one that shot Kathryn. And this administration protects sanctuary cities and lets them continue to just ignore Federal law. The lawlessness of this administration seems to know no bounds. If lawlessness breeds lawlessness, then the lawlessness of this administration has put this country in severe jeopardy. But here is what the President said, part of his quote from this evening, about the shooting in California. And I am quoting the President. ``And for those who are concerned about terrorism, some may be aware of the fact that we have a no-fly list where people can't get on planes, but those same people who we don't allow to fly could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm, and there's nothing that we can do to stop them. That's a law that needs to be changed.'' The President, the entire time he has been in office, has tried to subvert the Second Amendment to our United States Constitution and our Bill of Rights. He has tried every which way he can, whether using Social Security laws or all kinds of ways, to take away Americans' Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. As we see that the administration has been knowingly allowing criminals into this country illegally and allowing refugees to come into this country that were terrorists and even finding out, getting word that there were people who have become terrorists and not taking action to stop the death that followed, how dare anyone allow people to come into the United States illegally, knowing that there are some criminals coming in with people that are coming in illegally, knowing that there are criminals in the United States that this administration has allowed to be released after they have committed crimes. And then coming to the point now today where he says, you American citizens are going to have to give up your Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms because I have allowed so many people who are terrorists in here and we don't want terrorists to get guns. That is an outrage. It should not be allowed to stand against any kind of legitimate reasoning. You can't bring people into this country that are a threat to the country and then, because all these people are here and they might get a gun, you are going to keep law-abiding people from getting guns. That is wrong, and it has to be stopped. I hope and pray our Congress will stand up and stop the lawlessness and say, we are not letting you bring more refugees into this country that will have some terrorists within their group, as you have already done, and then tell us we have to give up our constitutional rights because you brought terrorists into the country that may want to go buy a gun. Shame on you. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, just to follow up on the eloquent 1-minute speech by my friend, Doug LaMalfa, that it is extraordinary to think that the President of the United States--some say he is the leader of the free world--would actually say publicly and, even worse, at a conference of world leaders that, in effect, the worst blow we could hit ISIS with is for the leaders to come together on climate change? It is hard to believe the leader of the free world would make such a statement. Maybe it was just something that was given to him to read and he read, maybe it was in a teleprompter, or maybe he didn't have time to think about what he was saying. Because I have talked to too many people in all parts of the world who have dealt directly with radical Islamist terrorists, and they make clear that radical Islamist terrorists know nothing and respect nothing but power. Incredible. Just incredible. Growing up, it would have been akin to bullies beating up and taking from smaller students on the playground and the teacher gathering all the students and other teachers together and saying, ``I am going to teach the bullies a lesson by just ignoring them and reading you a lovely story from our library.'' Who wouldn't understand that the next day the bullies would be beating people up again and robbing again? It is incredible. Such insanity followed a terrible event, a shooting in Colorado Springs. As a judge, a former judge, a former prosecutor, the man that did this needs to be punished. It is wrong, and no one should use any excuse to go in and shoot other people, whether it is an Islamic terrorist or whether it is a deranged, mentally unstable person thinking they have some kind of score to even with people they don't even know, shooting people about whom they know nothing. This story from November 30, Fox News, about the three people killed in Colorado, FoxNews.com: ``The two civilians killed in Friday's shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic were identified by authorities and family members on Sunday. ``Jennifer Markovsky, 35, was accompanying a friend to the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic when she was killed in the shooting rampage, her father told The Denver Post. ``John Ah-King said she grew up in Hawaii and met her husband, Paul, before the couple moved to Colorado when he was stationed here for the military. ``Ah-King told the Post from his home in Hawaii that Markovsky was a kind-hearted, lovable person with two children. ``The second civilian killed was identified as Ke'Arre Stewart, 29, Amburh Butler, a lifelong friend and family spokeswoman told the Associated Press. ``Butler said that Stewart was accompanying someone to the clinic, and leaves behind two girls, 11 and 5, who live in Texas. ``Stewart served in the Army's Fourth Infantry Division and was deployed to Iraq, where Butler said he would often send her letters describing the horrors he saw on the front lines. `` `He would tell me how terrible it was, how many guys he watched die. It was terrible for him,' Butler told the Associated Press. The Army stationed Stewart at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs in 2013 before he was discharged from the military the following year. `He went someplace where people expect to die, only to come back . . . and be killed.' '' She also said, ``He was just a standup guy, he would take a bullet for you. He was the most sincere person I'd ever met.'' ``Markovsky and Stewart's identities were confirmed by officials, who said a full identification would be provided once autopsies were completed Monday. ``The third victim was Garrett Swasey, who worked as a police officer at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and was called to assist with an active shooter at the nearby clinic. ``Swasey was married with two children and a co-pastor at Hope Chapel, where he was remembered Sunday by parishioners who watched a video of him ice skating. `` `We are learning that eyewitnesses confirm that the man who will be charged with the tragic and senseless shooting that resulted in the deaths of three people and injuries to nine others at Planned Parenthood's health center in Colorado Springs was motivated by opposition to safe and legal abortion,' Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountain CEO Vicki Cowart said.'' Well, that is from Vicki Cowart. That does not appear to be official. And it always seems if it works better--for example, I would hope that the President has learned by now that he shouldn't give opinions about shootings until he knows more about them. Don't condemn a policeman when it turns out the policeman was entirely justified because, by doing so, you help stir up and divide this Nation that needs to come together. So there are so many questions. When I was a prosecutor, when I was a judge, I wanted to know motive. I wanted to know what caused people to do what they did. We know why Islamic terrorists do what they do. They think that that is contributing to the caliphate. If they happen to die, just as Thomas Jefferson was told--it was reported that Jefferson asked why the Barbary pirates kept attacking American ships when they weren't a threat to that Muslim area. He was reportedly told, ``We believe we go to paradise if we are killed while we are fighting infidels like you.'' So we know what motivates most Islamic terrorists. Either they think they are going to go to paradise--what a surprise they are going to get--or they think they are contributing to bringing the world under a totalitarian domination by one theocrat, like the Ayatollah Khamenei or al-Baghdadi, who is head of ISIS. So, with that tragedy just in our rearview mirror, unfortunately, once again, the President, in front of a massive group, spoke without thinking about what he was saying. I don't know whether it was on a teleprompter again and he just hadn't thought about what he was reading to the public, maybe somebody put something in front of him, or maybe he was talking off the cuff and hadn't really thought about what he was saying. But this article from Alex Griswold, dated today, says, ``While giving a press conference in Paris, President Barack Obama told reporters that the mass shootings that plague the United States just never happen in other countries. `With respect to Planned Parenthood, obviously, my heart goes out to the families of those impacted,' Obama said in response to a reporter's question. `I mean, I say this every time we've got one of these mass shootings; this just doesn't happen in other countries.' '' He is in Paris, France, where they have just buried one of the 130 people, mostly from mass shootings. I mean, they probably just finished the funeral services for the victims of the Islamic terrorists, and the President says in front of the world so insensitively that these shootings, like the three people in Colorado Springs, never happens in any other countries, as he is standing in a country where it just had 130 people killed, mainly in mass shootings. In fact, the article says that ``the majority of the 130 deaths were in mass shooting attacks, where the ISIS-affiliated terrorists attacked public places with automatic rifles. Nearly one hundred people alone were killed in just one mass shooting at the Bataclan Theater.'' ``Earlier this year, Paris was also the victim of a terrorist attack targeting the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists wielded assault rifles, killing 11 innocent people.'' That was in Paris. Now, I do realize this article says the 11 people with Charlie Hebdo, the publisher of the magazine, that those 11 people, it says here, were innocent. But, obviously, again, a leader of the United States, our Secretary of State, John Kerry, addressed on video for the world to see this issue and basically was saying we can understand why the Charlie Hebdo people were killed. I mean, for goodness' sake, those people used the idea that they had the freedom to speak any way they wanted to; and, apparently, radical Islamic terrorists were insulted, even though the President has said repeatedly and John Kerry has said repeatedly and Hillary Clinton has said repeatedly, and continues to say, that these terrorist attacks by radical Islamic terrorists have nothing to do with Islam. Well, that is a head-scratcher, because if the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo had nothing to do with Islam, then why did John Kerry think there may have been some justification for Islamic terrorists to kill these satirists, these magazine employees, because they said something offensive about Islam? If it wasn't about Islam, then why were the terrorists killing these magazine employees because they said something about Islam? That is a head-scratcher. And then when we look at what the media is saying about the Colorado Springs shooting and we look at what people in the mainstream media, whether it is ``The View'' or other places, talk about, yeah, Hitler was a Christian. No, he wasn't. And, yeah, McVeigh, was a Christian. Well, I am sure that would be a surprise to him. He seemed to brag late in life about being agnostic. Hitler certainly wasn't a Christian. So if the President, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry are right that, gee, we need to worry as much about Christians--actually, our State Department seems to think, in their reports, that we need to worry more about Christians than we do about Islamic terrorists, even though there is no indication that the Colorado Springs shooter was a Christian. I can absolutely assure you, Mr. Speaker, no matter what he says his religious affiliation is, he certainly was not a Christian, because he certainly was not following the teachings of Christ. The Bible makes clear that we are known by our fruits, and if he has gone in and killed other people in this way, illegally, then he is certainly not following the teachings of Christ. He is not part of the government. There is no justification. There has been no trial. But it does also raise issues about the effects of the lawlessness of this administration, having had whistleblowers come to me, law-abiding, moral, ethical people you want to know. We have seen that the Justice Department will go after and destroy any honest, moral, ethical whistleblower that may reflect poorly on the administration. We have seen reports of the acting inspector general at Homeland Security changing IG reports. We get word that in the intelligence community reports have been changed from truth to something that would not make the administration look bad, reports now coming out about, and apparently former intelligence leader Flynn talking about this, how the truth that was coming from intelligence in 2012 did not match up with this administration's reelection campaign so they just changed the reports. I mean, what effect does an administration lying and being lawless have on what traditionally has been a majority law-abiding country? Can it create helplessness, a feeling, or a need that perhaps we need to take the law into our own hands? I would tell anyone that is never justified. You do it through lawful means, through the government. Of course, Thomas Jefferson might say otherwise. But what effect does it have when the law of the land, the Federal administration governing, ruling over the country, required by the Constitution to follow the laws that have been passed by Congress and signed by other Presidents, this President may not agree with and he just disregards the laws, say, on amnesty, disregards the laws about governing the EPA, so they just make up new regulations, and you just create 79,000 pages of new regulations as if you are a dictator in chief? I mean, if, hypothetically, that were happening, what effect would it have on people who believed in having a law-abiding country when the administration over the country becomes so lawless? It seems surely it would create a feeling of desperation. What do you do? I have talked to whistleblowers who had that feeling. What do you do? I can't go to the Justice Department with the truth about what is going on because they will prosecute me. They will destroy my family. I will never be able to make a living again. I have seen what they do to whistleblowers who just want the administration to be honest and follow the law. What do you do? Where do you go? I would submit that the place you go is not to Russia to give away our utmost secrets because that is treason, but it is bound to be mitigating when an administration makes it so tough to just come forward and state the truth. We found out that this administration had known about General Petraeus' affair for most of a year, but they waited until General Petraeus was in a position to destroy the election possibilities, reelection possibilities for President Obama, and they flowed out about the affair they have known about for most of the year, and he is destroyed. They prosecute him because apparently, as I understand it, he provided a calendar to his biographer and searched as they might for anything that they could hang around his neck of being a lawless activity. As I understand it, they found something in his calendar that could have been said to be classified, so he agreed to plead to that. And we find out yesterday there apparently have been 1,000, around 1,000 Hillary Clinton emails so far that contain classified information. If Chuck Colson gets a year and a half for having information he is not supposed to, Petraeus' life, his livelihood, is ruined because they are finally able to find something that might have been classified that he pleads guilty to having turned over to his biographer. How long do you get for doing that a thousand times? I am just asking, Mr. Speaker. But if, let's say, hypothetically, it were true what President Obama, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton keep saying, that you should not say anything negative about the terrorists who claim to be Islamic and who say, Praise be to Allah, ``Allahu Akbar,'' and then they kill innocent people, you can't say anything that that is related to radical Islam because that only makes matters worse. Well, if they really believe those things they have been saying, and if it were even true, and if Homeland Security is right that we need to worry about evangelical Christians or people that belong in the authority of the United States Constitution, then shouldn't the President, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, be worried that they are going to stir up another crusade by besmirching and maligning Christianity and Christians as routinely as they do, saying these Christian terrorists are so bad or pointing out we have got bad Christians, we have got the Crusades? Well, if Christianity is as big a threat to commit violence as people who say they are Islamic terrorists or jihadists, then I am just asking, Mr. Speaker, wouldn't that indicate that the President, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry are actually going to be responsible if a Christian goes and does something violent? I mean, using their own logic, if they are out there running down Christians as a threat to violence while saying you can't say anything negative about radical Islam and a Christian has done something wrong, well, if you are saying we stir up radical Islamic terrorists by talking about them, then wouldn't you be responsible if you--generic indefinite ``you''--be responsible for saying bad things about a Christian if a Christian then does something violent? I am just asking, applying the President's own logic or lack thereof. There is an article from 4 months ago by Kyle Becker that said, after the tragic Charleston shooting that left nine Americans dead, President Obama said the following: ``But let's be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency.'' The President said that 4 months or so ago, and he says it again now, while he is in Paris, where 130 people were just killed in a mass attack. But this article was written 4 months ago, and it actually charts it. And it reads, ``Since most statistics on mass shootings in the world compare apples and oranges by not correcting for population, let's get a chart that makes sense, shall we?'' Between 2009 and 2013, the author goes through and charts. The loss of even one life should not be occurring. As someone who has looked a defendant in the eye and has ordered him to be taken and held by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice until he is put to death and has signed the order requiring a multiple-murderer or a kidnapping murderer-torturer be put to death, I know every life matters. Every life matters. Every little baby who is cut up and sold for parts matters. How about the lawlessness of seeing the Planned Parenthood videos and not only not be offended or finding those grotesque and inhumane but actually having the Department of Justice stand ready to be the criminal defense firm for Planned Parenthood and stand by Planned Parenthood in these alleged horribly egregious violations of humanity? Would that invoke helplessness? It shouldn't invoke anybody to violence, but could it? According to this article by Kyle Becker, between 2009 through 2013-- these are rampage shooting fatalities per 1 million people--Norway had 15.3, Finland had 1.85, Slovakia had 1.47, Israel had 1.38, Switzerland had .75, and the United States had .72. Even one is too many, and the perpetrator should and must be punished. But if someone has committed crimes in Planned Parenthood, shouldn't we have an administration that believes in enforcing the laws and in at least doing a proper investigation on whether what was said in the videos were true, which certainly indicated orally that there were apparent crimes committed? Since every life matters, every Black life matters, not just the Black lives that are needlessly taken by a White person, but every Black life matters no matter who takes the life. This article from the Chicago Tribune reports, ``Holiday toll: 8 killed, 20 wounded over Thanksgiving weekend.'' It seems rather callous. The article reads, ``Eight people were killed, including a 16-year- old boy, and at least 20 others were wounded in shootings over the Thanksgiving weekend in Chicago, an increase over last year as the number of gunshot victims rose above 2,700 for the year.'' There were 2,700 gunshot victims in Chicago, when Chicago has such strong gun control laws in place? How could that be? Is it possible that having the toughest gun control laws, like Washington, D.C., has had, doesn't stop violent murders? In fact, is it possible that places that have the strictest gun control have become murder capitals? It certainly appears so in Chicago and in Washington, D.C. This article from the Chicago Tribune reads: ``Mysean Dunnin, 16, was among the first victims of the long holiday weekend. He was shot in the head a few minutes before midnight just west of Kedzie Avenue on Van Buren Street in East Garfield Park, about a block from his home. ``Police said two people walked up and fired at Dunnin. He was pronounced dead at the scene. ``Four other people were wounded between 3 p.m. Wednesday and 2:30 a.m. Thursday. ``Two men were killed and four others were wounded from 1:20 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day to 3:15 a.m. Friday. ``A 36-year-old man was killed and two people, including a 14-year- old boy, were wounded between Friday afternoon and early Saturday morning. ``The most violent stretch occurred Saturday into Sunday, when three men were fatally shot and at least four other people were wounded. ``Father of three, home for the holidays, dies in Back of the Yards shooting. ``Between Sunday afternoon and early Monday, an eighth person was killed and six other people were wounded. ``The toll during last year's Thanksgiving weekend'' in Chicago ``was 5 killed and 14 wounded. That included a fatal shooting inside the Nordstrom's store on North Michigan Avenue.'' With the President's precious ideas on gun control that certainly his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would have in place in Chicago since he has such power to effectuate the passage through the city leaders of ordinances for tough gun control, how could this be? The number of homicides is 444. ``So far this year, there have been at least 2,740 shootings in Chicago, up more than 400 from the same time last year. The number of homicides is 444, an increase of 42 from last year.'' That is tragic. An article by Charles C.W. Cooke on November 23, 2015, reads, ``Anyone who would use terror as an excuse to subvert the Second Amendment should be tarred and feathered.'' A rather interesting position. An article from Charlie Spiering of 30 November 2015 reads, ``In his inaugural speech at the COP21 climate change summit in Paris, President Obama acknowledged the terrorist attacks that occurred in the city earlier this month, but warned his fellow leaders not to be distracted from focusing on the looming threat of global warming.'' The President was quoted as saying, ``What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it.'' Ignoring the violent terrorism that the Islamic jihadists are infecting upon the world and talking about climate change--and, obviously, I mean, most thinking people know it is called ``climate change'' now because ``global warming'' hasn't really been supported for many years now, and, certainly, it is not provable that it was manmade. I do believe in climate change. We have it four times a year in east Texas, where I live, so I know climate change is a fact. We know that the weather normally works in cycles. We had a witness before our Natural Resources Committee who knows a great deal about the climate, and I asked him, is it true that planet Earth had to have been warmer during the days of Leif Eriksson's crossing the North Atlantic when the Norse came to Greenland? Is it true that planet Earth was warmer then? It turns out, according to his testimony, the planet was much warmer then. Now, we don't know what kind of fuel, what kind of carbon emissions those Norse boats were putting into the atmosphere, but I guess you would have to figure those Norse must have really been putting out some pollution from those ships with the sails on them to have created a warmer planet back then than we have now. Apparently, they were growing crops in places on Greenland where you can't anymore. My friend Ben Shapiro has an article in the Daily Wire entitled, ``Five Reasons Obama's Climate Change Agenda is Dangerous--'', and part of the words are blacked out after that. One reason he has highlighted is because ``we have no idea to what extent the Earth is warming.'' And he sets out some data and facts there, resources there or other. Two, ``We have no clue how much human activity causes climate change,'' and I would add ``if any.'' Of course, we call it ``climate change'' now because the data did not support the ``global warming'' that was being used in a fear-mongering fashion to scare people. By changing from ``global warming'' to ``climate change,'' that would allow them to say in the seventies, as they did, that we are at the beginning of a new ice age and then 30 years later say that we are heading toward cataclysmic global warming that will destroy all life on planet Earth. Now, after the long pause in warming that seems to be inexplicable to scientists and after the release of private emails and information from the University of East Anglia some years back, it indicated data was being manipulated so that it reflected things that weren't true about so-called global warming or climate change. Ben Shapiro's third point: ``We have no idea how much climate change impacts human life.'' It has discussions and references there. Then, the fourth: ``We have no idea what level of de-development would be necessary to maintain our current climate.'' The fifth: ``The solution--destroying carbon-based fuels and capitalism--is the problem.'' He writes, ``The left is in an all-out war with the two greatest forces for fighting poverty in history: cheap, carbon-based energy and capitalism. ``The same people celebrating the end of the Industrial Revolution economic model seem to forget that that economic model, boosted by carbon-based fuels, have led to a massive drop in global poverty; in 1990, 1.9 billion people lived under $1.25 per day, as opposed to 836 million in 2015. That's because of the dominance of capitalism and the increased efficiency of technology. It's certainly not because of governmental environmental regulations. ``Some on the left seem eager to try out their theory that we can maintain our current standard of living while hopping in a time machine back to less usage of carbon, without reference to market efficiencies. This is foolishness. We have time machines; they're called airplanes. Folks on the left ought to fly to countries where people don't have coal or oil or natural gas or free markets, and watch them burn cow chips for heat to see how lovely and natural that lifestyle actually is. ``But President Obama has his goals. How many people will have to suffer or die globally because of them isn't really the issue. After all, to question him would make us 'cynical,' he assures us. If cynicism means saving lives, then perhaps we all ought to be cynical of his world-conquering, unscientific, redistributionist nonsense.'' Going back to February 7, 2015, an article from Christopher Booker from The Telegraph titled ``The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever,'' he said: ``Two weeks ago, under the headline `How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming,' I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotof peopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming. ``This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world--one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record. ``Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way `adjustments.' First these were made by the U.S. government's Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official service records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in `global warming.' ``Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one- way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely `disappears' Iceland's `sea ice years' around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country's economy. ``One of the first examples of these `adjustments' was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss''--or the Goddard Institute for Space Studies--``Hansen's original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, `Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history.'' Wow, Mr. Speaker, I need to read that again. I had not seen that. ``Hansen's original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since.'' ``Homewood's interest in the Arctic is partly because the `vanishing' of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current--this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all. ``Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record--for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained--has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.'' Mr. Speaker, I am wondering if it might be possible that there is a mainstream media reporter out there--with the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, one of those that have lost so many of their viewers and readers--that might someday, against all of the criticism like Galileo got and others received, pick up that mantle and do a true investigation from a mainstream media outlet, facing the belittling and the criticism of all of the Chicken Littles that are in the mainstream media currently and actually gather accurate data, show the fraud, show the wasted money, show the lost lives, show the suffering by running up the price of energy so high, and show just what Christopher Booker talks about as he finished his article. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time. As the great philosopher Rush Limbaugh once said, ``Follow the money.'' Many others have said it. If you hear someone saying, ``Let's bring Syrian refugees in'' when we know there is no adequate data to be assured of who they are, where they are really from, follow the money. See if they are part of those dividing up the 1 billion-plus dollars being paid to people to bring refugees into the United States. Well, Mr. Speaker, when this administration goes about driving up the prices of energy as it has, despite its best efforts, gasoline prices came down. The last I saw, they had dropped their approval of production from Federal land to about 40 percent of grants that had been approved during the Bush administration's 8 years. Less production is being authorized by this administration. They are siccing the EPA now with these new regulations on the oil and gas industry, which will ultimately--if they are successful and Congress isn't able to stop them as we should, the price of gasoline will skyrocket as the President said he wanted coal-produced power to skyrocket. As one of my senior citizen constituents had told me--I think she said she was 80--she was born in a home that only had a wood-burning stove. Because of the way the cost of energy has gone up, she is worried that she may leave this world in a home that only has a wood- burning stove. The trouble for her is, if this administration has its way, she can't have a wood-burning stove even. You see the cost of home energy going up as dramatically as this administration has forced it and you realize that doesn't really hurt the rich in America to have higher prices for energy. It does hurt business. It absolutely does. It means they can't give raises because they are spending that money on higher bills. So people are not keeping up with what they should. Then we found out during this administration the unthinkable occurred, and the President even admitted it on camera. For the first time in the history of this country ever, after this President's policies had been fully implemented for 5 years, 95 percent of the Nation's income went to the top 1 percent. The President, who had talked so much about helping the middle class and helping the poor, has presided over policies that have made the rich--put them in a position where 95 percent of income is going to the top 1 percent. It had never happened before this President's policies, which have made life difficult for people in America. I mean not for the people that have all the cronyism, crony capitalism, General Electric and all those friends of the President. I am talking about the distance between the rich and the poor has gotten farther with fewer people in between. That is tragic. So countries swarm to the global warming conferences. Just watch. Follow the money. They hope to leave with an agreement by the United States that will punish American residents and cause them to have to pay more taxes that will be paid to countries around the world. Of course, they flock to these global warming climate change conferences because they think the President is going to do what he is hoping to do and start sending checks from the American taxpayers to all of these other countries, places where their policies have stifled growth or they don't have the energy we do. How about sending them some energy? Send them some coal. They will be far better off. In closing, Mr. Speaker, let me just remind that you don't have to pay people to hate you. They will do it for free. We don't have to be sending that money overseas. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of today, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, these are the times that try men's souls. After so many Americans have given the last full measure of devotion for their country, for our freedom, for the freedom of so many others, we are at a time in our history when we have enemies reporting that they are entering the United States. That is confirmed by the Director of the FBI and others in this administration. As is now reported, there are active ISIS elements in every State in the Union. Some say, well, those who want to suspend bringing in Syrian refugees, wouldn't that be like telling the Jews during World War II they couldn't come to America? Actually, it would be more like saying we are going to suspend bringing Germans--we are going to keep bringing in German Jews because clearly they are being persecuted. We are going to try to save them from the Holocaust, but we are going to suspend bringing in those who appear to have similar backgrounds to the Nazis because we are not sure who is Nazi and who isn't. Can you imagine dealing with what France has dealt with after we welcomed with open arms Nazis before and during World War II, if that had been the policy of the Roosevelt administration? Thank God it wasn't. But, unfortunately, Jews were turned away before and during World War II. The President wants to continue bringing in refugees, continue the mass migration of illegal aliens into the United States. We have this report from yesterday by Brandon Darby and Ildefonso Ortiz. They report on eight Syrians being caught at the Texas border in Laredo yesterday. The story says: ``Two Federal agents operating under the umbrella of U.S. Customs and Border Protection are claiming that eight Syrian illegal aliens attempted to enter Texas from Mexico in the Laredo Sector. The Federal agents spoke with Breitbart Texas on the condition of anonymity, however, a local president of the National Border Patrol Council confirmed that Laredo Border Patrol agents have been officially contacting the organization with concerns over reports from other Federal agents about Syrians illegally entering the country in the Laredo Sector. The reports have caused a stir among the sector's Border Patrol agents. ``The sources claimed that eight Syrians were apprehended on Monday, November 16, 2015. According to the sources, the Syrians were in two separate `family units' and were apprehended at the Juarez Lincoln Bridge in Laredo, Texas, also known officially as Port of Entry 1.'' The President has also stated in recent days--it's been played over and over as the President condemns Republicans and conservatives and liberals and moderate Americans across the specter of politics, Americans who are concerned about one thing: the safety of their homeland. The President comes out and condemns, and he said: ``When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who's fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted . . . that's shameful. . . . That's not American. That's not who we are. We don't have religious tests to our compassion.'' It doesn't violate the rules of the House to point out when an elected official is ignorant. It is a violation to insinuate some ill motive. I am insinuating no ill motive. I am stating that the President is completely ignorant of what our laws are because the law is very clear, if you look at 8 U.S.C. 1158--and I need to tip the hat to Andrew McCarthy. I have got his article in front of me from yesterday, from nationalreview.com. He points out that under Federal law the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum. Under the provision governing asylum--and again, that is 8 U.S.C. section 1158--``an alien applying for admission''--and this is the law--``must establish that . . . religion . . . was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting that applicant.'' Now, there are other potential reasons that can be given for establishing the persecution, but religion is a very important one, and we have always looked at that issue as being important. If you are being persecuted for your religious beliefs in the world, that is always historically American to look at that fact and determine, yes, there is a religious test, and these people are being persecuted because of their religious beliefs, and only if we look at their religion and whether or not that religion is being persecuted can we determine whether they are entitled to asylum. So to answer the question that is raised by the ignorant statement by our President, the truth is, yes, it is American. It is the law. We need to know what religion you are to determine whether or not you are being persecuted for your religion. In another place, and this is over from 8 U.S.C., this is in section 1101, and this is the section regarding refugee status, but to qualify, the applicant must be a refugee as defined by Federal law, and then that definition is what is at section 1101(a)(42)(A). ``The term `refugee' means (A) any person who is outside any country of such person's nationality . . . and who is unable or unwilling to return to . . . that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of . . . religion.'' Religion is important to take into account in determining whether someone is truly a refugee. It is American. It is not shameful. It is what we have done historically, and that is why I would have a Baloch minority in my office today talking to me about persecution against the Baloch people in Iran, because, as he says, Americans have traditionally been compassionate when people are being persecuted unfairly. And we have. And to take such persecution into account, we look at whether religion is a factor in their persecution. That is American. It is recognized even in Iran as being American and being unshameful--not only not shameful, but being to the glory and credit of the United States of America that we do care. Mr. McCarthy's article goes on. He says: ``In the case of this war, the Islamic State is undeniably persecuting Christians. It is doing so, moreover, as a matter of doctrine. Even those Christians the Islamic State does not kill, it otherwise persecutes as called for by its construction of sharia (observe, for example, the ongoing rape jihad and sexual slavery).'' From my discussions when I have been in Nigeria with the poor Africans whose children have been kidnapped, they explained it was only the daughters that were being kidnapped and that the school was attacked. I asked: Was it attacked because it was a girls school and they don't want girls having education? They said they don't want girls having education, but that is not the reason they attacked it. They attacked it because it was a Christian school. So these radical Islamists associated with the Islamic State, they attack schools, particularly Christian schools; and after they attack a Christian school, the Nigerians explained they bring the children out, and if they are boys, they just go ahead and kill them immediately because they are Christian boys, and they don't want that to spread. If, however, they are girls, the Nigerian Africans who were victims of Boko Haram explained, they don't kill them. No. But you couldn't really say they weren't persecuted because they are kidnapped and they are kept strapped to beds and they are repeatedly raped until such time as they are sold into sexual slavery. And this administration, according to some in Nigeria, has said: We may help you, but you have got to adopt a same-sex marriage provision, or we are not going to be such help to you. And as one Nigerian bishop said, to his deep credit: Our religious convictions are not for sale--not to President Obama, not to anybody. God bless them. The same effort was made to push Kenya into adopting same-sex marriage laws against their religious beliefs in that country. I was so proud of the Kenyan President. And I have heard other African leaders say they were so proud. They were also proud in Africa of the Kenyan President not being intimidated by President Obama's demand that they change their marriage laws to go against the teachings of the man whose profile is right up here above the main door to our Gallery--a man named Moses--who said he was speaking for God. And according to God's law, a man shall leave his father and mother and a woman leave her home and the two will become one flesh. That was to be marriage. When Jesus was asked about marriage and divorce, he quoted Moses perfectly--the man we have depicted up here in our House Chamber. He quoted Moses perfectly: A man shall leave his father and mother and a woman leave her home and the two will become one flesh. And then he added to Moses' perfect quote: And what God has joined together, nobody put asunder. Anyway, our President was in African in the past trying to push them into changing their laws, but unfortunately for people in areas where radical Islamist's have reigned, if you are a Christian, you are being persecuted for your religious beliefs. And if you are a Christian boy in a school that Boko Haram attacks, they will most likely just shoot you, kill you; and if you are a girl, they take you into sex slavery, in all likelihood. McCarthy goes on: ``To the contrary, the Islamic State seeks to rule Muslims, not kill or persecute them.'' I think that is a very important point Mr. McCarthy makes. The radical Islamists are not seeking to kill or persecute Muslims like they are Christians. They are seeking to rule them. Mr. McCarthy goes on: ``Obama prefers not to dwell on the distinction between the jihadist treatment of Muslims, on the one hand, and of Christians, Jews, and other religious, on the other hand, because he--like much of Washington--inhabits a world in which jihadists are not Islamic and, therefore, have no common ground with other Muslims . . . notwithstanding that jihadists emerge whenever and wherever a population of sharia-adherent Muslims reaches critical mass. While there is no question that ISIS will kill and persecute Muslims whom it regards as apostates for refusing to adhere to its construction of Islam, it is abject idiocy to suggest that Muslims are facing the same ubiquity and intensity of persecution as Christians. ``And it is down right dishonest to claim that taking such religious distinctions into account is `not American,' let alone `shameful.' How can something American law requires be `not American'? And how can a national expression of compassion expressly aimed at alleviating persecution be `shameful'?'' That is Andrew McCarthy yesterday, the NationalReview.com. ``The State Department Turns Its Back on Syrian Christians and Other Non-Muslim Refugees'' is an article by Nina Shea, November 2. She says: ``Over the past 5 years of Syria's civil war, the United States has admitted a grand total of 53 Syrian Christian refugees, a lone Yazidi, and fewer than 10 Druze, Baha'is, and Zoroastrians combined. That so few of the Syrian refugees coming here are non-Muslim minorities is due to American reliance on a United Nations refugee-resettlement program that disproportionately excludes them. Past absolute totals of Syrian refugees to the United States under this program were small, but as the Obama administration now ramps up refugee quotas by tens of thousands, it would be unconscionable to continue with a process that has consistently forsaken some of the most defenseless and egregiously persecuted of those fleeing Syria. ``The gross underrepresentation of the non-Muslim communities in the numbers of Syrian refugees into the U.S. is reflected year after year in the State Department's public records. They show, for example, that while Syria's largest non-Muslim group--Christians of the various Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions--constituted 10 percent of Syria's population before the war, they are only 2.6 percent of the 2,003 Syrian refugees that the United States has accepted since then. ``Syria's Christian population, which before the war numbered 2 million, has since 2011 been decimated by what Pope Francis described as religious `genocide.' '' I want to insert at this point, Madam Speaker, that I have been advised that this administration is now saying that the persecution of Christians is not being deemed a genocide. Perhaps it is because this administration feels like if you are taking the young girls and putting them into sex slavery and you are not outright killing them--you are just raping them and putting them into sex slavery--then maybe that is not a genocide. You are letting the girls live. So maybe they are so callous that they would consider it is not genocide if you just rape and put these young girls who are Christians or from Christian families into sexual slavery. This article from Nina Sea says: ``Clearly, far more than a dozen members of Syria's religious minorities should qualify as refugees under the legal definition of a refugee as someone with a `well-founded fear of persecution based on religion.'. . . Instead minorities have difficulty getting to step one in the U.N. process. The religious terror that drove them from Syria blocks their registering. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is largely limited to collecting refugee applications and making resettlement referrals from its own camps and centers--the burden of feeding creates strong incentives for this practice. ``In an email to me, Knox Thames, the State Department's new Special Adviser for Religious Minorities wrote that `many minorities have not entered the U.N. system because they are urban refugees.' That is, because they live far from the remote U.N. camps and aid centers, they lack the information and access to register. And, as is widely known, many non-Muslim refugees try hard to avoid these camps.'' The reason Christians try to avoid these U.N. camps is that they are Muslim. In fact, in this article, it is pointed out: ``According to British media, a terrorist detector asserted that militants enter U.N. camps to assassinate and kidnap Christians. An American Christian aid group reported that the U.N. camps are `dangerous' places where ISIS, militias, and gangs traffic in women and threaten men who refuse to swear allegiance to the caliphate. ``Such intimidation is also reportedly evident in migrant camps in Europe, leading the German police union to recommend separate shelters for Christians and Muslim migrant groups.'' The article goes on to point out: ``According to a recent UNHCR posting, 19,000 Syrians picked straight from `refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan,' have received U.N. approval and are awaiting resettlement in the United States. In October, President Obama ordered their expedited admission. Without further action, however, only token numbers of non-Muslim minorities will be among those rescued. George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, called it right about the Christian refugees, and his words equally apply to Syria's other non-Muslim communities: They are being `left at the bottom of the heap.' '' There is an article from Todd Starnes, November 18--yesterday-- entitled ``Obama is Importing Muslims, Deporting Christians.'' Well, if this is true, so much for his test--that we don't care about religious tests. But this article says: ``When individuals say we should have a religious test and that only Christians--proven Christians should be admitted--that is offensive and contrary to American values, the President said--just one day after he called such behavior un-American.'' But as Todd Starnes says: ``What is offensive and contrary to American values is refusing to properly investigate those wanting to come to our Nation--especially those coming from regions that are hotbeds of Islamic extremism. ``Those of us who fear that Islamic radicals might be lurking among the refugees have been called every name in the book: bigots, Islamophobes, and un-American . . . But the President says such prudence only further enflames the Islamic jihadists.'' The President warns that it is counterproductive and needs to stop. The truth is, I will insert parenthetically, what has been a huge recruiting tool for ISIL, ISIS, and the Islamic State, has been American weakness and unwillingness to confront radical Islam head up and call it what it is. We found back when we were engaged in Iraq that one of the big recruitments that was used by radical Islamists is they would go back to 1979 and the fact that Jimmy Carter did not after they attacked our Embassy and took over 50--51 people or so--as hostages. We did basically nothing to them. And they point out that we pulled out of Beirut after our Marines were killed there. And they go out and point out the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center under Bill Clinton. We really did nothing after that in response. And after the USS Cole was hit, we basically did nothing effective. And they go on to point out each time that America has been hit and we did nothing effective to counter the attack upon us, that is the biggest recruiting element that ISIS or any radical Islamist group has had, when they can show that they have attacked and we have been weak. And nothing has been shown to be less effective in responding to attacks against us, against Americans, against Christians, against minority groups, against moderate Muslims, then what has happened during this administration. Call George W. Bush what you will, but the fact is the world knew that while he was President, if you messed with America, he would strike back. That is what led Qadhafi to abandon his nuclear efforts. It led him to open up his doors. You tell me what weapons I can keep. He was afraid we were going to invade them next. According to this article, it says, ``But the cold, hard reality is that Protestants, Catholics and Jews aren't the ones beheading people. The Lutherans and Nazarenes aren't gunning down young folks in concert venues.'' Nevertheless, the President remains steadfast. The Muslims will come. ``We don't have religious tests to our compassions,'' he told journalists from high atop his soapbox. But that is not entirely accurate. Last year the Obama administration led a fierce legal battle to have a German Christian family thrown out of the United States. The Romeikes fled their homeland in search of a nation where they could homeschool their children. A judge initially granted them asylum, believing they were escaping from religious persecution. However, the Obama administration waged a fierce campaign against the Romeike family, demanding they be returned to Germany. The family lost court battle after court battle, but, at the eleventh hour, the White House relented and begrudgingly let them stay. But just a few months ago a Federal Immigration judge ordered a dozen Iraqi Christians deported from a facility in San Diego. An Immigration Customs Enforcement spokesperson declined to tell the San Diego Union Tribune why the Iraqi Christians were being sent back to their native land. So the next time President Obama wants to lecture the Nation about religion, maybe he could explain why his administration is importing Muslims and deporting Christians. I realize that I just have a few minutes left, Madam Speaker. Our hearts, our prayers and thoughts have been with the people of France and Lebanon and Russia, victims of radical Islamist attacks and anywhere they have been occurring, Brussels, as well. There is great irony. On Wednesday of last week, the European Union announced what it had been building to for some time. In essence, it announced it was declaring economic war on Israel. Anti-Semitism has grown all over the European Union to levels I never would have dreamed, as a little boy, would ever come back to Germany, where we read and studied about the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews not just in Germany, but around Europe, and there were other countries that actually assisted the Germans. There were people like George Soros, who was Jewish, that helped finger other Jews. I never thought we would get to the level of anti- Semitism where Europe, as a whole, as a group, would basically declare economic war against Israel. Incredible how anti-Semitism has grown there. And then, within 48 hours of them declaring war, siding with the Palestinian Muslims, siding with those--they are attacking the Christians and Jews in Israel and siding with the wrong people. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of today regarding House Concurrent Resolution 92, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I do want to commend my friend from Georgia. He speaks eloquently. I hated to lose dear friend, John Linder, from here in this body. He was a brilliant man, with great class. But since he is gone, I am delighted to have Rob Woodall here in his stead--just clear-thinking, articulate, and makes the case that the American people need to hear. Speaking of messages, Mr. Speaker, the American people need to hear, this is November 5, 2015. It was November 5, 2009, when a major in the United States Army at Fort Hood, Texas, killed Americans. He had given plenty of warning signs that he was a ticking time bomb who was going to kill Americans, particularly American soldiers, especially if he were ordered to go overseas because he would much prefer to kill American soldiers than he would go overseas and risk killing a fellow Muslim. Having heard about people in the United States Army, as I was in for 4 years, who had to deal with Major Hasan, it is appalling that political correctness led to this man's being allowed to remain in the military, ever being promoted, and being assigned to counsel troubled soldiers. Incredible. But political correctness has become more and more prominent. It was November 5, 2009. President Obama had been in office since January of that year. Major Hasan had been in the military during the Bush administration. He should never have been promoted. There were warning signs that we heard about after the fact, but nobody wanted to be the one to stand up and say: ``This man is a threat. He is a radical Islamist. He is a threat not only to the good order and discipline of the United States military, he is a threat to the very lives of our military members.'' Mr. Speaker, our military let those victims down at Fort Hood, Texas, before the shooting ever occurred. That is almost unbearable. But what becomes unbearable is the fact that 6 years later victims of Major Hasan who are still alive are still being mistreated by this administration. An article by Jacob Brooks and J.C. Jones in the Killeen Daily Herald today in the paper said: ``Six years after the November 5, 2009, shooting at Fort Hood, at least one victim is still fighting for overdue benefits. Former Fort Hood Staff Sergeant Alonzo Lunsford, Jr., said pain, betrayal, disrespect, and patriotism all come to mind when he thinks about that tragic day. He said, 'It is a lot. It is really a lot that goes through my head.''' He was shot seven times by Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who opened fire on unsuspecting fellow soldiers at a Fort Hood medical processing building for deploying soldiers. Six years later, the building has been torn down. Many of the soldiers who were there have since moved on, are either no longer in the Army or stationed elsewhere. Hasan, an Army major at the time of the shooting, was found guilty of killing 12 soldiers and 1 civilian on August 23, 2013, following a 12- day court martial at Fort Hood. Days later he was sentenced to die and is currently on death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, awaiting automatic appeals. Mr. Speaker, it took Congress battling and finally putting language in a bill that the Army and the Defense Department finally could not ignore that finally put enough pressure on the Army to do the right thing by these victims, and that is--for Heaven's sake, they were victims of an attack in the war against America by radical Islam. As Muslim friends in the Middle East, leaders in the Middle East who are Muslims, have asked on different visits I have had in the Middle East: Why is it that this administration does not understand radical Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, is at war with the United States? You keep helping the people who are at war with you, the Muslim Brotherhood. They recognize it all over the Middle East. Muslims over there scratch their heads--moderate Muslims--and wonder what is wrong with America. I met a number of the survivors of the shooting 6 years ago today when the Purple Hearts were finally awarded. A number of us were there from Congress because it was an important day and they needed to know Members of Congress do care. So we were there as representatives of this body and all of those within it who recognize the loss and the sacrifice occurred at the hands of someone who is at war with the United States, a part of the bigger radical Islamist movement. It is rather ironic that, as we think about and talk about the violations of the Iran treaty--yes, it is a treaty, despite the Senate's unwillingness to call it what it is and the administration obviously won't call it what it is--but the violations of the Iran treaty by Iran are still resulting in this administration's sending billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars to people who want to kill us and to eliminate our way of life. Yet, this same administration that is sending billions and billions and billions of dollars to our enemy can't scrape together mere hundreds of dollars to send to someone like Staff Sergeant Alonzo Lunsford. The article says he is now in North Carolina. I was impressed when I met him. He seems to be a very sharp man, a patriot, someone who cares about America. But like many of the victims, the wounds go even deeper than the shots that were fired. In his case, seven times he was shot. Oh, what a horrible day. And, yet, this administration becomes accomplices to the after-the- crime episode and damage by still refusing to acknowledge it for what it was and pay these patriotic servicemembers the money they have coming as people who were wounded in the line of duty. It is ridiculous that this administration will send billions and billions to our enemies who have already said that, with all the billions Obama is going to make sure that we get, we are going to be able to finance more, help Hamas more, help Hezbollah more. We are going to be able to help those who kill Americans. What does the administration do? They want to make sure that nothing gets in the way of their sending money to people that want to kill Americans and people who have killed Americans. A report out just this week indicates that Iran may be responsible for at least 12 percent of the Americans killed in Iraq. I can't help but think, based on those I have talked to in trips to Iraq and those who have researched even further, that when we get to the bottom line, it will likely be a lot more than 12 percent. But even so, the country, the radical Islamist leaders in charge, are guilty of killing Americans, and this administration rewards them by sending them money and, whether it is intentional or sheer intentional neglect, refuses to acknowledge the patriotism and the act of war against our members of the United States Army and the United States military and the one civilian that was killed, refuses to acknowledge and adequately appreciate those patriots that were killed or wounded in the line of duty in an act of war by Major Nidal Hasan. So, Mr. Speaker, the question arises: If this administration, either through neglect or intent, is so calloused and uncaring towards its own military members, then what is going on now that is going to result in future Americans, military members, being killed? How many more Major Nidal Hasans are there in the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines? God, I hope and pray that people like Nidal Hasan are not still being promoted because nobody wants to--in this administration, under this administration, under this Commander in Chief--rise up and say: This guy is giving all the indications of being a radical Islamist that will one day explode and kill Americans. Mr. Speaker, we have seen record numbers of generals--officers with stars on their epaulets--being fired. Personally, I recognize Edward Snowden to be a traitor. I have tried felony cases, including death penalty cases. Coupled with my experience here in Congress of trying to advise and help whistle-blowers and having seen this administration turn against whistle-blowers, use their own department they work in to destroy their careers, use the Department of Justice to harass them, and if it is somebody that has very damaging evidence about wrongdoing by this administration, then they will convene a grand jury to investigate and harass, never mind that it drives a spouse to the hospital near breakdown, never mind the damage that it does to those patriotic whistle-blowers who just want the government to do the right thing in all things. I have to recognize, if I were sentencing Edward Snowden for his treason, that in this administration someone that were to come forth-- if Edward Snowden had done this and come before superiors in this administration, he would likely have been destroyed, a grand jury convened, attempts to put him in jail, attempts to destroy his evidence. That would have to be taken as evidence in mitigation of whatever the sentence was for the treason because, under this administration, I have struggled with people who wanted to get the truth out. Where do you go? Eric Holder, as Attorney General, was not going to help a whistle-blower if they had information that was damaging to the administration. No. He was the head of the largest criminal defense firm in America defending the actions in this administration and going after and trying to destroy anybody who came forth with damaging evidence, particularly if it could have come before the election in 2012. Loretta Lynch will always be a blot on the reputation of the United States Senate because she made clear she thought that the things Eric Holder did in violation of the Constitution, in contempt of Congress, the disingenuity and dishonesty, were okay in her book, and they confirmed her anyway. So the indications are things haven't gotten any better than they were. What do you do if you are a patriotic whistleblower in this administration and you want to out Nidal Hasan, you want to come forward with documentation that shows this administration has acted inappropriately? It has been made clear to people, you raise your head up to try to speak up and speak truth, then we will make you rue the day you ever worked for the government. We won't help with mere hundreds of dollars to American patriots who were wounded in an act of war, and, obviously, 13 killed in an act of war by radical Islamists. We won't even call radical Islam what moderate Muslims in the Middle East recognize that it is. And a man of great courage I think will end up being recognized as one of the great leaders in the Middle East of any age. President el-Sisi gets the back of the hand most of the time from this administration. When he has had the courage to stand up to imams in a room, looking them in the eye, and say: It is time to take back our religion from the radicals. Because of his courage, because of his recognizing the threat that radical Islam is, not only to Christians and Jews, but to moderate Muslims, then there is no doubt there are people that want to kill him, when this administration ought to be doing everything they can to help them. I was asked by Egyptian leaders: Does your President not understand that the Apache helicopters that he promised the Muslim Brother Morsi that he withheld for so long, that we used those to keep the Suez Canal open, does he not want the Suez Canal open? Does President Obama not care? Well, that would certainly be the indication if you look at the actions of his administration. When I was in Egypt in September, people who desperately want to be friends with the United States, they yearn for freedom, they yearn for a free Egypt, free of radical Islam, even though they are Muslims themselves, they want to be friends with freedom-loving Americans, and yet with dozens and dozens and dozens of leaders from countries around the world, including Russia, top leaders from countries around the world, being there to note the incredible historic event in world history when Egypt, after having gotten rid of the radical Islamist Muslim Brother Morsi, who was refusing to keep his conduct within the requirements of their Constitution, was removed after the biggest peaceful demonstration in the history of the world. Over 30 million people are said to have gone to the streets to demand his removal. After Morsi is removed, people of vision like el-Sisi took over and they dug another lane to the one Suez Canal, so there are two lanes for a big part of it there. That was a historic day in June. The people of Egypt should have been lauded by all of those in this administration. Yet, not only did this administration not care to recognize the great historic fete of Egypt struggling as it is to achieve greatness once again, they didn't even send anybody from Washington. My friend Darrell Issa went. Congress was represented. I was not allowed to go, of course, because Speaker Boehner wasn't allowing people like me who spoke up for what we believe is right to travel. And, according to his staff, Speaker Boehner saw taxpayer- funded travel as a reward for people that apparently voted like he wanted them to, which kind of sounds like it would be a crime. But, nonetheless, we were represented. Congress was represented there, but not the administration. Leaders from around the world were there. Not this administration. It is time to recognize the good Muslims, the moderate Muslims in the world, with whom we can be friends, who want to be our friends, who want to work with us, and recognize those, like the Muslim Brotherhood, who want to destroy our way of life. And it is time to stop the political correctness that got 13 people killed at Fort Hood 6 years ago today and got so many more wounded. Since this administration doesn't want to properly recognize efforts to keep the Middle East peaceful and out of the hands of radical Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood, well, we had the Iran treaty that this administration pushed and the Senate refused to take up and vote on as a treaty. The Corker bill clearly didn't apply because the Iranian treaty did include terms about ballistic missiles, about weapons buying, about release of money under the sanctions. It did change the terms of the nonproliferation treaty. It was clearly a treaty. It really will be another blot on the Senate's reputation that they did not stop that. By taking a vote on ratification, it wouldn't have gotten the two-thirds required. And then we could have prevented the $100 billion plus--we are told $100 billion or so each year thereafter--that will be going to a country that, according to this news this week, where `` `Death to America' Stands Despite the Nuclear Deal.'' This report from AFP, dated November 2, from Tehran, says, ``the Islamic Republic will not abandon the slogan of `Death to America' despite its July nuclear accord with world powers. ``The martyr-nurturing nation of Iran is not at all prepared to abandoned the slogan of `Death to America' under the pretext of a nuclear agreement,'' 192 members of Iran's 290-seat parliament said in a statement carried by state news agency IRNA. ``They said the slogan, chanted at the weekly Friday prayers in mosques and at protests, had `turned into the symbol of the Islamic republic and all struggling nations.' '' So let's look, Mr. Speaker, at what has occurred since the Iran treaty that was not ratified was placed into being by this administration and by the Senate looking the other way. Well, they have had ballistic missile tests. They have had joint military operations with Russia and Syria. Those certainly violate the terms of the Iran deal. They have had open violations of international travel bans. We have had a cyber attack from there. We have had an arrest of a U.S. resident, Nazar Zaka. ``Death to America'' is still their chant. And yet here is this story from October 21 by Reuters. It says: ``The United States, Britain, France and Germany called on Wednesday for the United Nations Security Council's Iran sanctions committee to take action over a missile test by Tehran that they said violated a U.N. ban. ``In a letter containing details on the launch, they said the ballistic missile was `inherently capable of delivering a nuclear weapon.' ``The letter, seen by Reuters, was sent to the committee after the United States raised the issue in the 15-member Security Council. `` `We trust that this information will assist the Committee in its responsibility to examine and take appropriate action in response to violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions,' they wrote.'' ``Diplomats have said it was possible for the sanctions committee to blacklist additional Iranian individuals or entities if it determined that the missile launch had breached the U.N. ban. However, they said Russia and China, which have opposed the sanctions on Iran's missile program, might block any such moves. `` `The United States will continue to press the Security Council to respond effectively to any future violations . . . Full and robust enforcement of all relevant U.N. measures is and will remain critical,' U.S. ambassador of the United Nations Samantha Power said in a statement on Wednesday.'' Now, the reason that the United States has sent this letter, participated in it, asking the U.N. to take appropriate action, is because this administration is gutless to do what needs to be done. You have Iran, it has been confirmed, that killed so many hundreds responsible for the death of so many Americans. And this administration struck a bad deal with them that could never get two-thirds of the Senate to ratify it, so we just act like it is a treaty that is ratified, even though it isn't. But it is gutless to stand up to Iran and say: You violated the deal. We are not going to allow $100 billion to $150 billion to go to you while you continue to say ``death to America''; you continue to have ballistic missile tests; you continue to have joint operations, in violation of our deal, with Russia and Syria; you continue in open violation of international travel bans; you continue to attack us or have cyber attacks from your country; and you continue to stir up violence against the United States. You are not getting any money. How about giving just a little bit of that $100 billion to the victims of Nidal Hasan? How about giving it to the victims of radical Islamist violence? How about giving it to the victims of over 400 days in captivity in Iran under the Ayatollah Khamenei's leadership? This administration has got to act. This is outrageous. And then we have an International Business Times report, ``Iranian Airline Violates Terms of Nuclear Deal By Purchasing Planes To Use In Syrian War.'' This says: ``One of Iran's commercial airlines last week bought a UK- manufactured jet with the aim of using it to deliver Iranian soldiers and weapons to Syria . . . The purchase of the aircraft by an Iranian concern represents a clear violation of the deal brokered by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama.'' It is outrageous. The Iran deal needs to be brought to an end. No more money needs to go to Iran. No money for killers, for terrorists, but money to the victims in our United States military. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it has been an interesting day and an interesting week. I was in here listening to the colloquy between Majority Leader McCarthy and the minority whip. I had heard my good friend, a very intelligent, clever, witty friend from Maryland, Mr. Hoyer, indicate that Republicans bring us to the brink time and time again, talking about, I guess, the debt ceiling. Sometimes it is just good to stop from the rhetoric here and the lines like ``bringing us to the brink,'' and it is really good to look at what the history of the situation is. Until Newt Gingrich led with the Contract With America, Republicans recaptured the majority in the House and Senate, for the first time in 40 years, the Democrats kept bringing us to the brink. It didn't matter who was in the White House. The Democratic Congress kept bringing us to the brink, spending more and more money. We thought it was a great deal of money. They kept bringing us to the brink. It seemed so irresponsible not to be interested in trying to have a more balanced budget. There would be people like Phil Gramm, with the Gramm-Rudman law, that tried to force a balancing. In fact, I know the President will probably in weeks to come continue the mistaken rhetoric. He is such a nice guy, but he is so often mistaken or whoever puts those mistakes in his teleprompter. But the fact is that, repeatedly, this requirement that Congress raise the debt ceiling if more debt is to be incurred has been used as a vehicle to get laws passed that tried to rein in the irresponsible spending that has been going on for many decades. I believe it was Morgenthau, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Treasury, who wrote in 1940: After 8 years, we have spent more money than anyone ever in history, and we have nothing to show for it but more debt. That was quite an admission, that the New Deal was a total failure, and it actually was. It wasn't until World War II actually ended the Depression in America that we came out of the Great Depression. It was certainly none of the socialist policies that the United States began engaging in. I know just since I have been here in January of 2005, in 2006, as I recall, we were having debate. Republicans were in the majority. My friends, Mr. Speaker, on the Democratic side of the room over here were repeatedly making the point about how irresponsible it was for Republicans to be spending--I think at the time it was around $160 billion--more than we were bringing in to the Federal Treasury. I agreed. Actually, we should have balanced the budget back in 2005 and 2006. We were only $160 billion, at one point, away from doing that. I think that was part of the reason the Democrats continued beating up on Republicans for overspending what was coming in, $160 billion or so. Little would I ever dream that, after being pummeled verbally by my Democratic friends, as a Republican spending $160 billion more or so than we had coming in, that those same friends would do the unthinkable and increase that debt in one year more than 10 times the $160 billion. You would have thought that perhaps they would remember some of those things they used to say with such vitriol right here on the House floor about how spending more than $160 billion more than we were taking in was so irresponsible. You would have thought they might have remembered some of those because, when you say one thing one year and then you get the majority and you are 10 times worse than what you accused the other side of-- more than 10 times worse--some people feel a little sensitive. We have to be careful because we certainly don't want to violate the House rules on what we say here. But, you know, some people feel guilty when they accuse somebody else of doing something they are 10 times more guilty of. But, apparently, that guilt didn't exist. If it did, it was short lived and didn't prevent even my friend from Maryland from coming to the floor today and again launching the inappropriate statement that it is Republicans that keep bringing us to the brink. I realize that it was our own Speaker that went on the Jay Leno show and said that Republicans shut down the government, but, you know, sometimes he is engaged in activity that keeps him from realizing exactly what is going on. But if you go back and look at the actual Record, September 29, September 30 of 2013, the record is very clear. There was one party in Congress that was trying to be responsible, that was trying to rein in spending, that was trying not to shut the government down, was compromising against ourselves repeatedly, and it was the Republican Party. We didn't get a lot of help across the aisle. In fact, what we had from the other end of the hall here, from Majority Leader Reid, was an all-out effort to shut down the government. And that is a fact as to who shut down the government. If anyone bothers to go look, yes, you will see we had a spending bill that gave Harry Reid everything he and the President wanted plus some. It was hard for a guy like me to vote for that. But, yes, in the initial bill, we defunded ObamaCare. Why wouldn't we? We know. We hear from constituents how bad that is, how they have lost their insurance, lost their doctor, they can't get the medicine they did before. Instead of paying $105 now they are paying $100 for prescriptions. We are hearing all those things. So why wouldn't we vote to do what we believe is best for our constituents? We did. We voted to fund everything they wanted plus some, but defund ObamaCare. Yes, that is what we passed first. Harry Reid would not bring it to the floor for a vote. So we compromised against ourselves because there was no negotiating. I believe--and, Mr. Speaker, this is just my thought--it sure seemed there was plenty of evidence to show that Harry Reid believed the conventional wisdom here in Washington, that if there were a shutdown of the government, no matter who did it, no matter that the Democrats themselves did everything they could to shut the government down, it wouldn't matter because their friends in the mainstream media would blame the Republicans. Who knew we would have a Republican Speaker that didn't know the fact and would say, yeah, Republicans shut it down, but they knew the mainstream media would blame Republicans. And they needed a shutdown because the conventional wisdom here in Washington at the time--still is--if there is a shutdown, then mainstream media blames Republicans and then the Democrats get the majority back in the House or, if they didn't have it, as they don't have it now, they get it back in the Senate. So they have been wanting a shutdown. You can go back to, I think, March of 2011. Harry Reid would not yield at all when we got down to a midnight deadline, and our Speaker came in and basically caved just a few months after we took the majority in March of 2011 and said we have got to avoid a shutdown at all costs. So around 10:30, 11:00, Republicans completely caved and gave Harry Reid what he wanted because he wanted a shutdown. You could say that is bringing us to the brink for political purposes. That is exactly what it is. So we came back, and we bet against ourselves. We passed a bill that gave Harry Reid everything he and the President wanted plus some, but we put in a provision, not the complete defunding of ObamaCare, but just suspending it for a year. I frankly thought that, because there were Democrats on the ropes in the Senate, if they wouldn't even vote on that or voted against it, they would lose their seats. I bet you could find some Senators who lost their seats in that next election that wish they had taken that vote and voted to postpone ObamaCare for a year. They probably would have kept their seats. But they didn't. They didn't even get to vote on that bill on the Senate floor. I thought it was unwise. Having negotiated big deals back in Texas, I thought it was unwise to bet against ourselves yet again when the Senate would not even engage in any kind of compromise. They wanted a shutdown. But, no, we had another vote. We said: Okay, Harry Reid. We will give you everything you want, President Obama everything he wants, plus a little bit. But since the President suspended the employer mandate illegally, unconstitutionally, for a year, how about if we suspend the individual mandate for a year? That was not allowed to come to the floor for a vote. Even though we were doing everything we could to keep the government going, Harry Reid wanted a shutdown, would not allow a vote. I thought, at 1:10 a.m., when our leadership came here to the floor on October 1 and asked us to vote for folks to be conferees that would work all night and avoid a shutdown by 8 a.m., capitulate where they have to, but get a deal done, that it was really capitulation and that Harry Reid would be crazy not to go ahead and appoint Senate conferees so they could have a deal by 8 a.m., the country would never realize there was even an 8-hour shutdown. But Harry Reid would not even allow the Senate to vote to have conferees to work out a deal by 8 a.m. He didn't. So Harry Reid forced the shutdown, no doubt with encouragement of the President. Sure enough, the mainstream media blamed Republicans. That cost Republicans tremendously in the election the following year. Oh, wait. No, it didn't, actually. The American people actually, I think, ended up appreciating that Republicans were standing for the idea that we are on the brink because of all the decades of overspending, except for that little interlude in the 1990s when the Republicans took the majority here in Congress. As part of their Contract With America, they became very responsible, and they pushed through budgets that Bill Clinton didn't want to sign, but eventually took credit for, that actually brought the budget into alignment. Other than that, Democrats have brought us to the brink repeatedly, and Harry Reid and President Obama continue to do that. So who would have ever dreamed in 2006 that here in 2015 we would have Democrats crowing over the fact that: Gee, we may get our deficit in 1 year down to $400 billion, $500 billion. Wow, won't that be great? Because, once again, their memories have not allowed them to accuse themselves back during those days when they were blaming Republicans for running up a $160 billion or so deficit in one year. Now, my friend from Maryland also pointed out that Dave Camp had a tax reform bill, and in his words it was dismissed out of hand because it was not paid for. My friend, Mr. Hoyer, is such a smart guy. I admire him. I love talking to him. He has got a great sense of humor. But he is wrong on that. It happens. He is wrong. It was not dismissed out of hand because it was not paid for. It was dismissed out of hand because it was not a significant enough reform in the right direction of what we need: a complete simplification of the Tax Code that so many of us are asking for. I like a flat tax. Others like a fair tax. I sure can see their point. It has got some good points. But let's have that debate. Throw out the Internal Revenue Code. Throw out the tens of thousands of pages that have been added in interpretation and regulation. Let's have something that Americans can simply fill out easily where they don't even need an accountant, something like a flat tax: the more you make, the more you pay. Dave Camp's tax reform bill--and I just love the guy. He is a fine American. We were so thrilled when he was able to beat back the cancer that overtook him. He is a great guy. He worked hard. But, in my estimation, his problem on his tax reform bill was he tried to placate too many Democrats, which kept it from being as good as I and many others thought it should be. So I appreciate the points being made here on the floor, but I thought it called out for a little elaboration and correction. Now, we also had a hearing yesterday that went on for a number of hours. It was an important hearing, and I know there were people that kept talking about, gee, there have been seven hearings or eight hearings or whatever there have been, or seven or eight investigations. None of them had the documentation that is now only starting to be obtained from a recalcitrant State Department and Obama administration. Yeah, it is easy to get an okay when you don't turn over the documents that show lie after lie, misrepresentation. Yeah, it is easy. All you do is just not let anybody see the documentation for the misrepresentation that came. Now, my staff says you have got to read this article, and it uses the L word a number of times--the L word being ``lie.'' It uses that a number of times. But I don't want to even come close to getting in trouble for violating any rule here on the House floor because the content is too important. So we will just say, instead of lies, we will just call them unfortunate wrong statements, so with that substitution. Then I find out, gee, it is my friend, Ben Shapiro, that wrote this. I hope that doesn't hurt Ben that I mentioned we are friends. But anyway, ``Hillary Clinton's 5 Biggest Unfortunate Mistaken Representations in Her Benghazi Testimony,'' in the article, it points out: ``Hillary, as always, is the poor, put-upon victim of a vast right- wing conspiracy.'' Mr. Speaker, I know you will remember back in the nineties when her husband was accused of doing things that it turned out he really did; instead of making clear her husband had made mistakes--and she had made it clear there would be no more--she went after the women. She had a war on women and went after any women who actually accused her husband of impropriety, and even used and coined that phrase, ``this vast rightwing conspiracy'' during her war on women who just tried to point out what her husband had done to them. But the article says: ``She set up a private email server and deleted relevant emails from it for purely political reasons; she pressed for a pointless invasion of Libya for political reasons, chortled at its conquest for political reasons, watched it descend into chaos while doing nothing for political reasons, and then allowed her ambassador to twist in the Libyan tornado without proper security for political reasons; finally, she covered up that disaster by lying about its causes for political reasons. But those who ask questions about such matters are partisan politicians.'' The article goes on further down: ``Hillary kept claiming that she cared deeply about her good friend Chris Stevens. At one point, she whipped out her pre-planned righteous indignation to complain, `I would imagine I've thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I've lost more sleep than all of you put together.' This was salt in the wound, the equivalent of Johnny Cochran lamenting his worries over the fate of Nicole Brown Simpson.'' I have got to inject at this point, I was there for a good bit of the hearing because a friend, a real patriot, she served in the Navy, that is where she met a guy named Ty Woods, one of the greatest American patriots this country could ever hope to have as a son. She married Ty. They had even had another child right before--not just months before-- he found himself in Benghazi. And another former Navy SEAL, like Ty, that cared more about his country and serving others than his own self-interests came and joined him, as I understand, when Ty was getting ready to go to the roof to try to protect those people. He knew David Ubben, with the State Department, was formerly an Army Ranger, and David went with him, grabbed an M4. They went to the roof to protect the Americans that were in the building beneath them. I will never forget reading the name of the first Navy SEAL that this administration released, and the story--obviously, this language had to come from this administration--it struck me as such a slap in the face to this former Navy SEAL, because I have known so many Navy SEALs and former Navy SEALs. I am proud of every one I have known--well, maybe except for a former Governor, who is creating chaos for Chris Kyle's widow. But when I read the words, after Glen Doherty, a former Navy SEAL, contractor, and it said, from the information released from this administration, that he died while taking cover. Now, I didn't know anything about Benghazi at that point, about the specifics, but I knew enough Navy SEALs to know, if he died, it wasn't taking cover. It was probably giving cover or maybe moving to get a better vantage from which to defend other people. Those are the Navy SEALs I know, generally speaking. Then we find out he didn't die taking cover. Ty Woods didn't die taking cover. I don't know if that was the State Department's release to try to minimize how heroic those people were because they violated orders and said: We are going to help those people that are penned down in Benghazi. Those are heroes. I know my friend, Duncan Hunter, had moved to try to get a Congressional Medal of Honor. I think it is time we take those back up. Though they weren't in the military, they deserve the highest honor this body could give them posthumously. And David Ubben, I never brought it up during the months that he had asked me not to after I met him on one of my visits out to Bethesda, or Walter Reed combined with it now. But he was up there on the roof. There were three mortars that came in. The first one missed. Having been in the Army 4 years, I know they used to teach us, if there are three mortars or three artillery rounds coming in, then you better move before the fourth one hits, because they will use those three to triangulate your position, and the fourth one will be on top of your head. So when I heard David said there had been three mortars come in, I said: Oh, so they bracketed you. He said: Oh, no, no, no. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. We knew as soon as the first one missed, they knew exactly where our position was. It was short, but there was no question, they knew exactly at what angle to put that mortar so that it would come down on our heads. And that's what the second and third mortar did. There was no bracketing. They knew their position. Pre-planned attack. They had the coordination perfectly, exactly where that mortar needed to be. The first one was short, as he said, but the second and third were right on top of their targets. And that is what killed Glen and Ty as they were giving cover--not taking cover, giving cover. In fact, I heard yesterday--it wasn't in the hearing, wasn't said in the hearing, but I heard from somebody who had talked to a Delta Force individual. When he heard the name Ty Woods, he said: You know, that guy, he and Glen took on a whole city. They didn't care. They were going to protect the United States civil servants that were in the building that they went to the roof of, and they gave their lives giving them cover. David Ubben lost much of his right leg, but, after many surgeries, hopefully it is near the point now of being usable. He is a hero. This administration didn't even want to give him the right credit. And then to have them--and Ben Shapiro points it out here. They used this video, and even to say to any one of the survivors, as Mrs. Clinton did: We will get the guy that did the video. They didn't care about the video. I have talked to many of the family members of those who were killed. They didn't care about the guy that did the video. They cared about the people that killed their loved one. Dorothy Woods is a hero. So, for Mrs. Clinton to sit there and arrogantly, condescendingly say to the panel, ``I've lost more sleep than all of you put together,'' with Dorothy Woods sitting right there, was just another dagger to her heart because she still loses sleep. Let's go back to that night. We still don't know what Hillary Clinton and our President did specifically after they found out. Either the President was preparing for his fundraiser in Las Vegas the next day, or he just went to bed, with his personal Ambassador to Libya missing. Either they went to bed or did something far more embarrassing for them not to be willing to tell us what they did that night. I mean, I was only in the Army 4 years, but I cannot imagine what kind of mind will allow itself to go to sleep or just blow things off and move on to another project when somebody working directly for you has either been killed, you know people have been killed, and the Ambassador is missing in a hostile area that, turns out, begged for security, additional security 600 times. This is disgraceful, just disgraceful. They had nothing to do with the video. My friend Jim Jordan said: You tell the American people one thing; you tell your family an entirely different story. And, in fact, she told the Egyptian Prime Minister the day after the attacks: We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest. As I recall, not only was that simply not true, she took State Department funds, as I understand it, and spent tens of thousands of dollars on a commercial to facilitate and to perpetuate this lie, and spent that in foreign Muslim countries, running it on their televisions to say we had nothing to do with the video. Mr. Speaker, I meant to get into the fact that I haven't changed my vote for Speaker. I am still for Dan Webster. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I come before this honorable House with an issue that has been rather heartbreaking for so many of us for so long now: In The Middle East, the cradle of Christianity, where it started 2,000 years ago based on the Judeo principles from thousands of years before that, there has been a massive onslaught. Against Jews, it has been going on for some time; but especially in the last several years, it has become untenable for Christians. In an article by Debra Heine, September 20, my sister's birthday, she wrote about ``2,000 Years of Christian Civilization Destroyed on Obama's Watch.'' It says this in the article: ``The Islamic State has managed to destroy two thousand years of Christian civilizations in the Middle East in just a couple of years, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters noted on `The O'Reilly Factor' last week. And he placed the blame squarely on President Obama's . . . policy. ``ISIS has been spreading across the Middle East like a plague of locusts, and as they have spread, they have targeted religious minorities, particularly Christians, for destruction. In Syria, tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians have been attacked and displaced. ``They are forgotten refugees.'' Mr. Speaker, I have met with Christians and Christian leaders from Syria, and the stories they tell and the horrors they talk about, the inhumanity to man that is being inflicted upon Christians in that area is just untenable. It is unconscionable. Women--talk about a war on women. If they are Christian women, it is absolutely horrendous. I ran into the same problem in meeting with family members in Nigeria of girls that were kidnapped by radical Islamists, Boko Haram. That was in Nigeria. I would be interested to talk to the President of Togo tomorrow. I have been to his country before. I have seen the poverty, and I have seen the affliction. But in the Middle East, Christians are not even allowed to be in the area where the Apostle Paul walked. The Apostle Paul planted churches where Christian missionaries were, along the times right after Jesus resurrected. Right in the early days of the church, churches were planted. And now, while the United States is said to be the sole superpower, Christians are being persecuted in greater numbers around the world than ever in history. If there is a God who loves Christians, loves all people but has an affinity for Jews and Christians, then there would have to be a price for any nation that allows this to go on. This article goes on: A Catholic priest who visited Kurdish Iraq last fall described the wounded souls of the Christians who had taken refuge there. They had been forced from their homes in northern Iraq in the summer of 2014. `` `Without question, we are talking about genocide here. Genocide is not only when the people are killed, but also when the soul of a people is destroyed. And that is what is happening in Iraq now,' said Fr. Andrzej Halemba, head of Aid to the Church in Need's Middle East section, said October 28. `It is the most tragic thing that I have ever experienced.' '' This is from the priest. The priest goes on: `` `I have seen people who have been deeply wounded in their soul. In the various crises in this world, I have often seen people who have lost everything. But in Iraq, there are Christians who have had to leave everything and take flight three or four times. They can see no light at the end of the tunnel.' ``Last spring, hundreds of Assyrian Christians fled to Lebanon after ISIS jihadists stormed their villages in Syria's northeastern province of Hasakeh. ``Members of Lebanon's Assyrian community did their best to welcome the new refugees, but the displacement had left them traumatized. `` `The villages of Khabur are empty now, there is no one left except some fighters,' lamented Chorbishop Yatron Koliana, as he oversaw the distribution at his diocese.'' Mr. Speaker, this is tragic. Christian villages 2,000 years old, destroyed. Nothing left but some people trying to fight for just the ground that they are fighting on that once was their home. `` `Our people have experienced a great tragedy in Syria' . . . `They are depressed. Some of them have chronic illnesses. Their lives are difficult.' `` `How can we be comfortable living on aid?' asked 50-year-old Simaan, who fled his village Tal Hormuz. ``He railed against what he called international indifference to the plight of Assyrians under attack by ISIS in Syria and neighboring Iraq. `` `The whole world, from the U.N. to the United States and Russia, is responsible' . . . `They' ''--talking about ISIS--`` `have destroyed our whole civilization . . . and the world is watching.' '' We hear so many sad stories. Christians are being persecuted on our watch, and we are not talking enough about it. The President certainly isn't. He tells us that we need to take tens or hundreds of thousands of more Muslim refugees. What about the Christians and the massive extermination of churches in the Middle East under this administration? We get it. The Constitution gives the President wide authority and wide latitude on foreign policy. Congress has some say because we can appropriate or defund what the President is doing--if we have leadership with courage to do that. This article goes on: ``In July, 4,000 more Assyrian Christian families were among the 120,000 people who fled Hasakah to escape ISIS forces who had entered the city looking to carry out a mass ethno- religious slaughter. ``Fleeing Muslim persecution, Christian refugees are often targeted and persecuted anew by fleeing Muslim refugees.'' The International Business Times reported: ``Italian police have arrested 15 Muslim immigrants in Palermo, for allegedly having thrown Christian refugees off the rubber boat that was taking them to Italy after a fight for `religious reasons,' according to media reports. ``Those arrested--from Mali, Guinea and Ivory Coast--were part of a group of 100 that were rescued off the Libyan coast by the Italian coast guard. ``The Archbishop of Canterbury, recently warned British Prime Minister David Cameron that his government's refugee policy was discriminating against Christians because Christians are not among the refugees being helped in U.N. camps. They are not in the U.N. camps because they fear persecution from radicalized Muslim refugees. ``The Most Reverend Justin Welby reportedly met the Prime Minister earlier this month with concerns that Christians in Syria will be largely excluded from the 20,000 refugees due to come to the U.K. over the next 5 years. ``The government, in line with European Union policy, is committed to taking in refugees from U.N. camps in Syria and neighboring countries. It cannot discriminate in favor of any one religious group. But the Archbishop has raised concerns that Christians have avoided refugee camps because of fears of persecution from rogue Islamist groups operating inside refugee camps. ``In a speech in the House of Lords last Monday, Archbishop Welby said that, `within the camps there is significant intimidation and radicalization, and many particularly of the Christian population who have been forced to flee are unable to be in the camps.' ``He went on: `What is the government's policy of reaching out to those who are not actually in the camps?' '' Lord Carey, who wrote in the Telegraph about his concern of the plight of Christians, wrote: `` `The frustration for those of us who have been calling for compassion for Syrian victims for many months is that the Christian community is yet again left at the bottom of the heap.' `` `Mr. Cameron's policy inadvertently discriminates against the very Christian communities most victimized by the inhuman butchers of the so-called Islamic State.' `` `Christians are not to be found in the U.N. camps, because they have been attacked and targeted by Islamists and driven from them. They are seeking refuge in private homes, church buildings, and with neighbors and family.' ``Refugees who want to come to the United States will also be required to apply through the U.N. `` `A combination of European cowardice and awful American foreign policy has led to a mass Muslim migration that will affect the whole world.' '' ``Lt. Col. Ralph Peters disagreed somewhat with that assessment.'' He said, `` `I think you were much, much too soft on President Obama and a bit too hard on the E.U.' . . .`If America doesn't lead, it doesn't happen.' '' He went on to say: `` `Just look at a map of the Middle East . . . on George W. Bush's last day in office. There is broad peace across the Middle East and North Africa, Iraq was finally convalescing, and . . . Obama promptly, to please his America-hating base, abandons Iraq, backs the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, gets rid of Qaddafi without a plan for what goes after, threatens Assad . . . then does nothing, doesn't listen to the intelligence community when for years they are telling him about the Islamic State coming--then tries to blame the intelligence community, and launches feckless airstrikes. The combination of his fecklessness and cowardice, his rhetorical bravado and utter incompetence are responsible.' '' He goes on: `` `No. Listen to this. Two thousand years of Christian civilization destroyed on his watch . . . That's on Obama. When America doesn't lead, nothing happens.' '' Well, it is not just on President Obama. I am sure he is mainly responsible for our foreign policy, but we need to stand up to the President. When Iran is out there saying, as they have in the last couple of weeks, that with the $100 billion, $150 billion that President Obama is going to see to Iran getting quickly, and the hundreds of billions of dollars that will flow in subsequent years, they were already announcing they are going to increase their support for Hamas and Hezbollah as they kill Americans, continue to kill Christians, and continue to kill moderate Muslims who are not radicalized, at what point is Congress responsible for not standing up to the President? Mr. Speaker, I would submit that one very important point has come, and right now it is up to the United States Senate to have a backbone on behalf of the millions that stand to be persecuted and killed by the money that they are going to allow to go to Iran by failing to do what they could to stop this world atrocity. There is no question in reasonable, intelligent minds that the Iran deal is a treaty. It is a treaty as anticipated by the Founders. It is a treaty as referred to in the Constitution, article II, section 2, second paragraph, and it requires a vote of two-thirds of the Senate present to go along with it in order for it to be effective. Yes, the Corker bill tried to amend the Constitution. Legislation can't amend the Constitution. Once it is clear--as it is--that the Iran deal is a treaty, then we need desperately to have people in the Senate stand up--some of them have--make clear this is a treaty; it requires two-thirds in order to approve it or it is not ratified, it is not effective, and the President is not allowed to release the 100-plus billion, $150 billion to Iran that will be used for atrocities, especially toward America, toward Christians, toward moderate nonradicalized Muslims, toward Jews, and toward Israel. There is a real responsibility here. It may take courage--I am sure it will--for the Senate to stand up and the Senate majority leader to stand up and say: Sorry, Mr. President, the Iran deal is a treaty. We have listed in our letter to the majority leader in the Senate some of the bases, it is spelled out in our resolution that we filed and talked about here on the floor, it is clearly a treaty. The end of John Quincy Adams' oral argument that capped a couple of days of oral argument in the case can be found online. He was afraid that if he did not do an adequate job as a lawyer, those Africans that he was representing that had been captured by other Africans and sold into slavery, sent to the Caribbean, and then put on the Spanish ship the Amistad, they were able to overtake and overpower the Spanish and take charge of the ship. They landed in America. The lawsuit was over whether or not they were free Africans or whether they were property of the Spanish. I can understand the fear that John Quincy Adams must have had as he stood downstairs in the Old Supreme Court Chamber. One of the Justices had died one night during oral argument, not while he was actually arguing. That final day he knew if he didn't do an adequate job, his clients would wear chains and their children would wear chains all because he didn't do an adequate job as their lawyer. So he finished his oral argument by calling the names of Justices of the Supreme Court who had been on the Supreme Court but had passed away. Chief Justice, Justices, he knew them. He called their names: The Justice that started this case, where is he? Where are all these Justices? Where is the Solicitor General that argued before me? This is around 1821. This is in the late 1830s. He is now arguing in the Supreme Court in their Chamber downstairs. After going through all the Supreme Court Justices that had passed away, he finishes basically by saying they have gone to meet their Judge, and the biggest question is when they met their Maker, their Judge, did they hear the words: ``Well done, good and faithful servant?'' It is very clear, send a message to the Supreme Court. Think about it, Justices. If you died tonight like the other Judge just died in the last couple of nights and you go to meet your Maker, do you want the last thing you did to be having sent wonderful African people out in chains that they would wear and their children would wear--possibly their children and their children--all because you didn't do the right thing as a judge? He won the case, as well he should. I can't help but wonder if John Quincy Adams were here today arguing on behalf of Christian communities all over the Middle East that have been destroyed, refugees that have been sent running, Jews that can no longer populate the area because of threats and violence upon them, and he saw that the United States that he had been President of and was in the House of Representatives after having been President, if he would not be mortified, if he would not challenge us today: Do we want to meet our Maker, our Judge, and we saw and heard about the plight of Christians, Jews, and moderate Muslims around the Middle East and North Africa just being slaughtered, women being raped and torn apart, brutalized in unthinkable ways, and we turned a blind eye to that and said that we are going to bring in massive numbers of refugees who are Muslim, 72 percent of which are male, and we have been told by radicals that they are going to make sure that there are people that want to kill and destroy more Christians, more Jews, more of America, and we are going to bring them in without proper vetting--because you can't vet them properly--all while Christians, Jews, and moderate Muslims are being slaughtered and overrun all through the Middle East as we are credited with being the superpower in the world? Yet, also, these last few days, the U.N.--where we pay far more than anybody even comes close to in order to keep it going as they continue to become more and more anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli, and anti-American-- they entertain the largest supporter of terrorism in the world, the leader of Iran. And he says this in part, the leader of Iran, the President Rouhani: If we did not have U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the United States' unwarranted support for the inhumane actions of the Zionist regime against the oppressed nation of Palestine, today the terrorists would not have an excuse for the justification of their crimes. I am taking this from an article by Julian Hattem, 9-28-15, which is interesting. We have heard that throughout the United States, if we just hadn't gone into Iraq, if we hadn't gone into Afghanistan, if we hadn't gone into Afghanistan with the 300 Americans that we embedded-- about 300--we embedded and let the Afghans destroy the Taliban by February of 2002, then we became an overwhelming occupying force in Afghanistan--but at least by February of 2002, if we hadn't gone in and helped them, the Taliban would still be completely controlling Afghanistan. That is the way it is. Now, we went astray when we became occupiers, and this President has only tripled the number of deaths in Afghanistan, even though the war is supposedly over. Over tripled the number of American deaths, even though the real war was during President Bush, because of this President's rules of engagement and disastrous foreign policy. But think about it. This is the head, the President of Iran. He is telling the UN and the world that, if it weren't for the United States' invasion in Afghanistan and in Iraq, there wouldn't be any American terrorists. Mr. Speaker, why in the world should the U.N. listen to a man that is this big a liar or is this stupid? Because you don't have to be all that bright to understand September 11 of 2001 happened before we sent 300 or so into Afghanistan to help them destroy the Taliban and before we went in and took out a brutal dictator in Iraq. In fact, the planning of 9-11-2001 happened during the Clinton administration on President Clinton's watch. And for people that are fools or liars like Rouhani and they don't know or are just lying about it, during the Clinton administration, President Clinton's policies were to run and help persecuted Muslims whenever we found them around the world. And while we were busy helping Muslims, Western Asia, Eastern Europe, wherever we could help them, they were planning the attack on New York City and Washington, D.C., and hoping to wipe out the entire American government here in Washington, D.C. And but for the heroic act of people on a plane that took it down in Pennsylvania, they may well have. We don't need to hear any of these lies about, oh, if America just hadn't invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, regardless of whether you agree with what President Bush ordered with Iraq, the fact is 9/11 was a terrorist attack before and so was the attack on the USS Cole and so were the attacks on our embassies around the world during the 1990s and so was the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 that apparently had some planning back during the former President Bush's administration. And that was an administration that stopped a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, who had raided another Muslim country, and we went in and helped Kuwait get their country back. We went to help the Muslims. And how do they reward us? To plan an attack to try to take down the World Trade Centers in '93. It is very clear Christianity, Judaism, Israel, all were under attack and so was America. And our enemies can't believe how stupid Americans are because we are going to reward the biggest supporter of terrorism in the world--Iran--with $100 to $150 billion that they are already saying they are going to use to help Hamas and Hezbollah kill more Christians, more Jews, help wipe out Israel, help the attack against the Great Satan, the United States. Mr. Speaker, it is time for people in the United States Government to stand up and help correct the wayward policies of this administration. We start by having the United States Senate in one voice say the Iranian deal is a treaty and we are taking a vote on it and cloture is set aside with 51 votes. And they won't get the two-thirds to ratify it. It will not become effective against the United States. And thank God we will then have stopped the continued persecution of Christians, moderate Muslims, Jews, Israelis, and the United States, instead of rewarding them and helping them take us out. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, there are those who say you shouldn't shut down the government. We are not going to shut down the government. We are going to fund the government. And I am hoping that we are actually going to fund women's health with more money than what the President or the Democrats were pushing for to be given to Planned Parenthood. In the history of Planned Parenthood, they have never, ever, ever done one mammogram because they are not certified to do mammograms. They bring people in and refer them out to get their mammograms. I have been married for 37 years to the same woman, and I have three daughters. I want good women's health care. Let's fund it, but let's give it directly to the facilities that will do the mammograms and not send it to Planned Parenthood for them to take their cut. When you pay for the rent and the utilities and you know there is criminal activity going on, you are an accessory. Congress should not be an accessory.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, actually, there are some people that it is more of a pleasure to work in this House with than others. Congressman Buck, you are one of those that it is a real honor and privilege to work with. Mr. Speaker, I am back here on the floor to talk about one of the most important issues, maybe the most important issue, of this Congress, recent Congresses, maybe future Congresses, because it has to do with whether or not the Republican-marked majority in the Senate are going to just appear to oppose the Iranian agreement or if they are going to stop it. The Corker-Cardin bill was done, I have no reason to doubt, with the best of intentions. I didn't vote for it. I could see what I was afraid was coming, and it is what has come. But those that voted for it had a legitimate basis for doing so. Because the President of the United States, Barack Obama, had said this is basically an executive agreement, he doesn't need the Senate's vote. And that is true if it is not a treaty. We had the Secretary of State say that he was--and he said it-- negotiating a nonbinding agreement. Those were the kind of statements from which the Corker-Cardin bill was based. And so that bill gave the House and the Senate each a vote on something that was considered to be a nonbinding executive agreement with Iran. However, after the U.N. Security Council voted on it, finally Congress got to see the so-called nonbinding agreement. After the U.N. voted on it, then we keep getting messages about: Gee, you cannot stop this. Because to stop it would put us in breach of the agreement. How can we be in breach of a nonbinding agreement? Well, the truth came out once we had a chance to read the so-called Iranian deal, Iranian agreement. It is a treaty. There is no question it is a treaty. I don't care whose law you go under. You cannot amend a treaty with anything that falls short of being a treaty itself. It is just like here in the House. You can't amend legislation unless you amend it with other legislation, although we have bureaucracies like the EPA and others who have just decided to go off on their own and start legislating against the clear and expressed intent of Congress. But it is not lawful. They are acting unlawfully. They are acting outside the bounds of the Constitution. The President has usurped power that is not his. He has done so in setting out an amnesty. He spoke it, as any good monarch would, and then the Secretary of Homeland Security put it into memos. They effectively changed law from what it was on naturalization and immigration passed by Congress, signed by the President. They just changed it with the President speaking it and then Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, doing memos. Well, that is one thing. It does damage to this country. But when we are talking about an agreement which, under most everybody's description, will allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, there is disagreement whether that will be later or sooner. But it seems to be almost unanimous that, yes, it is going to allow them to get nukes, but it will be later. Others of us know. They have cheated on every agreement they have entered since 1979, when they came into existence as mullahs running a country. Yes, President Carter welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini as a man of peace--a peace of destruction--but they have broken every international agreement in which they participated in since 1979. They have never been made to account or held accountable for taking our embassy employees hostage for over a year. For heaven's sake, it is bad enough the administration negotiated with a man that is being charged with desertion in return for giving radical Islamists, murderers, and terrorists back to continue to create havoc and kill Americans and others, but now we are going to give them the ability to have an agreement. Well, they have broken every agreement they have entered for 36 years. But this one, we think we in the Obama administration are so special that this time they are really not going to breach this agreement, despite the fact that the Ayatollah himself and the other top leaders still say death to America, they still say they are plotting the destruction or overthrow of Israel, they still say they are plotting the destruction of the United States. And all the time they are doing that, we have people who didn't learn enough from the disastrous agreement with North Korea that gave the North Koreans nuclear weapons. Now they are trying the same strategy. If we are nice enough and let them have the wherewithal to produce nuclear weapons, then maybe they really won't do that. And if they do, it will be years down the road. But you don't even know in Congress what the side deals are between the IAEA and Iran. So where it says that this will hold Iran at bay for 8 years in this provision or until the IAEA states the broader conclusion that Iran's nuclear material is being used for peaceful purposes, whichever is sooner, we don't even know what the deal between the IAEA and Iran is. I heard recently the IAEA has been quoted as saying that, as far as they know, their nuclear material is being used for peaceful purposes, but they haven't been allowed into the material facilities for years. As soon as this administration were to decide the agreement is finalized and ratified, the IAEA could turn right around and say: As far as we know, it is peaceful materials, but we haven't been allowed into the military facilities where they are doing the real nuclear weapons work. They are going to give us samples, and the samples they gave us showed they are using it for peaceful purposes. So surely they wouldn't lie, even though they have lied about every international agreement they have entered since 1979. For some reason, these people think they wouldn't lie now. I am telling you that this Iranian agreement has to be stopped, and the United States voters gave the United States Senate over to a majority of Republicans in the last elections. As our great President has said, elections have consequences. Now, he acts like the elections, where we got a majority, Republicans got a majority in the House, that that was not meaningful, and he acts like the voters giving the majority to Republicans in the Senate, that didn't count, but it does count. The only way it is going to count, it is going to have consequences, is if the Senate stands up--and I would encourage them, their leaders. Mr. Speaker, I don't think I am asking too much to ask that the Republican leadership have the same or close to the same amount of backbone that Harry Reid did when he suspended cloture on confirmations. I hope that is not too much to ask. Just have Harry Reid--just almost as much as Harry Reid has stood up for things he believes in, we are asking the Senate to, the Republicans in the Senate, please stand up, almost as much as Harry Reid did when he set aside cloture on confirmations. Now, a number of us sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader McConnell, down the hall, imploring him to treat the Iranian agreement as the treaty it is because, if they just go along with the fiction that the Iranian agreement does fall under the Corker bill and, therefore, it takes two-thirds to disapprove in the Senate, two-thirds to disapprove in the House, well, here in the House, we have said the Corker bill doesn't apply at this time for sure. I would submit it doesn't apply at all. All we have to do is rely on our founding document, the Constitution, ratified, made effective 1789, written 1787, and this article II, section 2, second paragraph, beginning of the paragraph says the President ``shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.'' The last thing the President wants is for us to follow the Constitution here because the Iranian agreement is a treaty. It modifies other treaties, like the nonproliferation treaty. It also, as was specifically not contemplated in the Corker bill, it deals with allowing them to have weapons, purchase weapons, armaments, that was not supposed to be in the Iranian agreement. It also addresses the sanctions allowing them to have over $100 billion, to $150 billion, so that they can use it for terrorist activity, so that more Americans and Israeli, Jews, Christians, can be terrorized and killed--and I shouldn't fail to mention moderate Muslims. They are at every bit as much risk--or more--as Christians and Jews because the first people they go after are Muslims that disagree with them. It is clearly a treaty. All the Senate has to do is take the example that Harry Reid gave when he set aside cloture with 51 Democratic votes, so they could get through a whole bunch of judges confirmed. It must have been in hopes that they could have judges get to the bench that might have been stopped otherwise, judges like Justice Ginsburg and Justice Kagan, who violated the law by not disqualifying themselves on the same-sex marriage ruling. They performed same-sex marriages. The law requires them to, therefore, disqualify themselves because, by their actions and words, they made clear they thought it was constitutional. Their impartiality was beyond being reasonably questioned. They didn't have any impartiality. I guess, when Leader Reid, at the time, got 51 Democrats to remove cloture as a problem for their confirmations, he probably did get some more judges confirmed. This is so much more serious--even then that, as serious as that is-- because, if the Senate does not treat the Iranian agreement as the treaty it is, then the President's already saying he is going to treat it as being approved--ratified is what that means. When our U.S. administration treats the Iranian agreement as ratified, then when our dear friend in the Middle East, Israel, defends itself, then the United States, under Commander in Chief Barack Obama, will have to be at war with Israel for defending themselves against Iran continuing to move toward nuclear weapons. Now, it is possible, I don't think it will happen, but it is possible that squeamish in Israel could win the day by saying--when we said ``never again'' all those years, we meant never again, except we are going to let Iran have nukes and let them nuke us once they have nuclear weapons. Other than the millions of Jews that may be killed with nuclear weapons Iran has, other than that, we mean never again, but I don't think that is what a majority of Israelis are going to accept. I have such complete respect for Prime Minister Netanyahu--I disagree with him on issues; that is what friends often do. I don't believe when Prime Minister Netanyahu has said never again, he meant never again after the Iranians nuke Israeli cities. They are going to have to do something. If the Senate, with the Republican majority, does not stand up and have a ratification vote on this treaty, the Iranian treaty, and in that vote, fail to get the two-thirds to concur, as our Constitution requires, then President Obama is going to go forward as if it were ratified; and the consequences in the Middle East and to the United States will be absolutely devastating. As bad as the leadership is in North Korea, they are not radical Islamists. The leaders in North Korea do not advocate or at least haven't been advocating suicide bombers. They haven't been advocating that, if you die blowing up lots of innocent people in Israel or the United States, you go to paradise. They don't advocate that in North Korea. This is 10 times--many, many, many times worse than North Korea having nukes. This is something that would be written about in history books years from now. If the Republican majority in the Senate doesn't stand up, it will be written that, when Iran got nuclear weapons-- because the Republicans that were given the majority in the Senate, they were given the majority in the House, but they refused to use their majority to vote on ratification of what was clearly a treaty. As a result, the President was able to move forward as if it had been ratified. Iran got nuclear weapons, and millions of people died, and it changed the course of Western civilization forever. If they have their way, we are headed for a dark age with nukes leading the way, and that will be on our heads. The blood from all those lost lives, all of the murders, all of the bombings, all of those that occur with the tens of billions of dollars that the Obama administration gives to Iran, all of those will not just be on President Obama's head, they will be on all of our heads because America gave us the majority in the House and Senate, and we didn't have the nerve to stop this horrendous, disastrous treaty with Iran. Mr. Speaker, I even made an offer. I asked if the House just pass my resolution, which laid out this path for stopping this Iranian treaty, but it ended with the Senate calling a vote on ratification as a treaty the Iranian agreement is, and they fail to get two-thirds, then it can't be enforced in any United States court or any court anywhere around the world because our Constitution requires ratification, the Senate took the vote, and they did not ratify it. I said, if the Senate follows up the House and does that, I won't run again. I know that will make a lot of people happy, especially those that I am making very angry tonight with what I have got to say. I know that there is a debate on, so probably most Republicans that are politically plugged in are watching the debate. I skipped some of the debate. I cannot avoid taking the opportunity, at least one more time, to beg our Republicans in the Senate to stop this disaster to Western civilization so this chapter never has to be written about the demise of Western civilization going back to when the Senate refused to use their power to stop a horrendous treaty that gave to the biggest supporter of terrorism all of the instrumentality, all of the money they needed to set Western civilization back 100 years. Here I am, Mr. Speaker. I promised you I wasn't going to take 30 minutes, but I had to take the time to beg the Senate: Use your majority; 51 votes is all it takes. Yes, I know, I know, the President normally sends things over that get on the executive calendar, and that is when you vote on things for the President. I get that. The President sent over this agreement. Now, he didn't call it a treaty, but you should recognize it is a treaty. You have got one of two ways to bring it to the floor. One is you can say it is part of the executive calendar. He sent it over to us, and under our own procedure, we set that for a vote, but it is a treaty, so we are treating it as a treaty, and it is made through the executive calendar. I get that. You can do that in the Senate. Mr. Speaker, they could. Or the other way is just to say: Look, the Constitution does not require that the President send us a treaty and say, Here is a treaty, now ratify it, for us to take a vote on a treaty on whether or not to ratify it. That is not in the Constitution. It is in the Senate rules. What does it take to suspend the Senate rules? It is 51 votes, and the Senate has that many votes that know how bad this deal is. So either call it on the Executive Calendar because the President submitted, or suspend both the calendar rule and the cloture rule with 51 votes and then bring it to the floor of the Senate for a vote where you won't get the two-thirds needed to ratify it and we can all proclaim, ``This Iranian treaty is dead.'' Then we don't risk defending Iran against our friend Israel in the beginning of a war that should never have to start. The alternative to this horrendous treaty is not war. As Michael Oren once said, the day Iran believes the United States is a credible threat to attack its nuclear facilities is the day they stop enriching uranium. And he is exactly right. I hope he doesn't mind my saying that, but he was exactly right. War is not inevitable. It doesn't need to be. We don't need it. But if this Iranian treaty is not stopped by the Senate, it is going to be a war that we don't see coming--at least our leaders don't--and millions die. It doesn't have to happen. I hope and pray it won't. I urge the Senate to do the right thing: Have a vote on ratification, stop the Iranian treaty, and then we can get a better deal. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, a wonderful tribute from a man that knows courage. He has it, he has shown it, and he knows what it is to stand up for what he believes in. A lot of great examples have served in this body, and that is what we need right now. We face as important an issue as we have had, certainly since I have been here, and possibly decades. A deal with the devil is what it comes down to, a deal with what Ronald Reagan would say is evil. It makes the evil empire of the Soviet Union pale in comparison to the evil that Iran's leaders have perpetuated, and this administration has done a deal with them. Chairman Ed Royce has eloquently pointed out that Iran has violated every international agreement they have entered since 1979. So wouldn't it fill the definition of insanity if another deal is entered by what used to be the lone superpower with the one and only country in existence right now in the world that has broken every agreement it has entered since 1979? If someone were standing back as a historian and looking at what is going on right now and were totally objective, he or she would probably say: Well, it looks like the fools running the United States are going to get what they deserve. They have made a deal with sheer evil. These evil leaders have lied. They have broken every agreement they have ever entered, and these fools running the United States are going to get what they deserve. It is going to happen again. People are going to die in greater numbers than ever before. What grieves me more than anything is what seems to be the idea of some in the House and Senate that: Gee, since Iran is going to get nuclear weapons, surely they are going to cheat. They are going to get them. They are going to get them sooner rather than later. This deal is not going to allow anybody to stop them. So what is important here is to provide political cover to Republicans. We can do that by acting like we are fighting real hard in the House, acting like we are fighting real hard in the Senate. Then we lose. Then when Iran gets nukes and kills hundreds of thousands or millions of people, you say: See, we told you. We did what we could. But the trouble is that is not good enough because lives in this country and in the nation of Israel are all at stake here. We have been told that: Gee, the 15 nations heading up the U.N. Security Council, they have agreed; so, it should be binding against the United States. That argument was attempted to be made by the Secretary of State and the President himself, that: Gee, we have to go along because the U.N. has already voted. Well, yeah, that would be true if there were not something called the United States Constitution under which our first President under the Constitution took office in 1789. And since this has been in effect--our U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2, second paragraph, has been in effect, he, talking about the President, shall have power by and with the advice and consent of the Senate to make treatise, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur. It is very clear. And we also know it is very clear that you cannot have a treaty like the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The international agreement that was lauded by so many over such a long period of time--you cannot amend an international treaty like that unless it is with another treaty. You cannot amend that with an executive agreement. You cannot amend that with an agreement that is nonbinding. Therefore, it is exceedingly clear that what the President and Secretary Kerry and Wendy Sherman that did such a good job helping with the North Korea deal so they got nuclear weapons--they say it is not a treaty. But absolutely it is a treaty. So if we are going to uphold our oath of office, we have to acknowledge that this is a treaty and implore the Senate to announce that, even though the President has not submitted this treaty to them for ratification under Article II, since it is a treaty, they had the power to bring it up. And, yes, there is a convenient Senate rule called cloture that Harry Reid actually suspended numerous times in the matter of some confirmations so they could get judges on the bench that would uphold whatever interpretation of the Constitution this administration cared to bring before them. But there is a time when the Republicans in the Senate must say: You know what. This is too important to let a gaggle of minority Senators from the minority party keep us from voting on the most important bill of our time. We are not going to let a rule that we make, that we put in place, that we can suspend, keep us from having a vote on the most important bill of our time, the treaty with Iran. So the Senate can suspend, as Harry Reid did, the cloture rule with a vote of 51 Senators. Once they have the 51 that suspend cloture in this Iranian treaty, then bring the treaty to the floor for a ratification vote, it will not get two-thirds. And then, once and for all time, it will be clear to everyone, except perhaps the President and Secretary Kerry--it will be very clear, as it is to constitutional law professors I have talked to--that we are not bound by the Iranian treaty with the only country in the world that has broken every international agreement they have had since 1979. The resolution that I had filed with numerous great cosponsors, it points out that the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015--that is the Corker-Cardin bill--does not apply to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action regarding Iran--that is the Iran treaty--submitted to Congress on July 19, 2015, because the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is a treaty, and pursuant to article II of the United States Constitution, the Senate must give its advice and consent to ratification if the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is to be effective and binding upon the United States. It also states--because it is a fact--on March 11, 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry, in describing the administration's nuclear negotiations with Iran, clearly stated that it was ``not negotiating a legally binding plan'' with Iran, and therefore, it does not have to be submitted to Congress. If it were not legally binding, then, no, Secretary Kerry and the President do not have to submit it to Congress; but the President and the Secretary of State have already given this facade, this charade away because they have already said: Well, gee, if Congress doesn't go along with it, we will be in breach of the agreement because the U.N. has already voted on it. A-ha. You said it wasn't legally binding what you were negotiating, and now, you are telling us that is not true. I mean, it conjures up memories of other statements like: ``If you like your insurance, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep it.'' It conjures up sermons by this administration and this President how we had to take out Qadhafi out of Libya for stability of the area, that it would make the place so much better in North Africa. We saw what happened. Qadhafi would not have been removed without President Obama bombing on behalf of the rebels that were infused with al Qaeda that would end up ultimately attacking our consulate in Benghazi and killing four Americans. We now see, as I did last week when I was in north Africa, this President, this State Department have created massive instability across north Africa. It has put tens of millions of people in fear. What do you think this crazy migration started from? It started from the policies of this President in declaring that something that they love calling the Arab Spring but ended up becoming a cold, harsh killer of a winter was going to be helped along by the United States. Some in north Africa reminded me of our President's statement that President Mubarak had to go. The President declared he has to go. He interfered with what was going on in Egypt. He interfered with an ally, not a great guy at all. He created massive instability that allowed the Muslim Brother Morsi to take over. Yes, he was elected. Yes, as confirmed again this past week, there were plenty of fraudulent votes. He alleged to have 12 million or so votes. After a year as President of usurping the power under the Constitution, totally disregarding the Constitution, taking powers that weren't his, moving to become dictator, over 30 million Egyptians rose up, went to the street. These were moderate Muslims; these were secularists, Christians, Jews that came to the streets and said, with one accord, one heart, one voice: We don't want radical Islamists running Egypt. Our Muslim friends in Afghanistan in the Northern Alliance said the same thing, We don't want radical Islamists running Afghanistan, but the Egyptian people did it on their own. It may have been the greatest peaceful--it was the greatest peaceful uprising in the history of man. There have never been that many people peacefully demonstrating. What was not peaceful was the Muslim Brotherhood because they want the world caliphate. They thought they were on the way with the help of President Obama. They were taking Libya. They felt like they were taking Algeria, Tunisia, and come on around north Africa and the Middle East, they were on their way to that world caliphate they were promising they would have, the same world caliphate that the former adviser to the Secretary of Homeland Security here in the United States tweeted out after another American had his head cut off that the international caliphate was inevitable, Americans just needed to get used to the idea, a man that I had been warning was a Muslim Brother and was a top adviser in this administration and needed to be out. Finally, after he made it clear to even the most dense in this administration that he was in favor of an international caliphate, finally, they had to let him finish his term and let him go by retiring. Well, the President is still getting that kind of advice, and the truth is that it is a disaster. It has done so much damage to this country. Those who say this is a great deal are the same people that said we had to remove Qadhafi. It created massive instability. It created a situation where you have so many deaths as people try to flee from north Africa. Where do you think they are coming from? What do you think laid the groundwork for this? It was this President's intervention in Libya, this President's meddling in Egypt. We heard the President himself say on national television-- international television because ISIS heard it, that ISIS is junior varsity, they are JV. I played on the JV, and I played on the varsity, and there is a vast difference. ISIS knew there was a difference. This President did not. He said, if we could just arm the vetted moderate Syrian rebels, that everything would be fine in Syria. We have seen that he has created more chaos. He has created tens of thousands of more refugees because of his failed policies born out of massive ignorance--or somebody that is advising him is not ignorant, they know what they are doing--but it is setting the Middle East and north Africa, figuratively speaking, on fire and, in many cases, literally speaking. We heard over and over of instances where the President's vetted moderate Syrian rebels that we spent millions and millions and millions of dollars training and arming, they kept having all that incredibly upgraded equipment taken over by ISIS. I have been over there. I met with the Kurdish commanders. They are begging for up-armored equipment so they can at least have some way to stay on the battlefield with ISIS that this President has armed through the so-called vetted Syrian moderate rebels. Well, we heard tonight that Madeleine Albright thinks this is a good deal. Well, wow, I feel so much better that Secretary Albright that said, along with Wendy Sherman, that helped negotiate the deal with Iran, that, Gee, the key to keeping North Korea from having nuclear weapons is to give them nuclear power plants, give them the nuclear material they need because they are willing to promise, in writing, that they won't develop nuclear material or nuclear weapons if we will do all that for them. Well, that didn't work out so well. People advising this President that were part of the advice--and we hear Madeleine Albright thinks that is a good deal? Then if there was any doubt in any Republican's mind--I don't think there is--but any doubt in any Republican's mind just how horrendous this deal is, that had to be completely dispelled tonight when we heard from our friend on the Democratic side that Hank Paulson, the former Secretary of the Treasury, thinks this is the thing to do. This is the guy that gave us TARP. This is the guy that said when we asked, Well, if you don't know how much mortgage-backed securities are worth, how do you know you need $700 billion, and in our conference call with other Republicans, the answer to that question was, Well, we just needed a really big number. That is the guy that we are told, tonight, is assuring us that this deal with Iran is the way to go. On August 6, 2015, White House press secretary Josh Earnest, at a White House press briefing, stated: ``We don't need Congress to approve this Iran nuclear deal.'' On July 28, 2015, Secretary Kerry, at a hearing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, stated the reason why the Iran nuclear agreement is not considered a treaty is because it has become physically impossible to pass a treaty through the United States Senate anymore. It has become impossible to schedule. It has become impossible to pass. Two days after Secretary Kerry testified to that, that that was the reason he didn't bring this treaty as a treaty, well, the United States formally ratified the amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material when Henry S. Ensher, the Department of State's Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, delivered the United States' instruments of ratification to the IAEA. Whoops--it turns out Secretary Kerry's testimony was not true. I don't think he lied. I just think he was that ignorant. On June 4, 2015, less than 2 months before Secretary Kerry testified it had become physically impossible for the Senate to ratify treaties, he stated the Department of State is ``preparing the instruments of ratification of several important treaties'' and that he wants ``to personally thank the U.S. Congress for their efforts on the implementing legislation for the nuclear securities treaties.'' Well, I don't think he was lying or ignorant. I just think he forgot that he had just thanked us for passing these treaties--or at least the Senate for ratifying these treaties. He forgot that he had just done that when he said it is physically impossible to ratify a treaty anymore. May 7, 2015, the Senate held a vote on the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, commonly referred to as the Corker-Cardin bill, in which every Senator voted on that bill with the understanding that the Iran nuclear agreement was an executive agreement, not a treaty, and the United States' sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile program would remain in place. The Corker-Cardin bill actually states: It is the sense of Congress that United States sanctions on Iran for ballistic missiles will remain in place under an agreement related to the nuclear program of Iran that includes the United States. The Corker-Cardin bill was intended as a review of the application of statutory sanctions against only Iran's nuclear program. The Corker- Cardin bill prescribes a process for congressional review only of ``agreements with Iran related to the nuclear program of Iran.'' Under subsection (b) and (c) of section 135 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as added by the Corker-Cardin bill, lawmakers may resolve to approve, disapprove, or take no action on nuclear agreements with Iran. Under section 135(d) of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as added by the Corker-Cardin bill, it calls for ``congressional oversight of Iranian compliance with nuclear agreements.'' It is pretty easy to recall for those of us with a half-decent memory that actually, under the bill, the treaty being proposed by this administration, the Iran treaty actually doesn't allow Congress oversight. Not only does it not allow Congress the oversight, it says the IAEA is going to have oversight, not Congress, and we don't even know the arrangement that has been negotiated or is being negotiated between the IAEA and Iran. But we do know this. My friends across the aisle said in debate today--and I was amazed that this statement would be made--that if Iran cheats, we will know it. That was a quote from one of my friends across the aisle. Well, if Iran cheats, we won't know it. We don't even know if the IAEA has a decent agreement. But we know this. Iran has made clear they will not allow the IAEA inspectors to go to their military sites. They made that clear in every communication they have had since this treaty came forward. And then we find out, actually, Iran has said: We are going to provide samples to you. Oh, so, as my Democratic friend said, if Iran cheats, we will know it. What that means is when Iran cheats, they are going to bring samples from the area they won't let the IAEA inspect and say: Here are the samples that let you know we cheated, because our Democratic friends in Congress knew if we cheated, we would let you know we are cheating. Seriously? Is that how naive this government has gotten? We were told in debate by a Democratic friend that it would have been a mistake to demand the release of U.S. hostages. Oh, yeah, that would have been a mistake, that before we enter any negotiation, they have to show good faith by releasing the hostages so that we know that they are a country with whom we can deal? Of course that was the right thing to do. And $100 billion to $150 billion going to Iran under this deal is more money than we have given or used to help Israel with since Israel came into being again in the late 1940s. And yet we are going to give it not to our close ally Israel. We are going to give it to their worst enemy that has even said this past week that they were plotting to overthrow Israel. This week they have said that they are plotting to overthrow Israel, and they are coming for the United States. I have heard people, I believe, Mr. Speaker, wrongly compare Neville Chamberlain to the current situation that the President and Secretary Kerry have proposed. I would submit that that is a grossly unfair comparison for Neville Chamberlain, because at the time Neville Chamberlain had that paper that he got Hitler to sign that caused him to say, ``This is peace for our time''--a lot of papers messed it up and said ``peace in our time''; he said ``peace for our time''--at the time Chamberlain did that, Hitler had not violated every international agreement he had entered. He hadn't done that. Iran has. At the time Neville Chamberlain said, ``This is peace for our time,'' Hitler had not been saying, ``Death to England''; ``death to France''; ``death to the countries in Europe.'' He had not been saying that. Iranian leaders have been, including the Ayatollah. At the time Neville Chamberlain said this agreement means ``peace for our time,'' Hitler had not publicly stated he was plotting the overthrow of any of the countries in the area. Iran has. They are plotting the overthrow of Israel and to take out the United States. Our friend Tom Cole said in the Rules Committee this week that he was concerned that this agreement will cause an arms race, and he is exactly right. That was confirmed again this past week as I was over there talking to people that know in the Egyptian Government. The Saudis are already working a deal to buy nukes. The Saudis know they have got to have them because Iran is going to have them under this Iranian treaty if we don't stop the treaty. You stop the treaty by the Senate voting on it as a treaty and not getting to two-thirds. That means it is not binding against the United States. Other countries in the area--Jordan, Egypt, even Libya, Lebanon, and all these countries--know they are going to have to have nukes if they are going to survive the area. It is going to create the proliferation of nuclear weapons like there has never been in the world. And as someone said, mutually assured destruction with Russia was a deterrent, but with Iran, it is an incentive. This is such a dangerous time. But the Iranian treaty amends the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in several places. You can't amend a treaty unless you are amending it with another treaty. This is a treaty the Senate needs to step up and say it is a treaty. And for heaven's sake, this is far more important a situation where we suspend the cloture rule so that we do not allow a small segment of radicals supporting Iran to keep us from voting on the most important bill of our time. And then vote, and when you don't get two-thirds it is not ratified. What the House is doing this week is actually not a bad strategy for the House because, as a treaty, we don't get a vote. But if we stand idly by and let the President treat it as if it has been ratified, then Israel will have to defend itself. Under the Iranian treaty, we will have to defend Iran, not Israel, and the unthinkable will happen, and that is the United States and Iran will be on the same side against Israel. We have got to stop that. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, we have heard some try to demean the importance of what the chairman and others here on the Republican side are trying to do right now. The fact is that, when we talk about the information that has not been provided about the outside agreements with the IAEA, it is not only material, relevant, but it is also critical. I am reading directly from the Iran deal. Eight years after the adoption date or when the IAEA has reached the broader conclusion that all nuclear material in Iran remains in peaceful activities, whichever is earlier--it goes on to talk about sanctions that will be lifted. Another place, same thing, or when the IAEA has reached the broader conclusion that all nuclear material in Iran remains in peaceful activities, then another protocol is lifted. If we don't know what the agreement is with the IAEA, then these years mean nothing. The IAEA, I have already heard say, as far as it knows, nuclear material is being used for peaceful purposes. That would mean that these years are worthless. We have got to have the secret agreements.