Louie Gohmert

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, there is a deeply troubling matter that has come before our government here in the United States. Once again, Iran is at the bottom of it. They have shown since 1979, since President Carter basically was pushing for the ouster of the Shah, we turned on an ally who was not a good man necessarily, but we--well, actually, President Carter--hailed the Ayatollah Khomeini as a man of peace. What has been wrought--to use the words of Samuel F. B. Morse--has been years and years of terrorism in the hands of violent radical Islamic jihadists. Then we get word that Iran has named one of the people involved in the original hostage-taking incident in Tehran in 1979 as its Ambassador to the U.N. At this time, I want to recognize my very good friend from Colorado (Mr. Lamborn), who has really taken the lead in an appropriate response from our House.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I just want to chime in in agreement with the last thing that my colleague across the aisle said. He said let's do for the next generation what the last generation did for us. Mr. Speaker, I think that is incredibly important. What a great thing my Democratic friend said, because every generation before ours has tried to live within its means. This generation that is in power in this Congress is the first generation that continues to spend not only children's money, but grandchildren's and great-grandchildren's money. We have accumulated such debt that our children are not only not going to rise up and call us blessed, they are going to rise up and swear at our names. Because this is the generation that has felt that it was so incredibly important that we needed to put our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in hock just so we would not have to quit spending money so irresponsibly. I could not agree more with that last statement. Let's do for the next generation what the last generation did for us. Thank goodness I have a friend on the other side saying that. He pointed out the verse of Scripture: To whom much is given, much is required. We have been given much. We have been blessed more than any nation in the history of the world. We have got more freedoms than Solomon's Israel could have ever dreamed of and more individual assets than any nation in history could have dreamed of. We have been given much. As a result, this generation has become so self-centered, so narcicisstic, so self-indulgent, so obese that we want to engorge ourselves at the expense of future generations. Let me just say I haven't decided what I am going to do about the Ryan budget. I am still going through it. Paul Ryan and I have had some very severe disagreements during my 9-plus years here, but I know this: he does not want to hurt future generations. He wants to do for the next generation what the last generation did for us. And we will not--we cannot--do that if we are spending money so irresponsibly that generations to follow us will be paying the debts and the interest on those debts without getting a dime of the benefits that we engorged ourselves with in this generation. So it is time to be responsible. I disagree with something my colleague said when he said, basically, the Ryan bill destroys Medicare as we know it. I don't know if I like what Paul Ryan has been able to do about Medicare. I would have handled it differently. It is one of the things I am struggling with. What he is trying to do is what Democrats should have done for 40 years before the Republicans took office. They had the majority before the 1994 election. They put us on a course to destroying Social Security. Since the sixties, after Medicare was passed, we have been on a course to bankrupt Medicare so our children and grandchildren will have nothing for themselves because we spent it all on ourselves. So I don't know if it was the best way to do it, but I know what Paul Ryan was trying to do. He is trying to make sure that we protect our seniors and we make sure that we can have future generations have some of the same protections. And from what I was reading, he is trying to do that. Some changes would come in Social Security, from what I am reading, but not for anybody 56 or older. Anyway, I am still making up my mind on the bill, but I know what Paul Ryan was trying to do. He was trying to do an honorable thing for future generations, just like my colleague said he felt we should be doing. I also want to get to another topic today that has been so much on the minds and hearts of people all over the country this week as Killeen, Fort Hood, Texas, has had another mass shooting. The first one was in the civilian sector in a cafeteria. That caused Texas to rise up and pass a concealed-carry permit law, which was driven by a woman whose parents were killed there. She had to put her gun in the glove compartment and couldn't take it in. She could have saved her parents had we had a concealed-carry permit law in place at the time of that mass shooting. I have had people ask, as I know my friend from Georgia has: What have you guys in Congress done since the last shooting at Fort Hood to protect our soldiers? What has the Commander in Chief done to protect the military members under his command? Under this Commander in Chief, we saw in Afghanistan that in half the time he had twice as many fatalities--even more than that in injuries-- of our military members in Afghanistan. That is half the time of the Bush administration and about twice as many fatalities. We have seen what happened there. But what about right here? After the first Fort Hood shooting, it was an outrage--as it should be to every military member and everybody that understands anything about the military--when this Commander in Chief allowed the incident to be called workplace violence when, clearly, Nidal Hasan, according to all the witnesses, stood up, made the universal cry that a radical Islamist terrorist makes, claiming, in essence, that he is going to kill innocent people on behalf of a god who likes people like him to kill innocent people, just as they think there is a god that liked planes being flown into buildings to kill thousands of innocent men, women, and children. That is a god I don't know, and I know that is a god I will never meet. But I want to talk at this time about what we should be doing for our soldiers. I have got a bill that legislative counsel is working on right now. We will be filing it early next week. We anticipate calling it the Save Our Soldiers bill, or SOS. They have been crying ``SOS.'' It is just that nobody in their highest chain of command has listened. Well, Congress is listening and we are going to get something done, if there are enough people down the hall in the Senate who worry about their election next November that they will actually take this bill up and do something to protect our soldiers, other than lip service. Lip service doesn't really protect you against an incoming round. At this point, I would yield to my dear friend from South Carolina (Mr. Duncan).

Mr. GOHMERT. The gentleman from South Carolina has just made clear why I am such a big fan of his. And, yes, I was in the Army. By naming the bill ``Save our Soldiers,'' I am not saying the Army is more important, because it is, generically speaking, inclusive of our soldiers, sailors, marines, Coast Guard, and everybody that is in the uniformed military. That is who it pertains to. But we wanted a title that people would remember and think of all of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, Coast Guard, people that are protecting us. The greatest irony still comes back to this: we have military members who are qualified to fire tank weapons. We have got military members--I think the largest thing I fired in the Army was a 105 Howitzer. But we have a massive number of weapons, rocket-propelled grenades of different kinds, SAM missiles. We have got all kinds of things that our military are able to utilize. We have got airmen who operate airplanes that drop thousands and thousands of pounds of bombs, and yet for too long political correctness has said, even though they may fire 105 Howitzers or some of the most modern weapons we have, tanks, drop thousands of pounds of bombs, we probably can't trust them to carry a little pistol. Yeah, they may be on a ship. They may fire rounds that are bigger than I am, but, gee, we might not better trust them with a pistol. And what we have seen over and over in the tragedies here in the United States, the norm is for a criminal who wants to shoot and hurt and kill people to go to a gun-free area. That is why the shooter in the theater in Colorado could have gone to much closer theaters, but those theaters did not restrict the right to have weapons in them, so they probably would have had someone who could have pulled a gun very quickly and ended the rampage. From the reports of what happened this week at Fort Hood, when the hero, female military member pulled her weapon, he took his own life rather than risk ending up in a wheelchair or worse. He wasn't going to take chances on firing at anyone else once someone had a weapon leveled on him. We have lost enough lives in gun-free zones. It is time to allow the law-abiding, the qualified, to protect themselves, to save our military. I hope that our leadership will allow the bill to be brought to the floor here because I know good and well, if we bring it to the floor here--I am open to amendments, suggestions--we get a bill like that passed here, then the pressure will be on the Senate. Yes, I know Senator Reid protects his Democratic Members all he can. If there is a bill that his Members would get defeated for voting against, then he just doesn't bring it to the floor for a vote. Protecting his Members from having to cast a vote for a bill that is a good bill or against a bill that would get them defeated because it was a good bill, he just keeps it from going to the floor. We have seen that in so many of the bills we have passed here from the House that would have an immediate helpful effect on our economy. It would have had an immediate helpful effect on our government. For heaven's sake, I know the mainstream media will never get this right. Even our own Speaker didn't understand what happened that day, apparently. But last fall, our House of Representatives--a majority, at least--believed that ObamaCare was very detrimental to this Nation, to its economy, to people's health. So what did we do? We did what we believed, and we voted to completely defund ObamaCare. That is what we believed. That was the vote we did first. But understanding that in Washington you have to have two Houses pass a bill, we passed a compromise measure that simply said, look, obviously ObamaCare is not ready for prime time. You have had going on 4 years to get ready, and it is not ready for prime time, so we are offering you a gift, Democrats in the Senate and Democrats in the House. We are offering a gift. Our compromise is this: we passed the bill. It said let's suspend ObamaCare for a year. Clearly, it is not ready. Many people will be hurt. That was an incredible gift of a compromise to the Senate Democrats and the House Democrats and even to the President himself. But our Democratic friends down the hall had bought in to the mainstream conventional wisdom that if the Democrats could cause a shutdown, the mainstream media would protect them by blaming Republicans, and then that would help them win the majority in the House in the next election. So Harry Reid refused to even bring that gift that Republicans in the House offered to the Senate Democrats, the President, and House Democrats. He wouldn't accept it. I bet there are times that their Democrats in the House and Senate really wish they had accepted our offer of compromise and said: Okay. All right. We don't want to do it; but, okay, we will suspend ObamaCare for a year. There were some in our party that felt like, gosh, if we suspend it for a year, who knows what will happen in a year from now. Maybe we are better off letting America find out how bad it is so then we can get it repealed outright. But we knew the suffering that would ensue once that bill fully kicked in, and how could we want people to suffer like we knew they would once ObamaCare kicked in? But Harry Reid wouldn't bring that to the floor. I didn't think it was wise when they rejected a clear offer of compromise down the hall by refusing to even bring it to the floor for a vote. We funded everything Harry Reid wanted. We just had a 1-year suspension on ObamaCare. So then we came back and said, okay, the President has unconstitutionally signed an executive order that put off the business mandate for a year, so we will offer what was an incredible compromise. We will agree to postpone the individual mandate in a legal manner--not unconstitutional, but a legal manner--and we will go ahead and put in writing that the business mandate would be suspended for a year, and that would protect the President's order. Harry Reid wouldn't bring it to the floor for a vote. He knew good and well if he brought either one of our compromise bills to the floor that there would be Democrats that would either have to vote for the bill or, for sure, lose their Senate seat come November--Democrats in the Senate, that is. So he protected them and didn't allow that to come to the floor. And his Members seemed quite happy to just sit back and let Harry Reid try to protect them by not allowing them to vote. Then, at 1:10 a.m. on October 1, when it was clear to us here in the House that Harry Reid was not going to even accept a gift of a 1-year suspension or the following compromise offered gift of a year suspension of the individual mandate and a year suspension of the business mandate, then we did what was almost unthinkable--bid against ourselves for the third time. We voted to approve conferees from the House. These are people who would have reached an agreement if the Senate had bothered to even appoint conferees or negotiators. It was understood here, if Harry Reid will go ahead and appoint Senate conferees, they can start immediately, and before even anybody is required to be at work at 8 a.m., we could probably have a deal worked out, get it passed, and people would have never known there was a shutdown for 8 hours. But Harry Reid was so determined to follow through on what was the mainstream conventional wisdom: Harry, if you can just cause a shutdown, the Republicans will be blamed--they didn't even know the Speaker would accept the blame because he didn't know what we did that day--but they will be assessed the blame by the mainstream media, and then you can get the majority back. So he forced a shutdown. Actually, he tried to do that a few years ago, and our leadership and the Republican side capitulated at 10:30 the night that the shutdown was going to begin at 12 midnight. Probably, if the truth be known, the Democratic Leader, Harry Reid, may have hoped that he would have a shutdown at midnight that night because he consistently said: It is my way or nothing, my way or nothing, no compromise whatsoever. Of course, our leadership came back and said: Well, we actually cut $26 billion. And it turned out we did no such thing. But, anyway, we came so close to a shutdown that night. But some of us still have enough faith in the American people that we believe a majority will ferret out the truth, come to the truth, regardless of what the mainstream media says, regardless of what anybody on television who gets a thrill up their leg when they see certain Democrats, no matter what they say, eventually the majority of the American people will eventually come to the truth and that will save our Nation. So, clearly, there are areas in which we agree, as my Democrat friend indicated when he said let's do for the next generation what the last generation did for us. That is all I want to try to do. Let's give our children and grandchildren a nation where they have the freedoms that we have enjoyed, where they have the privacy that we used to enjoy, where they don't have $20 trillion of debt from the prior generation because the prior generation was so selfish, so self-centered that they didn't even care to clean up the waste, fraud, and abuse in the government. I read an article that talked in terms of the massive amount of fraud just at the State Department. Here is an article, April 4, today, from The Fiscal Times, Brianna Ehley: The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors. In a special ``management alert'' made public Thursday, the State Department's inspector general, Steve Linick, warned ``significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at the Department has led to billions,'' that is with a b, ``billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years.'' Mr. Speaker, by the way, that is while this President was in office. The unaccountability is dramatic. Future generations will have to pay for the waste, fraud, and abuse that not only will we not clean up, but we borrowed money in our children and grandchildren's name to lavish on massive, wasteful, fraudulent government, abusive government, because we couldn't control ourselves. There is going to be a price to pay for the irresponsibility of this government in the decades ahead. If we do not get this country turned around and back on a responsible track, then there will be books written about the rise and fall of the United States of America. And our generation will be blamed, and the line of my Democratic friend will be at the forefront in that book, that this generation refused to do for the next generation what was done for us. Mr. Speaker, I had hoped--that is why I am still here. That is why I have run again. I have hoped that we are going to get back on track, that we will be able to rein in the government, that at some point, Harry Reid will be willing to bring bills to the floor that we have sent down there passed by a majority here in the House that do things like get the economy going, that allow businesses to start hiring again without worry about just irresponsibility and overregulation. We need to be providing privacy for Americans that began deteriorating in prior administrations before this but that this administration has taken to an all-time high with regard to individual privacy information taken away and held onto by the government. People want to know, gee, well just what does the government have that would be invasive of our privacy? Well, for one thing, we now know the NSA has logs of every call that every American makes. That is outrageous. It is unnecessary. And we can't go into classified briefings. But, Mr. Speaker, I stand here to tell you that even though there are some in our intelligence that have said, gee, if we had not gathered every log of every phone call ever made, we may not have stopped a subway bombing, like we did. And from the evidence that we know from the public arena, it was clear--it sure seemed to me, as a former prosecutor and judge and chief justice--that there was plenty of evidence for an officer of the law--Federal, State, or local--to go before a judge and swear this information and get a warrant from the judge and go after an individual that was about to try to set off a bomb. It looked like, to me, from just what is available in the public, that there was plenty of information that would have allowed a judge to sign a warrant. So not only are they getting every log of every phone call made, but we are not quite sure, even now, whether some are right to say, well, actually, they could pull the actual discussions of the conversation, or whether they couldn't. But we also know that under ObamaCare, the Federal Government gets every record of everyone's most personal and private health insurance. And for so long in this body, I have heard my friends on this side of the aisle complain about, we don't want government in the bedroom. And then without a single Republican vote, they passed the ObamaCare bill that not only put the government in your bedroom, but it is in your bathroom, your kitchen, your living room, your garage. It is with your Realtor. It is just everywhere you can imagine. The government is there. That is with the health care law and the other bills that the Democrats have passed while they were in the majority. So if it is not enough that the Federal Government--and, of course, we have to give credit to General Electric, because I understand they have got the contract to gather this information. So it is not just the government. It is cronies of this administration in private business that also have this information. Anyway, the government has got your most private secrets, health care-wise. They know everybody you are calling. There is information in the public press that says they can comb through every email you send. And then we find out that one of the bills that the Democrat majority in the House and Senate passed was involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That group has apparently decided that in order to protect us, they need to gather everybody's credit card, debit card information just so they can protect us. So there we go. The Federal Government has got all of your medical information. They have got all of your credit card and debit card information, purchases, loans, all of those kinds of things. You have got regulators, Federal regulators going into banks, checking on your loans and things like that. I mean, is there anything left in the way of privacy that this Federal Government has not already co-opted and gotten access to without a warrant? I mean, I was very serious, and the judges I knew were very serious about making sure there was probable cause because that is the constitutional requirement. You have to have probable cause before you get a warrant. And there were times when law officers would come to me in my judge's chambers or on the bench during a recess or at my home at 2 or 3 a.m., and I would read the affidavit and the officer would swear to the information. But if it wasn't adequate, I, along with other judges I know would say, I am sorry. Probable cause is not here. There are not enough facts provided to justify going after somebody's private property or private information. I can't sign the warrant. And there were times where officers would say, give us another chance, a little more time. We see your point. We will be back. And they would come back later, and then you go, okay, well, yes, this is probable cause. Certainly this raises probable cause. Sometimes they wouldn't be able to get it. But that was the constitutional standard by which law officers and courts are supposed to live. And now, in the name of a little security, we have to stand there--I can't even count the number of times I have had to stand there with my arms open and be groped by Federal agents. Sometimes you can tell they have got a little bit of a grudge. And we giving that away because we want security. Okay. We want health care, so let's let the government know every one of our most intimate private secrets in our health care records. And, you know, we want to make sure that some bank doesn't take advantage of us. Heaven forbid the investment banks take any more advantage of us. Man, the investments banks brought us to the brink of ruin. And by the way, for those who don't know, Mr. Speaker, Wall Street executives and their spouses donate four-to-one for Democrats over Republicans. I know people think it is the Republicans that have all the rich people on their side. People are beginning to find out, it is middle class. And actually, poor people in America are coming to the conclusion, wait a minute. We have one party that keeps us dependent upon the government for the little crumbs it throws out. We have got another party over here that wants us to be president of the company, president of the country. They want us to have the best education possible. And they want us to be able to speak the language of this country that gets you to be president of the country, of the corporation, of the business, English. And gee, they want us to have a job. They don't want us to be beholden and having to beg the government all the time. They want us to be able to have independence and have our own money and make our own decisions. Gee, maybe, as a poor person, I would be better off supporting the Republican Party. As I taught a combined sociology class at Texas College not that long ago--Texas College started as an African American college and is still prominently African American. But I am telling you, the African Americans in that class had some good ideas about how we straighten up welfare, how we get people more independent, how we get our government on track. Those are folks that had some good ideas. And some of the things that they proposed, like a work requirement, well, that was put on when Republicans took the majority back in January of '95. And then this President stripped that out--I would say unconstitutionally. He did it with an executive order. He changed a law that was duly passed and signed into law by Bill Clinton. And it ended up being one of his most proud accomplishments because what we saw after the requirement for work for welfare was, for the first time in 30 years, single moms' incomes, when adjusted for inflation, started going up. It had been flatlined for about 30 years, since aid to dependent children had started, since welfare had started, single moms' incomes, adjusted for inflation, had been flatlined for about 30 years. And once the Gingrich-led Republican revolution took hold and a work requirement was put on for the first time in 30 years, single moms had more take-home money. They had more freedom. They had more autonomy away from the government, where they didn't have to be dependent on the government. They could make their own decisions without some law being passed by Congress to send them another crumb. It gave them money, more than they had ever had, and it gave them independence. That is what the people I know want for women, for African Americans, for everyone in America, for Hispanic Americans, for anyone, Asian Americans. It is what we want for Americans. One of the things that meant so much to me on 9/12/2001, as we stood out there, hundreds--maybe thousands of people in our town of Tyler-- and I know it was going on in Longview. And actually, all over east Texas it was going on. People came out to the town square, and they prayed together. And no court would have had the nerve to tell America on 9/12, you have no right to pray in public. They wouldn't have had the right to say that on 9/12/2001. So we were praying together as citizens out there. We sang hymns. We sang ``Amazing Grace'' and ``God Bless America.'' What is ``God Bless America''? It is a prayer asking for God's blessing to continue on this country. We held hands as we sang ``God Bless America.'' People by the millions did this all over America on 9/12/ 2001. And as I looked around among all of those people, my American friends, there was not a hyphenated American in the group. We had all national religions, races, genders. I mean, we had all kinds of groups represented, but we were Americans. There were no Euro Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Irish Americans, Hispanic Americans. There were Americans. And we stood together. We prayed together. We sang together. And there was no mess out there. We were together, one people. As that great speech given by Senator Barack Obama pointed out, there shouldn't be a red America and a blue America; a white America and a black America. There ought to be one America. But we have gotten into the politics of division. That is why the Senate refused to take up our repeated efforts at compromise to avoid shutting down the government. The politics of division, that is why the World War II memorial was barricaded and massive man- and woman-hours were utilized to try to keep veterans out of the Iwo Jima Memorial for Marines, the World War II Memorial. I couldn't believe they had the nerve to put up a barrier to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial. And I, along with my friend from Mississippi, opened up the streets, opened up the barriers there at the World War II Memorial. I clipped the yellow ribbon, the crime scene tape. I moved one barricade. He moved the other. The World War II vets came in. Steve King, a few others, and I went out to the marine memorial, and we opened up that memorial. We checked out their other days and made sure that that was accessible. One day, it turned out there was a bus of World War II veterans that had come out there. There was a big, plastic barricade shaped like the concrete barricades. This was plastic, and it was filled with water, a wooden barricade there. And that bus of World War II veterans--many of them that had fought in the Philippines, that had been to the top of the mountain and seen that flag be planted up there--their bus ran over that barricade. I was so proud of them. I ran up there, and I got up there, they were already out there enjoying the memorial. These people that saw that flag that was planted there now were enjoying the memorial to them. When we came back by, we were going to stop at the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. They had barricades up all up there. And I was so proud that there were a slew of Americans. Most were African Americans. I was so proud of them. They didn't let the barricades stop them. They climbed right over and went in to that wonderful memorial. And I didn't even have to stop to open that up. They had already taken care it. That is the politics of division: try to make people suffer and blame it on the other party. We need to be back to being Americans, not hyphenated, not Republican Americans, Democrat Americans, Tea Party Americans. For Heaven's sake, the Tea Party, all it means and all it is is a group who have been Taxed Enough Already. They are tired of the waste, fraud, and abuse in government. They want a responsible government so that we can do, as my Democratic friend said just a while ago that he wanted for us to do, for the next generation what the last generation did for us. That is all the Tea Party wants. They are not racist. They got all races in the meetings I go to. They just want us to be responsible and do for the next generation what the last one did for us. So, Mr. Speaker, I hope that we will be able to bring Save Our Soldiers to the floor. I know back 3 years ago, when I was concerned that our military was going to be used as a pawn to try to get people to vote for a bad continuing resolution under the threat that, gee, if you don't vote for this bad continuing resolution, our military members won't be paid, so shame on you. Well, I was furious that our military members had to even have it cross their minds that they might not get paid. So I filed a bill that would ensure that if there were a government shutdown that our military members' pay would be treated like Social Security is. I know there is a lot of fear mongering about that. But if there is a shutdown, the law is and continues to be and was 3 years ago, that it is basically on automatic pilot. If there is a shutdown, then the Social Security checks continue to go out. If someone is entitled to more Social Security during the shutdown, they don't get the increase until after the shutdown is over, and then they would get it. But that is what the bill would do for the military. I am grateful--even though our Speaker did not let that bill come to the floor, I was grateful that so many millions of Americans came on to some Web site set up for that purpose to say put our military pay on automatic pilot just like Social Security is so if there is a shutdown, people that have their lives in harm's way don't have to worry about their loved ones getting paid. Even last fall, we saw military members whose families--when they were dying in harm's way for us, this administration wasn't even going to let them get paid. It was really outrageous. We even passed a bill last fall to make sure that finally the military wouldn't have to worry about it, and the Defense Department and this administration interpreted it in such a way to inflict as much harm on survivors of our military heroes as this administration could. It was wrong. But they did it. It is the politics of division. It is going to be important, Mr. Speaker, that we let people know who the real heroes are for this country. Heroes would include those who are willing to lay down their lives for others. John 15:13: Greater love knows no man than this, that a man lays down his life for his friends. That includes generically men and women, anyone willing to lay down their lives, not to kill innocent people, but to save lives. That is what we have always attributed as a hero here in America. And yet we find out--I didn't know until I read an article by my friend, Andy McCarthy, about this on the President's Web site, but whitehouse.gov regularly profiles young, left-wing radicals that it calls ``Champions of Change.'' I am quoting from the article of Andrew McCarthy. It is dated today: Now, in a space of just a few days, two of the President's champions have made news. One is Linda Sarsour, described by the White House as a ``community activist'' who specializes in ``community organizing'' and ``immigrants' rights advocacy,'' and who ``conducts training nationally on the importance of civic engagement in the Arab and Muslim American community.'' Evidently, civic engagement need not be civil engagement. Ms. Sarsour has joined her voice to that of CAIR. CAIR is the Council on American-Islamic Relations that two Federal courts have declared is a front organization for the Muslim Brotherhood, which has appropriately been declared as a terrorist organization by Egypt, and others are looking at doing the same, including even Great Britain. But not here. No. We take our lead from whatever CAIR says in this administration. But this so-called Champion of Change, according to the White House Web site, has reacted to the widely viewed acclaimed film ``Honor Diaries,'' a film about the brutalization and systematic inequality faced by women in Muslim majority society. And this is what Ms. Sarsour had said: How many times do we have to tell white women that we do not need to be saved by them? Is there code language I need to use to get through? As Mr. McCarthy notes, he said: I would note that the executive producer of ``Honor Diaries'' is the heroic Somali human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It features several courageous Muslim women, including Pakistani-born Qanta Ahmed, a medical doctor who has an important column about the film and the campaign to suppress it at NRO today. He also points to Bonnie Youn as a Champion of Change as so named by the White House. And Matt Boyle with Breitbart has a column that says: An amnesty advocate that President Obama's White House publicly promoted as part of its Champion of Change series has been indicted in Federal Court on charges of fraud. And it goes on down. Part of it reads: The second indictment count alleges that Youn violated a Federal immigration law that prohibits bringing illegal aliens into the United States and harboring them, alleging she did so ``for the purpose of commercial advantage and private financial gain.'' So, apparently, a Champion of Change is someone who there is probable cause to believe is engaged in human trafficking. Mr. Speaker, this country has to reawaken. If we are going to do for the next generation what the last generation did for us, we have got to stop the indebtedness that is growing every second of every day. And we keep adding to the debt and the interest that mounts on top of that. We have got to get more responsible in protecting privacy and not allowing this administration to further go into people's bedrooms, bathrooms, credit card records, phone calls, and emails. We have got to stop the insanity, or not only will the next generation rise up and not call us blessed, they will curse our names. I am here because I have hope. We are going to turn things around. We have just got to keep fighting. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. I was talking with one of our Capitol Police yesterday after this shooting at Fort Hood, again. One of our great Capitol Police. We are so blessed with such great qualified protectors of the Capitol area. And he was in the military for 13 years and left the military and became a Capitol policeman. Well, I trust that gentleman now to have a weapon at all times. I am delighted if he will carry a weapon at all times. But Washington, D.C., has these really well-intentioned laws. Let's eliminate weapons in Washington, D.C. They have been struck down by the Supreme Court because they are unconstitutional. But I want somebody like that, that I could trust, whether he was still in the military, as he was, or as a Capitol policeman. I am very comfortable with him carrying a weapon and feel better knowing that there were people like him around carrying weapons. So when that question was asked, what has the military done since 2009's Fort Hood mass shooting to prevent this kind of thing from happening, I know that the military cannot do any more than the Commander in Chief orders them to do. I don't know of anything that the Commander in Chief has done, as the commander, where the buck stops, to provide more protection from an incident like as now happened again. If the gentleman knows of anything that has been done.

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, I would think, though, that at this point in time, with so many Senators of the Democrat persuasion being concerned about elections and the disaster ObamaCare has been, if we pass a bill that provides for military installations to allow permits to be applied for and obtained for a concealed-carry on a military installation, that the Senate will be in a difficult position if they don't take it up. And the President would hurt his party dramatically if it passed out of the Senate as well and he refused to sign it. There will be other incidents like Fort Hood again. It appears that we have not been adequately addressing post-traumatic stress disorder. And you never know if someone is going to go off, like we see with Washington, D.C., having such a high murder rate. Just like the old bumper stickers have said in the past, When guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns. That is exactly what has happened at Fort Hood both times. It is what happened in Killeen with the mass shooting in the cafeteria. And the problem is not honest, honorable, law-abiding Americans having a gun under their Second Amendment rights; it is the outlaws having guns. There were thousands of cases that came through my court as a district judge, felonies--all of them felonies. And I couldn't remember any cases involving guns where the guns were lawfully acquired. The criminals get guns, and they don't care. The name ``criminal'' comes from the fact that they commit crimes, and they don't care what the law is. They break the law. So the people that are disarmed are those law- abiding citizens. I really think we cannot stand another 5 years of calling such a terrible disaster just ``workplace violence'' when it is a tragedy that can be prevented, can be stopped. And since the Commander in Chief has not taken action that would impede it or stop it, we need to do that. And we need to reverse the law that was passed by the Democratic House and Democratic-controlled Senate back in the early nineties and get a bill to the President's desk. And if the Democrats--at least some of them in the Senate--are not willing to pass such a law or Harry Reid is not willing to bring that to the floor, the answer is very simple: We vote in Republican Senators so that they will bring it to the floor. And next January, then we can present it to the President. And then if he does not and is not willing to sign it at that point, then we will either have enough to override the veto or we will have a President from a different party come November of 2016 who will allow the military to protect themselves instead of condemning them to helplessly watch while they and their friends are gunned down by an outlaw. I yield to my friend.

Mr. GOHMERT. The gentleman makes so many good points. I would like to yield to the gentleman to answer a question. Having been a commander, we have talked about how military were qualified, were required to qualify to use weapons. But as a commander, do you know of any one civilian in the civilian world who has more training about not misplacing your weapon or setting your weapon down or leaving your weapon than somebody in the military? The gentleman knows what I talk about.

Mr. GOHMERT. During the time that my friend was in the military, what weapons were you required to qualify using?

Mr. GOHMERT. And that really is amazing about the military in a military installation because, like the gentleman said, when I was at Fort Benning, we had to qualify every year. And here at Fort Hood, one of the largest military installations anywhere, it adjoins Killeen, Texas. And many people--most people, I think, in Texas recall that there was a terrible shooting incident in a cafeteria in Killeen that adjoins Fort Hood where a man went in and started killing people in the cafeteria. And there was a woman there who had to put her gun in the glove compartment because we didn't have laws that allowed you to carry weapons around Texas. And she realized that she could have saved her parents from being murdered if she had been able to carry her concealed weapon. So she got elected to the State legislature. She is a hero. She got the concealed-carry bill through and signed into law. And that had been used in other States to get concealed-carry bills passed. So when people say, well, how horrible, there had been a prior mass shooting before. Actually, there had been two right there, just right so close together. Killeen, though, civilians, who are not required to qualify with weapons every year, like you and I have been in the military. Yet if, as someone trained with weapons, qualifying every year, you step one foot off that military installation, now you can start carrying a concealed weapon if you just got the permit. But if you step back on the military installation, where everyone is required to be qualified to use weapons, you can't have one. We are working on a bill which will not just create the power, but it will require that military installations allow people there to go through and apply for and get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, just as they could in Fort Hood if they put one foot off post into Killeen. And they ought to be able to step back on the installation.

Mr. GOHMERT. And actually, that was back around the time I became a district judge in Texas. And I didn't learn until I was here in Congress just recently that they had ever passed such a law. There was a Democratic majority in the House, a Democratic majority in the Senate. I can't imagine why they were thinking they had to protect our military members from themselves when we give them far more lethal weapons--I mean, you give somebody an RPG.

Mr. GOHMERT. In the 1 minute we have got left, I just want to thank my friend from Pennsylvania for all of his service to our country in the military and here in Congress. I hope that we are able to get a bill passed through the House, through the Senate, and to the President's desk. Let me just finish by saying there was an atrocity here on Capitol Hill yesterday with the testimony of the former Acting Director of the CIA. Our military has become an international--it is tragic, but a laughing-- If they are not defending themselves, then how can we count on them to defend us? And after the testimony under penalty of perjury yesterday by a former acting director of the CIA, it has told the world that the only place there has been worse intelligence than we have had, particularly during Benghazi, would have been back at Little Big Horn by General Custer. We have got to turn this place around so that Americans can protect Americans and Americans serving our military can protect themselves and our intelligence does start living up to the name instead of making it such a tragedy. With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I so much appreciate my friends, the Honorable Mr. Yoho, Mr. Perry, and Mr. King, discussing the issue that is very dear to my heart. And I appreciate my very dear friend, Mr. King, quoting me accurately, because you don't have to pay people to hate you. They will do it for free. We have spent billions and billions of dollars over the years paying people that have contempt for us. They don't like us. And from anybody that has ever tried to pay a bully their lunch money, they find they don't buy respect. They buy more contempt and more evil actions coming your way. So it just makes no sense, especially when money is fungible, and we continue to send money to the Palestinians. We continue to see outrageous examples in the Palestinian textbooks of just raw, unbridled hatred and demeaning of the Jewish people. And why should the textbooks among the Palestinians for their children be any different than what the adults are doing, when you find that Palestinian leaders are naming streets and holidays for people who have walked in and murdered groups of people with a bomb, children, innocent women, men, out with their families. They come in and kill them when they have done no harm, no wrong. We still hear people talking about Samaria and Judea, written in the Bible hundreds, maybe 1,600 years before the birth of Mohammed, about the areas that were the promised land for the children of Israel. So it becomes difficult for a people that didn't exist in 1000 B.C. to claim that someone who lived in that land, cultivated that land, had the prior claim to that land, somehow have a lesser right than people that came along hundreds and hundreds of years later. But America has a financial problem, and we shouldn't be just squandering money, paying people that hate us to educate their children to hate us, to educate the population to hate us, to teach songs that glorify hatred against Israel. As our dear friend Prime Minister Netanyahu has pointed out, Iran itself is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and they certainly don't need those to deliver a nuclear weapon to Israel. Those are coming for the Great Satan. That would be us. So people wonder, well, what are we doing to protect ourselves? Back after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States of America's leaders pressured Ukraine to deliver nuclear weapons in their possession to Russia. Now, the Ukrainians have never really trusted the Russians. And, yes, the Russians have put people out of their homes in some areas, filled them with Russian people. There are areas that today feel like they are loyal to Russia because they are Russians. They sent them there. They displaced the Ukrainians. But the Ukrainians went ahead and turned over possession of nuclear weapons to Russians whom they distrusted because they trusted America. And the United States' leaders made sure they understood: we have got you covered. We will protect you. You don't have to worry. Go ahead and give nuclear weapons to Russia. Now the trust that the Ukrainian people put in the United States' leaders is coming back, potentially, to haunt them. That should never be the case. If we want to be taken seriously in the world, we can't be breaking promises to countries who rely on our integrity. We can't be doing that. So as people ask when we travel around the world in the past 6 months or so, they ask: What are you doing to prevent more terrorism when you won't even acknowledge the source of the terrorism? As one of the Egyptian leaders asked: Why are you not helping us in the war on terror? Now you are helping the people that supported the terror. They don't understand, and neither do I. I was asked today, Madam Speaker: What has the military done to avoid another Fort Hood incident since 2009? Madam Speaker, it appears the answer is quite embarrassing. What have we done to protect the country when this President has made our military so much smaller? What are we doing to protect the country when this President canceled agreements that had been made, promised, relied upon to other countries' detriment, missile defense? What are we doing to protect our country? This policy that this administration has had internationally to think that evil, hateful people will love us and want to be very good friends if we just downsize our military, we tie our own hands, we don't let our military really protect themselves adequately, that surely they will come to appreciate and like us and they won't consider us divisive, derisive, dismissive, well, that is not what they are thinking. This Nation has lost respect around the world, and it is heartbreaking. So they wonder, what are we doing to protect ourselves, because if we can't protect ourselves, how can we help stop evil people around the world? Some say, and I think there are people in this administration that think we need to follow the European example where we don't have to have much of a military at all and we just show, look, we want to get along and go along. The trouble with that idea is the Europeans have had the benefit of downsizing their military and having smaller militaries because they knew the United States existed and that we would not let an evil power take over Europe, Britain, that we would stop it because we would not want another Hitler to get as far as he did last time. We want to stop them before that happens because, assuredly, if Europe falls, England falls, they are coming for the United States. And now we know, because of radical Islam, they are more concerned about destroying America than they are even taking on Europe and England. So these are serious issues. So what have we done to protect the men and women in our military who are protecting us? It is heartbreaking. This administration, after 2009's horrendous accident--not accident--incident where a radical Islamist Muslim killed 13 fellow military members. They were not allowed to have weapons on post. And we start digging and we find out, well, gee, when the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, apparently, back in 1992, there was a bill passed back around that time that prevented military members from carrying weapons on military installations.

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

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. I want to thank my friends, Mr. Speaker, who are both from Pennsylvania, for their superb comments. They are so right on everything they have said. In following up on those comments, there was an article today from The Washington Free Beacon: ``Employers Say ObamaCare Will Cost Them $5,000 More Per Employee.'' How much more can businesses absorb? Actually, in the last month, we have been finding out about more groups that are getting money from a health care program informally called ``ObamaCare,'' because it is so hard to call it ``affordable'' when it is not. They are groups that are getting money from the Federal Government that, it sounds like, are using it more as an opportunity to register voters as Democrats when that money could be used to get a pacemaker or to get a mammogram or to replace a knee for some 85-year- old widow who could really use a new knee or a new hip. Yet millions and millions of dollars are being paid to groups to go out and find people and to do all they can to get them signed up so they can say they had 7 million people sign up. They sign them up all over the country, using millions and millions of dollars that should have been for health care, yet they are using it to try to recruit votes for the Democratic Party. Millions and millions and millions of dollars are being spent on hiring big names that young people will recognize to go on television, to go on radio to try and talk people into signing up for health care to pay for the health care of others--because they hope they are in good health and won't need it--and that will fund all of the millions and millions of dollars that they are paying to celebrities to convince them to buy ObamaCare. We know that insurance companies cannot run like the Federal Government and, certainly, not like the executive branch. They can't just announce 7 million people have bought a product if they have not bought it. I haven't seen any insurance companies come out and say, Do you know what? We have had 1.5 million of these or we have had 3 million of these 7 million. Insurance companies have to know who has paid for their services, who has paid for their products. They can't just go along and announce to the IRS, We had 7 million people who bought our products. We don't know who paid for them. We will probably not know for a year or so. We don't know, but 7.1 million have bought our products, but you are going to have to give us a pass for a year or two until we find out who actually paid for it, and then we will eventually get around to telling you how much we owe you in income tax from all of the people who bought or who didn't buy our insurance. They can't work like that, because the IRS will not let them work like that. The insurance companies have to know how much money has come through their doors. They have to account for it. They can't get into this magical math that the executive branch gets into that 7.1 million have paid for ObamaCare and count that as some kind of glorious thing. We were told there were over 30 million people who didn't have health care and that that was the whole reason health care, itself, had to be turned upside down. Cancer patients had to be turned away from their cancer treatment providers. Of the people who had the doctors they wanted, who were doing great things for their health--keeping them alive--oh, they had to lose them because we had over 30 million who didn't have health insurance. Then we were told, of the 7.1 million or so who may have acquired health insurance under ObamaCare, there is only a small fraction of them who were people who didn't have insurance, part of the 30 or so million who didn't have insurance. If you are going to cut off people's cancer treatments and if you are going to cut off their ability to get the health care they need--cut off their ability to go to the cancer hospitals they have been going to for treatment--if you are going to basically bring people's lives to an early end because we have got to help those 30 million or so who don't have insurance, then wouldn't you want to get the 30 million signed up? Why are you happy that it is only, maybe, 1 million or 2 million or many fewer who didn't have insurance who have signed up? If it is a fraction of the 7 million who have actually paid, and if it is an even smaller part of the fraction who paid who didn't have health insurance before and who were part of the 30-plus million, then how is that a good thing? Why did every Democrat in the House and in the Senate who thought it was such a good idea without a single Republican's input--we didn't get to have any input in ObamaCare. They shoved it through this body and down the throats of the American people. They shoved it through the Senate, and they had to do it quickly before Scott Brown ended up in office, in having that seat. Tragically, they shoved it through without any bipartisan assistance, so nearly half of Americans were not represented in the creation of that bill. It wasn't done on C-SPAN, as the candidate for President, Senator Obama, had promised. It was done in back rooms at the White House, here. Who knows where. We don't even know who was present. We know there were some union leaders that met with the President about it, without anybody there to record what was said. We know that they ended up wanting every health care worker eventually to be a union member because their numbers have declined everywhere except in the area of government workers, where Franklin Roosevelt said we should never even have government unions. So if the 30-plus million who purportedly didn't have health insurance were the real important reason we had to turn health care upside down, that we had to cut $716 billion from Medicare, so seniors are not going to be able to get care they would have before ObamaCare was passed, if we had to turn away seniors from health care they need just for those 30-plus million that don't have insurance, then why should we be happy that maybe only one-thirtieth or so of that has signed up for insurance? In the 4 years since ObamaCare passed, the best they could do is sign up 1 million of the 30 or so million that didn't have insurance. That is a good thing? Most Americans are ready to have some real reform, like having competition. If you need an MRI, you shouldn't have to do like one of the people in my office who was in Boston and under RomneyCare at the time. The President said they modeled ObamaCare after RomneyCare. She was in a car wreck and couldn't get an MRI for a month or so after the wreck, so she had to fly back to Texas and get an MRI to find out she had broken bones. This is the kind of care we are heading to. You get put on a list. This is what happens in England and Canada, and that is coming to a health care provider near you. You will get on the list. Why? Because we are told 30 million people didn't have health insurance. Well, real reform would have made sure not that everybody had insurance, but that they had health care that was affordable and that they could get all the health care they needed and that it was affordable. In some cases, it would have been a whole lot cheaper than having insurance. Also, having catastrophic insurance for the things you can't afford. Those were some reforms that we wanted to make. Most of us were okay with fixing a problem called preexisting conditions, which had allowed some insurance companies to really screw over people unfairly. We offered to address that in a bipartisan manner, but the Democrats didn't want our input. They said they didn't need it. They had the votes without it. They didn't care what we wanted. They didn't care what our constituents thought was a good idea. So we got ObamaCare, and it is wreaking havoc across the country. It is time to repeal it. So we are told that, under this administration and under those two glorious years when the Democrats had the White House, the House, and the Senate, full control of all the powers here in Washington--and what did they put in motion in 2009 with control of the House, the Senate, and the White House? Well, now, we find out--the President admitted this last September. It didn't get much press at all, if any, from the mainstream because, of course, they got the President elected, and so they have got to cover for him. We understand that. But this is staggering. It has never ever happened before in American history. When the President, the Democratic House, and the Democratic Senate put these things in motion, 95 percent of all of the income made in America went to the top 1 percent of Americans. The top 1 percent of income earners in America got 95 percent of the income. Wow. We talk about how we have really got to help the poor and we have really got to help the middle class, and then we find out the actions of this Democratic-controlled House, Democratic-controlled Senate, and Democratic-controlled White House put in motion the mechanics to ensure that 95 percent of all the income for those years--2009 until it was admitted last September--went to the top 1 percent income earners. Staggering. Why isn't there more in the mainstream about it? They love to go after the wealthy. Well, because these wealthy are about 70 or 80 percent of the people on Wall Street who donate to Democrats over Republicans. People don't get that. It is shocking. But it is about 4 to 1 that donations from executives and their spouses on Wall Street go to Democratic candidates. It is shocking, I know, for some people to come to the realization that most of the wealthiest people in America are Democrats, and they are ready to pull up the ladder behind them. They are thrilled to have a President that will talk about the fat cats. They don't mind being called fat cats, when they are making 95 percent of all the income in America, they have got a President that talks about the poor and the middle class, and the ones he has helped like nobody else are the ultrawealthy in America. At some point, people are going to figure this out. At some point, the middle class and the poor are going to say: You know what? I have been supporting Democrats all these years, and now, 95 percent of all the income is going to the top 1 percent. How is that a good thing? Why should I keep supporting the party that is sending 95 percent of the income to the top 1 percent and the Wall Street fat cats have gotten richer than they ever have in their lives? I don't mind people getting wealthy, but not at the expense of the whole country, and you look at the separation of the wealthy and the middle class. It has never been so dramatically far apart as it is now under this President, with what was set in motion with ObamaCare and all these things that this administration has done. Crony capitalism has been amazing. How? You can pay over $600 billion to your buddies that you have known for years to create a Web site. Oh, they forgot to do security. That is going to cost people billions of dollars to try to save their own identity information that has now been out there on an insecure Web site. You have a Web site that keeps breaking down. Why? Because crony capitalism kicked in and people that are buddies got the contract. It is just like British Petroleum should have never been allowed to continue drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, but they were buddies with the administration. At the time the Deepwater Horizon blew out, I read that they had people from BP talking to John Kerry about coming out in support of cap-and-trade, so they didn't want to shut them down. They had hundreds and hundreds of egregious safety violations, compared to others like Exxon and Shell. I think they had one or two or none. Well, they should never have been allowed to operate. Why? Because crony capitalism is alive and well in this administration and with Democrats in control. Yes, we will let them keep operating. Never mind they are the unsafe drillers in the Gulf of Mexico. That is okay because they are on our side. America is sick of cronyism. They are sick of favoritism. We don't begrudge anybody getting wealthy, but what we begrudge is gaming the system so the middle class and the poor have no chance because the ladder has been pulled up behind ultrawealthy Democrats by a Democratic administration, and it continues. So employers are saying ObamaCare will cost them $5,000 more per employee. This has got to stop. We have got to repeal ObamaCare and have true health care reform. I know some people say: well, you don't have any ideas. Are you kidding? The last I saw, there were about 80 different bills--ideas for reform; and what I really want to see us do is, once we get ObamaCare repealed, let's have the full debate. Let's have it on C-SPAN. Like Candidate Obama said, let's let America see who is really standing up for them and who is cutting those sweetheart deals with unions, who is cutting the sweetheart deals with AARP, the big pharmaceuticals, the AMA, the AHA; who is cutting those big deals behind the scenes in private rooms, so that mainstream America sees 95 percent of the income going to 1 percent, the most wealthy? Let them see that. I welcome that. We have got to repeal ObamaCare. We have got to. There is a book Glenn Beck had pointed out a week or so ago. I had not seen it before. It was copyrighted originally in 1942. The Library of Congress has this book. It is ``The Road We Are Traveling.'' It is interesting. He basically talks about the ways that socialism and communism have failed. Really, socialism and communism are bad words, so you don't want to call it that. We know now it is called progressivism. Here, at page 95, he talks about: In war and peace, boom and depression, the march towards centralized, collective controls has continued. Planning has often been identified with socialism. Yet orthodox socialists themselves are far from pleased with the collectivism practiced in Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and they look with grave suspicion on the New Deal. Something has appeared which nobody anticipated, nobody wanted, and nobody really understands. This was written in 1942. Mr. James Burnham has called it the ``managerial revolution,'' in the first intelligent attempt to understand it which I have seen. Many more studies will be needed before the mystery is cleared up. We have something called ``X,'' which is displacing the system of free enterprise, all over the world. If we do not know yet what to call it, we can at least describe its major characteristics. They include, in most countries, free enterprise into ``X.'' He goes on and lists these things. Again, this is 1942. It is interesting. You can still find on the Internet, Mr. Speaker, a presentation about President Obama from, obviously, a supportive Obama group, called ``The Road We've Traveled.'' It appears to be a clear takeoff from ``The Road We Are Traveling'' that was written in 1942. But here is what is described as this new progressive ideal that we are moving toward that he was excited about in 1942 under President Roosevelt and these characteristics of what they call X because they know socialism and communism doesn't go over well. Progressivism sounds a lot better. But here is this X, a strong centralized government, an executive arm growing at the expense of the legislative and judicial arms. In some countries, power is consolidated in a dictator issuing decrees. Well, we have certainly seen, Mr. Speaker, the legislative and judicial arms compromised in this trilateral government, which the executive arm has even said, and got a standing ovation in here, basically, that he will usurp legislative power if we don't use it. It turns out that was an aim that was set out for progressives, socialists, X, as he called it, back in 1942. He goes on, these are the other things that we are trying to shoot for, according to him: control of banking, credit, and security exchanges by the government. Well, we know under the Democrat control of the House and the Senate and the White House, the Federal Government took control of all student loans. What a great thing. Thank God that my kids, we were able to get student loans for them before I had to go begging to a Democratic administration, because it isn't difficult to figure out how easily corruptible it is when the government controls who gets to get a college loan and who doesn't. So this was set out as what they were shooting for back in 1942. He says also: The underwriting of employment by the government, either through armaments or public works. The underwriting of Social Security by the government, old- age pensions, mothers' pensions, unemployment insurance and the like. Well, we have seen that all come to pass since 1942, just as this Progressive had hoped. The underwriting of food, housing, medical care, by the government. The United States is already experimenting with providing these essentials. Other nations are far along the road. This Progressive says he is also shooting for: The use of deficit spending technique to finance these underwritings. The annually balanced budget has lost its old- time sanctity. The control of foreign trade by the government, with increasing emphasis on bilateral agreements and barter deals. The control of natural resources, with increasing emphasis on self-sufficiency. We have seen the government, with every passing month, take more and more control of natural resources. And since Texas is doing so well, producing more oil, more natural gas than ever, basically, the Federal Government is, in effect, declaring war on Texas. Economically, they have sicced the EPA after Texas. They want to do everything they can to destroy any private resource production. It just sounds like somebody has had this book, and that the book, ``The Road We Are Traveling,'' fits right nicely in the road the President's supporters say he has traveled or we have traveled. This goal's progressive--they call it X in the book, but clearly it is the progressive. They want control of transportation, railway, highway, airway, waterway. Well, that has progressed right nicely since 1942. They want control of all agriculture production. Well, we have certainly seen that take effect as well; control of labor organizations, often to the point of prohibiting strikes. Now, that is something we haven't seen, but there really hasn't been a need, because when the President, as this President did, issues an executive order that even the IRS cannot enact policies until they have a private meeting with the head of the labor union to work things out behind private doors and it can't be recorded and nobody can know what they discuss, there is really not much reason for strikes. When top labor union heads sit down with the President in a private meeting about health care before they come out with ObamaCare and nobody gets to know what was said and done, why do you need strikes? The heads of the labor unions are working hand-in-hand with the executive branch. In this book, X, which clearly is progressivism, shoots for: The enlistment of young men and women in youth corps devoted to health, discipline, community service and ideologies consistent with those of the authorities. The CCC camps have just inaugurated military drill. Well, it is also interesting that in ObamaCare, in my copy, at the beginning of Page 1312, it talked about--or section 1312, but it talked about the new President's Officer and Noncommissioned Officer Corps, created under a health care bill for international health emergency or national emergencies, and they can be called up involuntarily at the present. So it sounds like that fits right into what was sought as the road to travel. Then here is another: Heavy taxation, with especial emphasis on the estates and incomes of the rich. Well, we have certainly heard that enough. He goes on and says: Not much ``taking over'' of property or industries in the old socialistic sense. The formula appears to be control without ownership. It is interesting to recall that the same formula is used by the management of great corporations in depriving stockholders of power. And last: The state control of communications and propaganda. We have certainly seen that take effect since 1942. And we have people in the House and Senate, my Democratic friends--some of my Democratic friends--that want even more control through the FCC and other government entities to control people's thoughts and what they can put out on the air. Let the government control all of that. It really is outrageous what is happening. In any event, it appears that ``The Road We Are Traveling,'' written in 1942, by Stuart Chase, setting out what he called X, because socialism, communism were not as popular, are the road that we have traveled. It is time to give the people their power back. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, a surprising twist today: Who says there is nothing surprising in Washington? We were told there was potential for a bill to come to the floor today to deal with the issue of the SGR, sustainable growth rate, or the doc fix, as it is sometimes called. There has been some disagreement in our party what would be the best way to handle it. We had a bill. It was a 1-year extension, 1 year that included some other things that some of the people that are providing the care that haven't been properly treated in reimbursement areas we are not happy about. So it appeared we didn't have--or our leaders may not have had the votes, and so it is quite a surprise that was voice-voted. No one asked for a recorded vote because normally, see, we trust our leaders that, if there is an important bill, that part of the leadership understand, someone here, part of the bill will request a recorded vote, and we will get a recorded vote, and we will all be able to either vote for or vote against. Otherwise, we have to keep people here all the time, and it did bring back to mind the time that was not so fond back in 2007, 2008, sometimes 2009 and 2010, when on the first day back in Washington, whether it was a Monday or a Tuesday, the first day, there is suspension bills. Those are bills that are expected to pass and have two-thirds of the body vote for them, naming courthouses, naming Federal buildings, recognizing some important person or deed, those type of things. They are generally agreed to, and despite all the negativity in Washington, those are things that we agreed to constantly; and both sides of the aisle worked together getting it accomplished. We saw very quickly, after Republicans lost the majority in November of 2006, sometimes Republican leadership would agree to allow some suspensions to go when it was extremely important. It should never have been brought to the floor on suspension, which means it doesn't go through subcommittee, it doesn't go through committee. It just comes to the floor, without having gone through Rules Committee, and that is why it takes two-thirds of a vote, because it bypassed the normal procedure. There were a handful of us who decided back in 2007, since Republican leadership at that time were agreeing to things that we knew our other friends in the Republican side, some friends on the Democratic side would never vote for, if it was a recorded vote, where everyone had a chance to vote--I started flying back early. I know Tom Price did at times; Lynn Westmoreland did at times. I got to where I was flying back, even if I thought somebody else was covering the floor. The reason was to make sure that, since we couldn't trust that our leadership would not agree to some bill that we thought was hurtful to the country, was hurtful to the Constitution or to our constituents, we had to be here to ask for a recorded vote. It went unnoticed except by leadership staff on both sides, and it got to where, when I came to the floor and would sit here for 3 or 4 hours, I would have staff come up, usually Democratic staff, since they were in the majority, and say: Well, obviously, you are concerned about some issue. Sometimes, I was just here to observe, to make sure nothing was brought to the floor without any notice. Sometimes, there was a particular suspension that I felt should have a recorded vote, so I would show up, and I would, after the voice vote, request a recorded vote. That is why staff started coming up and saying: Look, which one are you going to demand a recorded vote on or are you going to object to? Sometimes, I would get up and speak against the bill. It got to where if I had an objection, they knew--because I'd done it between the time of the call for a recorded vote--I would go back to my office; I would type up a notice on why a bill was not a good bill. I would be standing at the door, get a few other people to stand at other doors to hand out little fliers to Members of Congress as they came to the floor explaining why it wasn't a good bill. Sometimes, I won; sometimes, I lost, but all you had to get was one more then one-third of the votes to bring down a suspension. So we were able to deal with that issue and make sure that, you know, people knew if you are going to try to pull that stuff, we are going to have people sit here, so that you can't just pass something on a voice vote without it being called for a recorded vote. I was very surprised today with us in the majority, our own leadership in charge, with something as important as the doctor fix would be brought to the floor on a voice vote. I would have come over earlier, except it was in recess, back in session, recess, back in session. I didn't know how long the recesses were going to be, but now, I know that I need to get with some other Members and make sure we have people on the floor, since we won't be sure what our own leadership is going to do. That is very unfortunate. It is unfortunate. You need to be able to trust your own leadership. Mr. Speaker, I think it's, on another matter, very important that we note that this year's Margaret Sanger Award would go to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I have an article here from American Thinker, dated yesterday. Jeannie DeAngelis wrote the article. I won't read the whole article, but it points out that any woman willing to call late term abortion ``sacred ground'' and make false accusations that the opposing political party voting for the Protect Life Act would leave pregnant women ``dying on the floor'' deserves an award named after eugenicist Margaret Sanger. Nancy Pelosi will be given the Margaret Sanger Award, which Planned Parenthood considers its ``highest honor.'' Further down, it says: A committed socialist, Margaret Sanger once said, ``My own personal feelings drew me toward the individualist anarchist philosophy, but it seemed necessary to approach the idea by way the socialism,'' Sanger said. She also said this: This is the great day of social planning. We have come to believe in planning the production and distribution of goods. We plan methods of governing cities, States, and the Nation. We plan jobs and leisure time activities and vacations. We plan almost everything, big and little, except families. Sanger goes on to say: It can scarcely do any harm--and it may do a vast amount of good--to engage in the thoughtful planning of our population, a population with a still larger percentage of happy families. An active worker for the Socialist Party, Sanger believed: The more radical the ideas, the more conservative you must be in your dress. Saul Alinsky said: Dresses his crusades in vestments of morality. The article says: For Margaret Sanger, eugenics was an avenue to improve the human race by discouraging people with genetic defects or undesirable traits--Blacks, immigrants, and poor people--whom she called ``human weeds, reckless breeders, spawning human beings who never should have been born.'' Further down, it points out another irony, which is that Italian American Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi had grandparents named Maria and Tommaso, who immigrated to America from Italy. If Margaret Sanger had had her eugenic way with Maria Foppiani-Petronilla, Ms. Pelosi wouldn't be here, let alone be receiving an award. In February of 1919, in the Birth Control Review, Sanger published an article entitled, ``Birth Control and Racial Betterment.'' In 1934, Sanger wrote an article entitled, ``America Needs a Code for Babies: Plea for Equal Distribution of Births.'' Ms. Sanger's baby code said that people with bad genes, or dysgenic groups, should be given a choice between sterilization and segregation. Those who willingly chose sterilization should be rewarded by contributing to a superior race. In article 6, Sanger suggested issuing parenthood permits that would be valid for no more than one birth. Despite being lionized by socialist liberals, Margaret ``every child a wanted child'' Sanger's legacy is one of murder, racism, revulsion for the handicapped, intrinsic disgust for the male gender, and a form of twisted radicalism that viewed God-ordained marriage and the miracle of life with contempt. Margaret Sanger's life was committed to curing what she viewed as the ``urgent problem'' of how to ``limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective.'' It should be noted that, in the past, our former Secretary of State, Secretary Clinton, received the same Margaret Sanger Award, who believed in eugenics, who believed it was a good thing to limit the births of races who, perhaps, were too poor, who she thought were dysgenic. This article from, actually, March 31, 2009, Catholic Online, points out: A day before receiving the Planned Parenthood Federation of America's highest honor, the Margaret Sanger Award, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a visit to the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, leaving a bouquet of white flowers ``on behalf of the American people.'' When leaving the basilica a half an hour later, Secretary Clinton told some of the Mexicans who were gathered outside to greet her, ``You have a marvelous virgin.'' The following day, Friday, March 27, Clinton was in Houston to receive the Margaret Sanger Award, named for the organization's founder, a noted eugenicist. Secretary Clinton, according to a State Department transcript of Secretary Clinton's remarks, said this: I admire Margaret Sanger enormously--her courage, her tenacity, her vision. When I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her. Another article points out, from The Weekly Standard, April 15, 2009, that Secretary Clinton stands by her praise of eugenicist Margaret Sanger. Secretary Clinton points out: Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously--her courage, her tenacity, her vision. It is probably worth looking at exactly what Margaret Sanger stood for since she is so admired by our former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who could end up being President, and our former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Let's look at exactly what Margaret Sanger said. Here are some quotes from Margaret Sanger. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. That is Margaret Sanger. That is Margaret Sanger, whose name adorns an award that was so revered by Secretary Clinton and now by our former Speaker Pelosi. It is unbelievable that anybody would be held in high esteem who would make that statement: The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. For heaven's sake. That is not all. She had plenty more to say. We should apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. That was from ``A Plan for Peace,'' from the Birth Control Review in April of 1932. The first quote I read was ``Woman and the New Race'' from chapter 6, ``The Wickedness of Creating Large Families.'' Then from ``America Needs a Code for Babies,'' in March of 1934, article 1: The purpose of the American baby code shall be to provide for a better distribution of babies and to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit. You see, it is important to note here that what this kind of code does is say that we need a governing body that will decide who they think is fit and who they think is unfit. Gee, how about that? In ObamaCare, we have a panel that will decide. You get a pacemaker. You don't get a pacemaker. We know your hip is giving you a lot of pain, but you are just not worth a new hip. Do you need a new knee? Ah, we have looked at your life, and we have looked at your age. You don't get a new knee. You just suffer and die. I mean, it is unbelievable that a bill would pass that sets up a board that will decide who can get a pacemaker to allow him to live and who will not, who will get the lifesaving medication and who will not. I don't want an insurance company making that decision, and I don't want the government making that decision. I had a bill that would have avoided that kind of thing, but of course, it didn't come to the floor when Democrats were in the majority. They brought, instead, ObamaCare, setting up that board. Let's go back to quotes from Margaret Sanger. Article 4, from her ``America Needs a Code for Babies,'' says: No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child--and no man shall have the right to become a father--without a permit. Hey, there is good news. All you have to do is be politically ingratiated enough with the government under Margaret Sanger's code and they will give you a permit to have a baby, because they will consider you fit. Chances are, if you are of an opposing political view of those who are handing out the permits, you won't get a permit because you may have a child that disagrees with the people handing out the permits. It quotes article 6: No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth. This was Margaret Sanger. She also said, in 1932, in the April Birth Control Review: Give dysgenic groups--that's people with bad genes--in our population their choice of segregation or compulsory sterilization. In 1922, she said: Birth control must lead, ultimately, to a cleaner race. Gee, the Nazis were pretty good about pushing a cleaner race, but thank God they were completely wrong about the White superhuman race. I always loved that about Jesse Owens. He went there, to the heart of the Nazis, and showed them they were wrong about their superhuman race, and yet here we have a woman, Margaret Sanger, being held in such great, high esteem, who thinks we need a cleaner race, according to her whims. Here is another quote from the esteemed Margaret Sanger. This is from ``The Need for Birth Control in America.'' It is quoted by Angela Franks: Such parents swell the pathetic ranks of the unemployed. Feeblemindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly indifferent to their racial responsibilities, and it is largely this type of humanity we are now drawing upon to populate our world for the generations to come. In this orgy of multiplying and replenishing the Earth, this type is pari passu multiplying and perpetuating those direct evils in which we must, if civilization is to survive, extirpate by the very roots. Here is another quote. This is from ``Family Limitation,'' Margaret Sanger's eighth edition, in 1918: Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more, and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion. So that is Margaret Sanger. She is there to tell the world repeatedly that we need a government that will restrict the feebleminded or maybe, according to her, these disgusting women who work for wages. Ah, we can't let them have many children. Yet some have the nerve to say that Republicans have a war on women when you look at the heroine of the left, and she was for eugenics. She was a racist. She was a classist--a divider--who wanted and thought the best thing a large family could do was to kill a baby. We consider her a hero? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know my friends on the other side of the aisle don't have a single person on this side of the aisle who want children to go hungry or who want children to have a worse life than we have. I know that, but it is all about the way of getting there. So there are those of us who think the best thing a person could have for their own self-respect and their own freedom and their own ability to remove themselves from the ties and chains, the strings that come with money from the government, is to get them a job. Grow the economy so they can have a job and the self-respect and the freedom that comes from that. I know they have the best of intentions on the other side of the aisle, but I don't think that you help individuals by paying them not to work. Let's get the economy going so they can work and be free from all the strings and entanglements that come from handouts from the government. I would never call somebody on the other side of the aisle a racist or a hater of the poor. So it gets a little disgusting when I hear that about people on my side of the aisle. We don't want anybody to suffer. We have seen the likes of Margaret Sanger who think they know better. Get the government in charge, and then we will order people to be sterilized. And we will give you money if you will be sterilized. That is what government does. Strings come with the money. They always do. We need the government to give out less money because people need less money because they are able to earn it for themselves with all the freedom that means. That is what we want for America. That is what the Founders wanted. And that makes for a much more free America. In that regard, when it comes to freedom, I know the people that voted for ObamaCare thought it was going to be a great idea, even though most of them had never read it like I did. Because I could see it was a threat to all kinds of freedoms, and I could see before the vote there were provisions in there that allowed for clinics to get Federal money to provide abortion and to have insurance policies that would end up providing abortion. So I was shocked this week at the Supreme Court. I wasn't in the courtroom. I was listening in a side room for members of the Supreme Court Bar. I was shocked to hear somebody on the Supreme Court actually take the position, Well, just pay the tax and then you can have your religious views. The power to tax is the power to destroy. Our Founders knew that. Taxation helped cause a revolution. And in fairness to the people of the District of Columbia, they are the only group who, under the Constitution, are not allowed to have a full voting Member of Congress, and who are required nonetheless to pay Federal income tax. Puerto Rico, Samoa, Mariana Islands, all of those that are territories, under the Constitution they are not entitled to a full voting Representative and do not pay Federal income tax. Franklin made clear during the Revolution that if we do not get to elect one member of the parliament, then that parliament has no right to put taxes on us. I agree. So when Democrats were in charge, I had a bill. They wouldn't bring my bill to the floor. Now the Republicans are in the majority. They haven't so far--or our leaders haven't. I think it is only fair. They don't get to vote for a full voting Member of the House. So in fairness, the way to fix that legislatively is just to do for the District of Columbia what we do for Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, and the Mariana Islands. You don't pay Federal income tax. That would be fair. There are all kinds of things that aren't fair. But when it comes to intrusions by the government onto religious beliefs, the line cannot be drawn so that it excludes religious beliefs and the ability to practice them. For anyone, especially a Supreme Court Justice, and even someone who worked for President Obama as Solicitor General, who said--and I am paraphrasing because she didn't say these words--I never did my job when it came to ObamaCare. I didn't talk to the administration about it. I didn't talk to them about what would help them when it came before the Supreme Court. So I didn't do my job as Solicitor General, and that is why I am qualified to be on the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the Senate bought that. That is the implied position. They bought that. She is on the Supreme Court. She lights into the Hobby Lobby attorney immediately. But to come around and say, Just pay the tax, then you can have your religious beliefs, you can practice your religious beliefs, it is not that expensive--what's next? As a judge who has signed death penalty orders, I have struggled with that issue. I believe in some cases it is appropriate. I thought it was totally appropriate in Jasper, Texas, after three people were convicted of dragging an African American behind their truck. Once they had a fair trial, fair appeal, properly convicted, I wouldn't have had a problem with a law that said the victim's family gets to choose the truck and the terrain over which they drag the defendants to their deaths. When we give the power to decide who gets to practice firmly held religious beliefs to a Supreme Court or to a 218-vote majority in the House, this Republic and the freedoms it has provided more than any Nation in history can't be much longer for the world--not those freedoms--not when Congress will stand by and allow those to be taken. I think everybody that was here for that vote on ObamaCare knows good and well that if the intention of this government had been made clear that they were going to force people to go against firmly held Catholic beliefs, Christian beliefs, that bill would have never passed. And now they seek to enforce what would never have passed if their intentions had been made clear--it is before the Supreme Court. And who knows what they will do. Mr. Speaker, my hopes and prayers are still for ongoing religious freedom promised under the First Amendment, and that they will not be taken away on our watch. But that kind of depends on the American people and the people they put in office and the people they allow to serve on the Supreme Court. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, yesterday, I went over and heard the audio as the argument before the Supreme Court was taking place. It was shocking to hear a Supreme Court Justice ask Paul Clement why his client didn't just pay the tax and then they could have their religious ideas and religious beliefs. Of course, he called it a penalty, as the statute called it. She said: Well, the legislation called it a tax. She didn't even know that the majority opinion said on page 15 that it is a penalty because Congress called it a penalty. Forty pages later, the majority called it a tax so they could uphold it. Outrageous. Pay your religion tax, and then you can have your religious beliefs in America. Where is it going to stop if we don't stop it now?

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Harming 16,000 employees as a way to deal with an unconstitutional act.

Mr. GOHMERT. That is my recollection. And some of us were pushing for and asking our leadership why don't we do an amendment that will make sure the Supreme Court has to be under ObamaCare. I really think that would have been the more appropriate thing to do. In fact, I still think it is the appropriate thing to do. It is hard to know, since Congress was not given a chance to see what the Supreme Court was doing and who was asking what questions, but it sure seems like since they feel so strongly about ObamaCare, that they really should have the chance to experience it firsthand and just find out how wonderful it is.

Mr. GOHMERT. One of the Justices appeared to point out, apparently, that an agency is the one that established so many of these things. So the question arises, since an agency can say your insurance policy must provide this medicine, this medicine, not this medicine, this medicine, have we given unelected bureaucrats the power to determine what your religious beliefs firmly held include? Because under ObamaCare, an agency says: Your religious rights must yield to our unelected bureaucratic decision that this medication must be included; therefore, your First Amendment rights yield to our unelected bureaucratic agency rights to decide what your religious rights have to include and what they don't.

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, it is remarkable. Again, the Justice, if I heard her correctly, just advocated, well, just drop the insurance. Drop the insurance. This company is providing great insurance, as the gentlewoman pointed out, and her point was not made because time is so limited. I know Paul Clement knows, but that is such a huge benefit to the employee. There was discussion by the Supreme Court about benefits to the employee. Well, gee, you can raise their salaries and make up the difference, when actually you may have to raise that salary an extra third in order to cover the cost that is pretax to the employee. So the employee is getting hammered when they just, as this Justice appeared to callously advocate, just drop the insurance, pay the $2,000 tax penalty. Congress said ``penalty''; they said ``penalty'' and ``tax,'' take your pick. Either way, they were advocating harming the employee.

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, God bless Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas. I didn't hear Justice Thomas ask questions. He normally doesn't. It is extraordinary to spend time with Justice Thomas. You find out rather quickly just how really brilliant he is. He didn't need affirmative action to get him into Yale Law School--or Harvard, as he was accepted to, but at the time thought was too conservative. Justice Scalia took on the Government's position. The Government's attorney stood up and basically said if a corporation is for profit, no matter how religiously convicted the holders of that are, they have no right to religious beliefs. Scalia took him on and said there has never been a case. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Well, I was shocked that one of the Justices asked the question, basically: How can or does a corporation exercise religious freedom? You know, this Justice knows that the Justice Department has indicted corporations charging criminal intent, intent to violate the law, and yet she cannot figure out how a corporation could have intent to violate the law but could not have intent to have religiously held beliefs. That was a bit staggering to me to hear that question: How can a corporation exercise religious beliefs?

Mr. GOHMERT. She pointed out the $2,000.

Mr. GOHMERT. The gentlewoman makes a great point. But unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view, the Founders created so much in the way of checks and balances to prevent the government from abusing the power, as the gentlewoman points out. If the Congress will not protect its own powers, as we have not, the Senate has been very protective of the President's executive orders that usurped our power. They have gladly handed over power. I was shocked to hear in this very room, as the President spoke from this podium, a standing ovation from most of the people on this side of the aisle when the President, in effect, said: If you don't change the law, I will. And they stand and applaud a President who says, in effect: I am going to usurp even more of the legislative power given to Congress under article 1 than I have already taken. It is staggering to hear that applauded. It is also staggering to me to see the Senate has a body, in effect, protecting the President's usurpation of our power. That is one check, one balance.

Mr. GOHMERT. One of the justices--and, again, since we don't have cameras in the courtroom yet, I will be fighting for that in the future, I could only listen to the audio--but one of the justices, again, tried to belittle Paul Clement's comment that they have a choice. The gentlelady has pointed out accurately that you can pay $2,000 or $36,500; but he was indicating that, when you add up, with all the employees they have, the total cost, they either pay $475 million, or they can drop the insurance, leave the employees in a real dilemma to have to go buy ObamaCare insurance that, other than those four contraceptives that bring about abortion, they provide them far better insurance than what ObamaCare requires. So when he said it is either $475 million or $26 million, she was insisting that you could just pay the $2,000 fine and was virtually in unbelief that it actually amounted to $26 million when you add up all the people they would have to pay for. So that was his position before the Supreme Court: to follow our religious beliefs, we either pay $475 million or we pay $26 million.