Louie Gohmert

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you for those stirring and important words. Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Holding), my friend. Mack Pierce

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, sometimes it is very helpful to set the record straight, as my friend from Tennessee talked about earlier, and I thought that would be highly appropriate, given some of the lighthearted and sometimes mean-spirited barbs that have been sent the way of former Governor, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. So I just wanted to set the record straight, Mr. Speaker, so that people will understand, and the Congressional Record will properly reflect just how prescient that Sarah Palin has been in the past. We are going back 5\1/2\ years, but this was an interview that Charles Gibson did that gave rise to a ``Saturday Night Live'' skit. This was Charles Gibson, quoting verbatim from him, and then Sarah Palin. Gibson: Let me ask you about specific national security situations. Let's start, because we are near Russia. Let's start with Russia and Georgia. The administration has said, we have got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore Georgia and sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Sarah Palin: First off, we're going to continue good relations with Saakashvili there. I was able to speak with him the other day and giving him my commitment, as John McCain's running mate, that we will be committed to Georgia. And we've got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable, and we have to keep-- Gibson interrupted and said: You believe unprovoked? Palin: I do believe unprovoked. And we have got to keep our eyes on Russia. Under the leadership there. Gibson: What insight into Russian actions particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of this state give you? This is the operative line here. Sarah Palin said: ``They're our next door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.'' Gibson: You are in favor of putting Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO? The interview goes on, but that is what Sarah Palin said: ``They're our next door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.'' That should be relevant to people. If you are living next door on 1 acre of land, and the people that own the acre next to you have been guilty in the past of breaking into other neighbors' sheds and buildings, then certainly that is something that you ought to be watching more closely than people on the other side of the town that don't live next door. I mean, proximity can be an important matter. But here is the text of what ``Saturday Night Live'' did on September 13, 2008. We know that ``Saturday Night Live'' has altered sketches that, in the past, at least once I recall seeing, where they were afraid it might make President Obama look bad, and they certainly didn't want to do that. Okay to take shots at Republicans, but they certainly didn't want to be fair and hit back at President Obama the same way, and even as Lorne Michaels, comic genius that he is, has indicated, yeah, they do lean left there at ``Saturday Night Live.'' This was a sketch involving Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton. They were appearing together in the sketch, and these quotes are verbatim from the sketch. Tina Fey, as Sarah Palin says: ``But tonight we're crossing party lines to address the now very ugly role that sexism is playing in the campaign.'' Then Amy Poehler, as Hillary Clinton: ``An issue which I am frankly surprised to hear people suddenly care about.'' Tina Fey, as Palin: ``You know, Hillary and I don't agree on everything.'' Poehler as Clinton says: ``Anything. I believe that diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy.'' Then Tina Fey, acting as Sarah Palin said: ``And I can see Russia from my house.'' So that is where the line came from. There are many in the United States that actually believe Sarah Palin said ``and I can see Russia from my house.'' It was a very clever sketch. It was funny. I laughed when I saw it. I also knew how intelligent, and what a great leader and Governor Sarah Palin had been, and what a great leader she is, but we can all laugh at ourselves. I just didn't realize that that was going to take off, and by the writers at ``Saturday Night Live'' giving Hillary Clinton a line that said, ``Anything. I believe that diplomacy should be cornerstone of any foreign policy,'' sounding like a diplomat or a politician, and then trying to make Sarah Palin sound very much less so, when, actually, the best quote remembered from Hillary Clinton will probably go down as the statement made here on Capitol Hill in reference to the four American heroes serving in harm's way whose lives were taken by radical Islamists in an act of terrorism that had nothing to do with the video. Our Secretary of State, having suffered a blow to the head, we were told that kept her from testifying originally, she was able to say: ``What difference, at this point, does it make?'' Not realizing, obviously, that when Americans are murdered, who are working for this government, and even working for her with her as the boss, it is rather important to find out precisely why those people were murdered. In fact, some Libyans told me that very thing back before Christmas. They said, so many Americans want to know who killed your four Americans. That is important, but an even more important question is why they were killed. So we have Hillary Clinton, who is saying, at this point, what difference does it make why they were killed, how they were killed? Just the reverse of the way ``Saturday Night Live'' made those two individuals look through the caricature, Sarah Palin called the shot with Ukraine years ago. I would say prophetic, but it is not prophetic. It is a bit prescient, but it has more to do with someone who has studied international relations, understands leaders like Putin, understands their lust for power, and understands they have got to be stopped, instead of carrying a plastic button over to dogmatic, totalitarian, wannabe leaders of Russia and saying, here, let's press this button and we will restart, reset everything. That is no way to conduct foreign policy. The greatest strides in the security and safety and acquiring the security and safety of the world have come when people knew they were dealing with an evil empire and stood up to it. I was asked just shortly ago, why did you vote ``no'' on the bill that was brought to the House floor to provide money, give loans to the Ukrainian people? I developed a great love and care for Ukrainian people as a college student on a summer exchange program, and I found a lot of commonality with college students, some of the college students there in Ukraine. I made the mistake of saying ``the Ukraine,'' Mr. Speaker, but one of my Ukrainian college friends corrected me when I was there as an exchange student. He said: Do you say I am going home to ``the Texas''? I said, no. He said: We don't say ``the Ukraine.'' You come to Ukraine. It doesn't need the article ``the.'' So there in Ukraine, people are suffering. They feel the boot of Russian power coming at them, at first from the Crimea, and it may go farther. I understand, having been there a number of times, in Ukraine, that there are parts of Ukraine that have sympathies with Russia, that love the days of the Soviet Union when they didn't have to look for a job themselves. The government would tell them how far they were allowed to go in school. They would tell them what their job would be. You step out of line, you could go to Siberia. They actually miss those days. Whereas most Ukrainians seem to have that yearning that George W. Bush talked about as President, a yearning to be free--not all people have it, as we have seen. Some prefer security over complete freedom, and that needs to be understood. As Franklin was quoted, paraphrased as saying: Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither. I know there were Soviets after the fall of the Iron Curtain, after the demise of the Soviet Union, who were panic-stricken. You mean, I have got to find a job? I mean, the government has always told me everything to do. I will never forget being in Ukraine in recent years, and I had gone with a Ukrainian translator friend. My Russian has gotten pretty bad since college, not having any need to use it. We were in a Ukrainian restaurant. It was off the beaten road, and so it was mainly Ukrainians there. But in one area of the restaurant there was a very large, extended Russian family. That was clear. And the patriarch was clearly Russian, speaking Russian. He appeared to have had too much to drink. A little trio came by, a couple with musical instruments, one, a young Ukrainian, with an incredible operatic voice, and they would perform at tables and do requested songs. They came over to the extended table with the extended Russian family, and the patriarch called out that he wanted to hear ``Moscow Nights,'' and I bet the group knew ``Moscow Nights,'' but they said that they didn't know that. So they asked for another song, and they performed it. It was magnificent. Then the boisterous Russian patriarch said--and the translator was helping me--he said: We never knew why you, in Ukraine, wanted to pull away from Russia. We love you Ukrainians. We love you. We wanted to stay together, as brothers. We never understood Ukraine wanting to pull away and not be part of Russia. And the guy was probably late twenties, maybe 30, that was the singer; and he very politely said in Russian to the Russian: Have you been here to Kiev before? And the Russian said: Yes, but it has been perhaps 20 years. And the young Ukrainian said: Ah, so how do you find it now compared to 20 years ago? And the Russian patriarch, having had too much to drink, said: It is magnificent. You have done a fantastic job. Oh, we love all of the buildings, all of the growth, all of the wonderful things you have done here. We want to be brothers. You have done a magnificent job. And the young Ukrainian singer yelled: That is why we wanted to be apart from Russia. You kept us oppressed. You took away the best we had. You stepped on us. You mistreated us. You would not let us reach our potential. That is why we want to be separate from Russia. That is why we separated from Russia. That is why we do not want to be part of Russia. You took the best we had and left us nothing. We can do much greater things when you allow us, as Ukrainians, to be in charge of Ukraine. And I wanted to stand up to give the young man a standing ovation. I was just thrilled that he was so passionate and felt so strongly about Ukrainian freedom. There are so many in Ukraine who feel that way. They don't want the Russian boot on their throat. Some are not aware that when--perhaps the most evil man of the 20th century, Hitler--Hitler's forces marched into Ukraine, they were actually met initially with banners and lauding that the Ukrainians looked upon them as liberators from Russia. And if they had not been so consumed by the ridiculous superrace mentality that they had sold themselves on, they would have recognized that the Ukrainians would have helped them; but, instead, they brutalized them, wantonly killed Ukrainians, and forcefully turned the Ukrainians against the Nazis. Had the Nazis not been so consumed with their narcissism and self- aggrandizement, they probably could have used the Ukrainians' help and never suffered such a brutal winter in Russia as they did. That is history. And I am very proud that we have a former Governor from Alaska that understands people like Putin, understands that Putin may have suffered from a debility, like Stalin did. Stalin described it--the English translation was ``with power, dizziness.'' So Putin gets a little bit dizzy. Gee, let's take the Crimea--because he has done, as Khrushchev did of our late, great President John Kennedy--Kennedy was a brilliant man. There was no question he was a man of courage, as illustrated during World War II. We are told that he was taking a number of medications when they met in Vienna in the summer of 1961; but he also acknowledged, after his meeting with Khrushchev, that Khrushchev just brutalized him, and he seemed to be embarrassed with how he performed. Khrushchev, on the other hand, had said he was immature. He was weak. That was his assessment of Kennedy because he already knew that he had backed Kennedy down during the Bay of Pigs. The plan that was hatched during the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy was apprized of, but then it was changed. Kennedy takes office as our President, and he finds out there is going to be more American involvement. Unfortunately, within 3 days of the invasion to be launched into the Bay of Pigs to attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba, President Kennedy got cold feet and pulled back on the support that was going to be offered. The people were devastated, killed, or taken prisoners. It was a disaster. Kennedy said, later, that he would have preferred an all-out invasion to appearing so weak, words to that effect. A meeting between Khrushchev and Kennedy in Vienna--I believe it was June of 1961--reaffirmed in Khrushchev's mind that this was a weak, immature leader. Then toward the end of July of 1961, President Kennedy gave a powerful speech, basically making clear that we have a commitment to West Berlin. We have a commitment to West Germany; and we would not, under any circumstances, allow the Soviets to prevent us from making good on our promises. He even used the word ``force.'' We didn't want to use force; but if it was required, it would be used. Khrushchev had already taken his measure of the man, knew he could push him further, and the Berlin Wall began being built. The United States did nothing; and it reaffirmed, in Khrushchev's mind, that what he had assessed in Vienna--that Kennedy was immature, was weak--was even more true than he had thought before. He knew he could push this man; and as a result, he was willing to risk thermal nuclear war to put missiles with nuclear weapons into Cuba. He would never have been so brazen as to put nuclear weapons on missiles within 90 miles of Florida had it not been for his repeated assessment in the first year of John Kennedy's Presidency that he was weak. Well, he misread him. Kennedy showed weakness in 1961 at least three times, but he did have courage. It just took him a while to get up to it. But as a result of the weakness that was assessed by Khrushchev, we almost came to mutually assured destruction, where the Soviet Union and the United States would have launched nuclear weapons toward each other. It was a very, very dangerous time for the world. We are now under the administration of President Barack Obama; and I cannot imagine any Russian leader perceiving anything but just absolute weakness, as a leader, when the microphone picked up what President Obama said before the election: you know, tell Putin that, after the election, I will have a lot more flexibility. The message was clear. I am willing to cave on all kinds of things. I have to look strong right now, but I will cave on all kinds of things once we get past the 2012 election. For all the things that he is, Putin is not stupid. He knew exactly what that message was, though most of the voters in the 2012 election did not; and as a result of that and so many other things, Russia believes they can cow America, and we will not stand up. When this President draws led red lines, they won't be enforced. I am going to go back to something Sarah Palin pointed out in her interview, and this is actually in NewsBusters. It talks about the interview that Sarah Palin gave with Charlie Gibson, and it sets the record straight. Palin foresaw that, because of Putin's actions and Russia's movement against Georgia, that if we did not send a very clear message that such offensive border-neglecting actions were not rebutted, then there would be other invasions to follow. She has been skewered for saying, back in 2008, that if Russia was not stopped, then next, they would move against Ukraine. She was belittled for that; and yet, she had read Vladimir Putin far better than anybody in this administration. She knew what they were capable of. She knew what they wanted to do, and she knew there is only one way to deal with bullies, and it is not to repeatedly give them your lunch money. If you continue to attempt to appease bullies, not only will they continue to take more and more and more, but they will have no respect for you whatsoever. That is also a problem we have had with radical Islamist leaders in the world. They understand one thing: strength. That is why the United States Marines were sent to the shores of Tripoli. It was not the negotiations that Thomas Jefferson and others engaged in with the Barbary pirates, those radical Islamists. That didn't do any good. It wasn't until the Marines fought as bloody or tough or tougher than the radical Islamists that they realized, gee, we had better leave these guys alone. But for the valiant, fervent fighting of the Marines, then we would have continued to have to pay huge portions of our United States budget for extortion to get our sailors back. Sarah Palin understood that. She understood that you have got to stand up to bullies, so I think it is important that the Congressional Record properly reflect that Sarah Palin had it right. Saturday Night Live assessed her wrong. Sarah Palin had Putin pegged. She had the actions of Russia pegged. She knew what they would do next. So what have we done? Ukrainian borders are violated by Russia, and we want to go by as our friend is being brutalized, assaulted, and throw money at our friend who is being brutalized. That is not much of a friend. If I am being assaulted, I would hope a friend would stop and help me and not just throw money on the way by. In fact, we have agreements in writing that require more than simply throwing money at Ukraine when they are being brutalized by Russia. Russia's economy is not all that strong. And I don't know if Ukraine would get this desperate or not, but we know that Putin, just to show Ukraine that they can hurt them, has stopped the flow of natural gas before. Perhaps at some point, Ukraine will get desperate enough to say: Well, they may have a very weak leader over in the United States that will not come help us, but something we can do to hurt you, Mr. Putin, you do one more thing and those pipelines of yours that bring you so much money into your treasury will be history, and then see how you do. I hope it never gets to that point. I hope that Russia doesn't continue to push matters until they push us, as Khrushchev did, to the brink of world war again. But in seeing the debate between President Obama and Governor Romney in which President Obama chided him by saying the 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back, we have now seen the appeasement repeatedly of this administration. And that is why I have said before that Neville Chamberlain called to this administration, and he wants his foreign policy back, because it appears it is being utilized once again. It didn't work for England against Hitler, and it will not work now against Russia and Putin. I was very small as a kid in elementary school, but I learned early on I may get my nose bloodied, but I am going to make the big bully hurt. And when I made him hurt enough, after he had bloodied my nose, he left me alone. He could have hurt me. But it doesn't matter whether you are big or small, if you want to deal with bullies by appeasement over and over and over again, then it is clear you are going to continue to encourage bullying. I was never for bullying. I would stand up to it as a young kid in elementary school, and I am for standing up against it when we have the most powerful military in the history of the world--until this administration finishes with it. We still do for now. Well, here is something else that is pretty powerful. Sarah Palin in her speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee on March 8, 2014, said this: Those policies that the Cabinet have to explain and justify, how do you convey to Putin the threat that sounds like, ``Vladimir, don't mess around, or you're going to feel my flexibility, because I got a phone and I got a pen and, um, I can dial real fast and poke you with my pen. Pinkie promise.'' Well, obviously, she was having some fun herself, but she makes the point. A phone and a pen won't do it. When you are talking about a bully that does not mind violating borders, killing people, and subjugating masses of people, you have to stand up to them. I think one of the clear indications not only that we had a weak administration on foreign policy, but also we didn't use common sense in protecting ourselves came very clearly before the Boston bombing when the Russians, the Russian leaders--the Russian people like us pretty well, but the Russian leaders don't like us particularly and certainly don't respect us. But even so, they realized that we actually have a common enemy, and that is radical Islam, radical Islam that would love to see Russia fall, Ukraine fall, and the United States fall, would love to see them all fall under a giant global caliphate. So we have that common enemy who wants to destroy each of our ways of life. So Russia, despite their dislike and distaste in some ways for the United States, actually reached out and said: Hey, we are not sure you realize, but this Tsarnaev, he has been radicalized, and he is dangerous. We are not going to reveal too many secrets here, but any intelligent administration will take what we have said that Tsarnaev is dangerous, he has been radicalized, and he is a threat to you and do some digging. And the best we can find out, even after questioning the Director of the FBI, the best we can find out is they apparently went and talked to Tsarnaev himself. Well, okay, I guess you've got to do that. Good idea. If somebody is very good at questioning, if somebody really understands the radical Islamist mind, if he knows who the Islamic authors are that have inspired radicalism, if he knows who the imams are that have helped radicalize people, then you can ask the right questions about which imams you have been around, what authors are your favorite authors, what do you think of Qutb in Egypt and the writing that he had, that milestone that Osama bin Laden credited with helping radicalize him. If you know the questions to ask, you can find out whether somebody has really been radicalized. But as a few of us have found out when we reviewed the material purged from FBI training material, we are not allowing our FBI agents to be properly trained as to the threat and the beliefs of radical Islamists. Again, as one of our intelligence officers has told me, we have blinded ourselves of the ability to see our enemy. And it continues. We continue to have people advise this administration who have known associations with radical Islamists. The Egyptian paper, back when it was controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, bragged that they had six Muslim brothers who were top advisers in top positions in this administration. So we are not allowing our FBI, our intelligence officials and agents, to be trained to properly see this threat. So the Russians say: Hey, this guy is a threat to you. You had better check him out, and you will find out what we are talking about. He had been to an area where people were often radicalized. He had gone to an area that he came to America claiming asylum, to need asylum from, and he goes back to that area? Well, that should have been a red flag right there. He didn't need asylum from that area. He just went back and got radicalized. But our blinded FBI agents were not able to ask those questions, and when I chided the FBI Director for not even going out to the Muslim mosques to talk to people out there, to ask questions, to ask questions to find out if the Tsarnaevs have been radicalized, the FBI Director said that they did go out there to the mosque. I didn't hear it at the time, but I heard it on the replay when he adds, ``as part of our outreach program.'' They didn't go out there to investigate the Tsarnaevs to save Bostonians' lives. He didn't even know that the Islamic Society of Boston was started by a man named Al-Amoudi, who is in prison for 23 years for supporting terrorism. After being a very important adviser, he helped find Muslims to go into the military as Muslim chaplains. He helped the Clinton administration. He actually helped the George W. Bush administration early on until they figured out, whoa, this guy is supporting terrorism, and they had him arrested I believe it was 2003 out at Dulles Airport, and he is in prison now because they recognized what he is. But our FBI Director, the FBI agents didn't even know you had a terrorist supporter that started the mosque where the Tsarnaevs went. So when the Russians see that we give America--that we don't really like, we don't really trust, but we give them a heads-up to actually save American lives, and even with a heads-up like they gave us, we can't properly protect the people of Boston because of political correctness in this administration, well, it just adds to the assessment by Putin and the other leaders in Russia that these are people that don't recognize danger when it is pointed out to them with a big sign saying ``danger'' on it. So, of course, just like Khrushchev's assessment that turned out in the end to be wrong, I hope and pray that we don't get to the brink of nuclear war because leaders around the world have assessed, as Khrushchev did, that the American President is weak and can be pushed around indefinitely. I don't think President Obama can be pushed around indefinitely, but I sure don't want him to be pushed all the way to nuclear war before we finally take a stand, as Kennedy did. And you don't have to get that far if you stand up against the bullies early on, as Neville Chamberlain was not willing to do, and as a result, millions and millions died, and millions suffered unthinkable tragic suffering because leaders wanted to go the appeasement route. For all the flack Sarah Palin has taken, she had Russia pegged. And it is not because she ever said ``I can see Russia from my house.'' She never said that. She accurately said you can see Russia from parts of Alaska--not her house. She was willing to laugh at the skit, but now we are not talking about laughable things. We are talking about freedom being taken at the point of military weapons in Crimea, in Ukraine. We see China moving in areas and places they have never had the courage to move because they knew America would not stand for it and we would rally other nations against China. The Chinese leaders know that at times, as good as the economy seemed to be going, they are a fragile economy. As I have said before, I think if China knew that they could call all the debt of the United States and push us into a bankruptcy- type mode in the United States, they would except they would suffer dramatically, and if they ever get to the point where they think that they can take this Nation down financially without losing their own, they would do it. That is why it is a terrible wrong as a government to allow ourselves to become further and further indebted to China. Today, apparently the news we were seeing, their economy has taken a hit today. I look forward to learning more about that this evening, but it is time Americans woke up, Mr. Speaker, and realize that appeasement of bullies, of thugs, has never worked. It will never work, and when you are the most powerful, have the most powerful military in world history in the face of growing bully power, you don't abandon yours. We want to help those who cannot feed themselves in America. We want to help those who cannot provide for themselves in America. Certainly we differ on our side of the aisle. For those who are able-bodied and can work, let's get the economy going so that people have a job and can do for themselves and make more. Let's don't continue to make people more and more dependent on the government. I know my friends across the aisle do not want to see the world fall into war as it did in World War II, do not want to see us come to the brink of thermonuclear annihilation as it almost did during President Kennedy's term, but it is important to understand from history that is where you go when you show weakness. We can defend ourselves without putting tens of thousands or 100,000 troops into a country like we did in Afghanistan. For heaven's sake, we defeated the Taliban with less than 500 Americans in there helping the Northern Alliance. We helped them with weapons, we helped them with air cover, we helped them with intel, and they defeated our enemy for us, and this administration will point to the Northern Alliance and call them war criminals because they fought like the Taliban fought. We can fight our enemies by empowering the enemy of our enemy. They are Muslims. We can live with the Northern Alliance as long as they don't ever turn on us. As long as they are going to fight our enemy, then let them fight our enemy. Yet for the government that was given to Afghanistan at our pushing-- a tribal, regional country like Afghanistan was given a strong centralized government that would lead to nothing but corruption. We should have known it when it happened, so how do we deal with the problem there? As my friend, former Vice President Masood said, You help us get an amendment into our Constitution that allows us to elect our governors, elect our mayors, pick our own police chiefs, take that power away from the appointment power of the President, and we can protect our regions and keep the Taliban from taking over. This administration does not seem to want to push for something like that. It can't even get a status of forces agreement that was teed up completely for them by President Bush in Iraq but then was fumbled by this administration. I was meeting, had a visit with a Baloch friend today. If you have done homework, you know, Mr. Speaker, that the Taliban is apparently getting supplied mainly from Pakistan, and much of the supplies come through the more southern area, the Baloch area of Pakistan. We also know that the Baloch have been victimized, oppressed, persecuted, killed, and terrorized by the Pakistani military, the Pakistani government. Iran has done the same thing because the Baloch people are indigenous to the southern part of Pakistan and on into the most mineral-rich areas of Iran. So we don't have to go to war with Iran, we don't have to go to war with Pakistan, but if you start assisting the Baloch people to stop the oppression and perhaps have their own independent country, the Taliban stop getting supplied by Pakistan. Iran doesn't have all of the minerals. They have those mineral areas, a big part, an important part of them at least are run by the Baloch people, and we can do business with them. There are ways to deal with the enemy of our enemies so that they keep areas around the world in check so you don't have to lose so much American lives. Most people are not aware that most Americans have been killed under the administration of this President. It is time we stood firm. It is time we let the bullies of the world know Sarah Palin was right, and we need to stand up to them. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, at this time I would like to yield to my dear friend, Mr. LaMalfa.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I heard my friend from Tennessee talk about revisionist history, and yet he has also talked about the Republicans shutting down the government. So that we get this accurate, the truth is this body here proposed and passed three different compromises. One was going to suspend ObamaCare for a year. The Senate would not even take that up; they wanted a shutdown. Then we sent down a bill we passed from here that would actually just suspend the individual mandate--that the President has done unconstitutionally and unilaterally for Big Business. Then when that didn't work, we passed a bill that said: Look, here's our conferees; you appoint yours; we will have a deal worked out by morning. Harry Reid wanted the Congress and all of the Federal Government shut down, and so he did nothing. So, we know who shut things down, but I want to read a quote: These last few years we have seen an unacceptable abuse of power at home. We've paid a heavy price by having a President whose priority is expanding his own power. The Constitution is treated like a nuisance. Barack Obama said that, and he could not be more right as to classification of his own conduct.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, these are interesting times in America. For most of us who went to law school, we were taught that for an adversarial system of justice of law to work, there has to be active participation on both sides of an issue, of a person charged with a crime, on defense, or litigation over a law itself. So Chairman Goodlatte from just across the river in Virginia called a hearing in the Judiciary Committee this week. We had another hearing about the constitutionality, or lack thereof, of actions by this administration, and it is very alarming. Professor Jonathan Turley, with whom I have disagreed on many policy issues, has a wonderful grasp of the Constitution; and he recognizes the dangers when an administration decides to pick and choose which laws will be enforced and goes further and issues executive orders, not like prior administrations that simply explain on most occasions or illuminate some law as to how they think it is to be interpreted, but to actually make law and executive orders. That is just unconscionable for somebody that took an oath to defend the Constitution. I can't recall times that I have agreed with The LA Times before, but they had an editorial that indicates even The LA Times understands the danger of what is going on right now in this country with this administration. We have an Attorney General who has been requested to produce documents lawfully, informally, refused to do so, been subpoenaed to produce information documents, has refused to do so unlawfully, to the point that the committee had a hearing and ultimately found the Attorney General of the United States in contempt of Congress, which came to this floor and, in a very unusual action found, the Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer in this country, in contempt of Congress, basically in contempt of the Constitution. This has far wider implications than most in America seem to grasp because, when the highest law enforcement officer in America refuses to comply with the law, holds himself out as being above any law, creates laws that he wants to defend--at least the administration creating laws that they want to defend or follow--and actually saying in this room--I just had the President of the United States say in this room: I am going to go around the Congress--if you don't do what I want, I am going to go around the Congress. The ramifications for that are so staggering to anyone who has contemplated the founding of this country that it is beyond words. The Founders set up these checks and balances believing that, surely, there would be people in the judiciary--although they saw that as the least powerful branch, though it has now become the most powerful--they saw Congress as always being willing to defend its own laws, even to the point of defunding anything in the administration that did not protect and defend the law. They saw a President as standing up and refusing to follow things that were not the law. They felt like each branch would judiciously protect their own powers under the Constitution, and that balance would allow this Nation to go forward as the freest Nation in the history of the world. But today, we are living in a time where all of that is in jeopardy, when one branch can act to the total disregard of another branch or other branches. We have seen that with executive orders that just completely change the law as written and completely intentionally disregards the law of the land. It is staggering. The LA Times had an editorial on February 27 that talked about the Attorney General's posture on just picking and choosing which laws he would provide a defense for. Mr. Speaker, I stand here as someone--as a prosecutor, as a lawyer, as a judge, as a chief justice--who at times absolutely did not like laws--particular laws--but knew if this Nation were to remain for years to come, we had to either change the law legally; or as lawyers, as officers of the court, as judges, as chief justices, we had to follow the law. Back in the '80s, I was ordered by a State district judge to file an appeal--to represent a man on appeal after having been convicted of capital murder. I was then, as now, a very conservative person. I went to the judge after I got the call that I was going to be appointed and begged the judge not to appoint me, that I was doing civil trial work, I wasn't doing criminal work, please don't appoint me to appeal a criminal conviction because I will have to go back to school to do a proper job of representing a man on appeal of the death penalty. I knew if he appointed me--because I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, I would spend incredible hours to make sure I properly represented the man on appeal, even though I didn't know any more about the facts of the case than I had read in the papers. From the papers, I got the impression that he had probably gotten what he deserved. But the judge appointed me to appeal a capital murder conviction in which the defendant was sentenced to death. I didn't want the case, didn't ask for it, begged not to have it. But I knew that if our system was to work, I had to do everything ethically and legally I could to present my client's side of the case. As I got into it and I read the entire long, long transcript--every word of it--I realized the man had not gotten a fair trial, and unknown to the district attorney, an assistant district attorney had acted inappropriately, and it caused great harm and jeopardy to the case for the defense. I did the very best I could for my client legally and ethically, and the case was reversed at the highest criminal court in Texas. Even when, as attornies, we would disagree with the law--and as we have heard from this Attorney General and people in this Justice Department over and over--even when someone is absolutely convicted, clearly is a criminal, they deserve a proper defense. So how this administration and this Attorney General and this Justice Department can justify picking and choosing which laws they will defend and which laws they will let fall without a defense is unimaginable. For people who have learned anything about our Constitution, we have to zealously represent the clients, the laws that are put before us to represent. This administration has now repeatedly chosen not to defend some laws when the highest law enforcement in the land, we know, actually was willing to help convicted absolutely-known criminals to get pardoned, to get lighter sentences. We bring people in who have fought--or at least one individual who fought to get a convicted murderer of a police officer--who the evidence indicated stood over him after he shot him and shot him repeatedly--a police officer--and yet, the Attorney General can justify bringing someone in; the President justified bringing someone in by saying: Oh, no, but everybody is entitled to a defense, that is how our system works. Then when he has a constitutional obligation to produce documents to Congress and just says: I am going to ignore that requirement of the law, I don't care, and not only am I going to ignore that requirement of the law, even after the extraordinary event of having the United States House of Representatives declare the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the country to be in contempt of Congress--which is really in contempt of the Constitution--still has the nerve to come in here during the State of the Union, which is really thumbing the nose at the Constitution--at Congress--that: I will ignore the law, I won't follow the laws I don't like, I won't defend the laws I don't like; and then this week actually go out and tell State law enforcement officers--highest ranking State law enforcement officers that, in essence, if they don't like a law, then just don't defend it. So this editorial, just in part, from the LA Times, points out that: The six State attorneys general who have declined to defend their States' bans on same-sex marriage in court got some encouragement this week from U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. In a speech to the National Association of Attorneys General, Holder said that it was sometimes appropriate for attorneys general to abandon their usual obligation to defend the constitutionality of State laws. This page supports same-sex marriage unreservedly. But even so, we worry that Holder's comments will embolden additional State attorneys general--Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives--to pick and choose which of their States' laws they will defend in court. It also says further down: Yet when attorneys general are elected, as in 43 States, the temptation will be to transmute a popular political stand into a constitutional objection. Even if Holder is right that attorneys general should refuse to defend State laws in ``exceedingly rare'' circumstances, those laws ought to be defended by someone. Further down they point out that: They probably would react differently, however, if a future Attorney General refused to defend the constitutionality of statutes that treat attacks on gays and lesbians as hate crimes. I would imagine this Attorney General would find that unconscionable; but once we began to ignore the law and become a Nation of men--and that is generic, including men and women, whoever is in authority-- instead of a Nation of laws, then we become like the nations that so many people try to flee to come to America because there is graft, there is corruption, because the rule of law is not followed. It is whatever the dictator, the drug group, whatever the people in power think should be the law will be the law, and it becomes an unbearable place to live. There is a reason that fences end up being built around a country not to keep people in, as in the Soviet Union days, but because people want to come flooding in, which would overwhelm our country, overwhelm our ability to provide government services, and end the ability to be a Nation where people want to come. There is a reason. It is because we have been a Nation of laws that has applied the law fairly across the board. Clearly, because the government is composed of human beings, there will be mistakes and there will be abuses, but in abuses, even Presidents have been held to account. That keeps us being a Nation of laws. Yet, when the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the country refuses to provide information to Congress that he lawfully is required to produce, this country is in grave jeopardy. I am pleased that even the LA Times has gotten a glimpse of the potential problems here. In a couple of different hearings, I have asked the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in our country for the production of documents provided to the defendants, to the defendants who were convicted of supporting terrorism, making them terrorists. I have asked for the copies of the documents that were provided in discovery to convicted terrorists. I have been told there could be classification problems, and as I have pointed out, if you gave them to the terrorists, you can give them to Members of Congress. After yet another request last June, in writing--months and months later--I finally get a response that, in essence, says, Here is a Web site where you can go look at some of these documents. We have got 500 documents that were introduced at trial, and so that should take care of it. No, it doesn't. The Justice Department gave terrorists thousands and thousands of pages of documents, and even in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' opinion, the Fifth Circuit, they point out that there were 9,600 or so transcripts of recorded conversations. Those were given to the people convicted of terrorism, and yet this Justice Department refuses to allow Members of Congress to see those. The Founders had the idea that there would be oversight and that Congress would supervise what happened in the executive branch. That provided that balance of power to keep us from moving in the direction of a monarchy or of a totalitarian government. Yet, when this body finally gets around to some oversight, it is dismissed. What do we do? We vote to hold the Attorney General in contempt and then allow him to remain in contempt without consequences. Perhaps the proper remedy, under the thinking of the Founders, is, if an Attorney General refuses to enforce the laws that Congress passes and other Presidents sign into law, then you defund the particular individuals in the Department of Justice until such time as they start doing their jobs. You don't defund the people who are out enforcing the law, protecting the country, but you defund those people who are thumbing their noses at the Constitution and at proper, legal, constitutional oversight. We haven't done that. So the American public, the laws, and the Constitution remain at risk because people who have defended terrorists and who have worked to get even terrorists lighter sentences and pardons and things like that don't think laws duly passed by Congress, signed into law by the President and upheld by the Supreme Court are worth defending. Then don't stop there. Not only actually start telling the highest law enforcement officers in the country that they should start ignoring laws in rare cases but to ignore the laws when you don't think they are appropriate. We also know we have a Justice Department that, in their efforts to avoid making radical Islamist terrorists think that we might not like them, started outreach programs under the prior administration. I asked the prior FBI Director: Since you say that this Muslim community is like every other community in the Nation, how are the other outreach programs going with the Baptists? The Catholics? The Jews? The Buddhists? There is no other outreach program to any other religious group, so that would seem to indicate there is something special here. There are violent people in every religion, but as Thomas Jefferson was so shocked to find out, there is one religion that has a small component of it that believes that a sure way to paradise is to kill innocent men, women, and children because they don't believe religiously like those radicals do. That is the reason Thomas Jefferson got his own copy of the Koran that the Library of Congress still has. He wanted to see for himself. He was so well read. He couldn't believe there was a religion that had a holy book for a basis that would allow anyone to interpret it in such a way as to kill innocent men, women, and children. There have been, to be sure, purported Christians over the ages who thought it was their duty to go about brutalizing people who were not Christians, but anyone who studies the teachings of Christ about how we are to individually act knows those would not have been Christians doing the kind of violence that they did. It is not supported by the Bible. What is supported in the Bible is that if you do evil, be afraid, because God does not give the government the sword in vain. Individually, we are not supposed to judge and be vigilantes, but there is in an orderly society a need to have a government that will punish evil and encourage good conduct. This little experiment in a democracy, in a republic and representative form of government, is so fragile. It bothers me when I read and hear those words from Ronald Reagan that freedom is never more than one generation from being gone and, even more troubling, that a generation that loses liberty does not get it back in that same generation. I have hoped that I would find a time and place where Reagan was wrong about that, but I have not yet. So, when we see liberties being lost, privacy rights being violated right and left by our Federal Government, all kinds of snooping on American citizens without probable cause, not only by the NSA--and certainly they have the highest cause for which they are working, which is for our protection, but yet, when our privacy is completely eroded, is our safety worth losing all of our privacy completely? We lost a dramatic amount of our privacy when, without a single vote from the Republican side of the aisle, the Democrats in the House and Senate passed what they called the Affordable Care Act, which has become so unaffordable, because the Federal Government will get everyone's medical records. I was a bit staggered and maybe too naive. After I had heard people speak so emotionally from the heart about the protection of privacy and what happens in the bedroom, I was a little staggered over these years to see people on the Democratic side of the aisle--my friends over here--who were so thrilled to be giving every bit of private information about their most private body parts, about their most private activities, to the government in whole and bulk, and even said, That is not violation enough; let's do a contract with General Electric, and let them keep these records for us. It is not like the government and private industry can't be hacked. Talk about loss of privacy. I don't really have anything to hide in any of my medical records, but it is nobody else's business. Yet, wholeheartedly, people rushed and applauded the giving of all of that most private information to the Federal Government. This week, I have been so proud of my friend Jeb Hensarling, as chairman of Financial Services, who has been trying to rein in this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau--wow, what a misnomer--that is gathering information about our credit cards, our debit card activity, our loans when these were supposed to be private between us and our lenders as long as there was proper oversight to make sure they were not violating the Constitution. Yet the Federal Government, as they are, starts getting all of our debit card and credit card information. They now have all of our medical records that they are getting. They are now watching and have the ability to check every email, to check Web sites you visit. They have the ability to examine every log of every call that you make. People who once said I was crazy for giving this example some years back may begin to realize I wasn't so crazy. The example was this: When the Federal Government has the obligation to supervise every aspect of your health care--when you force government-run health care on the people of this Nation--and when you have that same Federal Government that can monitor every credit and debit card purchase you make and when they know where you go online and when they can go into your emails, is it so hard to believe that at some point some American citizen would not get a letter from the Federal Government, saying: We noticed that you purchased bacon and butter at the grocery store this last weekend, and we also noticed that your cholesterol level is over 200. What were you thinking? We can't let you do something like that, so we are going to have to punish you. We are going to have to start charging you more money. We are going to have to start supervising your activity. You are going to have to start going and working out. We saw that you let your membership at the gym lapse, and you are not going anymore. We can tell by where your car goes, by following the GPS on your car, that you are not going to the gym like you used to. You need to start going back to the gym. You need to quit buying butter and bacon, and then we won't punish you financially like we are now. Is that so hard to believe that that would start happening, could start happening? When you give the government this much private information, then liberty is sure to go shortly thereafter. In quoting Benjamin Franklin, it has been written different ways over the years--some say he didn't say it--but basically, he certainly advocated that those who are willing to give up liberty for their safety deserve neither. How much of our privacy and our liberty are the American people willing to give up just so that we can feel a little safer? Because when you do that, you will not be safe from your own government. Your own government then becomes the biggest threat to your liberty, to your freedom. Things that brilliant colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle have said over the years about our liberty and about our privacy are really becoming an issue now, and I am not hearing my friends across the aisle that raised those important points now talking about them. And I know when you have someone in the White House that is from your own party, it is kind of tough to stand up and say, This is a mistake. This is wrong. But it is time that friends across the aisle--Senators who are Democrats--start standing up in numbers and saying: Enough. You have usurped too much power that the Constitution gave to Congress. Just because you don't like the fact that we take a long time and it is not pretty to see laws being made doesn't mean you get to skip the whole process. The Founders wanted gridlock. They wanted it tough to pass laws. They didn't want us meeting year round like we do. I am sure if the Founders were around today, they would be appalled that we meet as much as we do. And when some people back in east Texas say: Gee, why aren't you in Washington? I'm saying: You're safer when we're here because it means we're not passing another law that takes your liberty away. The Founders wanted some gridlock. They didn't want it too easy to pass laws. Because they knew when that happened, every little emotional issue that came up would cause Congress to come in and pass something even though the moment was fleeting and we should not be doing things quickly and emotionally. Thomas Jefferson was not part of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. He was amazed at how good the document was. But he is reported to have indicated that if he could change one thing, he would make it a requirement that before we could pass a law, it had to be on file for a year to make sure people have plenty of time to discuss it. We see how good an idea that would be if we didn't just run in here and do things out of emotion, and we would never, ever pass another bill so we could find out what was in it. My party has not done anything as blatant as ramming through bills. My copy of ObamaCare was right around 2,500 pages. But we have had some bills that we have not been given time to read and to properly go through. We were going to take up a flood insurance bill yesterday, and I am grateful that it got moved off because we haven't had enough time to know what the bill has actually got in it word for word. Summaries are not enough, on many occasions. Sometimes if it is not a big deal, a summary may do it, but somebody besides some staffer needs to be looking at every word. That is one of the benefits of going through what we call regular order. The subcommittee gets to have a markup where they discuss every part of the bill, and anyone can offer an amendment to any part of the bill. And then it goes to the full committee, and anyone at the markup can offer an amendment to any part of the bill, and it gets debate and discussion. That is a good process. I believe that when we took the majority, we would do even better than we have. We have done a lot better than the 4 years from January of 2007 to when we got the gavel back in January of 2011. I was appalled at the completely closed rules and how it was just staggering. We had no input. Nearly half of the country basically had no representation at all on all of the important bills because they just rammed them through without any input from Republicans--who represented Democrats and Republicans. They didn't get represented in those districts. It is important, no matter who is in charge, that if it is really a critical issue that needs immediate laws passed, changes made, that we fully vet every law that we pass. We had an Over-Criminalization hearing today. One of the huge mistakes--and it has been a very bipartisan mistake--is that over all these years, when Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle want to show how strongly we feel about something and how tough we are, we slap a prison sentence on things, and one of the greatest injustices that Congress has done is to pass laws that say any violations of the regulations under this law will carry a term of imprisonment. In our hearing today, there was an estimate that there are probably 300,000 regulations, the violation of which carries a prison sentence. Congress has never seen them, never debated them, and knows nothing about them. We have heard testimony from people who have been sent to prison who did some act and had no idea there was a law against what they did. They did time in prison as a result. There was a man from Houston who was doing business during retirement by raising orchids. He ordered some orchids from South America. They were sent to him, but the proper forms were not filled out by the people that sent them to him, and under the law, any violation of those postal regulations requires time in prison. So what happened? He was arrested in his home in Houston. And since the law gives choice of venue and it had been mailed through Miami, they took him to Miami, where he didn't even know anybody, didn't have the money for bail, and ends up doing 18 months in prison, during which time he had a stroke. He couldn't testify. His wife had to. There was a poor guy from Washington State that was trying to create a better battery. He had every chemical properly stored. One day, driving home, the EPA SWAT team had black Suburbans come up behind him, the side, in front, and forced him off the road, yanked him out of his car, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, threw him in jail, and then drug him to Alaska. His heinous crime was that when he mailed a chemical to Alaska, legally, properly, he didn't know that it was not enough to check the box that it had to go by ground. It couldn't go by air. He didn't know that you needed a little sticker that had a picture of an airplane with a red line through it. That sticker with the plane with the red line through it had to be on there. And since he didn't do that, that caused him to deserve to be run off the road by the EPA SWAT team, thrown to the ground, handcuffed, hauled up to Alaska, and put in prison. When he got acquitted of that, the Justice Department wasn't happy with it, so they looked around and realized when they ransacked his home he had every chemical properly stored, but there was a law that says if you ever abandon these certain chemicals for over a certain number of days, then you committed a Federal felony. And even though it was the Federal Government that forced him to abandon those, and even though they were properly stored, he was in jail in Alaska and away from the chemicals beyond the time that the law allowed, so he went to prison for abandoning chemicals because the government drug him away from them. These are the kind of laws that are out there. We ought to pass a law in this body that says no criminal penalty may attach to a violation of any regulation unless this Congress has passed a specific law putting a criminal penalty on that specific regulation. We should not be able to leave it to bureaucrats to decide what becomes an offense punishable by imprisonment. So when you take the violations of privacy that have now been passed into law--all of our medical records, now our credit card and debit card records, our emails, all of our phone logs all being usurped and grabbed by the Federal Government--and couple that with abuses that we have seen over the years by the Federal Government of people's rights under color of law, and understanding that when this Federal Government violates your rights, your privacy, your freedoms, you have nowhere else to go and there is no appeal to anyone else, it is time this body and the Senate took action to make sure the Justice Department follows the law and doesn't just pick and choose. And also that we make sure the White House doesn't just make up law out of whole cloth and decide which laws they liked and which ones they didn't. There are oaths involved here, and there should be consequences for not following them. Then, we need to investigate further these executive departments who think they are above the law. And when Members of Congress duly request documents that were provided to people convicted as terrorists and we are told that terrorists can have them but you, Members of Congress, cannot, then it is time to defund people that will not abide by the law and will not participate in proper oversight. It is also time we had a select committee that properly investigated Benghazi. It is time we had a special prosecutor, not some big donor to the President, to investigate this horrendous scandal in the IRS that not only has smidgeons of evidence, it has overwhelming evidence of people's rights being violated. It is time that we started making sure as a Congress that people who enforce the law actually enforce the law. We have seen the desire by this administration to embrace Islam as closely as possible. And I know the attitude is that if we bring people close from Islam into the administration, that will help us get across that we mean no ill will. The trouble has been we have brought foxes into the henhouse to give advice to the chickens. We have a report from the last couple of weeks. The Clarion Project had been making Freedom of Information Act requests. They finally got some documentation that shows--and this article is from the Clarion Project. The Clarion Project investigation has discovered a jihadist enclave in Texas where a deadly shooting took place in 2002. Declassified FBI documents obtained by Clarion confirmed the find, and show the U.S. Government's concern about its links to terrorism. The investigation was completed with the help of Act for America Houston. The enclave belongs to the network of Muslims of the Americas, a radical group linked to a Pakistani militant group called Jamaat ul-Fuqra. Its members are devoted followers of Sheikh Ali Mubarak Gilani, an extremist cleric in Pakistan. The organization says it has a network of 22 villages around the U.S., with Islamberg as its main headquarters in New York. The Clarion Project obtained secret MOA, Muslim of America, footage showing female members receiving paramilitary training at Islamberg. It was featured on the Kelly File of FOX News Channel in October. A second MOA tape released by Clarion shows its spokesman declaring the U.S. to be a Muslim-majority country. A 2007 FBI record states that MOA, Muslim of America, members have been involved in at least 10 murders, one disappearance, three firebombings, one attempted firebombing, two explosive bombings, and one attempted bombing. It states: The documented propensity for violence by this organization supports the belief the leadership of the MOA extols membership to pursue a policy of jihad or holy war against individuals or groups it considers enemies of Islam, which includes the U.S. Government. Members of the MOA are encouraged to travel to Pakistan to receive religious and military/terrorist training from Sheikh Gilani. The document also says that ``The MOA is now an autonomous organization which possesses an infrastructure capable of planning and mounting terrorist campaigns overseas.'' Other FBI reports describe the MOA in similar ways with a 2003 file stating: ``Investigation of the Muslims of the Americas is based on specific and articulate facts given justification to believe they are engaged in international terrorism.'' MOA members believe the holiest Islamic site in the country is located at the Islamville commune in South Carolina. Other MOA entities include the International Quranic Open University, United Muslim Christian Forum, Islamic Post, Muslim Veterans of America, and American Muslim Medical Relief Team. On further down it says: The MOA referred to its Texas commune as Mahmoudberg in on- line instructions for a parade in New York in 2010. A posting on an Islamic message board in 2005 advertised a speaking engagement in Houston by someone from Mahmoudberg. According to the reports, the commune is 7 to 10 acres large, is in an ``extremely wooded area'' and two or three trailer homes moved there in December of 2001. However, ACT members visited the area as part of Clarion's project or investigation and interviewed one nearby local who confidently said it is closer to 25 acres in size and spoke of a presence dating back to the late 1980s. Further down, the FBI reported in 2007 that: One commune resident used to be a leader at the MOA commune in Badger, California. That site was called Baladullah. In March 2001, one of the Baladullah members was arrested for transporting guns between New York and South Carolina. Another was charged with murdering a police deputy that caught him breaking and entering a home. Interviewed residents all agreed that MOA members are private, yet, when the ACT members were spotted in the area, they were immediately and repeatedly approached. At one point a commune resident gave them a final warning to leave, despite the fact they weren't even trespassing or harassing

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is a great honor to have a number of outstanding football programs well established within the First District of Texas. To have two tremendous east Texas teams as the last ones standing, battling it out for a state championship title, makes me all the more proud as their Representative in Washington, D.C. Today, we stand to recognize and congratulate the Carthage Bulldogs on a stellar high school football season in 2013 which culminated with their claiming the Texas State 3A--Division I Championship over the previously undefeated Kilgore Bulldogs, also an extraordinarily talented group of young men who were playing in their second state title match in school history. As a result of extraordinary teamwork and athletic prowess, these two east Texas powerhouse teams faced off in what became known as the ``Bulldog Bowl.'' This canine clash came just one year after both teams were defeated in the state semifinals. More than 17,000 fans packed the stadium the week before Christmas to witness this battle to determine who would be ``top dawg'' in the state of Texas for 2013. The 34-23 victory secured the Carthage Bulldogs' fourth state championship trophy since 2008, the team having captured three straight state titles from 2008 to 2010. The Carthage Bulldogs' 2013 championship success is a testament to superb coaching, as well as a tribute to the players and all who assisted them along the way. Such championships do not come without extensive year-round preparation of everyone involved, the coaches' tireless groundwork, unrivaled discipline & selfless teamwork of players and staff, enthusiastic support and unwavering encouragement from family, friends and fans, all fueled by a dogged determination to reach the highest goal achievable in Texas football. The lessons learned about teamwork and discipline will undoubtedly improve every participant's life in immeasurable ways. These same lessons should help boost every player, coach, and supporter through the knowledge that potential obstacles that lie ahead in life can be overcome with championship capability. Congratulations to Superintendent Dr. Glenn Hambrick, Principal Otis Amy, Assistant Principals Pat Browning and Wade Watson, along with the entire athletic staff including Athletic Director and Head Football Coach Scott Surratt, Assistant Coaches Chris Smith, Darren Preston, Andre Granger, Chris Cloninger, Clint Endsley, Matt Folmar, John Goodwin, Brandon Hargers, Ryan Marion, Dennis McLaughlin, Benny Mitchell, Mike Morgan, Jay Malone, Charlie Tucker, Jim Milstead, and Stephen Luman; the Junior High Coaches Paul Bishop, Brian Caver, Jeff Griffin, Brian Stacy, and Damon Roberts; Athletic Trainer Dustin Swaim; and Student Assistants Mason Brittain, Kyla Burd, David Johnson, Nicholle Moore, Cynthia Puente, Hannah Taylor, Sydnee Taylor, and Sarai Vassar; and Athletic Secretary Mamie Vanover. And of course, we pay tribute to the championship team consisting of Jakeldric Jackson, Dylan Possoit, Keldrean Strong, Blake Bogenschutz, Terian Goree, Jeremy Matlock, O'keeron Rutherford, Clark Neuman, Kirston Ingram, Troy Davis, Roberto Jimenez, Trevor Cooper, Jarod Blissett, Ross Barron, Tevin Pipkin, Christian Allison, Micah Templeton, Jordan Romero, Juston Clough, Tredarion Jackson, Bryian Bolton, Ty Jones, Tra'Kareon Leary, James Marshall, D'Vodney Brooks, Jace Zett, Johnathan Brown, Ronald Mayweather, Javontay Brown, Christopher Howard, De'Arreus Hearn, Rafael Hernandez, Gilbert Perez, Travis Phillips, Jimmy Gonzalez, Seth Ward, Kiiron Lewis, Jonthan Sells, Ravodney Hardy, Kedrick Henderson, Cade Clinton, Garrett Harvey, Branton Halcumb, Bryce Rickert, Mario McCain, Braden Russell, Micah Johnson, Hunter Hutto, Nolan Griffin, Akashdeep Singh, Devon Nitzschke, TC Bryant, Jonathon Rayson, Griffin Bankhead, Trevor Broadway, Brandon Carlson, Adrian Goodacre, Dillon Husar, Cristian Jimenez, Jarrod McLin, Cagan Baldree, Leonard Maxwell, Marquise Guinn, Ja'Marcus Roberson, and Tavorin Pellum. May God continue to bless these young people, their families, friends, and all those individuals who refer to Carthage as home. It is my most esteemed honor to congratulate the 2013 State Champion Carthage Bulldogs and everyone involved with this endeavor, as their legacy is now recorded in the Congressional Record that will endure as long as there is a United States of America.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, today, once again, the President has unilaterally, almost like a monarch, said ObamaCare is the law. The fact is Harry Reid and the Senate were willing to shut down the government instead of just passing a bill that would have suspended ObamaCare for a year--or, at least suspend the mandates--and he did it again today. So it makes it very clear the shutdown of our government that hurt so many people was clearly a political game by Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats because they wanted America to hurt--and blame the Republicans--when all along they were willing to agree to what we offered to avoid the shutdown. Shame on you.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it has been an honor and a privilege and a pleasure to work with Trudi Terry here in the House. I really hate to see her retire. She has put up with me more times than most people have had to, and kept a wonderful spirit and cooperative atmosphere in this body, in this Chamber, and I will be forever grateful. Thank you. I really hate to see you retire. So I guess to add to the bad news of Trudi Terry retiring, there are other things going on. One story that hits home for me as someone with other friends like Dana Rohrabacher and Steve King, who have met with Baloch leaders from the Balochistan area of Pakistan--it is the area where most of Pakistan's minerals are located. It is an area where Pakistan has, for many years, terrorized the Baloch people, persecuted them mercilessly. They want the Baloch area's minerals and assets to keep Pakistan going and basically radicalized, but they don't want to let the Baloch people live in peace. I proposed in a previous op-ed a couple of years ago that perhaps it is time to look at encouraging a new Baloch state, a new country of Balochistan as independent of Pakistan so that the people can live in peace, so they don't have to be worried about Pakistan officials and military coming through and committing, really, crimes against these people. After I wrote that op-ed and included a statement that perhaps it is time to join in the encouragement for a new Balochistan state, there was an article in a Pakistani daily paper that said in essence maybe it is time to quit persecuting the Baloch, reach out to them and figure out a way to let them live in peace because to Pakistan that area was important. The op-ed from the Pakistan paper also indicated that perhaps they needed to quit funding and helping the Taliban defeat the Americans in Afghanistan and just concentrate on their own country. That would have been wonderful, and would still be. This story is out from the Toronto Sun, and it regards the Balochistan province in Pakistan. By the way, I have heard from numerous members of our American military and from others in Afghanistan that most of the supplies to the Taliban are coming from Pakistan through the southern Baloch area of Pakistan, and that is why the thought was triggered, maybe if Balochistan was independent of Pakistan, that would cut off the supply to the terrorist Taliban in Afghanistan and would save a lot of American lives. Since that has been said, we have lost hundreds more American soldiers. More American blood has been shed because we have failed to neutralize the Taliban, and they have continued apparently to grow in their efforts to take over Afghanistan shortly after we leave. This article, though, says: It would have been inconceivable that any U.S. official, let alone a Secretary of State, would host a delegation from Serbia the day after mass graves were discovered in Srebrenica in 1995. Yet on Sunday, a day after bullet-ridden bodies were discovered in suspected mass graves in Pakistan's military-controlled province of Balochistan, Secretary of State John Kerry was toasting a delegation of Pakistan security officials at the State Department. Balochistan and human rights officials say 169 bodies have been uncovered so far. Pakistani officials put the number at 15. Victims and families of Baloch youth who have disappeared and who are feared to be among the decomposed bodies being unearthed from the mass graves had hoped that Kerry would raise the issue with his Pakistani counterpart. Instead, they heard Kerry say to the Pakistanis, ``We are really delighted to have you back, and I look forward to our continued conversation.'' America looked the other way in 1971 when the Pakistan Army slaughtered a million of its own citizens in what is now Bangladesh. What emerged was a country that hosted the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, allowed Osama bin Laden to operate on its soil for more than a decade, and whose terrorists have been involved in numerous jihadi attacks around the world ever since the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the attack on USS Cole off Yemeni waters. Yet America continues to give Pakistan billions of dollars in aid, which is then turned around to generate more hatred toward the West and produce more jihadi terrorists. Inserting parenthetically into this article is my oft-quoted statement that you don't have to pay people to hate you; they will do it for free. We continue to send billions of dollars to nations that hate us and want us gone from the map. They want to see us suffer, and we keep sending them money to hate us. We can use that money here. We could save raising some taxes. We could get some roads and some of the infrastructure that the President promised if we gave him $900 billion, basically, in a stimulus package right after he took office, and that was going to fix all of the infrastructure, but maybe 6 percent of $900 billion went for infrastructure, and so the President is back out saying we have got to build these roads. I mean, we have been talking about this for 5 years. He has. So you didn't do it with the stimulus money--why don't we just save some of the billions that we are giving to people who hate us, and then we don't help them kill Americans. We don't continue, as this administration is doing, to assist Syrian rebels who are killing Christians. For anyone who happens to believe that there is a God as reflected in the Bible, the question will have to be asked: If there is such a God as reflected in the Bible, which I believe, is it going to bode well for a Nation which is funding and helping nations that are killing, torturing, kidnapping Christians around the world? This article goes on: Now the U.S. is giving the same Pakistan army another pass as it carries out the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Baloch people from their homeland. In response, the Baloch have taken up arms and are fighting their fifth war of independence since 1948, when the Pakistan army invaded and captured the independent and sovereign state of Kalat. The article goes on. But the fact is we have people in this administration demanding that what they say are indigenous people--despite the fact that the children of Israel occupied the promised land 1,600 years or so, 1,700 years at least, before a man named Muhammad was born. There are people who say: Oh, but these Palestinians--a name that arose as Newt Gingrich pointed out in the last 40 or so years--these Palestinians are indigenous, so you have got to give them their land. Yet they are not saying it about Balochistan. They are not saying it about the Baloch people that are being killed and persecuted by Pakistan. Oh, no. We are helping kill and persecute the Baloch people by giving aid and assistance to a government that is killing and persecuting them. If there is a just God in the universe, would there not be a price for a country as powerful as the United States that continues to support those who kill, maim, torture, horrify innocent people, Christians, Jews, secularists, and oftentimes they are even more brutal to moderate Muslims that are not as radical as they think they should be? That is why in Egypt, for those who really have eyes and really have ears to hear, we had an incredible event last summer. This was the real Arab Spring, but it came in summer. This is when moderate Muslims, Christians, Jews, secularists rose up, some reports of 30 to 33 million people, larger than any demonstration in the history of the world. They rose up and said: We don't want radical Islamists running Egypt. The radical Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood that were controlling Egypt-- as we knew they would if they had election too quickly--the Muslim Brotherhood became desperate because they knew, to have a new Ottoman Empire running around the Mediterranean that would become a worldwide caliphate, they could not afford to lose Egypt from under their iron fist. So what do they do? They immediately start burning down churches, killing Christians particularly, and so many others. That is why I was so encouraged. Over 90 percent of the people voting--which was a higher percentage than we have voting here in the United States--came out and voted for the new constitution that has been drafted under the chairmanship of Amr Moussa. I was very pleased that Chairman Moussa was willing to come on the Sean Hannity radio show a few weeks ago when I was guest hosting for Sean Hannity. It is really encouraging what is going on in Egypt by those who want a democratic form of government and who do not want terrorists running Egypt, who don't want a worldwide caliphate, who don't like the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are not as blind to the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood as the leaders of this administration are. If one will just go look at one of the symbols used by the Muslim Brotherhood these days, you find the crossed swords, the signs and wording in their language denoting the Muslim Brotherhood, and that is fixed over a globe of the world. It is not just Egypt, Iraq, Iran, not just in the former Ottoman Empire. Oh, no. This is fixed over a globe that is revolving, and the United States of America passes under those swords of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is true that the Muslim Brotherhood here in the United States does not want to utilize violence right now because they have made so much progress in this administration that they are afraid violence right now might do damage. Violence in Egypt, the same Muslim Brotherhood feels it was necessary because they had just been caught. They had been rejected by moderate Muslims--the majority of Egyptians--and they became desperate. So their violence had to occur. Christians, according to these radical Islamist Muslim brothers, had to die. Once America starts figuring out that the goal is global caliphate-- including the United States--then they will be participating in horrendous violence here, as they have in other places in the world. Some of our moderate Muslim friends in the Middle East asked some of us last September: What is wrong with you in America? Don't you understand? You call it al Qaeda, but that is really just an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. They are the ones that attacked you on 9/11/ 2001. These are moderate Muslims asking these questions. Why do you not understand: Yes, it was the Taliban, but it is really the Muslim brothers behind it that you were at war with in Afghanistan? They are the ones that did more killing of Americans in Iraq, and yet you are helping the Muslim Brotherhood, you are running to their aid and assistance; and in Egypt you are demanding that either they put the radical Islamists back in charge of Egypt or we are not going to provide them the Apache helicopters, the tanks, and the jets that we were going to provide to the Muslim Brother leaders of Egypt. They asked: What is wrong with you people? What are you not getting? You are helping the people that want to destroy you. People can see that around the world, but here in Washington, D.C., it is apparently one of the hardest things to find and see. We hear people saying: Well, we really need all the people's most private information about phone calls, every phone call they make; we need to have that as part of the government because one time we believe it may have stopped a bombing. Well, if this administration would do their homework, they wouldn't need the logs of every phone call of every American. We could go back to what the Constitution does require and the Court should require, and that is probable cause, before you start giving out personal information, before you let the government start monitoring every email of every person in America. We were promised my freshman term that if the PATRIOT Act were extended, specifically section 206 and 215, that that would only apply if someone were in contact with a foreign terrorist, but Americans would never have to worry unless they were in touch with foreign terrorists. Then after Edward Snowden, we find out that actually what they promised was not true. And yes, that was during the Bush administration. I don't care. I don't care if it was a Republican or Democrat. I don't care where it started. When we find out it is still going on, it has got to stop. We are supposed to have some privacy in this country. Those Democrats that were suspicious of the Bush administration wanting that much power were right. Where have my friends gone now that it is a Democrat administration? I certainly don't have a problem calling out a Republican administration when they are not doing the right thing. I wish my friends across the aisle would do the same thing and join me. What about the Boston bombing? The Russians took a huge risk in giving this administration information and saying: Look, Tsarnaev, this guy has been radicalized and you are letting him back in America. You are headed for trouble. This is a bad guy. They took a risk in giving us that information because, when any country gives intelligence to another country, then sometimes it allows that country that gets the information to figure out how that other country is getting intelligence just by the information they get. So now we have people here in this administration saying: Oh, the Russians, shame on them. They didn't give us enough information. Are you kidding me? They told you a person had been radicalized. When I asked the Director of the FBI in our hearing about not even going to the mosque to investigate, he says, ultimately: Yeah, we did go to those mosques--and I didn't hear it at the hearing. I didn't hear it until the replay. And he said: Under our outreach program. Under the outreach program? Well, that is the FBI's ridiculous former program where they have special outreach to Muslim communities to try to be friends with them. It is not the FBI's job to be friends with people. It is the FBI's job to enforce the law and, in so doing, protect us. When Tsarnaev, the older brother, came back into this country from a place on the globe where we know radicalization is occurring--and as I understand it, he didn't even have his passport; he had his legal permanent resident card--he wasn't even pulled aside for extra questions when there should have been bells and whistles going off everywhere. The best I can find out, all they did, basically, was talk to him and his mother, and he said: No, I am not radicalized. No, my son is not radicalized. They didn't go to the mosque and start asking questions that would tell them has he been reading Qutb, which is the author, the Muslim brother from the sixties that was involved in trying to commit assassinations and other terrorist activities, and he wrote a booklet called ``Milestones'' that Osama bin Laden credits with helping turn him radical. If you know about the people that hate you and want to destroy you, then you can ask intelligent questions to find out if someone is your enemy. But because of the purge of training materials at the FBI, the intelligence departments, at the State Department--as one intelligence officer told me, we are blinded to our ability to see our enemy, because there was a young man named Tsarnaev who wanted to kill innocent Americans at a Boston Marathon and they got a heads-up from the Russians. They got all the information right before them that they could possibly need, and we don't even stop him coming into this country after he has been radicalized. What more did you need? We shouldn't have needed a heads-up from the Russians. All the signs were there for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. But we were so busy in our outreach program to a mosque that was founded by the Islamic Society of Boston, the founder of which is a man named al-Amoudi, who is in prison today for 24 years, I believe, for supporting terrorism, despite all the assistance he allegedly gave to the Clinton administration helping them find good Muslims to help in that administration. After 9/11, a couple of years or so after 9/11, it has been determined that he has been supporting terrorism, and now he is in Federal prison. A man named al-Awlaki, who this President ordered a drone strike on in Yemen, though he was an American citizen, because his parents came over on a visa to study, had him, he is an American citizen. They take him back to Yemen. He learns to hate America, comes back and works on radicalizing Americans, except, of course, when he led prayers of Muslim staff members here on Capitol Hill. Otherwise, this President determined that he needed to be killed without a trial because he radicalized Americans, and he was a threat to this country. al-Awlaki had attended the Boston mosque where the Tsarnaevs attended. I mean, how many heads-up notices do you need to figure out there is a problem, and innocent Americans are going to be killed and maimed as they were in Boston? It is time to wake up. Yet we get this story from Matt Apuzzo. The picture was from the Associated Press, January 15: ``U.S. to Expand Rules Limiting Use of Profiling by Federal Agents.'' The Attorney General, who came here last night, sat here for the State of the Union address while he is in contempt of Congress, while he is being lawless in not following the law and providing information. They wouldn't even give me all of the documents that they provided to convicted terrorists in the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. I asked repeatedly. We finally got a letter many months after the request, basically saying, We will give you the 500-or-so documents that were entered into evidence in the trial, and we have got some others you can come look at. I still don't understand, Mr. Speaker. If they will give boxes and boxes of information to the terrorists who are convicted ultimately as terrorists, why can't you give that to Members of Congress? Is it because the convictions occurred in 2008 under the Bush administration? Then this Justice Department came in and stopped any further prosecutions from going forward even though there were a couple- hundred-or-so named coconspirators in that case who were unindicted. My understanding from former Justice Department folks is that the plan was, if they could get the first convictions, then they would move forward with more and continue to follow up until they got this network that was allegedly supporting terrorism. We know five of them were supporting terrorism. Could it be that this Justice Department doesn't want us to see all of the documents that they provided to the terrorists that actually show they are terrorists? Could that be the reason they don't want Members of Congress to see? It is because then we might realize, wow, they convicted those five in 2008 under President Bush. They could surely have gotten a lot more convictions if they had just used this same evidence. Oh, sure. Congressman Gohmert, come over here, and we will show you some of the documents. We will let you see some of the electronic versions. You gave them to terrorists for heaven's sakes. You can't give them to me so I can look at them in my office? It is unbelievable what is going on here. Then there is a story from Kerry Picket from Breitbart. The story starts: Senator Dianne Feinstein--a Democrat from California, chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee--told Breitbart News on Monday that she did not know a CIA annex existed in Benghazi, Libya, before the deadly September 2012 attack--which took the lives of four Americans--on the U.S. compound happened. Feinstein could also not confirm if other Members of Congress knew about the CIA annex prior to the attack. Senator Feinstein and I disagree on many things, but I know she wants what is best for America even though we have staunch political disagreements on how we do that and what that is. My understanding is that, with anything of that nature, it would have been required that the Super 8, as they are sometimes referred to, would be briefed--the top Republican and Democrat on the Intelligence Committee in the House and in the Senate and the Republican leader in the House and the Democratic leader in the House and the Democratic leader in the Senate and the Republican leader in the Senate. Yet Senator Feinstein said, I didn't know there was a CIA annex at the Benghazi consulate. What else is this administration doing to help rebels, who include al Qaeda--as it did in Libya? What else is it doing that it is not following the law and briefing the people who are required to be briefed in Congress? I heard the President, who was standing right here last night, get applause when he, in essence, says, If Congress doesn't change the law, then I will do it--and he got applause. To thinking people, when you hear somebody say, ``if Congress doesn't do what is necessary,'' which is required by the Constitution, ``I will do it,'' it sounds like I am going to chuck the Constitution and do what I think is best. Now, I have read about those situations, of countries that had a fair and representative form of government. Ancient Greece and ancient Rome had senates that were somewhat representative. There have been types of representative governments, and you would always find that, eventually, people had that desire for one rock solid leader. They would get tired of the disagreements because, as one of the English leaders had said-- and it may have been Churchill--democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others. It isn't a pretty thing to watch, as has been said. It is like watching sausage being made. Yet when you strip away the checks and balances that the Founders put in place to keep one executive officer from just doing whatever he wanted, then you don't have a democratic Republic as we are supposed to have; you have one man making the rules or one woman making the rules. It is time America woke up and realized their constitutional rights are at severe risk, and we are at risk as a result. I wanted to mention something else that happened here at the State of the Union. A wonderful young man got the longest, best applause of the evening here as the President recognized Cory sitting up there. In addition to Cory--the hero that that dear man is--I could see other uniformed people. In fact, there were some uniformed people up in that section up there, one of whom was not Cory but was Alonzo. The President didn't recognize Alonzo because Alonzo was a staff sergeant at Fort Hood. With Nidal Hasan, people kept looking the other way. They kept giving him good officer evaluation reports because they didn't want to be deemed to be profiling or doing something that was considered racist when the man made clear over and over that he was going to have to take action--violent action--against his country if they tried to ship him over and order him to fight Muslims overseas. I did not get to meet Alonzo last night. I looked up and waved a few times, but I have great respect for that man, and he deserves so much better than he has been treated. He was shot six times; and apparently, while he is lying with six bullets in him, he realizes, as the shooting continues by Major Hasan, that he is not going to be able to pass off as dead because he is sweating profusely. As he says, dead people don't sweat, so he figured he had better get out of there, as I understand, and he took off. That is when he got shot and lost one of his eyes. This administration has prevented Alonzo from getting the benefits he deserves because of an act of war, an act of terrorism. He is not even considered at the level of the 9/11 victims. He heard, Allah akbar, and he knew it was not going to go well. Everybody who heard that radical Islamist yell before the murders began knew this was not workplace violence, that this wasn't a postal employee going postal. This was a radical Islamist who was carrying out a war against what they consider to be infidels in America. They deserve to be treated as victims of an act of war--an act against them as uniformed military--and to get the benefits coming to them. That is what should have happened. We heard the references last night to health care, and it kind of sounded like applause started when he was talking about how they were helping to reform health care, and then it died so quickly they must have realized, ooh, I don't want to be on camera clapping for the reform of health care when people are hurting across America who have lost their insurance--people like me, who liked my insurance, but ObamaCare said your insurance policy is not good enough. So I lost it. Thank you very much. There are people in really tough shape around America who deserve better health care than what ObamaCare is doing to them. There were so many things in the State of the Union address. He was talking about raising the minimum wage with Federal contractors with a stroke of the pen. I mean, how many other laws does the President want to pass with a stroke of the pen? It is not constitutional to make laws with one man's pen. That is not the democratic Republic we are supposed to be. There was even, it sounded like, some snickering when he said that. He didn't talk about the millions who have lost their insurance as a result of ObamaCare. If it were only about trying to ensure the 30 million people who reportedly didn't have health insurance--they had health care; they didn't have insurance--then let's direct it at those. Let's don't take millions and millions of Americans' insurance away in the process. As far as illegal immigration, one of the newspapers in my district-- Longview--had an article, an op-ed, in which they were saying I was opposed to immigration reform. Obviously, they read left-wing blogs and don't read and talk to me and understand what I have said repeatedly. We desperately need immigration reform in America, but every time anybody here starts talking about legal status--amnesty--the ICE agents and the ICE union representatives tell us repeatedly that more people try to rush into the United States, that more people die trying to come across the desert, that more people fall into human trafficking and a horrible life. My position has been clear for anyone who cares to see or hear, and it is supported by so many other Republicans. Mr. President has the money; he has got the wherewithal; he has got the manpower to secure our border. As soon as it is secured, as verified by the border States, we will come to an immigration reform bill so fast that people won't be able to believe it; but until the President enforces existing law, there is no sense in talking about it and luring more people to their deaths, more people in here. Control the border. Secure it. Don't close it. We need that water continuing to flow into this pond, but secure it so we know who is coming in, and when people are here without valid visas, we need to pick them up. Nearly 40 to 50 percent of the people that are here illegally came legally and overstayed their visas. Enforce the visas. And so when a guy has been radicalized, do your homework. Don't let Tsarnaev back in when he doesn't have a passport and there are all kinds of indications he is now a terrorist. Don't let him in. We could have done without that one. Secure the border. We will get an immigration bill done immediately after that. But before that, there is no reason to expect the President will ever secure the border. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate so much my dear friend, Mr. Perry's, last hour, almost, talking about such an important issue. I know there are those who say the number one job of Congress is to create jobs; but I think a more appropriate reading of our constitutional duties is, number one, we are supposed to provide for the common defense. Every American should do as George Washington prayed that we would, to never forget those who have served in the field--that is our military men and women--some of whom have given all, but all gave something. That was Washington's prayer at the end of his resignation as he resigned as the commander of the Revolutionary forces--something that had never been done before. And my understanding is it has not happened since. As a leader in the Maldives Islands said a few years ago, unsolicited, he said: We have never had a George Washington to set the proper example, so we are always worried about a military coup. And, unfortunately, they have had one. What a blessed Nation we are because people like Washington were raised up for such a time as they were in. Abraham Lincoln spoke more than once so eloquently about the need to help those who have served and their widows and orphans. So it is particularly dismaying when Congress passes anything that does not properly honor and address the issues of those who have served in the field, and as we have talked about before, to follow up and fulfill our obligation to keep our promises. This government promises individuals if you come into the military and you serve until retirement, here is what you will get in return. We should not break our promises to those who have served and risked life and limb to protect us. Just as my friend, Marcus Latrel, said recently on CNN, basically that they didn't go to the mission in Afghanistan senselessly, that it is not senseless when someone hears the call, sees the order of his country, and acts in accordance with their order, win, lose or draw. And that is the mentality. Of my 4 years in the Army, probably 2\1/2\ were under Commander Jimmy Carter and a year and a half under Commander in Chief Ronald Reagan. The last year and a half was far better because we had a Commander in Chief that truly appreciated more the opinion of those who were serving in the field and restored honor for the military. President Carter, obviously, from his background had respect, but you sure couldn't tell it from the actions when we were in the military. As a result, our reputation suffered around the world and we had an act of war on our embassy in Tehran. And other than a scaled- back rescue attempt--scaled back by the White House itself--we were embarrassed. And it is still used for recruiting today among radical extremists. Muslim Brotherhood members abroad say that these guys don't have the backbone to do what is necessary to win. In such an important time in this world where so much is at risk to have an administration and some in the House or Senate that think it is okay to break our word to our military. We have got to turn this around. To those who think it is okay, we need to make clear, Mr. Speaker, it is not okay. We have the moral obligation to keep our promises and to do everything we can to protect those who are protecting us and to never send them into harm's way unless they have been given authority to win. That should have been the lesson learned from Vietnam that wasn't learned. The lesson was not that we couldn't win--we could. And as Sam Johnson says in his book and points out in person after his 7 years in the Hanoi Hilton--much of it in complete isolation, brutally treated-- after carpet bombing North Vietnam for 2 weeks, which could have happened many years before and ended the war early, a vindictive commander at the Hanoi Hilton laughed, saying, in effect, you stupid Americans, if you had just bombed us for 1 more week, we would have had to surrender unconditionally. So it should be. We should not get involved anywhere where we do not give full authority to those in our military to go kick rear-ends, win, and then come home. In an article today by Kristina Wong from ``The Hill'' publication, headline ``Pentagon's hands tied on hunting down Benghazi attackers,'' this article says: The U.S. military cannot hunt down and kill people responsible for the deadly 2012 attack on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya, as long as the terrorists are not officially deemed members or affiliates of al Qaeda, newly declassified transcripts from congressional hearings show. This article goes on to say: ``In other words, they don't fall under the AUMF, that stands for authorized use of military force, authorized by the Congress of the United States. So we would not have the capacity to simply find them and kill them either with a remotely piloted aircraft or with an assault on the ground,'' Dempsey said. They are talking about General Dempsey in his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, and those were the transcripts that were released. But he is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and here is where I have become amazed how this administration could think that the AUMF somehow gives this President authority without consulting Congress to go over and bomb and have our military play an active role in taking out Qadhafi, provide weapons to Libyans who very well may have been used to help attack our consulate, by the way, in Benghazi. We don't know enough to know for sure, but there is a good chance we were giving them the weapons. But how this President, this administration, thinks you can go over and go to war against Qadhafi, who had become an ally after he got scared enough after the invasion of Iraq that he just opened up all of his weapons systems, became an ally and, as some moderate Muslim leaders in the Middle East have said to me, he wasn't a good guy, but he was one of your good friends after he got scared of you in 2003. And some have said he was doing more to help fight terrorism in that part of the world than anybody besides Israel, and yet you bomb him and you give weapons to go against him. We don't understand you. But this administration felt as if under the AUMF it had full authority to go in and attack a place where even the Secretary of Defense said we have no national security interest in Libya. Oh, sure, the Organization of Islamic Council, the 57 states that make up that organization--sometimes confused with the 50 States we have here in America--but that 57 states that make up the OIC, they wanted us to go in and take out Qadhafi because they didn't like him because he was fighting terrorism, radical Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood. How would an administration, how would a Commander in Chief have authority to go into Libya, and then when we find out there are people that still want to destroy America, kill Americans and destroy our way of life, all of a sudden you say, but we don't really have authority to go after people who have declared war on us, have committed an act of war in attacking our embassy, but we are just not sure we can go after them. That did not seem to stop this administration and the President from issuing an order to murder, to kill a guy I wasn't a fan of, Anwar al- Awlaki, a U.S. citizen because his parents came over on a visa and he was born here, and then he went back and was taught to hate America. Even though earlier, even during the Bush administration, he came to Capitol Hill and led congressional Muslim staffers here in prayer here on Capitol Hill; even though he had contacts within this administration, he visited with people in this administration's government, for some reason, we didn't see the need to arrest him and put him on trial here in America, but they thought it would be better just to hit him with a drone attack in Yemen and kill him over there. And I'm not finding fault necessarily. That is a different debate over whether a President should order a drone attack on an American citizen without a trial. My point is if this administration felt as if the AUMF, the authorization for use of military force, allowed him to take out an American citizen in Yemen, then how is it that this administration all of a sudden gets scared and says, gee, we might violate the AUMF if we go after the people that killed our Ambassador in an act of war against U.S. property, which was our consulate in Benghazi? I think it is helpful to read directly from the language. It is something I was extremely concerned about and a number of my friends here have been extremely concerned about. It is why we have pushed amendments to rein in the Presidential authority to go after American citizens, and we have worked on language and passed language to effect this to prevent any U.S. President, whether it was former President Bush while he was still President or this President or a future President, it would prevent them from being able to just arrest an American citizen and hold them indefinitely. We put restraints on the President. Here is the language that now-General Dempsey and this administration say we just don't really have the authority under the AUMF to go after the guys that assassinated our Ambassador and killed three others including two former Navy SEALs and took much of the leg of a former Army Ranger that was on the rooftop with Ty Woods and Glen Doherty. Here is the language. It says: That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons. So we have had people that took that and said, gee, you know, al- Awlaki didn't help plan 2001's 9/11 attack. In fact, we had him around Washington, leading prayers here on Capitol Hill and having contacts with this administration. But, gee, they didn't have a problem using this language to kill an American citizen in Yemen--not because he participated or helped plan 9/11/2001, but simply because they were using language here in the last part that: Or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations. So that has been interpreted by this administration for a long time now, gee, you didn't have to participate or help plan 9/11/2001; but if you did anything to aid, abet, assist, encourage in any way any of these organizations that may have participated in some way in 9/11/ 2001, then the President can do whatever he needs to with military force to, as it says: Prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons. Well, if al-Awlaki could have this language used to take him out with a drone attack, then certainly under this administration's definition and usage of that language, it sure ought to authorize them to go after people that declared war on us and committed an act of war against our enemy, or harbored such persons or organizations. And we already know, everybody but The New York Times, everybody knows that the organizations, some of the organizations that participated in the 9/11/ 12 attack, the act of war on our consulate in Benghazi, were affiliated with al Qaeda, organizations that did participate in 9/11. So these organizations didn't necessarily part in 9/11 on 2001, but they certainly were working with them. So anyway, it just seems to be contradictory for the administration to use the AUMF to possibly accede their authority to kill people abroad and then turn around and hide behind it. And perhaps if Dr. Gates had not written the book he did and given us insight into things that are said or not said in this administration, then maybe we wouldn't know as much. But since we now know that even the Secretary of Defense and our top generals can feel the President is doing the wrong thing but not have the guts to tell him to his face, then I don't know, perhaps possibly General Dempsey is in that category now. Maybe he is one of those who fits in the category of maybe knowing something is appropriate but, instead, popping those heels together, saluting, yes, sir, and never fulfilling their duty not just to follow orders, but to give helpful information to a commander above you, in this case the Commander in Chief. This article says: The U.S. could seek to capture the Benghazi attackers under the existing AUMF, but it would need to allow forces in Libya, or any other countries in which the attackers are hiding, to do so. Well, isn't that interesting, because that is not what this President did to kill al-Awlaki, Anwar al-Awlaki. They just killed him. They didn't allow any Yemen force, or anybody else. They just took him out with one of our drones bombs. And now all of a sudden they want to hide behind this language and say, Oh, well, actually, we can't do that. So is that our excuse now for why, after a year and a half--and I feel sorry for the President because basically he wasn't going to rest until we got these guys. So, man, a year and a half is a long time not to rest. This article says Dempsey's classified comments highlight the limits of the existing authority which was approved by Congress after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the difficulty of fighting a constantly evolving enemy that in al Qaeda has inspired independent terrorist groups to try to murder American forces and civilians. The AUMF gives the military authority to hunt and kill those responsible for the 2001 attacks, wherever they are, and has allowed President Obama to authorize hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. It has also been used to authorize several Special Operations raids, such as the one that took out Osama bin Laden. But, see, the article just accepts what the administration says. General Dempsey said apparently in his testimony, Oh, well, gee, apparently you can go after all these other people. Well, if you can go after them, you can use the same language to go after the perpetrators of 9/11. So what is the administration afraid of? I keep wanting these questions asked, and I think we need a select committee to ask these questions. Why don't you just come forward, all those in the administration that have information, why do you keep polygraphing our intelligence agents who knew what went on in Libya and what was going on in Libya? Why do you keep polygraphing them to make sure that they are not talking to Congress or anybody else? Why don't you just let them tell Members of Congress so we have better information from which we can authorize other actions and appropriate money to help with those actions? Why don't you just come forward and tell us what was going on? Why don't you try for a change being the most transparent administration in history? It is a long way to go, but maybe it is time to start. We are in a war; and as others have so appropriately said, apparently we have been in a war since 1979 when radical Islamists committed the act of war against American property. An embassy belongs to the country and the soil is considered to be the country that occupies that embassy. You commit an act against that, military act, hostile act, it is an act of war. So we have been at war since 1979. The trouble is until 9/11/01, most Americans didn't know we were in a war. Only one side knew we were in a war. That was borne out in 1983 when our marines, over 200 marines, were killed in Beirut by a bombing, a truck bombing that came in there. So many acts of war, of violence, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, including the two embassies that were bombed under the Clinton administration, although perhaps some in the administration might be tempted to ask, as Secretary Clinton asked not that long ago, What difference at this point does it make how or why they were killed basically in those embassies. Well, it makes a difference because we can prevent them in the future if we know why they were killed and what went wrong in the present. But it is a mystery. Why hide behind the same AUMF as an excuse not to have brought the assassins of our Ambassador to justice? And something I heard, I heard a former JAG officer talking on Fox News one night this week, obviously a smart man, but an ignorant man. You can be smart, but be ignorant. He was ignorant of the Constitution because he seemed to think that the Constitution requires you capture someone who has declared war on you, you have to give them all kinds of access and let them send manifestos around, you have to give them all kinds of freedom; and that is simply not the case. Some people who mean well but are ignorant of the Constitution say everybody has to be treated exactly the same under the Constitution. Their constitutional rights mean this or that, not understanding that actually under the Constitution everybody is not entitled to the same court. They are entitled to due process, but constitutionally that means different things. So in the Army, in the military--I say the Army because that is what I was in--but in the military, constitutional rights are different. So you don't have the right to freedom of assembly. I wanted to claim that many times. We were ordered to be out for a 5 a.m. forced 25-mile march. I wanted to claim, Sir, I have a right to freedom of assembly wherever and whenever I want, and I would just rather not assemble for this 25-mile forced march. Or the--and I can't remember now--two 5-mile runs, whatever we used to do, early in the morning before you even started the day. It would have been nice to say, No. It would be nice to have freedom of speech so as a member of the military we could have said what we really thought about some of President Carter's orders, but he was Commander in Chief. And as it should be, you are not allowed when you are Active Duty military to publicly criticize your command chain. In order to have good order and discipline, that is the way it needs to be. But once you are not on Active Duty, you can say whatever you want. You should be able to say without worrying about a drone taking you out. So constitutional rights are different when you are in the military. The Constitution also makes clear that Congress has the authority to set up the disciplinary procedures, the court systems, tribunals for the military. It makes clear that Congress has the authority to set up different courts for immigration purposes, entirely constitutional. So I get amused when some people that are smart, but ignorant about the Constitution, start saying everybody in America has a constitutional right to be tried before a United States district court. Well, that is ridiculous. There is not a U.S. district court that is even established in the Constitution. That is completely up to Congress. This Congress has the authority to get rid of every district court in America, get rid of every Federal court of appeals in America and just set up a whole new system. We have the authority to do that. As Professor David Guinn used to say, there is only one court established in the Constitution, all others owe their existence, their jurisdiction, their very being to Congress. As Bill Cosby used to say, his daddy told him and his little brother, I brought you into this world and I can take you out. Well, Congress brought these courts into this world, and Congress can remove them. We have that authority. So nobody has a constitutional right to a U.S. district court. There is no constitutional creation of a U.S. district court. It is up to Congress. So to have some former JAG officer go on TV and say, Oh, yeah, you have to give all of these rights. No, you don't. Under our Constitution, if you declare war against the United States, we have every right if we capture you to hold you until the cessation, the stopping, of the hostility, the war that you declared against us. And then once the war is over, we don't have to try you. Convince your buddy, we will let you send a letter to your buddy telling them stop the war so I can be released as a POW. We don't have to release them if they are part of a group that is at war with us. And then when the end of the hostilities comes and the war is over, then you don't even have to release everybody that was a POW. If somebody you believe has probable cause, that is a good standard, you believe that they have committed a war crime, then instead of just releasing them and sending them home, you can try them for a war crime. But I understand that there are a lot of people in this administration that don't really understand that part of the Constitution. Perhaps they got a bad professor at the University of Chicago Law School or somewhere, and they don't really understand what the Constitution actually says or doesn't say. But you can hold people indefinitely, and the Supreme Court verified that. You may have to give them a writ of habeas corpus hearing, but you don't have to let them go or send manifestos. We owe an obligation to protect this country. We have authority to do it here in Congress; and, Mr. Speaker, that is what we should do. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. This is an important day in the history of at one time the greatest nation in the world, Egypt. It has come a long way since those days thousands of years ago. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about what has being going on in Egypt, including by people in this administration, which also means, of course, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the mainstream media and other liberal bastions. In fact, The New York Times had an editorial dated December 4, 2013, that talks about the election that is happening today, yesterday, today, in Egypt, 14th and 15th Egyptian time. This editorial from The New York Times editorial board talks about the Egyptians squandering another chance to build a broadly inclusive democratic system with the latest constitutional revisions. Mr. Speaker, what these intellectual giants at The New York Times don't understand is, when you're in the Middle East and you decide to try to build a democracy, a democratic republic as we have here, and you decide to be inclusive of people who believe in utilizing terrorism--there are religious fanatics who believe if they kill innocent children, women, men, then they may have just earned a place in paradise. That is so foreign to American way of thinking, to Western way of thinking, to Israeli way of thinking, to European way of thinking--historically, that is. As radical Islam, not to be confused with the moderate Muslims, such as those who are trying to establish democracy in Egypt, radical Islam, if included, will use terrorism, will use violence, will use anything they can to take over, and there will be no democratic republic. There will be no democracy of any kind. It will be top-to-bottom totalitarian, a religious extremist country. I know the editorial board has people that are extremely intelligent, but it is amazing to read these kinds of things broadly inclusive. So they are wanting the people of Egypt to do things like release a man who is acting outside the constitution. He is charged with ordering the murder of so many who just wanted to have liberty in Egypt. Morsi was playing the new version of Chavez in Venezuela; get elected and then pull all power to you. I asked General el-Sisi if it was true what a former American intelligence agent had told me that Morsi, President Morsi, was trying to hire--take out a contract, basically--to have General el-Sisi killed. He beat around the bush, but eventually he said in the presence of other U.S. representatives that, yes, they had evidence that Morsi was trying to have General el-Sisi killed. It may be a shock to some, say, at The New York Times, Washington Post, and others, but when you have a religious fanatic as the leader of a country, even though he may have been--and this is arguable as well, but he may have been elected. When he starts acting outside the bounds of the constitution, then the people have to act. And the constitution that the Muslim Brotherhood shoved through in Egypt after the so-called Arab Spring was one that did not even provide a provision of impeachment. That seemed strange to most Americans. I am sure it doesn't to The New York Times and The Washington Post. But to most Americans, not having a way to remove someone who is the highest official in the land, who is acting outside the bounds of their authority, it is a problem. How do you remove the highest leader in a country if your constitution, if you have one, does not provide for civil impeachment and removal of the leader? And Egypt's constitution that the Muslim Brotherhood shoved through did not, because the Muslim Brotherhood, once they seized power, there was going to be no need for impeachment, because radical Islam would be in charge. It is reported by credible people, there are videos of the supreme religious leader dictating terms that President Morsi would have to follow. The Arab Spring under President Morsi did not yield the kind of republic, democracy that had been hoped for, but this New York Times editorial says: The new charter defies the revolutionary promise of the Arab Spring by reinforcing the power of institutions that have long held Egypt in an iron grip. Apparently, not realizing that the Muslim Brotherhood had seized Egypt in its iron grip, and the only way around it, since there was no impeachment provision in the Egyptian constitution, was exactly what happened. It was not a military coup. A military coup is when the military rises up and takes over. What happened in Egypt was one of the most beautiful acts of true democratic efforts, and some have reported that this was the largest gathering, largest rebellion in the world's history, reports of 20 million people gathering in demonstration by Egyptians, a country with 90 or so million people. Another report of another effort, 30 million; 33 million, one report said. Morsi only claimed to have gotten around 13 million votes when he seized power. He said the opponent--the Muslim Brotherhood made clear if the opponent tried to contest and say there was any fraud, they would burn Egypt down. So they got control. They had a constitution that wouldn't allow them to remove Morsi, not to impeach him. This was a real revolution. Barely peaceful as revolutions go, until the Muslim Brotherhood began to carry out what they had promised previously, that if people who wanted true democracy in Egypt tried to contest Morsi being the supreme leader there, then they would burn the country down. Well, they began burning down churches. Now, some people when they hear the word ``church'' think in terms, well, maybe it was like a rural southern church. Maybe they had a trailer or something. This is in an area where there have been Christian churches for nearly 2,000 years. These are incredibly historic places, some of them, and the Muslim Brotherhood could have cared less. Now, we have plenty of Muslim brothers here in the United States, and so far they say we have been--in essence, their position is we have not really needed violence in the United States because we are getting so much control without violence. But certainly violence is an appropriate tool in places like Egypt where they got ousted so they couldn't follow through with pursuing a new Ottoman Empire, a new world caliphate as the Twelfth, the Twelvers, the Twelfth Imam believers wanted to take over and begin right there where the Ottoman Empire used to exist as it began its way around the Mediterranean. But for those who believe the Twelfth Imam is going to emerge out of chaos, even if it is self-inflicted nuclear chaos, those who believe he will emerge and begin ruling and take over a world caliphate, they know they can't afford to lose Egypt as an important linchpin. You have 90 million people there in Egypt. That is critical if they are going to take over and have a world caliphate. You have got to have Egypt. So last July, I took to this floor and this podium and talked about the incredible uprising, how deeply touching it was to hear personal accounts, to see the photographs, to hear and see the videos of what was going on when moderate Muslims, Christians, Jews, seculars were coming together figuratively and literally, hand in hand, to protest against radical Islam being in control of Egypt. As some have indicated, if the Egyptian people had waited another year to try to oust Morsi, he would have gathered so much power, they would probably not have been successful. It was critical that the people of Egypt rise up, as they did. And we owe them a debt of gratitude for rising up and saying, We are not going to have radical Islam in charge. Moderate Muslims did not want radical Islamists in charge. That is true throughout the Middle East. It is true in Afghanistan, where our allies who fought and defeated the Taliban, by 2002 with less than 500 Americans in country embedded, weapons we provided, aerial support we provided, under the lead of General Dostum who summoned this administration, now called a war criminal, they defeated the Taliban. These are moderate Muslim friends, allies, because their enemy is our enemy, the Taliban, and they do not want radical Islam taking back over Afghanistan. What does this administration do? It empowers the group that will end up allowing the Taliban to take right back over, when we ought to be empowering our friends in Afghanistan, not with 100,000 precious American men and women's lives, but empower the enemy of our enemy and let them protect their own country. They can do it, but not when you call the enemy of our enemy war criminals and do everything you can to marginalize them. The New York Times editorial says: The constitution, approved by a 50-member citizen committee on Sunday, replaces one imposed last year by the government of President Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed in July, and his Muslim Brotherhood allies. It is expected to be ratified by a popular vote in a referendum within the next 30 days. This was written December 4, published December 4. The editorial goes on toward the end to say: This new constitution is equally flawed because it was drafted with minimal input from Islamists and could further crush the Brotherhood by banning political parties based on religion. All one needs to do is just a little bit of investigation, open- minded investigation. If you are taking your lead from Al Jazeera, from the Muslim Brotherhood, from Imam Magid, who is the head of the Islamic Society of North America--the Federal courts have said it is just a Muslim Brotherhood front organization--or from leaders of CAIR, which Federal courts in this country have called a Muslim Brotherhood front organization to which is given great honor and credibility by this administration, but if you are listening to them, then, oh, yeah, this is a terrible constitution, because they are not going to allow a radical Islamist political party to take back over. Now, again, if you do a little bit of research, you find out this is something that Ataturk fought against and was able to overcome in Turkey so many decades ago. And because he was able to overcome and overwhelm radical Islam in Turkey, Turkey has surged to the forefront over the past decades in all kinds of areas. Now, we see the scary creeping of radical Islam back into control in Turkey. But the way they advanced as rapidly as they did in Turkey after this great leader Ataturk forced out radical Islamist leaders was they prevented those types of people from taking over, and it is the same thing. These are smart people, Emir Musa, the chairman of this constitutional committee, convention, whatever you want to call it, of 50 very diverse people. But no, it did not include the Muslim Brotherhood. They don't want a radical Islamist group taking over Egypt. I know it is hard for some in this country to believe who read too much of their own press, but banning a political party based on religion in the Constitution and recognizing other religions in their Constitution and recognizing the absolute right of belief religiously in this new Constitution should be hailed as a good thing. I was shocked--I believe it is article 235, perhaps, in the new Constitution, these moderate Muslims and secularists are so bent, so dedicated to try to have a democracy that they can build on and grow and advance. They even put this article in there that says, in essence: the country is going to rebuild the churches that the Muslim Brotherhood destroyed during their radical violent temper tantrum after a president acting outside the bounds of the Constitution and charged with ordering the death of so many civilians there, after he went so far astray. They don't want that kind of people back in charge. Now, something that The New York Times says at the end: In the final analysis, the real test of any constitution is how it is carried out in practice. That is true. That is so true. I once heard Justice Scalia telling a group, one of which had asked: Is the reason we are the greatest country with more freedoms than any country in history because we have the best Bill of Rights ever in history? Justice Scalia can be so blunt and so brilliant. He indicated: Oh, gosh, no. The Soviet Union had a better Bill of Rights than we do. That is why that last statement in The New York Times editorial is so true. It is more how the constitution is carried out. I am glad they recognized that by the end of the editorial. One thing is clear: if a constitution is pushed through by the Muslim Brotherhood, it is going to be radically religiously based on radical Islam, and the first elected leader could very well end up being the last until he is gone. Of course, in Iran, where we have radical Islam in charge, you have a supreme leader and then you have the token president that is elected that serves as long as the supreme leader is okay with it. The Washington Post, in an editorial published January 13, on down in it says a criticism of the current Egyptian government. They have a judge who is the interim President. Talking with him, meeting with him a couple of times, I think he is really trying to do right by the people in Egypt, but The Washington Post says: Opposition media have been shut down, and three Cairo-based journalists from Al Jazeera have been imprisoned without charge. One of the things that is so hard for some pseudo-intellectuals here in the U.S. to realize is something that Franklin Roosevelt grasped, even with his unconstitutional actions of interring American citizens, something that he appropriately understood is, if you have media that is helping the cause of anarchy or the overthrow of a constitutional democracy, Democratic Republic as we have here, then they are enemies of the state and they are guilty of treason and they can be stopped. Some in this country think freedom of speech means--whether it is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed down in Guantanamo or some other religious fanatic that wants to destroy our freedom here--they think: oh, well, you have to give them freedom of speech. Whereas, for most of this country's history, people understood if you are advocating for the overthrow of the constitutional government we have, it is treasonous. If you are advocating by peaceful means using the government, as some are trying to do: Let's move toward progressivism, let's move to what is really socialism, where the government gets to dictate everything, they know everything you are doing. As I said earlier today to a group, it appears that the main thing George Orwell missed was the date. He said 1984 when it turns out it was closer to 2014 where you have the government spying on their people, taking whatever actions they want, saying if Congress doesn't do it, we will just do it without Congress, which is a violation of the Constitution in most cases. This editorial from The Washington Post comments that the ``military's repressive methods cannot stabilize Egypt, much less address its severe economic and social problems.'' That is true. That is a wise comment because Egypt is suffering severe economic and social problems. We need to be concerned, because what Egypt had become is a social welfare state; what we are trying to become here in America, a social welfare state where most of the country is dependent upon the government for at least part of its means of living, that cannot long endure. It is always doomed to fail. The only reason socialized medicine doesn't completely fail is because socialized medicine ultimately ends up putting people on lists to get the treatment they need, they die while they are waiting on the list, and enough people die so it doesn't go broke. A country that is under a socialistic authority, as the Soviet Union was, it eventually will fail because the model can never work in this world. Egypt tried to do that. You had a tyrannical leader, as charged by many different leaders, but in order to buy loyalty, more and more welfare was provided, and they have severe economic and social problems. It is my hope and prayer, Mr. Speaker, that the people of Egypt will continue to show the courage they did when they rose up last summer and said: We are not going to allow radical Islam to rule this country, we want religions to live in peace, and they will not live in peace when radical Islam is in charge. That is why you don't find a synagogue in Afghanistan. For heavens sake, all the blood and treasure of Americans that has been lost and spent in Afghanistan for freedom's sake, and because we were okay with them having a constitution under sharia law with supreme power basically in a very tight federal government, then it becomes corrupt, it becomes easy to take over, as the Taliban will if this administration doesn't change its policies. Christians are persecuted in Afghanistan. For heavens sake, there ought to be religious freedom anywhere America sacrifices that much of American lives and treasure. Iraq, where Christians are persecuted, and we provided so much American blood and treasure there. The Washington Post says: If President Obama believes the United States should sanction a new autocracy in Egypt, he should make the case for doing so. Otherwise his administration should side with those Egyptians who continue to fight for a genuine democracy--starting with those who have been imprisoned. They have imprisoned radical Islamists who have killed Christians and burned churches, and here we have a newspaper advocating: let those people go that terrorize Christians and Jews and people who are secularists that don't want to follow any religion, let them out, let them back in charge of the country. The people of Egypt have spoken in greater numbers than percentage- wise we have had in this country in so many years when they went to the streets: we are not having radical Islam in Egypt. They are to be congratulated for that. They are a long way from being out of the woods. People here need to understand that this is a big deal. I got a letter today from the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, delegation that is here in Washington. They expressed concern with my comments on the House floor January 10. They claim that ``U.S. academic sphere demanding an end to decades of discrimination against Palestinians are based on the principle of equality, not hatred of Jews.'' Unfortunately, they are either lying or they haven't reviewed the material that children are being taught in Israel in the Palestinian schools. They are teaching hatred with money we are providing. They are naming holidays, they are naming buildings and areas after terrorists who have killed innocent women and children. I have got a tremendous amount of material that I could use, but time does not permit here today. But I am going to take some time to talk about the hatred that is being taught among the Palestinians. Here is a Palestinian summer camp named after Wafa Idris, the first woman suicide bomber who murdered one and injured 150 in Jerusalem January 27, 2002. It is a girl's camp naming it after a woman who went out and killed an innocent person and injured 150 innocent people. A Palestinian soccer tournament is named after a suicide bomber. This is a camp for 14-year-old Palestinian boys and it is named: ``The Tul Karem Shahids Memorial Soccer Championship Tournament.'' He was a suicide terrorist who killed 31 on Passover, and the children are participating in this tournament named for this horrendous human being who thought it so grand to kill 31 innocent people on a religious holiday of Passover. People from the PLO want to try to tell me that they are not using hatred. For heaven's sake, start spending some of that money to teach love and affection, and we will have peace in the Middle East. As Netanyahu said right here at this podium: If the Palestinians lay down their arms, there will be peace in Israel and among the Palestinians, and if the Israelis lay down their weapons, there will not be an Israel in which there are Jews. Now, I get it. The PLO and others say: Oh, yeah, we recognize Israel's right to exist. The Prime Minister of the Palestinians told me that years ago: Oh, yeah, we recognize their right to exist. As a Jewish state, that is why they were created after the Holocaust killed 6 million Jews in Europe. That hatred of Jews is arising again in Europe among academics in the United States. Shame on you. You are allowing that hatred to grow, and it is fermenting more hatred. It has to be stopped--talking about a boycott of anything Israel. So you want the Jews out there without a country so they can be killed in another Holocaust, or you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon so they can with one weapon have another Holocaust? This is where it is going. If people's voices are not heard as the Iranian gas chambers are being constructed now despite this ridiculous deal that is allowing them to keep the centrifuges going and developing, then the blood will be on our hands, and Mr. Speaker, we should not--cannot--allow that. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, sometimes people say, Gee, if you are back here in Texas, you ought to be in Washington in session. I have to remind them that when we are in session, it is often the single biggest threat to American liberty, because when we are in session, we pass laws; and most every law, in some way, impacts people's liberty in one way or another, for good or for bad. So often we think we know so much more here in Washington, that we can do so much better than others. And, of course, that message is not helped by ignorance in the media, particularly left-wing and so many in the mainstream. Mr. Speaker, I spoke a couple of days ago here about a real burden on my heart for women who are lured into ruts by promises of money by the Federal Government, lured into dependence, and how that is immoral for the government to do that. The government is not supposed to encourage or lure people into conduct that is not helpful to the individual. The government is supposed to be about encouraging good conduct. But if you do evil, then you should be afraid of the government because, as Romans says, God didn't give the sword to the government in vain. That is the point, that we should not be about encouraging or paying people to engage in conduct that is hurtful to them. And yet ignorance in the left wing of our media is so pervasive that you could actually have people write stories saying I was up here blaming single moms. I mean, it is either ignorance or just complete dishonesty of people that want to destroy the very fabric and foundation of this country because of their ill will for all that is good and wholesome. Why would they want to protect a system that lures people into dependency and prevents them from reaching their God-given potential? I realize some of them don't believe there is a God, and that is problematic because, since the Founders believed that we were endowed by a Creator with certain inalienable rights, among those life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, if you don't believe there is a Creator, it creates a problem, because then you have to think that government is the sole source of your rights, and if that is the case, you really have no rights. C.S. Lewis pointed out after he went from being an atheist to being a believer in some God, some universal authority of right and wrong, if you don't believe that, then there can be no justice, no right and no wrong, if there is not a universal standard. So if it is relying on some government to establish what is right and not an innate sense instilled in us by some Higher Power, then there's no hope for most people of ever having rights, freedoms and liberties as we have had in this country. It is plain that as we become more and more secular, there become fewer and fewer liberties and less and less privacy. Now especially, looking at ObamaCare, the government invades every room in the house. It used to be that our liberal friends here in the House complained repeatedly if they thought a Republican bill might, in some way, invade some room in the house. Yet without a single Republican vote, the Democrats passed through a law that invades every room in the house. I am a big fan of Mark R. Levin, and I don't know that there is a better synopsis or there could be a better textbook for people to learn about our founding history than the book ``Liberty and Tyranny.'' I guess the reason ``Liberty and Tyranny'' could never be a textbook for some government class would be that it costs less than $20, and in order to be a textbook, some professor normally has to make 100, 200, $300 a book, or it is not going to be utilized; or some leftwing source has to be the one providing the book and profiting, or it doesn't get used. ``Liberty and Tyranny'' has so many incredible jewels, as I have read from here on the floor numerous times. In Mark's last book, there are things that we need to be reminded of that this brilliant--I don't know that anybody knows more about the history of the Supreme Court than Mark Levin, a brilliant man when it comes to our law, our Constitution, our Supreme Court--but he mentions in here, he draws so much from our history and throws it back in our faces so that we can't miss it, but Mark Levin points out the Nation has entered an age of post-constitutional, soft tyranny. Then he quotes from French thinker, philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, as he explained presciently: It covers the surface of a society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence. It does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd. I know, because some people don't like to be beat up by the left wing--as I apparently do--they don't want to be pointing these things out, and so I know that apparently we have got Republican staffers helping Senators who think that the things in this book are not worth spreading around the country. This is our history. If you don't learn your history, then how can you ever figure out the best way to go forward? I am a big fan of the comments of Satchel Paige, an incredible baseball player. He came up with some great lines. I guess he is baseball's answer to Will Rogers. He is often quoted for saying, ``don't look back, they may be gaining on you,'' but I have read that later in life he had a quote that I like even better. Satchel Paige reportedly said: ``It is okay to look back, just don't stare.'' Well, I majored in history. I think it is good to look back. As the old adage goes, ``those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it.'' Some follow up and say that ``those who do learn from history will find new ways to screw up,'' but that is another lesson. Mark Levin goes on in ``The Liberty Amendments'' and said, de Tocqueville observed further: It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great. I wish they would try a little more to make great men, that they would set less value on the work and more upon the workman, that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak, and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens. Today, Congress operates not as the Framers intended but in the shadows, where it dreams up its most notorious and oppressive laws, coming into the light only to trumpet the genius and earnestness of its goings on and to enable Members to cast their votes. He goes on to say: Congress also and often delegates unconstitutionally law- making power to a gigantic, ever growing administrative state that in turn unleashes on society myriad regulations and rules at such a rapid rate that people cannot possibly know of them either, and if by chance they do, they cannot possibly comprehend them. Nonetheless, ignorance which is widespread and deliberately so is no excuse for noncompliance for which the citizen is heavily fined and severely punished. This is really a great synopsis of where we are. Congress thinks we know better, the President thinks he knows better, and some of this was started before the last Republican President left office with TARP. What a disaster. You can never achieve greatness if you do not have the same opportunity to fail. If the tightrope you are walking to achieve something extraordinary is sitting on the ground, then there is no risk, and there is nothing great achieved. Yet, this government wants to put such restrictions on people that they can never reach greatness. They can never reach as high as the grass might go. I love this part in Mark Levin's book, and I realize it may bother not only the leftwing but some Republican Senate staffers. Mark Levin wrote: Having delegated broad lawmaking power to executive branch departments and agencies of its own creation contravening the separation of powers doctrine, Congress now watches as the President inflates the congressional delegations even further and proclaims repeatedly the authority to rule by executive fiat in defiance of or over the top of the same Congress that sanctioned a domineering executive branch in the first place. Notwithstanding Congress' delinquency but because of it an unquenched President in a hurry to expedite a societal makeover has repeatedly admonished Congress that `if it won't act soon to protect future generations, I will.' That is, if Congress will not genuflect to his demands and pass laws to his liking, he will act on his own. And the President has made good on his refrain on a growing list of matters. He has, in fact, displayed an impressive aptitude for imperial rule with the help from a phalanx of policy czars from immigration, the environment, labor law to health care, welfare and energy. The President has excised his executive discretion to create new law, abrogate existing law and generally contrive ways to exploit legal ambiguities as a means to his ends. He has also declared the Senate in recess when it was not, thereby bypassing the Senate's constitutional advice and consent role to install several partisans in top Federal posts. Today, this is glorified and glamorized as compassionate progressivism. The Framers called it `despotism.' Then here is what makes Mark's book so great. He goes right to the source and quotes ``Federalist 48'' by James Madison. Most people give more credit to Madison for the Constitution getting specifically written than other people, but Madison wrote: An elective despotism was not the government we fought for but one which should not only be founded on free principles but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others. Mark Levin cites ``Federalist 78'' by Alexander Hamilton: Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive that in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. I mean this is the Founders saying that the Supreme Court that we must now all bow and scrape to as they rewrite the Constitution in their own image like some kind of gods on Mount Olympus, the Founders said they are the least dangerous because they are going to have the least power to ``annoy or injure.'' Levin goes on: Yet having seized for itself in the early years of the Nation the final words on all matters before it, the Supreme Court, with just five of its nine members, can impose the most far-reaching and breathtaking rulings on the whole of society for which there is no recourse. My copy of Mark's book is falling apart, but it is still good stuff. He also says in ``The Liberty Amendments'': What was to be a relatively innocuous Federal Government operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of powers has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. This is so scary, but Mark Levin puts it so well. He describes the Federal Government as the Nation's largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health care provider and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly, it bans or mandates by regulation. For example, the Federal Government regulates most things bathroom, laundry room, kitchen, as well as the mortgage you hold on your house. It designs your automobile and dictates the kind of fuel it uses. It regulates your baby's toys, crib, and stroller, plans your children's school curricula and lunch menu and administers their student loans in colleges. At your place of employment, the Federal Government oversees everything from the racial gender and age diversity of the workforce, to the hours, wages, and benefits paid. Indeed, the question is not what the Federal Government regulates, but what it does not regulate. And it makes you wonder, how can a people, incapable of selecting their own light bulbs and toilets, possess enough confidence to vote for their own rulers and fill out complicated tax returns. Mark also points out that the Federal Government consumes nearly 25 percent of all goods and services produced each year by the American people. That should, if people will wake up, it should begin to scare them because if the Federal Government is the largest consumer, just on that alone, it has the power to bankrupt companies, to make companies. And then you start running into the horrible constitution that we rubber- stamped and may have helped put together over in Afghanistan, where they so centralized the power in the federal government that the President in Afghanistan gets to appoint governors, gets to appoint mayors, gets to appoint police chiefs, appoint the highest level of teachers, appoints many of the slate of part of the legislature, has tremendous power of the purse, and you wonder why that country is about to fall as soon as we pull out, when we were complicit in a constitution that on its face should have told people this government under this constitution is doomed to fail and fall back into Taliban hands, and that is exactly what is about to happen. We should have known better than to help Afghanistan and be complicit in a constitution that does what our Founders said should never be done for a federal government. But when we have lost the lessons of our founding such that Congress allows power to be totally usurped by a Supreme Court or by an executive branch, and the American people do not rise up and condemn the comments by a leader in the Senate who says, What right does the House have to say how the money is spent?, that ought to be enough to have a recall election if a leader in the Senate doesn't even know why the House of Representatives is supposed to have an extremely loud voice in how the money is spent. And, in fact, any bill that raises revenue must start in the House, which the same Senate leaders did not understand, or perhaps they understood and tried to tap dance around, but since the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Roberts rewrote ObamaCare, the un-Affordable Care Act, because it is certainly not affordable, it is costing so many people in my district, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, party doesn't matter when it comes to ObamaCare. Seniors that I visit with at retirement homes and communities are scared because they are realizing and they are finding out, gee, ObamaCare cut $716 billion from reimbursing health care providers for care we were going to get. And they are starting to figure out even though they were assured, you don't have to worry, you are not going to be affected, you are not going to lose any health care because this is only cutting what we reimburse health care providers, seniors are smart folks. They have been around awhile, and they are figuring out, wait a minute, you cut $700 million out of reimbursement for our health care providers with ObamaCare, really, and you think we are not going to figure out that that means we are not going to get the treatment we need. We are going to be told we don't have the knee replacement we need or the hip replacement we need because we are too old, or we get put on some list for an exorbitant amount of time which means you are hoping that we will die before we get the treatment we need, as often happens in England and Canada and other places with totally government-run health care. Single payer, that is such a misnomer. It is government-run private lives. Instead of single payer, it is government. It is the GRE, government running everything. When the government can tell you what care you can have and not have, they control your life and they control how quickly your life will come to an end. It is wrong. It is so against the foundation, the principles upon which we were founded. My brilliant friend, Mark Levin said: What was to be a relatively innocuous Federal Government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific agents of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. I want to reiterate that because the problem that we see repeatedly now is when someone presides over death of people entrusted to their care and protection, they can stand up and say, What difference at this point does it make? So they died. What difference does it make why they died, how they died? A Libyan acquaintance a few weeks ago said, you guys in the United States, Congress in Washington, are asking the wrong question. Of course, personally, I think it is an appropriate question to ask: Who killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, and our two former Navy SEALs? Who killed them? Who killed Ty Woods and Glen Doherty? Who blew off much of the leg of David Ubben? I think it is a legitimate question, but this Libyan man I met said, You keep asking in America who killed these people. You ought to be asking why they were killed. Well, that is certainly an important question. And I know our former Secretary of State said, What difference at this point does it make? But I think this Libyan man is right. We need to be asking why were they killed. And it certainly wasn't about a video. And I know that we have got some newspapers that are losing viewership or readership and so they are trying as best they can before people completely quit reading it to help their next candidate for President, I get that. I understand. But the fact is these were radical Islamists, al Qaeda-related people in the group. There was never a demonstration. It was an attack from the very beginning, just as Chris Stevens called and Greg Hicks pointed out: we are under attack. There was no indication of a demonstration about some stupid video. They were under attack. It was predicted and talked about. Some in Egypt were saying if you don't release the blind sheikh who was implicit and in prison for the murder of New Yorkers as they tried in 1993 to bring down the World Trade Center, they were saying you have to start by releasing the blind sheikh or there is going to be violence. It wasn't about a video, for goodness sake. When the government consumes 25 percent of everything produced in America, the government is too big. It needs to be reduced in size. Powers need to be returned to the States from which they were usurped. We need to give more power and control back to the local government. We have got people screaming about the minimum wage. It is outrageous for people in this town to tell somebody in San Augustine, Texas, what they have to pay, that they have to go to pay $10 or $15 for minimum wage. It is outrageous. Some places in the country, that may not be enough as the bottom line and isn't, and people are being paid more than that. But for teenagers, like I was when I started working, actually before I was a teenager I started working, but I started paying into Social Security, I guess, when I was 13 or 14, but minimum wage is a great place to start. When I went to work as an assistant district attorney for Titus, Camp, and Morris Counties, I was getting paid $700 a month. It was what they could afford, and I was able to live at home and work for that and help those counties. The closer to the facts on the ground is the control of a government, then the better the government. When the Federal Government here in Washington dictates school programs, school tests, it is just wrong. And this isn't an issue of Republican or Democrat. I had this discussion with President Bush's Secretary of Education because she was violating the Constitution because education is not an enumerated power within the Constitution. Therefore, under the 10th Amendment, it is reserved to the States and people. She said if you liked what I was doing in Austin, you ought to love what I am doing in Washington. I said, No, when you were in Austin, you were acting within the confines of the Constitution. And now you are here in Washington, you are acting beyond the Constitution. You are mandating that people teach to a test. You got to go to Gladewater, Texas, with me and go to a special needs school there where they got over 120 precious lives. And when one of them for a good day can touch something, point to something shiny, to have a Federal bureaucrat dictate the kind of test that needs to be given, or in Tyler at the St. Louis School where I met a young man, a special needs young man, and their goal for the end of the year was if he could put his fork in a piece of food and get it to his mouth, but because the Federal Government intervened, because they didn't know that special needs young man and because they didn't know the kids there in Gladewater there at that precious school, they dictate. Now, the Secretary of Education said, Oh, but you can get an alternative test. And I said, Yeah, and you know what kind of alternative test got approved for that young man they were trying to teach to feed himself. They wouldn't approve him being able to feed himself. No, but they did approve if he would point to a sticker with food on it, he could pass his test. Thank you so much Federal Government. And that is what we have had with so many of these programs that were well intended. You want to help a single mom, I want to help a single mom with a deadbeat dad not helping at all. But the best way to do it is not to lure them into a rut from which they cannot extricate themselves. The better policy is to help them get a high school diploma. They are better off with daycare than with a handout that encourages them to have more and more children out of wedlock. I am not blaming the single moms. I am blaming the Federal Government for creating a system that after 50 years has taken our nuclear homes that were the backbone of this country and gone from between 6 and 7 percent of children being born to a single mom in the sixties, and because of this government's well-intentioned, but ridiculously stupid, program, we now have over 40 percent of children being born to single moms, heading toward 50 percent. It is wrongheaded when a government does not help. I will tell you, I spent some precious time out at Texas College in Tyler, one of the oldest colleges in Texas. It was started as an African American college. I used to wonder, I am looking forward--as Martin Luther King, Jr. said--to the day when people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. I am looking forward to the day when race is not on a form anybody fills out because it doesn't matter; it doesn't make any difference. I am looking forward to that day. But I have learned a lot from Texas College because I have seen young African Americans--repeatedly, I have met African Americans--who are the first in their family to go to college. It is a great stepping off place. It is a great place to start, to break through that ceiling that has kept people in poverty. I met with and visited with a combined sociology class some time ago and talked about this issue of the Federal Government wanting to help, but instead luring young single moms into holes they can't get out of. Many do, but many can't. I asked them for advice. There were single moms there. I was shocked with some of the suggestions they said. They said you need to have a drug test on aid for dependent children; you need to have a drug test on any kind of welfare; you need to have a work requirement on any kind of welfare. That was a tough group. They said you are not doing enough to push people to reach their potential. Then when you meet and talk with single moms, African Americans, that got lured into a rut, and by the grace of God they are trying to get out of that. They are trying to get some college and improve themselves and reach their potential, but they feel like the government lured them into a rut now they are trying desperately to get out of. We owe them better. We owe them a system that doesn't lure them into holes but helps them reach for the sky. Maybe it would have been better in the '60s to help with daycare if somebody has a child, a single mom has a child, because we know from study after study you've got a better chance of having a successful life if you finish high school. So why not have that as a goal instead of luring people into having more and more children. The people that I had to face for felony welfare fraud, some may think it is a racial issue, but I saw it wasn't at all. Every race, creed, color, people got lured into this, and it was wrong. The government should not have systems that do that. There is another profound statement that Mark Levin has in this book, ``The Liberty Amendments.'' He points out: The individual's liberty, inextricably linked to his private property, is submerged in the quicksand of a government that is aggregating authority and imploding simultaneously. What then is the answer? Again, Alexis de Tocqueville offers guidance looking back at the Constitutional Convention some 50 years afterwards. He observed that: It is a novelty in the history of society to see a great people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself, when apprised by the legislature that the wheels of its government are stopped, to see it carefully examine the extent of the evil, and patiently wait 2 whole years until a remedy is discovered, to which it voluntarily submitted without its costing a tear or a drop of blood from mankind. It is a profound book. Levin quotes Madison in Federalist 14: In the first place, it is to be remembered, that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws: its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the Republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any. Then in Federalist 45, he insisted: The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. In Federalist 46, Madison asserted that: The powers proposed to be lodged in the Federal Government are as little formidable to those reserved to the individual States, as they are indispensably necessary to accomplish the purposes of the Union; and that all those alarms which have been sounded, of a meditated and consequential annihilation of the State governments, must, on the most favorable interpretation, be ascribed to the chimerical fears of the authors of them. This is a great book. There is just so much wonderful history from our United States history that deserves further looking. The library should have the book if people want to read it. We are not thinking straight in this town, and there are negotiations ongoing with Iran about nuclear weapons, whose leaders have called us the ``Great Satan'' that needs to be destroyed, called Israel the ``Little Satan'' that needs to be destroyed, and they have missiles they can put nuclear weapons on top of Israel for its destruction creating a new holocaust, millions of lives could be lost. But as our friend Prime Minister Netanyahu points out, they are building and they have created intercontinental ballistic missiles. He is trying to wake the United States up, Netanyahu is, when he is saying that they don't need those to take out Israel. They've got missiles to take us out. Those intercontinental ballistic missiles are for the United States they call the Great Satan. Its leaders believe that under their interpretation of prophecy from the Koran that the twelfth Imam, al-Mahdi, can emerge or will emerge from chaos. They believe that it could be nuclear chaos. So by creating nuclear bombs and setting them off, Israel, the United States, Little Satan, Great Satan, they can hasten the return of the twelfth Imam to rule over the global caliphate. When somebody thinks that kind of thought, we need to make sure they don't get nukes, and we need to take out anything where they are producing nukes. We have the power and ability to do it. Everybody, including Russia and China, needs to understand, if we don't take them out, they could be launched at Russia and China, because they are led by infidels, to Iran's way of thinking, just like the U.S. and Israel are to their way of thinking. So January 7, there is an article in TheBlaze, Sharona Schwartz. It says: An Iranian official says that his country needs a nuclear bomb in order to ``put Israel in its place.'' ``We don't aspire to obtain a nuclear bomb, but it is necessary so we can put Israel in its place.'' Of course there are plenty of quotes from their leaders that the proper place for Israel is ``wiped off the map.'' ``After arriving in New York''--the article points out ``Rouhani''-- the new President--``again was contacted at his hotel by an unspecified White House official.'' And this is from a parliament member in Iran, Muhammad Nabavian: ``I assembled the delegation accompanying me and we decided not to meet with Obama. On Tuesday afternoon after the press conference, they said to me, `why did you humiliate Obama in America?' and I said there was no humiliation. Here I recalled the words of Imam Khomeini who said that one must humiliate the infidel leaders,'' Nabavian reported about Rouhani's description of the events. It is very important that the leaders in this country, including our President, realize that to these religious fanatic nuts he is an infidel leader, we are infidel leaders, and we are worthy of being humiliated, and as the leaders of the Great Satan we are worthy of being destroyed. That must be understood. What has come about as radical Islamist--and I am very careful about that, despite what some of the more ignorant in the left wing would say in the left-wing media. We don't have to fear moderate Muslims. And I am talking about the kind of moderate Muslims that I have befriended in Egypt and Afghan, who are the enemy of my enemy, who are the enemy of the United States' enemy, who are the enemy of Israel, our ally. We can work with them, just as is happening in Egypt right now where moderate Muslims were sickened by the Muslim Brotherhood's burning of churches, killing of Christians, persecution of Christians. That is something that former President Morsi is on trial for. And the interim President right now is a former judge, so we had some things in common as we spoke not long ago there in Egypt. Yet, as the odds are getting stacked farther and higher against Israel's existence, and as we are demanding Israel give away more of its land as Palestinian leaders continue to say they are not agreeing to anything, they are not agreeing to Israel's right to even exist as a Jewish nation, as a place where Jews can avoid another holocaust like in World War II, they are not even willing to recognize that, how can there ever be peace? As I said personally to the Palestinian's former prime minister, how can you expect peace when you won't even recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish nation? So they want Israel to keep giving away more and more land, and every time--going back to the very inception of Israel, 1,000, 1,600, 1,800 years before Muhammad was born, the actual founding of Israel, going back that early, any time Israel has given away land trying to buy peace, that land ultimately gets used as a staging area from which to attack it. They are about, I hope, to learn that lesson. So what do we have going on here in the United States now? Well, Caroline Glick has a great article called: ``Column One: The Left Against Zion.'' This is from December 19. She says: This week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement. In the space of a few days, two quasi-academic organizations--the American Studies Association and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association--have launched boycotts against Israeli universities. Their boycotts follow a similar one announced in April by the Asian Studies Association. These groups' actions have not taken place in isolation. They are of a piece with ever-escalating acts of anti-Israel agitation in college campuses throughout the United States. I would interject that it is sickening and incredible to me to see anti-Semitism growing just the way it did before the 1930s and 1940s when over 6 million Jews were mercilessly, brutally killed--and we are seeing it arise. When I learned about the Holocaust and when I went to Germany, through what I had learned and read and seen, I could never have imagined. Thank God we could never have that happen during my lifetime. Now I am watching the seeds of anti-Semitism, of anti- Israel--of people wanting to wipe them off the map, of those who are proposing another Holocaust. Then we have pseudo intellectual wannabes at universities where they no longer allow true diversity of thought and discussion that made them originally great, which allowed them originally to have liberals there get in charge, and now they cut off so often conservative speech. It used to be in universities, even as conservative as Texas A&M was when I was there, that we had many liberal speakers, and I enjoyed meeting and debating with some of them, with some of the greats in the country. Now, even at Texas A&M, they are careful not to invite people who are too conservative because you don't want to tick off the Faculty Senate. Like most universities, it has gotten very, very liberal. In Caroline Glick's article she points out: Every week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of aggressive anti-Israel activism. At the University of Michigan last week, thousands of students were sent fake eviction notices from the university's housing office. A pro- Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to disseminate the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass expulsions of Palestinians. At Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students who control Hillel are insisting on using Hillel's good offices to disseminate and legitimate anti-Israel slanders; and the left's doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root of all evil is not limited to campuses. At New York's 92nd Street Y, commentary editor John Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to explain why the ASA's just-announced boycott of Israel was an obscene act of bigotry. It is a great article. I don't have time to read it all, but she points out: This week, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz retired after 50 years on the law faculty. His exit, the same week as the ASA and the NAISA announced their boycotts of Israeli universities, symbolized the marginalization of the pro- Israel left that Dershowitz represented. For years, Dershowitz has been a nonentity in leftist circles. His place at the table was usurped by anti-Israel Jews like Peter Beinart, and now Beinart is finding himself increasingly challenged by anti-Semitic Jews like Max Blumenthal. The progression is unmistakable. People need to wake up and understand that this kind of thing has all happened before, and when people don't recognize it, it happens again in history. God help us that it doesn't happen while our generation is in charge, but these growing acts of anti-Semitism, anti-Israel continue to progress by so-called ``Progressives,'' making it seem as if this is another apartheid like in South Africa, which was so unfair, racially so wrong in South Africa. It got corrected. This is not the same thing at all. This is a group of people who have been persecuted throughout their history, having a country where they have a longer history of right to that area than any other people existing today. Yet, as universities, the so-called ``left'' become more loud and more vocal in their hatred and anger, I have wondered: If Iran dropped a nuke on Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, if Iran killed a million Jews in Israel, have those leftists--those anti-Semitic, anti-Israel folks at universities--gotten so far from decency that they would applaud Israelis, Jews being killed by the millions in Israel? I wonder. I wonder if there would be any reaction like there has been in history, like there was in Germany when Jews were being killed? They deserved it. They were the problem in this country. Rationalization is a great thing, and it is a dangerous thing. People who were in Germany, who lived through the Holocaust don't want to talk about it because they cannot believe that they got sucked into that group dynamic that allowed them to be so inhuman and so callous that they didn't care about the extinction of Jews in Germany. I really don't know the answer. These anti-Israeli groups in universities like to think they are diverse, but yet they go after and destroy anybody who attempts to debate them. Would they cheer if Jews and Israelis were killed by Iran? I hope they will wake up to what is happening at these universities, but here again, love and money can be the root of all evil, and we see universities across this country getting more and more money from Middle Eastern countries that say, Hey, by the way, you need to teach a course on Islamophobia or at least have a seminar, and talk about anybody who raises issues about radical Islam, like the author in The Washington Times, Husain, who just lied completely about things that I had said. He just lied. He made stuff up. He didn't do his homework. Yet those kinds of things are being talked about and taught at universities. We have got to get back to having real debate. Some people think, when I get upset, it means I hate somebody. I don't. I come from a family where we fuss at each other tooth and nail. We still love each other and stand by each other. I heard that this was attributed to Johnson, as President, but we had a pastor in Mount Pleasant, Texas, in 1953, who said it to my parents: if two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary. The same is true here in Congress. If we all agree on everything, then all but one are unnecessary. We don't need a Congress. We don't need advisors. If one person knows everything, then just let him make all the decisions, but that is not the case in this fallen world. We need to hear from everybody. Debate is a good thing, and it used to be at universities and can be again if they will allow all voices to be heard. I have one other story here from CNS News: Afghanistan will resume being a terrorist haven when U.S. troops depart. That is going to happen. I have been talking about that for a number of years, and it doesn't have to happen if we would simply grant the people of Afghanistan what the Founders originally gave us. We have messed it up, but they originally gave us a government where the States were the most powerful entity. As my moderate Muslim friends in Afghanistan have said, and as former Vice President Massoud has said, and others: if you will just help us push Karzai to let us have an amendment in our constitution that allows us to elect our governors, elect our mayors, get our own police chiefs, govern our own regions, our own state areas--if you will let us do that, we can keep the Taliban out. I mentioned it before, but when I asked, ``What makes you think we could exert that kind of pressure?'' they informed me that out of about a $12.5 billion government budget in Afghanistan, the Afghans only provide about $1.5 billion. The rest is provided by foreign countries, and most of that is the United States. Today, if this President says you either let the states elect their own governors and mayors and pick their own police chiefs--that is today--or we will cut off every dime going to Afghanistan, I would bet that would be the day they would get started and that they would get an amendment to their constitution, and they would become more of a democratic republic like we started out as, perhaps even more than we are now. We need to do that for them. We don't need to let more American lives be killed and be taken in Afghanistan. That doesn't have to happen. It didn't have to happen. Even though Secretary Gates said that he didn't believe the President was really convinced the surge was a good idea in Afghanistan, he still sent more troops, and what people haven't been talking about for a long time is that 75 percent of the people of the American soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan--soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen--all of them--have been killed while President Obama has been Commander in Chief. I did not think President Bush did the right thing by sending tens of thousands of American troops in after the Taliban was defeated with fewer than 500 Americans in supporting the Northern Alliance, but we became occupiers. It was a mistake by the Bush administration, I believe, and then a mistake that President Obama inherited, and it got worse. We don't have to leave and have the blood of our soldiers--of our military--cry out as we leave Afghanistan and as the Taliban takes back over. Let us, Madam Speaker, help Afghanistan to root out the evil in its own country. Let's help them get a constitution that let's them root it out for themselves. That is how we should be doing foreign policy. May God awaken the universities that were once so diverse and so great to understanding that they should not, cannot--I hope and pray do not--continue to foster this anti-Semitism, this anti-Israeli sentiment, that is growing, that might someday cheer when Israelis are nuked. With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I certainly want to thank my colleagues for bringing such an important issue to the floor for discussion. This is an important time in American history for so many reasons. Foreign policy is just in terrible shambles right now. But today is January 8, and it is generally recognized that 50 years ago, on January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared a war on poverty. There is an article today from The Washington Times entitled: ``That's rich: Poverty level under Obama breaks 50-year record,'' by Dave Boyer. It says: Fifty years after President Johnson started a $20 trillion taxpayer-funded war on poverty, the overall percentage of impoverished people in the United States has declined only slightly and the poor have lost ground under President Obama. Aides said Mr. Obama doesn't plan to commemorate the anniversary Wednesday of Johnson's speech in 1964, which gave rise to Medicaid, Head Start, and a broad range of other Federal antipoverty programs. The President's only public event Tuesday was a plea for Congress to approve extended benefits for the long-term unemployed, another reminder of the persistent economic troubles during Mr. Obama's 5 years in office. ``What I think the American people are really looking for in 2014 is just a little bit of stability,'' Mr. Obama said. Although the President often rails against income inequality in America, his policies have had little impact overall on poverty. A record 47 million Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more Americans than when he took office. The poverty rate has stood at 15 percent for 3 consecutive years, the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s. The poverty rate in 1965 was 17.3 percent; it was 12.5 percent in 2007, before the Great Recession. About 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the Federal Government defined in 2012 as an annual income of $23,492 for a family of four. President Obama's antipoverty efforts ``are basically to give more people more free stuff,'' said Robert Rector, a specialist on welfare and poverty at the conservative Heritage Foundation. ``That's exactly the opposite of what Johnson said,'' Mr. Rector said. ``Johnson's goal was to make people prosperous and self-sufficient.'' The President's advisers defend his policies by saying they rescued the Nation from the deep recession in 2009, saved the auto industry and reduced the jobless rate to 7 percent from a high of 10 percent 4 years ago. Further: The President last month declared the widening gap between the rich and poor as ``the defining challenge of our time,'' and Democratic candidates are expected to pick up that theme on the campaign trail rather than debate deficits or the complications of ObamaCare. In spite of the administration's antipoverty efforts, however, the government reported this week that poverty, by some measures, has been worse under President Obama than it was under President George W. Bush. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that 31.6 percent of Americans were in poverty for at least 2 months from 2009 to 2011, a 4.5 percentage point increase over the prerecession period of 2005 to 2007. Of the 37.6 million people who were poor at the beginning of 2009, 26.4 percent remained in poverty throughout the next 34 months, the report said. Another 12.6 million people escaped poverty during that time, but 13.5 million more fell into poverty. Mr. Rector said the war on poverty has been a failure when measured by the overall amount of money spent and the poverty rates that haven't changed significantly since Johnson gave his speech. ``We've spent $20.7 trillion on means-tested aid since that time, and the poverty rate is pretty much exactly where it was in the mid-1960s,'' he said. The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in a report that some trends have helped reduce poverty since the 1960s, including more Americans completing high school and more women working outside the home. But the group said other factors have contributed to persistent poverty, including a tripling in the number of households led by single parents. Mr. Rector said too many government antipoverty programs still discourage marriage, factoring into statistics that show more than 4 in 10 children are born to unmarried parents. ``When the war on poverty started, about 6 percent of children were born outside of marriage, he said. Today, that's 42 percent.'' A catastrophe. So it is rather interesting. Fifty years after the war on poverty was declared as an actual war, $20.7 trillion, according to Mr. Rector, has been spent on means-tested aid since that time, and basically we haven't changed anything except we have got more children being born in broken, single-parent homes. It is certainly noteworthy that, since the beginning of 2009, we have had 12.6 million people escape poverty, but 13.5 million fall into poverty. That means we have had just under a million people worse off, falling into poverty, than were there when this President started with all the giveaway programs--$900 billion in so-called stimulus that turned out to be nothing more than crony capitalism, spending money on so-called ``green'' programs that turned brown rather quickly after millions and hundreds of millions and billions of dollars were spent. He claims he saved the auto industry. Actually, there was a proposal by many economists, led by an FDIC former Chairman named Isaac, who made a proposal in late 2008, an alternative to TARP, and it could have been used to do a more effective job of getting the auto industry on its feet. The proposal was, instead of nationalizing Wall Street, having the government buy private assets, which is nationalizing, government takeover, by another means rather than the government nationalizing the auto industry, taking a big hunk of the auto industry, telling dealers which ones had to close their doors without due process of law. They were an unconstitutional taking. And to the embarrassment of this country and the great Justices--those who were great on the Supreme Court and the ones that are great on there now--to their total humiliation, this Court stood by and watched unconstitutional takings and did nothing. Now, it is true that, during the unconstitutional, illegal turning of the Bankruptcy Code upside down during the so-called saving of the auto industry, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to her credit, put a 24-hour stay on an auto deal that was proposed, but the stay lapsed and the Court did nothing, which should have been to their incredible embarrassment. They knew that bankruptcy laws had been completely eviscerated, completely ignored, turned upside down. There were no proposed plans by creditors. Secured creditors were treated as unsecured and, against the law, they were made unsecured. They had their security taken away. The government gave security, illegally, under the law, to unsecured creditors, and the Supreme Court didn't do anything but a 24-hour stay. I had hope for the Court. I had hoped that they would do the right thing, do the constitutional, the legal thing, and they sat by. Some say it was because they were privately scared by the administration, that if they put longer than a 24-hour stay on the auto bailout, the auto plan, that everybody in any way connected to the auto industry would lose their job, and it would all be the Supreme Court's fault. So what did they do? Nothing. They should be humiliated that they did nothing. Violation of the law, violation of the Constitution by unconstitutional takings of dealers, auto dealers, sounded like the bankruptcy court was used, weaponized a bit, as the IRS has been. We had an auto task force with a czar. What a lovely name, coming from old Russian days of dictators. We had an auto task force czar and an auto task force. At one time, I believe, as I recall, no one in the auto task force had ever been involved in auto manufacturing, the auto business, and as I recall, it may have been a majority of them, a big majority didn't even own cars. Regardless of whether they did or didn't, though Congress, some here, asked for transcripts of the meetings, who decided what dealers would lose their dealerships, we were never provided any transcripts, and that should be to the embarrassment of Congress. We should have demanded, we should have defunded White House activity until they came forward and produced what Federal money that Congress appropriated, had produced. What had they done? We have the power to do that. We should have. The American people were owed answers, and especially, those car dealers who lost their dealerships. Save the auto industry. If we went back to the proposal that Isaacs and other economists made, it was rather interesting. You had a number of us in Congress that thought it was the best idea we had heard proposed; basically, that we knew there was at least $700 billion, now some say clearly more than $1 trillion, owned by American citizens, American companies, that was earned in foreign countries and put in foreign banks. Taxes were fully paid in those countries where it was earned, where it was banked, but they knew if they brought it into the United States that a greedy Federal Government was going to yank another 30, 40 percent, plus penalty and interest out of them, and they would lose most, much of the money, if not most of the money that they had earned and paid taxes on where it was earned. So the money was sitting on the sidelines in foreign countries. So basically, the proposal was, instead of nationalizing, socializing, whatever you want to call it when the Federal Government buys private assets and becomes the boss of private industries, instead of doing that, basically, in essence, the proposal was, why don't we have Congress just say, if you bring that money, if you are an American citizen or an American company, and you bring money in a foreign bank that would otherwise never come into the United States, bring it in here and invest, whether it is in Wall Street, whatever Congress decided, or the President suggested was a troubled entity, if you will invest in that troubled industry, particularly the auto industry, then, obviously, you get ownership of stock. You become a player in that corporation, and the government gets to stay as a referee, not as a player and coach and referee. We would stay as referee, and American citizens would bring their money in and bail out the auto industry. They would also own stock, which means they would change the directors, change the officers, in all probability, and you would get a change of direction in those companies. If they needed to go through bankruptcy, they would go through legitimately, so that secured creditors remained secured, unsecured creditors were treated as unsecured creditors, contracts that were destroying the automobile industry could be renegotiated in bankruptcy, and we really would have saved the auto industry, far better than this clumsy effort that was done. Now, I had a Fiat during the 4 years I was in the Army. But why couldn't we have an American manufacturer owned by Americans? How embarrassing. That is what this administration pushed. Let's turn over, let's push an American auto industry into foreign hands. Yeah, right. You saved an American auto industry, when, actually, under--we had Democrats in control of the House and Senate when the President took office, and he pretty much got anything he wanted. I would submit, the auto industry would be a lot stronger today if commonsense solutions like those that former FDIC Chairman Isaacs proposed and other economists--and this economy would be much better on its way. Then, instead of 12.6 million Americans climbing out of poverty, while another 13.5 million climbed into poverty, fell into poverty, because of this administration's policies, we should have been already on track. I know this administration loves to brag about how oil and gas production are up, but it is no thanks to them. They have used again, weaponized the EPA, OSHA, Department of Justice, the Interior Department, they have become as big an impediment as they possibly could to the oil and gas industry in America. What a lot of Americans don't understand, and frankly, I was a little surprised myself to find out that, in the Continental United States, 94 to 95 percent of the oil and gas wells are drilled or operated by independent oil and gas drillers, American companies. So when the President, for the last 5 years, has talked about how he is going after Big Oil, if you look at his proposals, he wants to eliminate tax deductions, the elimination of which would bankrupt most independent oil and gas operators. So what would that do? The 94 to 95 percent of the oil and gas wells in America would either cease, or they would fall into the hands of the big, major oil companies that the President decries. Well, isn't that strange? You bash and bad mouth Big Oil, and yet, everything you propose and try to do seems like it is making them richer and getting rid of their competition. We hear a President call Wall Street executives fat cats, and determined to do something about them, and yet, when you look at the real books and the real story, four out of five gave money to Democrats. About 80 percent of them, of Wall Street executives, donate to Democrats and the President over Republicans. Well, that's strange. Why would he call them fat cats? I don't know. Why have they gotten richer and richer and richer and expanded the gap between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor during this administration's last 5 years? The distance, as this President has pointed out, has gotten worse. What he has failed to do is say, because of my proposals, the things I have pushed, the things I have done, the poor and the rich have grown further and further apart. My rich friends, my rich donors have gotten richer than they might have ever dreamed, and we have had more people fall into poverty than were able to climb out. That, 50 years after Johnson's speech. If it weren't for the policies in this war on poverty declared 50 years ago, it may well be that I would not have ever run for Congress, because what got me thinking about it first, as a State district judge back in Texas, was seeing more and more young women, single women, coming before me, single moms, charged with welfare fraud under State law, a felony, so they came before me as a felony judge. I heard the story over and over and over, how, as a young girl in high school, she was bored with high school, and someone suggested, well, why don't you just drop out of high school and have a baby? Then the government will send you a check, and they will send you a check for every baby you have out of wedlock. Drop out, have a baby out of wedlock, get the check from the government, and the ones that came before me would normally explain, it wasn't enough. So I thought, well, maybe if I have another baby and get another check it will help me get out of the hole. But it didn't. One woman had had 15 kids, didn't even know where they all were. That was the most that I ever dealt with. It began to really eat away with me that, in the sixties, the Federal Government, desiring to help poor moms who were dealing with deadbeat dads that weren't helping, decided, we will help. We will give a check for every child you can have out of wedlock, when the statistics made clear then, and make clear now, and every point in between, that a young man or a young woman has a better chance of a financially successful life if they finish high school. Normally, kids have a better chance of financial success if they finish college. That was until more recent days, and I am not sure what the statistics on that are now. We know that, clearly, people are better off if they learn to read, they finish high school, have a high school diploma, or at least a GED. That is why, with most of the women, I didn't send any of those women to prison. I put them on probation. I would normally give them a tremendous amount of, I think it was about 800 hours you could give as community service, and then give 750 hours credit if they got a GED or got a high school diploma, because I knew that was better for society if they finished high school, and if it was better for them, it would be better for society, and they could be more successful. After Republicans took over the Congress in the 1994 election, sworn in in 1995, one of the things they did was welfare reform, and they started requiring people to work who were on welfare. And when I was a freshman at Harvard, we were given a presentation-- and I was shocked it was at Harvard--which showed that single moms' income since the war on poverty began, when adjusted for inflation from the mid-sixties until 1995, was flat-lined. That incredibly expensive war on poverty didn't help single moms one iota in the long run. Oh, sure, it helped them buy groceries and things at the time, but look at what happened. They were lured into ruts from which many of them could not extricate themselves successfully. But after there was a requirement for work that was put in after the Contract With America, it was a contract for America, the graph showed that over the last nearly 10 years, income for single moms had taken a sharp rise upward over that entire period. And what happened when President Obama came in? He wanted to waive, and did waive, the work requirement. Could he do that? No, not legally. Did he do that? Yes, he did. Could he rewrite immigration law and say, We will legalize these folks meeting these requirements? No, not legally. Did he do it? Yes, he did. And what did Congress do about it? A bunch of us complained. But the Senate was going to protect the President no matter what he did is the way it appeared and the way it continues to appear. So when the President brags about saving the auto industry, the auto industry would be a whole lot better off today if the bankruptcy had been done in accordance with bankruptcy law and the Constitution and dealers had not had dealerships jerked away from them. For heaven's sake, it is not like the dealerships were costing the manufacturers anything. Dealers have to pay for their own expenses. Yet he cost them royally. And now we know, because so many people have gotten desperate and have just given up hope of getting employment, we actually have more people not working now than ever. So we have those who are listed as unemployed and those that just have given up hope, and they are not even counted in the unemployed anymore. The war on poverty has been a disaster. The best thing for Americans is that they have a home that is a nuclear home, and there is at least one or two people in that home who have a job making money. America has always been about greatness. Give us your tired, your poor--but not so we can put them on welfare and lure them into a hole they can never get out of. It was so that they could get a job and earn a decent living and raise a family; and, instead, we incentivized single homes. So that after the war on poverty began, we went from just over 6 percent--between 6 and 7 percent of all children being born to single moms--to now over 40 percent, continuing to head toward 50 percent. Why do the children have to suffer for the ignorance and stupidity of the government and those who meant well but just did stupid things? It is tragic. It shouldn't have to be that way. We owe the people of America so much better. Nuclear family homes are a building block of this country that has made it successful; and by the grace of God, I hope and pray we can pass legislation that gets us back to strong homes and jobs and not more government giveaways. And I keep wondering, Mr. Speaker, wouldn't it have been better in the sixties to say, you know what, we realize you are dealing with a dead beat dad. We know you would be better off with a high school education. So instead of giving you a check for every child you can have out of wedlock, how about if we give you some day care for that child so you finish high school and you are on the right track to getting a job. That would have made a difference for more Americans. And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, a great deal of news has come out. So many things have happened since we recessed in December. Some things did not get the attention they should have. This is an article from the Daily Caller, December 18, entitled: ``Senate Democrats Block Amendment to Restore Veteran Benefits by Closing Illegal Immigrant Welfare Loophole.'' Mr. Speaker, it would seem by anyone's standard of morality that when someone promises something in order to encourage or get someone else to expose themselves to death, to brutal treatment, and that person does so--they join the military, go through rigorous training, spend a career 20 years or more defending the United States of America, following orders--that it would be morally reprehensible for anyone, or in this case any government, to pull back on the promises that were made to those who served relying on those promises. In courts, that doctrine would be called ``promissory estoppel.'' Promises are made to induce someone else to act, the other does act in reliance on those promises to the actor's detriment, then in a court system a civilian would be required under the doctrine of promissory estoppel to provide what was promised. But the United States Government is not subject to such claims in court so it must rely upon Congress to have the moral compass and the conscience to keep our promises to those who have served enough years, long enough to retire. When I push for such benefits and the keeping of our word to our veterans, it is not something that enures to my benefit. I served in the Army, but only for 4 years. I did not reach the 20-year mark or more that would have entitled me to the promises that were made. But I know so many who had the chance to go back and make more money in the civilian sector and not give up their right of freedom of assembly and had to assemble at 5 in the morning, as we often did, or doing forced marches, as we did, or doing so many things that were not fun or pleasant, but doing so because it was proper training to be in the United States military. We owe those who have served to keep our promises. When George Washington resigned as commander of the revolutionary military, it was an incredible act that constantly comes up both here and abroad when people both here and around the world look for an example of true selfless service to one's country. And how George Washington could serve as commander of the revolutionary military, the revolution is won, and he did what no one in the history of the world has ever done: won the revolution as commander of the military and then resign and in effect that I have done all you asked and now I am going home. That was brought up to me in the Maldive Islands some time back that I was told was a relatively new democracy who were always worried about a military coup because we never had a proper example like George Washington, we never had a George Washington to set the proper example, and has had a military coup since, I was told. Not only did George Washington resign, but at the end of his resignation--and this was something that was said to all 13 Governors--he had a prayer for the country. Part of that prayer was that we would never fail to remember, basically honoring those who have served. Then apparently on December 18, the United States Senate voted against restoring the benefits that were taken away from veterans because they didn't want to close a loophole in the law that allows for people who come here illegally to get welfare. Because if that loophole had been closed, then people who come illegally would not be able to get welfare, and the money saved by closing that loophole would be enough to fund our promises that have been broken to our veterans under the brand-new budget. I hope very soon that we will have a chance to fix that in the House. It is the right thing to do. How else will we have the moral authority in Congress to do anything else? We can't keep our promises in answer to the prayer that George Washington had that we would never forget those, that we would help those who have served in the field, our military. That is a travesty. On December 19, the next day, there was an article in the Washington Times: ``Homeland Security Helps Smuggle Illegal Immigrant Children into the United States.'' It goes on to discuss a 10-page order by Judge Andrew S. Hanen. And Judge Hanen, it says, said the case was the fourth such case he had seen over the last month. And in each instance, Customs and Border Protection agents have helped to locate and deliver the children to their illegal immigrant parents. Now, Republicans believe in the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity and importance of families in America. When someone chooses to violate United States law and enter the United States illegally without proper documentation, no matter how noble the cause is believed to be to help family--obviously that is a noble cause--but if it is done illegally, without documentation, it is an incredible disservice and affects so unfairly those who have stood in line, paid money after money, done everything the right way to gain entrance into the United States legally. There is one person to whom I spoke last Thursday that he was married to a woman that he tried for so long to get legally into the United States and finally got her into the country legally. It is so grossly unfair to the millions of people who have come into this country as immigrants legally. We are a Nation of immigrants. As my friend Steve King says, there is really not a nation in the world, perhaps, that is not a nation of immigrants. But the United States certainly is. One of the big reasons we have been able to become the most free-- until ObamaCare perhaps--but the most free Nation in the world with the least government dictation and intervention in our private lives, and been the most blessed country, I believe, even more so than Solomon's Israel, is because we were a Nation of laws, as the Founders described it, a Nation where no one was perceived to be above the law. I even paid a parking ticket because people perceived that I had violated a law and a National Park policeman who did not know the law, was ignorant of the law, decided to give it. It was easier to pay the $25 than it was to help teach the National Park policeman the law on parking in Washington, D.C. Nobody is above the law. Nobody is supposed to be above the law. There are verses throughout the Old Testament and New Testament. So many of the first hundred years of this Nation's existence had scriptures quoted from the Old Testament and New Testament as a basis, or reason, that particular legislation should be passed. Well, one thing is clear in the Old Testament and New Testament: that showing partiality, showing favoritism, to anyone--as Leviticus talks about--whether it is to the very poor or the very wealthy, either way it is not right; it is wrong. If we are going to ever attain again moral authority as a Congress, we have to make sure the law is applied fairly across the board. When someone chooses to violate our laws by coming into the country, then we have a President who took an oath to see that the laws of the United States are carried out and properly executed. That means everyone who answers to the President of the United States, including the Department of Homeland Security, including Customs and Border enforcement, all of DHS, should be following the law and pushing others to follow the law and seeing that the law is followed. But yet we see apparently case after case, shockingly, that Homeland Security is getting involved in the human trafficking business carrying children around the country, seeking them out. How about we get the parent together with the child in a country where they are lawfully allowed to be? How about being a good neighbor to Mexico? Instead of providing weapons to drug cartels, which have killed hundreds of our neighbors in Mexico, how about standing up against the drug cartels--not supplying them weapons, not seeing that drug deals are done, which may help one cartel over another, but actually being a good neighbor so that Mexico becomes the country where people want to stay and work? I have talked to so many Mexicans who really want to live in Mexico, but they have trouble finding jobs. There is so much corruption in a country where a police chief or a law enforcement officer or someone trying to do the right thing or trying to stand up against the drug cartel can end up with his head on a pike. That is our neighbor. Why are we not helping our neighbor stop the killing in massive numbers of our neighbor Mexicans? Instead, we have the Department of Homeland Security, as found by the Federal courts, to continually be helping people violate our own laws. I want families together, but the law needs to be followed. That is why you have judges, like I was, who have their hearts broken when they have to enforce laws that they don't always believe in, but it is because the laws are duly passed and signed into law by the executive branch, because we took an oath to enforce the law and to follow the law. Then it was shocking to read this story in TheBlaze from December 27. The headline: ``ATF Agent Sends Shock Waves Across Internet with Explosive Allegations About `Fast and Furious' and Brian Terry's Death.'' On down in the article, it says: After the Terry slaying--in talking about Brian Terry, the Federal agent who was killed--and an attempted cover-up within the Justice Department, Dodson--in talking about this ATF agent--provided evidence and testimony to Congress. His revelations, later verified by an Office of the Inspector General's report, ignited a national scandal over Fast and Furious that resulted in a congressional contempt citation against Attorney General Eric Holder and the replacement of top ATF and Justice Department officials. In his book, Dodson uses cautious language to characterize his account of circumstances surrounding Terry's death, saying the information is based on firsthand knowledge, personal opinion and press reports. He asserts that the DEA had information about and may have orchestrated a large drug shipment through Peck Canyon that December night. He was talking about the night Brian Terry was killed. He alleges that DEA agents shared that intelligence with FBI counterparts, who advised criminal informants from another cartel that the load would be ``theirs for the taking.'' Dodson laid out a strategy in which Federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, allow criminal activity in order to increase the clout of FBI informants embedded within cartel organizations. ``If they can get these guys (informants) in a position so they're closer to the tier 1 or tier 2 guy (in the cartel), they'll do it . . . '' Further down, the article says: ``Essentially, the United States Government is involved in cartel-building,'' Dodson said. The claims sound eerily familiar to allegations brought forward by high-ranking Sinaloa Cartel operative Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, who is currently facing trial in Chicago on Federal drug charges. Further down, it says: ``(They) were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago and the rest of the United States, and were also protected by the United States Government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels which helped Mexican and United States authorities capture or kill thousands of rival cartel members,'' the defense motion in the case reads. It is incredible what is going on, and it is only appropriate that, if Congress is to continue funding these agencies and these departments, we should have--and do have--the right to know what they are doing with our money. That should also mean getting to the bottom of Fast and Furious. There should be a select committee to get to the bottom of what happened in Fast and Furious. Eventually, there should be mainstream media components that actually do their job for a change, which is so important to keeping a free nation, by actually going after the administration they have put in place and demanding answers to the questions of what happened with Fast and Furious. We owe our friends to the south, our Mexican neighbors, answers to what happened. It is outrageous for a government to treat a neighbor like this. There is no reason that the country of Mexico should not be one of the top 10 economies in the world. Mexico should be one of the top 10 economies in the world. They have the natural resources. They have got people willing to work and who are doing phenomenal work as we have seen even in this country. They have a beautiful country, but they need to be rid of the drug cartels. They need to be a nation of laws. This eerily brings us back to the demand that some who come into this country illegally make now: we want you to quit being a nation of laws, ignore the law and say that we are legally here, though we came illegally. Ironically, if we do that, we are no longer a nation of laws, which would make us like the nation of Mexico, where graft and corruption in so many places is the rule of the day, where cronyism is the rule in so many places, where they don't have the freedom that we have here from the fear of drug cartels. I have mentioned a Washington Times story. Unfortunately, there was one in the Washington Times today, entitled: ``Is Islam a religion of peace or a religion of war?'' written by Rahat Husain. In this, Mr. Husain shows that he is either one of the laziest reporters in the world or that he is one of the biggest liars. I quote from the article: Of course, those who seek to vilify more than 1.6 billion Muslims in the world do so with a serious disregard for logic or morality. In 2010, Congresswoman Debbie Riddle and Congressman Louie Gohmert put a theory into the public discourse, that there was such a thing as a ``terror baby.'' I have never used that term to describe anybody. So, from Mr. Husain, Mr. Speaker, that is an outrageous, abominable lie. Now, it is quite possible he could have gotten that from so many of the media sources that do what they do so well. I go back to a sign that used to be above a blacksmith's shop. It was a re-creation of an old blacksmith's shop just south of Fort Benning in a quaint, old village. The sign above the blacksmith's door said: ``All types of bending and twisting done here.'' So what happens is that some in the mainstream, so-called, take a point that I make, twist it into something I didn't say, create this straw dog that they can beat up over and over and over and run that use up so much on the Internet that, if you click on my name, you will see this term, though I have never used it, and the point I made was a valid point. This article says: Despite the moral depravity of referring to infants as terrorists-- which I never did. Mr. Husain is a liar-- Congressman Gohmert defended the notion and got into a shouting match with CNN's Anderson Cooper, insisting on the validity of his idea. Mr. Husain's writing does not deserve to be considered as serious literature if he is either that lazy or that significant of a liar. All he would have to do is research. Hopefully, he did that research, which would mean he is clearly one of the largest liars around. Now, if either Anderson Cooper or Mr. Husain or others would do a little homework--it doesn't take that much--they would find that something called ``birthright tourism'' is big around the world. It is significant. As I pointed out to Anderson Cooper, there had been an article shortly before that about a Chinese tourist agency that, for a certain amount of money, would get you a tourist visa into the United States when you were pregnant. They would help you get your baby born and then get you an American passport before you left. Then I saw, right after that, an article where there was a Muslim-owned hotel in New York that was hurt because they said they were the first ones to come up with this idea of having, in their case, basically, Muslim pregnant women come to the United States, have a baby, and then they would help you get the American passport when you returned to your country. The point that I was making--and it is still a legitimate point--is that there are people who hate the United States, who come into this country, who have a child. Children are a gift from God. They are--that is why abortion is so wrong--and the responsibility that comes with having a child: to train them up in a wholesome environment as best you can, not to hate people. Yet we have children who leave this country with an American passport and go back to the country where their parents are citizens, and they are then raised to hate America. Some may remember that, in 2011, a man named Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was killed by a drone in Yemen. Anwar al-Awlaki had been here on Capitol Hill numerous times. He had friends at the White House. He had friends in this administration. He had been on Capitol Hill, leading Muslim staff members in Muslim prayer. Why? How could he do it? Because he was an American citizen. How was Anwar al-Awlaki an American citizen? His parents came here on a visa to go to college. He was born, returned to Yemen, was raised to hate America, raised to hate our Western democracy, and as an adult became a terrorist who incited others to terrorism against the United States. Perhaps some have heard of a guy named Al-Amoudi. Actually, I had the paperwork, held it up for the Director of the FBI, Director Mueller, and he was not aware at all that the Boston mosque that the Boston bombers attended, were started--we had the paper on the Boston society that did that. Al-Amoudi was the founder. Al-Amoudi was a friend and an adviser in the Clinton administration, but during the Bush administration, he was arrested at Dulles Airport and later pled guilty and was sentenced to 23 years in prison for supporting terrorism. It might be worth noting for someone in Homeland Security or the State Department that Al-Amoudi, convicted and now imprisoned for supporting terrorism, while his wife was here on a visa, they had a child, who is an American citizen. A man named Morsi was President of Egypt until he began to disregard the constitution of Egypt, to the extent that people rose up in Egypt in numbers greater than anywhere in the history of the world and demanded his ouster. As the Coptic Christian Pope has said, this wasn't a coup; this was the Egyptian people rising up as never before, reportedly, over twice the numbers that President Morsi claims voted for him to make him President. It appeared he was doing as Chavez had done. It appeared he was doing, as one Egyptian told me, as the President who was elected in the Gaza Strip had done. Once he had an election, he pulled all the power to himself, and they didn't need elections after that. There would never be anybody defeat him, like Chavez did in Venezuela. They could see it happening. As one Egyptian told me in Egypt within the last few weeks, if the Egyptian people had waited another year to try to remove Morsi from office, they would have been unable, because he would have pulled that much power unto himself. So I think accolades should go out to the Egyptian people for rising up and demanding democracy, demanding the fruition of a true Arab Spring, and for people who are ignorant or promoting lies, like Mr. Husain, if you would do some checking, you would find that I have moderate Muslim friends around the world. Anyone--Muslim, secularist, any persuasion, race, creed, color, or religion, if they believe in freedom, they are brothers in liberty. Something I think it would do well for this administration to learn at some point before it is too late is, we should be able to work with the enemy of our enemy. Moderate Muslims in Afghanistan do not want radical Islamists leading and in charge of Afghanistan again. There is a simple answer to the problem of us leaving Afghanistan, which will soon become Taliban-run again, and this administration is bungling--even though the bungling began in the last administration, in fairness it did--but the final bungling will be by this administration if we don't take action to prevent those who fought for this country from believing their loved ones died in vain. I don't believe they did. They fought for liberty. But I have heard from too many family members who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan who have said, Don't let our loved ones have died in vain. The Taliban were defeated in a matter of months in Afghanistan, and we did it with less than 500 embedded special ops and intelligence. We gave air support and provided some weapons, and they defeated the Taliban. The former vice president under Karzai in the first administration, former Vice President Masood, a friend of mine--a Muslim--rushed out of his home to embrace me when I got there not too long ago, because he knew I was his friend. I don't want him to live under radical Islam. He doesn't want to live under radical Islam. This friend said, Look, if you could just help us get an amendment to our constitution. I said, What are you talking about? He said, Under our constitution that you apparently rubberstamped, in essence, a strong centralized government was created in a country that has been and is and will be for the foreseeable future very tribal, very regional. We tried to make it into a strong centralized government when what the people wanted was a federalist system where the states, where the regions had some self autonomy like we are supposed to have in this country. He said, If we could elect our own governors. It is a shock to so many that the constitution that we thought was okay under the Bush administration allows the President of Afghanistan to appoint the regional governors, to appoint the mayors, to appoint the chiefs of police. He appoints the top-level teachers. He appoints a slate of the legislators for a part of the legislature. He has powerful abilities to manipulate the purse strings. What we created in Afghanistan--or helped them create--was a formula for disaster and corruption. How could you give one man that much authority to appoint and not expect corruption, when you get to appoint all the governors. As my friend, former Vice President Masood told me there at his home, if we could have an amendment that allowed us to elect our governors, allowed us to elect our mayors, allowed us to elect--or select, at least--our own chiefs of police, then our regions would be strong enough to prevent the Taliban from taking back over the whole country, and we could rally together, as we did before, to overrun them and run them out of the country. I said, What makes you think that the United States could help push an amendment through your own constitution? That needs to happen here in Afghanistan, I said. He pointed out, Do you have any idea how much our federal government budget is? I had to admit I didn't know. He said, around $12.5 billion of your dollars. He said, Do you know how much Afghanistan provides of our $12.5 billion or so budget? I didn't know. About $1.5 billion. Other moderate Muslims there were all in agreement, You need to help us with this. He said that most of the rest of that $11 billion comes from the United States. You have the leverage to help us get an amendment to our constitution. Instead of trying to work out some messed up Status of Forces Agreement, as we have seen this administration try to do in Iraq, to no avail, instead of doing that, why don't we start pushing Karzai and say, you help get an amendment in there so you don't get to appoint everybody who is anybody in this country. We will let each state or each region elect their own governor. Let's get that amendment in there. Otherwise, we are going to cut every dime of support off. That might have some sway. We have the ability, we have the leverage, and we have, for a little bit longer, before we totally lose it, some moral authority to seek that on behalf of our moderate Muslim friends in Afghanistan who don't want to be killed because they fought with us and for us in defeating the Taliban before we became occupiers, before we gave them a centralized government that the Taliban can easily take over when we leave. We owe them that, and we owe ourselves that, because if we can empower the enemy of the Taliban to continue to keep the Taliban at bay in Afghanistan, we have done a great thing. We have helped our country, and we have helped our moderate Muslim friends in Afghanistan who do not want to live under Taliban tyranny again, and they don't want to die and be killed because they helped us and then we abandoned them. We owe them that. I hope Mr. Husain that is writing this garbage for The Washington Times will do a little research. He will also find out, if he did so, that President Morsi, the Muslim brother who was elected President, reportedly--some say it was a fraudulent election, or election results--but anyway, he was made President and then began to abuse the constitutional powers and tighten the reins around him. I was told by friends who love Israel that this is really exciting because Morsi is really our friend. He is really cleaning up the Sinai. After Morsi was removed, we found out the Sinai has been incredibly militarized by Morsi. What would you expect of a man who had said that Jews are descendants of apes and pigs? That is not a friend of Israel. Yet you have the Egyptian Government now taking action to demilitarize, to fight the radical Islamists in the Sinai that pose a threat to the Suez Canal, that pose a threat to our friend, Israel, and they are actually trying to take action. What did this administration do? They had promised 10 Apache helicopters to the Morsi presidency, to that regime. When the people of Egypt rose up in true democratic form and demanded and got the ouster of a man trying to become a tyrant, this administration wanted Morsi put back in place, and even sent a couple of Republican senators over there to ask for Morsi to be released from prison. They didn't even know, as General el-Sisi finally admitted to me in the presence of our Ambassador, that, yes, they had evidence that Morsi was trying to have a contract to have General el-Sisi killed. Murdered. Trying to higher a contract killer. That was just one of the many problems that Morsi created. President Morsi said he backed off his membership, his participation in the Muslim Brotherhood. Right. There is video of him having orders dictated, delivered to him, on what he should do by the supreme leader there. What happened when Morsi was removed? The Muslim Brotherhood went berserk. They began burning churches by the dozens, killing Christians, persecuting Jews and Christians like never before, persecuting moderate Muslims. I am so proud of the people of Egypt. They want a democracy. A man named Amr Moussa was appointed as chairman of the Constitutional Convention. Incredibly diverse groups there, incredibly diverse interests; yet they all agreed on this to start out, under Moussa's leadership, that unless 75 percent of all of those delegates to the Constitutional Convention agreed on a provision, it wouldn't be there. As Chairman Moussa pointed out to me personally, he said, you know, we learned from your Constitution. Basically, he said, you know, our prior constitution, under Morsi, had no provision for impeachment. There was no way to lawfully remove him under that constitution, which was the way Morsi wanted it. In their new constitution, they have provisions for impeachment. And this Constitutional Convention was led by moderate Muslim friends like Amr Moussa. And it was endorsed by the Sheikh of al-Azhar, a very well- respected Muslim leader, and has been endorsed by so many Muslim leaders. They don't want radical Islam in charge. Moderate Muslims can be and are our friends. And instead, this administration canceled the order for the 10 Apaches, or at least suspended it. And what is Egypt doing with the Apaches they already have? They are fighting radical Islamists in the Sinai, and they are making sure ships get through the Suez Canal. Well, that should be a worthy endeavor, worthy of this administration not condemning a true democracy-in-the-making in Egypt, but trying to help them keep the Suez Canal open, trying to help them demilitarize the radical Islamists controlling the Sinai, as a threat to the Suez, to Egypt and to our friends, Israel and Jordan, and others. If that Constitutional Convention is approved, which will be voted on in Egypt January 14 and 15, article 64 is a provision for freedom, stating that freedom of belief is absolute. You have an absolute freedom to believe in whatever religious beliefs you care to believe in without the government's harm. What we are seeing here is really, if it works out, the people approve it, is the beginning of what we saw in Turkey with Ataturk so many decades ago, when he overran radical Islam and Turkey bloomed and became a great nation under his leadership and under those who followed what he set forth. Article 93 of the new Egyptian Constitution commits that Egypt is obligated to observe all human rights that Egypt has ever endorsed and in all treaties to which it has agreed. Article 235 was shocking to me. In their new constitution, the moderate Muslims of Egypt, who want a democracy, they felt so badly about the radical Islamists that make up the Muslim Brotherhood burning so many churches, persecuting, killing so many Christians, that article 235 requires that the first parliament pass a law to deal with the churches that were burned to ensure that Egypt rebuilds those churches for them. What a statement to the world about the freedom they want to see take place. That is why it was so moving to people that told me about being there firsthand during those, the revolutionary masses, as they came forward by the millions, holding hands, figuratively and literally, Christians, moderate Muslims, secularists, Jews, saying we don't want radical Islam. It is high time this administration began helping the enemy of our enemy, instead of trying to help our enemy. As General al-Sisi asked me, are you and the United States still with us in the war against terror? He and others commented to the effect that United States leaders do not seem to believe we are still having to fight terrorists anymore. They are fighting them in this new government. Now, to be sure, they have got a long, tough road ahead because they are already where this nation is heading, with a massive welfare state, where so many of the citizens are getting giveaways from the government, where they have tried this idea of redistribution of the wealth and it has led to many more and more richer people, and much, much poor people, just as we have seen in this Nation in the last 5 years, and it needs to stop. Another thing that needs to stop was reported in Breitbart, written by Frances Martel: ``State Department Whistleblower Has E-Mail Hacked.'' The story talks about the whistleblower who helped expose misconduct by Hillary Clinton's security detail had his Gmail account hacked and key evidence against State Department officials deleted, according to an exclusive New York Post report. Diplomatic Security Service Criminal Investigator Richard Higbie had exposed earlier this year that the State Department allegedly covered up reports alleging improprieties by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's security detail in which they had engaged with prostitutes abroad. Those reports would have also exposed the Belgian Ambassador's alleged attempts to solicit. And it goes on. But the article says the Gmail hack deleted 4 years' worth of messages, according to Schulman, including significant damning evidence against high-ranking officials in the State Department. It also included messages with evidence sent to Members of Congress and their offices investigating the story. Higbie has called for the FBI to investigate the hacking, and continues to have unanswered questions about other strange occurrences since he began to expose the covered-up investigation. The article goes on, and that goes hand-in-hand with another story that was reported in the past 6 months or so of a whistleblower having her and her husband's home burglarized, and they ended up taking all of that reporter's files that she had used to expose wrongdoing, misconduct, within the very department that raided her home and took her records and won't give them back. At the same time, this administration continues to send people to the nation of Israel, the Jewish State, the home where people could come by the millions after 6 million were killed in the Holocaust of World War II. We have the nerve to send people over to the leaders of Israel and tell them they have got to give away more land, when every time they have given away land, whether it was northern Israel, that is now southern Lebanon, or whether it is the Gaza Strip, anything they have given away ends up being used as a staging area from which to attack it; and those to whom the land is given use our money we provide for books to teach their children to hate Jews, to hate Israelis, and to hate the United States. As I have said for years, you don't have to pay people to hate you. They will do it for free. We could make our word good to our veterans if we just quit paying the people that hate us. Let them hate us for free. Maybe they would learn to like us and come ask to work with us and find out we are actually pretty decent people if we quit paying them to hate us. The Palestinians, was reported, January 1 in this Jerusalem Post article, said Palestinians reiterate plans to reject any framework accord presented by the U.S. And yet we send over a Secretary of State, well-meaning, and others, to demand Israel give up more land to people that say they will reject it, but give us more land from which we can attack you. I think about the verses in Jeremiah, where the prophecy is there that there will be grapes grown in the mountains of Samaria, that some are saying doesn't belong to Israel. Well it used to; 1,600 years before a man named Mohammed was born, King David was ruling in that region. But over the years, over the decades and centuries, people have said, look, that area, those mountains of Samaria will not grow grapes. That is ridiculous. And yet in the past couple of years, I have tasted those grapes. The vineyards are beautiful. They are Israeli, Jewish vineyards in the mountains of Samaria, just as Jeremiah prophesied would happen, that God would make it happen. And we send a Secretary of State over saying, you have got to give away what you believe God providentially provided to you. We, the United States, know more than any god you believe in. Give it away. It has been prophesied. I would hate to go against prophecy. And yet this article from the Telegraph, Iran Nuclear Deal, Saudi Arabia warns it will strike out on its own. As Steve King, Michelle Bachmann and I, Robert Pittenger, traveled to some of the countries in the Middle East, as others of us traveled around the Middle East back in September, it is incredible, but this administration, with what it is doing in Iran, the rest of the Middle East believes is going to allow Iran to have nukes and Saudi Arabia and our other allies and our enemies all want nukes, and nuclear proliferation will become just a rule of thumb, which is why I think this article appeared January 2 in the Washington Times, showing a comment that makes sense now, but ``Anti-Communist Icon Decries Obama: U.S. No Longer Leads the World.'' This was from Lech Walesa, and he had great hopes for the United States. He obviously had great hopes for this administration. He said whatever hope in the world existed that Obama would reclaim moral leadership for America when elected in 2008 is gone, and instead the President has failed to bring that dream to fruition, he told CNN. We have to do everything we can to recreate, to reclaim America's role, and it seems that Obama would manage that, but he didn't accomplish that. America did not regain its leadership status. We're just lucky there were no bigger conflicts in the world, because if it had had bigger conflicts, then the world would be helpless. The trouble is, 2014 will be a year in which there are bigger conflicts, bigger issues. It is time we did the moral thing by our military veterans. It is time we did the moral thing by stopping the spending of children and grandchildren and great grandchildren's money. And it is time we did the moral thing by our friends and quit helping our friends' enemies hurt our friends. We need to regain, as Lech Walesa said, the moral authority we once had. That can be done, and we need to seize the day and do it. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. To address the Affordable Care Act, as it was improperly and inaccurately labeled, is an article from Ben Shapiro in Breitbart today that said: On Friday, PolitiFact bowed to the inevitable and named President Obama's ``If you like your health care plan, you can keep it'' statement its Lie of the Year. That came after PolitiFact labeled that statement ``half-true'' in June of 2012 and then defended its ``half-true'' rating in October 2013. PolitiFact said: It was a catchy political pitch and a chance to calm nerves about his dramatic and complicated plan to bring historic change to America's health insurance system, but the promise was impossible to keep. Of course, there's more to the story than that: the promise was a lie when it was made, given that Obama knew at the time that insurance plans would be canceled. But PolitiFact, even in naming the statement the Lie of the Year, soft-pedaled it: Obama fought back against inaccurate attacks with his own oversimplifications, which he repeated even as it became clear his promise was too sweeping. So even PolitiFact, doing all they could to defend something that ended up absolutely not being true, they finally had to come around and actually admit when the whole country basically--most of the country-- could see the truth, even PolitiFact had to finally get around to being factual. Here is another story from John Nolte, the Breitbart, 12 December, today. He said: During Thursday's White House press briefing, the press corps erupted in protest over the Obama administration's lack of transparency and media access. The press corps seemed to be in complete agreement that the Obama White House has been less transparent than the Bush White House. Quite a condemnation for the self-described ``most transparent administration in history.'' I have also noted in the news today statements from some of our leaders in our Republican Party here in the House that immigration will be a top priority for 2014. I would not have a problem with immigration being a top priority in 2014 if the administration would first enforce the laws that enter in effect regarding this Nation's security and its immigration laws. We had a hearing today in Judiciary and heard testimony about the administration from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, that actually they are not complying with the law. The law says if somebody claims asylum, then they are detained until such time that they have the matter ultimately adjudicated. We learned that actually about 75 percent of those claiming asylum, which has grown multiple times from where they were in 2008 when President Bush left, a dramatic, dramatic increase in numbers of people coming across our southern border and claiming asylum, and apparently this administration is releasing about 75 percent of them. And I was quite sad to hear testimony that even though they are making policy, that these individuals, deputy directors, could not give us the exact numbers of how many people they were releasing, how many people reported back for their hearings; and so that was quite a bit discouraging. So when you know that there have been so many misstatements by this administration that turned out to be far less than accurate or true, then I do not know why Republicans and Democrats would want to take up immigration. Just the discussion about legal status, amnesty, anything of the sort, creates a massive magnet drawing people across our borders illegally, as we have heard testimony repeatedly, statements repeatedly, from our ICE agents, our Immigration and Customs Enforcement people. They say it increases dramatically every time we start talking about legal status and amnesty. We see huge numbers of people, numbers that we get about the people dying coming across deserts, not having adequate water and food to get across. Why would we do something to create a magnet until we have a secure border? There are a lot of things that need to be reformed. But for those who continue to say, oh, yeah, but we will have real security in the next bill, look, there is money that this administration has, there is manpower this administration has, there is the ability this administration has to secure our border. What it does not have is the will. If it turned out the administration were really and truly serious about securing our border, they could be confirmed by the border States. Then you would see me, along with most of the people I know, willing to sit down and immediately work out an immigration reform package. But to debate it in committee and on the floor, to talk about it, to make speeches before the border is secure, I am afraid makes us complicit in drawing people across deserts that will not make it and will die in the desert because we started talking about promises, dangling shiny objects to draw people to us, when we had not put proper protection in place to make sure that innocent people did not die trying to get here. For those who say we need to vastly broaden the number of visas, there are some areas that I am in favor of increasing visas. There are a lot of things we can talk about, but it does not serve those who we will draw across deserts who won't make it, it doesn't serve them any good purpose until the administration secures the border. So with all the wonderful talk about triggers and, oh, but we are going to finally secure the border, well, President Reagan got fooled on that and regretted it. I just think it will be a terrible mistake to do anything other than take up a resolution. I filed one basically saying that until the administration secures our borders, as confirmed by the border States, not Homeland Security, which we have trouble getting straight answers out of, but as confirmed by the border States, who are important, critical stakeholders in the immigration and secure border issue, when they confirm the borders are secure, then we immediately move in to dealing with immigration reform. To do otherwise is a mistake that will do great damage to people that we draw in, unfortunately, to their great damage and possible demise; and it will do great damage to this country. Let's get the immigration, set it on hold, not take anything up until the President is committed and does actually secure the border. Then we get something worked out, and it won't be a difficult issue at all. But for those that say, oh, I think we can trust Homeland Security or we can trust groups in Washington or we can trust Homeland Security, sure, we can trust this administration. They say that once we give them everything they want in an immigration bill, then they really and truly will start securing the border to the extent that the law requires. I am sure I look stupid to some, but I say that is a massive mistake. Follow the law. If you won't enforce and follow and execute the law faithfully now in accordance with the oath that was taken at the beginning of office, then why should we think things will change after you have gotten everything you want and there is no more incentive to follow the law. Well, we get back to the promises made about the so-called Affordable Care Act. Here is an article from The Wall Street Journal today that says ObamaCare raised the cost of your kids' braces. And again, those of us who have used the term ``ObamaCare,'' we don't mean anything any more derogatory than the President when he called Massachusetts health care ``RomneyCare.'' It was just a way to identify Massachusetts health care. The President didn't mean anything derogatory when he says ``RomneyCare.'' People who use ``ObamaCare,'' including the President, don't mean anything derogatory, but it certainly identifies for people more than the Affordable Care Act does, as we have seen man-on-the-street interviews on television that people don't know the Affordable Care Act and ObamaCare are actually the same thing. This article points out: Here is something your orthodontist is not smiling about, a new tax rule raised the cost of braces this year thanks to a change from the Affordable Care Act that places an annual $2,500 contribution cap on flexible spending accounts which let workers set aside pretax dollars to cover medical expenses. Some consumers may be spending more on braces, expensive eyewear, or other medical supplies they would typically buy with the accounts. Before the new rule, there was no official cap on how much taxpayers could stash into the account, although many companies typically set their own limits of $5,000. For a person in the 25 percent tax bracket, it cuts the maximum tax break in half to $625 from $1,250. And then it goes on to explain how these increase the cost of braces and orthodontic care. Another issue here, this article from The Wall Street Journal as well, dated December 11, says, ``Juking the ObamaCare Stats.'' It says: Most of Washington seems to have bought the White House claim that the 36 Federal exchanges are finally working, and glory, glory, hallelujah. But if that is really true, then what explains the ongoing secrecy and evasion? We have had so much trouble getting specific, direct answers about people who have actually purchased insurance through the exchange. Now, Health and Human Services, HHS, if they don't have these numbers, if they can't even tell us the number of people that have actually purchased insurance, then how in heaven's name will they ever be able to tell people whether or not they are actually covered and how extensively they are covered and whether or not they are going to take care of expenses. I mean, the fact that they can't come in here and give us specific information on who signed up, how many have signed up for this, that or the other, is a terrible harbinger for just how bad and disastrous this health care bill is. As we have continued to have a number of hearings where we get nothing but obfuscation when specific facts are requested from the administration, we know that somebody has this information in this administration and it brought to mind the legal doctrine called spoliation. Now in our American courts in every State, in Federal court, we have very strict laws about the admittance of hearsay into evidence before a jury because our rules are there to protect the finder of fact, the jury, from hearing evidence which does not have really enough credibility to it, and hearsay has to be a specific exception or it is not allowed. It must be direct evidence; otherwise, it is not allowed, with very tight exceptions. One exception that most jurisdictions, as we have in Texas, it is called spoliation. The doctrine is this, in essence. If one party in court has control of evidence that would be admissible toward proving or disproving a fact and that party does not, will not, or say they cannot produce that evidence to prove or disprove a fact, in that case the judge, as I used to be, could turn to the jury and instruct the jury that even though this is not direct evidence because of our justice system and the effort to achieve justice in America better than any court system in history, we can direct the jury under the doctrine of spoliation that this party had evidence in their possession that they have either refused to produce, cannot produce, or will not produce. Since this party has possession or had possession of that evidence, then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you may consider the fact that they are not producing that evidence as evidence itself that if produced that evidence would disprove what they are claiming. That is called, in essence, the doctrine of spoliation. So that is the evidentiary doctrine that came to my mind as we continue to have hearings and the Obama administration fails to produce specific information about sign-ups to ObamaCare. So if we were in a court of law, it certainly appears that that instruction might be appropriate. Ladies and gentlemen of America, the administration has evidence in its possession that it either cannot, will not, or refuses to produce. Therefore, Americans, ladies and gentlemen of America, you may consider as evidence the fact that they will not produce that information as evidence that it does not support what they claim. Basically, that is what we have here. They are refusing to produce evidence, information about ObamaCare. So I think the American people would be justified. I think a jury in my court would be justified in presuming, a legal presumption, that their failure to produce this evidence is evidence that their claims are not supported by the evidence they refuse to produce. Here is an article from The Weekly Standard, December 11, entitled, ``Sexiest man alive brought in to boost ObamaCare enrollment.'' I don't really know who Adam Levine is; probably my daughters do. Apparently, he was designated as such by People magazine. Apparently he has been enlisted, according to Bloomberg, as having been hired by this administration to give credibility to ObamaCare. To me, again, that seems like if you have to hire some sexy guy to come in and promote and tell people, promote ObamaCare as being so wonderful and great, it is a pretty clear indication that as people look into ObamaCare personally that they don't like what they see, and that is what we are hearing from most constituents. Thankfully, there are a few people who have benefited from ObamaCare; but the people we are hearing from, the vast majority, have been hurt, not helped. Here again, another article from the Washington Examiner, Brian Hughes from today, actually 5:08 p.m. today. It says, ``HHS extends more ObamaCare deadlines.'' It goes on to talk about that the Obama administration announced today that they would take steps to push back an already delayed deadline, help those struggling to obtain health coverage on January 1, and extend a Federal insurance program for those with preexisting conditions. They keep extending deadlines. If Harry Reid and Senate Democrats had not been so dead set on shutting down the government on October 1 as they did, if they had been at least willing to forgo their desire to shut down the government and hope Republicans got blamed, which they knew that the mainstream would do because the mainstream media would not actually look at the facts that the House was compromising repeatedly and the Senate was saying ``our way or the highway,'' basically, by their actions, making clear they wanted a shutdown. Well, they got the shutdown, and now, in retrospect, there have got to be Democrats in the Senate saying, You know what? Since we have to keep extending these deadlines, the American people are going to figure out we could have avoided that whole shutdown if Democrats had been even remotely reasonable in the Senate and said, Okay, let's go ahead and postpone this for a year because it is not going well. Well, they wanted a shutdown and they got a shutdown, as the Senate Democrats wanted, and now there has got to be some buyer's remorse. They created the shutdown when they should have taken one of our various compromise offers and at least extended, suspended the individual mandate the way the President illegally did for businesses. I want to touch on another thing quickly here. Iran is, as Israel has said repeatedly, an existential threat to the very existence of Israel. If they get nuclear weapons, they want to attack Israel first as the little Satan and they want to attack America next. And we have had Wendy Sherman, who is the lead negotiator for the Obama administration, come up and brief Members of Congress. I wasn't there because I had read about her policy leadership in working out the deal with North Korea under the Clinton administration which provided them nuclear power plants, fuel, got them up and going, and also agreed not to inspect their nuclear facilities, which gave North Korea time to develop nuclear weapons. In order to get us to give them nuclear power plants and all they needed to make nuclear weapons, basically most of what they needed, all they had to do was promise they wouldn't pursue nuclear weapons. They have got to be thinking these Americans are the most stupid people in the world. Sure, you want us to tell you we won't pursue nuclear weapons, we won't pursue them. Now give us what we need to make nuclear weapons and we will make nuclear weapons. Here we have some of the same people involved with the Obama administration who want to do the same type of thing with Iran. The trouble is this time it really is a threat to the United States. It is a threat to Israel, and we have betrayed our ally, unfortunately, in Israel. But anyway, here are the people in whom the Clinton administration and numerous people now in the Obama administration have such faith in. This article today, 5:07 p.m., ``North Korea State Media Says Uncle of Kim Jong Un Executed.'' Oh, these are great people. These are people that we shouldn't have trusted, but the Clinton administration did and Wendy Sherman did back in the 1990s. She continued to persist. Oh, we can trust these guys, even in her op-ed in 2001. You couldn't trust them, and people who knew these people knew you couldn't trust the leadership. You can trust the North Koreans, but you can't trust their leadership. You can trust the Iranians, but you can't trust their leadership. Here is another article in the National Review online entitled ``Nuclear Gangbangers.'' An observant Iran appreciates three laws of current nuclear gangbanging: 1. Nuclear weapons earn a reputation. 2. The more loco a nuclear nation sounds, the more likely it is that civilized states will fear that it is not subject to nuclear deterrence, and so the more likely that they will pay bribes for it to behave. Gangbangers always claim they have nothing to lose; their more responsible intended targets have everything to lose. 3. As of yet, there are no 100 percent effective nuclear- defense systems that can guarantee non-nuclear powers absolute safety from a sudden attack. The nuclear gangbanger, not the global police, currently has the upper hand. And this administration is turning a blind eye to the deceit and the lies and the nuclear development in Iran to our detriment and the detriment of our dear friend. Madam Speaker, in the remaining time, since this is the last Republican Special Order time before we recess in the House for the Christmas holidays, the new year, I want to say that although it apparently irritates some liberals to no end and they miss the point of why it is important to read these historic statements, some people say, Gee, we are getting lots of calls from irate people saying that the things that are being read on the House floor by Congressman Gohmert are an affront and should never be allowed to be a part of the United States Government. They miss the entire point that the reason that I am reading them is because these poor people have not had a proper education. They do not know what a historic basis it is in going back to George Washington who created an order that you couldn't take God's name in vain, creating in his resignation a prayer for the Nation, talking about the divine author of our blessed religion and that without a humble limitation in these things that we can never hope to be a happy Nation. There were the proclamations thanking God, directing people to have days of prayer. There were all of these things throughout our history. So, Madam Speaker, I hope Americans appreciate the profound things that have been done by America's leaders in the past. This is from Franklin D. Roosevelt, December 24, 1933, in a Christmas greeting to the Nation. Again, it was okay in the 1930s, just as it was throughout our history, to thank God. No one ever had a problem with Democrats or Republicans paying tribute to God in the House Chamber, in the Senate Chamber, in the White House, anywhere. These are Franklin Roosevelt's comments. He said: This year marks a greater national understanding of the significance in our modern lives of the teaching of Him whose birth we celebrate. To more and more of us the words ``thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself'' have taken on a meaning that is showing itself and proving itself in our purposes and daily lives. May the practice of that high ideal grow in us all in the year to come. I give you and send you one and all, old and young, a merry Christmas and a truly happy new year. So for now and for always, ``God bless us every one.'' The following year on Christmas Eve, Franklin D. Roosevelt gave us these words from the White House, a government property. It was entirely proper. He said: Let us make the spirit of Christmas of 1934 that of courage and unity. That is, I believe, an important part of what the Maker of Christmas would have it mean. In this sense, the Scriptures admonish us to be strong and of good courage, to fear not, to dwell together in unity. That was just some of his comments. Franklin D. Roosevelt, January 25, 1941, in the prologue of the New Testament published by the Gideons and distributed to soldiers during World War II--and I have one that my aunt provided me that she said my uncle had received. It says: To the Armed Forces: As Commander in Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the Armed Forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries, men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel, and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength and now, as always, an aid in attaining the highest aspirations of the human soul. Very sincerely yours, Franklin D. Roosevelt. On December 21, 1941, two weeks after America was attacked, a day which will live in infamy, as President Roosevelt said, Franklin Roosevelt delivered this message: Sincere and faithful men and women . . . are asking themselves this Christmas how can we light our trees? How can we give our gifts? How can we meet and worship with love and with uplifted spirit and heart in a world at war, a war of fighting and suffering and death? How can we pause even for a day, even for Christmas day in our urgent labor of arming a decent humanity against the enemies which beset it? How can we put the world aside, as men and women put the world aside in peaceful years, to rejoice in the birth of Christ? President Roosevelt goes on. He says: Looking into the days to come, I have set aside a day of prayer, and in that proclamation I have said: ``The year 1941 has brought upon our Nation a war of aggression by powers dominated by arrogant rulers whose selfish purpose is to destroy free institutions. They would thereby take from the freedom-loving peoples of the Earth the hard-won liberties gained over many centuries. The new year of 1942 calls for courage . . . Our strength, as the strength of all men everywhere, is of greater avail as God upholds us. Therefore, I . . . do hereby appoint the first day of the year of 1942 as a day of prayer, of asking forgiveness for our shortcomings of the past, of consecration to the tasks of the present, of asking God's help in days to come. We need his guidance that this people may be humble in spirit but strong in conviction of the right; steadfast to endure sacrifice, and brave to achieve a victory of liberty and peace. Our strongest weapon in this war is that conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of man which Christmas day signifies. President Roosevelt goes on: Against enemies that preach the principles of hate and practice them, we set our faith in human love and in God's care for us and all men everywhere. On January 6, 1942, President Roosevelt said: Our enemies are guided by brutal cynicism, by unholy contempt for the human race. We are inspired by faith which goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. ``God created man in his own image.'' We on our side are striving to be true to that Divine heritage. We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God. Those on the other side are striving to destroy this deep belief and to create a world in their own image, a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom. That was Franklin Roosevelt, 1942. He knew at the time that there were the axis powers, the evil powers that included Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, radical Islamists in North Africa joining forces together, and he talked about our heritage. Here he is a year later, Franklin Roosevelt. These are official statements, Madam Speaker. This is President Roosevelt's official government message: To you who serve in uniform I also send a message of cheer that you are in the thoughts of your families and friends at home, and that Christmas prayers follow you wherever you may be. To all Americans I say that loving our neighbor as we love ourselves is not enough, that we as a Nation and as individuals will please God best by showing regard for the laws of God. There is no better way of fostering good will toward man than by first fostering good will toward God. Then President Roosevelt quotes John 14:15. President Roosevelt says: If we love Him, we will keep His commandments. In sending Christmas greetings to the Armed Forces and merchant sailors of the United Nations we include therein our pride in their bravery on the fighting fronts and all the seas. It is significant that tomorrow, Christmas day, our plants and factories will be stilled. That is not true of the other holidays we have long been accustomed to celebrate. On all other holidays work goes on gladly for the winning of the war. So Christmas becomes the only holiday in all the year. I like to think that this is so because Christmas is a holy day. May all it stands for live and grow throughout the years. That was Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1944, December 24, the official government statement by Franklin Roosevelt as President was: It is not easy to say ``merry Christmas'' to you, my fellow Americans in this time of destructive war, nor can I say ``merry Christmas'' lightly tonight to our Armed Forces at their battle stations all over the word, or to our allies who fight by their side. Here, at home, we celebrate Christmas Day in our traditional American way because of its deep spiritual meaning to us; because the teachings of Christ are fundamental in our lives; and because we want our youngest generation to grow up knowing the significance of this tradition and the story of the coming of the immortal Prince of Peace and good will. He goes on: But in perhaps every home in the United States sad and anxious thoughts will be continually with the millions of our loved ones who are suffering hardships and misery and who are risking their very lives to preserve for us and for all mankind the fruits of his teachings and the foundations of civilization itself. The Christmas spirit lives tonight in the bitter cold of the front lines in Europe and in the heat of the jungles and swamps of Burma and the Pacific Islands. Even the roar of our bombers and fighters in the air and the guns of our ships at sea will not drown out the message of Christmas which comes to the heart of our fighting men. President Roosevelt goes on: The tide of battle has turned, but slowly, but inexorably against those who sought to destroy civilization. We pray that this day may come soon. We pray, until then, God will protect our gallant American and women in the uniforms of the United Nations, that He will receive into His infinite grace those who make their supreme sacrifice in the cause of righteousness and the cause of love of Him and His teachings. President Roosevelt finishes by saying: We pray that with victory will come a new day of peace on Earth, in which all the nations of Earth will join together for all time, that in the spirit of Christmas, the Holy Day, may that spirit live and grow throughout the world in all the years to come. And then finally, close with this, Madam Speaker. This is Franklin Roosevelt, January 20, 1945. This is part of his last inaugural address. And as I finish with this, may I say, Madam Speaker, that I know all of us here in the House and the Senate, no matter what our persuasions, have these same very best wishes as Franklin Roosevelt had for our American troops, our men and women in uniform today, just as those wishes were made 68 years ago. This was 1945. Roosevelt said: As I stand here today, having taken the solemn oath of office in the presence of my fellow countrymen, in the presence of God, I know that it is America's purpose that we shall not fail. The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways. He has given our people stout hearts, strong arms with which to strike mighty blows for freedom and truth. He has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all people in an anguished world. President Franklin Roosevelt finishes by saying: So we pray to Him now for the vision to see our way clearly, to see the way that leads to a better life for ourselves and for all our fellow men, to the achievement of His will, to peace on Earth. Roosevelt finishes by saying: In the presence of God, I know that it is America's purpose that we shall not fail. Madam Speaker, if we keep that same faith of Franklin Roosevelt, in his official capacity as President of the United States, he is right. God will not let us fail. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, tonight, one of the things we did was to take up the National Defense Authorization Act. It was to extend the power of the President. There were some good things in it. I applaud the inclusion of the conscience exception that would allow members of the military to do as members of the military have done throughout our history--be able to have, for example, a Bible on a desk, which are things that now have begun to result in persecution--and, actually, knocks against the military--things that our greatest Commander in the history of our country, George Washington, felt were noble things. Under this administration's watch, these things have now begun to result in persecution. When you go back to the bill, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, that was passed on September 18, 2001, when the United States did not even know who had attacked us, it is incredible. I don't fault the legislature at the time, the Congress--the House and the Senate. Americans were scared. Churches and synagogues were packed all over America. I have never seen anything like it in my lifetime the way people especially flocked to churches and were praying fervently. Then after there was not another attack within 90 days, it was as if Americans began to say, Never mind, God. We don't have to worry about that because we haven't been attacked again. The NDAA is basically added to the Authorization for Use of Military Force against September 11 terrorists. That is the name of it. It says in section 2(a): The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons. Then it sets out War Powers Resolution requirements consistent with section 8(a): (1) Of the War Powers Resolution, Congress declares this section as intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution, 50 U.S.C. 1544(b). It goes on and it is more extensive, and as I say, the NDAA actually modifies and extends things. When that was passed, we didn't even know who had attacked us. I, obviously, was not here in Congress at the time, but we were afraid and concerned. We didn't know what was going to hit next, but it, perhaps, in retrospect, was a granting of more powers than should have been granted by the Congress because it is subject to being abused. Fortunately, I don't consider it to have been abused by President Bush. Some blame him for Iraq. I wasn't here at the time, but I can't help but wonder when people supported the numerous successful efforts by President Bush at the United Nations in building a big coalition of countries to support our efforts to curtail Iraq's military efforts of not allowing U.N. inspectors to check on them. I don't blame the Democrats who voted for the authorization to go into Iraq, and I don't blame the Republicans, because Saddam Hussein gave every indication to the people who were in Congress at the time and to the President that he was up to no good. That was a long time ago. Now we find that the President is using authorities that were granted, and this administration is using authority that was granted to do things like help rebels who we knew at the time in Libya had al Qaeda infused within them. We just didn't know how extensive, and many of us pointed that out. Now, this fall, we see that this administration has sent hundreds of tons of weapons to the Syrian rebels, and we find out that the Syrian rebels who are fighting a cruel dictator named Assad are engaging in more brutality, particularly against Christians, in the original roots where Christianity was born. These are areas in which Apostle Paul established churches. It is the only city in the world that still speaks the original Aramaic that Jesus was believed to have spoken. This is an amazing place. This isn't just some trivial area in which a few Christians happen to be. This is right to the very founding of the Christian church. So many people came to America to have the freedom to worship without persecution. They fled Europe and fled other places so they could worship without persecution in a Christian church, and now this administration is using incredible powers that were bestowed on the President by Congress to help the wrong people. I go back to a visit to the Middle East earlier this fall when allies basically were saying, We do not understand what you are doing. The Muslim Brotherhood is that which supports radical Islam, and it was the radical Islamists--the Muslim Brotherhood--that supported the 9/11 attacks. It was the Muslim Brotherhood that basically supported the training and all of the efforts the Taliban was doing. It is the Muslim Brotherhood that was engaged in trying to take down Qadhafi, which, without American help, they may not have done. It was the Muslim Brotherhood that took control in Egypt and was persecuting Christians as the Coptic Christian Pope, the Egyptian Pope, verified himself in meetings with him this fall. Now, in Syria, you are backing the people who are at war with you? We don't understand. So it appears that we have gone from being at war, as President Bush talked about, with anyone who has supported the terrorists--you are either with us or you are with them--to now, not only not being at war with those who are at war with us, but to helping them. As a Christian, to know that votes we have taken in Congress have helped enable this administration to provide weapons, weapons of war, to people who are brutalizing, raping, killing, seeing reports of the beheadings of Christians in Syria. Though I greatly appreciate some of the things that were included in the NDAA, and in the past I have even helped work on bipartisan agreements, bicameral, with the Senate and the House, worked on an effort to rein in the President's authority to just indefinitely detain American citizens--and I think we had a great solution we worked together to get inserted, so I don't believe the President can do that any longer with the language now being used--I still can't continue to support what we are doing. I hope that we will have a bipartisan effort in the new year to actually end the authorization for use of military force against September 11 terrorists now that we seem to be helping those who are associated with the radical Islamist terrorists instead of being at war with them. Horizon Industries

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to stand here and congratulate the National Industries for the Blind, that is the NIB, on their 75th anniversary and the great work they do for Texas' First Congressional District. NIB's mission is to ``enhance opportunities for economic and personal independence of persons who are blind, primarily through creating, sustaining, and improving employment.'' Unfortunately, 70 percent of working-age Americans who are blind are unemployed. However, the NIB is trying to reverse those upsetting trends by providing more employment opportunities for people who are blind through their more than 250 locations across the United States. Horizon Industries, which is a division of the East Texas Lighthouse for the Blind, is located in Tyler, Texas, and currently employs 70 blind and visually impaired individuals. When I visit Horizon Industries, East Texas Lighthouse for the Blind, I am overwhelmed with amazement and appreciation for the dedication, the ability, the desire, and the outright help that these visually impaired American wonders are working with. Horizon, one of their jobs, they convert paper products into industrial cleaning cloths for the General Services Administration and its customers. These incredible employees have also manufactured 35,661 miles of parachute cord for the Department of Defense, much of which was shipped directly to our troops who are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Horizon Industries has empowered blind Americans through employment since 1976. These marvelous friends, whose visual impairment has heightened their other senses to an amazing extent, are dedicated, they love this country, they want to help this country, are a blessing and an asset to their community, to east Texas, to Texas, and this country. May God continue to bless these wonderful, lovable, dedicated Americans as they continue to bless America. The Affordable Care Act

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I also want to comment before we're done here today about what is going on in Syria, because there is so much false information going on. There are many really fine people, including friends in the Senate who are smart people but are just actually ignorant of the facts on the ground there. This administration had decided that we should support the Syrian rebels. There are indications that this administration, because Congress has not specifically appropriated in so long, the administration figuratively has got sacks of money and so they decided, Oh, we will support the rebels in Syria. Now, 2 to 3 years ago, it might well have been Syrians who were not radical Islamists, who wanted freedom, but this government didn't step in until the rebels were infused with and really governed by more radical Islamists. The stories that are going on in Syria, just like others in the Middle East, the horrors of what the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamists were doing in Egypt, especially after Morsi got arrested-- this administration blamed the military when actually, as the Egyptian pope told me, this was not a coup. This was the Egyptian people rising up, wanting to be free of radical Islamists leading. These were moderate Muslims, secularists, Christians, hand in hand, arm in arm, protesting, demanding Morsi be forced out by the military. It was an uprising of greater numbers than participated in the American Revolution. The Egyptians rose up in greater numbers than they ever have in the world. They were seeking both moderate Muslims, Christians, Jews, secularists, other religions. They were just wanting not to be ruled by radical Islam. Instead, this administration and some Senators, including from my party, felt like we ought to be helping the rebels that were just really infused and overtaken by radical Islamists. As moderate Muslims told a few of us in Congress back in September: What do you guys not understand? I mean, it was the Muslim Brotherhood that really was behind the attack on 9/11/2001. It was technically the Taliban, but basically it is Muslim Brotherhood you were at war with in Afghanistan. It is Muslim Brotherhood that you have now helped in Libya, helped in Egypt, now helping in Syria. What do you not understand? These are the guys that have been at war with you. We are moderate Muslims. We don't want them taking over things. For some reason, it sure seems to be because of the advice this administration is getting from people that Egyptian media had indicated were Muslim brothers at the highest levels of advice that this administration gets. But as a result, this administration thinks we need to keep helping these radical Islamist-infused rebels that are absolute terrorists. They are doing the most unthinkable, unimaginable acts to Christians, especially Christians. And as a report in Britain has indicated recently, Christians are the most persecuted group in the world right now. This administration is choosing to help the people over and over, help the people, help the groups that are most radically brutalizing Christians. Here is an article from The New York Times, ``Brutality of Syrian Rebels, Posing Dilemma in West.'' It talks about just the horror and the disgusting nature of the killings that were going on against unarmed civilians, and yet we are supporting the rebels? Here is one, ``Media urge Syrian rebels to stop kidnappings.'' Hmm, well, fortunately that was written a long time ago. Here is one, ``2 Bishops, Priest, 12 Nuns Still Missing After Being Kidnapped By Syrian Rebels,'' by Lee Keath of the AP. It talks about the horrible nature of those kidnappings. I had the honor of having a visit today by Mother Agnes. Some in the left-wing media who were so overwhelmed with trying to protect this administration, they don't want to look facts in the face. They want to try to destroy the reputation of anyone with whom they disagree. They have taken Voltaire's attributed line, ``I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say that,'' and kind of disintegrated it into ``I disagree with what you say, and I want to destroy you for doing so.'' I have read a number of terrible things about Mother Agnes in the last couple of days, but I met with her. Some had written that she is just the basic primary defender of the Assad regime. She told me she is not defending Assad; he is a bad man. But, as she said with a little twinkle in her eye, the media is getting out in the open everything that seems to be done wrong by the Assad regime. Anything brutal, anything inappropriate the media is getting that out there. I am just trying to get the full story out. Yes, Assad is not a good man, but the people that are trying to take over now are worse. She knew these nuns who had been kidnapped. She knew these people who had been persecuted and brutalized. She knew of people personally of having unthinkable acts done to them by these Syrian rebels that this administration has been choosing to help. Well, we get finally to a story that says that the administration was going to cut off--I thought I had it here--but a story about the administration would suspend assistance to the rebels because of the horrors and the brutality of what they were doing. That is nice, but these stories have been coming out for years, for at least a couple of years. Stories even here from The New York Times, ``Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West,'' that story was September 5. And around those same times there were stories about this administration sending hundreds of tons of weapons to these people who were brutalizing Christians. How long does it take? I realize there are all kinds of things that demand people's time when you are a leader of a great Nation like the United States. You have to stop and do a selfie from time to time. There are all kinds of things that disrupt your time. But at some point, somebody should have gotten information and said, Look, you know, you want to help the radicalist Islamist rebels in Syria. Really, some of the brutality on Christians has really gotten kind of rough even for us. Maybe we ought to suspend that. That should have gone on months ago. And yet this administration was determined to help. ``Syrian Rebels Attack Christian Village, Behead Priest,'' Katie Pavlich. Whew, man. Rebels have attacked a Christian village in the war-torn country of Syria, beheading priests, brutally killing others. Not surprisingly, the rebels have ties to al Qaeda. This is from townhall.com: The rebels launched the assault on the ancient Christian village of Maaloula--which is on a UNESCO list of tentative World Heritage sites. The village, about 40 miles, 60 kilometers, northeast of Damascus, is home to about 2,000 residents, some of whom still speak a version of Aramaic, the ancient language of biblical times believed to have been spoken by Jesus. Heavy clashes between President Bashar Assad's troops and Nusra Front fighters persisted in surrounding mountains Thursday, according to the Observatory, which collects information from a network of anti-regime activists. Speaking by phone from a convent in the village, a nun told The Associated Press that the rebels left a mountaintop hotel Thursday after capturing it a day earlier. The nun said the frightened residents expect the Islamic militants to return to the Safir hotel and resume shelling of the community. ``It's their home now,'' the nun said. Al Qaeda-led rebel force groups have also reportedly vowed to continue their attacks on Christians as soon as the United States ``liberates'' the country from its President Bashir al-Assad. Yesterday, Republican Senator John McCain inserted an amendment into a resolution approving military force in Syria with a goal of shifting the power on the battlefield from the Assad regime and to rebel forces. On September 4, 2013, John McCain said: My amendment calling for changing momentum on the battlefield in Syria passed SFRC by voice vote, a significant measure. Meanwhile in Egypt, Coptic Christians continue to be slaughtered and nearly 100 churches have been burned to the ground. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry haven't commented on the brutality against Christians in Syria and have done very little to protect Christians living in Egypt from violence being waged by the Muslim Brotherhood. An objective look at what happened in Egypt is very clear. After the masses, the millions of Egyptians rose up and said, Enough. President Morsi has been usurping powers that don't belong to him under our Constitution. And under the Egyptian Constitution, there is no power of impeachment. So we demand that the military remove this unconstitutionally acting leader so that we can set up new elections. I am urging the people in Egypt to go ahead and get those elections done so you get back to having a more democratic process, having a more republican form of government. I don't mean republican like the Republican Party. I am talking about Republic as Ben Franklin when the lady asked what have you given us, and he said, ``A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it.'' It was clear that Morsi was not going to allow the Egyptian people to keep their republic. The people rose up and demanded that they be able to keep their republic by having the military remove Morsi. They did remove him. I still can't find anyone in the media that is reporting what General al-Sisi said to me in the presence of our acting U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, in the presence of Democrat and Republican Members of Congress that, yes, they had evidence that Morsi was trying to contract to have General al-Sisi murdered before he was arrested. Yet this administration, not only was very supportive of Muslim Brother Morsi, but when he was removed, they threatened to cut off aid if they didn't get him back. And after they refused to get him back, then this President cuts off all aid to Egypt. It is amazing because, as this article points out, it was not until Morsi was arrested that the Muslim Brotherhood started staging these violent acts--burning churches, killing Christians. They were persecuting anyone who disagreed with them. The military did a very good thing. They cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, they stopped the burning of churches, they stopped the killing of Christians. As the Egyptian Pope has told me: They did a good thing. We are not threatened like we were before they stopped it all. Please, tell your government that the military has stopped the burning of churches and killing of people. It is a good thing. How did this administration respond to the Egyptian people ensuring that the burning of churches and the killing of Christians stopped? It rewarded those noble efforts by cutting off aid. As we keep hearing from allies in the Middle East, Muslim, other religious beliefs, you guys keep helping the wrong people. How can you not understand you are helping the people that hate you. Now they are cutting a deal with Iran, led by Wendy Sherman, who was the policy director for North Korea when President Clinton and Madeleine Albright made that atrocious deal to give them nuclear power plants, nuclear help, and in return all they had to do was promise not to develop nuclear weapons, which they readily did. In return, the Clinton administration agreed not to inspect their nuclear facilities for what amounted to about 5 years. It gave them plenty of time to develop nukes. If someone is evil enough to behead, to brutalize, to persecute innocent people, to somehow think it is a noble thing to terrorize and kill innocent people, how do you not understand that they are also capable of lying, as well? You want to trust people that want to kill you and have said so many times? I think it is time we wake up. The world is less safe because of some of the actions that we have taken. We need to be wise about what we do because just as Jesus said, To whom much is given, of him much will be required. We have been given much. We have been blessed more than any nation in the world. We have more freedoms. We have more assets. We have been blessed more than any nation in history. Much is required, and part of that requirement is that we use wisdom and discernment in choosing those whom we wish to help; and we should not be helping people who choose to kill or brutalize, persecute people because of their religious beliefs, because of their tribe, because of their skin color, because of their national origin. That is un-American, and it is time we stopped helping people who are acting in ways contrary to what we hold dear. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I was grateful to hear from my dear friend--and I do mean dear friend. I think greatly of Ms. Kaptur. I was glad to hear somebody has gotten a good report on the so-called Affordable Care Act. We are continuing to hear sad story after sad story of people continuing to be laid off, people continuing to be cut from full-time to part-time and people being forced onto food stamps because they just can't make it with the loss of income going from full-time to part- time, the loss of their insurance. And as people have now realized across the country, though we were told there were 30 million without insurance, it looks like by next fall, November of next year, there will probably be many more than that that lost their insurance even though they liked it and wanted to keep it. Because, as we know, if you like your insurance, there is a good chance you won't be able to keep it. There is a story from December 11, ``Four in Ten Would Rather Pay Fine Than Buy Insurance.'' I am sure there are people like me. You take a look at how much the insurance is going to cost, how much it has skyrocketed several times more than what I have been paying if I were going to keep insurance with the deductible now skyrocketing and dramatically increasing under the potential policies, higher than what I have now, and when I look at the costs several times higher than what I have now, and since I am not accepting the subsidy and I am not paying into the attending physician for that care, I will be going without insurance. It has been amazing to me how many in the liberal media--and I say ``media'' loosely, because they are really in the business of trying to protect this administration and twist stories any way they can to make anyone who objects to something this administration has done look bad, so I will loosely refer to them as ``media''--how they have been aghast that anyone would even consider going without insurance. And it really is a lesson in how far this country has moved, in so many ways. I know, in the early sixties, there was no such thing as Aid to Dependent Children, that program born out of the best of intentions because deadbeat dads were not a small minority of Americans. Different races, different backgrounds--some even well-off--were just not assisting financially the children they had fathered, and so the government wanted to help. So, in the mid-sixties, here came the Great Society. We want to help these people--these poor moms--who had to deal with deadbeat dads who wouldn't help. They said, We will help. We will give them a check for every child they can have out of wedlock. As people who study governments and government assistance, it is well documented: when you pay for an activity, you get more of that activity. We went from 6 to 7 percent of children in America being born without a father in the home to now over 40 percent, and it still seems to be heading upwards toward 50 percent. The United States Government in the 1960s, not by what it said but by where it put its money, decided we would be a lot better off with more fatherless homes. Nobody was saying that, and I don't believe anybody intended that result, but it is what they got. In the act of paying people for an activity, you get more of that activity. So we had more children growing up in fatherless homes. Also, back in those days, health care was so much cheaper. It wasn't at the extraordinary level that it is now. It wasn't nearly as expensive. Even though I was a small child, I didn't know people who had health insurance because, for so long, nobody had health insurance. If you had a problem, you went to the doctor, and they assessed you a charge after your visit, after they saw what the doctor did. He would write something down on your chart. We went to a few different doctors there in my small hometown of Mount Pleasant--a great town. I still love it. There are still great doctors there--but back in those days, people in my hometown in east Texas knew what doctors were charging what for what. I mean, you could actually compare apples and apples when it came to health care. If you found out some doctor said he was going up on his prices and another doctor had not gone up on his prices, then you went to the doctor who was cheaper unless you felt like he wasn't as good, but we had a number of really excellent doctors, and they cared about their patients. Then, eventually, you heard of somebody having health insurance, and it was true insurance. A small premium was paid either monthly, quarterly, semiannually or annually, but it was a small premium to insure against a catastrophe--a dramatic illness, a car wreck-- something that you could not foresee. You paid a small premium to insure against this unforeseen event just in case it happened down the road because, during those days, Americans were very independent. Americans did not want to go on welfare. Most Americans did not want to receive government handouts--they felt like it was a matter of pride-- and they certainly did not want an insurance company telling them what doctor they could go to, what hospitals they could go to or which hospitals they couldn't go to, which doctors they couldn't go to, which medicines they could not get if the doctor prescribed them. They didn't want an insurance company telling them, if they needed to go to this doctor because he was an expert on this type of treatment, that you couldn't go there because it wasn't in your plan. What plan? I am the only one who is planning for my life. No insurance company is going to tell me where I can or can't go. I mean, that was the type of independent thought that there was in America. There were a lot of problems in those days, and I thank God for Martin Luther King, Jr., because, through his actions and his life and his efforts, through peaceful protest--some around him got upset and didn't always abide by peace, but the man proclaimed everything needed to be done in peace because he was an ordained Christian minister, and he knew those were the teachings of Jesus. Because he did what he did, some people say that what he did for America was he allowed African Americans to be treated as equals. I would submit to you, since I was very young, what he did was allow me to grow up and mature in an America in which as a young, white Christian I could treat brothers and sisters like they were brothers and sisters. It didn't have to matter what color anybody's skin was. They could be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. That was a great thing for America. As we progressed toward making America a greater place with more liberties, more equality, more freedom, at the same time--really unrelated--there was this effort of let's start giving money from the government to individuals or to individual programs that, though unintended, would make them more dependent upon the government for their lives and their livelihoods. People quit thinking as independently. Oh, well. The government is giving me money, so maybe they would do good to tell me what I can or can't do with a few things. Then, eventually, more and more employers had employees saying, Hey, I know this other company. Their employer is buying health insurance for their employees. That would be helpful because then I wouldn't have to ever worry about having a terrible accident or some cancer or some terrible disease that would bankrupt my family. So more employers started adding health insurance to their benefits. Unfortunately, it created a system in which the employer owned the insurance policy instead of the employee. The employer was paying for it, so the employer owned it. One of the reforms that many of us were proposing, instead of the catastrophe known as the so-called Affordable Care Act, was that we wanted employees to own their insurance policies. Fine and dandy if an employer wanted to pay for insurance, but the employees should own them so that, if the employees go somewhere else, they are still their policies. They are portable, and they go with them. They still pay the same rates, and they aren't jacked up through a COBRA plan or something like that. Somehow, along the way, we grew more and more dependent on insurance companies to manage our own health care, and at the same time, as things like Medicare were created to help those seniors who needed help, more and more dependence grew upon the government, itself. The problem with an insurance company or with a government managing someone's health care is that they get to say what you get and what you don't get in the way of treatment. So it has been quite an evolution to the point at which we are now where your religious beliefs, under the United States Constitution, have been so weakened and so nullified that now the United States Government can pass a law like the so-called Affordable Care Act--it is hard for me to just call it the ``Affordable Care Act'' because it is so disastrously expensive and unaffordable for so many people, including for me now. The government could say, You may believe with all of your heart because of your religious conviction that abortion is the murder of a life and being, but we, the government, now control your health care, and you don't have that religious choice anymore. Oh, it may be a matter of conscience. It may be that, without regard for religion, you believe that killing a life and being that could live on its own outside the womb would be murder, but we, the government, now say you have to help pay for that type of murder. Even 20 years ago, nobody would have believed that we would get to the point where the government could order an American to pay for the killing of another, albeit an unborn child. I guess it really comes home to me because of our first child being born 8 to 10 weeks prematurely and holding her in two hands. I could have held her in one hand, and I kind of did from time to time, but usually, in those early days, I used two just because she was so fragile, and I just did not want to risk someone I loved so much being harmed. The doctor there at the hospital in Shreveport, where our child was taken--she was very fragile--said, Look, talk to your child. She knows your voice. Her eyes don't work very well, but she knows your voice because she could hear your voice when she was in the womb. It is very comforting, and it really gives her a feeling of security to hear your voice. If you just caress her little arm or her little forehead while you talk to her, it is such a comfort. She knows you. She can't see you, and she doesn't know what you look like, but this child has known you from long before she was born, so talk to her and touch her. I put my finger down by her hand. So many people have had this happen, but when it happens to you, it is so special. This tiny, little hand would wrap around the end of my finger and just hang on and not let go. She wanted to live. She knew me, as the doctor said, before she was ever born. The doctor pointed out later as he came by--as we noticed on the monitors--her breathing was still extremely shallow as her lungs were not quite developed, and her heart rate was still escalated, but they stabilized as long as she was holding on. He said, She draws security. She draws life. She draws your love. So, in my heart, in my mind, in my soul, I know that child knew me before she was born, and I was a comfort to her. My wife had to stay in the hospital in Tyler for a few days. It was really emotionally difficult, as well as physically, what she had been through. But now the government would say, Though it may absolutely devastate you and break your heart to know of some young girl who wants an abortion, you are going to have to help pay for it--pay for the abortion. Even 20 years ago, that would have seemed inconceivable that anybody in the United States, any governmental entity--whether it is executive, legislative or judicial--would say even though they support abortion they are going to make somebody who had religious beliefs fervently against it pay for it. But under ObamaCare, under the so-called Affordable Care Act, that has happened. Some of us told the President we have solutions; we have sent word to the White House many times we have solutions. We have been told--and we heard the President say it again here recently in the last few days-- that they don't have any solutions. I remember him saying those same things back 4 years ago when, obviously, it was spoken out of ignorance. I know he didn't intend to deceive anybody. He apparently did not know that there were people who had great alternatives. For my part, the bill I proposed, the solution I proposed, would return control of people's health care to themselves. If you like Medicare and you are a senior, great, stay on Medicare; but if you would like a Cadillac policy, not a bronze but a gold-plated, platinum- plated policy, then we will pay for that. Say $5,000 now might be an appropriate--of course, some of the policies I was looking at, a $5,000-$6,000 deductible, policies like that makes them a lot cheaper for seniors--and then give the seniors the cash for the whole deductible so they wouldn't be out a dime. I proposed that to representatives of the AARP. They were so gracious, came to my office, I explained it: this would be so awesome for seniors because it means they will never have to buy another supplemental policy; they will never have to buy another wrap-around insurance policy. And seniors' money is so tight on Social Security. It is really tight. I know a family that struggled, but they bought the supplemental policy. Now, won't that be great? I know AARP cares so much about seniors. This would be great. Well, we will have to look at it, look at it closely, give us some more information and we will look at it. Stupid me, I was just too naive. I didn't know AARP made many more times off selling supplemental insurance than they did off membership dues or anything like that, that it was just a cash cow for AARP to sell supplemental insurance. So, of course, they couldn't afford to say that a policy that just really was a wonderful thing for seniors--no more out-of-pocket for deductible, co-pay, this just took care of them, and they made their own choices, and they had a debit card to pay for their health care all the way through their deductible amount. How could I expect AARP when they are making hundreds of millions of dollars clear profit off of supplemental policies say, oh, let's forego the supplemental policies for the good of seniors. So, obviously, they didn't. But we can and do have alternatives for health care reforms that are true reforms that get competition back in health care. How can you have a free market system working in health care if nobody knows what any procedure, anything really costs? If it is medicine, they know their co-pay. We have got to get back to the point where people know what things cost and they have more direct control. If we get to a place where we are truly helping those who cannot help themselves and we make it advantageous for those to put in a health savings account money so that they can take care of their own deductible if they are under 65, they are not on Medicare and bill to that point, and then it becomes very clear that most people when they start at an early age will have so much money in their health savings account built up that they hadn't spent over the years that they not only will not want the government telling them what kind of health care they can have, they won't need it. And then for those who are young and chronically ill that will never build up an HSA, those who are actually unable to help themselves, we help them. There is a very small percentage that would be; but under the Affordable Care Act, as it is called, unjustly, the government gets control. As I have said, it is all about the GRE, the government running everything. They get to run your lives because when they can control health care, they can control everything. They control not only what is in your bedroom--I have heard so many folks on the other side of the aisle say, we don't want the government in the bedroom. Well, I don't either; but now by the bill they passed, ObamaCare basically puts the government in every room in your house. They tell you--well, it is just so invasive. But if we can get back to the day where insurance companies and the government did not tell people what they could or couldn't have for their well-being, if we restored the independence to Americans by helping the economy just bring about a new economic renaissance--I have talked to so many people. They are in business and they are so afraid. They are afraid to hire anybody because of ObamaCare. They are afraid because of the EPA or the intrusiveness of the Justice Department, OSHA, all of these governmental agencies that come out of nowhere when you are trying to stay in business and keep your employees paid. If they didn't have to worry so much about a government that is so invasive, this economy would take off. People would be making so many times more than what they are in so many places. We would end up being energy independent. What we thought we never could be 9 years ago when I first got here, we can be that. We use natural gas that we have got hundreds of years of. Just what we know, for goodness sake. Then we could be not only energy independent; that would mean we were not funding any country's terrorism where some of their energy money goes for terrorism. We would see an economic renaissance; we would see the economy explode, and people would have enough money. With all the money they would be getting paid, they would be able to say, look, Doctor, I want to know how much you are charging and how much you are charging because you are both very good doctors. But if one of you is charging $6,000 for an MRI and one of you is charging $400 for an MRI--and I have been challenged on that and actually I am familiar with what some insurance companies have paid for MRIs over the years, because as an attorney when you help somebody who has been in a car wreck or been injured by the negligence of another, if you have a settlement or you win a court case, then you are required under Texas law to put that money in an escrow account and you cannot distribute it until such time as the medical has been paid. So you had to make sure everybody had been paid. When they were paid in full, then you checked if there was a health insurance company. Okay, everybody says they have been paid in full; I have got documentation from all the health care providers you have paid them in full under their agreement with you. So now all I need to know is how much you paid for these charges, and then I reimburse you, and then I can disburse what is in escrow. There were companies that had paid less than $400 for an MRI, much less. So anyway, our CAT scans, it is amazing how little--and I have seen bills recently $6,000 being charged for an MRI. Well, they are not getting paid $6,000. But then, on the other hand, if you come in and say, I need an MRI, but I don't have insurance, then normally they will cut you a deal. Okay, you are paying cash, we may cut you a deal. Say they had a 50 percent off sale: we will only charge you $3,000. Well, for heaven's sake, why couldn't you just pay what Blue Cross paid? Why couldn't you pay what Aetna paid? That is the kind of thing a real reform would get us back to. You don't get a bill for $6,000 or nobody goes to them anymore. You have to know what is being charged, and we have got to get control back to the individual. Anyway, when you are looking at how much things cost, I can identify with people in America. We have three daughters; they finished their college. We had set money aside years ago when I was in private practice making more money--actually, in municipal bonds, and when they got in college it was going to more than take care of each year. But after I had a huge cut in pay to go become a State district judge--I felt like it was something of a calling, something to help my community, a way to give back, even though you really put a lid on what you can make financially--we ended up going through that money. I was determined that my three girls would not have to pay college loans that they wouldn't have had to pay if their father had not gone into public service. This was my contribution to the community, to Texas, to the country. I shouldn't force a contribution onto my children when their college should have been taken care of. So my wife and I are paying the college loans for our children. So when you start adding up the expenses and you see the amount of the loans and what has to be paid and then you see you have health insurance here that is now skyrocketing, deductible going dramatically up, wow. I know some have written, gee, what if you are in the hospital for a few days and run up $180,000 or so in health care costs? Well, the answer is easy. If I or my wife ran up $180,000 in health care costs and I don't have insurance, then I would go to the health care providers--as I have done back in the days when I was an attorney--what kind of deal can we cut here, because I pretty well know what the insurance companies are paying you and I expect to get the same kind of deal or we will go to another hospital that will do this kind of cash deal for us? Maybe you take out a note for $18,000 and pay everybody off. I have been surprised, even conservatives in the media have not really been aware of how little health care actually costs. They see a bill, like one in the media that said, hey, my father had heart surgery, he could never have paid that $150,000 in expenses, but Medicare took care of it. And as I told him, if you think that costs $150,000, you are not near as smart as I used to think you were. But you negotiate and you work it out and you take out a note and you pay that off. I know that there are people running around the country saying, oh, no, oh, no, what if you don't have insurance? Well, nobody in America had insurance at all not that long ago. I don't want to go back to those days. We have made so much progress. But why not build to the point where those who can build a health savings account do that? I am encouraging our leadership: let's don't wait until ObamaCare comes crashing down and the world gets so angry that they demand a repeal and it does get repealed. Let's go ahead and start having hearings now on how good real reform would be, where we have competition, where people get to make their decisions, where people are encouraged to, and do, build a health savings account where they get to decide who they see, that there is no doctor that is out of the plan. We need to restore liberty to Americans while giving them a safety net, not a trap net from which you can never arise. It ought to be a safety net where you can come out of; but it is more like we are capturing Americans with a net thrown over them and the government now has that net over you and you can never get out from under. We control everything about you. And now we have added 18,000, or we are in the process of adding 18,000 IRS agents. If you think a proctologist looks closely into your situation, wait until the IRS agents get hold of you. I mean it should not be that way. We have got to restore freedom in America. This article says, ``4 in 10, we would rather pay the fine than buy insurance.'' People in the media are freaking out, how stupid, how crazy. Well, actually, it doesn't help the survival of ObamaCare or the Affordable Care Act, as it is improperly named. My staff has given me this. We just had someone else report that here is another constituent whose policy expires July 2014, but they stand to lose $40,000 if they try to keep it. They can't get definitive information, but they had to make a decision by December 7, and they don't know what to do. And they are sure not getting that help from the Web site. Here is an article, ``Oregon signs up just 44 people for ObamaCare despite spending $300 million.'' Well, there was a great investment. Well, probably as good as investing it in Solyndra and all the other solar companies. ``Paper Application Missing From Healthcare .gov,'' another great article, Jeryl Bier from the Weekly Standard. ``ObamaCare sign-ups rise, but 800,000 short of their goal.'' All of these are really harbingers of the complete failure of ObamaCare. I don't mean anything derogatory by using the term ``ObamaCare.'' I am sure that President Obama didn't mean anything derogatory by calling health care in Massachusetts ``RomneyCare.'' So just as I am absolutely certain the President never meant--and Democrats never meant--anything offensive by using the term ``RomneyCare,'' we don't mean anything offensive or derogatory by using the term ``ObamaCare.'' The President embraced it one time. Anyway, it requires looking at more closely the reforms that need to be made. I would rather have insurance. I wasn't crazy about my insurance, but I liked it okay. We had health savings accounts. We have got to work out what do we do with the money we built up in our health savings account. Hopefully, Aetna is not going to screw us over and not let us have the money we built up. There were certainly some reforms that needed to be made to the health savings account law so that we do have more flexibility. You could put unlimited amounts in there, but once it is in there, it has to be used for health care. You can't pay a penalty and fine and take some out. So that you build some up, you could give some of your HSA out to, say, a Salvation Army HSA. I know there is not one out there right now, but those kind of things. You could gift some of your HSA to your children without tax implications. You have money in your HSA when you pass away, then you could leave it to your heirs or to a charity HSA. I mean, there are all kinds of great things that we could do if we passed proper laws to make this work better. But the goal would ultimately be to have health care affordable. The President and so many keep saying, you know, interchangeably, health care and health insurance. They are not the same thing. You can get health care without having any health insurance. I know that because I have waited hours behind people in the emergency room with children or with family, seniors. I have known that people ahead of us, that didn't have any money, didn't have any insurance, they got health care just like I did, at the emergency room. That was when I had insurance and my in-laws had insurance, Medicare, but everybody was getting the same kind of care. So health insurance and health care for my liberal friends in the media, Mr. Speaker, they are not the same thing. They are not the same thing at all. Syria

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, as a follow-up to my dear friend, Frank Wolf from Virginia and the discussions he was having, this needs further emphasis. Here is an article from the Dallas Morning News dated 10 November 2013, ``The Triple Tragedy of Christian Persecution in the Middle East.'' It explains that Christians in the broader Middle East, it seems, are in the crosshairs. In September, two Taliban suicide bombers rushed All Saints Church in Peshawar, Pakistan, as worshippers exited. One exploded his bomb outside, one inside. Eighty-two people were slaughtered. Eighty-two people trying to peacefully attend a Christian church in Pakistan, where we are sending so much money, were slaughtered, with no consequences coming from the Pakistani Government that we keep engorging with our money. Back to the article. In March, it says, two churches and about 100 Christian homes were ransacked in Lahore. Today, millions of Christians and other religious minorities are facing vile persecution. Many Christians are struggling to escape from the countries where their ancestors have lived for two millennia. The human tragedy unfolding in these countries is profoundly disturbing, but the tragedy extends beyond the suffering of individuals and families. Next month, in Rome, Georgetown University, in partnership with Baylor University, where I went to law school, will showcase the findings of a 2-year study on Christianity and freedom. Three dozen scholars will assemble to discuss what Christians have contributed to freedom and prosperity in their own country and, implicitly, what will be lost if those countries are emptied of their Christian populations. Might be worthy of parenthetically inserting that, in Afghanistan, where thousands of Americans have shed their blood for Afghan freedom, where billions and billions of dollars have been spent, we help them with a constitution that makes shari'a law the law of the land, that makes the President, basically, almost a dictator. As some of the regional leaders have told me, Dana Rohrabacher, Steve King, and others, look, if you would just help us with an amendment to the Afghanistan constitution, we would have a shot at staying alive after you pull out. The Northern Alliance that actually defeated the Taliban completely within a few months after we started providing them aerial support, embedded special ops, and intelligence, less than 500, they defeated the Taliban, provided some weapons. They defeated the Taliban. People have forgotten, but for years, in Iraq, people referred to Afghanistan--even Senator Obama. That is where the real fight is. That was where it was done well. And it was done well. The Taliban was defeated. It was routed by some of the most incredible and fearless fighting, led by General Dostum. We have got people in this administration now calling him and others war criminals because they fought for themselves, their own freedom, to rid themselves of tyrannical radical Islamists. They are Muslims. They are my Muslim friends. They defeated our enemy. They are the enemy of our enemy. And yet this administration is releasing Taliban. One of the Taliban leaders that has been on national Afghan television was released from Guantanamo by this administration for humanitarian purposes. And the humanitarian purposes are, now he is back leading the Taliban and making it clear that the Taliban will control all of Afghanistan once the United States pulls out. He likes to talk in terms of how the U.S. has been greatly defeated, and that is why we are begging the Taliban, offering to buy them things, give them things if they will just let us exit gracefully. We are embarrassed around the world. We do no longer have the world's respect. There are a lot of countries that have never admired us. Tyrannical leaders have not admired the United States because we are the only nation, that I am aware of, in the history of the world that shed our blood and our treasure for other people to have freedom. That is why they still speak Japanese in Japan. That is why they still speak German in Germany. We have never been about building some great empire. We have been about freedom, liberty. No other country has done that. No other country has died for the cause of liberty for people they didn't know. And now it seems that this administration keeps committing us to support countries that are persecuting Christians, persecuting secularists, persecuting those who do not have the strict radical Islamist beliefs that the radical Islamic believers have, the leaders, as radical Islamist believers have. This article in the Dallas News goes on and says: The countries include Egypt, where the holy family fled when Jesus was a baby. Many Christians now are exiting Egypt in the wake of the badly misnamed ``Arab Spring.'' In August alone, scores of churches were torched, some of them dating to the fifth century. They include Syria, Paul's destination when he was called by Jesus. Today, many Syrian Christians have fled, fearing the prospects of an Islamist regime. One village, Maaloula, is one of the last places on Earth where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken. In September, it was overrun by Islamist terrorists. Those, by the way, are the Islamist rebels that this administration is supporting. It has been publicly reported, this administration--without Congress making a move to stop them--has sent tons and tons of weapons to the radical Islamist rebels in Syria who are killing, raping, and torturing Christians in Syria. If there is a God, as I know with all my heart there is, if the God that had his protective hand on Israel--until Israel stopped honoring the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--if that God exists, as I know in my heart he does, then how long will he continue to have a hand of protection on a nation that has, in the last 2 years, repeatedly betrayed and stabbed Israel in the back, taken whatever actions it could to prevent Israel from defending itself, and in this last act of ignorance, in trying to negotiate with Iranian terrorist leaders who want the little Satan, Israel, wiped off the map--they made that very clear--who want the great Satan, the United States, wiped out the map. Of course they will talk to the United States. Of course. They are working as allies with North Korea. And North Korea can explain to them, as we have talked about here on the floor, how in 1994 they convinced Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Wendy Sherman, who was the policy director for North Korea for the Clinton administration, to do a deal where the United States would give them nuclear reactors, help them, get them running, fuel, whatever they needed, and in return, we were basically asking them to renounce nuclear weapons and promise they wouldn't develop nuclear weapons. And we additionally agreed to not be inspecting their nuclear facilities, which actually allowed them to develop the nuclear bombs and the ballistic missiles by which they are assisting Iran. Wendy Sherman actually briefed this Congress this week. She is the lead negotiator for the Obama administration. I mean, that makes as much sense as an administration hiring a company to do an absolutely essential critical Web site for people's health and well-being as someone who has no track record of being terribly successful. I mean, surely an administration wouldn't do that. Oh, yes, they did do that with ObamaCare. Oh, yes, they are doing it in negotiating with terrorist thugs who want us wiped off the map. I mean, this is the same kind of inane thinking that would have an American President in the 1970s proclaiming the Ayatollah Khomeini as a man of peace when he was a terrorist and took over a nation and its military, for the first time in generations that a terrorist Islamic leader had been the leader of a country with a powerful military. Here is another article, from Townhall.com, December 5, 2013, by Conn Carroll: Violence against Christians is rising across the Middle East. Open Doors USA's CEO David Curry investigates for the December issue of Townhall magazine. Christians in the Middle East and around the world are being persecuted, imprisoned, and martyred for their faith. There is widespread, systematic violence, and no one in the mainstream media and government seems to have noticed. We may see the elimination and extinction of Christianity in its very birthplace, without a whimper of protest from the West. I have got to say, if the God who protected Israel in its inception through many generations until they stopped honoring the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--which, by the way, no country has ever fallen while it was truly honoring the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So if you were completely a-religious, completely atheistic, but you wanted to have a free country and you wanted to have it safe and protected, then it would sound like, from historical purposes, that it might be a good thing to encourage those who believe in God to keep doing so, because when a nation's leaders honor that God, that nation is protected. It is only when it turns away that it falls. The article goes on: Middle Eastern Christians are not persecuted because they are criminals, anarchists, or for participating in uncivil behavior. They are persecuted because of what they believe. They are not promoting any particular political party or agenda. They simply want the freedom of faith and religion that Americans experience every day. It is puzzling why most of our media and political leaders remain silent, despite overwhelming evidence of a major humanitarian crisis. When the scope of the persecution is seen, it's hard to understand how this could have slipped under the radar of nearly all our leaders in Washington. One is left wondering if the oversight is intentional or merely a giant blind spot the size of the entire Middle Eastern region. Consider what occurred during a 4-week period during August and September: Syrian rebels attacked the historic Christian enclave of Maaloula, damaging some iconic churches while driving out most of the Christians as well as other residents. Jihadi terrorists blew up a church in Peshawar, Pakistan, taking more than 85 lives and injuring many more. After the attack, Pakistani Christians protested in the streets, to no avail, demanding protection of their churches and schools, which are under daily threat of harassment and destruction. Muslim Brotherhood forces in Egypt attacked and burned 73 churches, hundreds of Christian-owned businesses, properties, and schools. These are but a handful of attacks that make news. Each day, Christians in the Middle East are suffering all manner of indignities for their faith. Those include destruction of property, harassment, targeted rape of Christian women, and a legal system that ignores the rights due to their faith. Many governments fail to pursue, capture, and prosecute jihadist radicals who perpetrate these crimes against Christ's followers. Then it goes on to talk about a broader pattern. Leadership in a vacuum. An article from Crossmap.com says: One Christian Killed Every 11 Minutes: U.K. Parliament is Told Christianity is ``Most Persecuted Religion.'' The plight of Christians around the world was discussed in a 3-hour debate at the Houses of Parliament in London yesterday. Members of the House of Commons were told that the persecution of Christians is increasing, that one Christian is killed around every 11 minutes around the world, and that Christianity is the ``most persecuted religion globally.'' A long list of countries in which life as a Christian is most difficult was discussed, including Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, Nigeria, Iraq, and Egypt. M.P. Jim Shannon said the persecution of Christians is, ``the biggest story in the world that has never been told.'' He said that although the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there are many countries in which these rights are not given. Shannon alleged that 200 million Christians will be persecuted for their faith this year, while he said that 500 million live in ``dangerous neighborhoods.'' He added that in Syria Christians are ``caught between opposing sides in the conflict,'' and mentioned the ``specific targeting'' of Christian-dominated locations, such as Sadad and Maaloula. M.P. Sammy Wilson said that in Syria, ``50,000 Christians have been cleared from the city of Homs,'' while in Sudan, 2 million Christians were killed by the regime over a 30-year period. He added: Within the last month, hundreds of people, from Nigeria to Eritrea to Kazakhstan to China, have been arrested and put in prison simply because of their faith, and when they go into prison, they are denied due process. They are denied access to lawyers. They are sometimes even denied knowledge of the charges facing them. They can languish in prison for a long time and in horrible conditions. This is not only happening in Muslim countries. From Morocco to Pakistan, Christians in Muslim countries are under threat, but it happens elsewhere, too. There is an article from Religious Freedom Coalition from October 18 of this year. It says: On Wednesday evening, Senator John McCain was on NBC Nightly News and was asked what he thought about Congressman Louie Gohmert suggesting that he was supporting al Qaeda- linked groups in Syria. To this, McCain responded that he considered Representative Gohmert to be a ``person of no intelligence''--clearly suggesting that Gohmert was dimwitted and not worthy of dealing with. In responding to McCain's attack on his intelligence, Gohmert issued the following statement to the media. ``Obviously, Senator McCain would be better off with `no intelligence' since he doesn't know the Syrian opposition he met with is infested with al Qaeda and terrorist kidnappers. His `intelligence' even caused him to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that burned churches and killed Christians, as the Senator stood against the will of the massive majority of Egyptians, including moderate Muslims, Christians, and secularists who demanded the Muslim Brotherhood extremist persecutions must end.'' I want to add here that this administration has supported the Muslim Brotherhood leadership of President Morsi in Egypt while Christians were being persecuted and as the largest arising, gathering of people in protest of the history of the world rose up in Egypt and demanded an end to the radical Islamic rule of President Morsi after he had vastly exceeded, repeatedly, the constitutional powers. And as they told me in my last trip to Egypt, unfortunately, the constitution that we should have helped them do a better job with did not include any provision for impeachment. I can't understand why the Obama administration would not have encouraged a country developing a new constitution to put in a provision for impeachment. I don't know why this administration would not have encouraged that, but it wasn't there. So when President Morsi vastly exceeded the authority of the constitution and began moving toward being a monarch, millions of people--reportedly 20, 30, 33 million Egyptians rose up--90 million people in the whole country--they rose up and demanded that the President be removed. The Christian Pope in Egypt told me personally that this was the will of the people. Please tell the administration and people in America this was not a coup. This was the people of Egypt rising up, as he talked about arm-in-arm the moderate Muslims, secularists, Christians joined hands, joined arms, and protested and demanded that the military remove President Morsi. And they did. As these articles have talked about, the violence in August, the violence in the summer against Christian churches--73 or so burned down, Christians killed and tortured--that was by the Muslim Brotherhood. And because the people of Egypt and the military could see the persecution of Christians, and they wanted to stop it, they basically disbanded the Muslim Brotherhood as a party, as an organization in Egypt; and the burning of churches stopped and the persecution of Christians stopped. And to such a great and noble thing that the Egyptians have done in bringing an end to this radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood control of Egypt, bringing an end to the burning of churches, bringing an end to the killing and torturing of Christians in Egypt, how has this administration reacted to reward Egypt for doing such a noble thing? The aid that this administration was providing to Egypt when it was controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood has now been cut off because the Egyptian people had the temerity to demand an end to radical Islamic reign and the killing and persecution of Christians. It is unbelievable that I live in a country that rewards groups that persecute Christians and withdraws assistance to those who stop the persecution of Christians. This article says: Of course, McCain is doing exactly what someone who has been busted usually does: he smears his accuser. Why else would McCain defend the likes of Reid, Schumer, and Durbin while accusing Gohmert of having ``no intelligence''? The answer is that Gohmert is doing what no one at his level or higher is doing; he's calling McCain out for siding with America's enemies. Those were comments of former PLO terrorist Walid Shoebat. He has seen the light, ended his time as a terrorist, and is trying to educate people on the dangers of radical Islam. The article points out that our friend, Senator McCain, had hired a Syrian Islamist propagandist, Elizabeth O'Bagy, to become one of his legislative assistants after she was exposed for lying about her Ph.D. and being paid shill for Islamists seeking to overthrow President Assad of Syria. As former terrorist, Walid Shoebat explains: Congressman Louie Gohmert should be getting reinforcements from the more conservative elements in the Republican Party. But will he? Frankly, we doubt it. Congressman Gohmert deserves our praise, our vocal support, and our prayers for having the courage to hold another Republican responsible for promoting national security policies that endanger the lives and freedoms of millions of Syrians and Egyptians who do not wish to live under an Islamic dictator. I appreciate their commendation. I know that there is not a Senator in the U.S. Senate that wants to do harm to this country or to Christians around the world. But that is why it is so important to take a look at what this country's, this administration's policies are doing to the cause of persecution of Christians around the world. An article from Christian Today, dated Wednesday, December 4: Seventy Christians killed at the hands of Boko Haram in Nigeria. Further attacks against Christians in Nigeria have been reported, bringing the total number killed in the past year to an estimated 900. According to Release International, 34 Christians were murdered in Borno State in the northeast last month, and raiders killed an additional 37 in the central Plateau State on 26 November. Church leaders believe the attacks in the north were carried out directly by Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram, while those in central Nigeria were carried out under their direction. What is going on around the world right now with the persecution of Christianity is tragic. Or as the UK Parliament was told, Christians are the most persecuted people in the whole world. In fact, even in the United States right now, Christians are about the only group in America against whom it is okay to discriminate. It is okay to hate them and ascribe hatred to the believers and the man of love and peace, Jesus Christ. It is rather tragic. And as the world sees, this administration continues. As leaders in the Middle East told a handful of us back in September, What do you not understand? It was the Muslim Brotherhood behind the attack on 9/11 of 2001. It was the Taliban, but basically the Muslim Brotherhood in Afghanistan you went to war against. It was the Muslim Brotherhood that was killing Christians in Egypt. It was the Muslim Brotherhood--al Qaeda--that attacked you in Libya, that helped in Libya, and now you are helping them in Syria. We don't understand what you don't understand. The people you declared war on that hate you and want to destroy you, you are supporting in Syria and you supported in Egypt. We don't understand. And for moderate Muslims around the world, our friends in Afghanistan, our friends in the Middle East, they don't understand how we keep rewarding those who hate Christians and hate the United States, and we persecute leadership like in Egypt right now that stopped the persecution of Christians. We ought to be sending people rushing over to Egypt saying thank you for stopping persecution of especially Christians, but also moderate Muslims and secularists in Egypt. You have done a good thing. We ought to be helping them set up their next elections, which they want to do. As I am sure people are aware, CNN has got a story here about, ``China claim of air rights over disputed islands creates risk of incident.'' China has wanted to claim this part of the ocean for decades, but they were always afraid of making a move to physically exert claim over this area of the blue water. And yet they have obviously come to believe that the United States is so weakly led right now that they could make claim to this part of the sea that they were scared to claim in the past and overtly take control over it. It hurts our friend Japan; it hurts other allies for us not to take a stand. And yet we get reports that this administration was telling our allies, Well, just do what China requests for now. Just do what they request--instead of showing strong leadership to stand up against a move of aggression. We see Russia moving more radically than we have seen in decades. People just thought Russia had gone away. The Soviet Union did go away, but Russia now has perceived a vacuum in world leadership since the United States seems to be taking a leave of absence; and now we have Putin being considered more powerful than our U.S. President. Well, I can see how some would see the aggressive leadership he has taken and believe that he is more powerful. It is not right. Our President has all the power he needs if he would use it. But it is time to take a stand, even for those who like to belittle Christianity, even those who have far different beliefs. This Nation has had an invisible protective hand that has guided it, led us away from slavery, led us to proper civil rights. Then it seemed we were at about the peak of enforcing our Constitution so that it didn't discriminate, so that the words of the Declaration of Independence were fully embraced: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, as churches have been behind the movement to establish the Constitution, the movement to eliminate slavery, the movement to recognize civil rights so people are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character--as was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, an ordained Christian minister--now we have turned full circle, and now we are starting to persecute and reward those who abroad persecute the very churches that made America the freest country--the only country from which people have fought and died for the liberty of others--the most generous and giving Nation in the history of the world, where more freedoms, liberties, and assets have been attained by individuals than in any country in the history of the world. It is exceptional, but we are losing our exceptionalism because we are refusing to stand up for the beliefs of Christians here and around the world. If we want to extend this little experiment in democracy, as one of the Founders said--if we want to acknowledge Ben Franklin's comment ``it is a Republic if you can keep it,'' and we want to keep it--it is time to rise up, not through violence. Just stop rewarding those who persecute Christianity. Those who burn churches, those who kill Christians, quit rewarding them--quit providing them arms--because, if we don't, we will slip down the slide of history into the dustbin of history, and people will only be able to look back and say, ``What an amazing country that once was.'' I am here in Congress because I believe we have the chance to salvage this great country and get back our international leadership we once had and stand for freedom of religion in the world and in America, but God help us if we don't. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, well, we got a notice: All House Member briefing: Iran, Wednesday, December 4, 9 a.m. The briefing team, right at the top of the list, Ambassador Wendy Sherman, Under Secretary of Political Affairs. So that was thrilling. I recognize that name, Wendy Sherman, who is going to give the House a briefing in the morning at 9 a.m. on how good things have gone in the dealings with Iran. As The Wall Street Journal article from November 20 points out, the Clinton administration's policy coordinator for North America, Wendy Sherman, is now the Obama administration's lead negotiator for the Iran nuclear talks. In a 2001 New York Times op-ed, Ms. Sherman urged President Bush to cut a deal, writing that Kim Jong Il ``appears ready to make landmark commitments because to ensure the survival of his regime, he has to improve the country's disastrous economy by reducing the burden of a vast missile program and opening the doors to trade.'' Well, Ms. Sherman was wrong about that in her op-ed she wrote in 2001. Kim Jong Il needed to help his economy, she was right about that, but she thought it meant that he was ready to get rid of his ballistic missile program and open the doors more to trade. Well, certainly they were willing to open the doors to trade. But just as she had been wrong in 1994 when she helped the Clinton administration work out an amazing deal with North Korea, and to recap the highlights of that deal with North Korea, Korea was believed to be pursuing nuclear weapons so Ms. Sherman was the policy coordinator for North Korea involved in this process. She, Madeleine Albright and President Clinton thought, what a great thing, we will give you nuclear reactors, nuclear power plants, give you some fuel, and in return, you have to renounce nuclear weapons and you have to promise not to pursue nuclear weapons. Wow. Oh, there was one other thing. The Clinton administration, Wendy Sherman, Madeleine Albright agreed to a provision which would have prevented them and did prevent them from inspecting the North Korean nuclear facilities for at least 5 or so years, which ended up being enough time for them to pursue their nuclear weapons. I mean for President Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Wendy Sherman kind of remind me of the repossession guy that Jeff Foxworthy talked about coming to his house when he was poor telling him he hadn't made his payment in months and so he had to take his car, and Foxworthy begging him not to take the car, and he has to have it to make a living. He said the guy said I have to leave with the car or cash or a check, to which Foxworthy said he replied, ``You'll take a check. Well, why didn't you say you will take a check. Sure, I can write you a check.'' Well, that is what the North Koreans did. Oh, you mean in return for new, sophisticated nuclear power plants and fuel, you will take just a promise from us that we won't pursue nuclear weapons? Well, why didn't you say that. Sure, we will promise anything you want in return for nuclear weapon fuel and nuclear power plants that we can use for our own benefit. Sure, we will make those promises. Any other promises you want? I mean, how gullible does an administration have to be to believe that a promise from a rogue regime is worth basing the future safety of your citizens upon? Well, we don't have an answer to how gullible you have to be because this administration is now doing the same thing. It wasn't enough that Wendy Sherman was wrong in 1994 and wrong in 2001 in her op-ed; now she is the lead negotiator with Iran, and she is going to brief Members of the House here tomorrow. How gullible are we? There is no requirement that we have to be as gullible as this administration. I mean, sure maybe you believe an administration when they say if you like your insurance, you can keep it. Maybe you believe that administration when they say if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period. Maybe the House is gullible enough, or maybe the majority at one time was gullible enough to believe that, and did. In fact, people in this room actually repeated those promises, making them themselves. But how many times do you have to be shown that people making the promises are wrong before you get skeptical? Now on top of all of the broken promises about ObamaCare, we have an administration promising us that we can trust Iran, that we have made a great deal. They have made us some promises, just like North Korea did, and we know we can trust them because the only thing at stake is the existence of the nation of Israel and the existence of the United States without nuclear weapons going off in it. That is all that is at stake. Or perhaps an EMP caused by a nuclear weapon that is shot off from an intercontinental ballistic missile. It doesn't even have to be that accurate. If it goes off near the middle of the United States, certain range of elevation, then it will fry most every computer chip, and we are going to be in trouble. Grocery stores cannot operate appropriately without their computer systems. Wal-Mart. There are all kinds of places that won't be able to operate appropriately. Most everybody's cars now rely on computer chips. Our military is very reliant on computer chips. Yet this administration says now Iran is somebody we can trust. I keep coming back to what some allied leaders said back in September in the Middle East: Do you guys not realize that you are now helping the people that attacked you, the organizations that attacked you on 9/ 11? That make up the Taliban, Muslim Brotherhood background; al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood background. I mean, what do you not realize that allows you to now help the people you are at war with or supposed to be at war with? I say the word ``war,'' and of course this administration has made clear, we are not at war with anybody. According to this administration, we are trying to counter violent extremism, but we don't talk about terrorism. We don't talk about radical Islam. We have stripped that from our training manuals because it may offend and does offend radical Islamists that want to destroy us and kill us. So we don't want to do anything that might offend the people who want to kill us. You know, there was a time in this country when if another group declared war on us, then we fought them. We weren't going to let them win that war against us. This administration thinks you can make a great deal with Iran just like the Clinton administration did with North Korea and stop their nuclear proliferation right in its tracks. I would humbly submit, Mr. Speaker, it will be just as effective, less so, than the deal with North Korea was. Iran has been crippled by sanctions, but sanctions were not going to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. They have consulted with, they have learned from North Korea how you game the system. All you have to do is enter into talks with a Democratic administration like the Clinton administration or the Obama administration, and they will cut you a deal. They will even help you get nuclear material. All you have to do is write them a check, and on that check say we promise not to pursue nuclear weapons. Heck, the United States under the Clinton administration, they have shown they will even agree not to inspect your nuclear facility, which will allow you to finish your nuclear weapons. Well, Israel understands what a tremendous mistake this is because they are too close. Their existence rides on not making a mistake of the calamitous nature that this will be, and this is. So it is amazing, though. You know, people stood up and made America all kinds of promises about ObamaCare, and it turns out, at the time promises were made about ObamaCare, they had already had the discussion and knew that people wouldn't be able to keep their insurance if they wanted it, and knew they wouldn't be able to keep their doctor if they wanted it. So what did they do? They said, we have a Presidential election coming up and it won't sound good to use words like ``if you like your doctor, there is a chance you might can keep your doctor.'' That won't sell good in the election. ``If you like your insurance, there is a chance you might can keep your insurance,'' that won't sell, so we have to go out and tell what is not true so we can win the next election. How about that Benghazi? Let's keep that under wraps. We know it was an attack by an al Qaeda-affiliated group. Of course, there might have been some concerns that they used the very weapons that this administration supplied to the al Qaeda-infused rebels that may have been turned on our State Department personnel, our Ambassador, and they didn't send anybody to help them. They did not send anybody to help them. We had planes, we had personnel that could have gotten to Benghazi and at least saved the last two of the four, could have saved Dave Ubben's leg, could have saved a lot of damage, could have saved a lot of the classified material being out there for a month or so for anybody who wanted to get it. It could have saved all of that, but no one was sent. People want to believe promises that are made by their own government, especially when it pertains to something as important as their own health, their own health care, or the defense of their Nation when it is at risk. Well, it is at risk. There are people who are at war with us. They have been at war with us since 1979. We didn't really fully appreciate it until 2001 on 9/11. And now we have an administration that has completely failed to realize that the people who declared war on us in 1979, who want shari'a law to govern the world, who want a worldwide caliphate over which the 12th imam will rule the world--some of them believe Jesus will come and fight at his side--this administration does not understand they have never given up on their goals. Thank God that most Muslims do not believe the radical Islamist approach to Islam. I am grateful. But it is crazy not to realize that there are radical Islamists that want to destroy our way of life. As the Obama administration was bragging over their great deal with Iran, we got word yesterday that Iran announces--this is an article from the Washington Free Beacon--a second nuclear reactor. And the leader, Rouhani, says, ``Our enrichment will never stop.'' So much for this administration's misplaced belief in Iran honesty. These leaders are at war with us. They want to destroy us. They want to destroy Israel. How can we get someone in this administration to take notice? Mr. Speaker, I have the answer. It is when people in the United States Senate and enough people here in the House say, Mr. President, you can't do this kind of damage. We know it is innocent. We know you think this is the way to go. But we know you can't trust Iran, you can't trust the Ayatollah Khamenei, you could not trust the Ayatollah Khomeini, you could not trust Ahmadinejad. Just because they have got a different President, they have still got the different leader. By the way, we didn't used to call the Ayatollah Khomeini the ``supreme leader,'' just like U.S. leaders didn't used to call Hitler ``mein fuhrer.'' He was not entitled to that title. He was an evil man. I personally don't think it is appropriate for any United States leader to call someone who hates Israel and hates America and wants them wiped off the map and thinks that the 12th imam is coming and will one day rule over the area in which Israel is, the area in which the United States is, that we should not be calling that man ``supreme leader.'' It is the same thing as calling him ``mein fuhrer.'' You don't do it. This administration has not learned that lesson. So Iran announced that they are still not going to comply with what the Obama administration says they have agreed to do, yet this administration is still sending the former Clinton North Korean policy director, a former Democrat who was advising President Bush in an op-ed to cut a deal with Kim Jong Il, that he really wants to make a deal, kind of like North Korea did in 1994. She was wrong in 1994. She was wrong in 2001. She is wrong now about Iran. We are told that those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it. When there is enough arrogance that anyone, any leader thinks that they are smarter, wiser, and better than anyone who has gone before, therefore, they can make a better deal with corrupt and evil people like no one else has made, then their name goes down in history just as Neville Chamberlain's has. He waived his peace agreement, which he agreed to give away part of Europe to his fuhrer thinking it meant peace in his time. What it meant was his ignorance and naivete was going to cost millions of people their lives. History is there for people who are willing to study and learn from it. I shutter for the people in Israel. I shutter for people in the United States that think we are invulnerable. The only way the United States could possibly stay invulnerable for a while longer is if its leaders realized we are vulnerable and we have to stay prepared, we have to stay vigilant, and we have to stay on the lookout for people that want to destroy our country. Yet they would rather make a deal with the lying cutthroats who lead Iran than they would sit down and work out an agreement with Republicans in the House of Representatives. We were willing the night of the shutdown. We were willing the day before the shutdown. We compromised three different times, and Harry Reid refused to even allow negotiators to be appointed. We appointed ours. People say Republicans shut down the House, shut down the government. We didn't do that. Harry Reid did that. He refused to even negotiate. It was his way completely. He asked a question when the press was there. Not many of them reported on how ridiculous the question was. But he asked the question of, basically, what right do they, the House of Representatives, have to say what government programs get funded and which do not? Well, I asked that exact question to four constitutional experts that testified before our Judiciary Committee today. One clearly was a defender of the Obama administration, yet all four of the witnesses-- brilliant, constitutional scholars, even though we have our disagreements. These were brilliant people, and every one of them had the same answer for Harry Reid's question. The answer is the United States Constitution, article I, section 8. It gave Congress control of the purse strings, and it gave the House a little more control than the Senate. The Senate has got to go along with whatever legislation is going to become law. But he asked the question, and I put this question to our experts: Suppose you were in a town hall meeting with constituents back in a congressional district and an elementary schoolchild asked the question, What right does the House of Representatives have to decide which government programs get funded and which do not? They unhesitatingly said the answer is our Constitution, article I, section 8. They all agreed. They all knew immediately. So I have asked that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee make that testimony available to our dear friend, the Senate majority leader down the hall, so he won't have to ask that question to reporters who are not familiar with the answer. We can get it to him straight from some of the greatest constitutional minds on both sides of any aisle, and he will understand it is the Constitution that gives us the right to have a say. For Harry Reid to shut down the government by saying you are either going to give us every dime that we demand or the government will be shut down is really outrageous. They shut the government down. We even gave them an out. There is a wise Chinese saying that says, it is good to give your adversary a graceful way to exit. We gave the Senate majority Democrats a graceful way to exit by saying, Look, you don't want to completely defund ObamaCare; we get it. We think that is the best idea for America. Here is a compromise. Let's just suspend the whole bill for a year. Harry Reid could have taken that and said, We don't want to do this, but the Republicans in the House are making us hold off on all of ObamaCare for a year. Gosh, golly gee, we didn't want to, but they are making us. That was a graceful way that they could have exited. But they were so determined to shut the government down that, when we came back with another compromise passed out of this body, we said, How about if we do this? The President acted unconstitutionally. That became very clear in our hearing. For the President to say he wasn't going to enforce the business mandate in ObamaCare is unconstitutional. Not only is it unconstitutional, the President is directly violating his oath of office. He is required to faithfully defend the laws, see that the laws are carried out, and he announced he wasn't going to do it for a year. He doesn't have that kind of luxury. Even in a spirit of extreme compromise, I didn't vote for it. I thought we shouldn't be compromising against ourselves. But a majority in here voted to send the bill, and we sent it down to Harry Reid and the Senate that said the President has decided to suspend the business mandate for a year. If businesses deserve a mandate for a year, let's do it for every individual in the country for a year. That gave Harry Reid another out. He was so determined to shut down the government, he wouldn't even bring that to a vote. Then our final ultimate compromise in compromising against ourselves, without any Senate offer of compromise whatsoever, was to say here are our negotiators we are appointing. We voted for it. We sent the list of negotiators; you appoint yours. We will probably have a deal by 8 a.m., and we will not even have to have a real shutdown. But Harry Reid was determined to have a shutdown, and so he got a shutdown. Now there is no graceful escape because we have got to repeal ObamaCare. That is very clear, and I hope that we do that. I see my friend from California. Actually, he is a very dear friend. We have been in some interesting situations worldwide as we stand up for our country and for the people of the United States of America, for truth, justice, and the American way. As my time is about to expire, let me say that I didn't vote for the patent bill in the Judiciary Committee. I have some real concerns about it, as I did the last one that I voted against. I still believe in my heart we should not have changed 200 years of patent law from the first to invent being right, changing it to the first to file being right. I think the law was appropriate the way it was. We needed to make some reforms, but I think we made a glaring error. Many people came to this floor and said we have got to pass that bill to deal with the issue of patent trolls, and now we have another bill that we are told will likely come to the floor tomorrow that this time it will really deal with patent trolls. There are some things in there that I like, and I am glad we are trying to deal with them, to help people that need to be helped. You know, where a bank is utilizing a procedure that they paid for, they are not infringing on anybody's patents intentionally, and so to hold up people, you know, a small community bank that doesn't have a million bucks to spend on patent litigation, when they are innocent stakeholders, it just seems grossly unfair. There are things we ought to do. But I am very concerned that we ought to be spending more time, let America help us get this bill right, and I am still hoping that we will wait, get more input so that we don't mess up the patent system any more than we already have. My time is expired, or is about to, so I yield back the balance of my time.