Louie Gohmert

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. I thank the gentleman from Florida. What a profound novel idea: if you take the oath, you should keep it. And that doesn't even mean if you like it. It is just, if you take the oath, you should keep it. As my friend, Mr. DeSantis was pointing out, there are so many problems with the ObamaCare bill. And I know the President referred to the bill as ``ObamaCare'' many times and said he was proud to do so, and so I certainly don't mean any disrespect or anything like that. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to call it the ``Affordable Care Act'' when you know it is not affordable. And a great indication of just how affordable it is came from a lady named Jessica Sanford. I heard the President at a press conference read the letter from Jessica Sanford from Washington State. And when I heard it, I thought, well, good. At least somebody has been able to find something good from ObamaCare, because in my office we have heard from so many people who have already been adversely affected. So I thought, well, great. Three hundred-plus million people in the United States, he found one person that had a letter he could read from Jessica Sanford. Then it turns out, this article from the Daily Caller on November 19: Jessica Sanford received a major shout-out last month when President Barack Obama mentioned her fan letter lauding her cheap, new ObamaCare coverage. But the Washington State business owner has now been informed that she can't even afford the cheapest ObamaCare exchange plan in her State. ``I'm really terribly embarrassed,'' Sanford told the Washington State Wire. ``It has completely turned around on me. I mean, completely.'' The Washington State exchange Web site Washington Healthplanfinder originally gave Sanford a quote for coverage that would insure both her and her son for $169 per month. But after a series of corrections--and she was one of the few people who was able to get through on the Web site--she gets a quote, and it turns out that it was entirely wrong. It makes you wonder how many people got the wrong quote and won't find out and won't realize they did and will end up January 1 without insurance thinking they signed up, thinking they bought a policy they can afford only to find out they couldn't afford it. In this case, it says the ObamaCare exchange Web site originally calculated Sanford would be eligible for a Federal ObamaCare tax credit that would lower her monthly premium total by $452 per month, prompting the effusive letter that Obama read out loud during a White House speech. I am a single mom, no child support, self-employed, and I haven't had health insurance for 15 years because it is too expensive. I was crying the other day when I signed up, so much stress lifted. So the President was quick to share Ms. Sanford's gratitude and said: Sanford's experience is what the Affordable Care Act is all about. He went on: The essence of the law, the health insurance that is available to people, is working just fine. In some cases, it actually is exceeding expectations. The prices are lower than we expected; the choice is greater than we expected. But this article points out that Sanford was one of 8,000 people to be affected by 4,600 policies sold on the Washington exchange that had been quoted premium rates that were too low. Ms. Sanford said: I was dumbfounded. I thought this was a total mistake; they're going to correct this. This isn't true. Now she says she can't even afford the cheapest Bronze ObamaCare plan. ``I was like, forget that. I'm not going to pay.'' So she is going uninsured. Sanford now says of ObamaCare: You are stuck on this big treadmill of bureaucracy. And, you know, it feels very out of control. This article from today--this afternoon, actually--from Steven Ertelt, entitled, ``ObamaCare Denies Hospital Choice for Blind Child With Rare Bone Disease,'' says: As The Washington Post reports, a number of the Nation's top hospitals--including the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, and children's hospitals in Seattle, Houston, and St. Louis--are cut out of most plans sold on the exchange. In most cases, the decision was about the cost of care. Here is how ObamaCare is hurting one family: In Seattle, the region's predominant insurer, Premera Blue Cross, decided not to include the children's hospital as an in-network provider except in cases where the service sought cannot be obtained anywhere else. ``Children's nonunique services were too expensive given the goal of providing affordable coverage for consumers,'' spokesman Eric Earling said in an email. That brings up the point, the President wanted to provide everybody health insurance; and some of us, like me, were more concerned about getting them quality health care that was affordable. All this talk about insurance, insurance, insurance, the bigger, more important question should have been can we get them health care they can afford. One of the biggest promises was it will lower most everybody's cost, and it turns out that was not true at all either. There are some in States, in a State like New York, where it was overpriced previously where it has come down some. But overall, when you add 18,000 new IRS agents that will not ever even apply a Band-Aid, they may cause a bunch of ulcers, but they will never provide any health care. And they are not from the U.S. Government to help you. They are there to go through all of your most important and most personal decisions with you--the IRS. Go figure. This institution, the IRS, this agency that we find out got weaponized by the Obama administration to go after people they disagreed with. Richard Nixon had an enemy's list, but he never could do much with it. This administration has an enemy's list, and they have really gone after people and made them suffer for having a different political opinion than this administration. This article points out: For example, a pediatric appendectomy at Children's costs about $23,000. At another community hospital, the cost is closer to $14,000. Melzer said his hospital often bills more than community hospitals for comparable procedures because the children it treats are often gravely ill, so even a routine tonsillectomy may be more complicated. But as a result, families like Jeffrey Blank's, which has relied on Seattle Children's since his daughter, Zoe, received a rare diagnosis of a rare bone disorder, face difficult decisions. Under some of the new law's health plans, the family would no longer be able to take Zoe to Children's for her routine checkups, or it could count as an ``out-of-network'' visit, saddling the family with huge bills. As the pro-life movement warned during its adoption in Congress, health care will be rationed and health care access will be limited when the government gets involved. These lessons have been seen for decades in nations like Canada and England, and the United States is now following suit. It makes such a great point, because when you add 18,000 IRS agents to be even more intrusive and get into your most private decisions about health care and your own health, they not only may cause you ulcers or create problems, they don't help at all. And I have no idea what the average IRS salary will be. I would imagine the IRS' average salary will be a lot higher than $56,000. But if you just take $56,000 as the average for the 18,000 IRS agents, it means that a billion dollars next year will go for IRS agents to harass you, that will come out of money that should be going to health care, and it is not going to help you a bit. In fact, they are playing for the other team. They are out after you, not out to help you. And then when you add in all of these millions of navigators and you add in all the tens of thousands, maybe some make over $100,000, and I am sure some of them will that are involved in this whole navigator process, not the lowest level but some surely will, and you think about all the billions of dollars over the next years that will be spent for navigators that, as we heard here in testimony from Kathleen Sebelius herself, yes, they can be convicted of a felony and we won't catch it because we are not checking on that kind of thing. As a former judge who sentenced people to prison--for example, I never sent a woman to prison for felony welfare fraud when her crime was getting a job to try to get out of the hole the government lured her into by promising checks for every child she could have out of wedlock. I do believe in holding people accountable. I would sentence them, give them probation, and then do things like either max them out or come close to maxing out 800 hours of community service, but then make very clear as an incentive that if you get your GED or high school diploma, then I'll knock out 750 hours, to urge them to go forward and help themselves, which ultimately helps society. That is the kind of thing government is supposed to do. Instead, this government, for too long, going back to the Great Society days, has incentivized things that lured people away from their God-given potential. It hasn't helped them; it has lured them away from their potential. Here we are now with ObamaCare not just luring people away from their health care, it has put a wall up between them and their health care. I knew when I would hear our friends across the aisle here in the House and in the Senate talk about how health insurance is a right,-- well, it is not in the Constitution as a right. I was more concerned about ``health care'' than ``health insurance.'' There are ways to make it affordable. When we see disparities of $23,000 to $14,000 for the same tonsillectomy, it should be very clear that we need competition, and when you have the government running everything, there is no competition. The government screws that up royally. It prevents the thing that made America so great: entrepreneurialism, competitive advantages that people have that work hard. It destroys those kinds of incentives, and now we are seeing it destroy lives. Here is an article from November 19. ``HHS Secretary Sebelius Visits South Florida to Meet With Health Care Navigators.'' Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we weren't paying billions of dollars for government workers that will make your health care decisions more miserable instead of giving you more freedom? Here is an article from yesterday on foxnews.com: Second Wave of Health Plan Cancelations Looms. It says: A new and independent analysis of ObamaCare warns of a ticking timebomb, predicting a second wave of 50 million to 100 million insurance policy cancelations next fall--right before the mid-term elections. The next round of cancelations and premium hikes is expected to hit employees, particularly of small businesses. It goes on to say: As reported by AEI's Scott Gottlieb, some businesses got around this by renewing their policies before the end of 2013. But the relief is temporary, and they are expected to have to offer in-compliance plans for 2015. According to Gottlieb, that means beginning in October 2014 the cancelation notices will start to go out. So the millions of cancelations that have gone out now--people make the mistake of saying 5 million people. That is 5 million policies. That is the information I have got. There are million policies approximately so far. That is a lot more than 5 million people. That could be 15 million, 20 million people. This article is exactly right. AEI is exactly right that come next year, a lot of people--we have heard this, Mr. Speaker, that a lot of people have been renewing their policies now before the end of the year so that they don't completely lose it until next year around this time. Next fall, there will be millions and millions and millions more who will get those notices of cancelations. As a result, this article from Marguerite Bowling points out, Obama's legacy will be more Americans than ever reject government enrolled health care. It then points out the way it has gone from 64 percent and even up to 69 percent wanting government to be responsible for their health care to now dropping to 42 percent of Americans because people have begun to see what so many of us have been talking about for a number of years: the best solution is not more government. The best solution is not having navigators and IRS agents taking away money that could be spent on health care. I have this article from David Martosko that points out that our President had claimed that more than 100 million Americans have enrolled. Obviously, that was just a mistake in the teleprompter. It is not his fault. Here is an article from the Heritage Foundation's Morning Bell: The American people rose up to repeal a health care law once before. They can do it again. It goes back and points out about the bill that had been passed under a man that I greatly revere, a great President, Ronald Reagan, and he thought he was providing America with a great gift of catastrophic care for seniors, but it didn't take but a couple of years for people to see this is a disaster, this isn't a good thing. So in 1989, they stepped up and got it repealed. An interesting CBS poll from yesterday points out that 84 percent of Democrats want ObamaCare changed or repealed. I had not seen that before, that article. So it is important to understand just what is at stake with ObamaCare. These things are kind of worn. I have been through them so much, and I had gone through and read the bill so I would know what was in it before I voted, which is why I voted against it. There are things in here--and I will just hit a few since people are now waking up as this thing has become a reality. People are starting to wake up and realize that, wait a minute, this was not such a good idea. When there were some who were concerned here in this room about the President representing that abortions would not be paid for under ObamaCare, some of us had read the bill--I think at that point it was the 1,000-page bill, and then the one that came out of the committee, and then somehow it magically became around 2,000 pages, and then we end up with my copy, which is just under 2,500. At page 119, this was a comfort to some people when they read: The services described in this clause are abortions for which the expenditure of Federal funds appropriated for the Department of Health and Human Services is not permitted based on the laws in effect at the date that is 6 months before the beginning of the plan year. But then it does have a provision that abortions with public funding are allowed. Then the next section: Prohibition on Federal Funds for Abortion. Services in Community Health Insurance Option. That is the last I can find of abortion specifically being mentioned. What gets really clever, since we now are of the Information Age where you can go online and see bills and you can do an electronic word search, if you go online and do an electronic word search for the word ``abortion''--I didn't see it. What you have to be aware of is these are really clever people. They were clever enough as they wrote this to make sure that the Speaker's office and certain staffs would be exempted. It was really intriguing how clever some of these things were. To avoid a word search picking this stuff up, like over here at page 122, it says, ``Assured availability of varied coverage through exchanges,'' and it says: ``The Secretary''--talking about Secretary Sebelius right now-- ``shall assure that with respect to qualified health plans offered in any exchange established pursuant to this title--(I) there is at least one such plan that provides coverage of services described in clauses (i) and (ii) of subparagraph B.'' Well, that surely couldn't be abortion, unless you flip back and see what (i) and (ii) of B is. Guess what? That is the abortion referenced over on page 119. That is the way you get around people picking up those things; of course she is going to have provisions in here about that, and of course people shouldn't forget that the provision at page 429--it was a special adjustment to FMAP, determination for certain States recovering from a major disaster. This was put in there to buy the votes from Louisiana. That is why some have called it the ``Louisiana Purchase.'' So we have got special consideration in there for that. There are all kinds of things I used to go through. Of course, AARP got special dispensation. Also, this administration saw that Medicare Advantage was really helping some people out. Their costs were lower. There were a lot of people that were telling me they liked Medicare Advantage. So as ObamaCare would do it, it would try to destroy anything that people liked and was helpful and mandate that you couldn't have those provisions in your policy. They knew all along by putting this kind of thing in this bill, like at page 904, that people that liked their Medicare Advantage were not going to get to keep it. They sure weren't going to like it after this bill got through with them. At 904, it goes after Medicare Advantage and says: ``Nothing in this section shall be construed as requiring the Secretary to accept any or every bid submitted by an MA organization under this subsection.'' Then the next capital C, subparagraph (ii): Authority to deny bids that propose significant increases in cost-sharing or decreases in benefits. Because as the government keeps mandating more and more things, like maternity care for men that are single and may be beyond their childbearing years--well, a single man that is 70 years old may think, gee, I am beyond childbearing years. I probably won't get pregnant any time soon. Maybe I don't need maternity care. Well, maybe Secretary Sebelius thinks you do. So you are going to pay for it anyway. That is the way people end up paying more than what they really need. That was in the second volume. I never could understand it. I keep asking questions, and nobody will give an explanation as to why, at page 1,312 in the health care bill, to make sure that everybody got the health care they needed that we had to create the Commissioned Corps and Ready Reserve Corps for service in time of national emergency over on page 1,314. It talks about national emergencies and public health crises. It gets ``health'' in there for part of it, but not under national emergencies. Above that, it is talking about the purpose to ``meet both routine public health and''--that is conjunctive, not disjunctive--``emergency response missions.'' Well, I wish they would put ``health'' in here, and we would be more assured that this isn't creating some kind of Presidential brownshirts or something, but we can't get an answer on who these people are, what they are being trained with, what they are being trained on. Are they being trained with weapons? Are they being trained with medical equipment? What are they being trained on? One thing that I have learned, as both a judge and a chief justice, and now in Congress, is that if words are not specific, somebody is going to figure out to just use their plain meaning. So when something says ``national emergencies,'' like this bill, there will be times it will be called in for national emergencies rather than just health emergencies. And the next section talks about public health emergencies, both foreign and domestic, but we have already learned that they didn't put the word ``health'' in the national emergency. And so it is strange. These are commissioned officers of the Ready Reserve Corps. They will be appointed by the President. Commissioned officers of the regular Corps shall be appointed by the President, and it is subject to advice and consent of the Senate; but that is for the actual appointment. But it makes clear over here that they are subject--it says that the Corps will be available and ready for involuntary calls to Active Duty during national emergencies and public health crises. And then below the health crisis, foreign and domestic. So that is some more. I have insurance that has a health savings account attached to it. I think Aetna could have done better, and I was looking forward to improving my policy, except that ObamaCare came in and made sure that anybody that had a policy with a high deductible and a health savings account they liked were probably not going to be able to keep it because they took shots and terrifically restricted what you could use a health savings account for. The goal is to get rid of them because if people get that much control over their own health savings account or, as the bill I filed back before ObamaCare ever passed, nearly a year before it passed, I say give seniors a choice. Let them choose Medicare. Let people choose Medicaid. Or it would be cheaper for us if we just say, look, we will buy you a Cadillac, not a bronze, we will buy you the best coverage, great coverage, and it will have a high deductible now, maybe $5,000, something like that for a deductible, and we will give you the cash in a health savings account. You get control back of your health care. You can handle it yourself. Your debit card will be coded where you can only use it for health care, but then let you make the decisions. But this won't even let you go get your own medicine or drug unless it is prescribed. This kind of stuff is running up the costs and trying to get rid of HSAs. It is very clear. Oh, and I love--they have got a provision in here for States, this, back 2,300 or so, they have got a provision in here that, gee, we have given out grants, but if your State has bothered to do malpractice reform, like the Federal Government hasn't done, then if you put caps on pain and suffering, for example, then you are not going to be getting the grants that other States are. Well, there are a lot of problems with ObamaCare; and I hope that, by the end, before the election next year, people will realize that what some of us have been saying for years is true. It is in America's best interest to have health care reform, but that is not it. It is not it. There is another issue--there are two other things I want to address very quickly. One is about Guantanamo Bay. I had the television on when I was working at my desk in the wee hours of the morning this morning, I can't remember, maybe, 1, 2, 3 a.m., something like that, but a show where some psychologist had been, basically, corrupted by being used at Guantanamo Bay for psychological warfare. Totally false story. I mean, there are still a lot of people walking around that don't know that no one has ever been waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay. Having been there two or three times, you get the picture. Amnesty International comes regularly. These groups come regularly; and when you find out what is really going on there, it is really the guards that are put through all kinds of Hades. They have excrement and urine thrown on them, and they are not allowed to even get angry back. Last time I was there, they said there had been one soldier who had responded angrily, and he was punished for it. Their instructions are when you have urine or feces thrown on you by one of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, you just don't react. And then you get the day off so you can go clean up, change clothes. So the inmates are constantly coming up with innovative ways to get feces and urine on our guards. That was last time. Hopefully, they have dealt with it better. The punishment, when I was there before, they would take away some of the movie-watching time that the detainees got to have; and if it was really egregious enough, they might cut into their outdoor time a little bit. But I was told that Amnesty International gets real upset about that, so they don't like to cut out their outdoor time, so they are more restrictive on the movie-watching time that our detainees at Guantanamo may get. And this--what a juxtaposition. What an amazing thing. The New York Times used to bill itself--and it is arguable that it really was accurate as the newspaper of record, but they have so corrupted their standards that they could say about an overt lie, someone misspoke. This is not a newspaper of record. It is really just a sad day for America regarding the New York Times. But every now and then they get a story right. But, unfortunately, now we have to sometimes go to England or other countries whose media is not overwhelmed with bias for or against a particular administration so we can get proper reporting. But this story is from Russia Today. I mean, I was in the Soviet Union in 1973. I could read a little bit of Russian, speak a little Russian back then. I haven't had any reason to for over 30 years, so I don't remember much of anything but how to get to the bathroom. But from Russia Today they report, and this was the first I saw, and then started looking for more information: U.S. Senate is seemingly deadlocked when dealing with the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, voting down dueling measures which would have either loosened or tightened restrictions on transferring detainees. And then we found one, 2014, NDAA, now in the Senate, could finally mean the end of Guantanamo. More than half of Guantanamo Bay's 164 detainees have been cleared to transfer to other nations, MSNBC reports, but have remained at the prison due to congressional measures complicating the transfer protocol. Yes, some of us are concerned that since we keep transferring people out, releasing them, and they keep killing Americans, so many of them, after they are released, I would say one is too many, but one is not near as many as have been reported going back and continuing to kill Americans. This talks about even a good Republican who is reportedly aiding the Guantanamo Bay win for President Obama, but White House, top Senate Democrats successfully defended provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act that would loosen restrictions on transferring detainees out of Guantanamo Bay, advancing President Obama's goal of closing the facility by a margin of 55-43. Yeah, they can vote like that because they have got enough people that aren't up for re-election next year. So they can take a vote like that. So that caused me to go look at the law being discussed and voted on, and find this provision in there, section 1032, the authority to temporarily transfer individuals detained at United States Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States for emergency or critical medical treatment. So, okay, they say, yeah, see, we have got to get them out of there sometimes for medical treatment. They have got incredibly good medical treatment at Guantanamo Bay. This says, status while in the United States, an individual who is temporarily transferred under the authority in subsection (a) while in the United States shall be considered to be paroled into the United States temporarily pursuant to a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. But then it goes on, under section 1033, to say that transfer for detention and trial, the Secretary of Defense may transfer a detainee described in subsection (a) to the United States for detention and trial if the Secretary determines that the transfer is in the national security interest of the United States. And it does provide that Congress should be notified not later than 30 days before the date of proposed transfer. But if the President, with a wave of his hand, can wave off mandatory language in a bill that was passed without a single Republican vote, if they can wave off provisions of the immigration bill and just flat out change the law, unilaterally, as the Chief Executive, then it sure wouldn't be very hard to say, oh, whoops, we didn't give Congress notice; those people are in the United States because once they are in the United States, things take a big turn. I remember my friend from across the aisle, Anthony Weiner, was so upset. He actually said he wanted these detainees brought to New York City and put on trial and executed there in New York City. Well, having been a prosecutor, judge and chief justice, I knew he would be exhibit A for why, if they brought the detainees to New York City, they shouldn't get a trial there. They would have to transfer them somewhere else because you had people like Anthony Weiner who were not particularly capital punishment supporters, but wanted them to be executed. So that would have been exhibit A in why you couldn't get a fair trial if they were brought to New York. Some of our friends get very confused and demand, we want these people at Guantanamo Bay to have the same rights under the Constitution that everybody else does. Well, everybody doesn't have the same rights under the Constitution. When I was in the Army for 4 years, I didn't have the rights everybody else did. I wasn't free to assemble where I wanted. I wasn't free to say what I wanted to about the President. I wasn't happy with Jimmy Carter. We saw Fort Benning going down and down and down. We saw our Nation attacked by an act of war in Tehran, and there was no response. That is still being used today to recruit people to al Qaeda, to terrorism, because of how weak our response was then, how weak the response was when we were attacked in 1983 at Beirut and, certainly, the ongoing weak responses after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the USS Cole, the embassy attacks. And I know there are people that would say to such embassy attacks in the 1990s, well, what difference does it make at this point? Well, perhaps if it had made a difference to the Clinton administration, we would have been better prepared and people wouldn't have died in Benghazi. But this is a disaster. Under the Constitution, nobody is promised a trial in a U.S. District Court. And people need to understand that, because in the Constitution there is no U.S. District Court. As my old constitutional law professor at Baylor used to say, there is only one Court created in the Constitution. Every other court in America, Federal court, that is, owes its existence and continued existence and jurisdiction to the United States Congress. That is it. So if are you an immigrant, our Constitution says you get due process at an immigration court. If you are in the military, the Constitution ensures you will get due process in a military court. And I can tell you, that is kind of tough. When a soldier stands in front of a military jury, all wearing uniform, all appointed by the commanding officer to whom they account after that trial is over, it is a little different than a jury that you would get just picked at random from your peers. They are not picked at random. The commanding officers, from platoon on up through company and all the way up to the installation, they send recommendations, and they eventually funnel their way up to the commanding general for a general court-martial. And then they are handpicked by the general. These are the people who will be on the jury. Well, that is constitutional. It has been upheld many times. So I have a little trouble, having served in the military, understanding why someone who wants to destroy our country and kill all the Americans they can, why are they entitled to more rights under the Constitution than somebody that is giving their lives in our U.S. military? They are not. They are not given more rights than our U.S. military. And, in fact, under international law, the way it has existed, going back as far as it has been recorded, when someone was part of a country or group that declared war on another country or group and they were captured, they were held until their group or country said they were no longer at war. Then we let go of the ones that promised not to be at war after the war was over and punished those who were guilty of war crimes. And I also, Mr. Speaker, want to make sure people understand what we have at Guantanamo. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the leader--people call him the mastermind--of 9/11/2001. Very unrepentant. Not only is he unrepentant, he, in 2008, in December, agreed to plead guilty and went through, I believe, at least two hearings where, through in-depth questioning by the judge, he admitted to his role in killing Americans. We know he filed this pleading, of which I have a copy here, that was released by Military Judge Colonel Henley, declassified so we could see what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind--he, himself, talked about his planning it. And he had some resources where he could translate his language into English so that he could write this whole thing. There are some idioms, perhaps, that may be misused, but anyway, he is a brilliant man. He just hates Americans and loves to kill them. But in his pleading, he says: In God's book, he ordered us to fight you everywhere we find you, even if you were inside the holiest of all holy cities, the mosque in Mecca, and the holy city of Mecca, and even during sacred months. In other words, it would be perfectly fine for him or one of his buddies to kill Americans in the mosque in Mecca, but heaven help the person that causes any damage at all to the same mosque. He said, ``In God's book''--and this is as if he had legal training. He does this quite well. He states a premise, and he follows it up with a provision from the law of the Koran. I mean, the Koran is a book, basically, of law. In God's book, verse 9, Al-Tawbah: ``Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush.'' Further down, he says: We do not possess your military might, not your nuclear weapons. Of course, this President may be presiding over the United States-- unless Israel protects itself, this President may be the one that sees, for the first time, a radical Islamic terrorist regime get a nuclear weapon, and that will change the world forever. We can't afford for that to happen. But he points out, at the time he wrote this: We do not possess your nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, we fight you with the Almighty God. So, if our act of jihad and our fighting with you caused fear and terror, then many thanks to God, because it is him that has thrown fear into your hearts, which resulted in your infidelity, paganism, and your statement that God had a son and your trinity beliefs. And then the provision he follows that up with, from the Koran: Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, for that they joined companies with Allah, for which he has sent no authority. Their place will be the fire; and evil is the home of the wrongdoers. And he misspelled ``their.'' When he said ``their place,'' he used T-H-E-R-E. But, I mean, this is amazing stuff. He is admitting: we want to destroy you. And if you think for a moment that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Ahmadinejad or Khamenei would not mind using a nuke to destroy what some of them believe were people descended from apes and pigs, as some in the Muslim Brotherhood say, well, you have got another thing coming. These people are not stupid, but they are insanely crazy in their desire to kill innocent people. He went on at the end of his pleading on page 6, and says: You will be greatly defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq, and America will fall, politically, militarily, and economically. Your end is very near, and your fall will be just as the fall of the towers on the blessed 9/11 day. We will raise from the ruins, God willing. We will leave this imprisonment with our noses raised high in dignity, as the lion emerges from his den. We shall pass over the blades of the sword into the gates of heaven. So we ask from God to accept our contributions to the great attack, the great attack on America, and to place our 19 martyred brethren among the highest peaks in paradise. This is a guy that some people want to bring to the United States. They have no idea how desperately wrong that would be. He is being held constitutionally right where he is, and under no circumstances should he be allowed to be brought into the United States itself. They have the perfect courtroom set up down in Guantanamo for conducting terrorist trials. Enough bulletproof material in the middle of an area where a bombing would not do the damage that it would in Manhattan. Israel understands the threat. They understand the danger. And it absolutely breaks my heart to find out that Israel is having to seek another ally that understands the threat of radical Islam to them and to the United States. Now, it was Prime Minister Netanyahu who asked me, after I apologized for America putting them in a position where they have to defend not only themselves but the United States, because some people here do not understand the threat, he said, I just ask that you remind your President, the people in America, that it was your President who said the words, ``Israel must defend itself by itself.'' I didn't remember President Obama saying that. I had to go back and do a word search. It turns out, that was slipped in in a bunch of other glowing comments about what a wonderful ally and we are not going to let Iran get nukes and all this stuff. And then he slides that little sentence in there that is profound. But ``Israel must defend itself by itself.'' That is why I wasn't the only one that didn't pick up on that, because of the way in which he contextualized it. But here is an article from The Blaze today, from Sharona Schwartz, ``How Bad Are Things Between Israel and the U.S.? Israeli Foreign Minister Says It's Time to Find New Allies.'' Israel's foreign policy for many years went in one direction toward Washington, but my policy has more directions. This is Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman who said this. He said: There are enough countries that we can be a help to, and, therefore, our foreign policy must be to search for allies. The Americans have a lot of problems and challenges around the world that they need to solve and they have problems at home. We need to understand them and our place in the global arena. We need to stop demanding, complaining, moaning and, instead, seek countries that are not dependent on money from the Arab or Islamic world and who want to cooperate with us in the field of innovation. I mean, Israel has been a leading innovator in intellectual technology. They need to be our friends. They believe in the value of life, as we do. They do not name streets and holidays for people who kill innocent women, children, innocent victims, men who never saw it coming; whereas, even in Palestine, as it is called now--it was never called that before in recent history. But it is time that we realize what a friend we have in Israel and that we could never spend enough money to create the defense system we have in Israel if we will just be supportive. One other thing I want to address before I conclude today. There are some people that are calling attention to the President's omission of the words ``under God'' from the Gettysburg Address when he did the entire Gettysburg Address on camera. I don't know whose decision it was to leave that out. I don't know if he was just reading it, and whoever gave it to him to read in the teleprompter took it out and he didn't realize. I don't know what happened. But, Mr. Speaker, it is important that people understand, yes, there are five existing copies of the Gettysburg Address. There is only one that Abraham Lincoln signed, the Bliss copy, unless the President has removed it, like he did Winston Churchill's bust from the White House. Unless it has been removed, it is up there in the Lincoln Bedroom. This is the Bliss copy, it is called. And actually, at the Gettysburg Foundation Web site, they have an explanation of those five copies--the Nicolay copy, the Hay copy. So you had a couple of them there. And you can see what actually was in the copy. But the Everett copy--Senator Everett was the Speaker that went 2 hours or so, and he asked for a copy, so Abraham Lincoln made sure he got a copy. And I was talking to a brilliant historian, Stephen Mansfield, this week. He was pointing out these things, that it was thought that Lincoln had provided his secretary with his notes. And since he had interlineated, as I see people on both sides of the aisle do all the time here--making notes, scratching stuff, putting stuff in--he had interlineated ``under God.'' So when he gave the speech, ``under God'' was part of it. I don't know about anybody on this floor that wants the Congressional Record to carry a copy of their speech before they made all the changes in it, just as Lincoln did. But the last three copies, the Everett copy that Lincoln personally gave to Senator Everett, it says ``that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.'' And then the Bancroft copy, that was one that also was requested by historian George Bancroft, and that has ``that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.'' And then the last copy, the Bliss copy that is most often used, is considered to be the most authoritative copy of what was said at Gettysburg, because this is the only copy that Abraham Lincoln signed. He didn't sign any of the others. He signed this one. And it went to Colonel Bliss, who was going to use it to auction and use the money to help wounded warriors. This is a Nation under God. It had a new birth of freedom. And I hope and pray that God will give us wisdom to avoid destroying that freedom. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, first of all, it is my honor to yield to a good friend whom I have tremendous respect for, from the State of Florida, my friend, Ron DeSantis.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Chairman, I am very grateful to my dear friend, Bill Flores, and to Doc Hastings, chairman of our committee. I appreciate Mr. Cuellar's comments. The truth is, we have been working on this for a long time, and Mr. Flores has gotten it here. This is fantastic because we need jobs in America. We need more of our own energy in America. This bill helps us do that. I got into a discussion with one of our colleagues across the aisle who is now in the Senate, and I brought this up to him in previous years. If a State has a regulatory body that is addressing the issue, has cleaner air, cleaner water, is doing the job, then let them do it. Let's not add another layer of bureaucracy that takes away jobs. It slows the economy. I am very grateful that it looks like we are going to pass a bill that creates jobs instead of these job-ending things that have been happening down the hall and down Pennsylvania Avenue. So I applaud my colleague and I applaud my friends that support this bill. This is going to help America.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, recognition and rousing congratulations are due to the Carlisle High School Varsity Baseball Team in completing an outstanding season which concluded with the team's triumph in the 2013 Class A state baseball tournament. Through hard work and determination, the Carlisle Indians defeated the Stamford Bulldogs with a final score of 6-1. Within the first innings of the first state championship game in Carlisle's history, it was abundantly clear that the Indians were dominating the game. At the conclusion of the fifth inning and after twelve hits by the Indians, Carlisle already held a 5-1 lead over the Bulldogs thanks to an exceptional performance by the team's offense and defense. The Indians maintained their lead through the seventh and final inning--granting the team the prestigious title of Texas State Baseball Champions. The Carlisle Indians made history for their high school by bringing home Carlisle's first state title. Their success has been attributed to the excellent leadership of their athletic staff, their outstanding veteran pitching lineup, the reliability of their defense, and timely hitting when they had to have it. This season alone, the Indians produced 18 shutouts, and ultimately finished the season with an incredible record of 29-1. The Carlisle Indians exemplify what it means to work as a team. The players and staff seamlessly united their efforts to produce a sound performance that culminated with their capturing the victory. Their sportsmanship, humility, determination, hard work, and skill are to be commended, admired, and emulated. The winning team was led to victory by an outstanding coaching and administrative staff including: Head Baseball Coach, Wesley Colley; Athletic Director and Assistant Coach, Rocky Baker; Assistant Coach, Cal Goss; Assistant Coach, Bob Tamplin; Manager, Ty Kennedy; Manager, Colby Draper; Strength and Conditioning Instructor, Clay Baker; Principal, Sarah Baker; and Superintendent, Michael R. Payne. Great praise goes to the team members who played through and secured the team's first state title: Ty Baker, Kyle Byrd, Clay Allphin, Ben Goss, Caleb Colley, Shadow Sanders, Dylan Sanders, Cooper Grigsby, Jaylan Holland, Zach Brightwell, Michael Savala, Gunner Baker, Collin Gray, Justin McMurtry, Dalton Sanders, and Kolton Heim. Accolades must also be given to the players' families and the entire community of supporters who reside in Rusk County, who embraced the warrior spirit for which the team was named. Without these devoted fans' support and encouragement, the Indians' road to the championship would have been much more difficult. It is with great pride that I join the constituents of the First District of Texas in congratulating the players and athletic staff of the 2013 Class A Champion Carlisle High School Varsity Baseball Team. 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. I thank my dear fellow alumnus of Texas A&M. We do go way back, knowing each other from undergraduate days. I want to follow up, and I am very grateful for my friend from Texas (Mr. Flores) taking charge of this hour, setting it up to talk about the IRS and the abuses. And I know we have been talking about the abuses of Tea Party conservative groups, pro-Israel groups; but I wanted to just touch in brief on the extent of the arrogance of the IRS. They feel like they are above the law. Lois Lerner never showed any remorse for what certainly appears not only to have been perjury but also to have been a crime. There is a specific criminal code provision dealing with abuses of the Internal Revenue office. And you have Kathleen Sebelius. And right now, of course, people all over the country, millions are losing or have lost their health insurance. And there was this article here in October. This was from CNN News: In an interview with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta Tuesday night, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she won't be enrolling in the problem-plagued health insurance system that she was charged to implement. ``I have created an account on the site. I have not tried signing up, because I have insurance.'' Well, she--like the IRS--has Federal employee insurance, and they don't care about everybody else, but we know the head of Health and Human Services says she is not going to bother with it. And as we look into the arrogance of the Internal Revenue Service-- and I especially appreciate my friend from Texas, Bill Flores, bringing this up because I don't know how many CPAs we have in Congress--but I know the CPA exam was a lot tougher than the bar exam. And I certainly appreciate somebody that knows about dealing with the IRS. But this article, ``IRS Employees' Union Urges Members to Oppose Obamacare--For Themselves.'' And the article goes on. So NTEU, which is the union for Treasury employees, is strongly urging its members, including the IRS agents tasked with implementing ObamaCare, to oppose Dave Camp's legislation which would compel them to personally participate in the same health care program they will be enforcing. On the NTEU Web site, union members are urged to email their Congressmen and Senators and ask them to oppose H.R. 1780. It provides a sample letter that they should provide, saying: I am a Federal employee and one of your constituents. I am very concerned about legislation that has been introduced by Congressman Dave Camp to push Federal employees out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and into the insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act. It is just the height of arrogance that the IRS, while they are investigating groups that believe in the propriety and fidelity of the United States Constitution--because somehow they are a threat to the United States Constitution because they believe in it--at the same time, they know they are gearing up to enforce ObamaCare and to delve into the most private information that people have. It is not enough to just look at financial information. They are going to be looking to see about their health care and their health care coverage and can get even more detail than what we have been hearing during this hour. I can't imagine a worse prescription for abandoning the Constitution than that. And not only that, we have heard that ObamaCare--correctly, apparently--that it will cause the hiring of 17,000, 18,000 new IRS agents. And although I was not a math major, I love math and did very well every time I took it, but if you multiply 56,000 times 18,000 IRS employees, in 1 year you have added over $1 billion to health care costs. And there is not one of those 18,000 IRS agents, as arrogant as they may be and as personal as they are going to get, that are going to do anything but create a need for health care and not provide any whatsoever. They may cause some ulcers. They are certainly not going to solve or be a solution for someone's ulcers. We still don't have proper accountability for the IRS. One other thing about the IRS and their handling of this. We keep being told that there are 5 million people that have lost their policies. As I understand it, it is 5 million policies. We are talking about a lot more than 5 million people. And when you think about the people that are going to have to pay for their health care and the extra billion dollars for new IRS agents and the billions of dollars over time that will be paid for the navigators and all those people that won't provide any health care whatsoever, it is staggering. People across America, from the polls, are figuring out this isn't about their health care. This is about the GRE--the government running everything. And some people I know wonder, well, what solution is there? Even if you had a fair tax or a flat tax, you still have got to have an IRS. And I love Arthur Laffer, Reagan's economic adviser. He said, Louie, you don't have to have the IRS. You ought to do away with it. The problem with the IRS is that, of course, they are going to get arrogant because they pick who they are going to audit, just like we have seen with all these abuses. They pick what all they are going to audit, just as we have been hearing. They get so intrusive, so personal, and then they decide what your punishment is going to be. There is no other area like it in America, and I don't think the Founders anticipated that the IRS or any entity would ever exist that could be the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and the executioner all. And that is why Arthur Laffer says you need to get rid of the IRS and have an auditing agency that is a fraction of the size of the IRS. They don't get to pick whom they audit. That is done completely at random. They never get to pick whom they audit. And they never get to decide what will be done with their auditing. It has to be passed on to Justice or to the collection of the taxes if they have not been paid. They never get to participate in that. And I like the way that sounds, especially the more we hear about the abuses of people that are just freedom-loving Americans. So I appreciate very much my friend taking this time so we can talk about the IRS. And I realize that he knew when he signed up for this hour that there would be others to come. And it is a brave thing because he is risking an audit as we go in because he knows better than anybody just how abusive the IRS can get.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I won't take long. I got this email from a constituent that, on Tuesday of last week, my 89-year old mother-in-law fell and broke her hip. Her doctor gave her only a 50 percent chance of survival, but survive she did. He, the doctor, stated after the operation that she was lucky that it happened now, because ``in 2 weeks I could not have performed the same procedure because it is not an approved procedure under the new rules. It's too expensive.'' We all wondered what her chances of survival would have been under Dr. Obama. That is from Jay, in my district. There are all kinds of terrible things that are happening as a result of the passage of ObamaCare. I voted ``yes'' on the bill today. Apparently, the Senate is not going to take it up. It just said if the insurance companies could allow them to continue on their policies without making it illegal, as ObamaCare does, to keep those policies. We have numerous proposals. Anybody that says Republicans don't have any solutions, we have got numerous solutions. I filed a bill that would have been a better, far better bill to ObamaCare back before ObamaCare passed. CBO wouldn't score it. They helped the Democrats all they could, but especially after the director was woodshedded at the White House. There are many solutions, and one solution now would be to allow insurance policies that have been approved for this year by State commissioners, let them go on, like those that are on the Federal, State, or local cafeteria plans for Federal, State or local workers. There are many things we can do to have a bridge to get us through the next year if we can just repeal ObamaCare. It did not look like a possibility a few months ago but, as Americans are finding out more and more about the disaster of this government taking over everyone's health care, they are finding, gee, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea, as we had 30-plus Democrats, in a bipartisan vote today, express, gee, maybe we should have allowed people to keep their insurance if they wanted it. One article today from FOX News, ``Obama's Insurance Plan `Fix' Stirs Confusion, Ridicule At the State Level,'' points out what a disaster it is. The President's even adding to the problems by unilaterally passing a new law, as he has done repeatedly. Normally it is reserved only to monarchs, kings, emperors, those kind of things, to step up and say, I am changing the law. He has done it with regard to immigration. He has done it with regard to ObamaCare. He ignores parts of laws or laws he doesn't like, and that has also been done at the Department of Justice. Here is a headline, CNN: ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers ``Complete Disaster.'' And we are finding out that 26,000-or-so signed up and bought insurance when they needed 500,000. Here is one from McClatchy: ``Roiling Health Care Waters, Obama's Fix Could Make Matters Worse,'' by Anita Kumar and Lesley Clark. From The Weekly Standard, Daniel Halper: ``Fairy Tale'' Continues As Obama Proposes Extralegal ObamaCare Fix. It is unconstitutional. And by the way, Madam Speaker, it seems like those who had the President for constitutional law are probably entitled to file a class action, wanting their money back. Because, clearly, the President is not familiar with the fact that the executive branch just can't announce or change laws as they wish without getting Congress' approval. Here is another, ObamaCare Architect: ``Could Be the Beginning of a Death Spiral'' from Today by Daniel Halper. In fact, it quotes the architect of ObamaCare being interviewed by Megyn Kelly. She asked, ``Is that the beginning of the so-called death spiral?'' And he said ``That could be the beginning of a death spiral,'' as people did not sign up for ObamaCare like they needed to. And then one from Human Events: There is No ``Fix'' for ObamaCare. And, Madam Speaker, I think that is the bottom line here. We have got to repeal ObamaCare. People are already being dramatically, adversely affected. It has changed the 40-hour workweek. It has changed people's ability to have their own decisions about their own health care. We need to move, as Ben Carson suggested, toward health savings accounts, encouraging those higher deductibles with cash to take care of the difference. There are all kinds of great solutions. Many of us have them. We just need to repeal ObamaCare for the good of America. And it is deeply saddening to know that our government is not even warning people about going on ObamaCare, that when they enter their personal information, it is subject to being stolen by identity thieves and may put them in great personal identity quandaries and difficulties legally. So I bring that up because somebody needs to warn people about the problems of registering with the ObamaCare Web site, if they can get through. My hope and prayer is that we will do the right thing by America. We will get back to acting within the Constitution. And friends like our leader, who spoke moments ago, expressing profound ignorance of what has gone on here on the floor, as he has stated that we had Paul Ryan and many other Republicans voting for the government not to pay its bills. There is no Republican I know of that has voted that way. Apparently, he has paid more attention to mainstream media that has misrepresented the truth than he has to what has actually gone on here. No Republicans voted for America not to pay its bills. In fact, Republicans are the ones who voted repeatedly to compromise before the shutdown. But Harry Reid had it in his mind that if there were a shutdown, if he could refuse to compromise on anything, force a shutdown, then Americans would get misrepresentations as to what occurred. They would blame the Republicans, and then they would get the majority back here in the House next year. But a funny thing happened on the way to that plan. Many people are starting to find out: wait a minute, Republicans compromised repeatedly. Harry Reid is the one that wouldn't bring a compromise to the floor, wouldn't even allow negotiations to occur with a conference committee. And then people are finding out why Republicans were so concerned about ObamaCare, because it is a disaster. It is affecting people's ability to get the health care they need. It is so grossly unfair. It is putting people at risk. It is time to stop the figurative bleeding of America and repeal ObamaCare. And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. I thank my friend from Missouri for yielding and for setting up this time that we could share about what is going on. Just in contrast to my friend from Louisiana's examples of the abuses of military members' First Amendment rights, the government is not supposed to prohibit the free exercise of religion. Of course, we know in the military--I knew--that there are some things you give up when you are in the military. You can't assemble when you want to, and you can't speak when you want to, but Commanders in Chief have always known that when it comes to religious liberty, you should not infringe upon people's religious beliefs, especially when they believe they are fighting for a country in which people could have First Amendment rights to utilize and to worship God. In fact, of course, in my 4 years in the Army, we didn't have a Commander in Chief who had issued an order--attributed to George Washington--that people should not take the name of the Lord in vain, because how can we ask God's blessing on our military at the same time and in the same mouth as one's taking God's name in vain? That was not the order of the day when I was in the Army; but by the same token, you saw crosses at chapels on military installations. You saw crosses inside of chapels and outside of chapels. Now they have been removed, we have been told, from the insides and outsides of chapels on military installations. It is outrageous. We hear people call the generation in America that won World War II-- making the world safer for democracy--the Greatest Generation. Yet, if you look at what occurred during World War II, you had a President of the United States who went on national radio on D-day and prayed about the evil forces that our troops were trying to defeat. He prayed God's blessing openly for several minutes on national radio. I was given by my aunt a New Testament with a metal cover. There are all kinds of stories about these metal covers actually stopping bullets when they were placed in pockets, but on this metal cover, it says, ``May the Lord be with you.'' Under the new rules, I haven't seen anything that this Commander in Chief has signed or said of ``you can't practice your Christian beliefs'' or ``we are not going to afford you conscience exemptions'' like have always been provided throughout our country. I haven't seen that. But as Harry Truman said, the buck stops with the Commander in Chief. Whether it is actually stopping with Valerie Jarrett, or wherever it is stopping, the Commander in Chief has the power to get the buck, bring it to his desk, and make these decisions. Well, here is what Franklin D. Roosevelt did. Here in this New Testament, it says, ``May the Lord be with you on the front.'' Inside, at the top, it says, ``The White House, Washington.'' As Commander in Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the Armed Forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries, men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel, and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength, and now, as always, an aid in attaining the highest aspirations of the human soul. Signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. I have been trying to find a Bible in recent days that has an inscription or signature from the current Commander in Chief who has said he takes such great inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, not only do we not find Bibles being encouraged and handed out, we see crosses being taken back, people being told they can't even have their own Bible where people might see it. It is an outrage. I worry for our Nation, just as George Washington did. How can we expect God to bless a nation that is not being allowed to even praise God publicly in our military? It is a sad day. But what is more, if George Washington is right, we are stripping our Nation of the opportunity to have our military blessed because of what was done in prior militaries that brought about blessings. Even if you don't believe in God whatsoever, why wouldn't you want to at least have an insurance policy that maybe the reason they were blessed was because of things like this done for our military in our military, signed by the President of the United States? Obviously, this is a stamp of the President's signature. But again, I appreciate my friend from Missouri. #MilitaryFreedom--we encourage people, Mr. Speaker, to utilize that, to get us information, because we want to help our military protect us. I thank so much Mrs. Hartzler for this effort and for this hour and encourage all of our colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to stand up for what is right for our military--their freedom of religion.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, one thing becomes very clear from our study of history, and that is that things that nations do have consequences. Things we do individually have consequences, and things we do as a Nation have consequences. That is why some people remember that on May 30, 2010, there were six flotilla ships--and this is from the U.N. release, a report into last year's raid, how events unfolded, dated 2 September 2011. It points out that on May 30, 2010, six flotilla ships leave Cyprus for Gaza in an attempt to break Israel's naval blockade. The Turkish cruise liner Mavi Marmara is chartered by Islamic charity IHH and carries 581 of the 700 flotilla activists. We know that didn't turn out so well. Israel did have a legitimate right to blockade the Gaza Strip to prevent more rockets, more munitions from being brought into the Gaza Strip that were being used to fire on, kill, and terrorize Israelis. Again, actions have consequences, and many remember the flotilla coming down and challenging the blockade, and there were people who were killed. If you go back, here is an article. It is dated also May 30, 2010, which was a Sunday. But it points out--and this is an article from The Washington Times entitled, ``Israel assails resolution on nuke weapons as `flawed,' '' and it is talking about an agreement that President Obama was trying to get done, a nonproliferation agreement, and the article points out that on Friday, which was May 28, 2010: A U.S. delegation in New York voted to endorse a consensus document ending the 2010 review conference for the Non- Proliferation Treaty that calls for a conference in 2012 to discuss a weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East. The final document of the monthlong review conference calls on Israel to join the treaty, a move that would require Israel to disclose and then give up its undeclared nuclear arsenal. This was viewed and discussed as being the first time in people's memory when the United States, by and through its administration--the Obama administration--had taken action that was very adverse to Israel and the international community, and particularly in the U.N. Normally we did not side with Israel's enemies. One of the lessons that I was taught by history professors at Texas A&M is that when a nation's enemies see that nation's strongest ally pulling away, it is provocative. It often provokes action by that nation's enemies against it because they think their strongest ally is pulling away. Some saw that before the war in Korea. They thought that the United States might have North Korea beyond its ``sphere of influence.'' Those kinds of things, those words, these actions, these votes can be provocative. So 2 days after the United States sides with Israel's enemies in demanding that Israel disclose its nuclear weapons, the flotilla launches to challenge the blockade. Isn't that amazing? It just happens to be right after this administration sides with Israel's enemies. Here comes a challenge to Israel's blockade that was just trying to save Israeli lives. Well, the reason that it is important to point these things out now is, what is happening between the United States and Iran, as we leave Israel out of the equation--even though it is Israel that is considered to be the little Satan and we are considered the great Satan, and Israel is probably to be the first attacked, if there is an attack-- they are certainly the most vulnerable. Yet we leave our former friend Israel out of the equation. It brings to mind a number of things that have been happening during this administration that have caused the vast majority of people in Israel, of Israeli citizens, to believe that this Obama administration is not concerned about Israel's best interests. There are many who have been aware of Scripture, and it has often been a guide in our relations with Israel. It is really such an historically appropriate thing in this House of Representatives, especially if we were down the hall in the former House Chamber, now called Statuary Hall, where they used to hold church most Sundays during the 1800s. Up until the late 1800s, the largest church congregation was in the House of Representatives, and it was not considered to be violative of the Constitution because it didn't endorse a particular religion. It was considered nondenominational. Scripture was read regularly, every week, down the hall. Thomas Jefferson had coined the phrase ``separation of church and State'' as being appropriate. He didn't find it offensive, that notion, and, in fact, at times would bring the Marine band to play hymns. So it seems appropriate, when we talk about Israel, to talk about Israel's roots because in Genesis 12--and this is the King James version: Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee; And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing; And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee, and in thee shall all families of the Earth be blessed. So Abram went to the land of Canaan, which later became Israel, just as God had promised in these verses. So it was no accident that just minutes after Israel became a Nation, the United States, through its President, Harry Truman, became the first nation in the world to recognize what was prophesied throughout the Old Testament about Israel returning after its absence. Israel returned and Harry Truman made sure we were the first Nation that recognized them as an independent nation. The U.N. had voted unanimously. Because of the Holocaust and over 6 million Jews being killed, they wanted to ensure that another Holocaust would never happen again. And that brought about Israel being reestablished in part of the land they had possessed 3,000 years before. This is an article from The Washington Post, David Ignatius: Is Israel preparing to attack Iran? Because it is considered a betrayal of an ally to warn an ally's enemies that that ally may take self-defensive action to prevent being attacked. And the United States and Iran, including President Obama, has said repeatedly and has promised an American-Israeli gathering here at the Convention Center that he would never allow Iran to have nuclear weapons, that it is an existential threat to Israel. It certainly is. So we have been hearing behind the scenes for a number of years that this administration was telling Israeli leaders, Don't you dare attack Iran without our permission. We will take care of this. We won't let them have nuclear weapons; and yet it is not the United States that is first threatened. The great Satan, the United States, in the eyes of leaders in Iran--not the Iranian people, but Iranian leaders--would get around to attacking us. But first Israel is threatened. So there was concern, obviously, here in Washington in the Obama administration that the reported threats to Israel not to defend themselves without our permission--even though no nation should ever need permission from another to defend itself--and even President Obama said this out here at the Convention Center to an American-Israeli group. Prime Minister Netanyahu reminded me of our President's words, and I went back and looked them up. Sure enough, he said: Israel must defend itself by itself. Our President said that. And yet if we are not going to help Israel defend itself, which is actually defending us as well, then shouldn't we avoid jeopardizing Israel's own self-defense? Yet here is this article dated February 2, 2012. It says: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months. Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May, or June--before Iran enters what Israeli's described as a ``zone of immunity'' to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon--and only the United States could then stop them militarily. That is a betrayal of our ally, Israel. That is a gross betrayal of our ally, Israel. We are supposed to be on the same side; and if Israel defends itself, it is defending us as well, whether we recognize it or not. That was a betrayal of Israel to leak what this administration believed were their plans to defend itself. If we are not going to defend ourselves, for heaven's sake, at least allow Israel to do it without putting them more in jeopardy. By leaking that, obviously, it was this administration saying to Israel, Well, you better not go when you were thinking you were going to go because they are going to be ready because we warned your enemy for you. So we get to May and, obviously, the window that Israel may have been considering attacking had to pass because of the leak by our own administration to Israel's enemies, through The Washington Post. An intentional leak. This is from March 29, 2012, ``Israelis Suspect Obama Media Leaks to Prevent Strike on Iran,'' by Alexander Marquardt from ABC News: Two reports today about Iran's nuclear program and the possibility of an Israeli military strike have analysts in Israel accusing the Obama administration of leaking information to pressure Israel not to bomb Iran and for Iran to reach a compromise in upcoming nuclear talks. That is simply outrageous. This article says, continuing that same article: The first report in Foreign Policy quotes anonymous American officials saying that Israel has been given access to air bases by Iran's northern neighbor Azerbaijan from which Israel could launch air strikes or at least drones and search and rescue aircraft. The article goes on: It seems like a big campaign to prevent Israel from attacking, analyst Yoel Guzansky at the Institute for National Security Studies told ABC News. I think the Obama administration is really worried Jerusalem will attack--and attack soon. They're trying hard to prevent it in so many ways. The Foreign Policy report by Mark Perry quotes an intelligence officer saying, We're watching what Iran does closely. But we're now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we're not happy about it. Further down: In recent weeks the Obama administration shifted from persuasion efforts vis-a-vis decisionmakers and Israel's public opinion to a practical, targeted assassination of potential Israeli operations in Iran, Ben-Yishai writes. The campaign's aims are fully operational: to make it more difficult for Israeli decisionmakers to order the Israeli defense forces to carry out a strike, and what's even graver, to erode the IDF's capacity to launch a strike with minimal casualties. We are putting Israel's own forces at far greater risk for casualties. Is that something an ally does to a friend? Some of us believe that the Bible is accurate. Certainly, so many prophesies have been fulfilled. And if that is true, this administration, unless they can find a verse that accurately says that those who betray Israel will be blessed, then this country is being dug in a deeper hole by this administration and its betrayals of Israel's trust and Israel's friendship. This is from November 3, 2013, from TheBlaze, ``Fury, Scandalous: Israel Conveys Bitter Protests to Obama Admin Over Reported White House Security Leak. This says: The Israeli government conveyed ``bitter protests'' to the White House this weekend over the Obama administration's reported leak of who was behind last week's air raid on a Syrian base near the port city of Latakia. Words being used by the media and officials speaking anonymously in Israel to describe what they perceive as a breach in trust on the part of the United States include fury, scandalous, baffled, unthinkable. This administration continues to betray our friend, our ally, Israel. Other things that have happened in the past were the comments made by President Obama to President Sarkozy in 2012 at a G-20 summit which were belittling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, comments in 2011 that Israel should return to its 1967 borders that would have subjected it to relentless attacks and vulnerability. They were not helpful to our friend and ally. The Obama administration's failure to condemn Palestinians building of illegal settlements, yet constantly criticizing Israeli housing plans for East Jerusalem; the Obama administration's decision to eradicate the missile defense programs that would have helped Israel as well as the United States; leaving Prime Minister Netanyahu in 2010 on for over an hour in the White House meeting room while President Obama dined with his family and refused to take a picture with him was not a friendly gesture. Also, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the Obama administration planned to send $147 million to the West Bank and Hamas- run Gaza; President Obama stated that all his friends in Chicago were Jewish and says he was sometimes being accused of being a Jewish ``puppet''; the Obama administration leak to The Washington Post of the time window in which Israel would take out Iran's nuclear program; the Obama administration leaked to the media that Israel was going to use the Azerbaijan airspace to take out Iran's nuclear program. We placed immense pressure on Israel not to defend itself without the United States' permission. The Obama administration has never rejected or condemned the racist, hateful teachings about Jewish people going on in Palestinian schools in the Middle East and in some Muslim schools in the United States. President Obama traveled to Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and apologized to them on behalf of the United States. The Obama administration's support for the Muslim Brotherhood's rise to power in Egypt as well as throughout the Middle East, though the Muslim Brotherhood had never backed away from their demand for the nonexistence of Israel, the Obama administration continues to support the Muslim Brotherhood's return to power in Egypt, when Egypt is where the Muslim Brotherhood turned violent on Morsi's arrest because of his violation of the constitution that did not provide for impeachment, after the Egyptian people turned out in the millions to demand his removal. It was not a coup, as the Christian Pope in Egypt told me. It was not a coup. This was a people rising up and demanding removal, and yet this administration now has cut off support because Egypt does not want the group, the Muslim Brotherhood, that was killing Christians, burning churches, terrorizing the nation, we want them back in charge--this administration does. It is an outrage. Though the Syrian leader Assad has been ruthless in killing and abusing his people, has not been helpful to Israel to the extent the Egyptian leader Mubarak was, this administration has not done anything but put Israel in more jeopardy by its actions in Syria. So we have not been terribly helpful to our friend Israel. And it doesn't sound like we are actually blessing Israel. It sounds like we are cursing Israel, belittling its leaders, marginalizing its efforts to defend itself, which also enures to our benefit. My oath of office is to this country. When I was in the Army for 4 years, my oath was to this country. My allegiance continues to this country, and I believe that being Israel's friend is helpful to this country; and that is why I so strongly support being a friend to Israel. And even if you took the Bible completely out, you took out most anything except just looking at the Middle East and who believes in the value of life like we do here in the United States, who believes more in democratic actions like we do in the United States, then Israel should certainly be our friend. But what this administration is doing with Iran is foolhardy. It is foolhardy. And thank God for France. They didn't wave a white flag of surrender. They said, This is a terrible deal. And thank goodness they slowed it down, because this administration thinks they just knew and everything they try will work perfectly. Hello, ObamaCare. It doesn't work any better when they try to mess with our friendships and reward our enemies and hurt our friends. So, in the few minutes that are remaining, Madam Speaker, I would like to reference back to the New York Times article by Barry James, October 21, 1994, during the Clinton administration. The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency expressed skepticism Thursday about the U.S.-North Korean nuclear agreement, saying it could delay inspections by the agency. Officials at the agency, some U.S. Republican Senators and politicians in South Korea criticized the accord, saying they feared Pyongyang had bought itself a further 5 years of secrecy, thus concealing whether it has reprocessed enough plutonium to build one or more nuclear weapons. The energy agency says it needs to inspect two nuclear waste dumps to be able to answer the question. North Korea has never conceded the existence of the dumps. ``It would be in the interests of all concerned that a prolonged delay be avoided,'' said the agency director, Hans Blix; but, he added, ``We are better off'' with the agreement than with none at all. ``We have to worry about how much they have squirreled away,'' an agency official said. ``Blix thinks 5 years is a long time to have to wait for our inspectors to gain access to the facilities we need to see, including the two facilities the North Koreans have never declared.'' Yet, under the agreement that the Clinton administration reached, North Korea agreed to place in storage the fuel removed last spring from a 5-megawatt graphite reactor containing enough plutonium for four or five nuclear bombs. U.S. Republican Senators protested in a letter to President Bill Clinton that this reversed longstanding U.S. policy because it allowed the North Koreans to hang onto their spent fuel rods and would delay for several years the inspection of suspect sites. The accord ``shows it is always possible to get an agreement when you give enough away,'' said Senator Bob Dole of Kansas . . . The deal also has been heavily criticized in South Korea. Many people there see it as a diplomatic triumph for Pyongyang, which failed to dispel doubts about its nuclear intentions. As part of the pact, which will be signed in Geneva on Friday, the United States will head an international consortium to provide North Korea with an interim supply of fuel to overcome its chronic energy shortage and, eventually, two 1,000-megawatt light-water reactors. In exchange, North Korea will abandon its existing nuclear facilities and renounce any plans to build nuclear weapons. Gee, doesn't that sound familiar? This administration is repeating the same mistakes of Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton as President. They are running to Iran, which can not be trusted, which has lied repeatedly just like North Korea did. And how did the Clinton deal work out? Yes, they took the nuclear facilities we provided them, but they didn't stand good behind their promise not to develop nuclear weapons. They developed them and we helped them. Now this administration wants to do the same thing with Iran? We are still paying for the mistakes of the Clinton administration with North Korea's helping them get more nuclear power--and now this administration wants to do that with Iran? That is a huge mistake. We need to help our friend Israel, to stop betraying them, to help our friends, to stop rewarding our enemies, because the consequences to this Nation will be dire if we don't turn this around. Madam Speaker, it is my prayer--it is my hope--that this administration will turn from its stupid ways. The arrogance that existed before ObamaCare kicked in surely should have come down a notch so that they can realize maybe we are making a mistake in dealing with bloodthirsty people in Iran as well. This country's future is at stake. That ought to be enough to make this administration slow down and realize they are about to make another huge mistake that we will pay for for generations if they don't stop. Iran will certainly not stop just as North Korea did not. They had gotten help from North Korea. They learned the lesson from North Korea. It is time this administration learned a lesson from our mistake and from the mistake of the Clinton administration and Madeleine Albright. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today on a motion offered pursuant to this order, it adjourn to meet at 10 a.m. on Friday, November 1, 2013, unless it sooner has received a message from the Senate transmitting its concurrence in House Concurrent Resolution 62, in which case the House shall stand adjourned pursuant to that concurrent resolution.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, this has been an interesting week for a number of reasons. I would like to call to attention a letter that was written by Chairman Darrell Issa, my friend from California, to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week. The first paragraph, after saying, ``Dear Madam Secretary'' says: The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the insurance exchange application, online at www.healthcare.gov, established by the Department of Health and Human Services. As part of this investigation, we are writing to request information related to voter registration data collected during the application process. On further down, the letter says: While HHS and its contractors continue to struggle with the task of processing applications for health insurance coverage, the agency uses the Web site to collect voter registration information. Once an applicant completes the online application for health care coverage, a dialogue box appears asking, ``Would you like to register to vote?'' In light of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the Motor Voter Act, which requires any agency that provides public assistance to provide individuals with an opportunity to register to vote, the Department decided to include the voter registration option on the health care application. The inclusion of this voter registration may give applicants the impression that registering to vote is somehow tied to receiving health care benefits, such as insurance subsidies. Given the well-documented flaws with the health care application process, the public lacks confidence that HHS has the ability to safeguard applicants' voter information. Documents reviewed by the committee show that applicants may submit personal information over the Internet during the application process without encryption, potentially exposing personally identifiable information to interception and abuse. Further down it says: Further, it is unclear how HHS uses the voting information it collects once a user submits this data on the Web site. Applicants rightly expect that only State election officials will have access to their information. Voter registration contains important personal details that are valuable to various individuals and organizations. Toward the end, Chairman Issa says: These facts raise questions as to what happens when the same individual expresses the desire to register to vote multiple times. HHS does not appear to have the capacity to differentiate between duplicates and first-time applicants. In short, it is unclear what happens to voter registration information once HHS receives it. Applicants have an expectation that the Federal Government is not transmitting private information to third parties, knowingly or unknowingly. But interesting questions were raised by my friend Chairman Issa. It should also be noted that the chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, my friend from Utah, Jason Chaffetz, also signed that letter. So that has certainly caused some digging in my office to find out what this was about. And then we find information about www.demos.org. They have a report by Lisa J. Danetz called ``Building a Healthy Democracy: Registering 68 Million People To Vote Through Health Benefit Exchanges.'' Well, that is interesting. It makes you wonder what they are up to. They are involved in this www.healthcare.gov, apparently. And their own information from demos.org says they are going to use the health benefit exchanges, apparently, to try to register 68 million people to vote. So while people in America--and I have talked to many who are just scared because they have got someone sick in their family. They have lost their insurance that the President promised they could keep. They are scared about the superhigh deductibles they have gotten. They are scared that under ObamaCare they have been sentenced to go from full- time work to part-time work, which means, as I have heard from some, that, gee, that means we have now had to go on public assistance because I never wanted welfare, didn't need welfare until the so-called Affordable Care Act forced us into it. So people are concerned all over America. The majority want ObamaCare gone. The Web site is not working. And then we find out that, actually, the Web site seems to be as concerned about getting people registered to vote and getting their invaluable voter information as they are about dealing with the crisis in American lives involving their health care and their health insurance. You have got people with ulterior motives. They are apparently not just signing people up from the goodness of their hearts because Demos makes clear in their own information, We are going to use the health benefit exchanges to register voters. Well, now, who would they be registering to vote? Because we are all in favor of people eligible to vote voting. Although we know that the Attorney General has sued States like Texas, even though the Supreme Court has made clear that Indiana's law requiring a photo ID, the Attorney General's rules that require a photo ID to get in to see him, the Democratic National Committee requiring photo IDs to get into their convention, having to have a photo ID to get alcohol or cigarettes or basically to get on a plane or get on most any conveyance in interstate commerce, you have got to have a photo ID. And States like Texas have said, If you can't afford it, then just fill out the oath, and we will take care of it for you. So, on the one hand, we have an Attorney General and Department of Justice doing everything they possibly can, even in the face of a Supreme Court decision saying photo ID requirements are okay. They still are going after States, which I would humbly submit, Mr. Speaker, disenfranchises legitimate voters when the Attorney General of the United States takes action to prevent States from preventing fraudulent votes. I was shocked when people called out for international observers to come watch our own election process. This is America. We don't need international observers to watch our process, so I thought. And yet international observers watched our process of voting and were absolutely shocked that we were so cavalier about who got to vote. No identification requirements. Clearly, people were in a position to vote more than once if they wanted to. People were in a position to vote who were not U.S. citizens, and people could vote multiple times. I know in Iraq, I was over there right after their first election, and those people had to dip their fingers in permanent ink that they wore around for weeks until it finally wore off. But it made sure that, even in Iraq, they were protecting the integrity of their voting system further than what we are doing here. Well, this demos.org, they are going to register, they say, 68 million to vote through health benefit exchanges. So the thing to do, it seemed to me, was to get their annual report. So, Mr. Speaker, that is what I got--Demos' annual 2012 report--to see who these people are that are going to register voters. I am sure they would be fair and register voters from all walks of life. And then here we see the president is Miles Rapoport. Being the president, he has got a nice Letter from the President, the board chair. So then you look up a little background. Well, who is this Miles Rapoport? An article from keywiki said Miles S. Rapoport is the leftist president and CEO of New York-based think tank Demos. It goes on to say: While studying at Harvard in the late 1960s, Miles Rapoport was active in the radical Students for Democratic Society,

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, to follow on my dear friend Mr. Franks from Arizona's discussion about the so-called Affordable Care Act, I continue to hear from people who have lost their insurance, had insurance go up significant amounts, it is not affordable. Now, I did hear from one of my constituents tonight that about 30 out of 147 people at his place of business actually were helped by the Affordable Care Act, and that is great. Eighty percent of Americans seem to have gotten no help or been greatly harmed by the Affordable Care Act. Their insurance has gone up dramatically. They didn't get to keep their insurance. They didn't get to keep their doctor. They didn't save $2,500. Most Americans have been harmed by the Affordable Care Act. It is just very hard for me to call it the Affordable Care Act, but in this body so often there have been bills which had for a title, such as the Affordable Care Act, had a name that was exactly opposite of what the bill actually was going to accomplish. The cap-and-trade bill, as it was called, certainly didn't help trade, but it sure did cap a lot of commerce that could have taken place and would not have been able to if that bill had been passed. There are just all kinds of bills. Some people are pretty creative in the way that they put a name on. There is no law that says the title to a bill has to be truthful, and that is how you can end up with a bill calling it ``affordable care'' when the majority lose their insurance and don't get the care that they need or, for example, find out that in 3 to 5 years, when they need a new pacemaker, the new law will not allow them to get it. Those are problems. What I have also found more and more of are senior citizens who are now beginning to figure out that when the AARP-endorsed ObamaCare--and I don't think it is disrespectful to the President to call the bill ObamaCare, just as the President and others called the bill that Governor Romney signed in Massachusetts RomneyCare. I don't consider it disrespectful to former Governor Romney to call it RomneyCare, and I don't think it is disrespectful to call the un-Affordable Care Act ObamaCare. So no disrespect to the President intended by referring to his signature bill. But people have been hurt. People have been moved from full-time employment to part-time employment. They liked their insurance policy, but then they found out they didn't get to keep it. They have lost it. They found out their deductible shot up dramatically, and now they don't think that they can afford the thousands of dollars that will be required before their insurance policy kicks in. We have seen news reports repeatedly about companies that have had to drop spouses from coverage or families from coverage or drop coverage altogether. We found out that there may be as many as 80 percent of those who individually bought their insurance that will or have lost their insurance. And so when I see a number projected like 14 million Americans will lose their insurance, my understanding is that most of these projections about the millions that are losing their insurance are actually talking about millions of policies that are lost. So, for example, if it were my family when my children were growing up, then it would mean not just one policy was lost, but it would mean five people lost their insurance. So I think we will continue to see millions and millions losing their insurance rather than getting to keep it, which is a broken promise. Now, there was an article written by Lisa Meyers, and it is referenced here in the blog of Ace of Spades, and I don't have the article itself here, but a great point is made that it is bad enough that we were told over and over: If you like your insurance, you can keep it. If you like your insurance, you can keep it. If you like your insurance, you can keep it. If you like your insurance, we will make sure you can keep it. You want to keep your insurance, you can keep it. We were told those types of things over and over by the President himself and people speaking for the President as well. And the point is made that actually the law itself did not destroy as many insurance policies as have now been lost, but so many of the lost insurance policies have been forcibly lost by this administration by the law but also by the thousands of pages of regulations that have been written. And this article points out: In other words the ACA, Affordable Care Act, did make it incredibly hard for insurers to continue plans for the millions of Americans who don't want comprehensive insurance. Financially, insurers almost certainly had to adjust them in such a way that they would lose the grandfathered status. This isn't ``normal turnover in the insurance market,'' although there is plenty of that in the individual market. There is a reason why an exceptionally large number of Americans are getting cancelation notices this fall. It points out that very often insurance companies will keep premiums down despite rising costs of insurance by raising deductibles or copayments, and that is precisely what Obama's regulations say makes a policy automatically ungrandfathered. So people were told, if you like your policy, you can keep it because we are going to grandfather them in. The President himself used that term, ``we are going to grandfather in these policies.'' Then his Health and Human Services wrote the regulations in such a way that it forced insurance companies to have to change their policies, mandated some new coverage if it was going to comply with the law, but there were so many things that were written into the regulations that forced insurance companies to change their policies which meant they could not be grandfathered. So it was bad enough that people were promised, if you like your insurance, you can keep it, and then there were going to be some people who lost their insurance anyway, but then the regulations were written in such a way that it was going to force and has forced people to lose their insurance. So the President's own Health and Human Services Department has created more lost policies by the way they have written the regulations. They could have been written in such a way so that the President would have been allowed to keep his promise. And all it would have taken from a strong leader who wanted to make sure that no Department made a liar out of him would have been to either pick up the phone or write a letter or have an email sent saying, Hey, don't make a liar out of me. Don't you write these regulations in such a way that it causes people to lose insurance policies when I promised them they won't lose their policies. That could have happened, but it didn't happen. In fact, what the Health and Human Services Department did, by virtue of the Secretary who is in charge, they made sure that millions and millions and millions of Americans would lose their health insurance. So it makes that point, the Affordable Care Act as written and passed, would have protected the grandfathered plans for a longer period of time and with more freedom for adjustment, but the Obama administration filled out the Secretary's ``shalls,'' and there are so many ``shall this,'' ``shall do that,'' ``shall do this'' in such a way as to make it that much harder, if not basically impossible to do. The Obama administration's original June 2010 rules were actually even stricter and have, for example, made it impossible for an insurer company to change the firms it uses to manage and administer the plan, which needn't affect coverage and is a simple way to lower costs. But those ludicrous restrictions were eliminated, but enough rules remained that it is again near impossible to maintain a grandfathered health insurance policy. Very tragic. Promises made were not kept. And also, I had some folks tell me that, gee, it seems disrespectful for Republicans to say, to talk about President Obama without mentioning the word ``President.'' It seems disrespectful. And so, Mr. Speaker, I certainly don't mean any ill will any time I have used the shorthand, and I try to use ``President Obama,'' but I also hope that my friends, probably every one of the Democrats in this body and probably all of the Republicans in this body that have referred to anything that happened in the Bush administration or used the shorthand rendition ``under Bush'' without saying ``President Bush,'' that those people who want President Obama to always have ``President'' before ``Obama'' said that they will go ahead and apologize for ever referring to Bush without ``President'' in front of that. But the reason that doesn't necessarily need to happen is I know most people didn't mean any ill will by that. Obviously, those who hung President Bush in effigy or said some of the most mean-spirited, nasty things about President Bush, it never crossed my mind that they might be racist, because I thought they just disliked the man. But we are hearing now from so many people that if you say something about the President, then you must be a racist. I just look so forward to the day when the dream of Martin Luther King, one of them, will be realized that people will be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. I testified today before the Senate Subcommittee of the Judiciary about the Stand Your Ground Act, and actually that language comes from an 1895 Supreme Court case where the Supreme Court said an individual could stand his ground, so that is not a new invention. But I was reminded, when people began to talk in terms of racism from stand your ground laws, that, as a prosecutor, we didn't care what anybody's race was, not as a defendant nor as a victim. Everybody deserved to have protection regardless of race, creed, color, gender, national origin. But it did remind me that back when I was a judge, judges did not select the grand jury, their grand jury members. Those were chosen by grand jury commissioners the judges chose, but the commissioners chose the panel members for the grand jury. There were some defense attorneys that decided to attack the system by claiming judges were by a disproportionate number appointing too many Anglos as grand jury foreman because that is something that judges did in Texas. A judge selected the foreman for the grand jury. He did not select the members. But among the members, they would choose who the foreman would be. I was subpoenaed at one time back then without the defense attorneys doing their homework, and they intended to put me on the stand in their attack on a racist grand jury foreman system and use that to establish that, gee, it was grossly unfair, the disproportionate number of Anglos that were chosen as grand jury commissioners. Then, after I was subpoenaed and before I testified, they did their homework, and they found out that actually it was a disproportionate appointment if you only looked at race. I had appointed proportionately more African Americans as foremen of my grand jury than the percentage of African Americans in my district. The reason I did that was because I did not care what anybody's race was. It didn't matter to me. I had to look at the backgrounds of the individuals, look at the individuals that were on the grand jury, and then select from among those someone that I believed would be a leader, would be good at organization, would have the respect of the other grand jurors, and be able to work for 6 months as head of the grand jury and make good decisions as a peacemaker and an organizer. I never looked at their race. I didn't care about that. But I happened to know the people that I appointed as grand jury foremen. Sometimes they were women; sometimes they were men. I couldn't have told them, but they went back and checked and, wow, I had appointed a majority of African Americans during the time I was in charge of the grand jury rather than Anglos. Once they found that out, that blew their theory as far as me as a witness. So they quickly sent word that my subpoena had been dismissed and my testimony was not desired because, clearly, I wasn't going to help them establish a case of district judges being racist. I can remember a couple of the grand jury foremen I selected. It had nothing to do with race. They were good people. One I remember was a community leader, was in so many organizations that everybody respected her. I knew she was amazing in organization, a former assistant superintendent. Anyway, I feel like so many times people want to use the term ``racist,'' and they are like those defense attorneys that don't bother to check the facts before they start mouthing off. Another article that I saw in the last couple of days disturbed me greatly because it follows along in a pattern of abuse of law enforcement, of the tools of the administration. It follows along in what really amounted to the weaponization of the Internal Revenue Service. We still need a special prosecutor to go through and indict anyone and bring them to trial, anyone in the IRS that abused their positions, anybody that has committed perjury. We need a special prosecutor to do that. Obviously, the Justice Department will not, and we need someone to do that. We have seen how abusive this administration can be using the powers of its office to go after people. We also know, despite the promises before being elected that this administration would be the most transparent in history, it has not been so. More and more mainstream reporters are starting to realize that, wait a minute, these guys are not even as open as the Bush administration was. I am sorry, the President Bush administration. This story by John Hayward in Human Events is entitled ``DHS Raids Human Events Alumnus, Seizes List of Whistleblowers.'' We also know this administration, instead of being the most transparent, has the dishonor of having prosecuted more whistleblower or leakers than any other administration, in fact, than all other administrations put together. It is ruling with an iron fist. This article points out that: Human Events alumnus Audrey Hudson was the target of a Department of Homeland Security raid in August that was ostensibly related to firearms, but in a new interview with the Daily Caller, she revealed that DHS and the Maryland State Police also just happened to confiscate her files and notes, which included information about whistleblowers inside Homeland Security. Hudson says the files were taken without her knowledge and without a subpoena. The Daily Caller confirmed that the search warrant pertained to firearms and ammunition. Even that part of the story seems rather flimsy, but then we get to all those juicy files that got hoovered up during the raid. At about 4:30 a.m. on August 6, Hudson said officers dressed-- That is 4:30 in the morning. It is hard to believe that people sleeping peaceably, law abiding citizens, a reporter who has written stories using sources within Homeland Security that the administration didn't like, they bust into her home with a subpoena and say we are here to look for firearms, and instead, without the consent--I would say that if the subpoena did not allow for them to take her notes pertaining to DHS whistleblowers that provided this reporter information, it begs the question that perhaps these law enforcement officers acting under color of State law or Federal law stole these without due process. So it bears looking into. If we had a Justice Department that was going to do justice in such an abuse of power, the same kind that would actually prosecute people who brought a billy club and intimidated voters at a voting location--but that doesn't seem to be the case. Anyway, the article says: After the search began, Hudson said she was asked by an investigator with the Coast Guard Investigative Service if she was the same Audrey Hudson who had written a series of critical stories about air marshals for The Washington Times over the last decade. The Coast Guard operates under the Department of Homeland Security. Hudson said that investigator, Miguel Bosch, identified himself as a former air marshal official. But it wasn't until a month later, on Sept. 10, that Hudson was informed by Bosch that five files, including her handwritten and typed notes from interviews with numerous confidential sources and other documents, had been taken during the raid. In particular, the files included notes that were used to expose how the Federal Air Marshal Service had lied to Congress about the number of airline flights there were actually protecting against another terrorist attack, Hudson wrote in a summary about the raid provided to The DC. The Coast Guard was involved because Audrey's husband works for them as an ordnance technician. What was the reason given for grabbing his wife's files? She said she asked Bosch why they took the files. He responded that they needed to run them by TSA to make sure it was ``legitimate'' for her to have them. I am sorry. Legitimate for a reporter to have her own handwritten notes? What kind of a country are we living in that busts into somebody's home at 4:30 in the morning to take her notes regarding whistleblowers at Homeland Security? We are living in a scary time. Back to the article. This guy basically came in here and took my anonymous sources and turned them over--took my whistleblowers--and turned it over to the agency they were blowing the whistle on,'' Hudson said. ``And these guys still work there.'' Hudson says none of the documents were classified, and no laws were broken in obtaining them. She said the government papers in her possession were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, an assertion the Coast Guard confirmed. And how did they confirm it? They handed the material over to the ``source agency'' for review--or, as Hudson put it, they turned the whistleblower information over to the agency that had the whistle blown against it. It wasn't just official documents that were seized, however. Hudson says they also ``took four other files with my handwritten and typed interview notes with confidential sources, that I staked my reputation as a journalist to protect under the auspices of the First Amendment of the Constitution.'' One of her major reasons for coming forward with the story is to give the whistleblowers a heads-up, because she's ``terrified to contact them'' directly. This is unbelievable. This is happening in America. Mr. Speaker, I think we should defund the Department of Homeland Security until such time as they start being honest about what they are doing and we get answers from the Justice Department. They need to be addressed until they provide the information that the Attorney General has been held in contempt for. We want to make sure law enforcement services are done, we fund those, but we don't defund the Attorney General himself or the head of DHS until such time as they start complying with the requirements of the law, like Americans across the country are required to do without this kind of abuse. We have got to stop the abuse. We have the power to do it. All we have to do is defund it until they come within the letter of the law themselves. 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, today, we recognize and celebrate the Wiley College and University of Southern California debate teams on their Exhibition Debate. On October 25, 2013 the Wiley College and USC debate teams will reenact their historic debate of 1935. The 1935 debate was depicted in the 2007 movie, ``The Great Debaters,'' which Denzel Washington starred in and directed. ``The Great Debaters'' tells the story of Wiley's defeat of USC, the then reigning national forensics champion, under the direction of Professor Melvin B. Tolson. Following the release of the movie, Denzel Washington donated $1 million to Wiley College to revive the debate team. October 25th will not be the first meeting of the teams in recent years. In 2012, USC traveled to Wiley College in Texas' 1st Congressional District for an exhibition match with the great debaters at the Julius S. Scott Sr. Chapel. At the conclusion of the evening, both teams were declared victors and they committed to another match at USC. The Wiley College team also known as the Melvin B. Tolson/Denzel Washington Forensics Society, will be represented by Sophomore Lyle Keinman and Junior Nathan Leal along with team director, Christopher Medina. Now ranked fourth in the nation, Wiley's debate team completed its 2012-2013 season of competition having amassed 82 national awards, 368 season-long awards, 16 championship trophies, and the first team title by a historically black college. The debate team is affiliated with Pi Kappa Delta, the National Forensics Association, and the American Forensics Association. We commend both Wiley College and USC in their efforts on enhancing students' critical thinking skills through the medium of debate. We wish the best for both teams and look forward to have such a historical event re-enacted in the California 37th Congressional District.

Mr. GOHMERT

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

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, as the ObamaCare debacle continues to unfold, there is more and more that is absolutely staggering that is now coming out. People in America need to understand who shut the government down September 30, October 1. The House of Representatives had voted out, first, a bill to completely defund ObamaCare because we could tell--many of us have read it. I read it before I voted ``no.'' I could see it was a disaster waiting to happen, that real Americans would be really hurt. So we offered a compromise. All right. This obviously, pursuant to notice by Democrats themselves, was a train wreck, nightmare. It was not ready for prime time. So we actually gave Democrats in the Senate and in the House that pushed it through without a single Republican vote, and the President himself, an easy out because that is, if you really want to get something done, unless it is ObamaCare that you want--that America knows is going to be harmful and totally against, or at least over half are against. Unless you are going to do something like that that is really totalitarian and against the will of the American people, it is good, a Chinese proverb notes, to give adversaries a way out. We gave a way out for Democrats in the House and the Senate that passed ObamaCare without Republicans. We gave a way out for President Obama. We said, okay, here is a compromise that ought to be an easy agreement. You know, we will give you money that you are demanding, with a gun to our heads, namely, the shutdown, and all we ask is that you do the right thing for America and suspend the implementation of ObamaCare for a year. Clearly, it is not ready now. Harry Reid, maybe he consulted with the President, surely he did before refusing to let that go anywhere. So we did what people are not supposed to do in a negotiation, continue to compromise against themselves. I didn't think it was a good idea. We should have waited for the Senate to vote on something, something. Do something, because being in a legislative body requires more than just saying no, no, no, no, which the majority leader in the Senate did. Nonetheless, our Republican leadership decided we would compromise against ourselves--yet again. All right, if you don't want to suspend the whole thing for a year, at least do for individuals in America what you are doing for Big Business. Big Business, basically, as set forward in ObamaCare, was anybody with more than 50 employees. And yet, again, Harry Reid and the President were a ``no'' on the compromise that would have just suspended, legally suspended, the mandate forced upon individuals that they are going to pay higher taxes, a fine of $95 or 1 percent of their income, going up to 2 percent. But that was going to be implemented, they were going to be penalized, or as Chief Justice Roberts rewrote the ObamaCare bill and called it a tax after he called it nothing but a penalty. So Americans were going to get hammered. We could see that. At least, we implored the Senate and the President, give individual Americans the same break you have now, basically, illegally given to Big Business by saying yeah, the law says that, but we are just not going to enforce it for a year. Why not do that for individuals in America if you will do it for Big Business? Why not? It's the fair thing to do. Once again, it gives a legislative opponent a way out. It gives you a back door to say, well, okay, we are caving in. We are going to allow the individual mandate to be suspended for a year, like we, like the President did, legislating from the executive office. But, again, the answer was no. And in response to Majority Leader Reid's no and the President's no, the President, of course, had called people to the White House later on, after the shutdown, and made clear to the leaders of the House and Senate, you know, I wanted to make clear to you I am not negotiating. Give me my money. Raise my debt ceiling, and then maybe we will negotiate. Later on, in essence, it was give me my money. Raise the debt ceiling. You will be amazed at what I will be willing to negotiate once you give me everything I want. So it was indicated yesterday, by the administration, you know, gee, there is a possibility we may have to delay the individual mandate. And in an article today from Jim Wizner, the title of the article, ``ObamaCare Mandate May Be Delayed. Official says deadline to have insurance could be postponed.'' The article says, the Obama administration may gave Americans extra time to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, postponing when penalties for failing to buy coverage will go into effect, Market Watch has learned. Further down, it says, the administration declined to say whether people who purchase health insurance late in the enrollment period, say, on March 31, would be exempt from a penalty, even if their policy doesn't kick in until April or May; nor would the Department give a specific date by which people would need to buy coverage to escape a fine. The HHS, or Health and Human Services, official, however, indicated that the administration may extend the deadline beyond February 15: we are exploring options currently, and will issue guidance at a later date. The article at marketwatch.com goes on to say the potential extension comes as the Federal health exchanges are under fire for ongoing technological problems that are making it difficult for some people to enroll. The Obama administration has so far resisted GOP pleas to delay the requirement that individuals purchase insurance next year, but has lately expressed frustration with the technical difficulties. Those problems, perhaps the elephant in the room during deadline discussions, may influence a decision to provide an enrollment grace period to avoid fines. There is another problem that the penalty policy or, as rewritten by our Chief Justice, the tax policy, may be in flux. While Health and Human Services referred Market Watch's previous inquiries about the fine and the deadline to avoid it to the Treasury, a spokesperson there referred a request Wednesday back to Health and Human Services, suggesting that the health officials are now the ones writing new rules for the law. For this administration, for Democrats in any part of this body or at the White House to even consider out loud suspending for 1 year the individual mandate is absolutely outrageous, and it exposes, clearly exposes that there were games being played in Congress, and it wasn't by Republicans. It exposes that people knew there were problems with ObamaCare, with the Web sites. They knew that Americans were going to have a nightmare, and were having a nightmare in even trying to get online and review different policies, and they didn't care, just as, obviously, there were people in this administration who could have changed the policy. They didn't care about the veterans. They can say now, oh, yeah, we had a policy that World War II vets were going to get in, or people that were utilizing their First Amendment rights. Well, I was there the first day. There wasn't any mention of that. Those barricades were connected across in front of the World War II Memorial, across in front of the Lincoln Memorial, across in front of the Martin Luther King Memorial. There were barricades, for heavens sake, on the road that just made a loop around the Iwo Jima monument, the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial. They were out to make things as difficult as possible. Apparently, at least as early as Thursday, before the shutdown the following Tuesday, plans were being made to gather barricades. There was an indication at one point some of them may have been rented. We still haven't gotten to the bottom of where they all came from, where all the cones came from to interrupt people's lives around the country, as this administration sought to make it as difficult as possible on Americans. As one park ranger indicated, it was disgusting, the park ranger is reported to have said, but we have been ordered to make things as difficult for people as we can. Well, they were doing a good job. So, for them, anyone in this administration, anyone down the hall, anyone in Congress to now think about, gee, maybe we should suspend the individual mandate, is an outrage. It tells you that there were people in Congress and there were a lot of people down Pennsylvania Avenue who had no consideration for the American people. They were out to score political points. They didn't care. They wanted people to hurt and to suffer so maybe they could win the majority in the House next year, and the American people began to see through this. When the next-to-last compromise of a compromise continuing against ourselves was to suspend the individual mandate for a year, there was no excuse for rejecting that. The Senate should have at least voted that through. What an incredible turn of events for this administration now to say, Yes, we are thinking about suspending the individual mandate. You have got to be kidding me. Nothing could make it more clear to the American people that games were played with the shutdown--and it wasn't by Republicans who kept compromising against ourselves, but it was with the people who kept saying, No, no, no. Then the last thing we did the night before things really shut down was to say, Okay, under the law, the rules, here are our conferees. You appoint your conferees, and we will have this worked out hopefully by morning before people even realize there has been a shutdown. And once again, the answer was, No, no, no. Obviously people in the majority at the other end of the hall wanted the government shut down. And I would expect that in the future, if someone were looking for a modern day Marie Antoinette, who reportedly, in response to the suffering of the people in France, had said, ``Let them eat cake.'' So out of touch with the suffering of the people, if that were actually said. Here is an article by Susan Jones, CNSNews.com, and it is dated today: In an interview with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta Tuesday night, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she won't be enrolling in the problem-plagued health insurance system that she was charged to implement. And this is the quote that the Secretary of Health and Human Services told to CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta. This is the person who is charged with implementing ObamaCare. This is the person who is charged with overseeing ObamaCare. This is the person who has been given--by an overreaching, oppressive ObamaCare bill, she has been given the power over people's lives, over their health care. There is nothing more personal than that. This person who will have so much control, if she is still in office at full implementation, says this: I have created an account on the site. Talking about the ObamaCare site. I have not tried signing up because I have insurance. Mr. Speaker, you had insurance. I had insurance. We had the same policy that every Federal worker in America had the chance to have. There were a number of different policies you could choose from in the Federal employee handbook, the ``Federal employee cafeteria plan,'' as they call it, a number of different insurance policies with private insurance. We had insurance just like Secretary Sebelius has now. The difference is that this bill, this oppressive, government-controlled ObamaCare business, took our health care insurance away. There has been a lot of confusion in America about whether or not Members of Congress are under ObamaCare. We are. As of December 31, we will have lost our insurance. I had a health savings account. I wasn't totally thrilled with it. It doesn't work like it should. There are some glitches that needed to be worked out, but I had a choice. I could choose to have a higher deductible, as I have, and a health savings account that I would manage, but Secretary Sebelius had authority to take that away, and she did. So she says, Gee, I have insurance. Well, so did I. So did all of us in here. Mr. Speaker, so did you. But an oppressive, overreaching Congress took it away. And those Americans were promised over and over and over, if you like your insurance, you can keep it. That promise has now been broken millions of times to Americans. People were told, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. That promise has been broken probably millions of times to Americans. The arrogance when millions and millions of Americans are having their insurance taken away from them, having to get different insurance, having to pay higher deductibles, having to pay higher amounts for their insurance, the arrogance to come back and say, I am not going to get insurance under ObamaCare. I already have insurance, that takes a lot of unmitigated gall. You might as well say, Let them eat cake. I have got my insurance. Let them eat cake. Maybe people want a different Health and Human Services Secretary as a result of the horrendous job that was done in preparing this rollout, but I would think the head of Health and Human Services, to have this kind of arrogance, should not remain in the position with an attitude like that. It would be like the president of American Airlines refusing to fly on anything but United. In the real world, people would care so much about their own product, that is what they would use. They would be embarrassed to refuse to use the product they were forcing on others. Airlines aren't forcing their products on us. This is being forced on us. And the one who is in charge of the forcing is too good to have ObamaCare insurance. Now, the difference was, the Office of Personnel Management had put into the law something that wasn't in the law, and that was that Members of Congress would continue to have the Federal Government, which are the taxpayers, paying for over 70 percent of our monthly health care costs. We pay a little over a third--well, actually, not quite a third--and the government, the taxpayers, pay over two-thirds, so OPM had issued an order that that could continue even though the law didn't provide for it. I have indicated that I am not going to accept that. Likely, I will be paying a fine unless the individual mandate is suspended for a year. Just to indicate how bad this rollout is, this is from the Washington Free Beacon, headline, ``HHS Finds Two Enrollees for Pro-ObamaCare Ads. Ad claims website is `very easy to use.' '' This is by Elizabeth Harrington. It says: New advertisements promoting ObamaCare by Health and Human Services claim HealthCare.gov is ``very easy to use'' despite a flood of reports about glitches and a dearth of users being able to actually access the site and purchase insurance. President Barack Obama held a press conference on Monday in defense of his health care law, saying it is ``not just a Web site,'' which has been under scrutiny for its disastrous rollout since October 1. Coverage of the site has been largely negative, with pundits and reporters alike at news outlets from The Washington Post to The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times noting the problems with the Web site. However, Health and Human Services is out with new ads touting its success. For heaven's sake, we ought to have a law against the government lying to the American people. We ought to start with a lie like that. The new ads ``feature two individuals who have received media attention for beating the odds to sign up.'' ``The site was very easy to use, and the customer service representatives were patient and helpful,'' she said. The woman was identified online as Deborah Lielasus, 54, a self-employed grant writer, who has written grants for HHS. Well, how about that. One of the two people in the ads that they were able to find to talk about how wonderful the ObamaCare Web site was happens to write grants for HHS. How about that. See, back when I was a judge and chief justice, we would call that evidence that could be used to impeach her credibility. Because of that link with Health and Human Services, she has a direct interest in promoting how good things are at Health and Human Services so that she could potentially get favorable treatment. That is what you would call it in a court of law. And in a court of public opinion, reasonable people might be embarrassed that all you can find is somebody who has a pecuniary interest in promoting HHS. But this article points out: Her process for enrolling was not as smooth as the ad suggests. According to the Associated Press, Lielasus was only able to create an account from before the Web site crashed on October 2. ``As a grant writer who does a lot of research on Federal Web sites, Deborah Lielasus was impressed by how easy it was to use the new online insurance market that launched Tuesday--until it stopped working,'' the report said. ``They're telling me the system is down at the moment,'' Lielasus said. Lielasus told the Washington Free Beacon that enrolling took several days. ``On the first day, I was only able to register for an account, but 2 or 3 days later, I was able to submit an application and enroll,'' she said in an email. Lielasus said her experience with HealthCare.gov was ``primarily positive.'' `I expected some technology glitches in a rollout of this magnitude, particularly on the first day when the site was flooded with reporters as well as individuals trying to enroll,'' she said. Lielasus appears to be one of the few who have successfully enrolled in New Hampshire. An ObamaCare navigator tried to sign up 45 people during the first week, ``but she wasn't able to enroll anyone online because of the glitches,'' according to the Concord Monitor . . . Lielasus said that she does not recall who contacted her to be in the video for HHS, only that, ``I believe I was approached for the video to share my personal story.'' A second HHS video features Daniel McNaughton, who was the only person able to sign up for health insurance during ObamaCare's first week, the Orlando Sentinel. McNaughton said in his ad that with HealthCare.gov, it was ``pretty easy'' to shop for insurance. ``I already had health insurance, but I just wanted to see if I could do a little bit better on the health insurance marketplace, and I did,'' he said. ``Once I was on the site, it was pretty easy for me to compare plans. I was able to pick a much higher quality plan, and because of my income as a student, I only pay about 70 bucks a month for it.'' Well, the article goes on, and it says: On Facebook, McNaughton posted a link to the plan he signed up for, which includes a $3,000 deductible, which doubles to $6,000 out-of-network. McNaughton, a 22-year-old male, will have maternity care covered, which is an ``essential benefit'' mandated by the health care law. So another great thing, when the Federal Government decides to create a one-size-fits-all, single young men must pay for maternity care for themselves. Because he only makes $15,000 a year, McNaughton is eligible for a subsidy and will pay about $70 per month, according to the Sentinel. He is known as one of the few Floridians who have successfully signed up for ObamaCare. The Miami Herald calls enrollees urban legends. He is only one of two people found by the Herald, which solicited readers for stories of enrollees in the first weeks after the launch. That's weeks, plural: Nearly 2 weeks after the Federal Government launched the online Health Insurance Marketplace at HealthCare.gov, individuals who successfully used the choked-up Web site to enroll for a subsidized health insurance plan have reached a status akin to urban legend: everyone has heard of them, but very few people have actually met one. It is pretty sad, but that is what happens when the Federal Government takes charge of people's personal lives. Here is an article from National Review Online by Andrew Johnson: An Iowa City man may have the distinction as the Hawkeye State's first ObamaCare enrollee, but it didn't come easy. Edward Voss, a computer programer, told the Des Moines Register he had to try more than a hundred times before he was ultimately able to sign into HealthCare.gov. Voss said he didn't know whether or not he had actually enrolled in a plan until CoOpportunity Health, one of Iowa's two carriers in the exchange, called him on Friday to congratulate him for being its first enrolled customer. Even though he was eventually successful, Voss criticized the Web site for resembling one from the 1990s, saying it was one of the worst he's seen. He recommended that the administration consider shutting the site down for at least a week in order to address the problems. It's hard to fix things while you're up and running, he said. That's rather amazing. Over a hundred times to sign up. I guess he probably got maternity care, too, that individual young man. Here is an article from CNS News dated today--this afternoon--by Ali Meyer. The first line says: House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from California-- Also, the Speaker who helped push through ObamaCare without any Republican input or votes, and who famously said, We'll have to pass it to find out what's in it, this article says she: --admitted Wednesday that the ObamaCare Web site is beyond glitches, adding that somebody should fix it. Well, it seems to this person speaking that the somebody that should fix it should be led by the former Speaker, who shoved it through this House without America's support, without any Republican support, and without having any clue what was really in it. That is somebody that ought to work on fixing it. Another article from National Review Online, by John Fund. Hopefully, he wouldn't mind me calling him a friend: The no-excuse administration has a whopper of an excuse for ObamaCare. President Obama told the Nation there is no excuse for the disastrous rollout of the health care exchanges that are central on ObamaCare. But that didn't stop Kathleen Sebelius, his Secretary of Health and Health and Human Services and in overall charge of the project, from making excuses in a CNN interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta yesterday. She claimed to Gupta that President Obama hadn't been told of any potential problems prior to the launch of the exchanges on October 1--a dereliction of duty any way one defines it. But there was also this startling explanation of what went wrong at HHS. We talked about having testing going forward, and if we had an ideal situation and could have built a product and, you know, a 5-year period of time, we probably would have taken 5 years, but we didn't have 5 years. And certainly, Americans who rely on health coverage didn't have 5 years for us to wait. We wanted to make sure we made good on this final implementation of the law. Well, okay, she only had 3\1/2\ years since ObamaCare became law in early 2010 to oversee the design of the exchanges and the Web site accompanying them. So now she tells us she needed 5 years: Bruce Webster, a noted IT consultant to many companies, is stunned that Sebelius thinks that she needed 5 years, but only had 2, as somehow an excuse for this disaster. That's like Boeing saying, We know the plane crashed, but we needed 4 years to build it and a year to test it, but we only had 2 years. Color me boggled. Bureaucratic baffle-gab like that was probably behind yesterday's White House announcement that it had, as Bloomberg reported, tapped former Acting Office of Management and Budget Director Jeff Zients to work with the team overseeing repairs to the ObamaCare Web site. Zients was named last month as the director of the National Economic Council, but his arrival there will now be delayed as he takes on his new Sisyphean task. It is pretty clear that the White House has, as bureaucrats say, minimal confidence in Secretary Sebelius to deliver a functioning health care exchange system. I am told that, for now, her job is safe because firing her would prompt cries from liberals that she was the scapegoat for mistakes made by higher-ups such as her boss, who signed the legislation creating this mess and then failed to hire the proper people to ride herd on its implementation. It also brings back to mind, through this disastrous rollout of ObamaCare, for which Republicans here in the House, with Speaker Boehner leading--he actually did a favor, with our consent, to say, Here's a way out: You want a CR, you want a continuing resolution, you just keep getting the same massive amount of money; you want the debt ceiling raised to who knows what; we'll do that. We'll give you an out on how bad ObamaCare is. Let's suspend it for a year. When that didn't work--let's suspend the individual mandate. That gives you an out and allows us to postpone some of the harm that is going to come to America from ObamaCare, and they still said, ``No.'' Shut the government down for over 2 weeks, hurting Americans, refusing to provide death penalty benefits to families of fallen warriors in combat, even though they had the power under the bill we passed before the shutdown; making it as uncomfortable and difficult for people as possible, all the while when they were given an out by Republicans to just suspend it for a year. It is an out. It saves grief for America for a year. They wouldn't have it. Now I know some have said, Well, the problem the administration is in is if they actually postponed ObamaCare for a year, after so many have already lost their insurance, there is no alternative. There is nothing we could do. Gee, what would anybody do? They have lost their insurance. Well, this is just a suggestion, but I bet we in Congress could get a majority. I can't imagine there wouldn't be friends across the aisle among our Democratic friends who would agree to this, as they see how problematic ObamaCare is for Americans, and knowing that people think Federal employees have had this gold-plated health insurance policy is okay. I had better before I came here. I had better when I was in private practice. But given where we are, there are private insurance companies that have provided insurance policies for what is called a cafeteria-style group of choices so every Federal employee in the country, before ObamaCare, could read through the thick handbook and say, Okay, I have studied the different insurance companies, the different plans, the different costs, and this is the one I choose or that's the one I choose. How about if for the next year, 2 years, give America a break? Let's say any health insurance company that is part of a Federal exchange or a State cafeteria plan or a local government cafeteria plan, we make those available to anybody. If it is a local plan, anybody in that area. If it is in the State, anybody in that State. If it is in the Federal plan, any insurance in that plan or any insurance company that wants to offer the same type coverage for the same price. Let's offer to every American across the country the same private insurance choices that Federal employees have until ObamaCare kicks in. But let's give them all of the choices that we had up through this year and just say we will suspend ObamaCare. Yes, Mr. President; yes, Harry Reid; you shut down the government for over 2 weeks to make life difficult for Americans when you didn't have to. We are more interested in helping Americans. So how about a compromise plan that just says, Hey, why don't we let Americans across the country choose from any of the Federal choices we had before ObamaCare, any State choices, local choices, and you can allow employers, since the President is suspending the business mandate, whether there are more than 50 employees, less than 50 employees, let them choose from those. If their employees choose the policy and the employer wants to pay for part or all, let them do that. Let's give them another year before we force them under the iron hand of the government. Let them choose from any of those, from private insurance companies. Let them make the choices Federal employees had until ObamaCare. It would still take away the problem of the preexisting condition because the market would be so wide, the people signing up would be so numerous, it could afford to take care of that. If you want to leave people on that are 26, heck, I don't care, 28. Normally, people in their twenties are in good health. So let them stay on. We offered to agree to a bill like that before ObamaCare ever passed, but the Democrats were so insistent on their way--not the highway, but their way, period--and now 3\1/2\ years later we see the consequences. We ought to have unlimited amounts. If you have got a health savings account under a Federal plan, State plan, local plan, or if your insurance company that provided the employer insurance plan and the employer wants to continue that next year, even though it has already been canceled, if the health insurance company wanted to re-extend that, let that be part of the agreement during the suspension period of ObamaCare. Let's allow people to put pre-tax dollars--as much as they want to-- in Health Savings Accounts with the understanding that, once it is in there, it can't be used for anything but health care. I have a fear there will be people who might accumulate over the years $80,000, $100,000--well, I don't care. I will pay a 40, 45 percent penalty in interest. Man, just think. I could have two or three good bass boats for that, but we couldn't allow that because it is too important for people's health. Once that money is in a Health Savings Account, it can't be used for anything but health care. Let's do what Ben Carson suggested, and let's start encouraging young people to have Health Savings Accounts. Let's do that. Those who are in Medicare and Medicaid can stay there. If they have the wherewithal to sign up under one of the plans--the Federal options--the Federal employees have had until ObamaCare passed, let them do that if they would rather, but still they will be in Medicare and Medicaid. Let's suspend the hurt that is being done to Medicare through ObamaCare. Let's suspend the hurt that is being done to young people. If one is a young man, single, then until such time as we have a pregnant young man in his twenties, let's don't make him pay for maternity care. There is no need for it. Just when you think it couldn't get much worse--this is from the Washington Free Beacon dated today, this afternoon--then we also find out the NSA spied on 124 billion phone calls in one month, and those are the people who want to run our health care--the Federal Government. An article from The Washington Times from this afternoon, today: House Speaker John A. Boehner predicted Wednesday that, by the end of the month, more Americans will have lost their insurance by being kicked off existing health plans than the number that was able to sign up in the flawed online HealthCare.gov Web site, and the early numbers may back him up. A massive number of people have now gotten their notices that they have lost their insurance or will effective January 1. Here is an article that is on the Breitbart Web site, but it is talking about a CNN story: CNN: ObamaCare site doomed. Riddled with security dangers. This reports that today, on the CNN Money site, there is a terrific story about the problems surrounding the ObamaCare Web site. The story includes all kinds of new information from a host of experts. Most of the news is flat-out terrible: A half billion dollar site needs to be rebuilt from scratch. The site has an unwieldy 500 million lines of computer code--it took just 500,000 lines of code to send a rover to Mars--and that code of ObamaCare is riddled with security holes that could result in one of the biggest breaches in American history. That was quoting from CNN, that article by John Nolte. It is staggering. State exchange enrollments are mostly Medicaid, not private insurance plans. This is another story on Breitbart by Dr. Susan Berry: Defenders of President Obama's signature health reform legislation claim the States that put effort into establishing their own exchanges, mostly Democrat-led, are signing people up successfully for ObamaCare. A new report, however, indicates most of the individuals signing up in these State-run exchanges are enrolling in Medicaid. Pretty disingenuous. Then just as you think you can't stand any more about the Federal Government--they are in your bedroom, your bathroom, your kitchen, all into your private lives; they will have your medical records, and they will be giving them to navigators who are not thoroughly vetted so as to keep it secure, and it will be put online where people are saying it is a dream for hackers to steal personal information--and just when you think you can't take anything more in the way of bad news, here is a story from the AP today. It is by Stephen Ohlemacher with the AP: The headline reads: ``700 IRS Contract Workers Owe $5.4 Million in Back Taxes.'' It kind of reminds us of the old Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner. He signed four different documents, certifying--basically swearing--that if he would be given all of the money as an independent contractor instead of having money withheld, he would certify--he absolutely was swearing--that he would take care of paying his taxes, and he didn't do it until he got nominated to be the Secretary of the Treasury. As one Treasury employee told me privately--she didn't want to make it public because she didn't want to lose her job--if employees of the IRS were to have done what Timothy Geithner had done in not paying the taxes he swore he would pay, they would be fired on the spot at the IRS. Of course, that was before Lois Lerner and her crew weaponized the IRS so they could go after conservative groups. Anyway, it is bad news when it comes to ObamaCare; but, Mr. Speaker, like I say, we offered repeatedly to agree--in fact, we didn't just offer. We passed a bill that would allow ObamaCare to be suspended for a year to, if possible, get its act together and give an out to the President. The President and Harry Reid could have said, Well, those Republicans in the House--we didn't want to do it, but we needed a continuing resolution to keep the government going. We needed the debt ceiling raised, so we went ahead. We had to. They had us over a barrel. We agreed to suspend ObamaCare for a year. Gee, those pesky Republicans made us do it. That is a political way out that they had, that we gave as Republicans in the House, that we extended as a gift. We passed it as a House bill. We extended it as a gift and gave them an out. That would have given them an extra year to try to get the act together; but, oh, no, they were more interested in scoring political points because they knew the mainstream media would give them cover, that they would blame Republicans 100 percent even though it was 100 percent not Republicans. It was the people who refused to even appoint conferees to try to work it out before the shutdown really took hold. It was the Democrats who refused to agree to just suspend the individual mandate, and the compromise before that was to suspend the bill for a year. They wouldn't even do that. How sad for the mainstream media that the best question about ObamaCare and the horrendous roll-out of its Web site was not asked by somebody at the ABC, CBS, NBC evening news, but was asked by Jay Leno after finding out that the President said, We are putting our very best people on fixing this Web site. In essence, Jay Leno asked an entirely appropriate question: Wait a minute. We are talking about our own health care. Why wouldn't you have put our best people on starting the Web site instead of waiting until it crashed so miserably? The answer is unknown, but the American people deserve an answer. Are you so intent on having the Federal Government take over people's private lives--their most personal medical secrets--that you would force this horrible health care system upon them? I am certainly willing. I will bet you we could find a majority in the House, and if Harry Reid would let it come to a vote in the Senate, they would say, Okay. Let's suspend it for a year. Come on. Maybe make it 2 years. During that time, everybody in America--every employer--can either get their insurance back if the insurance companies will do it; and if they want, they can get the private insurance that we used to have as part of our cafeteria plan for every Federal employee in America. Let Americans choose from that. Don't force these ObamaCare exchanges on America. Let them choose like Federal employees have done. Let them choose. Mr. Speaker, I would like to pay a brief tribute to a patriotic man who was devoted to the military, devoted to seeing that the military had what it needed, devoted to America. C.W. Bill Young will have his funeral tomorrow in Florida. He was 82 years old. There have been plenty of tributes written about Bill Young. There will be many more written and many more spoken tomorrow, and I will look forward to hearing those at his funeral, but there is nothing that could be said that could surpass the witness he was to who he was. I talked to him numerous times. Sometimes I had questions. Sometimes I had points to make. When I had questions, he always had time. He was always honest--completely honest, very sincerely honest. He was a kind, decent, honest man. We miss when we lose a kind, decent, honest man. Bill Young, you will be missed. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I want to emphasize the point being made by my friend, Mr. Franks from Arizona, about the origination clause. I have been talking about this for 3\1/2\ years of when the Senate took a House bill that provided a tax credit for first-time home buyers who were in the military or veterans, took out every single word and took that short little bill and expanded that by thousands of pages--my copy was around 2,500 pages--it had nothing to do with military or veteran home buyers. It had nothing to do with that. They inserted health care. We have found out since it is costing more; and if you like your doctor, you're going to lose your doctor, and if you like your insurance policy, there is a good chance you may lose it. Fortunately, not everybody is losing their doctor, but the promises have been badly broken. It turns out those people, including the head of this administration, were just flat wrong when they said, If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor; if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. For example, there is a story here from Kaiser Health News from Anna Gorman and Julie Appleby, dated October 21. I won't read all three pages, but this is what it points out: Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies. The main reason insurers offer is that the policies fall short of what the Affordable Care Act requires starting January 1. On further it says: But the cancellation notices, which began arriving in August, have shocked many consumers in light of President Barack Obama's promise that people could keep their plans if they liked them. ``I don't feel like I need to change, but I have to,'' said Jeff Learned, a television editor in Los Angeles, who must find a new plan for his teenage daughter, who has a health condition that has required multiple surgeries. He liked his policy. She had a pre-existing condition. Now, because of ObamaCare, he has lost the insurance for him and his daughter, and he is going to have to find another plan, which will likely cost much more. The article goes on and says: An estimated 14 million people purchase their own coverage because they don't get it through their jobs. Calls to insurers in several States showed that many have sent notices. Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the State. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people--about half of its individual business in the State. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent. The article further down talks about other notices and says: Blue Shield of California sent roughly 119,000 cancellation notices out in mid-September, about 60 percent of its individual business. About two-thirds of those policyholders will see rate increases in their new policies, said spokesman Steve Shivinsky. The President, Jay Carney, this administration, Senators who quoted this, Democrats, leaders here in the House, owe millions of people an apology. They owe an apology to those who they told that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, and people that were told that if you like your policy, you can keep it. I know that our President has traveled the world apologizing for things he did not do that were done in prior generations, prior times in this country; but I think in order to keep credibility in this country, it is important that instead of apologizing for things you had nothing to do with, it is important to apologize when people trust you and you make promises and those promises turn out to be totally false. I understand that the President's spokesman may have indicated today that they may need to suspend the individual mandate. Mr. Speaker, let me tell you that after Harry Reid and the President refused to suspend the individual mandate--that was the third compromise we proposed before the shutdown. They said, Absolutely not, under no circumstances. Their actions made it very clear that they were saying, We are willing to shut this government down. We have already worked out the purchase and rental and the use of barricades to keep World War II veterans in wheelchairs from getting to see things they want to see. We have worked out barricades for the Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial, that so many come to Washington to see. We worked out barricades across the entire Lincoln Memorial plaza. When I asked one park ranger the second day of the shutdown, how many they normally have out there, she said four. Actually, I've been there all hours of the day and night. I rarely see more than one or two in the area; yet I was shown a photograph that had mounted police, most of them on horseback in the picture, with a few of them standing around. It looked like there were at least 16 mounted police there to try to enforce the barricades at the World War II Memorial, which would violate the existing law that says in the event of a shutdown, you are not supposed to spend more money than you were before. Yet this administration, in order to make the hurt be felt across the country by veterans, by people who had their one-time vacation planned for a national park, this administration and Harry Reid were willing to shut down the government, rather than just suspend the mandate that individuals have to buy this insurance. Now they have got to buy it in the next few months. They have got to buy it. By their actions, they were saying, We are willing to shut the government down for over 2 weeks to keep from suspending that mandate to individuals. Yes, the President already issued what should be an illegal order saying that he was not going to enforce the mandate for Big Business under ObamaCare. So this side of the aisle repeatedly said, Look, if you are going to suspend the mandate for Big Business--businesses with over 50 employees--then why not just agree to suspend for a year, the same amount of time you are giving to Big Business, do that for the individuals? Then, as the shutdown continued, we saw what a disaster, what a train wreck it was. The Democrats that called it a train wreck, a nightmare, they were exactly right. It was playing out in front of us, and still Harry Reid and this President said, We don't care. We are not suspending the individual mandate. We are forcing individuals to do what we are not making businesses do. Even though it is in the law required for businesses to do it, that seemed like a pretty easy ask. That was where we were in the negotiations, right before the last bill we passed about an hour after midnight on October 1, which I saw as basically capitulation. All right, all right, Harry Reid, Mr. President, we are not demanding that you suspend the individual mandate as you have done for Big Business, but here are our conferees, negotiators. It is what the Constitution anticipates, and it is what the law and the rules require. Harry Reid, again, by his actions said, We would rather shut this down. We would rather have mounted police out there in the face of our veterans. And as we saw when veterans ultimately took barricades to the White House, we saw, for the first time in my memory, officers of the Federal Government in uniform who were supposed to protect Americans' rights, instead for the first time in my memory, being used, the first time in my lifetime that I can remember, to take away Americans' and specifically veterans' rights that they fought for for all Americans. It is almost unthinkable. It is like a bad dream, the Federal Government hiring officers to take away Americans' rights. How far is this administration willing to go to make Americans hurt, to get the money they want? How ironic that leaders in this administration, going to the top, would use the term ``extortion.'' Extortion is when you do some action threatening someone with action if you don't give them all the money that they demand. I always thought when Jay Carney said that Congress is putting a gun to their heads to be paid for doing their job, that that didn't make sense because this is exactly the other way around. Some of our Democratic friends are very good at taking action that is offensive to most Americans and then blaming their opponents for doing what actually they are doing when their opponents weren't even doing what was alleged. That is basically what we saw here, people saying Republicans in the House were using extortion. Hardly. The Constitution of the United States gives the Congress the purse strings, control over the money. What this administration said by their actions and made very clear is, We will harm World War II veterans, Korean veterans, Vietnam veterans; we will harm veterans by preventing them from getting to the cemetery in Normandy, being able to pull over and take a picture of Mount Rushmore, trying to take advantage of the Claude Moore farm that operates off of individual expenditures; they would put up barricades at a World War II Memorial that was built entirely with private funds that has a trust fund of millions of dollars that is used for operating expenses; they would go out of their way to spend more extra money just to make Americans' lives more difficult and unpleasant, all the while saying, We will never agree to suspend the individual mandate, the requirement that individuals buy a certain level of insurance or be fined the minimum of either $95 or 1 percent of their income tax, whichever is lower. One of these days some of the fact-checking people will actually admit that I have been right and they have been wrong. Even with subsidies, people that make 133 percent of the poverty level are projected to come out of pocket potentially thousands of dollars, one, two, three--one projection that I had read before I talked about this ran $3,000 even after the subsidies. And so, you know, all the mainstream media that is doing everything they can to protect the President, some are coming around and realizing: Wait a minute; there were a lot of things that weren't true. And I appreciate NBC making some of these stories the stories they should be. But it is appalling what is happening to Americans, what is happening to the health insurance they once had. It is time for real reform. And as I have said from this podium, going back 3, 3\1/2\ years, a bill that starts out as a fraud is not likely to get better. And when you take a House bill, because of the origination clause, article I, section 7, all bills that raise revenue must originate in the House. Now, it could and had been considered that ObamaCare was not a revenue-raising bill. But when Chief Justice John Roberts did the unthinkable and rewrote legislation that clearly defined itself as a penalty and rewrote that as a tax--even though at page 15 he made clear that it was a penalty; it wasn't a tax. It was penalizing people for not doing an act. So under the anti-injunction statute, it was clearly a penalty, not a tax. But then to save it, he had to actually do the unthinkable and say further in the opinion, actually, it is a tax, not a penalty. Well, once he defined it as a tax, in order to rule it constitutional, then, clearly, that is a bill that raises revenue. Clearly, article I, section 7 kicks in, and a bill to raise revenue, which is what taxes do, must originate in the House. I have heard people say, who have not done the legal research, well, the Supreme Court has decided many times that you don't have to have precisely the same bill when the Senate strikes language in the House bill and puts other language in it and sends it back, then it still originated in the House. Mr. Speaker, I would submit to you that when you strike every single word of a bill, including the title about it being a tax credit for first-time home buyers in the Armed Forces or veterans, you even strike the title and substitute therein about a 2,500-page bill that is all about the government running health care, about getting health care records controlled by Washington, about creating navigators to get your personal information--which, actually, we have been told is just a dream for identity thieves because of how much information will be accessible, be stolen by hackers--you put all of that stuff in there, dictating about what has to be put in vending machines, notices that have to be put, requirements for restaurants--I think there is a requirement for restaurants, they may have to have a place specifically for nursing mothers--you put all of those in there, including issues--and I love the fact that women nurse babies. I think it is one the greatest gifts God gave, but that has nothing do with a tax credit for first-time home buyers in the military or veterans, so, clearly, that bill did not originate in the House. It originated in the Senate. When the only thing that is left of the bill that originated in the House is a number, like 3590, that is not a bill that originates in the House. It originated in the Senate. And since we now know after the Supreme Court opinion that Chief Justice Roberts rewrote the law, which the Constitution simply does not allow, but the Supreme Court did it anyway--there are checks and balances. Congress could check the Supreme Court when they act unconstitutionally like that themselves. But he rewrote it to call it a tax after he called it a penalty, so that means it had to originate in the Senate. It did not originate in the House. And what limited case law there is indicates it absolutely must be germane to the underlying bill, and that is not germane. There is no way that is germane to first-time home buyers. It is about the government controlling people's health care. It sets up a panel that will decide: Do you get a pacemaker or do you not get a pacemaker? You are too old for a pacemaker. You are going to die early because we are not going to let you have a pacemaker. Are you going to get the surgery you need? You know, like people in England, Canada, others, again, I have had a number of people from England and Canada go, you know: Where are we going to go now when we need immediate treatment when you screw up the greatest health care system in the world? It certainly needed reform. But what people need to understand is you can look at the entire history, recorded history of mankind, going back to the very beginning, when we knew what mankind was doing, and some medical historians say it was around 1900, 1910, 1912, maybe it was during World War I, 1916, '17, '18, maybe it was during the great influenza outbreak and protocols were established, but somewhere around that time, about 100 years ago, it has been said that for the first time in the entire human history you had a better chance of getting well than of getting worse after seeing a doctor. When you consider that just in 100 years this country has been at the forefront of saving lives, enhancing lives, improving quality of life, making incredible breakthroughs in medicine and health care--reforms were needed, but not the government taking it over and making it run like the Post Office, not the government taking it over and making it run like the Department of Education or Energy or Interior, that slows everything down, because when somebody needs heart surgery, they don't need the government in the process of slowing things down. It is incredible what has been inflicted upon man by man, and the ObamaCare law is inflicting massive cost increases for most Americans, higher deductibles, running many doctors out of health care. It is time that this administration, if Jay Carney is willing to now say, after the President and Harry Reid shut down the government for over 2 weeks over a little temper tantrum that they did not want to suspend the individual mandate, that is what we were down to, and then after that, okay, just produce conferees--we have got ours; we will get an agreement hopefully by morning so most Americans will never even know the government was shut down--refused to even have conferees to work it out before morning because before that they weren't going to suspend the individual mandate. They would rather shut down the government indefinitely than allow individuals to have the same break that they gave to Big Business. I am a fan of Big Business as long as they treat people fairly and right. Most do. But now to say, well, we may suspend the individual mandate, it means all the suffering this administration inflicted upon our veterans, on people on vacation, people that needed Federal services and didn't get them, on those whose loved ones were killed in Afghanistan, and this administration, though we gave them the power to pay the death benefits, wouldn't even do that, played games with their death benefits while they were grieving. This administration was willing to do all that, knowing we are probably going to have to do what the Republicans were asking anyway, but we will try to get--we know the mainstream media will blame it 100 percent on the Republicans. We know that is going to happen. They will give us cover, and so we can refuse something as reasonable as just suspending the individual mandate for a year, something as reasonable as just appointing conferees and working it out before morning. We can refuse to do those things because the mainstream media, MSNBC, CNN, they will give us cover, they will deceive the American public about who is at fault. And I am wondering, if this administration goes about suspending the individual mandate that would have prevented there ever being a shutdown in the first place, which was the next to last thing we did before we just capitulated and said, all right, appoint conferees, if they are willing to do that now, I still have hope that even CNN will have to recognize that it was the President and Harry Reid that shut the government down, that inflicted pain and suffering upon the American people who needed Federal services for something that they were agreeable to do anyway. We will see. But then again, this is the same administration who weaponized the IRS to go after conservatives. Here is a story from today at Watchdog.org, by Kenric Ward, ``IRS pays illegal immigrants $4.2 billion while stalling Tea Parties.'' It says: On January 19, 2007, file photo, the U.S. Border Patrol detains a large group of suspected immigrants at the Arizona- Mexico border in Sasabe, Arizona. While harrying and stalling Tea Party groups seeking nonprofit status, the Internal Revenue Service mailed $4.2 billion in child credit checks to undocumented immigrants. Critics say midlevel IRS bureaucrats continue to abuse the Additional Child Tax Credit program by dispensing $1,000 checks to families in this country illegally. ``The law needs clarification that undocumented immigrants are not eligible,'' Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told Watchdog.org in a statement. To make Congress' intent clear--that only legal U.S. residents are entitled to the Additional Child Tax Credits-- Grassley cosponsored a clarifying amendment with Senator Mike Enzi, Republican from Wyoming. ``Unfortunately, the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat from Nevada, cut off debate, so we weren't given the chance to offer our amendment,'' said Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. So all the while--and I spoke to another Tea Party group this weekend, different races, all ages, even kids, very, very senior people, both genders, people from all walks of life were there, and out of hundreds of people at that event, there was only one who got more benefits from the government than he paid in. That is the common thread I see with the vast majority of Tea Party people. They pay income tax. Those who identify with the Tea Party are a majority of those paying income tax, the 53 percent, 52 percent, whatever it is. They ought to be able to say something without being called all kinds of criminal names, without being slandered and libeled. They just want fairness, and they are not seeing it. Mr. Speaker, when it comes to the shutdown and that this administration was willing to make the American people--World War II veterans and so many others--suffer, the survivors of the loved ones who died in Afghanistan, make them suffer, when all they had to do was suspend the individual mandate for a year--and they are talking about doing it anyway--the American people ought to be furious. Like I say, I still hold onto that hope that springs eternal in the human breast that even the mainstream media will figure out who was actually at fault for the shutdown, when Republicans submitted compromise after compromise after compromise that included things the administration may do anyway. If we are going to get this country turned around, America is going to have to wake up to who is causing the problems and who isn't. With that, 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. In an article from WND Radio published October 10, they wrote: Sticker Shock! Americans Floored By ObamaCare Cost. The technical problems with the ObamaCare insurance exchanges are no surprise, are further evidence the whole program should be delayed or scrapped and Americans will be even more horrified when they can get somewhere on the Web site, according to health care policy expert Grace-Marie Turner. The first 10 days of the ObamaCare insurance exchanges have been a technological and public relations mess for the administration. Many Americans have suffered through hours of stalled or crashed Web sites, no reporter has yet been able to navigate the site, and many people have entered personal information that online security experts believe could make them targets for identity theft. When WND spent hours online and on the phone trying to get a cost estimate for an ObamaCare plan, it was told to expect a quote by January 1. As WND reported, anecdotal evidence on the government's own health care Facebook page suggests both problems are significant factors. A few users seemed simply confused, but the overwhelming number of comments were critical, and many of those were scathing. Complaints about the application process had three recurring themes: long waits, glitches, and sticker shock. There was also much ridicule of the site's ability to handle ``tremendous demand.'' Information technology experts told The Wall Street Journal the Web site ``appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation.'' Another article from WND published yesterday--I am not sure I like the title, `` `Pulling Out Hair' Over ObamaCare Web Site `Nightmare.' '' Sometimes people look okay with their hair out. Sometimes they don't. The article says: Forget, for a minute, all those arguments about the new health care law's ``death panels,'' the forced cancellation of existing coverage, the violations of religious liberty, and the transformation of full-time jobs into part-time work. Even people who want to sign up for ObamaCare are finding it impossible. Digital Trends reports the healthcare.gov Web site already has ``shut down, crapped out, stalled, and misloaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.'' That is even though taxpayers paid ``more than $634 million'' for ``the digital equivalent of a rock,'' the report said. The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other critical components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 States it serves from purchasing health care at competitive rates--healthcare.gov's primary purpose,'' the report said. It goes on to talk about the massive nightmares of the people that are trying to sign on to it. Here is an article from Peggy Noonan from The Wall Street Journal: ``Now is the Time to Delay ObamaCare'': The Obama administration has an implementation problem. More than any administration of the modern era, they know how to talk but have trouble doing. They give speeches about ObamaCare, but when it is unveiled, what the public sees is a Potemkin village designed by the noted architect Rube Goldberg. They speak ringingly about the case for action in Syria but can't build support in the U.S. foreign policy community, in Congress, among the public. Recovery summer is always next summer. They have trouble implementing. Which, of course, is the most boring but crucial part of governing. It is not enough to talk; you must perform. There is an odd sense with members of this administration that they think words are actions. Maybe that is why they tweet so much. Maybe they imagine Bashir Assad seeing their tweets and musing: ``Ah, Samantha is upset--then I shall change my entire policy, in respect for her emotions!'' That gets us to the real story of last week, this week, and the future, the one beyond the shutdown, the one that normal people are both fully aware of and fully understand, and that is the utter and catastrophic debut of ObamaCare. Even for those who expected problems, and that would be everyone who follows government, it has been a shock. They had 3.5 years to set it up! They knew exactly when it would be unveiled, on October 1, 2013. On that date, they knew millions could be expected to go online to see if they benefit. And it goes on. It is an excellent article. She says: A quick summary of what didn't work. Those who went on Federal and State exchanges reported malfunctions during login, constant error messages, inability to create new accounts, frozen screens, confusing instructions, endless wait times, help lines that put people on hold and then cut them off, lost passwords and user names. After the administration floated the fiction that the problems were due to heavy usage, the Journal tracked down insurance and technology experts who said the real problems were inadequate coding and flaws in the architecture of the system. . . . The founder of McAfee slammed the system's lack of security on Fox Business Network, calling it a hacker's happiest nocturnal fantasy. He predicted millions of identity thefts. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius--grilled, surprisingly, on ``The Daily Show''-- sounded like--and that is unkind, but--she failed to justify why, in the middle of the chaos, individuals cannot be granted a 1-year delay, just as businesses have been. More ominously, many of those who got into the system complained of sticker shock--high premiums, high deductibles. She goes on to say, talking about Republicans: They would make a mistake in dropping ObamaCare as an issue. A few weeks ago, they mistakenly demanded funding--a move to please their base. They will be tempted to abandon even the word ``ObamaCare'' now, but this is exactly when they should keep, as the center of their message and their intent, not defunding ObamaCare but delaying it. Do they really want to turn abrupt focus to elusive Medicare cuts just when it has become obvious to the American people that parts of ObamaCare (like the ability to enroll) are unworkable? The Republicans should press harder than ever to delay ObamaCare--to kick it back, allow the administration to at least create a functioning Web site, and improve what can be improved. There is an article from CNN from today about Utah's national parks will reopen despite ongoing government shutdown. Utah will reopen its five national parks by Saturday, as well as three other nationally run locations. Utah's Governor Gary Herbert made the announcement Thursday, saying a deal had been reached with the U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. ``Utah agrees to pay the National Park Service up to $1.67 million--$166,572 per day--to reopen eight national sites in Utah for up to 10 days.'' The sad thing is, they don't have to do that. We passed the bill to keep them all going. We did it at a rate, at an amount the Senate already agrees to. All they have got to do is pass it, send it to the President, and it will be taken care of. I have an article here from the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. It is a research summary. Before I mention that, I want to mention something about one of our Senators, a Senator from Arizona. Some people have tried to take things I said in an inappropriate way. I know that Senator from Arizona. We owe him a great deal for what he endured on our behalf in North Vietnam. There is no question about it. And I know that Senator would never intentionally hurt this country. But he has made mistakes that have hurt it but certainly it was never intentional. Let me mention this Mercatus Center, George Mason University research summary. It says, ``The Debt-Limit Debate 2013: Addressing Key Myths.'' Mr. Speaker, I think it is very important the people understand that there are a lot of myths about the debt limit. One myth is this: Standard & Poor's U.S. credit rating downgrade in August of 2011 was caused by Washington's brinkmanship over increasing the debt limit. Congress must, therefore, avoid attaching spending cut demands to the current debt limit increase if they want to avoid jeopardizing the Nation's fragile economy. The reality, it says, is: Washington's failure to deal with unsustainable Federal spending mostly related to entitlement programs and debt caused the 2011 S&P downgrade and is spurring warnings of another downgrade by the credit rating agencies. Of course this administration went after them through the judiciary system--after they got a bad rating, they got a downgrade. But they point out that in June of 2011 that: S&P reported: ``If the U.S. Government maintains its current policies, it is unlikely that S&P's ratings services would maintain its AAA rating on the U.S. Government. From the same report: ``One contributing factor in our negative outlook decision is our view that there has, as yet, been no significant progress in addressing these long-term cost drivers nor any consensus developing among the Obama administration, the Senate, and House of Representatives regarding the specifics of a comprehensive plan to address the long-term budgetary challenges.'' On July 14, 2011, S&P warned it would downgrade U.S. debt if ``Congress and the administration have not achieved a credible solution to the rising U.S. Government debt burden and are not likely to achieve one in the foreseeable future.'' So the downgrade was because we did not adequately address the massive debt that had been building up. Another myth--and there are plenty more to back up their contention about that, just facts: ``Had Congress and the administration failed to raise the debt limit by the Treasury's stated deadline in 2011, the Treasury would have been forced to default on the Nation's debt.'' Make it very clear. The reality, ``had the 2011 agreement to increase the debt limit been postponed, the Treasury could have met Federal Government obligations, including Social Security benefits and interest on the debt until the end of the fiscal year, possibly longer.'' And then it goes into the options that the Treasury Department had. Another myth: ``If Washington agreed to significant spending reforms and cuts--and then actually followed through on them--it would cripple the recovery and devastate the economy.'' The reality is that ``the most dangerous thing Washington can do is continue on its current course. The economic literature is clear: Chronic overspending and its result, chronic excessive debt, lead to economic harm. Washington must agree on meaningful spending reforms--and begin implementing these policies immediately to satisfy markets about the credibility of spending cuts. ``Myth number four: The real problem with the last debt limit deal was that it failed to apply a `balanced approach' of spending cuts and tax increases.'' The reality is, ``Replacing borrowing with higher taxes does not solve the fundamental problem: Federal spending-- including Social Security, Medicaid, and especially Medicare--is unsustainable. ``Fiscal reform that focuses on large revenue increases and modest spending reductions is likely to inflict the most damage on the economy. A study of 21 countries looking at 37 years of data representing 107 episodes of fiscal reform, shows that reform efforts that focus on a package of both spending and revenue reductions''--that is, tax decreases--``tend to be much more effective than those that have modest spending reductions but continue to increase revenue. ``Of more than 100 attempts to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio in all developed countries over the past 30 years, some 20 percent succeeded. They had two common components: one, a focus on spending cuts; and two, policy reforms that increased competitiveness.'' And that is the truth. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate so much my friend from Florida. I am always greatly appreciative and thrilled when I find somebody who attended an Ivy League school that got a good education. The points are well made by my friend from Florida. There were many promises made and promises not kept. Go from top to bottom: ``If you like your insurance, you can keep it.'' Not remotely true. ``If you like your doctor, you can keep them.'' Not remotely true. So many stories are coming forward. ``It is actually going to be cheaper for Americans under ObamaCare.'' Not remotely true, unless perhaps you are in New York. There is a small part of the country, a small group of individuals, who were already paying so much because of a massive amount of waste or laws that allowed for a great amount of waste or abuse; in those there may be some people that actually saved money. But for most Americans, they are not only going to have to pay more, they are going to pay dramatically more. As we have seen the government shutdown play out, it has been interesting to note the things that have been open and the things that have been closed. We were told that only essential government services would be provided. We had also passed immediately before the shutdown and sent to the Senate a military pay bill. Now, that military pay bill was intentionally left broad enough so that it could take care of the need to take care of the death benefit, broad enough to take care of the needs of the family that are always provided by the military, by the Department of Defense, for those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in losing a loved one in the course of combat. And lo and behold, even though that was made clear, it also was made clear in the bill that civilian employees could be included. Even independent contractors under that law were allowed to continue working that were supporting the role of the military. So it was a very broadly worded act in order to give the Obama administration, and particularly the Defense Department, great latitude to make sure important things got done. Now as we have seen, the Secretary of Defense has laid off hundreds of thousands of civilian workers, though the bill gave him latitude to leave them working and they supported the military. It was only after about a week that they finally said, okay, we are going to let a whole lot of those employees come back now that we have made the determination that the bill gives us enough latitude to allow them to work. We told him it did. The bill gave him that kind of power. Perhaps he had talked to President Obama and they decided, yeah, let's put lots of people out of work, or perhaps he had not talked to the President. We don't know. But as Peggy Noonan pointed out recently, talking about things that have gone on here in the last couple of weeks, she reminded us of Harry Truman's sign that was on his desk: ``The buck stops here.'' They didn't have to hurt all those civilian employees. They could have left them working. But they chose to send them home, creating more hardship. They chose not to pay the death benefit for families who were entitled to it after losing a loved one who is a patriot. They chose to do those things. They have chosen to close parks, farms, different things that don't cost the Federal Government a dime, don't cost anything. But they have strategically chosen to close things that create suffering, some chaos, different problems for people. It is as if the park rangers, who were quoted recently, were exactly right in saying that they were told: make life as difficult as possible for people, because that is what the administration has done. But there is good news. This story was published by FOX News: National Parks Are Closed, the IRS Call Centers Have No Staff. And I insert parenthetically here: The IRS is still getting your money in, the money is still flowing in, they are just not helping people as it flows in. The article says: Countless government Web sites have been taken down. We know even the panda camera was turned off, even though it required no monitoring. Yet despite these changes, which range from inconveniences to major headaches, a number of not so essential government operations are still up and running. Here are a few that have evaded the partial government shutdown: The Denali commission. You have probably never even heard of the Denali Commission. But the tiny Alaska-based economic development agency gained some notoriety after it emerged that the group's inspector general was petitioning Congress to defund it. But guess what agency survived the shutdown? According to its own contingency plan, because the Commission's staffers are paid under the prior year's budget, all 14 employees are exempt from furlough, and ``reporting to work.'' That is a commission that its own inspector general petitioned Congress to defund. Another government function that was left up: ``The White House Twitter.'' Oh, sure, there were plenty of government help Web sites that would have made life easier for people having to deal with the Federal Government. They were shut down because they would have helped people. But the White House Twitter was left up and rolling. As the article says: Right as Congress missed the deadline last week to pass a spending bill, First Lady Michelle Obama's office informed its Twitter followers that: ``Due to Congress' failure to pass legislation to fund the government,'' updates to the official First Lady Twitter account would be limited. But the White House Twitter account is alive and well. The account has blasted out a series of tweets calling on Congress to end the budget impasse. Another item that has been left up and running despite all of the government Web sites and help call centers and all that have been shut down, and that is ``Let's Move.'' The article says: While a number of government Web sites have been temporarily taken offline, and the First Lady's Twitter account has been largely abandoned, not so for Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign. The Web site for the First Lady's healthy-living initiative remains operational--though it doesn't appear to have been updated much since September. The top of the site displays the message: ``Cheers to Water!'' Another thing left up was the ``Park Rangers on Patrol.'' Despite national parks and monuments being shuttered across the country for lack of funds, the National Park Service is devoting considerable resources to putting up barricades and patrolling them. An innkeeper along the Blue Ridge Parkway who was forced to close his business due to the partial shutdown told FOXNews.com that park rangers have set up a ``24/7 blockade'' outside his inn--to prevent would-be customers from coming in. Another thing, the ``Obama Campaign Stop.'' President Obama canceled a long-planned trip to Asia over the budget impasse. But he, nevertheless, ventured outside the beltway last week for a rally in nearby Rockville, Maryland, to pressure Republicans to pass a budget bill. The article says budget bill, but actually we are past the budget time. Now it is appropriation time, and that is what we need. The Patent Office. If you happened to invent something during the stalemate, good news. The United States Patent and Trademark Office is open for business. According to the office, it is using fees from the prior year to keep running and should be able to for roughly 4 weeks. The IRS is taking but not giving. IRS call centers are closed. The IRS is not issuing refunds during the partial shutdown. The agency, though, will gladly accept tax payments during that time. The IRS says in a statement on its Web site: The IRS will accept and process all tax returns with payments, but will be unable to issue refunds during this time. Another article from the Right Scoop had talked about the Amber Alert Web site being taken down. Although some have been kept up, the Amber Alert Web site was allowed to go down. And, thankfully, the administration realized there was enough pressure. For heaven's sake, it is for children who are kidnapped, lost. So, thankfully, the administration finally decided after enough pressure to bring the Amber Alert Web site back up. It has been amazing to me, and I saw it again today in some of our memorial sites, memorials that are down on The Mall, the Iwo Jima monument, or the memorial, we have spent--this administration, that is, has spent more money keeping people out of open-air memorials than it ever spends just to leave them open. They are open 24/7. I have been up to the Iwo Jima, the U.S. Marine Corps monument so many times since I have been in Congress, again, all hours of the day and night. I don't sleep that much while I am here on the Hill. Although we have some park rangers who don't know the parking laws and give tickets to people who are lawfully allowed to be there-- apparently not enough training for our rangers--but they have gone to the trouble to get barriers to make life difficult for veterans, World War II veterans that fought to secure Iwo Jima, being kept out of seeing the Iwo Jima monument. Why? Because they put barricades in the way to keep people from going up and being able to drive up there. One of the times I went up there during the last couple of weeks, there were probably 200 people up there, but they had to park over by the townhouses, go over rails, down steep embankments and get in there. Unfortunately, as this administration knows, our World War II veterans in their eighties and nineties that I have been with and that I have helped and pushed wheelchairs for, they are not able to climb over rails and go down steep embankments, although they sure did while fighting in the Pacific, European theater, and North Africa. But they cannot do it now. And for anyone to keep putting up the barricades at that Iwo Jima monument just to screw over our veterans is outrageous. I don't know who is doing it, but shame on the people who are doing it. I was gratified last weekend, on one occasion I went up there, and there were plastic barricades that had been filled with water to hold them in place, make them too big for a person to push over, and yet there were three busloads of World War II veterans up at the Iwo Jima monument, and someone had rammed those plastic barriers, knocking them over, spilling the water everywhere. Once the water was dispersed, pushed them out of the way. A wooden barricade looked like it had been run over so the buses could go up there. I don't know if those buses did that or not. I like to think they did, that those World War II veterans were not going to have some mean-spirited person in the administration up there to prevent them from seeing the Iwo Jima monument for one time before they left this world. Mr. Speaker, I hope the people in this administration that keep trying to punish the American people so that they can get the money that they are demanding, that S&P and Moody's has said you guys have to get responsible about the money you are spending, the money that American taxpayers gave the Republicans, the majority, in 2010 to do something about. My friends across the aisle are constantly saying elections have consequences. That is right. The American people didn't like ObamaCare, and so they voted the Democrats in the House out of the majority with people running on that main issue. We will do everything we can to get rid of ObamaCare. It is true that the President won reelection. Many of us still believe that if we had had a candidate that could challenge the abuses of ObamaCare before the last election last year instead of one that gave a prototype for it in his home State, the President would not have been reelected. But Republicans chose a very nice man, a philanthropic man, a great businessman, a very caring American, but somebody who had already shown he supported a type of socialized medicine in his home State. ObamaCare, as it was passed, as it was originating in the Senate and then passed in the Senate, sent down to the House as bill H.R. 3590, should have originated in this House because it raises revenue, called penalties. It is called penalties throughout the bill. The Supreme Court noted that. In a very hypocritical opinion, the Supreme Court went to page 15 and noted that Congress called it a penalty. It only is applied if people don't do what is required. That makes it a penalty. Clearly, it is a penalty because the anti-injunction act makes very clear that if Congress passes a tax, then no Federal court can take it up and make a decision on it until the tax is actually imposed and the person suing has standing by virtue of having the tax actually imposed on them. That is a nutshell. So if the Supreme Court had found that ObamaCare contained a tax and not a penalty, then it would not have jurisdiction. But the Supreme Court opinion at page 15 decided it is a penalty; it is not a tax. If it was a tax, we couldn't go any further on the opinion. The opinion would be over. We would have to dismiss and wait for the tax to actually be assessed. But since it is a penalty, like Congress called it through the bill, and since it is a penalty, as President Obama made very clear to the American public--it is not a tax; it is a penalty-- the Supreme Court went on. Eventually, after determining that ObamaCare, as written, based on what the proponents said was the interstate commerce clause that gave it the authority to pass ObamaCare, the Supreme Court said, no, it doesn't. The interstate commerce clause does not give authority to Congress to pass a bill that takes over health care. That is not constitutional. Then eventually they got over and took up the issue of exactly what was involved in the individual mandate, the business mandate, and the Court concluded that actually, despite Congress calling it a penalty, the President assuring America it was a penalty and not a tax, the Supreme Court ends up saying it is a tax, and, therefore, it is constitutional. So we, as the Supreme Court, will rewrite the law and uphold it as we have rewritten; because as it is written, it is not constitutional, but we will rewrite it. Though that would be legislating and it would be unconstitutional, they did it anyway. So when I hear people say it has been upheld by the Supreme Court, no, the bill that was passed was not upheld by the Supreme Court. It was struck down as violating the interstate commerce clause, but the Supreme Court did them a favor. They rewrote it legislatively, violated the Constitution in doing so, and then sent it back. And now Americans across the country, by the millions, are suffering as a result of a tax the majority of Americans did not want, that all Americans promised was not a tax, and now it is taking away their insurance. It is taking a way their doctors. It is taking away, really, quality health care that most Americans had. So it would seem if the idea behind ObamaCare was strictly to help those who are uninsured, we should have dealt strictly with those Americans. But that is not what ObamaCare was about. It was about the G-R-E, the government running everything. I am amazed at how many friends across the aisle who have screamed and hollered about we don't want the government in our bedroom voted for a bill that puts the government in your bedroom, in your bathroom, in your kitchen, in your closets. It puts the Federal Government everywhere. And you combine that with what the all Democratic majority House and Senate passed with President Obama at the helm, that created a bureau under the guise of making sure that credit card companies were fair, and now that bureau is gathering everyone's credit card information and debit card information under the guise of making sure they are playing fair. This Federal Government has seized more private information. They have been more vindictive through weaponizing the IRS, and we are finding out about other agencies and departments. It is more than any administration has ever done, and American people will ultimately pay the price. I hope and pray that the Supreme Court will take up the origination clause litigation because that bill did not originate in the House; and the origination clause says any bill that raises revenue must originate in the House, and the only single thing in that bill that was left was the number. Even the title about being a change to the Internal Revenue Code to provide a tax credit for first time home buyers who were in the military or veterans, they didn't leave a single word of that bill; and they brought in something completely ungermane to that bill for veterans and military members. And instead of taking care of the millions they said were uninsured, that was the whole purpose of ObamaCare, they have done tremendous damage across the country to so very many. As the shutdown has gone on that was brought on, not by the House Republicans, who passed a bill, we said, Look, Americans are being devastated by ObamaCare. The health care industry is being decimated. Since a majority of the American people didn't want it, gave us control of the House as a result of it, let's get rid of it. We have got to start acting responsibly about the money we spend. Taking away Americans' rights to decide whether they should have knee surgery, back surgery, get a pacemaker, taking away the right and the ability of Americans to determine what kind of treatment they should get is not something, when we are in financial difficulty, we should be doing. That was struck down. It shouldn't have been a surprise. Harry Reid didn't want to pass it. The President didn't want to. Then the House began sending down one compromise which was turned down. Okay, let's just suspend it for a year. That would be the fair thing to do. As so many have said, Republicans and Democrats across the country, it was not ready for prime time. It was a train wreck. It was a nightmare. Let's just suspend it for a year. We know the President wants it, so we are not talking about getting rid of it like a majority of Americans want to do. Let's just suspend it for a year. When that didn't go and the Senate said, No, we want a shutdown, we are not doing this, then we sent down a further compromise to basically suspended for 1 year the individual mandate just as businesses had gotten, as the President rewrote the law. The Constitution doesn't allow him to do it. Congress is supposed to step up, as happened in past generations where I'm told no matter whether a Democrat or Republican President, no matter who controlled the House and Senate, when a President overstepped his constitutional authority this far, usually there would be a trip down Pennsylvania from leaders of the House and Senate, both parties, that would privately tell the President, You overstepped your bounds. Back off, or we are going to defund everything that you are trying to push through on this, and it would get worked out. Unfortunately, at the other end of the Hall in the Senate, they are not bothered by the fact that the President, by a stroke of the pen, wrote legislation and undid what the law said and made up his own law. That is not supposed to happen under our Constitution, but it did. We were bothered by it in the House, so we said, Look, let's work this out like gentle people. Let's just postpone it for a year. When that didn't work, we said, Let's at least suspend the individual mandate. You have suspended it for the business community. Let's do it for individuals. They wouldn't even do that. Then when that didn't work, we sent a bill to the Senate that said, Okay, we are not trying to push anything on you. Just sit down and talk. Here are our negotiators. You appoint your negotiators. That is what the Constitution, law, and the rules require, and we will have this worked out probably by the time people get up in the morning; and they would not even appoint negotiators. Why? Because I believe they believe the conventional wisdom from the last 3 years that if the Democratic Senate and President forced a shutdown, the Main Street media would blame Republicans. It would enure politically to their benefit, and it would be worth causing the pain of a shutdown. So they refused to even negotiate at that point. It was not until the polls showed that the President had dropped to 37 percent from a favorable rating of 53 percent to an unfavorable rating that we finally had a willingness to sit down and talk. During those times that so many things have been shut down, including the Normandy Cemetery--this story emerged yesterday from Marketplace.org: Coming Soon to Your Favorite TV Shows: Plot Lines About the Affordable Care Act. Hollywood Health & Society, a program with the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center got a $500,000 grant this week from The California Endowment to help TV writers tell better stories about the new health insurance law. That is $500,000 to Hollywood for propaganda to tell people who are suffering from the ravages of losing their insurance, losing their doctors, losing the ability to make decisions under new policies as they once did, telling them how good they had it. That $500,000 would have paid to open a lot of memorials and parks. It would have kept the Moore farm going for years that doesn't get a dime of Federal money and hasn't since 1980, but may lose the farm because of the outrageous actions of the National Park Service in forcing it closed; as the park Ranger said, making it as difficult as they can for people. Here is an article from Ken Blackwell: When President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on March 23, 2010, it was the starting gun for a massive Federal effort to get the new system up and running. The administration had deliberately allowed for 3\1/ 2\ years for the launch, October 1, 2013. That's a long time. It's 1,288 days. You would think, in that length of time, we could have brought a system online that would not be bedeviled with glitches. And more glitches. By comparison, FDR had 912 days from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, to D-day, June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy. The D-day Museum at Portsmouth, England maintains a Web site that offers some idea of what was involved in mounting the invasion. It says further down: Today, Obama administration officials are making the rounds of TV talk shows touting the millions of Americans who have logged on day one of ObamaCare. They are not able tell us how many of those millions have actually signed up for ObamaCare. But that, of course, may be due to the fact that 85% of Americans already have health insurance and the rest, primarily healthy young adults, may have reasons for not having health insurance. It's interesting to hear administration spokespersons dodging and weaving about how many Americans actually are eager to give all their personal data to the IRS and then be guided about by navigators chosen by Mr. Obama out of his compassionate concern for his people. Obama Cares was an inspired idea for a bumper sticker last fall. It helped the incumbent easily gain a second term in the White House. It's odd, though, that after 4 years of major liberal legislation, the FDR comparisons have largely disappeared. Americans today can judge how warm-hearted President Obama is. His administration has ordered the closure of the World War II Memorial in Washington. Ninety-year olds on Honor Flights faced barricades as they made that last trip to see the monument to their heroism on D-day and a thousand days. White House spokesman Jay Carney raced to tell reporters that it was not the intent of the Obama administration to deny death benefits to families of soldiers recently killed in Afghanistan. It just seems to have been another glitch. The Obama spokesman's efforts to avoid responsibility were strenuous. But he might have consulted another veteran of that great WWII generation. Harry Truman kept a plaque on his desk in the White House: The Buck Stops Here. That was the article I was thinking of earlier. Here's another article from October 10 by Jocelyn Maminta from New Haven, Connecticut. In the midst of major changes in health care, UnitedHealthCare has sent thousands of pink slips to Connecticut doctors. Termination letters went to physicians caring for Medicare patients. Those letters were sent out to doctors caring for ``Medicare Advantage'' patients. It's a plan, marketed to seniors to provide additional services through UnitedHealthCare. A mix of primary care and specialty doctors are affected by it. And it comes at a questionable time. Open enrollment for Medicare starts next Tuesday, and it's still not clear at this time as to which doctors are still in the United network. The Connecticut State Medical Society is fighting back. The biggest concern is patient access to healthcare. ``What the government is looking for is to manage better care by adding a patient-centered medical home so that you have a doctor who is totally invested with taking care of every aspect of the patient and coordinating it. This is clearly not a patient-centered decision,'' said Dr. Michael Saffir, president of CT State Medical Society. Perhaps that is Connecticut Medical Society. Anyway, it has an update at the bottom: In an email statement, UnitedHealthCare spokesman Ben Goldstein told News 8, ``With the many changes happening in health care, we are building a network of health care providers that we can collaborate with more closely to have the most positive impact on the quality of care for our members. And what a lot of people didn't realize, but they soon found out, ObamaCare, the so-called ``Affordable Care Act,'' actually cut over $700 billion in Medicare reimbursements. It took money that was going to be used for senior citizens' health care and put it towards trying to get this horrendous, this unworkable bill to the American people. May I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield to my friend from Florida (Mr. DeSantis). ObamaCare

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. And I am sure that Mr. LaMalfa has had people ask, as I have had, now, why in the world is ObamaCare costing so dramatically much more than the health insurance we had before? And then we get notified we are actually getting less health care. And my friend mentioned Wolf Blitzer, this article in National Review online quoted him as saying if they weren't fully ready, talking about the Web sites, ObamaCare Web sites, they should accept the advice that a lot of Republicans are giving them, delay it another year, get it ready, make sure it works. They know how to do it; but if they didn't get it ready on time, then maybe fix the problem and make sure people don't have to worry about it. But we come back, it is a disaster. It is more expensive than people's health care was before. They are getting less health care; they are not keeping their doctor. And most--it sounds like an awful lot of Americans are not keeping the policy they have. So why is it costing so much more? And what people that don't know need to understand, when you hire thousands and thousands of people who don't provide health care to be navigators through the health care system, and you hire 18,000-or-so more IRS officers to go through every detail of people's personal financial and personal life, and they don't provide any health care, they may cause some health problems, but they don't provide any health care--you add all this bureaucracy--it is going to cost more and you are going to get less treatment, and it is not going to be as good a treatment. I yield back to Mr. LaMalfa.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, for a government that shuts down, there sure seems to be a great deal going on. Down here on the Mall, somehow the National Park Service, which has been, parenthetically speaking here, presiding over a park service, beginning with the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial, has not had God mentioned in any memorial since that time. We don't have time or a place for mentioning God, as our memorials have in some way in the past, but, by golly, we have got time during a shutdown to approve a permit to allow people who want to demand that--though they are here in this country illegally--they have a right to demand rights. This administration, just as it did with the Occupy Washington movement, facilitates that. We know with the Occupy Washington movement there was all kinds of lewd, lascivious stuff going on in public. The Park Service didn't seem to be bothered by that. But let veterans show up to the World War II memorial, and they have got barricades. Let World War II veterans, who fought their way to the top of Mt. Suribachi, try to get to the monument that commemorates climbing to the top of Suribachi, they put up big obstacles to our veterans getting there. So the message from this administration very clearly is that if you are illegally in the country, we will bend over backwards to let you commit all kinds of acts on the Mall; we will send Capitol Police down to pick up your garbage; and if you just want to illegally occupy a public area, we will let you do that. We will let you use the basest services in public. All kinds of lewd and lascivious things were going on there with the Occupy Washington movement, and that was allowed to continue on and on and on. However, if you have served your country in the United States military, then we're going to try to make life miserable for you. It just might be those people that have hung on to their God and their guns and love America and love the Constitution, so this Homeland Security thing is sure a threat. Which is quite interesting. You know, with all the things that are going on, we have seen that this administration has not had a problem with some things that some of us felt were a problem, such as, like I've mentioned in the last couple of years, one of the members of what was originally the Countering Violent Extremism Working Group named Elibiary from Texas, who was placed on there. And then he got a promotion from Secretary Janet Napolitano up to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, and, gee, now we're finding out that he's continuing to defend one of the principals of the Holy Land Foundation. We're finding out that he is still defending, he still considers them to be unjustly prosecuted even though Federal courts have found that crimes were committed and that terrorism was supported by the Holy Land Foundation. The Dallas Federal court, along with the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans, found that groups like CAIR, which has now changed its name to WTF, and ISNA, groups like that were the largest front group for the Muslim Brotherhood in America. So it's rather interesting, because this administration has made life so difficult for our veterans just trying to get here and enjoy the memorials. I've been down to the memorials I think every day until today, and it's amazing. I've been down there different days, all hours of the day and night. You're lucky if you see one park ranger in the area of the World War II Memorial, and yet now they've got them very strategically placed. They will stand there with the barricades closed most of the time. If some group comes up and explains that they're a World War II veterans group, then they'll open and let them through, but they stand there intimidating. Sometimes an officer comes by with a canine, which is a bit more intimidating to most people. So unless Members of Congress are standing there, we see people come up and get intimidated and walk away, unless a Member of Congress goes up and says, Please, come in. You are welcome. Fortunately, veterans of Vietnam and Korea are just going around the barricades and fortunately are not being stopped. At the Lincoln Memorial, though, when a couple of Members of Congress encouraged people to come on up, like they do at the World War II Memorial, they said that it appeared that the park SWAT team--I mean, officers came in from all over, threatening arrests. Get out of here. It's just amazing how far this administration will go to hurt Americans that love America, that have served this country. And then we find out about Americans killed in Afghanistan. There should have been no problem whatsoever with the Defense Department cutting the $100,000 checks to these families. There should not have been. And if there was any doubt, then the bill we passed before the shutdown began should have taken care of that. There was plenty of prerogative to do that. But we had to come back today and pass another bill just to say get a check to the families of those who lost a loved one serving this country, because the administration is playing hardball and has gotten policies in place that are hurting as many Americans as possible. But when you look at who's advising this country's top leaders, is it any surprise? Here's a story from October 6 from The Daily Caller: Senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security is an old friend of an activist who was convicted in 2008 of financing the terrorist organization Hamas. In an interview with The Daily Caller, Mohamed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, reiterated claims he made this summer that former Holy Land Foundation President and CEO Shukri Abu Baker is innocent and a victim of political persecution. Elibiary, who in his position on the council also has regular access to classified information, said the United States insults Muslim dignity and compared the Muslim Brotherhood to American evangelicals. Elibiary confirmed to journalist Ryan Mauro of the Clarion Project in August that he is a longtime friend of Baker. The Mauro interview can be read at the Center for Security Policy. Baker and four other officials of the closed Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development were convicted of using the charity to finance Hamas in 2008. It was the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history. Federal prosecutors described the foundation, which was closed by the U.S. Government in 2001, as an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Elibiary first disclosed the relationship in a 2007 article in The Dallas Morning News. He met Baker as a teenager and was so moved by the terrorist funder's explanation of alleged Israeli persecution of Palestinians that he says he began donating monthly to Baker's foundation until it closed in 2001. The friendship continued, with Elibiary meeting with Baker for coffee the day before he was convicted. Elibiary maintains that Baker is innocent. And in 2010, he wrote that the U.S. Government was ``using the law to force compliance with unjust foreign policies.'' He reiterated his belief that the U.S. should not have prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation. The Muslim activist has never disguised his support for Muslim Brotherhood extremism. In a 2006 letter to the Morning News, he defended the fanatically anti-American early Brotherhood leader and theorist Sayyid Qutb stating, ``I'd recommend everyone read Qutb, but read him with an eye to improving America not just to be jealous with malice in our hearts.'' Let me insert here, Qutb wrote, in Egypt, a book called ``Milestones,'' where a guy named Osama bin Laden gives a great deal of credit for radicalizing him. And here we have someone that Janet Napolitano handpicked to be at the highest advisory council level, have access to classified material, somebody that thinks the guy that radicalized Osama bin Laden is somebody we all should read with an eye toward improving America. ``Elibiary has been honored by the FBI's Society of Former Special Agents,'' the article says. And again, parenthetically here--it's not in the article, but we also know that the FBI continued a relationship with CAIR, even knowing that they had gathered evidence that showed that CAIR was a large Muslim Brotherhood front organization which was supportive of the Holy Land Foundation. Even knowing those things, even knowing that it was implicated as a named coconspirator in that trial, amazingly, it took until 2008 and 2009 for the FBI to suspend their partnership with CAIR. And we know that CAIR continued until they changed their name here recently in the last few weeks to WTF. They continued to complain. They have instant access to anyone in this administration. They helped get the FBI material, training materials purged of anything that might be offensive to someone who was a radical Islamist. The article says: In September, Elibiary was promoted to senior adviser at the advisory council, a title held only by select members. Other council members include William Bratton, the revered former New York police commissioner and Los Angeles chief of police; former CIA Director Bill Webster; and L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca. And we have this, which has been tweeted out: I'm honored to be reappointed to the Secretary of Homeland Security's Advisory Council and promoted to senior fellow position. That's Mohamed Elibiary. This article says: ``If you've ever wondered why the Obama administration believes that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate force for good and partners with known U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities, this interview with Mr. Elibiary helps us find an answer,'' Mauro said. Elibiary received national attention in June 2012 when Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann and four other Members of Congress--one including me--wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, naming him as one of three advisers with extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations and causes. Anyway, it's just amazing. And it is also amazing, when I confronted Secretary Napolitano in a hearing about the fact that Mr. Elibiary had accessed classified material and I was told by the director of the Department of Public Safety, Steve McCraw, in Texas, he had spoken with her chief of staff. He had confirmed that he had briefed her totally on what Mr. Elibiary had done, and they would be looking into it. When I asked her about it the next day after her chief of staff had said she had been totally briefed, she looked me in the eye and said she didn't know anything about it. But she did say she would investigate. We now know from a Freedom of Information answer from the Department of Homeland Security, they never investigated. Even when you had a writer, a journalist, Patrick Poole, wrote a story stating that Mr. Elibiary had actually shot two documents that they knew he had downloaded from the classified Web site, he had shopped it to a national media, and Mr. Poole confirmed to me that they have never once asked him about his sources. And we then had it confirmed from the FOIA request that actually they never did an investigation. Instead, they just promoted him. It is incredible. But then again, when you look at what this administration is doing to those who don't necessarily worship Allah but worship God and believe in God and have served the country, this administration is making it tough. One of our most revered monuments, Mount Rushmore. Well, I was quoted accurately in the media over a week ago saying, After shutting down these open-air monuments, just sidewalks where you can roll around in disabled veterans' wheelchairs, what are they going to do next, put drapery over Mount Rushmore? Well, it turned out what they did--I guess I shouldn't have said anything because maybe it was the power of suggestion. Oh, there's a way we can make people miserable. Even though it's a State road, built by the State of South Dakota, maintained by the State of South Dakota, patrolled by the State of South Dakota, we had Federal authorities go put cones and barricades to prevent people from being able to pull off to the side of the road to even take pictures of Mount Rushmore. Somebody, while the government was shut down, sent enough park rangers out to put up massive numbers of cones to try to make life as difficult as possible simply for people who loved America, who just wanted to pull over and get a view of Mount Rushmore. They weren't going to patrol it. South Dakota does that. When South Dakota, our dear friend, Kristi Noem, she said when South Dakota had pointed out, hey, this is State road, the Federal authority said, oh, no, but this is on Federal land, and we're not letting anybody pull over. So this is what you get. This is the way Americans are treated unless you're going to be illegally in the country and have a protest, then we will give you permits, whatever you want. I was gratified to hear our friend, Representative Noem, point out to us that, though sad that South Dakota had 4 feet of snow in some places, unfortunately, that covered all the barricades and cones, strictly in the interest of safety, South Dakota had to send their snowplows and wipe all the snow, and there was no way to sort out the cones and barricades, so apparently they were in some ditch somewhere. But for safety purposes, because they were just trying to help those South Dakotans and Americans that wanted to see Mount Rushmore get through that road, that State-built road. So, anyway, another chance to make Americans miserable, but Mother Nature came through, followed by South Dakota, making things safer. Here is one. This is out by the Moore Farm that hasn't gotten a dime of Federal money since 1980. Former Park Director, National Park Service employee as director, been a director for 32 years, they barely make it, but they have lost $15,000 to $20,000 just by being closed down. They rented barricades to take out there and close down a colonial farm from the 1700s and, as a result of this mean-spirited action by an administration, this farm may close down for good. They are running out of money. But I have a dear friend that has arrived on the floor, and I would certainly yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa) for such time as he may consume.

Mr. GOHMERT. Reclaiming my time just momentarily, it is also worth noting that here in the House we have actually had numerous Democrats vote with us. So the only really bipartisan thing that has been going on in this whole Capitol are our bills to fund certain parts of the government. I yield to my friend.