Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Denied a straight answer to that.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Denied any answers. So what we know is that the administration immediately announced that it was a spontaneous eruption of a protest over a video. How they ever found that information to even be able to tie it to it because it's completely disconnected and illogical, but they sent Susan Rice out before the American public and on five networks she gave the same story. And now she's been awarded with the confidence of the President to advance her even more within this administration and sent before the House of Representatives in a classified setting to lead us in the briefing on potential Syrian engagement. So we know it wasn't a video. Do we know if the individual who actually produced that video is yet out of jail? Do you have any information?

Mr. KING of Iowa. And the last information I had was that he was still in jail. That's been some weeks ago. But I think he's a person you might be able to identify as a political prisoner at this point. It's unlikely that he would be in jail for his not meeting the parole requirements for this period of time except for the politics that he got wrapped up into, Madam Speaker. All of these things that are inaccuracies and some of them outright dishonesties. There's been no question that this administration went out and willfully misinformed the American people. They did so in open source setting, the President's dialogue directly to the United Nations and multiple oblique references to a video. They knew in real-time that it was a planned attack. There's a reason why we know that, and I know Mr. Perry knows that reason. I ask you if you can tell us here why we know that it was a planned attack against our U.S. Ambassador.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I recall a message that came out from the administration that Libya is a highly armed country and people walk around with AK-47s or else they've got them very handy so, if there's a violent demonstration, that they can grab their AK-47 and run to the sound of not the guns but the demonstration. I don't disagree that that's a possibility in Libya. I know it was a possibility in Iraq with the armament that they have or the weapons they have in their homes. But we also know that there were RPGs there. We know that there were mortars there. We know that there were two locations. The first location was where the attack took place, and then there was a fallback location. One was the compound and one was the annex. We know that there were mortar rounds dropped in on the secondary location. It looked like, the sequence, that they had already dialed in that secondary location as a target. If that's the case, not only was it a planned attack, but it was a planned attack with intel that had the secondary location, the alternative location where they would retreat to once attacked, and the primary location already set up, the mortars zeroed in on that. Does that fit with what you know from a military background, I would ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman were going to set up a mortar and zero in on a target, what would be the minimum number of rounds that it would take to have confidence that you can zero in on the top of a building?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would ask the gentleman, if the third mortar round was the fatal round for two of our brave Americans, would that indicate that that mortar had been set up and planned in advance?

Mr. KING of Iowa. And we would have known that in almost real-time in the Situation Room in the White House, would be what I would say, and yet still people went out and made the story that it was a movie. And then after the story of the movie began to break down, it became, well, it was actually a spontaneous response and people came running with the weapons that they had. We've gotten more truth out in this dialogue that we've had here in this past 45 minutes on the floor of the House of Representatives than has willingly been brought forward by this administration. I have said that Benghazi is worse than Watergate. I think that's a very easy position to hold in that Watergate was a burglary that the President found out about afterwards. It was wrong for President Nixon to seek to cover that burglary up. It cost him the Presidency and it cost America dearly in the events of history that unfolded from that, but this is something that goes deeper and worse. I believe it was a planned assassination attack on our Ambassador, and I believe that we had a whole group of heroic Americans who conducted themselves very well and they deserve to be identified, if they want to be, and they deserve the respect and appreciation and the honor that the American people would like to give them. The best thing we can do for the memories of those that are lost is to provide the full truth that goes outside that that must be classified. As history moves on, classification changes because of relevance of need for it to remain secret also changes. So perhaps today we can pick up the momentum to get those final signatures on the Wolf resolution, get to the point where we can convince our Speaker that we need to have this special select committee to investigate Benghazi, that it incorporates the top people from the five committees that have jurisdiction to do those kind of hearings with a significant budget where we can make sure that it's well staffed and also subpoena the people that we need to put that record out into the public eye and the public ear, record that record and build that and put it into a bound copy, a version which says, This is the reasoned judgment of Congress. These are the facts as they can be gathered, and that has been scrutinized by the public in real-time. If we do that--we can draw our conclusions; historians will be able to draw their conclusions--we can do honor to those who lost their lives, gave their lives for us. We can do honor to those who have suffered serious wounds, and we can do honor to those who were in that conflict. And we can clean this up to the point where all of those that serve us in the Foreign Service and put their lives on the line--and there have been, by my recollection, eight Ambassadors who have lost their lives in the line of duty or died while in service of our country over the course of the history of the United States--Ambassador Stevens the most recent, the most violent, but also the one that they have the most questions about. This was going to be an open administration, one of the most transparent in history. And now we have the Secretary of State who presided over this, who was the lead voice, the one who should have given us the most direct response, has not given us a full testimony. She did appear before a Senate committee and it was a limited amount of testimony, but she has not come clean with this. As we see this, the situation of the coverup of the facts of Benghazi, we are also seeing the people that are engaged in this that do know the facts asking for an even higher level of responsibility in leadership, in fact, all the way to the White House seems to be the direction that the former Secretary of State would like to take. I'm going to suggest, Madam Speaker, that this can't happen in America. You cannot have someone who covered up something worse than Watergate find a path to go back to the White House and then put this country back under another shield to hide information, a coverup. The American people deserve the truth. One of the strengths that we have as a Nation is because we have been willing to face the real truth, face the real realities, and brace up and take on the enemies within the world. The people that serve this country, and do so with dignity and honor and nobility, are those in uniform. But it isn't only those in uniform. It's those that are in the CIA. It's some of the civilian contractors that have served in our military that are also part now of civilian security detail. There are those in the State Department that know they're out there on the edge and on the end. We need to honor all of them by bringing the truth out. There are many people, especially within the State Department and the CIA, who are sick at heart because they know the real truth. We need to give them an opportunity to bring that real truth out. I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I will just say a few more words, Madam Speaker. I sat through a series of briefings over the last week or a little better in different places around the world. In one of those briefings, one of our Special Operations Forces personnel made a point that they were ready to go to Benghazi. Now, there's nobody there that trains that isn't ready. Nobody is reluctant to step in and serve. No matter how dangerous a mission, no matter what the prospects are of success, if there are Americans in trouble and they are given the green light-- and that's the order to go into battle--they don't hesitate. They don't shrink back. They don't think, ``I wish I wasn't here.'' They train for that. And as they train for that, there is no hesitation. So we should always know that our military men and women, our security personnel, there is no hesitation on their part. They wanted to be there. That's why, when they got the order to stand down at the third time, they went anyway because these were brethren that needed to be protected. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, reclaiming my time, it appears to me that there was a political decision that was made in the Situation Room in the White House, and that political decision was: We're in a tough, tight, reelection battle. This is September 11. We are less than 2 months before the election date. This could become a whole pivotal issue that the election is decided upon. Let's see if we can slide this thing down and tamp it under the rug and maybe it will go away. Maybe it won't be as big or as bad as we fear that it is. That is the question that comes back. There is a time in this job to do your duty. There is a time in this political arena that we're in that you set aside politics. There is a time when you look at your reelection and you decide, My job here in this moment doing the right thing is more important than any prospects of how people will vote 2 months from now or a year or more from now. That's that sense of duty. That's why we take an oath to uphold this Constitution. We all stand here on the floor of this House and take this oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. The President does so. The executive personnel do so. When I look back through history, I can think of no time that our leadership in the White House has decided that the political calculation was more important than the lives of an Ambassador that had an opportunity to be saved. And maybe we would not have been able to save the Ambassador. Maybe we could have saved two of the others that were killed later in that operation. But we could have at least been there to send that message and to intimidate. And we're now a year and a day later. The press has identified some of the perpetrators. They have gone to Benghazi and sat down and had lunch and interviewed them. There are at least three media networks that have interviewed one or more of these perpetrators. If we know who they are and justice was going to be brought to them, why hasn't that been the case? Why hasn't this administration acted? Meanwhile, they will tell us they know exactly how to put a precision strike in on Assad in Syria to send just the right message that won't tip the balance of power and change the result of the civil war in Syria, but it will give him the message that he won't use weapons of mass destruction again. They have enough intel to apparently do that, but not enough intel to just follow the reporters around in Benghazi and collar the people that they talk to. That would be just that simple. Furthermore, the intel that seems to have identified the elements of the Free Syrian Army, I'll just say a few words about that that I've gathered as I have circumnavigated this globe and sat down in a whole series of meetings that took place that put the pieces of the puzzle together on the intel with Syria and Egypt and others. Just on the Syria side, we had a Free Syrian Army that emerged. It emerged as a popular uprising against Assad for his cruel and evil dictatorship of his people and for killing some of his own people even then, his political enemies. And the Free Syrian Army emerged. So they should have easily been the people that we supported. Well, as that battle went on, they were taking over different areas within Syria, tactical objectives and communities and cities and large geographical areas of Syria. And at a certain point, the Muslim Brotherhood stepped in. They took over some parts of the Free Syrian Army. They set up an operation to essentially sacrifice the leader of the Free Syrian Army. He was captured in an operation where he was sacrificed. They took him out of command. His successor commander now has been marginalized and pushed off to the side. And the Free Syrian Army--the knowledge that I have--is now controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist entities, including al Qaeda. That is the entity that we now have good enough intel that we are starting to send supplies and military supplies into. Those two entities, Assad and radical Islamist components, which is a large component of the Free Syrian Army, they're the bad guys. They're both our enemies. Yet the administration is in the business now, a year after that should have been happening in an aggressive way, of arming some of the wrong people. It's not that we didn't have good choices. There still are good choices. There still are good people in Syria and outside Syria that will step forward that want to have a secular Syria, a Syria that has freedom of religion, a Syria that is run by the people of Syria. Those elements are still there in Syria and around Syria--at least 2 million Syrian refugees. That force can be put together. It takes longer than firing a cruise missile into Damascus and picking a target to send a pinprick message. It can be done, but I'm not confident that this administration has identified our friends. What I have seen is that, when we've aligned with anybody in the Middle East, it's been the Muslim Brotherhood. We've had 2\1/2\ years of the Arab Spring; and in every break that has changed the power within the countries of North Africa and the Middle East, every break has gone in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, except one. That is now, when the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt under Morsi. Thirty to 33 million people came to the streets in a popular demonstration--the largest demonstration in the history of the world--to unseat Morsi because they don't have a constitutional way to impeach him. They didn't have a way to arrest him. The only thing they could do was go to the streets and demand that he be removed from power. Our administration sent a message before Morsi came to power that Mubarak had to be gone yesterday--remember that word? ``He needs to be gone yesterday.'' Well, that upset the balance of power in Egypt. That helped Morsi come to power. Morsi squeaked by by winning an election with 5.8 million people voting for him out of 83 million or so Egyptians altogether. Not exactly what you would call a majority of the people supporting Morsi--Morsi's complete incompetence, but also his very bold moves to consolidate power within Egypt to where it became clear that there was not going to be another election in Egypt and that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to impose shari'a law. And you start seeing that happen. Well, 30 to 33 million people in the streets of Egypt, and the Egyptian military stepped forward to support the popular uprising that took place. Now they have laid out a time line, a roadmap to write a constitution, put a constitution out on a public vote to ratify and then to elect a president and a civilian government. And General Assisi has pledged to turn over this military control of the Egyptian Government to a newly elected, legitimate civilian government. That time line is a good time line. It's a good commitment that has been set up and it's a good result. The problem we have is that our administration was against Mubarak and helped push him out of power. That helped open the door for Morsi, who came in--one of the Muslim Brotherhood. And it's clear, this new leadership, the interim President of Egypt, General Assisi, commanding the military--and also, by the way, they have the support of the Pope of the Coptic Christian Church in Egypt--all of that, the new forces are clear. They oppose the Muslim Brotherhood. The struggle within the Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, radical Islam, radical and violent Islamist groups working against the free people in that part of the world, we need to be on the right side of everyone, not on the wrong side of everyone. And the administration is going to have to turn their course around in Egypt and get behind the new administration and support new elections and a new constitution. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, I would just say to the gentleman that he has pointed out a stark contradiction in our policy. Eleven or 12 times of alleged, at least, weapons of mass destruction used against the Syrian people. I'm going to suggest that this push now is because some of the people that want those elements of the Free Syrian Army that I described to succeed are saying, Help us out by landing a strike or two in on Assad. That's my guess. But with regard to justice for the people that perpetrated the Benghazi incident against our Americans and our American Ambassador, that justice needs to be delivered. We know who some of those people are. And it's irresponsible of this administration to shut information down to the United States Congress, to the American people, and to fail to act when they have a clear act of war committed against the United States on U.S. territory. {time} 12:45 I'm aware that the clock has ticked down here to the end. I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for coming to the floor. I'm sure that he wasn't aware that this wasn't choreographed. It was a spontaneous eruption of protest calling for the truth to come out and a light to shine on Benghazi. I thank the gentleman from Virginia for his leadership on this, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And I appreciate the presentation that's come forward from my colleagues from Pennsylvania and Nebraska with regard to the Syrian situation and the international issue that's in front of all of us. I don't always find myself in complete agreement with the wisdom that emerges here from this microphone; but, generally speaking, that's where I stand this evening on the Syrian issue. And I think that it would be of interest to the gentleman from Pennsylvania that I and a couple of other Members, yesterday morning, perhaps the day before yesterday, in the morning--my days blend together--we sat down with Syrian Christians who were expatriates who had escaped from Syria and are very interested in the cause there. And I understand that the gentleman from Pennsylvania has a good number of constituents that would be representative of the same cause. It was a very interesting conversation that we had at breakfast day before yesterday at Brussels. And the concern that they expressed essentially came back to it's hard to choose a good side in Syria, in that Assad, of course, he's an evil dictator. We've known that for a long time. We have the Free Syrian Army that emerged as a force for good that seems to now be taken over by forces that are not so good. So it appears to them, and it appears to me, that whether it would be the Assad forces that prevail in the end, or whether it would be the forces that are taking over the Free Syrian Army, it's not going to be good for Christians in Syria. And I'm concerned that, for us to find a way forward, the best hope for Christians in Syria is likely to be the moderate groups that began the Free Syrian Army in the first place, those groups that want to have a secular Syria that respects everyone's right to freedom of religion and freedom to associate, and respects the rights of humanity that we all defend here. So I reiterate the statements that the gentleman from Pennsylvania has made. And we stand, certainly, with the Christians in Syria, but also the secular forces in Syria, however they've been marginalized by the forces of the Muslim Brotherhood, the forces that are Assad, and the anti-freedom forces that seem to want to take Syria over and use it for their own evil aims. So having traveled, Mr. Speaker, over into that part of the world, not into Syria specifically, but into the Middle East--and we just came back last night from a trip that was to Tokyo. We spent several days there dealing with the top leadership in Japan, including Prime Minister Abe, and then from there to the United Arab Emirates, where we had a meeting set up with a number of officials. The first meeting was at 11:00 in the morning. We were scheduled to meet with the Crown Prince about 1 or 1:30 in the afternoon. Instead, he gave us a very pleasant surprise and arrived at our 11:00 meeting. And we were able to have a long, engaging conversation, doors closed, which gave us a very good perspective on the Middle East and on Syria. So I appreciate my colleagues' focus and interest on this, and mine is also focused the same.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Dent). I would add that there was some dialogue in that breakfast meeting with the Syrian Christians that took place the day before yesterday, in the morning, about how there was a concerted effort to push and eradicate Christians out of all the areas in the Middle East. That seems to be something that they have embarked upon. And I know that there's a long history of it of over a thousand years. But it's been accelerated here, I believe, Mr. Speaker, within the last few years. In fact, the date of this meeting goes back to 1982 when that began. We're hearing similar narratives about Christians that are being persecuted by both sides in this. The population percentage in Syria of around 15 to 20 percent fits with what I'm told. I added up the data that they gave me from different sections of the Syrian Christians and my number came to about 2.6 million Syrian Christians. There are also about 2 million Syrians that are refugees that have left Syria and that are now housed in refugee camps in the surrounding country. There's about 2 million refugees. There are about 2.6 million Christians in or around Syria altogether. I see that as almost the equivalent of the population of the State of Iowa. So we've watched as Assad has persecuted his people--the people that were not his. Anybody but his political allies were persecuted by him over the years. I remember that he was identified by the Bush administration as, I believe, an evildoer. I remember some communications being opened up with Bashar al-Assad that took place sometime in 2007 or 2008. I remember some pictures that came back from there. This individual now has been identified as head of the regime that has launched chemical weapons against his own people. The evidence that we see doesn't necessarily confirm that it would be Assad himself that gave the order, but it does appear that there were chemical attacks. It also appears that there were conventional artillery assaults into the same neighborhood that brought about many casualties. To sort out whether they were chemical casualties or whether they were kinetic action casualties is a question that's not been answered yet. I'm hesitant to get very far into this from a factual standpoint because of what's classified and what isn't, Mr. Speaker. I want to make this point. It doesn't get brought out in this Congress enough, if at all. The forces are lined up on the side of either Sunni or Shia. Of course, the Alawite sect of the Shia is the sect that is Assad himself. And he's supported by them. When you look at his allies--Hezbollah and Iran--they are Shia. If you look at his enemies, generally speaking, his enemies are al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. There's a list of those Sunni interests that have poured into Syria. At the beginning, this was a conflict that was formed by the Free Syrian Army that wanted to unseat Assad and establish a government that would be of, by, and for the people of Syria and consistent with American ideals and American principles of a government that's empowered by the will of the people instead of by the will of a dictator or a king. So as the Free Syrian Army began, their forces were growing and they were strong and they were taking over territory. Since that period of time, we've watched as the sometimes-labeled ``rebel effect'' has diminished. And it's almost been in direct proportion to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, and other radical interests stepping in to take over and pick up some of the resources that are being used to support the opposition to Assad. As I've watched this and from what I know and from the information that's come to me, continually the Free Syrian Army is more representative of the Muslim Brotherhood than it is of the free Syrian people. And not by a majority of the population of the army itself, but by the leadership, by who commands the resources, by who's being trained. This is now ever more clear that there's not a side that's easy to get on in this conflict and be confident that the forces are the forces of good. In other words, to identify the good guys has gotten ever more difficult month by month. It's more difficult today than it was a month ago or 2 or 3 or 4 or 6 months ago. But it doesn't mean that there aren't good influences, that there aren't good cores of people that we should be identifying with and that we should be strengthening and empowering. But from my view, anybody that supports al Qaeda or is of al Qaeda is our enemy. Anybody that is Muslim Brotherhood or supports Muslim Brotherhood turns out to be our enemy. The difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda is they both have the same military wing. The Muslim Brotherhood has got a lot broader political approach to this. But in the end, they're looking to establish the Islamic caliphate everywhere in the world they can and establish sharia law everywhere in the world they can. And they don't view individual rights, human rights, or this God-given liberty and freedom here that our Founding Fathers claimed for us here over 200 years ago. They don't have respect for that. They reject it. And their approach is not compatible with human rights. So we see the sectarian interests in Syria taking over the secular initiates in Syria. I believe that there's an ability--if we can identify the good guys--to empower them, to train them, to fund them, to supply them. But there's a way to bring this around and bring it to a good conclusion. But the people that need to be empowered in Syria are a long way from power. The people that don't need to be in power, whether it's the Muslim Brotherhood side of this and the Sunni radical Islamists or whether it be the Shia interests and Assad, they are competing with each other now for dominance. They fought each other for centuries as well. There's no good result that can come easy in Syria. There is a good result that could come over a long period of time if our administration identified the people that we should be allying ourselves with and if they could emerge as the strong force. But while that's going on, we've been offered something from Putin and the Russians that I don't think anyone expected, a little more than 24 hours ago, and that is a way to avoid a military conflict in engaging U.S. forces in Syria. I will say, Mr. Speaker, that the mail that I'm getting and the phone calls that I'm getting are almost universally in opposition to going into any kind of military action whatsoever in Syria. Almost universal. All of my calls today were against going into Syria. Almost every call the last week were against going into Syria. It's not that I make decisions exclusively off of constituent input or American communications input. I have an obligation and I owe my constituents and I owe Iowans and the people in this country my best effort and my best judgment. And that includes the input that comes from them, weighed more heavily than if it were not directly from my constituents. And I owe them my best effort and best judgment--and that is to go out and gather information. I have probably the best access to the broadest amount of information, including myself, among my constituents. So I owe them my best effort. Part of that is to go and see with my own eyes and get into those parts of the world so that I can be fully informed, because this Congress is being called upon to make decisions that redirect the destiny of the United States of America. We should not do that in an uninformed way. We should not do it in a willfully ignorant way. There are many things going on in the world that you cannot learn by listening to just briefings here or reading the paper. We should know from long history that you've got to drill into these things. You've got to look the right people in the eye and you've got to verify the information that they give you. I've done that. I've done that over the last week. I kept my powder dry on Syria throughout that period of time because I wanted to gather all the information that I could. I didn't want to take a public position until I had seen as much as I can with my own eyes and hear as much as I can with my own ears. And even though we've done a trip into Cairo and the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East and we had briefings in countries beyond that and briefings from our State Department, we met with, as I said, Syrian Christians and we also met with refugees from Libya. We met with Special Forces interests and different perspectives on the Middle East entirely and different perspectives on the Syrian operation. You put that altogether, from the State Department's position on, I came back with stacks of notes on it, Mr. Speaker. But I didn't want to speak on my Syrian position until such time as I had sat through the classified briefing that I knew over a week ago was scheduled for five o'clock yesterday. And that went on from five o'clock until about a quarter to seven last night. That briefing was useful. The people that were there to brief us were Susan Rice and Director Clapper and Secretary Kerry. We also had Secretary of Defense Hagel and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Five people of the highest level you could ask for assured the President of the United States. He gave us a briefing with the data that they have and what they know. And they told us what was classified and what wasn't. They told us the conclusions they had drawn and some method about how they arrived at those conclusions. But my independent assessment doesn't agree with the course of action that seems to be the direction from the President of the United States. It doesn't mean that I disagree with the data that they have, but the conclusion and how to move forward, I do disagree with. And I have taken a position today that if there were a vote on the floor today to authorize military force in Syria, I would not support that. Mr. Speaker, I would vote ``no.'' I want to make it clear that I believe the President has constitutional authority to order action in Syria or anywhere else. The President of the United States has to have that authority to order our military into action in an instant. Our Continental Congress was not very functional when it came to fighting a war by consensus. When they finally got through the Revolutionary War and put a country together and built a Constitution that could be ratified by the majority of the States--the 13 original colonies--they concluded that we needed to have a President of the United States who was also the Commander in Chief of the United States military who was in full control of the military. And subsequent to that, there was a piece of legislation passed within the 20th century that was the War Powers Act that was designed to restrain the activities of the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States. Those two conditions were, one, the constitutional authority of the Commander in Chief to order our military into battle in an instant without consulting Congress. And the other, the War Powers Act, requires the President to come back after a period of time and consult with Congress. Those two, the Constitution and the War Powers Act, are compatible as long as they are respected by the Congress and by the President of the United States. Anytime we're engaged in a long military engagement, I think the President should come consult with Congress. If it's a short operation and it's over before it can be consulted, that's consistent with the Constitution. I would point out when President Reagan ordered our military into Grenada, that was an operation that took place quickly. He came before the American people and let us know after it was launched that he had ordered military action in Grenada. It was a successful operation, and we pulled out of there when the objective was achieved. That was Ronald Reagan. When George Herbert Walker Bush--Bush 41--ordered our military into action in Panama to put an end to dictator and drug smuggler Noriega, that order was issued and our military took to the field. And as that operation was unfolding, then we found out about the order of our Commander in Chief. This operation that's proposed in Syria is an operation that the President of the United States has the authority to order. He has the constitutional authority to do so. And if he had identified targets in Syria, and was determined that was the right course for America, the President should have then issued the order to engage our military in the fashion that his best judgment said he should. But what has happened instead is there has been a vacillation that has taken place. He has sought to sell this to the American people while the message and the warning is going out to Assad. The red line that was drawn in the sand back during the Presidential campaign, it appears that the administration thinks that line has been crossed multiple times. And if you cross a red line in the sand enough times, it gets pretty blurry after awhile. Now they've decided that August 21 was the bright red line that was crossed by Assad. And here we are on the eve of the anniversary of the Benghazi attack--tomorrow is September 11--and on the anniversary of course of the September 11, 2001, attack; now we're negotiating with Congress to get support to go into military action in Syria. My position, Mr. Speaker, is if the President thought it was a good idea, in a very limited way, as Secretary of State Kerry said, he should have done that. He should have issued the order, gotten it over with. If they're right and it's a very narrow operation, he could have pulled back and we would be done by now. But he watched as David Cameron and the United Kingdom took the issue before the British Parliament. The British Parliament voted down the initiative to strike Syria over the chemical weapons, and that put the brakes on the United Kingdom supporting us or any other entity in an operation in Syria. I think when the President saw that, maybe he concluded, Well, I'll ask Congress. If Congress says no, then I'll have this responsibility, this cup taken from him, so to speak--the one that he asked for when he put out the red line statement during the campaign in a debate with Mitt Romney. So we're now in this situation where we've had a protracted national and global debate. And each stop around the world where we have gone into-- into Tokyo, into the UAE, into Cairo, into Brussels--and met with multiple entities along the way, Syria is the discussion matter. But they look to the United States to lead. Some of the countries don't think it's a very good idea to go in there, but they say they will support us anyway because they want America to succeed. They understand that if we're not strong in the world, if we don't lead in the world, then this becomes a very precarious place. I had it expressed to me a number of times: We don't think it's a very good idea, but if you do this, we'll support you; or, We think it's a bad idea; we have to support you anyway. But I didn't find anybody that said that they were really happy about the idea that America might strike someplace inside Syria to send a message to Assad. Some said don't pave the road to Damascus for the Muslim Brotherhood, that the devil we know may not be as bad as the devil we don't know. And we're starting to learn that. So as this has unfolded--and I heard the gentleman from Pennsylvania, I believe it was, mention NATO and a NATO operation. We aren't going to have the support of NATO in an operation in Syria. NATO operates off of a consensus. The 28 nations or so that are NATO now have a lot of trouble getting to a consensus. If some of those countries decide they don't want to participate, they will just simply not commit their forces. In the end, it comes down to what will the U.S. do, what won't the U.S. do. We're not going to have the support of the United Nations. There has already been that effort to bring it before the United Nations, and we've got opposition from Russia and opposition from China. Now, maybe they would reconsider. Maybe China would reconsider; maybe Russia would reconsider. But the United Nations is not going to be there behind us, Mr. Speaker. NATO is not going to be there behind us. We will have perhaps a coalition--not of the willing, but a coalition of the unwilling, those unwilling to allow the United States to, let's say, be embarrassed by this policy. So the best course forward appears to be the lifeline that was tossed to us within the last 24 hours by Putin from Russia. He said, Let's take you up on your offer, Secretary Kerry, and see if we can gather up these chemical weapons and eradicate them from Syria. If doing so will prevent a military strike, then let's give it a go. That's a British expression, by the way, Mr. Speaker, ``give it a go.'' Well, I'm for giving it a go. I think that is the best alternative we have. I think the military strike is a mistake because it runs the risk of paving the road to Damascus for Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist entities that are part of that constellation that have been systematically marginalizing the true free Syrian Army and empowering themselves, and some of them with resources that we would see as sourced back to the U.S. taxpayers. Well, the best course forward now is to work with the Russians and see if we can get the chemical weapons gathered together. I would want Americans involved in any kind of a mission to gather those chemical weapons. I think the United Nations showed an ability to go into Iraq before 2003 and do the nuclear inspection that was there. I was uneasy with their conclusions--in fact, I didn't agree with their conclusions, but they're the force on the planet that has an opportunity to have the global credibility. If they get to that point where they say we've got all these weapons picked up, or they will qualify their answer, that's the kind of thing that should be going on, Mr. Speaker. But in any case, any kind of inspection team, any kind of chemical weapon collection team, under the auspices perhaps of the United Nations so that it isn't directly under, say, Russia or the United States, but with Americans there on the ground to verify the actions that are taking place and give us a sense of credibility and confidence. Mr. Speaker, I point out that it won't work to go there and just get the job done to eradicate the chemical weapons. We must do so in a way that has credibility so that especially the American people will accept a conclusion and we can perhaps move on. But picking up chemical weapons and gathering up that entire inventory, which is tons and tons of that inventory, if it's done so in a precision way, perhaps doesn't change the balance of the regime versus the forces for good and those evil forces that align themselves with the forces for good, perhaps doesn't change that balance, or changes it in a more minimal way than a military strike would, and it would send the message that we will put an end to the abuse of chemical weapons. It is also curious to me, Mr. Speaker, that this level of concern and outrage didn't seem to exist when chemical weapons were being used between Iraq and Iran during the Iraq and Iran war in the eighties. It doesn't mean it's all right. I think it's a good position to take against the abuse and the use of chemical weapons, but the red line itself, as far as a reason for America to put ourselves into a military conflict in a nation that we don't have much strategic interest in is, I think, a mistake and I would oppose that. We should remember, again, who are the forces there, the messages they send to the world. What have we seen happen in the Arab Spring? An Arab Spring that has emerged now--we are a couple years into that. It looks to me like the forces that have emerged on top have invariably been the Muslim Brotherhood. So it isn't always good to see a change within a regime or administration. We saw President Carter support the return of the Shah in Iran and support ousting the current power, the power that was in Iran and put the Shah in, thinking that there would be a representation that was a religious movement--excuse me, the opposition to the Shah in Iran. In any case, the Ayatollah was viewed by President Carter as being a religious movement that was a voice for the people. What we ended up with the Ayatollah instead of the Shah was the beginnings of radical Islam within Iran, and the flow that came from 1979 until today might have been different had we taken a different position in Iran. Where we had friends in Iran, now we have enemies in Iran. As we have developed friends in Iraq, we are watching that friendship diminish. As we developed the foundational support in Afghanistan, we are watching that diminish. As we see, we have strong friends and a military alliance with Egypt. We supported Mubarak and he was our friend. We built military operations going on in the Sinai Desert. That took place with--a good number of Iowans served there and people from probably every State served in the Sinai in operations with the Egyptians. Then Mubarak was essentially pushed out. And the message that came from our administration was he needs to leave yesterday. Well, the Morsi forces were able to push Mubarak out. They held one election. 5.8 million of the 83 million Egyptians voted for Morsi. Morsi came in as an incompetent Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood came out of that on top again like every other situation in the Arab Spring that has unfolded in the last couple of years, Mr. Speaker. Now the best break we've seen in Egypt is that 30 to 33 million Egyptians took to the streets. Their peak day was the 3rd of July. They took their country back; and, yes, they had the support of the military. And some call it a coup, but there is no constitutional provision for them to impeach the incompetent Morsi. The Egyptian people had had enough. You can't mobilize that kind of support unless there are many good reasons--the economic shambles that they allowed to take place and the injustices that were taking place under the Morsi regime. So now we have a new leadership that has taken hold in Egypt. I have met with the interim President of Egypt, President Mansour. He makes it clear he is the interim President, that they are going to hand the country of Egypt over to an elective representative government. They're going to pass a constitution that they're busy writing now. And the military will let go of their control over the country and submit to the civilian leadership that emerges in a constitutional fashion. They have laid out a timetable and a roadmap, Mr. Speaker. So this is the best future that Egypt can hope for. Morsi was a mistake. He is Muslim Brotherhood. These forces are anti- Muslim Brotherhood. They are pro-Egyptian people. I'm supporting the forces that are in place in Egypt now, and I would, face to face, encourage them, move forward with the timetable that you have. It appears to be aggressive and it has some risk. But writing a constitution, ratifying a constitution, having elections and establishing a civilian government in Egypt and then handing the control of the military over to that civilian government is the right thing to do. It sets the right destiny for Egypt. And I think that the United States needs to do a 180 on the support of the people that are now in charge in Egypt. I appreciate, Mr. Speaker, your attention and an opportunity to address you here this evening, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to be able to cover some of the subject matter that sets the stage and the tone and some of the things that I think we should be thinking about as we take this traditional August work period and go back to our individual districts and hear from our constituents. There are a number of us that have constituents that have guided this country in the right direction, that have given considerable contribution to this Nation, and I think it is an appropriate time for us to commemorate some of those individuals as well as highlight some important agenda moving into the other side of Labor Day. To begin that process, I am pleased to yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Flores) to address this topic matter.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas for bringing these two individuals before this Congress and commemorating their contributions and their lives to this country. And one individual that has been making a contribution in each of his days and years here in Congress is the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), who, Mr. Speaker, has taken the lead on the Benghazi issue. And he has consistently, persistently and relentlessly illuminated the reasons for us to take a much closer look and dig into the bottom of Benghazi. I'd be happy to yield as much time as the gentleman from Virginia may consume to address that topic.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, and this time here today, I've switched to a topic. But first I want to address that I've been very, very supportive of Congressman Wolf's initiative for a select committee and bringing these witnesses in under subpoena so that we can get to the bottom of this, because America's legacy and America's history is at stake. And when I think about America's legacy and America's history, this day I come to the floor with my eyes and my memory and my heart full of the last 2 days of saying goodbye to America's greatest living hero, up until the time of his death, Colonel Bud Day. Colonel Bud Day, this is one image I would point out, Mr. Speaker, of the Bud Day that I knew, the man that I had the privilege to call a friend, the man that I admired. In our time, a living American hero, Colonel Bud Day was, up until the time of his death, the most decorated living American hero. I believe we had to go back to General MacArthur to find someone who was more decorated than Bud Day. To put this in a short capsule, Mr. Speaker, Colonel Bud Day served in three wars. He volunteered as a high school senior when he heard that there was going to be a draft. He abhorred the thought of having to draft people to serve our country in a time of war, and he immediately went down to the courthouse to see the Marine recruiter. He served in World War II, he served in the Korean War, he served in the Vietnam War, he became a prisoner of war, and was repatriated and brought back to the United States and to his family in 1973. Bud Day received the Medal of Honor, he received 70-some other medals. Every available combat medal that was available to him in the theaters that he fought in in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam had been awarded to Bud Day. Bud Day was the one who, in the Hanoi Hilton--his and one other POW's cell is where they brought John McCain when John McCain was in a body cast, and, as has been expressed, was rattling around inside a body cast, weighing about 75 pounds. They brought John McCain in and threw him on Bud Day's bunk. And the two individuals began to heal John McCain back to health. This life of this man is full of service, service in three wars, and he served our country through, as I add them up, through the decade of the forties, in World War II, the decade of the fifties, in the Korean War, the decade of the sixties and the early seventies, in the Vietnam War. He came back and continued to serve his country up until nearly the eighties in the service, and then went back, went into service in practicing law in Florida. So that would be through the nineties. And as recently as just a few days ago, he won another case shortly before he died. Bud Day was a fighter. He was a scrapper. He was an American patriot. And, Mr. Speaker, I come here to the floor today to tell a more thorough narrative of Colonel Bud Day. And I want to point out first that much of that narrative is in one of two books that are of and about Bud. This one is by him. And when you read it, it's ``Duty, Honor, Country: Colonel George Bud Day, Warrior, Lawyer.'' And when you read ``Duty, Honor, Country,'' you hear the flavor and the thread of his conversation. You know, you'll see and read books that are written by ghost writers, and they'll go in and interview the extraordinary person and put that into a narrative form. And you can read the book, and when you read that you don't always get the feel and the favor of the character. In this one I see the language that Bud Day used constantly coming up. And it's flowery language. It's actually almost always very tasteful language. But he saw images that were, I'll say captured in his mind's eye that he kept in his memory for years, and he expressed them in this book. Going back to read it a second time upon the occasion of his death, the personality of Bud Day emerges in this book, Mr. Speaker. And so I'd like to go down through the history and the life of Colonel Bud Day. And I was able to, as I said, call him a friend. We were hunting buddies. We spent a lot of time out in the fields of Iowa together with a shotgun, stopping to rest, talking politics, talking history, talking the history of war, re-fighting some wars while we were at it. But the beginning of his life was February 24, 1925. Colonel Day was then, of course, George Bud Day, born in Riverside, Iowa, which is a suburb of Sioux City. And he went to Central High School in Sioux City. When he learned that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and he saw that in 1942--remember that was December 7, 1941. In 1942, when he heard there was going to be a draft, Bud Day decided that he would go down and sign up. And he saw the Marine recruiter and became a Marine. And then from that point, he served 2\1/2\ years in the South Pacific. And he came back home in 1945 and went to college at Morningside College there in Sioux City. And shortly after that, went up to the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, South Dakota, and received his law degree up there. By 1949, Marine Bud Day had an undergraduate degree at Morningside College and a juris doctorate law degree from the University of South Dakota, where he thought he would go and practice law. But he also served in the Iowa National Guard from 1950, then he attended flight school because he wanted to fly. So therefore, in 1951, the Air Force called Bud Day to active duty, and he was a fighter pilot in the Korean War. He served two tours as a fighter pilot in the Korean war. That experience growing up in Sioux City anchored him to the 185th Air Guard that is based today in Sioux City. He maintained his relationships with the airmen that served out of the 185th in Sioux City. Sioux City was always his home. He kept his contacts there; but he transferred his family down to the area of Pensacola, Florida, because there's a lot of military down there and it's a great place to live. I came back from there last night, having joined in the funeral and the procession to the cemetery for Colonel Bud Day. After his Korean war experience, where he served two tours, he decided to make the Air Force a career. One of the things he did was be deployed to a base at Niagara, New York, which he euphemistically called ``Nigeria.'' But they loved it up there and he built good, strong bonds with people. He took his flying hours up. With those flying hours that he had, he became one of the most experienced pilots to be deployed to Vietnam. He anticipated that he would retire in 1968; but then-Major Day volunteered for a tour in Vietnam and was assigned to the 31st Tactical Fighter Wing at Tuy Hoa Air Base. That was in April of 1967. There, he commanded the wing called the Misty Wing. That was because Bud Day named them so. ``Misty'' was his favorite song. They flew missions over North and South Vietnam. The most dangerous missions, by far, were over North Vietnam. On a mission over North Vietnam in an F-100, they were spotting and locating Russian surface-to-air missiles that had freshly been placed there that had the capability of taking down B-52s. As they located the Russian surface-to-air missile site, they were hit by enemy fire. Some say it was an enemy missile. In Bud's book, he says he thinks he took a direct hit from a 37-millimeter antiaircraft weapon. In any case, it hit the fuselage of the F-100 and took their flight down. And he had to, as he said, ``punch out.'' There, he was imprisoned. He was immediately captured by the North Vietnamese and was imprisoned for 5 years and 7 months. He became the highest ranking officer in that prison. He commanded people like John McCain during that period of time. Throughout that long ordeal that our American prisoners of war served in what they used to euphemistically call the Hanoi Hilton, Bud maintained his spirit and strength. He gave encouragement to the others who were there. He defied his captors in a way that I think amazed the people that served there with him. When he was released on March 14, 1973, he was reunited with his wife, Dorie, and their four children, Steven, George, Jr., Sandra, and Sonja. Then he was presented the Medal of Honor by President Ford in 1976. In all, as I said, he received over 70 medals. He had a combat medal from each field that he served in, each war, each theatre, and he was the only person to be awarded both the Medal of Honor and the Air Force Cross. Bud Day then retired from active duty in 1977 and resumed practicing law in Florida. One of the issues that he took on was TRICARE. In the nineties, he saw that the Clinton administration was starting to back away from the commitment that if you served 20 years in the Armed Forces, you would receive half your pay as your pension for life and medical care for life. That was the deal. That was the agreement, and he was appalled that the Federal Government was starting to move away from that agreement. So Bud Day, ever the fighter, ever the scrapper, ever the lawyer, went to court and put together a class action lawsuit to force the Federal Government to keep their word with our warriors. Most of that was designed to benefit America's Greatest Generation, the World War II veterans. We've lost so many of them since that period of time. But Bud Day drove that lawsuit and worked his way up through the courts. He got all the way to the Supreme Court, where they refused to hear the case. They refused to grant cert, as the ruling was. So the indomitable Colonel Bud Day, Medal of Honor recipient, decided, Okay, if we can't get what's right done in the courts, I'll go to Congress. So he took this argument to Congress. And if I have my dates right, it was in 2002 that Congress passed TRICARE. We've had a good number of debates on TRICARE since then. I don't believe we would have TRICARE at all if it weren't for Colonel Bud Day. Yesterday, I parted with his wife, Dorie, whom he affectionately called ``the Viking.'' I read in his book when he talked about her ice blue eyes. I saw them sad yesterday, but they're still bright and they're still ice blue and there's still a sparkle behind the tears. The family is strongly together, with Steve, George, Jr., Sandra, Sonja, and fourteen grandchildren. It was a ceremony and a service like no other for a man that there will never be another like Colonel Bud Day. I've looked through a number of articles, and recognizing, Mr. Speaker, that I probably can't be the best author to commemorate the life of a great iconic man that has captured this country, but I will take you down through a bit of a narrative from his story. Here's one of the things that Bud Day did. I'll just take you through the narrative of the way he treated death multiple times. Remember, this is a man that signed up for the Marine Corps in 1942, Mr. Speaker, and was able to come back from 2\1/2\ years of being deployed in the South Pacific and get his college under-grad degree and his law degree. He went into the Iowa Guard because he wanted to fly. He did fly. He volunteered to go to Korea. There, he served two tours flying a bomber over Korea. Then, while he was flying training missions, he was deployed different places like Georgia, for example, and at a base in England. And here are the number of times that Bud Day cheated death. The first one that I recall is when he was flying out of a base in Georgia. The fighter aircraft had the fuel doors open, and he had a leak. There was a plane that was flying next to him that said, You've got a leak. It looked like it was a fatal mechanical error. He didn't have enough altitude to bail out, and he didn't have enough power to land. He wasn't going to be able to sustain his power to land. And I'll give you an example of what he was going to be able to do for a lifetime and, that is, quick thinking. It's the kind of thing that pilots would likely be trained on this after they found out what Bud Day had done. He did the only thing he could do that would save his life. He put the nose of that plane down, knowing that if he could get to 170 knots, those ``sucker doors'' would close. And if they closed, it would shut off the risk of the fire. So he put that nose down in a courageous way; and right before he got to the treetops, he was able to reach 170 knots. In doing so, the sucker doors closed, and he was able to stabilize the aircraft and land it safely. That was the first time that's recorded that Colonel Bud Day cheated death. Not very long after that, he was flying out of a base in England. The name of the base, I think, is a pretty important one. The name of the base was Wethersfield Station in England. The uniqueness of that was pretty interesting. As Bud Day flew out of England, he had another situation where he had an engine fire at low altitude. There was no ability to set the plane down. He got it on a course where it would be away from a populated area. As he was at a lower altitude--around 500 or so feet--the only choice he really had was to eject. So he ejected. And he looked up and he said, Where's the chute? There was no chute, no opening, no orange blossom. He joked that fighter pilots or plane pilots will often argue if your shoot doesn't work, just take it back. And here is a man in a no-chute bailout of a jet aircraft, trailing down through skies with the chute not opening, with no blossom, and just trailing down. He went through the pine timber in England. If any of us, Mr. Speaker, remember when Rambo jumped out of the helicopter and went through the trees and survived that fall, I don't know where the inspiration came from that scene in Rambo, but I think of this happening to Colonel Bud Day, and this man survived a no-chute bailout. As the chute wouldn't open and as it strung down through the skies, he went into the pine trees and bounced off the branches. And as those branches began to break his fall, some of the cords slowed down a little bit on the branches and he hit the ground hard. He broke his ankle. He was injured in other places. But he was alive. He was the first person to survive a no-chute bailout of a jet aircraft. He did so in England in 1957. It was the second time he cheated death. The third time he cheated death was in a zero-zero landing. It was only 5 months after he had gone through his no-chute bailout. Remember, this is a man that had the presence of mind to put the nose down in a fighter aircraft and head toward the ground, knowing that if he didn't reach that speed--170 knots--he was not going to be able to survive that flight. And he had to pull it up right above the trees and have the air speed that he needed to get the sucker doors closed to stabilize the aircraft and to land it. And then here we are, not that much later, flying in England, and having to bail out of a burning aircraft and go through not having your chute open. And what did he say? Well, he expressed that it was an old Royal Air Force expression. He said: I thought I bought the farm. What a lousy way to go. But he went through the trees. And he said that flyers have an old, bad joke about parachutes. If it doesn't open, take it back. There are not many members of that take-it-back club. Colonel Bud Day was one of those members. The ejection was from an F-84. It was the first in Air Force history that anyone survived. Colonel Bud Day said, God must be saving me for something. In fact, his wife said, God must be saving you for something. It was less than 6 months later that he was flying out of Wethersfield Royal Air Force Station in England. They took off to go get some parts. The weather cleared. It was supposed to open up and stay open across Europe at the alternate landing forces they had. Instead, the fog socked in. The visibility went down to zero. The ceiling went to zero. Bud Day said the weather was so bad, not even the birds flew. But they flew that F-80C and were hoping the weather would reverse itself. His copilot was Bill Moore, known affectionately as Billy Moore. So they had a choice. With everything socked in, they decided to go back to the Wethersfield air strip because that's the one they knew the best. That's the one that didn't have a lot of urban areas or housing around it. They had pretty much clear approach to landing. And if they didn't make it, it was less likely that they would kill other people other than themselves. So they turned and went back to Wethersfield. Bud Day is thinking, I don't want to bail out of this plane again. My ankle is just healing up from the last time my chute didn't open. I want to come in and land this, and Billy Moore agreed that it was the best choice that they could make. So they approached the landing strip. This is a complete instrument landing, with zero visibility and zero ceiling. It was black as it could be. On the first approach, Bud said to his copilot, Billy Moore, You take the controls, I'll watch. And if I can see the runway, I'll take the controls from you the instant right before we land, and I'll land it. Because Bud, sitting in the front, was the one that can see the runway. And so as they made that first approach, right before touch down on impact was unknown, right before they touch down, Bud Day saw they were off the side of the runway. He saw a light on the side of the runway and said, Pull it back up. So they pulled it back up and they went back around again and they adjusted their radar again. As they approached, it was a complete instrument landing, zero ceiling, zero visibility. Right before impact, right before they touched, Bud said to Billy Moore, Pull it back up. That instant he realized they were lined up and within just an instant of making contact with the runway, Bud Day took the controls and set that plane down. And it was the first zero-zero landing that they had survived. He said to Bill Moore, his copilot: Good show, pal. That was about as scary as it's going to get. I think we owe the radar controllers a beer. That tells you something about the spirit of this man. He said: I didn't want to bail out again; my leg and back are still sore from the last bailout. And you know, Bill, we may be the only pilots living today that have made a zero visibility, zero ceiling landing. And I think that turned out to be true. Later on, Bud Day volunteered then for combat duty in Vietnam, where we went on to command the squadron there. As they were flying over that SAM site--that service-to-air missile site--his captain was Corwin Kippenharn of Amana, Iowa--two Iowans together in that flight as they were hit and shot down on that date. They punched out, but Day was taken prisoner immediately. That was the third time he cheated death, when they took a direct hit on the fuselage of that plane. As he bailed out, this time his chute did open, but when it opened, it settled him down in the location where he was immediately taken captive. His copilot--Kip, as he was known--was rescued right away. And as Bud Day is on the ground looking up, there was an American helicopter that was hovering off at a close distance. They were looking for him. He was in the trees and they couldn't see him, but Bud could see the helicopter. And standing in the side of that helicopter door was his copilot with a rifle in his hand. They were looking to go get Bud Day. If they would have seen him, they would have been able to recover him. But of course that didn't happen, and he was put into captivity. So three times he cheated death. As they beat him and as they tortured him, as they put him in a hole, he had his arm broken in three places. He had other injuries from the bailout. He had hit the side of the plane on the way out and suffered those injuries. But they drove him and marched him through the villages in what they would liked to have called a ``march of shame.'' But he was put under guard by a young Vietnamese teenager whom Bud Day feigned that he was--he was hurt badly and it was hard for him to walk; his knee was bad; his arm was broken three places. But he feigned that he was worse than he was. He noticed that his captor would go off and talk to another guard because he believed that Bud could not move, could not get out of the hole that he was in, and that he wouldn't be able to travel. So he was a relaxed kind of a guard that wasn't really paying attention. Bud recognized that, he exploited that, and he feigned his injuries to be--it was bad, but he feigned them to be worse than they were. As he did so, the guard got more and more relaxed. And after several days, Bud saw his opportunity. They were going to move him then on up to North Vietnam to the Hanoi Hilton is what it sounded like. There was some expression; the guard had drawn a picture into the dirt of a jeep, and that said that they were going to transport him. So they went in and tied his legs together with a cord and they left him there. Bud Day knew that within hours, or a day or so, they were going to come and get him. And once he went to the next stage of his captivity, each day that goes by gets harder and harder to escape. So as the guard went over to talk to his friend and had his back turned, Bud Day was able to untie the cords that tied his legs together, even though he only had one arm to do it and the other one broken in three places. When he did that, he had to pick a time that he thought the guard was as relaxed as possible. He got out of that hole, and he headed out through the jungle to try to get down to the DMZ--the demilitarized zone--and to try to get, then, across the DMZ, cross a river, swim across a river, and then try to get into American hands. That looked like it was going to be a long trip, and it was. Bud Day had a canteen. He had some water in it. He was able to refill that sometimes from water that was captured from rainwater and banana leaves when he would stop and refill his canteen. He went for days without eating, days without thinking about eating. He was so focused on avoiding ``the V,'' as he called them, the North Vietnamese military, but also the Viet Cong. As he's traveling through North Vietnam, traveling through enemy territory, he had to be ever alert to maintain hiding and travel at night part of the time for the first couple, three days of his trip because that was the only way it would be safe. But to try to navigate at night through the canopy of the jungle and try to follow trails that you don't know where they go is a very, very difficult task. To keep his mind on task as he got weaker and weaker was a struggle. That is something that is so impressive to see that he was able to hold it together. And he wouldn't have said that he held it together. He went up and down through delirium. He would discipline his mind back to focusing on staying alive because he remembered his beloved wife, Dorie. He remembered his children. He remembered the people that he flew with--the Misty pilots and the Misty team that was out there. He prayed to God to come and save him. The 23rd Psalm was his favorite Psalm. When he didn't know what else to pray, he prayed the 23rd Psalm. It happens to also be my mother's and mine. As he worked his way down south and was able to build himself the equivalent of a little bamboo raft and go into that river--and the river that he said was equivalent to--and Bud Day grew up on the Missouri River and played out there on the Missouri River, where I've spent a fair amount of time, outside of Sioux City. But he said the river was equivalent to the Missouri River at St. Louis. It had a lot of water. It was flowing fast when he put into it. He thought that it would be slower than it was. It was flowing more than 7 or 8 miles an hour. That's about what the river flows around up in Sioux City, Iowa, today. It took him downstream fast, but he was able to get across the other side with arm broken in three places and all. As he emerged from the river, he had to struggle his way through the jungle, starving, hungry, weak from hunger. He found a cache of U.S. military--we would call them today MREs. He thought: I found the mother lode of food; now I can reenergize myself. I can store up with food. I can get my energy back, and I'll be able to go on. But each can that he picked up had been bayonetted because it was likely U.S. Marines who couldn't carry all of the food with them; they ate their fill. And in that jungle, if you poke a hole in a can, it only takes a little while and that food is spoiled. So it was all spoiled. But he was glad to see that the marines were following the due diligence in their combat training that they'd had. Throughout this, you will hear his voice kind of go up in despair, and then he would check himself and say: What are you complaining about, Bud? It's a great day. The sun came up in a bright way this morning. You had good weather to travel with. He found a way to find a blessing in thing after thing. He was shelled and escaped death then. U.S. bombs were dropping around him at a close area. He escaped death then. He had to go barefoot across the craters of a bomb field where some of the sand turns into glass. It cut his feet. His feet were swollen. He was wounded from some of that. And of course an arm broken in three places. Ten to 12 days he wandered across the desert, always renavigating, always resetting himself, always disciplining himself to stay on task: Stay on task. God is saving you for something. Throughout those days, those days of courage, he was faced multiple times with North Vietnamese military that, at any slipup--if he hid in the wrong place, if they looked in the wrong place, if he made a motion, he would have been captured. Outside of Khe Sanh, which was a marine base about 2 kilometers or perhaps 2 miles from there, Bud Day's luck ran out. He was encountered by a couple of young North Vietnamese who were either preparing to assault Khe Sanh or trying to assault any supply chains that would be coming to it. They discovered Bud Day, who then, when he realized he was discovered--now, remember, he lost about 25 pounds. He went into this weighing about 150. Maybe at this time it's less than 125 pounds. He's weak from hunger. He's eaten frogs and drank some water and a little bit of pulp from a banana tree that he took apart, and that's about it. So you can imagine how weak he must have been, how wounded he was, with a bad knee and an arm broken in three places, but he got up to run. As he ran--he made it a ways. He got through the jungles a ways, but as they shot at him, he took a bullet through the thigh and a bullet through the hand. He continued to run to evade his captors, who nearly didn't find him, but at the last minute, as they happened to find themselves standing next to him, not realizing it, they captured him. They captured him and they pressed him back again and sent him back to Hanoi to the Hanoi Hilton, where all of these days of disciplining his mind and himself, the resolve that was there went away, because he lost all of those days and went back into the Hanoi Hilton. This is the man whose spirit held together. And when they began to torture him in an even more sophisticated and even more relentless fashion--they would hang him by his feet for hours. They would beat him with fan belts. He said that--here's an expression from the 15th chapter of his autobiography. This chapter is titled, ``Crucifixion.'' He vividly details the most violent and barbaric tortures he endured. He called them ``rope tricks.'' That gives you a sense of Bud Day's sense of humor. There were ``rope tricks'' that literally dislocated shoulders and tore muscles, flesh-piercing leg irons, torture cuffs, and kneeling on sharp objects for days on end until the knees became raw, bloody stumps. They beat him with fan belts. And he would pray, ``Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.'' This is something that I think needs to go into the Record verbatim, Mr. Speaker. Bud Day, ever the warrior, prayed: Jesus, if I survive this nightmare, I will have divine understanding. I am your brother, in blood and deed. I am being crucified! I know Satan. I have seen the deepest rings of hell. I am in the pit, Lord, and I am fading. My strength is waning. Give me strength, Dear God, strength. I cannot bear the thought of my wife or children hearing that I am a traitor. I cannot live in disgrace with my fellow prisoners. Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, the spirit of a man who feared he would disgrace his fellow prisoners? He couldn't bear the thought of becoming a traitor. He couldn't bear the thought of not seeing his beloved wife, Dorie, and the kids again. This was Colonel Bud Day. This is the spirit of the man who gave courage and inspiration to all of those in the Hanoi Hilton. I recall the day we commemorated the statue of Bud Day at the airport in Sioux City, where we got together and named the airstrip after Colonel Bud Day. There's a statue there of Bud Day--it's a bronze statue that I'll describe in a moment, Mr. Speaker. Bud Day's defiance to his captors--they would point a rifle at his head and threaten to execute him, and Bud Day would stand there and sing the national anthem. There was another prisoner of war who was first blamed for organizing a prayer session. A number of them took the oath, essentially an oath that they would hold their ground and insist that they were going to do prayer sessions. As the Vietnamese marched them off, the first one to be marched off was beaten and bloodied and being hauled off, and what does Bud Day do? Stood up on his bunk and sang the national anthem at the top of his lungs. That voice of him singing the national anthem echoed across these cellblocks. They couldn't all see each other, Mr. Speaker, but they could hear. They echoed it across the cellblocks. They all stood up and sang the national anthem at the top of their lungs. They asked that prisoner, What did that make you feel like? And he said, It made me feel like I was 9 feet tall, ready to hunt bear with a switch. And the statue of Bud Day that commemorates the Bud Day Airstrip in Sioux City is a bronze statue, 9 feet tall. I remember the day that his twin daughters unveiled that statue from the roof of the airport building, where they pulled the tarp off and showed us the statue of Colonel Bud Day, the man who cheated death time after time after time, the man whom a lot of us wouldn't have believed that his life would end, even that he could cheat nature. I thought he might have been able to do that. I listened to the remarks made by John McCain on the floor of the Senate this Monday, and I was impressed by that delivery, by the poignant moments that John McCain captured. I will just hit some of those highlights because I think it's so important and I was so impressed with his presentation. I think it's very close to the delivery that he gave yesterday at the service. He said that Bud's lifetime ``could have supplied enough experiences, excitement, and satisfaction for 10 lifetimes.'' ``He knew terror and suffering. He knew joy and deliverance. He knew solidarity, self-respect, and dignity.'' This is John McCain still: ``We met in 1967 when the Vietnamese left me to die in the prison cell Bud shared with Major Norris Overly. Bud and Norris wouldn't let me die. They bathed me, fed me, nursed me, encouraged me, and ordered me back to life.'' Norris did much of the work because Bud had healing of his own to do, to paraphrase. But to continue the quote: ``Bud showed me how to save my self-respect and my honor, and that is a debt I can never repay.'' From John McCain. Continuing to quote: ``Bud was a fierce--and I mean really fierce--resister. He could not be broken in spirit no matter how broken he was in body.'' ``He defied men who had the power of life and death over us. To witness him sing the national anthem in response to having a rifle pointed at his face--well, that was something to behold.'' ``In 1967, then-Major Bud Day commanded a squadron of F-100s that served as forward air controllers over North Vietnam and Laos. They were called the Mistys, named for Bud's favorite song.'' On August 26, 1967, Bud Day was one of the casualties over Vietnam. Continuing the quote of Senator McCain: Bud was the bravest man I ever knew, and I have known more than a few. He was great company too and made it possible to actually have fun in prison once in a while. An extraordinary statement to make, knowing the pain, the agony, and the torture that they all went through there in Hanoi Hilton, in that prisoner of war camp. Mr. Speaker, I want to relate, though, the Bud Day that I knew. We see him here, the Bud Day of his later years--the happy face, the sparkle in his eyes, that look, that smile. Anybody that knew Bud Day understood this man by looking at this picture. It captured him. It literally actually captured the real man that was there. This is the Bud Day that I knew. He loved to hunt and fish; he loved the outdoors. As busy as he was and as active in his law practice up until the last day's of his life, he still made time to go out to the field. He made time to come back to Iowa and South Dakota, that area that he grew up in that he knew so well and loved so much. He always kept his home connections with his home territory. As we went out in the field year after year and hunted pheasants together primarily--South Dakota and Iowa--I will tell a little narrative. Now, think of this fighter pilot who has been through so much, who could fly up through that Valley of Death and tell you the narrative of all the anti-aircraft that was being fired at them and the surface-to-air missiles that were fired at them and, of course, small arms fire that they would fire at them constantly. Here is how Bud Day would explain it: It was really exciting. Can you imagine a man with the kind of courage that would be facing death by expressing, It was really exciting? This is a man that loved the outdoors, he loved to hunt, he loved to shoot. We would put together hunts--and we'll do another one this fall--it's going to be the ``Bud Day Pheasant Hunt.'' But this is the sparkle in his eye--he always wore the sunglasses out there--but I know this sparkle in his eye. That smile on his face anybody would know. The people that knew Bud Day would smile. If you hold your hand like this and you stretch it out, you know that's the action of him stretching the tendons in his injured hand that he did constantly at rest. That hand would always be stretching those tendons back out. In that ceremony yesterday, there was eulogy after eulogy by other true American heroes, other Medal of Honor recipients, others that flew and fought with him, or part of the Misty Squadron, and the families, the military wives that were there, the people in that room, the four stars on shoulders time after time. And as I looked around that room and I saw all that brass, I thought: there are at least enough stars here for a constellation at this funeral, probably enough for a galaxy if you look at all the people whose lives he touched. And in the four legs of my journey down there, in three of them someone approached me and said: Did you know Bud Day? Are you on your way to the funeral, are you from the funeral? Here is how he touched my life. In the last leg of the journey, a young man across the aisle from me asked me if I was on my way back from the funeral. I said yes, and we talked a little bit. I don't know that he knew I'm a Member of Congress. I asked him what he did. He said, I'm an aviator. A little bit later he pulled up a picture of some of the pilots standing there together with Colonel Day in the middle taken recently, within the last couple of years, with a great big beaming smile on the face of Bud Day and those proud pilots all standing in a row. We exchanged cards as we stepped off the plane. I put it in my pocket, my front pocket, so I would look at it later, because without my glasses it's better to shake hands and smile and read it later. When I got home last night, I pulled it out. This man is a Blue Angels pilot, proud and honored to have his picture taken with Colonel Bud Day. I'm proud and honored to have had the privilege of knowing him, admiring him, stepping up to do some work to honor him. The honor that they gave him yesterday as we went on a 48.1-mile processional from the funeral service to the cemetery in Pensacola, every mile had mourners standing out there. For the first 15 or so miles it was almost shoulder to shoulder. I have never, Mr. Speaker, seen so many flags and umbrellas in the same place in my life. You would see families, full families, standing there holding flags, waving them, hands over their hearts. You might see someone in shorts and a T- shirt standing at full salute as the processional went by--hundreds of cars on the way to the cemetery. When we entered the cemetery, there stood airmen in full salute for the first leg down through the cemetery, perhaps a half of mile of airmen stretched out. That is something that grabs your heart. When we turned the corner, we turned the corner and then it was marines in full dress saluting all the way down to the burial ceremony. It was something that puts your heart up in your throat and moved people to tears and to emotions that they had not seen all day by that great, great level of love, appreciation, and respect for America, up until the moment of his death, America's greatest living hero, Colonel Bud Day. As I've said, I've had the privilege to walk the Iowa--and South Dakota--Iowa cornfields with Bud Day and to hunt and to shoot and to stop and rest and talk philosophy and history and politics and what we need to do. I would like to put into the Record, Mr. Speaker, that the rallies that we did here to battle ObamaCare were inspired by Bud Day, on top of one of the bluffs up in Plymouth County, Iowa, where he said: Call everybody into the Capitol, surround the place, jam the place, don't let anybody in, don't let anybody out. If you just get so many people there that say: Keep your hands off my health care, they will have to give up. That was Bud Day. That brought tens of thousands of people here. But in conclusion, Mr. Speaker, I want to put John McCain's description of heaven into the Record, because I see it the same way. I'm glad he said it, and I'm glad he wrote it. He said, speaking of Bud Day, Colonel Bud Day: But he's gone now to a heaven I expect he imagined would look like an Iowa cornfield in early winter filled with pheasants. This, Mr. Speaker, is a shot, I believe, of the last hunt in Iowa as Colonel Bud Day walked off the field, taken by my youngest son, Jeff, who did so because he wanted to commemorate that moment fearing that it might be the last time. As I look at this picture of Colonel Bud Day, America's greatest hero, Medal of Honor recipient, 70-some other medals, every combat medal available to him in three wars, serving our country, giving us TRICARE, giving us inspiration to battle ObamaCare, with a smile on his face and a glint in his eye and a sense of humor and a way to express that extraordinary life that he lived, John McCain said, as I do: I will hunt the field with him again. God bless his life. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege to be recognized by you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and it's my privilege to follow the gentleman from Texas as we close out this legislative week and a lot of the Members are on their way to the airport, or at the airport now, going back to serve their constituents. I'll be there myself, and I trust Mr. Gohmert will be too. I wanted to come to the floor and talk about this country that we have, this civilization that we have, the foundations of our civilization, and what's required to retain them and enhance them and move this country beyond the shining city on the hill and to a place beyond there onward and upward. Ronald Reagan often described the shining city on the hill. He described it as an America that is. An America that was and an America that is. We were always challenged by the dream, but he didn't actually articulate, that I recall, something beyond this shining city. But societies must progress, and those that progress the most effectively and those that can be sustained the longest need to be built upon solid pillars. The shining city on the hill standing true and strong on a granite ridge was built on a solid foundation, and I argue that the foundation of it are the pillars of American exceptionalism, and those pillars are listed in the Bill of Rights. You add to that free enterprise capitalism, Judeo-Christian values, the foundation of our culture, which welcomes all religions, and on top of that the dream that inspired legal immigrants to come to America, and that dream embodied within the vision of the image of the Statue of Liberty. That's the American Dream. That's the American country that we are. And that's the foundation upon which we've got to build our American future. How did we get here? What was the reason that these pieces came together? How was it that our Founding Fathers came to a conclusion that we would have freedom of speech, religion, assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, freedom of the press, that we would have property rights, that we would have Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure, that we would not have to face any kind of jury but a jury of our peers, and that we would not suffer double jeopardy and that justice would be blind and every person would stand before the law to be treated equally? The statue that we see of Lady Justice holding the scales of justice perfectly balanced is almost always shown to us blindfolded because justice is blind. But justice is not a feeling. Justice is something that has to be delivered by the law. These are pillars of American exceptionalism, as are those rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution that devolve respectively to the States or the people, those enumerated powers that we have for Congress or those delegated to the Presidency, the executive branch, and the judicial branch of government. All of this is laid out as foundations that have been--although they've been altered to some degree over the years, we have adapted to those principles more often than we've altered our constitutional principles because our Founding Fathers got it right. Where did that come from? How could it happen that these Founding Fathers could come together on what was an obscure place on the planet and get these ideas so well articulated that they could be the foundation of the greatest Nation the world has seen, the strongest economy the world has seen, the most dominant culture and civilization that the world has seen, the furthest reach in our economy, the furthest reach in our influence strategically? How did this all happen? And I would take you back, Mr. Speaker, to think a little bit about the formation of, I'll say, modern history. I take you back to Mosaic law before the time of Christ when Moses, who looks down upon us right now, the only face that is looking directly at us from all of these faces of law providers in history, Moses looks down over this Chamber in full-face form, and he's looking back here and he sees, as we should see, ``In God We Trust,'' our national motto. How did that come together, Mr. Speaker? It was when Moses came down from the Mount with the law, God's law, and the foundation of that law, the way it was separated out through the tribes and the way the law and the way justice was delivered, emerged out of Mosaic law and appeared also in Greek law. And as the Greeks, masterful people as they were, they were shaping the Age of Reason. So we had Mosaic law that informed the Greek Age of Reason, and the Age of Reason, where I imagine that Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers sat around and challenged each other intellectually like gunslingers did in the West with guns, they did it with their brains. And young philosophers would go up to Socrates and challenge him with their philosophy, and Socrates would take it apart because he was the top guy and he informed others. But as they were proud and prideful of their ability to reason and the culture of Greece at the time, they had to infuse Mosaic law to uphold their rationale. And some of them, as they voiced Mosaic law, were teased by other Greeks that said, Well, you got that from Moses. But my point in this is that as civilization was progressing, Mosaic law came down from the Mount, was handed to civilization. It emerged through the Greek civilization as the Greeks were developing their Age of Reason, and we're talking about the foundation of Western civilization. And almost concurrently with that, Roman law was emerging as well. Now, I'll take you then to the time of Christ. Christ taught us our values, the very values of repentance and redemption that didn't exist in any form before then, and that's his gift to us. But I make this point in talking about the law, and it is this: Think of Mosaic law coming down, being infused within the Greeks, transferred also to the Romans. Roman law ruled over that part of the world where Christ stood before the high priest Caiaphas. And if you remember, Mr. Speaker, the high priest said to Jesus: Did you really say those things? Did you really preach those things? And Jesus responded to the high priest, as the Jews were watching, he said: Ask them. They were there. They can tell you. That was, Mr. Speaker, the assertion by Jesus that he had a right to face his accusers. That principle remains today in our law, that we have a right to face our accusers. And when he said: Ask them. They were there. They can tell you, he's facing his accusers and demanding that they testify against him rather than make allegations behind his back. And what happened when Jesus said that? They believed and the high priest believed that Jesus' answer was insolent and the guard struck Jesus. Jesus said: If I speak wrongly, you must prove the wrong. If I speak rightly, why do you punish me? He asserted his right to be innocent until proven guilty before a Roman court. Those two principles remain today in our law: a right to face your accuser; innocent until proven guilty. You face that jury of your peers, as I said. You need a quick and speedy trial. They didn't have to wonder about that in those days; it happened quickly. And the punishment came quickly as well, right or wrong. This foundation of law was wrapped up in Roman law, and it was spread across Western Europe as the Romans occupied areas like Germany, England, as we know it today, on into Ireland. And when the Dark Ages came, when the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 A.D., then we saw civilization itself tumble and crumble, and we saw the heathens break down anything that represented the old culture, anything that represented real civilization. While that was going on--they were tearing buildings into rubble, they were burning anything that was written documents--while that was going on, the priests, and let me say the descendants of the disciples of Christ, began to gather up any papers and documents they could get their hands on. Some went to Rome to be secured and replicated by the monks and the scribes there. A lot went to an island off of Ireland where the monks and the scribes replicated those documents there. That was the foundation of the relearning of a civilization, a civilization that had been lived for centuries, having lost the ability to reason. That Age of Reason that they were so proud of in the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was lost to civilization for centuries as people just lived by instinct and didn't leave much of a record of their rationale and didn't develop science, technology, or thought. And at a certain time, this information that was preserved in the documents of the classics, both Biblical and religious information, and any document that the monks and scribes could get their hands on, they preserved. And they analyzed it and they studied it, and they took a continent and taught that continent how to think. As the church emerged from Rome and from the St. Patrick side of this thing out of Ireland, they built monasteries across the continent, and they were the centers of knowledge. They began to educate the classical information that they had preserved primarily from the Roman but also from the Greek era, and they reeducated an entire civilization and re-created civilization based on what, Judeo- Christian values, the Age of Reason, and that reason that tied the values of faith together with the values that will allow for science to be developed. And that brings us to that year, let's say the years emerging from the Middle Ages, and Martin Luther stepped on to the scene in the 16th century and brought us, on top of that, the Reformation Period where he made the point that cast across the globe that you can honor God in a lot of ways. A mother changing a baby's diaper honors God more than a thousand rote prayers that you don't give meaning from your heart into. And so the Protestant work ethic got added to all these values that have been added together. And the competition between the Protestant and Catholic Church within Christianity ended up, it was rough and it was brutal, but the effect of it on our civilization and on our society has been good because the competition that drove from that made us all better, and each religion drew from the other. And, by the way, the Eastern Church was separated when the Turks sacked Constantinople. So the Eastern Orthodox and Russian Orthodox were separated, and they evolved in a little bit different way, but we're tied together. We're tied together culturally. We're tied together historically. We're tied together by our common humanity and our belief in, and this is the unique component, their belief in redemption. These attributes that I've discussed now, they're embodied within Western Europe as we emerge into, as we had emerged into the Age of Discovery, meaning Christopher Columbus and the explorers who came over here to the Western Hemisphere, that component, as well as a little bit later, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Think about where we are here in America. We are the recipients of some of the wisest, most analytical people that the world has ever produced, our Founding Fathers. They are a product of a culture and a civilization that believed in Adam Smith's free enterprise and the rights to property, and they believed they were free men, that they were free. In fact, they said so in the Declaration Independence when Jefferson wrote in the Declaration: A prince who exhibits the characteristics of a tyrant is unfit to be a ruler of a free people. A free people. They saw themselves as a free people before the Declaration. They didn't become necessarily free people as a product of, although they certainly had to earn it. They declared their freedom from England, but they saw themselves as free people before they issued the Declaration of Independence. But that brings us now to July 4, 1776. I brought this history around from a couple thousand years, or a little bit more, more than 2,000 years. On this continent now we have the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. I believe they are inspired by God, and it was by Divine Guidance that the Declaration was written, but it arrives here this, with what, these rights that we have--freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly, the right to keep and bear arms. The balance of these rights from the judicial side of it, the property rights from the Fifth Amendment, the devolution of power down to the people or the States, all of this landed on a continent with unlimited natural resources, so we believed at the time. All of these rights, free enterprise, strong Judeo-Christian faith and values, the reason many came here, unlimited natural resources, and a concept of manifest destiny. Now, who could create a giant petri dish that's so robust that it could settle a continent in the blink of a historical eye and leave such a foundation for the growth of population and the image and inspiration of faith and freedom, who could do that? Not man, but the entity that shaped their movements and their thoughts. So here we are, the recipients, God-given liberty, defined in the Declaration. It should be inarguable. It should be unchallengeable. I think it is. But we're a Nation that cannot be reverse-engineered and come up with a better result. We're a Nation that has components of American exceptionalism, pillar after pillar of American exceptionalism, none of which can we pull out from underneath the edifice of this shining city on the hill and expect that this shining city would not collapse. Yes, it would. And so what is our charge here? It is not as hard as the charge of our Founding Fathers. It is not as hard as those who picked up their muskets and marched into the Red Coats' muskets and the Revolution. It is not as hard as the blue and the gray that clashed all over the battlefields here in this country and put an end to slavery and reunified this country. It's not as hard as the doughboys that marched off to war. It's not as hard, certainly, as those 16 million Americans who put on uniforms to defend our country in the Second World War. It is certainly not as hard for us as the 450,000 who gave their lives during that war. It's not as hard, either, as those who marched off to Korea and are honored down here in their memorial, the memorial that says on the slab in front of them: Our Nation honors the men and women who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met. None of what we are charged with right now is that hard. And yet some despair and some think that we can create this new America that is not tied to the pillars of American exceptionalism; we can sacrifice some of those principles and we'll still be a country okay because we've got some political pressure that says we should sacrifice this principle or we should chisel away some pieces out of this beautiful marble pillar of American exceptionalism. Imagine what it would be like, which if this Congress and this culture that directs this Congress, what if we decided you're going to have limited speech. Certain things you can't say, and we'll give you the list of words you can't utter because if you do that, you're going to be violating somebody's sense of political correctness? What if we said that you can assemble, but we're going to diminish your right to assemble because sometimes we disagree with what comes out of those meetings? You know, the Greeks did that. They had meetings in their city-states. Remember the Greek black ball system that they had. The demagogues would emerge, people that could step up before the masses in Greece and the city-state and issue a speech that was rhetorically so inspiring that the Greeks marched off in what turned out to be the wrong direction. And what would they do? They would label him a demagogue. They would bring the demagogue before the city-state and then they would excoriate him, and then they would have a vote. It's like the Greek system today: two gourds, two marbles, one black and one white one. They called them balls, of course. As each of the Greeks walked through, they would drop their voting ball in one gourd and they would drop their discard ball in another gourd, and if the demagogue got three black balls, he was banished from the city-state for 7 years. That's how they muzzled the people that led them in the wrong direction with emotional rhetoric. But can you imagine if we did that, if America would banish people into the hinterlands for, let's say, giving a speech that was disagreed with by three people? That's all it took--three. They were restrained, of course, because they didn't want to be the next one banished. But that was the system. We're not going to limit freedom of speech in this country, and we're not going to limit freedom of assembly. We're not going to say you cannot get together and talk about these things because we know that an open public discourse and dialogue, what emerges from that are--we believe in this reason that we have inherited from the Greeks and other civilizations, that what will emerge is the most logical, rational policy. That's what I'm advocating for, Mr. Speaker. I want the most logical, rational policy. And I think we need a policy that's right for America. I have an obligation to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and represent my constituents and represent my State and represent my country. And all of those things should be compatible with each other. And I believe they are. And I've not found myself in a conflict here between them. So I suggest that we have open dialogue, we have open debate. I challenge this civilization to be reasonable, have reason, be analytical, be a critical thinker. We send our kids off to school, and sometimes they're just taught a mantra, but they're not taught to take ideas apart and understand the components of them and put them back together. Well, I've just taken America apart and described some of its essential components, history apart, and put it back together, Mr. Speaker, and, hopefully, informed this body of some of the principal reasons why America is such a great Nation. We're a great Nation because we have God-given liberty. We would not be a great Nation if we didn't exercise those God-given liberties. If we don't have access to those rights, if we don't put our positions out there in front of the public and challenge the people in this country to analyze those alternatives--what if we went down one path? What if some leader from on high, let's just say King George, not Prince George today, but King George, what if he decided we're going to go down this path, and no one shall discuss anything outside of this line that I've described for you? What kind of a country would we be? Would we believe that one mortal individual can chart a path for this country superior to the collective wisdom of 316 million people? I don't think so, Mr. Speaker. And I don't think thinking Americans will either. But I know that this country's full of emotionalism. As I watched the reactions to the George Zimmerman trial and verdict, I saw a lot of people who simply denied the facts that had been proven in law, and seemed to be incapable of considering anything that didn't concur with their conclusion that they had drawn before they saw the facts. Now, I engage in this debate. I challenge people to debate with me because I believe one of two things: if I can't sustain myself in debate, I need to go get some more information. I need to get better informed. Or could it be that I'm wrong? Only two alternatives can come from not being able to sustain yourself in a debate, and I'll go back and get all the information that I can get, but I'll also reconsider, and anybody should. That's why I challenge people to debate. I'll take it up, and we will see who can sustain themselves. We may not get this all resolved in one discussion. In fact, in this Congress it's been a very rare thing, over the last 10-plus years that I've been here, to see anybody stand up and admit, I was wrong. What you said changes my position. What I learned changes my position. No, there are too many egos involved in this Congress for that to happen very often. It will happen a little bit privately, it will happen incrementally, but it doesn't happen publicly, unless there's some kind of leverage brought to bear. So here's my point, Mr. Speaker, and that is this: Our southern border is porous. It's not as porous as it was 7 or 8 years ago, mainly because the economy has grown in Mexico at about twice the rate that it's grown in the United States over the last 4\1/2\ or 5 years. We don't have as much pressure on our border. But I can tell you this: 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico. I can tell you that in Mexico they are recruiting kids to be drug smugglers. Between the ages of 11 and 18 they have arrested and, I believe, incarcerated, and the number of convictions is at least this: over 800 per year over the last couple of years at that ratio of those who are kids who are smuggling drugs into the United States. We pick up some on our side of the border. That adds to that number, the ones that we catch. Many get away. Every night some come across the border smuggling drugs across the border. Increasingly, the higher value drugs, heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine in some form or another, are being strapped to the bodies sometimes of young girls, teenage girls. The media is replete with this. Anybody that reads the paper should know, especially those that live on the border, should know that there are many, many young people coming across the border unlawfully who are smuggling drugs into the United States. They should also know that now, the drug cartels, and I mean specifically, the Mexican drug cartels, have taken over drug distribution in most of the major cities in America. I think intel will tell you every major city in America. And the numbers that I've seen go from a little over 200 cities in this country to 2,000. I don't know what population that dials it down to or what areas. I haven't seen the map. But it should be appalling to a country and a civilization to see that that's taken place. When you understand that, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, of every chain of illegal drug distribution we have in the country, they will tell you, at least privately, as they have to me on multiple occasions, that at least one link is illegal aliens that are smuggling drugs into the United States. It's important that we know that as a Congress, as a country, as a civilization. If we deny those facts, if we deny the information that comes, even out of the Obama administration that certainly supports those, if you deny the information that comes out through the major media that's there, if you deny what we're told by our law enforcement officers on the border of the United States that are continually interdicting drugs at about the same rate that they did 6 or 7 or 8 years ago, when the population of illegals was flowing over the border at a faster rate than it is today, the illegal drugs coming across the border are roughly similar to that time. That says there's still a high demand in the United States. A high demand means drugs are likely to come in. If we are enforcing our borders and tightening security the price of drugs should go up. If you look at the price of drugs, I think you're going to find that we haven't been very effective interdicting drugs coming across our southern border. Part of that is they find new ways to smuggle, and some of those reasons are because kids are being used to smuggle drugs into the United States. That's appalling to me. The death across the Arizona border, it's still there. It happens through the summer. And this debate taking place now in the middle of the summer is going to end up with more people being found out there on the desert, in the brush, who have lost their lives trying to get into the United States of America. We need a secure border. We need to build a fence, a wall, and another fence, so we've got two patrolling zones. We need to put the sensory devices on top of there. We need to use our boots on the ground in the most effective way possible. No nation should have an open borders policy. No nation should have a blind-eye policy towards the enforcement of the laws. No nation can long remain a great nation if they decide to sacrifice the rule of law on the altar of political expediency. No nation like the United States of America can continue to grow and be a strong nation if we are going to judge people because they disagree with our agenda, rather than the content of their statement. We have to be critical thinkers. We have to be analytical. We should understand facts from emotion. And let's pull together, let's understand that we do have compassion. We do have compassion, for every human person deserves dignity. We need to treat them with that warmth, treat them with that love, as the American people always have, just like the Korean War veterans did when they gave themselves for a country they never knew and a people they never met. But we must not sacrifice the rule of law on the altar of political expediency. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota for yielding, and I appreciate the delivery you make and understanding in driving this issue. If a few of us don't stand up and drive this issue and remind, Mr. Speaker, that the American people observe what we do here-- and they are thoughtful, they're intelligent, they're analytical, and they understand the history of this country, and they don't want to have somebody feed them a line. They want to know the squared-away truth. That's why I dig down into a bill like S. 744, the Gang of Eight's bill in the Senate, and take it apart and analyze it and put it back together and come down with this conclusion. From the beginning, I called it the Always is, Always Was, and Always Will Be Amnesty Act. The reason I say that is because you'd have to just kind of have a little bit of license with our grammar. But if you is in America, you get to stay. If you was in America, you get an invitation to come back. And if you ever get here, you always will get to stay here. So it's the Always Is, Always Was, and Always Will Be Amnesty Act. If that doesn't trip your biblical trigger, then I can describe it this way in more secular terms. It is the Perpetual and Retroactive Amnesty Act, which means it was on forever and it also invites the people who have been deported in the past. It says, We really didn't mean it. If we deported you in the past, it was by a mistake that we didn't realize because our President hadn't been elected yet, and he hadn't decided that he was going to violate his constitutional oath and grant this executive edict that's called the ``Morton Memos'' that legalizes the people that are here. I would remind you, Mr. Speaker, that we had 400,000 people that were adjudicated for removal in this country, and the President issued an order and used our precious resources to go back and comb through the records again, and that directive said, Look at them on an individual basis. The reason they do that is because they claim they have prosecutorial discretion. If they deal with individuals, then they cannot enforce the law. But If they have to put it into classes of people, then they know that they don't have prosecutorial discretion from a legal point. So they use resources to comb through those 400,000 names of people to find ways they can waive the application of the law. That's amnesty by executive edict, and it's using resources to grant that. It didn't matter that they were young or old. If they hadn't committed a felony and been caught at it, or if they didn't commit and been caught at these three mysterious misdemeanors, they were going to get the application of the law, which was removal. They were just waiting for their final removal order, and so the President believed that he had the constitutional authority to grant this amnesty. Now, this was just the precursor to the balance of the Morton Memos, which are the DREAM Act lite, so to speak, this executive edict for the DREAM Act. And it then sets up four categories of people, generally young people, but now we see, according to the Gang of Eight's bill, age up to 35. If up to age 35, if you want to test that you came to America, say, before your 16th birthday or your 18th birthday, depending on which policy you want to take--now, it really wasn't your fault; it was your parents' decision. Well, it reminds me of a long shirttail relation who found himself in jail on Christmas Eve, and his father decided he would bail him out and bring him home for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Christmas dinner, and take him back to the jail where he belonged again. When his father showed up, let me say this uncooperative son was so resentful that he said to his father, It's not my fault, Dad, it's your fault because you controlled everything. You controlled my genes and you controlled my environment. I didn't control either one. I'm a product of nature and nurture, and you are the one who produced the nature and nurture; therefore it's your fault that I'm in jail. I can tell you what his father said: You can stay in jail if you think it's not your responsibility and think it over. Well, I heard this new theory come in the committee here just yesterday, I guess it was, that young people can't form intent. I wondered about that. That was a bit of a new theory for me. We do prosecute intent in this country and we prosecute intent of juveniles.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady for yielding, as that is my point. We know that young people can form intent. That's why we discipline them at a young age; 2-year-olds get a little discipline because they have intent; 3-year-olds have a little more intent, and they get a little more discipline. By the time they get to be 7 or 8, they are actually disciplined. So I think that's an argument that moves us off the target. Regardless of whether they have intent when they're 1 day old, 1 week old, 1 month old, 1 year old, or 10 years old, whenever that time comes, when they become of age and they realize that they're unlawfully present in the United States, the law requires that they remove themselves. It's just the law. So we expect them to accept this responsibility, whether it was the intent that they had when they came in or the intent that they have to stay tomorrow. If we don't do that, then we've absolved a whole class of people from a responsibility and rewarded them with the objective of their crime. These are the things that trouble me. If we destroy the rule of law, an essential pillar of American exceptionalism--we could not be a great Nation without the rule of law. If we destroy that even in the narrower version of immigration or the even narrower version of the DREAM kids, if we do that, then it expands into all people that are here illegally because age is the only difference, and you cannot draw a bright line. Furthermore, then you have expanded the amnesty throughout all immigration, and you've destroyed the rule of law. And if we can't restore it in this time, since we've been struggling to do so since the 1986 Amnesty Act, we could not restore the rule of law with regard to immigration for all time. And we could therefore, then, not control immigration in this country any longer, only by trying to keep people out by barriers at the borders. But we then couldn't enforce the law against anybody that got in. Can you imagine, turning over the immigration law in the United States to everybody but those who are in America? If you're not in America, you get to decide immigration law; and if you're in America, you don't get to decide immigration law. That's what we're dealing with.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady. I think we have some intelligent and some responsible Members of Congress that probably haven't contemplated something that I'm about to say. I hear them talking about they're okay with increasing the workforce, especially in the low-skilled categories because they believe that agriculture needs laborers and food processing needs laborers. I hear that from agriculture and I hear that from food processors, too. But here are the facts. The double-digit unemployment, the highest unemployment levels that we have, are in the lowest skilled jobs. So when you go into double-digit unemployment and the low-skilled people are in oversupply, you have to believe that labor is a commodity like corn or beans or gold or oil, and it is determined by supply and demand in the marketplace. And if you have an oversupply of people that are willing to work in unskilled or underskilled jobs, then the wages go down and get suppressed. An example would be like this. In the packing plant in the town where I was born, people that worked in the packing plant 25 or perhaps 30 years ago made equivalent to the salary of a college-educated teacher working in the same town, and they could raise their family and pay for a modest home. Those children would have an opportunity to go to college, if they chose, and they could live a happy life by punching the clock and going to work every day and cashing the check and paying the bills. Today, people working in the same plant are making about half of what the teachers are making; and the teachers aren't overpaid in that community, either. That's what we're dealing with. The difference is that the people who used to work in that plant 30 years ago, they're not there anymore. But people who came to work in the plants have been recruited from foreign countries and put into that workforce, and there has been such an oversupply that they've driven the wages down--supply and demand. So why would we as a Nation, when we have an oversupply of people who are willing to do low and unskilled work, and the wages are suppressed and the unemployment rate is up, why would we go out and legalize another 11 or 22 or 33 or 44 or 55 million people? Why would any nation do that? Why would a nation that has 100 million people of working age that are simply not in the workforce decide we don't want to pull those people to work, we're going to let them collect the 80 different means-tested welfare benefits, and instead we're going to go over here and import tens of millions of people to do this work, then realize that you've got a double liability here because people working in the lower skilled jobs can't sustain themselves in this society with the wages that they're getting because they're suppressed by oversupply. And on the other side of this, you've got these 100 million people, a lot of them are drawing from the public Treasury and we're paying them not to work. You put that all together, we've got a double liability here instead of a double asset. I spent part of my life in the trucking business. We always say we want a payload both ways. We don't want to go empty two directions. We want a payload both ways.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I think the gentlelady has described it very accurately. We have to be very careful what vehicles get sent over to the United States Senate that could eventually be turned into a conference report. I know that we have an assurance that it's not going to be such a thing, but we also know that there are things that come up that surprise us. So I ask people that are advocating for different pieces of legislation that would come off of this floor, paint for me the path through which enforcement legislation could get to the President's desk without amnesty attached. And even if it did get to the President's desk with the best enforcement model that you could imagine, that amnesty attached, the President would sign it and he wouldn't enforce the law; he would just grant the amnesty. I had a statement that I would like to introduce into the Record just for clarity purposes. And I want to say that I appreciate the gentlelady coming down here and leading on this event here tonight and taking such a strong voice. We have a great country still, and we can be a greater country yet, but we must reanchor and reestablish ourselves to the principles and the pillars of American exceptionalism. We cannot do it without holding the rule of law intact. [From the Associated Press] Mexico Children Used as ``Mules'' by Drug Gangs (By Omar Millan) Tijuana, Mexico.--Luis Alberto is only 14 but has the wizened gaze of a grown-up hardened by life. He never met his father, worked as a child, was hired by a gang to sell drugs and then got addicted to them. In October he checked into Cirad, a rehab center west of this border city that handles about 500 drug addicts at a time, a fifth of them younger than 17. ``They brought me here because I was using and selling `criloco,' '' Luis Alberto said, referring to methamphetamine, the drug of choice for 90 percent of adolescents in detox because of its low cost and easy availability. Luis Alberto is just one of an increasing number of young people being used as ``mules'' to ferry drugs across the border into the U.S. or sell them in nearby Mexican towns, said Victor Clark, an anthropologist who studies drug trafficking. ``Minors are cheap labor and expendable for organized crime in an area where there are few job opportunities or places for recreation, and where the distribution and consumption of drugs have grown fast,'' Clark said. Mexican authorities say they are aware of the problem, but there are no official figures on the number of adolescents detained for selling or distributing drugs because the law forbids keeping criminal records for minors. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says that between 2008 and 2011, the number of youths aged 14 to 18 caught trying to cross the border between Tijuana and San Diego to sell drugs has grown tenfold. Lauren Mack, spokeswoman for ICE in San Diego, said 19 minors were arrested in 2008, 165 in 2009, 190 in 2010 and 190 again last year. Most of them were high school students who carried drugs, usually methamphetamine or cocaine, hidden in their bodies or in their cars, Mack said. Clark said similar things are being seen all along the border, at Mexican cities like Nogales, Ciudad Juarez and Reynosa. ``It's growing at a worrying pace,'' he said. Officials at drug rehab centers across Tijuana estimate that of the approximately 500 adolescents now undergoing treatment, about a tenth of them are like Luis Alberto, not only addicted to a drug but also used by cartels to sell it. Luis Alberto, whose last name cannot be published because he is a minor, said he started selling drugs about two years ago in a neighborhood of east Tijuana along with other minors who were hired by ``a boss.'' He made about 200 pesos ($16) a day, which he says he spent on food and drugs. ``Between me and my friends we sold about 40 packets a day. My boss kept 1,100 pesos (about $88) per packet and the rest was for us. Sometimes there were about three or four packets left over and we just divided them among ourselves,'' he said. Sometimes the drug bosses used the children as lookouts in case police or soldiers approached, he added. Mexico's cartels have also employed children for their hit squads. In what may be the most shocking case involving a youth in Mexico's drug war, a 14-year-old boy born in San Diego and known only as ``El Ponchis'' was arrested in December 2010 in central Mexico and told reporters he had been kidnapped at age 11 and forced to work for a cartel. He said he participated in at least four beheadings. The number of youths 18 and younger detained for drug- related crimes in Mexico has climbed from 482 in 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his offensive against drug traffickers, to 810 by 2009. The latest available numbers indicate 562 youths under age 18 were arrested in the first eight months of 2010. In Tijuana, officials grew aware of the growing involvement of young people at the end of 2008 as more and more youths turned up at drug rehab centers and told their stories, said Jose Luis Serrano, director of the El Mezon rehab center. Serrano said that on average 70 adolescents come to his center each month with addiction problems, and about a tenth of them have also worked in the drug trade. Jose Ramon Arreola, director of the department for children and adolescents at the Cirad center, has seen a similar trend. ``There are a lot of drugs on the street; anybody can tell you how easy it is to get some,'' he said. Serrano said drugs became extremely cheap by the end of 2008, with methamphetamine easily available and selling for about 15 pesos (a little over $1). Due to increased border vigilance, ``it became harder for the drug traffickers to cross the border into the U.S., and they started paying their employees with merchandise, which the employees then had to distribute along the border. That was when we noted an increase in teen drug use, mainly crystal (methamphetamine),'' Serrano said. According to the National Survey on Addictions, Tijuana has Mexico's worst methamphetamine addiction problem. The Tijuana Psychiatric Institute says it has about 22,000 meth addicts. Serrano and Arreola point to outdated laws as one reason gangs have recruited young people to help push drugs. In Baja California, children under 17 can be jailed for no more than seven years even if they are convicted of serious crimes such as murder, violent robbery or involvement in a drug cartel. Tijuana was one of the first cities to which Calderon sent troops to fight the cartels five years ago, yet hundreds of kilos of drugs still arrive each week for local consumption or for sale in other cities, military and police officials said. The Sinaloa cartel, considered Mexico's most powerful crime organization, is mainly responsible for bringing in heroin, cocaine and marijuana, said Gen. Gilberto Landeros, the military official in charge of Baja California. Other gangs from Jalisco and Michoacan bring in mainly methamphetamine, he said. ``We are fighting the supply but not the demand, and as long as there is demand, there will be people producing and distributing the drugs,'' said Jose Hector Acosta, director of the treatment department at the Youth Integration Center, an organization that has been treating drug addicts for 37 years.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding and leading this. Mr. Speaker, I despise ObamaCare--just about everybody in America knows that. I think it should be ripped out by the roots. A minority of the Supreme Court, the clear-thinking constitutionalists, though, agree with me. The gentleman from California says, however, ObamaCare is the law of the land. All right, I'm going to agree with that for this argument-- the law of the land. The law of the land is the Constitution. It's the supreme law of the land, and article II, section 3 says the President shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Well, the President of the United States has decided he's going to write his own law and waive the language that's clear statute in the bill that carries his name, ObamaCare, and his signature. It's appalling to me that the President could have such contempt for the Constitution and that this Congress would seek to conform to the President's whim. We needed to bring, first, Scott Garrett's resolution that declares and rejects this idea, this unconstitutional act of legislating from the executive branch of government. And I would point out the height of audacity, Mr. Speaker, is the President's veto threat for us to be conforming with his unconstitutional act. Statement of Administration Policy H.R. 2667--Authority for Mandate Delay Act (Rep. Griffin, R-Ark., and 26 cosponsors) H.R. 2668--Fairness for American Families Act (Rep. Young, R-Ind., and 23 cosponsors) The Administration strongly opposes House passage of H.R. 2667 and H.R. 2668 because the bills, taken together, would cost millions of hard-working middle class families the security of affordable health coverage and care they deserve. Rather than attempting once again to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which the House has tried nearly 40 times, it's time for the Congress to stop fighting old political battles and join the President in an agenda focused on providing greater economic opportunity and security for middle class families and all those working to get into the middle class. The Affordable Care Act gives people greater control over their own health care and has already improved many aspects of the Nation's health care system. Because of the Affordable Care Act, tens of millions of Americans who have previously been denied coverage due to a pre-existing medical condition will now be covered. The nearly one in two Americans under the age of 65 with pre-existing medical conditions will have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that they can't be dropped from their health plan or denied coverage because of those conditions. House passage of H.R. 2667 and H.R. 2668 will undermine this security for tens of millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions. H.R. 2667 is unnecessary, and H.R. 2668 would raise health insurance premiums and increase the number of uninsured Americans. Enacting this legislation would undermine key elements of the health law, facilitating further efforts to repeal a law that is already helping millions of Americans stay on their parents' plans until age 26, millions more who are getting free preventive care that catches illness early on, and thousands of children with pre-existing conditions who are now covered. If the President were presented with H.R. 2667 and H.R. 2668, he would veto them. H. Con. Res. 45 Whereas section 1 of article I of the Constitution states that ``All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives''; Whereas section 3 of article II of the Constitution states that the President ``shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed'', which imposes a duty upon the President to enforce the law, regardless of difficulty of enforcement or displeasure with the statute; Whereas the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010; Whereas such Act contains a provision commonly referred to as the ``employer mandate'', which requires businesses that employ 50 or more full-time employees to provide health insurance to its employees upon threat of financial penalty; Whereas section 1513(d) of such Act states that the employer mandate ``shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013''; Whereas the executive branch announced on July 2, 2013, that it would unilaterally delay the enforcement of the employer mandate until January 2015; Whereas the principle of separation of powers is a constitutional safeguard of liberty as asserted by James Madison in Federalist No. 47 in which he stated, ``The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny''; and Whereas the executive branch's unilateral decision to delay the implementation of a law sets a dangerous precedent under which legislation that is enacted through the passage of that legislation by the democratically elected Members of Congress and the signing of that legislation into law by the President will no longer have the force of law and will instead be relegated to having the status of a mere recommendation, which the President may choose to ignore: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of Congress that-- (1) President Barack Obama has violated section 3 of article II of the Constitution by refusing to enforce the employer mandate provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; (2) the perpetuation of republican government depends upon the rule of law; (3) the executive branch, which has no constitutional authority to write or rewrite law at whim, has invaded upon the exclusive legislative power of Congress; (4) the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has proven to be unworkable; and (5) such Act should be repealed by Congress immediately.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I want to say, first it's a privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And it's also interesting and engaging to listen to the gentlelady from Minnesota as she delivered her presentation here tonight with typical vigor and precision. I looked at that poster, and it was very interesting to me. And so I see that $400 million in 3 hours, and I divide that out, multiply it times 24, then multiply that times 56 days, and I come up with a number that's $179.2 billion increased national debt in the period of time that none is registered. And so putting this in perspective, it's just another example of an administration that hasn't been straight with us. So, I come here, Mr. Speaker, to address this situation of immigration, as the gentlelady from Minnesota has. It's something that's important for all of us to understand the big picture, the full picture. And it is about economics, it's about culture, it's about civilization, it's about balancing our budget, it's about the vitality of the United States of America, and we have to be weighing all of these factors. The immigration issue is the most complex and the most far-reaching topic that we ever deal with here in the United States Congress. And we think that ObamaCare is complicated. It is. It's a lot of pages of legislation. But also the bad things that are flowing from it were predicted here from this spot by many of us on our side of the aisle. It was understandable for us. But because it's somewhat objective to be able to look at the formulas and see what's going to happen and know what insurance policies do, the immigration issue goes deeper. And it's the multiplication of current demographics and how they blend with future demographics, and what we might do, and all of the things that flow from it. So as the gentlelady from Minnesota said, the net cost on the Senate's Gang of Eight bill turns out to be $6.33 trillion, $6.3 trillion, Mr. Speaker. And that's what that group will generate. Let's see--the net cost, $6.3 trillion, they will pay, there's $9.4 trillion all together dealing with this. There will be $3.1 trillion in taxes paid. The benefits, $9.4 trillion in benefits drawn down by the group of people who would be given amnesty under the Senate version of the bill. They would pay $3.1 trillion in taxes over their lifetime, and the net figure would be $6.3 trillion that would come out of the pockets of the taxpayers to add on to that nearly $17 trillion in national debt that we have today. And the study that was done by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, I saw a little piece on the Internet here a couple of nights ago where someone described it as ``the much maligned study.'' Well, I'm occasionally the much maligned Member of Congress, but I don't notice that that makes me any less accurate or any less factual in the positions that I take. They are soundly based, and so were the analyses and the study done by Robert Rector in his study to show us the net cost of the amnesty act that's passed out of the Senate today, and not yet messaged to the House, but passed out of the Senate. And that's just the economic cost. And he showed, by formula, there are always exceptions to this. When you're dealing with human beings, there are always exceptions. But by formula, the newly arriving, those that are here illegally, those that would come in the next waves or two, as Mrs. Bachmann said, there'd be an average of about a tenth-grade education. People who are high school dropouts or high school graduates, on average, cannot sustain themselves in this society without welfare benefits. We are a cradle-to-grave welfare state. We have at least 80 different means-tested welfare programs in the United States. They range from the food stamp program to temporary assistance to needy families to the WIC program. And it goes on and on. The heat subsidies, rent subsidies. No one has them all memorialized, Mr. Speaker, which means no one can figure out how they interrelate with each other, how they interact with each other, or how people react on that interaction of those 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs. But we know this. At a certain point, if you pile on more and more welfare, even those who are quite ambitious are eventually going to be living better than those that are working hard and smart. And so what it does is in a way it bribes people to leave the workforce and go on the welfare roles or transition from the workforce into the welfare roles. That's going on all over America. That's one of the reasons why, in this country of about 316 million people in this country, we have so many people that are on the welfare system and this workforce that Mrs. Bachmann talked about of 22 million who are looking for a full-time job. Here's some other data from the Department of Labor's Web site. You go and look at the numbers there of those who are simply not in the workforce. They might have retired early on their own money, they might be on SSI disability, they might be on anything, all but unemployment. Those folks might be homemakers. They might be in school. They might be doing nothing. But when you add all of them up that are simply not in the workforce, of working age, that number comes to over 88 million people. And when you add the official unemployed to that, some number approaching 13 million people, it's clear that for the last 5 to 6 years we have had over 100 million people in this country who are simply not in the workforce but are of working age. Now, I don't conclude that every one of them can go to work or are suitable for work, but I would say this. If we need more workforce, Mr. Speaker, why in the world would we grant amnesty, a path to citizenship, and full access to those 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs for 11 million or 22 million or 33 million people that are in the United States illegally? Why would we give them American jobs when we have Americans here who are not in the workforce? One of the jobs we should do in this Congress is constantly be thinking and pushing and promoting legislation that increases the average annual individual productivity of the people in our country. And I watched as some of the libertarian CATO economists will tell us, well, we have to open our borders and bring in 11 million or 22 million or 33 million or 44 million or 55 million people because that's how we grow our economy, and we can't grow our economy unless we do that. Some even say that the fertility rate is higher with newly arriving immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. I think that that's drawing a conclusion that's not necessarily supportable by the data that's out there. It might just be by observation. But to bring people in and give them jobs while Americans are looking for jobs is the wrong thing to do. And just because somebody increases the GDP doesn't mean they're a net contributor to our economy or our society. Say there's someone 50 years old and never worked a day in their life and never lifted a finger. It's completely possible in this society today. That person hasn't contributed to the GDP by anything they've produced, perhaps by what they've consumed, but at best they can be break even. They can't be a net increase. But if that individual goes out and does an hour's worth of work and receives an hour's worth of pay and produces an hour's worth of product, good, or service that has marketable value here or abroad, they've contributed to the gross domestic product by the value of that hour's work that they've contributed. So, by that theory, CATO economists say all the people that we would legalize in amnesty that are illegal today, presuming that they will work, they will help grow our economy. Sure, they would, but they also would contribute to the necessary loss to the taxpayers because they can't sustain themselves. That doesn't mean that there aren't good, smart, productive legal immigrants that can contribute and can be a net increase to our economy. There are quite a number of them, if you count them. But statistically, by a wide margin, the lower and undereducated cannot contribute. They cannot be a net contributor to this society. That's proven clearly by the Heritage Foundation study done by Robert Rector. It's something the American people need to look at. It's not been effectively rebutted by the people that disagree. They have another agenda. So I have put this argument out in this way, Mr. Speaker. I used to take the position that there was nothing in the Senate Gang of Eight amnesty bill that was good for the American people. Why would Americans do this? Why? Mark Steyn wrote an op-ed about 3 or 4 months ago. He laid out some of the data, and the last sentence was one word, a question, ``Why?'' Why would America do this? Why would we bring in the equivalent of the population of Canada and throw in New Zealand's population while we're at it, if I remember his statement correctly. Why? Well, not because it contributes to the social, economic, or cultural well-being of the United States of America. That wouldn't be why. That is what kind of an immigration policy we need, yes. But it's because it isn't true that no Americans benefit from this. If you look at narrow self-interests, there are three categories of Americans that benefit from the illegal immigration that they would like to see legalized and they would like to see the perpetual flow of new illegal immigration coming in so there are people lining up for the next amnesty. There are three classes of people, three categories of people. One is the elitists that believe that somehow they've got a birthright to live in gated communities and have cheap labor to clean their houses and mow their lawns and weed their flower gardens and maybe wash their car and make sure their lives are as smooth as they'd like to have them be. That's an elitist attitude if they think they want to have discounted labor to do that. I had a meeting with a group of elitists in the great Northeast and one of them said to me, I went down to the day labor parking place and I needed somebody to come up and weed my garden and clean up around the place. I offered him $15 an hour, and nobody would take the money. You've got to pass an immigration bill. I don't have enough access to people that can take care of my lawn and my garden and my yard. He thought $15 an hour should have hired anybody, but I'm really certain that it's been a lot of years since he's worked for $15 an hour. So I said to him, If you can't hire somebody to mow your lawn and if you don't have time to do that yourself, maybe you should get an apartment down in the big city and sell your house to somebody that can either pay the wages necessary or do it themselves. That's how the economy has to work. It's supply and demand. And the value of a commodity in the marketplace is determined by supply and demand, Mr. Speaker. Whether it's corn or beans or gold or oil or labor, it's supply and demand. And people say, well, there's work that Americans won't do. I completely reject that theory. It's offensive to me to hear from elitists that there's work that Americans won't do. I don't know if you can find work that my family hasn't done. I'm pretty confident you can't find work we've refused to do. But we try to be, I often say, hardworking Americans. Well, we also have to be smart-working Americans. Smart and hardworking Americans. It's not good enough in this society to just work hard anymore. You've got to work smart at the same time. So, when we do that, we market our wages to the point where we can sustain ourselves in this society. Or, if you can't get that done, you supplement it by some of the 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs. But when you think that there's work that Americans won't do, when people say that, I would argue, no, I think that you can hire an American to do anything, anything that's decent and just and right and moral. There's honor and dignity in all work. You just have to bid up the price until you get the people to do the work. I've had to do that in most of my business life. I started a construction company in 1975. And, yes, I had to hire people, and I was proud of the work we did. We put some long, hard hours in in difficult conditions. But in order to have people show up for work the next day, you had to pay them an adequate wage for the day before. And when I found that I couldn't hire the right people for the wages I was paying, I raised the wages and I increased the benefit package, and we hired the people we needed and we kept the people that we needed. That seems to be beyond the realm of the way of thinking of a lot of elitists' attitudes here that say there's work that Americans won't do. So I just say, okay, I'll prove it to you. Somebody is going to have to front the money to do this. But I'd say this. I can hire Bill Clinton to mow my lawn. I might have to pay him a million dollars, but I could hire him to mow my law. I might have to pay him $2 million or $10 million, depending how much I might want to tease this situation. But you understand my point, Mr. Speaker. You have to bid it up. At some point, somebody's going to take the bid. Just like when you're waiting to get on an airplane and somebody has to get bumped from a seat and they start to auction that off and say, I'll give you a $400 ticket to fly someplace else. Somebody decides to take that. If not, they up the ante again and again. Up the ante, up the ante, and somebody will take the bid. You auction this off in a way until somebody steps up to do the work. Americans will always do the work, Mr. Speaker. We have always done the work. And we need to keep the work here at home and we need to make sure that the people in this country that have the skills and have the desire are going to work. If they don't have the desire, it might just be that the safety net that is our 80 different means-tested welfare programs has turned into a hammock and they've gotten lazy on us. If that happens, you need to dial that down a little bit so the hammock is no longer so much a hammock as it is a safety net. When that happens, some of those folks will decide, I'm going to climb out of this safety net and I'm going to go to work, and I'm going to contribute to the GDP and I'm going earn enough that I can sustain myself and my family. There was a time not that long ago--25 years ago, maybe now 30 years ago--when a young man could grow up and graduate from high school and look over to the beef plant and decide, I want to get a job there and go punch that time clock and make good wages and make my living in there processing meat. And you need that if you are going to eat it, anyway. So they would aspire to do so and go punch that time clock and work there every day, and they would work there for 40, 45 years. And they would be making, each year, about the same amount of money as a teacher does with a college degree. And that went on until they started bringing illegal labor in to drive the wages down in the packing plant. Today, teachers are making about twice as much as that guy that's working in the packing plant. And that young man--especially young men, and young women also. But that young man now that decides that he doesn't have a future ahead in college, he can no longer go in and punch the time clock and make a living and pay for a modest house over a lifetime and maybe provide an opportunity for his kids that want to go to college. That opportunity isn't there anymore. So they drift off onto the welfare programs, and some of them drift off into drugs and some of them leave the community because they're being underbid by people who will work cheaper, that are more mobile, that aren't lawfully present in the United States, that came here to live in the shadows. And my colleagues will say, well, we have to bring the 11 million out of the shadows because it's the right thing to do. Well, is it? What's our moral obligation for those folks? I believe in the dignity of every human person. I think we owe them that respect and that dignity. But to solve a problem that they created by their own action by sacrificing the rule of law and rewarding people who broke the law with a path to citizenship, American jobs, the right to vote as a reward for breaking the law, do you think, Mr. Speaker, they're going to raise their children then to respect the rule of law if they're the beneficiaries of breaking it by the tens of millions--11 million, 22 million, 33 million, maybe 44 million people? It changes the culture in the United States of America when you inject millions of people in who are rewarded for breaking the law. My friends down in the Senate side and some here in the House will say, But they have to go to the back of the line. It's not amnesty. They're going to have to pay a fine. They're going to have to pay back taxes. It's an onerous road to get to citizenship under the plan of the Gang of Eight. Well, is it as onerous as maybe living in the shadows? They're not living in the shadows, Mr. Speaker. They come into my office. They plug their Obama phones in to charge them, which is about the height of an entitlement attitude. They're not living in the shadows. They're out in the open lobbying Congress as open and blatant as can be with disrespect for the rule of law. They erode the rule of law. By the way, for the 11-plus million people, outside this country there are at least 5 million who respect the law, who are lined up in their home country the right way to come into America the legal way. And what do we say to them? We're going to take 11 million or 22 million or 33 million people and we're going to make them go to what we define as the back of the line? But if it's in the United States, it's not the back of the line. The line is outside the United States, 5 million long. So are they going to say, Go to the back of line; go back to your home country and get in the back of the line? Have you ever, Mr. Speaker, stood in a line and thought, Well, I'm almost there. It's been a long wait. I want to get into the movie theater. Maybe I've got to visit the men's room, and the line gets longer on you instead of shorter. What's more frustrating than having respect for rules and the rule of law and having to back up because somebody else cut in front? And how long are you going to have patience with that? I oppose amnesty. I oppose perpetual and retroactive amnesty, and I support the rule of law. I'm going to continue to defend this rule of law and defend this country so that we can send to our children the promise that came from our Founding Fathers: the future of an American destiny above and beyond the Shining City on the Hill. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.