Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, in response, I have heard a piece of history revisionism. Now is the first time I recall, in all these debates that we have had, that the purpose of Davis-Bacon, which does produce a result of union scales imposed by, as I said earlier this evening--it is not prevailing wage. Employers that are nonunion don't report wages to the Federal Government because the union comes to organize their employees. So the thing that is called prevailing wage is a distortion of the reality. We know this. I have been in this business 42 years. I talked to a contractor just a week ago who was a bridge contractor. He has been operating in rural Missouri. In just this past year's numbers, unskilled laborers cost him $45 an hour. There is no way that you go down to Missouri and hire somebody that is unskilled and you have to pay them $45 an hour. For somebody that is going to look through the chart, I should tell you it is about $23 an hour for labor and $22 for fringe benefits. The fringe benefits are to pay for your health insurance and your retirement program. But some of these employees are on our ObamaCare, with their premiums paid by other money that we borrow from China. It is foolish for a fiscally responsible nation, trying to get to balance, to have a David-Bacon law in place. And I will pound on this drum until we come to our senses on this. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I would just conclude that this is the first time I have heard that Davis-Bacon was formed to protect minority migrant workers that came out of Alabama to work in New York. That seems to me to be Members of Congress representing the folks that are not their constituents. That would be one of the rare times also. So that is history revisionism. This is a Jim Crow law. It needs to go. It needs to be ripped out of the code at every opportunity. Mr. Chairman, I would urge adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to modify my amendment by the modification at the desk.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for her consent to this unanimous consent request which will help expedite our debate here on this long appropriations discussion that we are having. This is the amendment that requires that E-Verify be used in all new hires that are funded under this appropriation. And it is a well established debate, I think, not only throughout the years of E-Verify, but also throughout this evening. It is all new hires, in conjunction with an offer of employment, simply run their data through E-Verify. If it comes back from E-Verify verifying that that information that is provided by the applicant identifies an individual who can work legally in the United States, that is the verification that the efficiency has gone way up into the upper 90, 99 point something percentile. Mr. Chair, I urge the adoption of this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Carter).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I would just reiterate that we are getting reports that there are gaps in this enforcement and, spending my life in a contracting business, I would remind the Members that we have general contractors, we have first tier contractors, we have second tier subcontractors, even third tier subcontractors, and so we want to ensure that the enforcement is there of E-Verify. And I want to thank everyone for their cooperation, and I urge the adoption of my amendment. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk made in order by the rule.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, this is a Davis-Bacon amendment that addresses the MILCON component of the legislation that is before us. This Congress has had this debate a number of times over the past years. The history of the Davis-Bacon Act goes back to, I will say, a couple of Republicans that got together and decided they didn't want the construction market to have to face the competition of African Americans coming out of Alabama to build a Federal building in New York City. They took such great offense to that that they wrote legislation that is known as the Davis-Bacon Act, and the language says it requires a prevailing wage. I have spent 42 years in the construction business, if I count the work my son does as he owns that company today, and we have dealt with that, I would say, nearly every year, if not every year, throughout all that time. What we have is the Federal Government interfering in the relationship between the employer and the employee and setting a wage scale that is called prevailing wage. But that is set by folks sitting inside a room with a closed door, and they come out of there with the equivalent of a union wage mandated by the Federal Government. That is the net effect. As we have kept records over the years, the increase in the cost of the projects for us has been between 8 and 35 percent, depending on how much is labor, how much is materials, and the nature of the job. The Heritage Foundation has done a study or two. They come with a number kind of in that area. So I just boil it down to 20 percent. It is a 20 percent increase over the otherwise cost of a project, and that means this: without the Davis-Bacon wage scale imposed upon it by the Federal Government, the merit shop employees who meet plans and specs and do high-quality work--and there is nothing in our 42 years of history that would indicate otherwise--that we can build 5 miles of road instead of 4, we can build five barracks instead of four, we can build five bridges instead of four. This is an unnecessary cost to the taxpayer. It brings efficiency to the expenditures of the taxpayers' money, and it does a lot better job of taking care of our military. Mr. Chairman, I urge the adoption of my amendment, which simply does this: it says that none of the funds may be used to implement, administer, or enforce prevailing wage requirements that is referenced as Davis-Bacon. Mr. Chairman, I urge its adoption, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, as I listen to that rebuttal, I would like to bring back a little more of the history of this, and it is this: that Davis-Bacon, and I have been looking at this a long time, as far as I know, and I believe it is true, is the last remaining Jim Crow law that exists in Federal statute today. We should take care to pull it out of the Federal code. Its legacy is badly tainted. It was built as a racist law, and that needs to be eliminated, and we need to have a merit shop society where people can compete rather than the Federal Government deciding with a board or a commission behind closed doors. Let's build more roads, more bridges, more barracks, more airstrips. Let's put our money to the best use we can. That is in keeping with Donald Trump's philosophy: get more for less. That is what you get with the King amendment, more for less, and we get to eliminate at least the effectiveness of this Jim Crow law on our MILCON as a starter. If we do this here, we have got an opportunity, then, to go forward with this and finally one day completely repeal Davis-Bacon. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining on each side.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, as I listen to the gentleman, unfair; there is no such thing as unfair when you have someone who applies for a job and they are willing to work for a wage, and we want to hire the best people we can hire. We want to keep the best people we hire, and we want to pay the best benefits we can. But when we have the Federal Government interfering with the efficiency of our operations and deciding that this machine pays $25 an hour and this machine pays $35 an hour, and on this shovel, if you are leaning on it, that pays 20 bucks an hour, who is going to climb into which machine and do what? The efficiencies of our operations go downhill when you have got the Federal Government setting those kinds of things. We had a project years ago where the center line of the highway--we worked on both sides of a highway. The center line of the highway was a difference between two different regions with different prevailing wage scales. It was almost twice as much money on the south side of the highway as it was on the north side of the highway. Well, where do you think my crews wanted to work? They wanted to work on the south side of the highway. You have got to fight that constantly. We don't need the Federal Government interfering. There used to be a gentleman from Massachusetts that would say that we should not have the Federal Government interfering between any relationship between two consenting adults. That is what an employment is, two consenting adults. It is a contract. We don't need the Federal Government there. We need to build more projects for less money for the same standard of work. It is not unfair. It is high-quality work coming out of all the records of merit shop employees, and it is consistent with what America needs to do to compete with the rest of the world. Mr. Chairman, I urge that the body come forward and vote for this amendment and block the Davis-Bacon wage scales and end up with an efficient form of construction for MILCON. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I am privileged to be recognized by the gentlewoman from Wyoming, and I rise in support of this combined rule that we have here. I thought it was important that I speak to some of the provisions that are in the underlying bill and also the provisions that are not in the underlying bill. I would characterize this rule, that is the rule for the reauthorization of the Department of Homeland Security--it is actually the authorization. It has never been authorized in that fashion before--the authorization of Homeland Security after 15 years. I think that it does a lot of good things in that it lays out a definition and frames the duties of the Department of Homeland Security broadly and pretty closely in their entirety. There are some things that are missing from this that I would like to have plugged into this reauthorization language. However, I believe the goal was, all along, to draft a piece of reauthorization language that would be, I will say, compatible to both sides of the aisle and without particular dissent. Therefore, we have a piece of legislation that isn't as impactful as I would like, and yet it is here on the floor under suspension with the idea that we can move this along and frame the Department of Homeland Security's duties in the fashion that is here. I don't object to the provisions that are in the authorization language that exists, but I would point out that it sets the stage, and now there is an agreement that has been reached through a number of entities, including the White House, the DOJ, the DHS, and I understand from our leadership and others, that soon there will be the piece of legislation that we refer to as Davis-Oliver. In Davis-Oliver, we actually have the enforcement provisions that are necessary to restore the respect for the rule of law, and especially the domestic enforcement of our immigration laws. We are setting the stage for that and clearing the path for that with this rule on the legislation that will pass, I believe, under suspension.

Mr. KING of Iowa. The provisions that are necessary that I would point out to the body, Mr. Speaker, are this: The number one most important is this: We only have 5,000 ICE agents for 50 States and territories. They are spread so thin they can't possibly enforce immigration law. We need that number tripled. That is 10,000 ICE agents. That is the most important component of this to have the officers to bring that enforcement. Second thing is we need to make sure that the ICE detainer language is there and in Davis-Oliver. That is something that had been neutralized by an action of the Obama administration, and they need to be certain that they have the full authority to carry firearms. Mr. Speaker, I make these points so that the body can anticipate what is coming down the pike. I intend to support the rule and the underlying bills, and I intend to be here on the floor advocating all of the components of Davis-Oliver, also including the components I have articulated here today. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the House.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. And I have no better friend in this city either--or this country, for that matter. Mr. Speaker, I am just called to come to this floor to add a few words to the topic that the gentleman from Texas has courageously brought forward and so few others would want to even speak to: the societal experiment that is going on in our military, the greatest military in the history of the world. When the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) talks about how history will be written one day, this isn't a civilization killer, but it is an indication of a civilization killer. I think of the circumstances in a little bit older history, back in the 16th century and the 17th century when the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim armies were sweeping across the countryside, and whoever they captured, they pressed into slavery. And when they pressed them into slavery, they wanted to have their crack troops--they were called Janissaries, and there were other troops too, as well. But what they did in order to keep them from reproducing was that they did reassignment surgery on those slaves that they captured, that they had put into their Janissary troops, and that reassignment surgery was they took them from being a virile, reproductive male into being a eunuch. Now, they were suitable to work in the harem, but they found out when they put them out in the field to do battle against the enemy that they didn't have the testosterone to take on the fight. And so over a period of time, a generation or two, they finally realized: I guess we are going to have to stop turning these men into eunuchs if we are going to have them as a fighting machine. That is the Janissaries. And the old history through that is replete with narrative after narrative of them taking out the knife and actually cutting the flesh off of these anatomically complete men. Some would die from that and some would live, but none of them had the will to fight. And so they decided that they were going to keep anatomically complete men, men that were producing testosterone, in their crack Janissary troops, where they fought well. That is a lesson of the military, the Ottoman military from 200, 300, 400 years ago. And today we are here thinking somehow we are going to make the military better by letting people line up at the recruitment center who have planned that they want to do sexual reassignment surgery, know that it is expensive, and believe: I can just get into any branch of the United States services--the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, maybe become a Navy SEAL--and then submit to sexual reassignment surgery and go from a man to a woman. By the way, it doesn't look like there are going to be any women becoming men after they go through SEAL training. I don't think that is going to happen, at least currently. But there is no way that this enhances the capabilities of our military. There is no way it enhances the morale of our military, and you will never see a platoon that is made up by all of the folks that are likely to line up to sign up into our military. This policy clearly enacted, clearly advertised, is a neon sign for people who want to have sexual reassignment surgery. They will line up at their recruiter's office and they will go into the military, and the military will be saying: You know, we had to turn this person away because they were too heavy, and this one had flat feet, and this one had a bad eye, and this one had a congenital defect of one kind or another, but if they don't have those and they want sexual reassignment surgery, we will cut them up and remake them into something different, to the tune of $3.5 or $3.9 billion over a 10-year period of time, and put them off in the recovery room for 2 years before we can put them to work and use them. And, by the way, they are likely then to be discharged to come back into society if their only purpose was to get the free surgery. And can you imagine someone who has now gone into Walter Reed Hospital, taken up a bed in Walter Reed Hospital, maybe a roommate with someone who was hit by an IED, someone who lost a couple of legs, amputated in the dangerous, dangerous service of the freedoms of our country, can you imagine those two beds, side by side, and one of them missing a couple of legs, or an arm, or an arm and a leg, or two arms, and the other one saying, ``Well, I just came in for sexual reassignment surgery''? I won't say the next thing that is in my mind. I think the public understands the image of what this is. This is one of the most appallingly stupid things I have ever seen the United States Congress do, and it has got some competition, but I don't even know what is second, it is so bad. And the long-term thinking of this, the implications of this are awful, Mr. Speaker. We need to reverse this somehow. I would add, also, that Bob Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, testified before the United States Congress that we had an obesity problem with our young people in America that is a national security risk, it is a national security concern, and we ought to be adopting Michelle Obama's Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act that cut the calories down on these kids, because we didn't have enough of them that were available to meet the physical standards to get into the military, and it was a national security risk. Those were his exact words, ``a national security risk.'' Well, if we can put the kids on a diet in school because it is a national security risk for getting people to meet the weight standards of our military, isn't this a national security risk when you have all of these resources that are redirected from F-35s and pension plans and a raise for our military and housing on our bases, and the list goes on and on, redirect those resources to sexual reassignment surgery and then have them mustered out of the service as soon as they get what they went into the service for in the first place? This is idiocy on the part of the United States Congress. I salute the gentlewoman from Missouri (Mrs. Hartzler) for introducing this amendment. I had a similar amendment that was turned down in the Rules Committee. But this is something this Congress made a significant error on. Twenty-four Republicans and every single Democrat voted against this. I thank the gentleman from Texas for bringing up the topic, and I would be happy to yield back to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to address you here from the floor of the House of Representatives in this great deliberative body that has been deliberating all day long in the markup of the National Defense Authorization Act. The work that is done, especially by the members of the Armed Services Committee, goes deeply into the destiny and the future of America. They have to look at the whole globe and the whole budget, and they have to look at the equipment that is out there and the technology that is developing, and it is a heavy responsibility to present this NDAA authorization bill to the floor. Often, there are efforts that are made to turn it into a political bill, rather than the bill that can defend America, and ensure that we have the best military that the world has ever seen, and the best equipment for the best military the world has ever seen, and the best standards to uphold the best people, the nobility of the United States military. So I want to compliment especially the members of the committee and the chairman for his work and the work that has been done here on this floor. They are going to take a deep breath and tomorrow will bring this thing back to the floor for a vote and a potential final passage. I came to the floor to address a bit different topic, and I may revert back to the NDAA, and I actually intend to do that, Mr. Speaker. But I have wanted to come to this floor for some time to discuss the circumstances going on here in the United States of America and an issue that has been very important to me for a long time; and that is the issue of the United States of America getting to the point where we finally declare a language, our English language, as the official language of the United States. I sat down once, and I went through the--when we had the World Book Encyclopedia, before the internet, more or less, eroded the ubiquitousness--that means everywhere--the World Book Encyclopedia was everywhere in the country and many places in the world. I looked through--I took a 1979 almanac, and I looked at all the flags for all the countries in the world, and I looked up every single country to find out, do they have an official language, or don't they? And from that 1979 almanac, and some of the countries have changed since then, but every single country in the world had an official language, at least one of them, except for the United States of America. As I studied this, and it comes to me, the more I look at history, the more I look at the forces that move the world and the people in it, often it is the culture; it is the cultural foundation that moves policy in America, and in every country in the world. The culture lives in the hearts and minds of its people; and what is in the hearts and minds of its people is, if you are members of a nation state, what binds us together is having a common experience, a common cause, common enemies, perhaps, a common sense of history, a common sense of struggle, a common sense of economic ties, and also, a common language. A common language is the most powerful unifying force anywhere in the world throughout all of history, even more powerful than religion, and religion is a very powerful unifying force, and sometimes it can be a dividing force. But of those powerful unifying forces we have, it might be race, it might be ethnicity, it might be national origin, it can be those things. It could be religion, but all of these components go together to make your culture, and the binding force that we have proven in this country over and over and over again is the common language. Some years ago, just one floor down, out that door, I sat down with several ambassadors to the United States from Israel, and I remarked to them that they had established Hebrew as their official language in 1954. The country was approved by the motion in the United Nations in 1948, and 6 years later, the Israelis established Hebrew as their official language. I asked them: Why did you do that? Hebrew was a dead language. It was essentially a language only of prayer for 2,000 years. But they resurrected that language and decided we are going to make it the common form of communications currency in Israel in order to bind the Israelis together. And so they did. They deployed the Hebrew language in the streets of Israel. In fact, there weren't any streets in Tel Aviv at the time. They created Tel Aviv also as a manufactured city to add to the glory of Israel. But as the people walked in the streets, they decided we are going to embrace this language of Hebrew. So it is today the language of the Israeli people, Hebrew. Why did you do that? And their answer to me was: We looked at the United States. We knew we were going to be assimilating people from many countries in the world, maybe even all countries in the world, and they would come from all races, all ethnicities, all national origins, coming back because--primarily they were attracted back because they were of Jewish faith, many of them by Jewish blood and heritage; but they came into Israel, and they needed to be bound together as Israelis. And the best way to bind them together--these are smart people--was a common language. And a common language that was unique was helpful, also. It gave them the distinction and the pride that they would have of the nationalism of being Israelis. And so Hebrew became the official language of the fresh new nation state Israel just 6 years after it was formed. I was not astonished by that, but I was very impressed by the wisdom that they used to apply the necessity of a common language to bind them together so that they could be one people. I went there, and I traveled, and I looked at what they were doing. They had brought in several hundred people from Ethiopia to come into the Israeli society, and they get 6 months to study Hebrew and to be assimilated into the broader Israeli economy. Those who come to Israel that are not literate in their own language, they first had to teach them to read and write in the language that was native to them, their natural language, and then they taught them Hebrew and converted them into being able to read and write and speak in Hebrew. But they got 6 months to do that, and then out into the world they went. That is a pretty fast assimilation process. But I don't know if there is a country since, other than the United States, that has done a better job of assimilating people from everywhere in the world into one society than has happened in Israel. Mr. Speaker, I would say that I never, ever hear anybody talk about divisions within Israelis. I don't hear them speaking, well, you are an African Israeli or a German Israeli or a Russian Israeli. There are a lot of them, but they see themselves as Israelis. They have a common language, common culture, and they are pulled together out of a need to have a common defense and a common cause. That is the model that they created by looking at the model of the United States of America because we had been so successful in assimilating people into this country and binding us together by having a common language; that common language, a common form of communications currency that allows us to communicate with every American everywhere, to walk into any city council meeting, any county supervisor's meeting, any State legislature, any discussions that go on here in the House, in the Senate, any meetings that go on within the government buildings in the Federal and the State and the political subdivisions thereof. All of our meetings take place in English. Anybody that speaks English can walk in there and understand them. That is the policy that brought us together as a people. That is the policy that was so admired by the Israelis that they emulated it. Yet we sit here still the only country in the world, by the measure that I described, of the World Book Encyclopedia and the 1979 almanac, at least, the only country in the world that doesn't have at least one official language. We have a common language that is English. We need to make our official language English, and, of course, I have introduced legislation, Mr. Speaker, to do that. It is H.R. 997; it has been H.R. 997 since I came to this Congress, and one day we are going to see a President sign that bill, and it might very well be this President we have today, President Trump. He has spoken in favor of official English, and I certainly agree with him on this. But it is more than this. When President Bill Clinton introduced the executive order, I believe it is 13166--and I am operating from a dusty memory here. Perhaps I have got it on a note. But let's go with 13166. That executive order directed that any government facility that is there needs to accommodate any language request that comes from anybody who walks into a Federal building or a State building or any government service. It just runs up the cost of our government in an unnecessary way. The idea, I suppose, is, well, we are going to make it easy for people who have trouble understanding English; and so if we do that, eventually they will pick up and learn and understand English, and they will assimilate into society because, after all, every other generation, every other people that has come into America has assimilated into our society. But when you change the rules and you change the format and you take away the incentive, then you can't expect to have the same result. And how it was, was that people were brought into this country and they were immersed into the American culture and the American civilization. For example, my grandmother came to the United States from Germany and she spoke only German. My father went to school, kindergarten--one of seven siblings altogether, number three in line--speaking German. He was quite confused on his first day of kindergarten, even though ``kindergarten'' is a German word. And when he came home from school that day, he walked into the house and said ``hello'' to his mother in German. My grandmother, his mother, Freda Catrina Johanna Harm King, said to her son: Emmett, speaking German in this household is for you from now on verboten. I came here to become an American. That means speaking English, and you will go to school and learn English, and you will bring it home and you will teach it to me. So my father had spoken his last words of German in that household, and he went to school and learned English, and he brought it home and taught it to his mother, and she learned English from her son and her sons, but primarily my father. That was an expression of gratitude to the country that had embraced her and welcomed her, and she embraced this country, the United States of America. And of the six sons that she raised and a daughter, one of the sons was physically unable to serve, four of the remaining five went back to fight against the fatherland. And my father went to the South Pacific for 2\1/2\ years to fight the Japanese, and came home weighing 115 pounds on U.S. rations with a lot of stories that he never told. That was the way she thanked the host country, the United States of America. And there I sat growing up in a small town in Iowa being told: You hit the jackpot, Steve. You were born into the greatest country on the face of the Earth. You could not have been born anyplace better than this. The United States of America is the greatest country in the world, and you need to pay back this country that so welcomed the people that have come here. Well, I want to continue to do that by tying together our society and our civilization, knitting us together, and English is the very best way to do that. We can eliminate the billions of dollars that we are unnecessarily spending by proliferating other languages within our government. I think it is important that people learn multiple languages. It is important, especially in this world that we are in today where we have got so much foreign trade and so much foreign travel and so many foreign visitors into this country. I do a significant amount of travel myself. But to try to promote other languages to be spoken on the streets of America or confuse our students by catering to the language that is the language of their home rather than the language of the streets, then we end up with ethnic enclaves and people that really don't embrace the American culture and the American civilization. I was quite struck by the book that was written by Winston Churchill called ``A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.'' I carefully read through that book forward and back. It took me quite a while to get through it carefully. I absorbed it and soaked it up. When I finished the book, I remember it was about 1:30 in the morning, and I looked up at the ceiling, and I thought: Huh. Wherever the English-speaking peoples have gone, by reading Churchill's book, freedom has accompanied the English language. How did that happen? The concept of freedom is carried by the English language all over the world. And if you look where the British have gone, as far away as India where they taught English, and you look at the African continent where the English language has been established, you see that freedom is more likely to be found in the English-speaking peoples than of any other speaking peoples on the planet. Is that some kind of coincidence? Or is there something about our language that carries freedom with it? Or is it about the people that carry the language that understand the concept of God-given liberty, and then they transport that God-given liberty and that freedom to the countries that they are settling, that they are contributing technology and science and medicine and literature and academics to and economy to? I think it is a couple of things. One is the British had enough confidence in their culture and their civilization to export it to the rest of the world. And we as Americans, up until the last generation or so, have had enough confidence in our culture and civilization to export it to the rest of the world. And the rest of the world has embraced our values, and we have seen it happen over and over again. I point out Ataturk in Turkey, who, for 40 years, moved Turkey to the West, and the prosperity in the nation-state of Turkey improved the closer they got to the West. I recall seeing pictures recently in Afghanistan from the 1960s, when the women wore Western clothing and there was a lot more civility in Afghanistan and more prosperity in Afghanistan. I sat with the son of the Shah of Iran just a couple of months ago, and we had an engaging conversation. We have met several times along the way throughout the years. His father, the Shah, was moving Iran to the West. The women were uncovered; they wore Western clothes, and their education was accelerated, and they were moving into the Western world, and they had significantly more prosperity than they have today. Part of that was English language, part of that was culture, part of it is the Western civilization that we are. But we wouldn't have a Western civilization if we didn't have an English language that helps to tie that together. And the Western civilization itself is rooted in the real estate where the very footprint of Christianity laid the foundation for civilization, and most times it is the English language that is part of that, that ties that together. And where it doesn't exist, they have more troubles than where it does exist. So I tip my hat to Winston Churchill for the wisdom that came together in his book. I want to reiterate, Mr. Speaker, that he never wrote that the English language took freedom to the rest of the world. He just wrote about the history of what happened to the rest of the world when the English-speaking peoples engaged themselves with the rest of the world. However, there is another intellect from the United Kingdom, Daniel Hannan. Daniel Hannan is a member of the European Parliament. He has written a book that goes even deeper and takes a bigger bite out of this. He says that, as a member of the European Parliament, he will put his earphones on to listen to the interpreted versions as they are using different language. By the way, English is the official language of the European Union, and he has an understanding and he is at least, I will say, at a minimum, marginally fluent in multiple languages. And as he listened to the interpreters interpret into other languages, he would take that earphone back away from him and he would listen to the language they were using, and then he would hear the interpretation in the other ear. He said that what he learned was that other languages didn't have the utility to express the concept of freedom that the English language has. I believe he is right on that. So our concept of freedom and liberty, at least theoretically and by the theory of Daniel Hannan and my own, cannot be carried in any other language. And the English language does carry freedom. It expresses it like it can't be expressed in any other language because our history goes back to the Magna Carta. By the way, the Romans, who laid the foundation for a republican form of government and the rule of law, had a significant imprint on what is the United Kingdom today, Old England, and the English language that emerged from that brought many of our values to us. If America had been formed by any other culture or any other civilization, any other language, we wouldn't be the country we are today. We wouldn't have the Declaration of Independence that we have. We are very unlikely to have this concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And we are very unlikely--and I will say it would be almost impossible--to conceive of a Bill of Rights that would give us the pillars of American exceptionalism, almost all of them packaged up in the Bill of Rights. This came from our history, our culture, the derivatives of Mosaic law, Greek age of reason, the Roman rule of law, the Roman republican form of government that flowed up into England and into other parts in Europe and came about over here to the United States of America at the dawn of the industrial revolution with unlimited natural resources, a concept of manifest destiny, a Judeo-Christian foundation of beliefs and morality. America was a giant Petri dish that was formed by, I believe, the hand of God that shaped this Nation and the foundations of this Nation. I would defy anyone, challenge anyone to reverse engineer America and come up with a better product than we have today. But our principles, our values that came to us are essential to the future of our country as well. It is not just enough to look at our history and think--well, here is what some of my colleagues believe in, and I have trouble with that. They believe that society evolves, and this evolution of society can't be reversed, it can't be changed. It is essentially the product that comes because of time and technology and the force of human nature. So they are often looking at this on both sides of the aisle, but I just take some blame over here on the Republican side of the aisle, too, and they are kind of looking over their shoulder thinking: I am their leader. So I better get in front of this society and see where it is going because it is not going to revert back. The fundamental principles can be changed, too. Well, I disagree, Mr. Speaker. I think what was a sin 2,000 years ago is a sin today. Fundamental principles are fundamental principles. The pillars of American exceptionalism are the pillars of American exceptionalism; and if we mess with them, if we alter them, we better come up with a good and a strong argument about why we should change these pillars of American exceptionalism. We can't just simply dish it off and say: Well, society has moved away from a man and a woman joined together in holy matrimony, so the family doesn't matter anymore, or we can redefine it to be something else. We can't just say, even though technology has proven without a doubt to us that human life begins at the moment of conception, that we can ignore that scientific fact and set aside the immorality of abortion and somehow our Nation is going to be blessed. We can't ignore the idea that even though Adam Smith wrote his book on ``The Wealth of Nations'' published in, what a glorious year, 1776, and he laid out the fundamental principles of free enterprise that inspired this country and a world. We can't just disregard those principles and decide that, well, we can have now college students that reject free enterprise and embrace socialism and managed economies on the basis of what? On the basis of some kind of belief that free enterprise and capitalism victimizes people because some people get rich and other people don't get so rich? You can be a socialist, you can be a Marxist, but you have to believe it is a zero sum game if you are one of those folks, and then you are about redistributing the wealth, but the wealth ends up in the hands of the elitists--the leftist elitists. And if you belive in free enterprise and a meritocracy, then you know that the pie gets bigger. The more people create, the bigger the pie gets. The bigger the pie gets, the more people are prosperous. It is an axiom for the world that when technology is invented and deployed, on average, it improves the standard of living of everybody. Some marginally, some not even noticeably, many a lot. But it moves the world into a modern place. How could we think that whatever we had for net assets, or let me say--well, that is fine. Whatever we had for net assets in the year 1900 are not the net assets that we had in the year 2000, and not the net assets we have in the year 2017. We didn't have a lot of inventions in the year 1900 in comparison to what we have today. It was a smelly place, it was a dirty place, it was a dangerous place. There was no modern medicine. People died of diseases and the garbage got dumped out the windows, and the sewage ran in the streets, and we had invented the steam engine, and we were on the cusp of an airplane and a locomotive-- well, we had locomotives by then. And we were on the cusp of airplanes and automobiles. Modern medicine hadn't emerged. Pharmaceuticals hadn't emerged. Surely, the internet had not. All of the technology that has been developed in the last century has made our efforts far more efficient. Back in the days when we were subsistence farmers and you had to spend 8, 10, 12 hours a day to try to raise a crop to feed you and your family and you had very little left to sell or to trade, our time was occupied with staying alive. I have a cousin who spent 8 years in Honduras near Tegucigalpa in the Peace Corps. He was struggling to try to get them to raise 10 bushels of corn per acre, and we were raising 100 bushels at home at the time. I said: ``Jim, why don't you bring some seed corn down there? Why don't you bring some nitrogen fertilizer down there? What is the capability of that soil?'' He said: ``Oh, it is a 100-bushel soil and 100-bushel climate.'' ``Cannot you bring them into the modern world? That is what you are doing down there.'' And his answer was: ``No, my biggest task is to keep them from having to eat their seed corn.'' Well, we moved along a lot faster in our society today. We have done genetic engineering, GMO products. We have gone from their 10 bushels an acre now to 300 bushels. We are on the way to 300-bushel corn. We can feed 7 billion people on the planet, and we will be prepared to feed 9 billion people on the planet as well, Mr. Speaker. But technology has always moved us forward. It has always put us in a place where the standard of living for the world was improved, whether it was medicine, where not only our standard of living, our quality of life and the length of our life has been improved dramatically over the last couple of generations, or the technology that comes from this iPhone that is here, that has far more storage capacity and computer capacity in it than was in Apollo 13 that went to the Moon, and it saves us time. We communicate in real time. It has changed our lives. When I started my construction business, we all had to go in to eat lunch at noon, and we had 12 until 1 when we sat by the telephone and ate our lunch because that is when we communicated and reset our afternoon. We didn't have any other way to communicate with each other other than to be by that landline phone. And when they rolled that landline phone out, maybe 40 years earlier or so, we were pretty happy to have that because we had to go talk to people face-to-face to communicate. Now if you send out an email and it is one that needs an action on it, if you don't get an answer back in 15, 20 minutes or 30 minutes, you think, well, that person is not a very good businessman or -woman if they are not answering their email, they are not answering their texts. So now we make decisions on the fly. It is real time. Our efficiency is far much better because the communications are far much better. That is what has happened with technology. That is what has happened to move us into the modern era of the world. But we still have this thing that is culture and civilization. We still have this thing that is language. And I know that the argument has been made to me that one day we will just hold up our iPhone and someone who speaks another language, it will come back and it will be interpreted into our ears, and we will be able to understand what they say. And I think that will happen. I think that will happen, but I don't think we should overvalue what that means. Because if we are going to walk around and listen to our iPhone even when we are looking at people face-to-face and eye-to-eye, and if there is a delay in the interpretation--and there will be that delay, that will last indefinitely--we still have those pieces of our culture and our civilization that are instantaneous. When people speak to us, we need to be able to hear and understand their voice inflections. We need to watch the body language and timing with the voice inflections. We need to pick up the slang and the vernacular that is used within the communities that we are. A nation needs to be able to do that in real time, instantaneously. And when we can do that, we are bound together and suspicion dissipates and unity comes together. That is why America needs to establish English as the official language, because it is our common language. We are extraordinarily blessed to have English as our common language, and we can eliminate, then, the billions of dollars that we spend as we hire interpreters, and we slow down our process. And if we establish English as the official language, we will accelerate the learning of our language all across this land. I mean, I don't know why in the world Spanish is in the airport in LaGuardia, for example. That is a long ways away from any country that speaks Spanish, but that is up there in dual signs, in English and in Spanish as you walk through the LaGuardia Airport. As I am in a foreign country, I sometimes try to learn the language; and if they have got dual signs up there, I will try to read the sign to learn that other language while I am there. But I also know this: my eyes always revert to the language that I know and that I am comfortable with, and for me it is English. When we put multiple languages on our signs in this country, it just helps facilitate for people--it takes away their desire to learn a foreign language. And so I am a strong supporter of English as the official language, H.R. 997, and I urge its movement here--and cosponsorship is necessary, of course--to finally get a vote on English as the official language here in the floor of the House of Representatives. Mr. Speaker, I spent 6 years on this project in the State of Iowa, and I brought it three different ways in three different general assemblies. And finally, in the last term that I was there, I was able to--well, I didn't get to see the bill signed into law because the Governor wasn't thrilled about the bill-signing ceremony, but he signed it nonetheless, and it is the situation in Iowa and in nearly 30 States in this country that have adopted English as their official language. The bill that I have introduced here is a mirror of the bill that is now law in Iowa. We did have to sue once on it and litigate, but it was because the secretary of state was determined to violate the law. He got pulled back in order. Otherwise, there would have been no litigation on the legislation itself. It has happened smoothly, and it has been a useful utility. It saved money in the State of Iowa. It saved money in every State where English is the official language, and it is time for this Congress to adopt that a majority of the States have established English as the official language. I intend to continue beating this drum until such time as it becomes law, and at that point, then I will begin the celebration myself, Mr. Speaker. I was about to change subjects, but I will carry on for just a moment. I should also say that English is the language of success. Those who have developed proficiency in the English language do better than those who don't. We are seeing people who are sometimes three generations into America without learning the official language. I recognize my friend from Tennessee has arrived and I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. Jim Cooper.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I am always happy to yield to the gentleman from Tennessee, and I appreciate his contribution to the United States Congress while I have served here, and each year that he has been here as well. Mr. Speaker, I would like to shift gears a little bit now and address the circumstances of the NDAA debate that has taken place. I want to express my disappointment with some of the decisions that were made, some of the votes on the amendments, and also decisions that came from the Rules Committee. Last year, in the authorization of the National Defense Authorization Act, I offered a number of amendments that were made in order, and I brought them here to the floor. We had a legitimate debate on those amendments, and I appreciate the ability to do that. But I also want to reiterate that this is a deliberative Congress, and Members have a right to be on this floor and to debate and to vote. The Rules Committee's job is to make sure that that is in an orderly fashion, and I recognize that when you have well over 100 amendments that are offered, we could be here a long time if everyone debated those. I would also point out that there was a unanimous consent agreement that was negotiated here a little bit ago, and the chairman, Mr. Thornberry, made the unanimous consent request that the balance of the amendments that weren't debated today would be approved en bloc. I supported that, and I verbally voted in support of it. That is a process that we do here. But the amendments that I offered before the Rules Committee, all four of them, every single one of them was turned down, even a couple of them that I offered last year that were debated here on the floor. The first one was an amendment, and it is this: ensuring that no funds under the NDAA would be used to enlist DACA aliens--Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was how President Obama listed it--to ensure that no funds will be used to enlist illegal aliens into our military, including our DACA personnel, into the United States military when they only consider them through the MAVNI program, which is to try to find special skill sets that aren't available in the United States. That is what the MAVNI program is about. But President Obama, I will say, distorted that program, Mr. Speaker, and he began to push the DACA recipients through there. Well, DACA is unconstitutional. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, as he named it, is unconstitutional. President Obama, 22 times, told the world that he didn't have the constitutional authority to grant amnesty to people who came into America, at least allegedly, before they were 18 years old--22 times. The last time that I recall was at a high school here in Washington, D.C., which was only 2 or 3 weeks before he issued this policy, which was in September of 2014, to grant a quasi--and I will say an unconstitutional legal status to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Now, it has been my position, conviction, and belief that if we reward lawbreakers, we get more lawbreakers. And it was the conviction of President Obama that he didn't have the constitutional authority to reward these lawbreakers. In his lecture to the high school students shortly before he implemented this policy, President Obama said: No, you are smart students. You know that there are three branches of government. Article I is the legislative branch; they pass the laws. Article II is the executive branch, which he headed at the time. They enforce the laws. Article III are the courts, and they interpret the laws. That is about as clear and concise as it gets. And President Obama was an adjunct professor who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I would take issue with some of his constitutional interpretations, but I would not take issue with that one. He was right. He had no constitutional authority to award a de facto amnesty to people who attested that they were brought into this country maybe against their will, without their knowledge, or too young to be held accountable, to reward them with a path to citizenship. But that is what this NDAA legislation fails to do is to strike out this language that was implemented by President Obama in September of 2014 that rewards people who attest that they came into America illegally, committed the crime of unlawful entry into the United States, criminals who then stepped up into the military and applied to go into the military and took an oath to support and defend our Constitution after they broke our laws. They had to lie to get into the military, so they committed the crime of unlawful entry. They lied to get into the military, and then they took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Well, two of those three things are wrong at least. But did they mean it when they took the oath to support and defend the Constitution? Can you trust them if they violated our immigration laws and then lied about that in order to get into the military? This President set about rewarding those kind of lawbreakers, those criminals, by granting them a path to citizenship because they signed up in the military. I simply offered an amendment at the Rules Committee to be able to debate this on the floor of the House of Representatives so Congress could bring its considered judgment. Now, I have an oath that I have taken, and that is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, too, Mr. Speaker. When I see a bill come before me that, on its face, rewards lawbreakers under a policy that is a constitutional violation, one that Secretary Kelly said as recently as this morning he doesn't believe that the constitutionality of this can be upheld, and he doesn't expect that the Justice Department is going to defend it, and he anticipates that there will be a suit that will be filed--and I will tell you the specific date is September 5--that I believe will successfully litigate and put an end to this DACA program. This Congress, every Member of this United States Congress has taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States-- every one. And I don't think there is a single one that stood there and had their fingers crossed behind their back as they took their oath and said: ``Oh, unless I don't like it, it makes me politically uncomfortable, or unless I have some sympathy for the people that might be facing the enforcement of this supreme law of the land, the Constitution of the United States.'' They don't get to cross their fingers behind their back and make an oath that they don't mean. So when we take this oath--all 435 of us in the House and 100 of us in the Senate--we better mean it. We better believe what we say because we tell our constituents: You send me to Washington, D.C., send me to represent you in the United States Congress, and I will uphold the Constitution. That is the number one duty, to uphold the Constitution. Well, in this Constitution, to support and defend it, I tell you it requires the President to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and, under the Take Care Clause, take care that the laws are faithfully executed. That doesn't mean kill off the law. It means enforce the law. The President has violated the Constitution. Now the Rules Committee denied the ability of the House of Representatives to strike this out of the policy that exists under the authorization now of the National Defense Authorization Act. They are asking me to vote for this bill even though it violates a principle that was encompassed in our oath and a principle that was encompassed in everyone's oath. Not only did we not get to put these Members of Congress up on a vote and challenge them afterwards as to whether their conscience is clear and whether they meant it when they took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, we don't get to have the debate. We don't get to have the vote. So here is the National Defense Authorization Act all ready for a final passage to come to the floor tomorrow with unconstitutional components encompassed within it, that being something that Barack Obama 22 times said was unconstitutional, and we don't even get a debate or a vote here on the floor of the House of Representatives. That is amendment No. 1, Mr. Speaker. That troubles me a lot. Second, a simple amendment that I brought last year ensuring that funds are not used to house UACs on military installations-- unaccompanied alien children. When unaccompanied alien minors come into the United States illegally, they are violating Federal law. They are committing the crime of unlawful entry into the United States. They are facing up to 1 year in prison if we convict them and sentence them to the maximum of the law for one unlawful entry into the United States. We had a policy that existed under the Barack Obama administration to start to house them on our military bases. Our military bases are for our national security. They are not there to be babysitting for children who are under 18--so they say--to house them on those bases to weaken our defense capability and interrupt the process of our military. We need that amendment to clean up another mistake of the Obama administration, and it was denied by the Rules Committee. So we don't get to have a debate. We could very well have an administration that just continues the old process going of housing unaccompanied alien minors--illegal aliens--on the bases in America consuming our military resources for something like that. I disagree. I don't think they should be housed on our bases. By the way, we ought to be picking them up at the border and sending them back to the country they came from. That is what every other nation does or should do. Those that don't are making colossal mistakes. I will try to stay out of what I think is going on in Europe today, but they are being subsumed by idiotic immigration policies. The next amendment that was denied by the Rules Committee was the Obama-era Executive Order 13672 that prohibits Federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It is just an unnecessary executive order, common decency, common courtesy. How do you discriminate against someone if you don't know what their sexual orientation is and gender identity is? That has not been a problem out in this society. That executive order needed to be rescinded. We don't get a debate or a vote on that executive order either. This is the amendment that I introduced. Vicky Hartzler from Missouri, thankfully--I appreciate her bringing an amendment that was very similar to mine. My amendment ensured that no funds are used by the Department of Defense to force servicemen and -women to undergo any kind of transgender sensitivity courses or to screen servicemembers regarding gender reassignment surgery. I will just couple it with discussion and debate on the Hartzler amendment. And that is this: that the United States military should not be used as an experiment. It shouldn't be used to do a social experiment agenda. Yet, under the Obama administration, not only did they decide to put an end to Don't Ask, Don't Tell, they set up an affirmative action program to promote people through the ranks who would assert their orientation to be different from heterosexual. Then we got into this national fixation on transgenderism. And the orders came down in to the Department of Defense through our Secretary of Defense that the American taxpayer--well, let's just say we borrow money from China and Saudi Arabia to do sex reassignment surgery on people in our military? It is something that has never happened before without a vote or a debate here on the floor of the House of Representatives or in the Senate for that matter. It is not a policy that has been approved by America or Americans, but a policy that was more or less shoehorned into this by the former President of the United States and the former Commander in Chief Barack Obama. I can't believe that President Trump thinks it is a good idea to spend one-quarter or more billion dollars doing sex reassignment surgery, taking people out of the service of the military for the better part of a year while they recover from this surgery and thinking that somehow they are going to make our Nation stronger by using those resources when we have military members who are on food stamps today. So we would divert resources for sex reassignment surgery, thinking that it would somehow enhance our national security? Sex reassignment surgery enhances our national security? I can't say that with a straight face and expect anybody in this country is going to believe this. So here we are, an America that is the unchallenged greatest nation in the world, significantly more powerful militarily than any other country in the world, but also with responsibilities that expand beyond that of any other country in the world, and we would obsess ourselves with the idea that we are going to send an advertisement out to people all over America, which is--well, maybe even outside of America--if you are contemplating sex reassignment surgery, come into the military and declare yourself a transgender, and then we will pay for that surgery. And we will have a whole lineup of people over at Walter Reed for their sex reassignment surgery laying in hospital beds next to our noble wounded who have lost an arm or a leg, or maybe both arms and both legs, maybe that have sacrificed a great deal, and we are going to divert the resources--the considerable resources--and medical skill and capabilities of our military medicine system that we have to sex reassignment surgery? Who would have thought? I can't believe that the pundits haven't unloaded already on this all over the world. We are going to be the laughingstock of the world if this comes out that the Hartzler amendment failed on the floor of the House of Representatives by a handful of votes, but it failed. So that says to those who want to enter into the military and are contemplating sex reassignment surgery--by the way, I am not using the language that they are using. They are saying this is gender reassignment surgery-- gender reassignment surgery. Well, gender cannot be reassigned. That is in one's head. Sex is south of the border. Gender is in the head. It is not gender reassignment, it is sex reassignment surgery. We would take those resources that we need to be using to take our combat-wounded and those who are ill and sick and serving in our military and get them well with the best care that we can provide for them, the battles we have had here on the floor to try to get the VA up to speed and they would divert those resources for sex reassignment surgery and for pharmaceuticals and the kind of medication that would make them physically more like they say they are in their head? That is not a problem for the military to solve, Mr. Speaker. I am greatly troubled by the arrangement of the amendments, those that were allowed and those that were denied. This amendment was the Hartzler amendment that failed. I can only think of the MASH unit, and I will probably stop with that, Mr. Speaker, and not go any further into what images that brings to mind for me. But I saw that there were 24 Republicans that voted against the Hartzler amendment. That is greatly troubling to me, Mr. Speaker, to see that. By the way, Mr. Speaker, every single Democrat voted against the Hartzler amendment. In the course here of about 18 to 24 months, this Congress thinks that they are reflecting the will of the American people, and now we have not only a social experiment but a medical experiment, a transgender medical sex reassignment surgery experiment going on in our military while we need to maintain ourselves as the strongest and most capable military in the world. Our focus needs to be singular. We have people who can't get into the United States military for one reason or another. Maybe they aren't a strong enough physical specimen. Maybe they can't pass that physical test. Former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates testified before Congress some years ago. He said that obesity is a national security problem in the United States, that too many of our young people sit in front of the television or in front of their Xbox. They eat junk food, they get fat, and they are too heavy to meet the standards to qualify to be recruited into our military in any branch of the service. He said that if we don't do something to control the diets of young people so that they are not too fat to get into the military, he said it is a national security issue. Obesity in our young people is a threat to our national security. Yet, rather than focusing resources on getting these young people in shape, we would get out the scalpel and do sexual reassignment surgery on somebody from the same generation who went to the same school and probably sat next to some of those other youth in the high school classes, and we would take a man and physically turn him into a woman or take a woman and physically turn her into a man at their request because she says: up here that is where I am. Don't they know that when they sign up for the military? Can't they make that decision beforehand and can't the military screen for that? If they can screen for obesity, if they can screen for intellect and for IQ, if they can screen for medical records and medical history, if they can screen for criminal activity or violations of the law, if they can say you can't get into our military because you don't meet our standards in any of these, if you are too short, if you are physically unable like my uncle who was physically unable to serve in the military, all of those things, from obesity to too short, to having flatfeet, to being cross-eyed, whatever it might be, they can say: no, you don't fit our standards. But if you walk up there and you say, ``Well, I think here I am a woman and I am not a woman here,'' then we will bring you in because you meet all other standards and we have got these specialists up at Walter Reed and other facilities around America, we will surgically make you into whatever you want to be. And somehow that strengthens America's security and helps us to fight our enemies? This is so utterly ludicrous for the United States military to be engaged in such a diversion from defending our country. Yet this Congress turned down the Hartzler amendment. At least the Rules Committee allowed it to be offered. They didn't allow mine. They allowed that one to be offered. This is what we get? This kind of answer? Every Democrat says: oh, this is okay. We want to do this. It is important to us. And 24 Republicans agreed with them? Where is our country going? Can't we focus on the things that are important? Can't we focus on these constitutional principles? Vote down this DACA thing that rewards lawbreakers, and support the Hartzler amendment and end this idea that we are going to do great medical and social experiments in the United States military and somehow out of that we are going to--there is no way in the world that makes us stronger. So somehow do we even maintain our power when we become the laughingstock of the world? There was also an initiative that I had to fight here a while back about meatless Mondays in our military. I recall a picture of the Norwegian military. They are vegans on Monday. Meatless military in the Norwegian military, and they are sitting there eating their vegan sandwiches and on their shoulder patch is a reindeer. I suppose that is their national animal, and that is good over there. For us, we want a strong military. We want to maintain a noble military. We want to focus these resources on those things that matter. They are all going to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution when they sign up and commit themselves to the military. God bless them for doing that. I take it, too. There are 435 of us here who did, and 100 down the Rotunda in the Senate did. How many of us mean it? How many of us will take that stand and say: I will not vote for a piece of legislation that is unconstitutional because it violates my oath of office; and I am not going to commit the resources of the taxpayers of the United States of America to do social, medical, and pharmaceutical experiments on people who now would be attracted to come into the military for that purpose and then be discharged out onto the streets of America, having been reconstructed into a different kind of human being with a different hair cut? That can happen on their own. That can happen in civilian life. That is each person's cross to bear or each person's choice, but it is not the duty of the United States military. It is a national security issue, according to former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, because too many of our youth are too overweight to meet the standards to get into boot camp. My answer to that was: if it is a military national security issue, sign them up. Put them in there. They can just stay in basics until they make weight. Maybe you add another 2 weeks, 4 weeks, or 6 weeks to their training. You will get them down to weight, if you work them hard enough, if you watch their diet. It will be a good thing for them. It is not a national security issue, in my opinion, for too many young people to be overweight and they can't qualify for the military. If you work them hard enough, feed them right, keep them long enough, they will make weight. But it is far wiser to do that than it is to do sex reassignment surgery and take somebody out of operations for 200-some days out of a year in order to recover from this reconstructive surgery. It is a ridiculous thing that has happened today in the United States Congress. It is disgraceful that a vote like that could take place and that a majority of the people voting on the Hartzler amendment would turn it down when we have a country to save, a country to protect. So I suggest this, Mr. Speaker. If this NDAA bill fails tomorrow, it will come back again. It will come back again with the Hartzler language in it, under a rule that will allow it to pass here on the floor of the House of Representatives. Democrats are not going to help us pass this bill. Only a handful of them will do that. So Republicans have to do the right thing. We should stop dividing ourselves. We should stop letting America be embarrassed in front of the word for a ridiculous decision that was made today. So I urge a correction to the NDAA, and I urge English to be adopted as the official language of the United States of America, because it unifies us and helps us communicate with each other. A common form of communications currency is the most powerful unifying force throughout the entire history of the world. We need to employ it here and protect it in law here in the United States of America. 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. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I would like to reciprocate in a compliment to the gentleman from Texas, who stands here and leads in this Congress every day, and takes on a heavy load in the Rules Committee. A lot of times those are late night meetings--maybe the rest of us have put our feet up, not so much me, but some of the rest of us, Mr. Speaker--and Pete Sessions is up there working away, keeping organization in this House, and helping bring these things to the floor. We would not be here on the floor today if we didn't have a Rules Committee to work with and that cooperated. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Chairman Goodlatte for joining with me on this and putting his name on top of this bill as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, or we would be still stuck back in hearings and markups. This is a great week to be debating these immigration bills that are here. A big reason for that is that this is a hold-their-feet-to-the- fire week that many of us have joined, as the radio talk show hosts that believe in secure borders, the rule of law, enforcing immigration law, and building a wall come together at the Phoenix Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. We talk about the rule of law and enforcing immigration law. That has gone on now for a long time. I have joined in most of those. But, also, this is a week that the grieving families, who have lost a loved one at the hands of a criminal alien in this country, have not only come to this city and joined in the radio discussion that has taken place at the Phoenix Park Hotel, but they also were invited out to the White House to meet with the President yesterday, where there were a number of these families that were there to be represented and respected. I would say two-thirds to three-quarters of them are people who I have worked with from nearly the beginning of the tragedy that struck their family. I am greatly respectful of the individuals who have had the courage to step forward that President Trump has identified. I recall those times when he asked some of these families--Jamiel Shaw, for example; Michelle Root; Mary Ann Mendoza; and Sabine Durden, whose son Dominic was killed by an illegal alien. These families are families that have paid a huge price, but they were strong enough and courageous enough to step up on the stage with Presidential candidate Donald Trump and recount their stories to the media, some of them to speak before the national convention and reiterate these stories. Just this morning, I heard Jamiel Shaw reiterate the story of the murder of his son that took place within the sound of the gunshots of the living room that Jamiel Shaw was sitting in. I have heard that now for 9 years, but the pain has not gone out of his voice, Mr. Speaker. We have some obligations here. And I heard it in the previous speaker: Keep our people safe. Well, of those who die at the hands of criminal aliens, illegal aliens--anyone who is unlawfully present in America and perpetrates violence against an American citizen, kills an American citizen, or someone who is lawfully present in America--every one of those are preventable crimes, 100 percent preventable crimes. I would just direct the attention here, Mr. Speaker, of a tweet that I had them pull down for me. I didn't know the date, but I saw the news story about Kate Steinle. It says: ``Family devastated after woman shot, killed in San Francisco. ``The family of a San Francisco woman who was killed in a seemingly random act of violence is mourning her loss as police continue to search for a . . . .'' And then it is lost in space--the article that I read. But it must have been published on the 2nd of July--she was killed on the 1st--of 2015. My tweet came up on the 3rd, the very next day. I didn't stop to think about it. I didn't wait to see if it became a national story that Bill O'Reilly would bring up. By the way, I thank Bill O'Reilly. He helped a lot in getting us here today. But here is a message I sent out, with a picture of Kate Steinle. It says: ``100 percent preventable crime. Just enforce the law. This will make you cry, too, and it happens every day.'' That is within only 142 characters, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record a tweet regarding Sarah Root. Sarah Root, 21, would be alive, living & loving life if Obama had not violated his oath & ordered ICE to stand down. Teen charged in Iowa woman's death may've fled the country Authorities say a teenager who was at the wheel of a car that was involved in a crash in Omaha last month that killed an Iowa woman has missed a court hearing and may have fled the count . . .

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, every day in this country, at the hands of criminal aliens, people who are lawfully here are suffering, and they are paying a huge price. There isn't a way that we quantify loss to a crime. The crime victim is often out of the equation when it comes to enforcing the law. I sat in on a case where I was the subject of a severe property rights crime. I listened to them announce the case, the case of the State v.--I remember his name--Jason Martin Powell. It occurred to me that I am not in this. My name isn't part of the proceedings because we don't honor the victims enough. Well, we are honoring them here today in a couple of pieces of legislation that are coming down, and we are honoring the life of Kate Steinle, and we are honoring the work of Jim Steinle, the rest of her family, and all of those adults who came forward and put their necks on the line for this.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee not only for working with and cooperating on all this legislation, but for the relentless work that has come forward in the committee. He has spent a lot of time on this floor and in committee, and we are getting some progress here today. This is a big week, and we are starting to restore the rule of law. The sanctuary cities legislation, which is before us right now, is something I just looked back through my records and wondered: How long have I slugged away on this? The first amendment I brought was in 2005 to cut off some funding to sanctuary cities. At each appropriations opportunity, along with CJS and Homeland Security, when there was a chance, I would bring another amendment and another amendment, 2005 on through 2014 and 2015. In 2015, then I introduced the broader sanctuary cities legislation which is the basis for this legislation. I also had the misfortune and fortune of having the Root family as my constituents. Sarah Root was tragically killed by an illegal alien on the streets. Her father and mother both have been here to testify. Her mother is in town this day. Her father, Scott Root, testified before the committee. He said this: They bailed the killer of my daughter out of jail for less money than it took to bury her, and he was out of this country before we could have the funeral. Those words were some of the most chilling and mournful words that I have heard in this Congress. This bill today honors his daughter's life, Michelle's daughter's life, Sarah, and it also brings into play the enforcement that we need to have. We have got to put an end to sanctuary cities and ban those policies--which the bill does--block the DOJ grants if they don't comply with the Federal law, and refuse the warrants to the sanctuary cities because they will just release them on the streets and let ICE take custody of them within 48 hours. And then the good faith hold harmless for ICE detainers, when they got the wrong recommendation out of the Obama administration, this makes the right recommendation to local jurisdictions. The private cause of action is also very useful to us. It is a good, solid bill. I thank the chairman and all those who put the work in this today, and I urge its passage.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding and for working this legislation through and facilitating that it comes to the floor this week. This week, the event of ``Hold Their Feet to the Fire'' is being held where many of the families of those who have been killed by illegal aliens are here to contribute. They went to the White House, and the message has been sent across the country. They have gone and done radio shows, and they have been part of this for a long time. I think of how far back this goes, Kate Steinle's law. From my perspective, she was murdered on the streets of San Francisco on July 1, 2015. It hit the news, I think, the next day. I sent out a tweet on July 3 that said it was a 100 percent preventable crime. Just enforce the law. This story will make you cry, too. And it happens every day. What we are trying to accomplish with Kate's Law is sentencing that is enhanced for those who overstay or those who have been deported from the United States and come back into the United States. I want to compliment former Congressman Matt Salmon from Arizona, who, after her death on July 1, introduced legislation only 8 days later, which was the foundation for what we are talking about here with this bill. That was H.R. 3011, introduced on July 9, 2015. Matt is retired. I picked up that legislation in the first days of this year, and we have cooperated in this Judiciary Committee to get this here to this time. But, also, Bill O'Reilly, who made this a national issue, it hit my heart as soon as I saw the story. It hit the hearts of America when it went out over television, and it is too bad that we can't look at data and come here and fix a massive problem that we have. It is too bad it has to be focused on individuals and personalities, when there are many other families out there that have suffered equally with that of the Steinle family and the other families we have talked about here today. Nonetheless, if that is what it takes to get America to move, we are here now. We are here this week. We have the right legislation in front of us. I urge its adoption.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his presentation in bringing this topic together in a way that he has. And in his method of addressing the Declaration of Independence on the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I would expound on that as well. Life is the most paramount. It is a priority right, and our Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. They set up life as the first priority, liberty as the second priority, and the third priority was the pursuit of happiness. Mr. Speaker, I will start from the bottom because, of the three, I think it deserves the most explanation. That pursuit of happiness is often viewed as maybe a fun tailgate party or a bliss of some kind or maybe a barbecue outdoors with the family, the things that we love. That is the enjoyment of our life. The pursuit of happiness, as it was understood by our Founding Fathers, came from the Greek word ``eudaimonia.'' And that is spelled, E-U-D-A-I-M-O-N-I-A. And under the Greek word ``eudaimonia,'' it means developing the whole human being. And it is not just the mental well- being, but it is developing the intellectual human being, the physical human being, the knowledge base that is there, and the spirit within us, and our theology and our souls--the whole package of what we are as human beings, developing that to the maximum, these God-given gifts, developing them for his glorification, and that is the concept of the pursuit of happiness that our Founding Fathers understood. So the principle is that we have a right to pursue happiness, developing our whole human being, which includes the human enjoyment that we think of when we say pursuit of happiness. But no one in their pursuit of happiness can trample on someone else's liberty because liberties are God-given. And the liberties that we have cannot be subordinate to the pursuit of happiness, but they are subordinate to the life of others because life is the most sacred. Human life is sacred in all of its forms. It is the number one paramount right. So the protection of human life is the principle and is the highest priority in the Declaration of Independence. And the liberties that we have--freedom of speech, religion, the press, the right to keep and bear arms, a jury of our peers, no double jeopardy, the whole list in the Bill of Rights--those are God-given liberties, as conceived by our Founding Fathers and enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and, of course, in our Constitution. The rights that we have cannot be trampled upon or subordinated to someone else's pursuit of happiness. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, a well-thought-out, prioritized list in our Declaration that gives us the inspiration that was the foundation for our Constitution and the principles of our lives in America today. So I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his explanation of this and for giving me an opportunity to flesh this out a little bit in the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the segue that he has served up to me is this: that our debates today here in this Congress on the immigration bills that have now just passed the Congress have been focused on the right to life--the right to life versus the criminals that took the liberty to take them. They have violated the very foundations of our Declaration, and, of course, they violated our laws in a number of ways. But I think, especially, of the onset of this discussion, and I think of Sarah Root. And her legislation that is Sarah's Law was introduced by me in this Congress. I have a copy of this bill today. We introduced it last year also, but in this Congress, it became H.R. 174, and it came about, and then we incorporated it into the broader bill today that we call the sanctuary cities legislation, Mr. Speaker. Sarah Root had just graduated from Bellevue University in Omaha. Her hometown is Modale, Iowa. She had just finished her graduation the day before with a perfect 4.0 grade point average, and her major was in criminal investigation. She would, today, be investigating criminals if it hadn't been for the criminal that killed her the day after she graduated. And the individual who is responsible here, Eswin Mejia, who ran her over, ran into her vehicle on the streets with triple the blood alcohol content that is legal. Eswin Mejia was on a first-name basis with at least two of his immigration attorneys. When he was taken into custody, interestingly, as bad as the accident was, Sarah was rendered unrecognizable and she was on life support for a little while while the parents were deciding what decision to make. And she was also an organ donor. Sarah saved six. And many days I wear this bracelet that says, ``Sarah Root saved six.'' And this bracelet hangs on the antlers in my man cave. And when I walk down there in the morning, I often say a prayer for all of those bracelets that are hung on the antlers in my man cave that represent those individuals whose lives have been lost at the hands of criminal aliens who were unlawfully present in the United States and perpetrated violence against generally American citizens but others that are generally those that are at least lawfully present in America. Sarah Root was one of those victims, a stellar young lady with a 4.0 grade point average and a fresh diploma from Bellevue University; her whole life and a world ahead of her, and run down on the streets. Her father came to testify here in the Judiciary Committee in Congress, and he said: ``The judge bailed Eswin Mejia, this perpetrator, out of jail for less money than it cost to marry my daughter, and he was back home in his home country before we could bury my daughter.'' Those were some of the most powerful and moving and memorable words that I have heard in my time here in Congress. We think Eswin Mejia went back to Honduras, his home country. He had been incarcerated before. He had been encountered by law enforcement before, and they turned him loose on the streets. This happens again and again in America every day, local law enforcement picking up people that are unlawfully present in America, violating our immigration laws. The law requires that they be placed into removal proceedings. That is the law, but they turn them loose anyway and turn them out on the streets because we have sanctuary cities and sanctuary cities policies. Some local jurisdictions that don't have a written policy, but they just simply--it is a practice that they have evolved into accepting. So when I say every one of the Americans who died at the hands of someone who is unlawfully present in America, illegal aliens, generally speaking, every one of those are a preventable death. If we enforced the law, they wouldn't have been in America in the first place to commit the crimes they committed against our American citizens, our innocent people like Sarah Root, this beautiful young lady with a perfect grade point average, the world ahead of her, a happy, joyful young lady that, today, would be living, loving, laughing, and learning and contributing to our society. But she is in her grave today because Eswin Mejia got triple drunk, was unlawfully in the United States, and ran her car down and killed her on the streets and absconded for a $5,000 bond. What we did with Sarah's Law--this is H.R. 174, the original language--and I wanted to assure the family of Sarah Root that this language is incorporated into the bill we passed today. It is incorporated into sanctuary cities legislation that we passed today. And what it does is it prohibits the judge from releasing an illegal alien on bond if they have been charged with or subject to a homicide or a crime where there is serious bodily injury. Once this issue came up in Omaha, Nebraska, and the public knew about this, we tried to unseat the judge that released this criminal that may have done damage again. But the judge that had let him out on $5,000 had a similar case. The next time, the bond went way up into six or even seven figures. So I think he got the message, but the public got the message, too. And I don't know whether he will be able to hold his seat or not, but we have got to bring the right things. We have got to put the fixes in place. You would think we would have a judge that would understand this, yet, somehow in the political culture of America, we are watching criminal aliens be turned loose on the streets over and over again. I recall, Mr. Speaker, sitting in on immigration hearings in the Judiciary Committee. This is over a number of years now, and I suppose there are a couple of people in this Congress that have sat through more, not many. The witnesses would be--every week or so we would have a hearing and there would be witnesses that would testify about how many people died in the Arizona desert trying to sneak into America. And that number would be 200 in a year, 250 in a year, maybe the next year it went to 300. I remember that number going to 400 or more who died in the Arizona desert on the way into trying to sneak into America. Finally, with this parade of witnesses that were experts on why we ought to open the border so they didn't have a difficult time getting into America--that is the lunacy that we have heard in the debate today over on this side of the floor, from my view, Mr. Speaker. I began to ask the witnesses this question: You are an expert on immigration and you have come to testify on how many didn't make it through the desert. Could you tell me how many Americans died at the hands of those who did make it through the desert? And I would ask the witnesses--generally four witnesses--and they would go down the line: I don't know the answer; I don't know the answer; I don't know the answer. And that went on for a while. And the fourth witness in one of those days was a former INS agent, Michael Cutler. And we are just a few years after September 11, 2001, when I asked him this question: How many Americans died at the hands of those who made it through the desert? Which is the phrase to imply how many Americans died at the hands of those who were unlawfully present in America. And Michael Cutler's answer was: I don't know the answer to that, but I can tell you it is in multiples of the victims of September 11. Now, think of that. Three thousand Americans were killed that day. Multiples of that would be at least 6,000. If he is right--and he is confident he is right, and now I am confident he was right--that started me thinking. So shortly after that, I commissioned a GAO study. That GAO study dug down deeply into the records that we had access to. It is hard to get this Congress to compare apples to apples, so I began to ask the questions: Of the people in the prisons of America, what are they in prison for? How many of them are criminal aliens? We did a report on that. They sliced and diced it and narrowed it down. It never actually became apples to apples, but it did come down to this substantial number that has been supported a couple of other times in other studies, in one subsequent that I had done in 2011. The number is very close to 28 percent of the inmates in our Federal penitentiaries are criminal aliens--28 percent. So it is reasonable to do a calculation and an extrapolation off of this, if 28 percent of these inmates are criminal aliens, what percentage of the murders are they committing? What percentage of the rapes are they committing? What percentage of the violent crimes are they committing? Or are they in jail for just simply violating a law of immigration? You will find out very few are in prison for violation of immigration law. They are the reflection on criminal aliens. They are similar, a very similar, if not identical, proportion of the crimes that are committed by others. So when you put that on there and hit the calculator--I am not going to speak those numbers into the Record here, Mr. Speaker, because it is shocking and stunning how many Americans have lost their lives at the hands of people who shouldn't have been here in the first place--Sarah Root included, Kate Steinle included, and many more. A few days after Sarah Root was killed, I sent out a tweet that just said: Sarah Root would be alive living and loving life if the President had not violated his oath and ordered ICE to stand down. That is what happened during the 8-year period of time President Obama asserted that he had this thing called prosecutorial discretion. Now, that is something that is established in law, at least in precedent, but it has to be done on an individual basis, and he delivered it in a blanket basis. Janet Napolitano delivered the document. I questioned her on it in the committee. They decided that prosecutorial discretion can be defined. They created four categories of people and essentially granted amnesty to all of them and turned them loose. They turned criminals loose on the streets in America--36,007 of them in one bunch. Some of them were murderers out on to the streets of America. You can see what happens to the crime in this country. If you are importing people from the most violent countries in the world, and when they are encountered by law enforcement turning them loose, or if they are picked up for a taillight or speeding or getting in a fight or shoplifting, whatever the case may be, failure to signal, running a stoplight, they are picked up for that. When local law enforcement encounters them, they look at their identification. They ask them a few questions. It isn't hard to figure out whether they are legal or not. Some are good enough liars. But any time that law enforcement encounters people unlawfully present in America, they are to put them in removal proceedings, and ICE is to do it. Yet thousands have been turned loose on the streets. At least 300 cities in America have established sanctuary policies that they turn them loose. Some of the cities have passed policies that refuse to allow their law enforcement to even gather information or accept information on illegal aliens that they encounter. So, for example, this is how bad it is even in a place like Iowa. One of my staff people who was involved in a car accident that was caused by an illegal alien who had no license and had no insurance but he did have an illegal job in the town where he caused the accident crashed into my staff and wrecked my staff's car. So when I got the phone call on that, I turned to my then-chief of staff who is a lights-outs, University of Chicago School of Law lawyer. I said: I want you to go to this town and stay there until you can get this resolved. And I want to find out: What can we get accomplished to enforce the law? This was our opportunity to learn if a Member of Congress' staff can be run into by an illegal alien without a driver's license and without insurance with an illegal job in town and owning a car, and I have a topnotch lawyer chief of staff to go up there and communicate with law enforcement to try to bring the law enforcement in place so we could at least deport the guy. After 3 or 4 days up there and a number of phone calls from me down here, I finally got the message back that finally convinced me we couldn't crack through the code of local law enforcement to be able to deport the individual who was clearly illegal. He was unlawfully working--no driver's license and no insurance. The practice of simply staying out of immigration law because they were local law enforcement and didn't want to touch it was so ingrained that we could not move the bubble off the center. Finally, I said: Okay, we have got other people to take care of. We are not going to get this solved, so let's turn our focus back to other things. That is so very frustrating. I tell this, Mr. Speaker, to let the world know the frustration of families who had a loved one who was killed by illegals and watched them turned loose on the streets, and then have them abscond and go back to their home country or go back into the shadows and hide. That is the thing that happened with Sarah Root. Today, we did honor to her and her life by passing Sarah's Law as part of the sanctuary city law. How utterly appropriate to bring a ban on sanctuary cities, to pass it off the floor of the House, and wrapped up in the same bill is Sarah's Law to respect her; her life; the sacrifice of her life; the sacrifice of her mother, Michelle; her father, Scott; and her only sibling, her brother, Scotty, who carries the whole load now for the next generation--all of that. Finally, Congress did some justice for Sarah Root. It is only a small piece of justice. It is the least we can do, but it is the right thing for us to do. What her family wants is that no other families have to suffer like they have suffered. This is the story of Sarah Root whose name was elevated on the national stage by President Trump. As much as I push things out of this Congress, I don't come close to having as big a megaphone as Donald Trump. So I want to thank the President of the United States for picking up the case of Sarah Root when he came to Iowa to campaign for the nomination of the Presidency of the United States. When he began to make his immigration cases and lay out the platform for his immigration policy, I noticed that it mirrored mine very closely. I mentioned to him one day: Mr. President, I have market tested your immigration policy for 14 years in Iowa. It shouldn't have been a surprise that they understand these issues. They support the rule of law, they support securing the border, they support building a wall, and they support banning sanctuary cities. That is not just Iowa values, that is at least heart of the heartland values. Those are American values--American values that want to live in a country that has the rule of law, a country where our children can be safe, and where they can play in the streets and they don't have to be looking over the shoulder; or a mother or a father doesn't have to keep them indoors because the streets are too dangerous. This morning, we have heard from Jamiel Shaw who has been in to this Congress and testified before my committee maybe as far as back as 8 or 9 years ago. He is from Los Angeles. His son, who was a star football player, Jazz Shaw, was shot down and killed by an illegal alien gang member who went on the hunt that day with an assignment, as I understood it, to go shoot a Black person. Jazz Shaw was murdered on the streets close enough to his father, Jamiel's, house that his father said this morning on FOX News that he could hear the gun shots. He went out there to see his son laying on the street in the blood pooling in the street. A ghastly murder for the sake of what? A gang challenge and a race label. That would not be the case if that murderer had been deported back to his country. It would not be the case if he came back in and we picked him up a second time. Under Kate's Law, the killer of Jamiel Shaw's son would not have been in America if we had had Kate's Law and had enforced Kate's Law because he had been encountered before and had been deported. This is the evil murderer, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez. This is the beautiful young lady, 32 years old, Kate Steinle, who was down on the wharf in San Francisco with her father enjoying a day and was simply shot down and killed for no reason and at random by this individual who had been five times deported and convicted of something like seven different felonies in this country. Under Kate's Law, that jacks that penalty up. He would have been locked up for a good, long time if that law had been in place, or the sanctuary city legislation we passed today outlawing sanctuary cities. They would be turning over these kinds of criminals to ICE where they would get their just sentence in Federal penitentiary and then be deported. But even though we have these laws now passed, and if the Senate takes them up and passes them into law, the President will sign them. We are confident of that. He asked that these bills be brought before the House of Representatives as soon as possible. Of course, that was today. So if these acts that we passed today become law, then many Americans will be saved from the kind of carnage that we have heard about in case after case. When I saw the story come through of Kate Steinle, I looked at that. It was the most tragic story. Here is a clip of what I sent out that day. This is July 3, 2015. It is a picture of Kate Steinle. The message in the tweet is: A 100 percent preventable crime--dated July 3, as I said, 2015--100 percent preventable crime. Just enforce the law. This will make you cry, too, and it happens every day. Every day in America, there are Americans that die at the hand of illegal aliens. I recall the case in Cottonwood, Minnesota, where an illegal alien who had been encountered by law enforcement before and turned back on the streets of our country who didn't have a driver's license, didn't have insurance, and should have been deported at least once and probably more times than that ran a school bus off the road in southwest Minnesota. Four kids in that school bus were killed. Two of them were siblings. Three families lost children in that bus accident where the bus was run off the road by the illegal criminal alien. The dialogue that came from the left--the people that we heard debate over here today and voted against every one of these bills--was: this doesn't have anything to do with illegal immigration. It has got nothing to do with that. It is just the happenstance of life. In every society, there are car accidents, there are murders, there are rapes, there is assault, there is battery, and there is grand theft. Every society has that to some degree, but every single victim of a criminal alien that is in deportable category is a preventable crime. I have made that case over and over again for years, Mr. Speaker. But I made the point. They will say that it was just an accident, it was happenstance, and it has nothing to do with immigration. My district director looked at me. He is a mild-mannered, soft- spoken, and judicious kind of a person. He said: If they believe that, if they say that, then you say to them: then you go up there to Cottonwood, Minnesota, and tell their parents that their children would still be dead if we had deported the illegal that ran the bus off the road. That hits home to me, too, Mr. Speaker. It rings so true. Any family that is suffering the loss of a loved one--the Steinle family, the Root family, and so many other families, the families in Cottonwood, Minnesota, the families in Omaha, and the families around in my district--those families know that if he had enforced the law then their child or their husband would still be alive. So as part of the sanctuary city legislation that we moved through here today, and as in Kate's Law just passed--I need to make sure that I state that--and in Sarah's, they would both be alive today living, loving, laughing, learning, contributing to our society, sharing joy, and giving joy. There is another case that I have just picked up. A teen charged in an Iowa woman's death may have fled the country. Authorities say a teenager who was at the wheel of a car that was involved in a crash in Omaha last month that killed an Iowa woman--that is Sarah--has missed a court hearing and may have fled the country. Well, that is a little memo that says: He absconded, we think, to Honduras. He may be living in the shadows. Here is another story, and that is addressed, Mr. Speaker, by legislation that was brought by Andy Biggs of Arizona. I thank him for advancing this legislation, also. This is the story of Grant Ronnebeck. He was 21 years old. He was gunned down in January of 2015, while working at a QuickTrip in Mesa, Arizona. The man charged with killing him, Apolinar Altamirano, was 29 years old, in the country illegally, and had been released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement even though he had previously been convicted of a felony burglary charge. Now, why are we turning people loose in the streets of America to walk the streets again when they were deportable before they committed the felony burglary charge, convicted of a felony burglary charge, and then turn them loose again? Does the judge decide that somehow he has a right to be in America? That is a clear deportation requirement. I recall when we had John Ashcroft as the Attorney General. He testified before the committee that when they released criminal aliens on to the streets without bond with a date set for a hearing, 84 percent of them didn't show up. And that was before President Obama sent the message that it didn't matter. Those numbers have gone up, not down. Here is another one. This was just another ghastly, tragic story that happened in Omaha. Louise Sollowin died in July of 2013. Three days after the attack in her home, according to Omaha police, an officer sent to the south Omaha house Sollowin had lived in for 71 years found her body covered in blood in her bedroom about 9 a.m. The officer said Sergio Martinez-Perez, 19--I am going to skip some of this, because it is too nasty to put into the Congressional Record-- was passed out there, having raped the 93-year-old woman. Authorities believed that Martinez-Perez entered the home through an unlocked door. He, too, was an illegal alien who had been encountered by law enforcement and was released and went out to rape and murder. So when the President said that we have people who do these things among those who have come from some of those countries, that is clearly true. A lot of good people also, but we need to have the rule of law. We need to enforce the rule of law. And when they are coming from these other countries that have corruption but don't have the benefit of the rule of law and the respect for the law that we have, they are importing those low standards in here. We must sustain the rule of law, restore the respect for the rule of law. If we do that, we will sustain ourselves as a First World country. If we fail to do so, if we lose the rule of law, then we will devolve into a Third World country eventually. The core of this from the beginning for me, Mr. Speaker, has always been to restore the respect for the rule of law. Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty act in 1986. I give him credit for at least naming it--calling it what it was, an amnesty act. It was a reward for law breakers. The cabinet around him encouraged him to sign the amnesty act. Me, you know, I kicked my filing cabinet the day I heard on the news that he had signed it, and I kicked a dent in it because--well, out of frustration was why. But I believe Ronald Reagan would see with clarity that you can't reward law breakers and think that somehow you are going to be able to put that behind you and that the law will be enforced and respected from that point forward. There were to be a million people that received amnesty in 1986. Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty act, and it became 3 million people because they probably counted a little wrong, and there was a lot of fraud, a lot of people who presented themselves and alleged that they were to be included. This was a faster track to citizenship for them. Three million people received amnesty in 1986, and I said then that none of them should have, that they should not be rewarded for breaking the law. Yet they got their amnesty. The signature that Ronald Reagan put on that amnesty legislation was supposed to be in exchange for enforcement of the law, but the law didn't get enforced. The amnesty was delivered triple what was expected. And I knew then that we would have a long, hard slog restoring the respect for the rule of law, but I have set about doing that since that period of time. More than 30 years later, we are here on the floor strengthening the rule of law after all this time, after the amnesty that has been advocated by others. Each decade we seem to have to have a battle. They want to come with what they now call comprehensive immigration reform. Just about anybody in America knows if you say ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' you really mean amnesty. I say to them: Just be honest. If you think amnesty is a good idea, why do you say all those three words when you can say ``amnesty'' and be honest? People know what you mean. If the public is ready for amnesty, then you can pass it. If we are not, you can't. The American people understand this intuitively, that we have got to stop the law-breaking and that we cannot be rewarding those who break the law. Now, there are those who think that we should somehow find a path of amnesty for those individuals identified unconstitutionally by Barack Obama in his DACA program--Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. They aren't all innocent little waifs who have been brought in by their mother against their will, as many would say. Instead, many of them are prime gang-age recruitment, young men. I have gone down there and watched that flow of epic humanity coming out of Central America, coming through Mexico, some from Mexico--a diminishing number from Mexico--coming into the United States. The numbers we looked at were 81 percent male. And if they are under 18, they are coming on their own--if they are 14, 15, 16 or 17 years old. And they don't always tell you the truth either, Mr. Speaker. So this large group of people are prime gang-age recruitment youth. And these youth are coming from some of the most violent countries in the world. And 11 of the 13 most violent countries in the world are south of the Rio Grande, and one of those countries is not Mexico. So when they come into America, they bring with them the violence and the culture that is part of it, and we can expect our crime rates to go up. The people from the inner cities, who generally sit over on that side of this Congress, want to get them out of places like El Salvador and Guatemala and put them into the inner cities, in places like east St. Louis and Detroit and Newark, and a number of other cities where the violent crime rate is very high, to get them away from the violence that is part of their neighborhood. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we may be putting them into neighborhoods that are more dangerous than the countries that they come from, but we don't log those crime statistics very clearly because it is so sensitive to the people in the inner city, they don't want to talk about it. So crime has been pervasive in these countries. They are sending young men especially that are prime gang-age recruitment. They are being recruited to MS-13. Judge Jeanine Pirro said the other day that 30 percent of them become MS-13 members. Mr. Speaker, let me inquire, if I could, the amount of time I have remaining.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that response. I wanted to roll through what our sanctuary cities legislation does that we just passed today, and it goes a pretty good, long, comprehensive way. I pointed out that I brought the first sanctuary cities legislation into this Congress that I could find a record of. It was in 2005 when I brought an amendment through the Homeland Security appropriations to cut all funding to sanctuary cities. 2005. And then along the way, each opportunity that was there, I brought an amendment to cut off funding to sanctuary cities. Most of the time it was in the Judiciary, the justice appropriations bill. And I see a number of them here scattered in my memo that I asked staff to put together. So as far back as 12 years ago, I have been working to end Federal funding going to sanctuary cities that defy local law enforcement. And we have gotten resistance from the other side of the aisle consistently. Barack Obama was never going to sign anything like that, but I kept beating the drum every year to cut off funding to sanctuary cities. Finally, I introduced the legislation on sanctuary cities in 2015, and then again at the beginning of this Congress. And Chairman Bob Goodlatte was gracious enough to pull that together so we could bring it to the floor today. And we have had a lot of cooperation from many others on this. I see the first date I introduced the sanctuary cities legislation as a standalone bill was November 4 of 2015, and here we are today finally passing it. I thought I had been at it for a long time, Mr. Speaker, and it added up to 12 years that I have been actively engaged, at least--maybe 14-- until I talked to Congressman Lou Barletta from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, who, as a mayor in 1999, began to raise the issue and made it a national issue. He was selected to this Congress. He has been at it 18 years. Others have been at this a long time, too. So many of us are grateful today that the sanctuary cities language has passed and that Sarah's Law, Kate's Law, all of that that I was able to introduce into this Congress has passed out of the House of Representatives and messaged to the Senate. And I hope the Senate picks it up. The sanctuary cities language does this: It bans their policies, for starters, Mr. Speaker. It blocks the Department of Justice grants to the sanctuary cities that defy Federal law and refuse to cooperate with Federal law enforcement on immigration. And those grants would be generally grants that have to do with law enforcement that would be effected by DOJ. It allows the Department of Homeland Security to refuse warrants from the sanctuary cities. The sanctuary cities might serve a warrant to someone in custody, and DHS can say: We are not going to hand this person over to you because we are pretty confident you are just going to turn them loose on the streets. So that piece in there is a protection that keeps some from being released. And then it requires ICE to take custody of these criminal aliens within 48 hours of the notice that comes from the State or local government that would have them picked up. It also establishes a good faith provision that holds local government harmless for honoring ICE detainers. Now, that is something that was undermined on February 25 of 2015 by then-Acting Director of ICE, Dan Ragsdale, who sent a letter out that just simply advised local law enforcement that an ICE detainer is a suggestion, not an order. Well, the law and the rule says that it is an order, not a suggestion. This statute clarifies it and firms it up with respect to detainers. And then if a local jurisdiction is sued by, say, the ACLU, as they are wont to do, it gives them a protection, and it lets the Department of Justice and the Federal Government substitute itself for local government, and it holds local government harmless when it comes to the case of ICE detainers. Here is a very powerful piece, Mr. Speaker, and it is this: the sanctuary cities legislation passed today, H.R. 3003, provides a cause of action against any jurisdiction that releases an alien who subsequently commits a felony. Now, that is a powerful provision, and it is something that moves me in my heart. As a former crime victim, it occurred to me when they announced the name of the case that I wasn't involved in that equation at all even though it nearly destroyed my business, and I began to think about how this is. Our criminal law comes from old England. And in old England, if you committed a crime--the king owned everything. If you killed one of his serf, you killed the king's serf. That was the murder that took place. If you shot a deer, you shot the king's deer. If you stole something, it was a violation against the crown. And we transferred the criminal law into America, and the State has replaced the crown. So when you commit a crime, that crime is committed against the State as if you had killed one of the king's deer, but it doesn't consider the victim hardly at all. We are doing a little better in recent years, but this allows the crime victims to have a recourse, Mr. Speaker. And I think we will hear a lot about this provision in the sanctuary cities law as this moves over to the Senate. I think we made a lot of progress today. It has been a good day to do honor to the lives of Sarah Root, a beautiful young lady whose mother is here in this Capital City today and speaking and testifying and doing radio and meetings. And one day I hope we hunt down Eswin Mejia, the killer of this beautiful young woman. And one day I hope we have the relationship with his home country where they will hunt him down and extradite him to the United States of America. That is, of course, a law we need to have in a civilized world. And Kate Steinle, I thank not only Matt Salmon for bringing this forward, but Bill O'Reilly and the President of the United States. Something this President has done is he asked the family members of the victims of criminal aliens in America to step up on the stage with him around the campaign trail over and over again. One would think that they were props for a campaign. That kind of criticism flowed out. But here is what he has really done: he illuminated the pain that they went through over and over again. When he came back to Iowa on a ``thank you'' tour, he had some of the crime victims there. He brought them up on the stage. You can tell by the look in his eye that they moved him. He has said the thing that moved him the most in the entire campaign were the families who had an illegal kill their daughter, their son, their family member. That moved him the most. He has done honor to that. He has asked that we bring this legislation to the floor. We have done so. We have passed it out of the House. And the President, yesterday, met with a dozen or so of these families at the White House. He will continue to push this legislation till it becomes law. And I expect at the bill signing ceremony, these families will be invited back to the White House and they will get a closure on the pain that they are going through this day. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor and privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and have an opportunity, in this great deliberative body, to bring up the subject matters of my choice, and the purpose is to inform you and the American people. Before I go into the topics that I am prepared to speak of, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Rothfus). Meaningful Accomplishments of the 115th Congress

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.