Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

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 to have an hour to invest in laying out some points here that I think are important for you to consider. And as America listens on, hopefully it will stimulate some of the thought process and help bring people to some conclusions. The first thing that I think that any one of us wants to speak of and to is the President's announcement which took place very late on Sunday night that the Special Forces team had been successful in taking out Osama bin Laden. Our first response to that news, that happy news for all of America, I think, is to congratulate the team that fast-roped down into that compound, those who put their lives on the line to put an end to the life of perhaps the most evil man on the planet, Osama bin Laden. And I congratulate the President of the United States for issuing the order and making the decision to go into that compound in the fashion that they did. He had a number of options. As the news has reported, and I accept this to be fact, that the President sat in and led five different discussions to evaluate the quality of the intelligence that was available and the tactics that might be used in that compound and that he gave the order. Some have said it was the most courageous order a President had given in their memory or lifetime. They were all from the administration. It was a good order, there's no question. I don't think it was the most courageous. It didn't lack courage. But there are a number of other big decisions that stand up there, I think, in a higher profile than this one. But it was the right decision, it was a good decision, and the President had to take a chance. He could have ordered a massive bombing raid on that compound and, as some have said, turned it into a glass parking lot, which would have raised the level of the degree of success but firmly eliminated the chance to show that Osama bin Laden was in that compound. He could have dropped a single bomb, a one-ton-plus bomb from a Predator, that would have had a reasonable chance of succeeding in taking out the most evil man on the planet. Or he could have just done nothing. Or he could have ordered the Special Forces in to fast-rope inside that compound and do what they did. Of those options, I believe the President chose the right one, and I congratulate him for that decision. Yet in sitting here and listening to the gentleman from California (Mr. Lungren) talk about the situation with the intelligence that we had, it is clear to me, and it has been clear to me for a long time, that one of the essential links in the intelligence that led us to Osama bin Laden in the compound in Pakistan was information that was given up in part by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in enhanced interrogation encounters that he had, probably before he went to Gitmo. That information then was worked, it was matched up with other information, and the thread was followed. In fact, the courier was followed to the compound in Pakistan. It's ironic that the President of the United States campaigned against such enhanced interrogation tactics. It's ironic that many whom I serve with on the Judiciary Committee lined up against George W. Bush and accused him of ordering torture against people who had been attacking and killing Americans, terrorists of the like of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a very small number of others. I agree with the gentleman from California. Waterboarding is not torture. If it were torture, we would be torturing our own Special Forces troops. I would be willing to wager--and this I can't verify not knowing the identities of the individuals who did fast-rope down into that compound--that a number of those very same forces that went into the compound that took out Osama bin Laden in their training were likely waterboarded as a part of their training. I've sat in my office and I've gone out in the field and I've talked to those Special Forces personnel who were waterboarded as part of their training. It is not a painful procedure, but it is one that gives one the sensation that they are drowning. It's easy enough to go on the Internet and read the material there, Mr. Speaker. It's an enhanced and effective interrogation technique, and in all of the research that I did--and I read back in story after story of this and had others dig down in it--I found one case where there was a fatality that was nearly a century ago that was because of the brutal tactics that they used in conjunction with the waterboarding. In any case, there are many Americans that are alive today because of the information that our people were able to acquire because of enhanced interrogation techniques, and it's ironic that President Bush approved the methods that acquired the thread, the significant thread of information, without which no one can explain to me how we would have found Osama bin Laden in that compound. And so the very President who campaigned against the tactics that George Bush was employing is the one that was able to take the information from those tactics and make the right decision to take out OBL. I'm glad that George Bush made the decisions that he made. I'm glad that he was strong and courageous and defended America's ability to gain information in the fashion that they did, because anyone will tell you that was involved with the interrogations, especially of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that once he understood what waterboarding was, he sang like a canary. If he had not warbled in the fashion that he did, I don't think we would be celebrating in the fashion that we are the end of the life of the most evil man on the planet. So, I agree with the gentleman from California that the cloud of investigation around the American interrogators who are being investigated for the tactics that they were assured by the Justice Department were constitutional and were legal and now we have a Justice Department with a different opinion, it's putting some of our interrogators through an investigation with the cloud of an eventual indictment hanging over their head for doing the same type of tactics that were used with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a very few others to gather the information that allowed us to take out Osama bin Laden. This paradox needs to be resolved, Mr. Speaker, and I am hopeful that the President will give the order for the Justice Department to accept the conclusions that were drawn by the Bush administration and adopt that policy so that Americans can continue to be protected and safe in the face of this threat that we have from without, this threat that comes from radical Islam. We are fighting radical Islam. Radical Islamists are seeking to kill Americans on a regular basis because they disagree with western civilization and our philosophy. It's why they attacked us on September 11. That's why they attacked the Khobar Towers. That's why they attacked the Twin Towers the first time in the early nineties. That's why they attacked the USS Cole, the Marine barracks, the list goes on and on, the times that we have been attacked by people who reject our free society. They feel threatened by the liberty and the freedom that is America. They're threatened by the free enterprise that we are. They're threatened by the robust nature of our culture and our economy and our innovativeness where we lead the world in patents and trademarks. Because of that, we need to stand strong and hold ourselves confident. I point out, also, that the probability that the intelligence was correct and that Osama bin Laden was inside the compound where the attack came from our Special Forces on Sunday, the probability that he was there was a probability that was probably less than 50 percent chance. The President took the chance. If they had gone in and attacked the compound and Osama bin Laden had not been there, I would like to think we would have never heard about it, Mr. Speaker. I don't have any information that says that they tried any other compounds or tried any other locations, although I suspect that we have checked a few more places. I'd like to think we checked a lot of caves up there in the mountains in Pakistan. It's where a lot of us thought he was. That's where our intelligence was telling us that he was. So I would like to think that we were going into some of those locations. But if they had gone into that compound in Pakistan and Osama bin Laden had not been there, we would have never heard about it, which is appropriate and proper, because the odds of this kind of intelligence being spot-on are always less than 100 percent, and in this case I believe it was less than 50 percent. In fact, if you compare the value of the intelligence that said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before we went in there, when you had a universal intelligence conclusion that was drawn by the Israelis, the French, the Americans, as the universal global intelligence said, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The probability of those weapons being there in Iraq if you analyzed it from the intelligence we had at the time made that probability for WMD in Iraq greater than the probability that Osama bin Laden was even in the compound last Sunday when the attack came. I make these points, Mr. Speaker, so that we can look back across this continuum of history and understand that intelligence isn't an exact science. It's a series of judgment calls. It's a series of connecting different threads of information together and following hunches and then coming to that and following the hunch and making the decision. President Obama made the right decision. The value of the intelligence we had, it wasn't a 100 percent piece of information that he had to work with, so whatever was the hunch, whatever was the conviction that caused him to make that decision, there's times you're going to be right and there's times you're going to be wrong. He was right this time. I'm glad he made the decision. I'm glad the world has seen the end of Osama bin Laden. With regard to whether a photograph should be published of Osama bin Laden to give the world a higher measure of proof, I will give some deference to the opinion that came from the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Mike Rogers of Michigan, who said his measure is, does it make it harder for American military to work with, say, the Afghan people for intelligence and information on the ground in Afghanistan? Does it make it harder or does it make it easier? Are the chances better or worse that our troops on the ground in Afghanistan will have a more successful time if the picture comes out or if it doesn't? In addition to that position, I would say this, Mr. Speaker, that if the rumors that it's a hoax grow so great that they're able to use those rumors to recruit more al Qaeda, and if the rumors that it's a hoax strengthen the recruitment of the Taliban, then we should release the picture or the pictures or enough information that people can be completely convinced. I don't have any doubt Osama bin Laden was in that compound; Osama bin Laden is in the bottom of the Arabian Sea. And I don't have any doubt. But we may have to get to the point where we have to erase the doubts, and I suspect it will be very hard to keep the pictures of this operation completely with a lid on them, although if anybody can do it, our Special Forces can. If that's their order, I expect that they will. I just don't know that the Pakistanis aren't sitting on something now that would get released. Just another little irony I would point out as I transition, Mr. Speaker, into a little bit different subject matter. The compound is reported to have had 12- to 18-foot walls around it with barbed wire on top. It's pretty interesting that the Secretary of Homeland Security made a trip over to that part of the world to advise Afghanistan on border security and compared the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with the U.S.-Mexican border. It's interesting that the Secretary of Homeland Security has long said: You show me a 50-foot wall; I'll show you a 51- foot ladder. It's interesting that the 12- and 18-foot walls weren't scaled by Special Forces personnel with 13- and 19-foot ladders. They put helicopters over the top of the compound and fast-roped down inside. The wall was effective and the wire on top of it was effective. That's why they put them there. They don't build all of these walls with wire on top all around the world if they're not effective. It isn't like ladders aren't available in Afghanistan or Pakistan. My point is, and I often facetiously respond to this idea, that if you show me a 20-foot wall, I'll show you a 20-foot ladder, as if that just makes fun of anybody that thinks we can protect our borders with a wall. If anybody has been to a military compound, you will know there are fences and walls around the military compound. Why is that? It's to keep out enemy infiltrators. No, they don't keep out everybody. You have got to still guard it. People come along with wire cutters and they come along and dig underneath and they will detonate and blow a hole in a concrete wall. They did that in the wall around the Embassy in Saigon, if you remember. So it isn't that they're the only solution. And when I say we need to build a fence, a wall and a fence on our southern border, Mr. Speaker, I'm not advocating that we build that and walk away and let somebody come up to the other side with a 21-foot ladder. I'm suggesting that, first of all, we don't have to build 2,000 miles of fence, wall, and fence, that we just build a fence, a wall, and a fence with a patrol road in between in those locations and build it until they stop going around the end. If anybody has been down to the border, you will see the beaten path that goes through, sometimes right through what they're declaring to be fence, the 600-some miles of fence that they declare that we have. 646 I think is the last number that I saw. And when you go down and look at the real fence that's there, some of it is triple fencing that they call tertiary fencing. That's a little too sophisticated for me. If you go to the San Luis area in southwest Arizona, you can see 24-foot-high fences, triple fences. When I was down there last, I asked them directly, Has anyone defeated this triple fencing? Their answer, after several evasive responses and me point-blanking the question several times, was, No, they go around the end. Of course they do. It's a short fence. It doesn't go far enough. And so people go around the end. So we just keep building a fence, a wall, and a fence until people stop going around the end. If we end up with 2,000 miles of fence, wall, and fence, we must have needed it because they were continuing to go around the end. We can do this, and we can do this for a lot less money than we're spending today to chase people across the desert 70 and 100 miles north of our border. Here's how the math works out, Mr. Speaker. We're spending about $12 billion protecting our southern border. That's 2,000 miles. Already, smart people have done this calculus and taken $12 billion and divided by 2,000 miles and come up with a unit price conclusion that we're spending $6 million a mile to defend our southern border--$6 million. Now, imagine this. For me, I'm an Iowa guy and I live out in the country on a gravel road, and it's a mile to concrete from where I live in any direction. So my west road, no one lives on it. It's a full mile of gravel. If Janet Napolitano came to me and said, Congressman, I've got a proposal for you. I need you to guard this mile. Will you guard this mile and see to it that the people that go across it--you can let 75 percent of them through. No problem. Let 75 percent go through. And the 25 percent that you're required to stop, or you should be stopping, you just have to turn them around and send them back south again. And, by the way, I'm going to pay you, Congressman, $6 million a mile to defend this mile of your gravel road. I'd look at that and say, Could you give me a 10-year contract? That's what we do here in this Congress. We budget out for 10 years. That's $6 million a mile for 10 years. It's $60 million for the budget window of 10 years to guard a single mile. The population that's going across that, 75 percent of those that try are getting through; 25 percent are being interdicted. This is a little bit dated information, but it's testimony before the Immigration Committee. And so if they were going to pay me $60 million to guard this mile and I didn't have any kind of efficiency standard except turn 25 percent of them back, or so, first, I'm going to want an efficiency standard. I want a 100 percent efficiency standard. We ought to be developing infrastructure that gets us to that point. And so it wouldn't take me $60 million to build a fence, a wall, and a fence on that mile, that mile that runs from my house west. That's $6 million a year for 10 years, $60 million. I would tap into the first year's annual budget and take one-third of it, $2 million, and I would build a fence, a wall, and a fence for the full mile. So it's 3 miles of structure. I would put a concrete wall in the middle of it. It would have a concrete foundation that made it difficult to dig underneath. And one thing you know about concrete is you don't get through it with wire cutters. You don't get through it in a simple fashion like you might with a wire fence. I would put a concrete wall in the middle. I'd have a fence down near the border. I'd move in about 60 or 100 feet and put a concrete wall in that's about 14 feet tall with wire on top, and I'd put another fence inside that. So if they got over my concrete wall, there's another corral. I would then hire fewer Border Patrol, and with needing less equipment, less pension plans, less benefit packages, I would put the first front money up in the infrastructure. You know that by the time they get through the fence, the wall, and the fence, you'll have a chance to catch them. We would put the sensory devices in, put the cameras up, put the vibration sensors in. Maybe we could get Boeing to perfect their system and add that to the fence, the wall, and the fence. But it is foolish for us to think that we can just keep hiring more and more Border Patrol--we've more than doubled our Border Patrol--and then back off into the desert 70 or 100 miles and begin chasing people around in the sagebrush. That's not the way to do this. We need to shut off the bleeding at the border. This is not a recreational sport to be defending our border and chasing people down in the desert. If we can stop them before they get into the United States, that is the preferred way to go. I have gone across the English Channel from England over to Calais, France, where the Brits have leased a chunk of ground because they want to stop the illegals before they get across the channel. They have leased this piece of ground from the French and they've set up a high security system there, and the trucks that come through go on ferries, and the ferries haul them across the English Channel, cars and trucks, just a constant rotation of ferries going back and forth across the English Channel. The British have leased this piece of ground. They raised their technology and their manpower there to preempt access into the United Kingdom because they would rather deal with them on French soil than they would on British soil, because the British laws get a little sloppy like ours do. Once you pick somebody up inside the interior of the United States, they've got an opportunity to appeal, be adjudicated. It can cost us a lot of money. The important thing is to keep them out of the United States. Let's build a fence, a wall, and a fence. We can do the whole thing for about $2 million a mile, and that leaves $4 million the first year left over to hire Border Patrol and to pay them wages and salary benefits and retirement packages and to give them some equipment with. Then the next year, there's another $6 million available every year--a little maintenance on that wall but not a lot. So that's a $60 million contract, Mr. Speaker, for a decade on a single mile. You put $2 million up front, and now you've got $58 million to play with. I'll submit that we can do a better job by building infrastructure and using it to protect our border than we can by hiring a lot more personnel and chasing people around in the desert. It is a simple business equation. This political arena doesn't lend itself very well to simple business equations, but that is one, Mr. Speaker, and I'm going to continue to push to build a fence, a wall, and a fence; and yes, we need to put something on top of that. I don't care if it looks a little bit bad. If they don't want to see wire on top of the wall at the border, why do the Mexicans build walls at the U.S. border with concertina wire on top? They're not offended when they put up it up. Why would they be offended if we put it up, Mr. Speaker? It's part of our immigration situation that we need to address, and I'll continue with that in that ``stop the bleeding at the border.'' That is the way to do it. We can force all traffic through our ports of entry, and we should beef up our ports of entry, widen them out, and invest in infrastructure there. We should put personnel there so that we can use surveillance techniques that are state of the art so that we can efficiently move through the traffic that is relatively safe and that is unlikely to have contraband in it. Then we can even better scrutinize those pieces of traffic that are likely to have illegal persons or illegal contraband in them. That would stop the bleeding at the border in a significant way. We forget that 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America comes from or through Mexico--90 percent. The drug enforcement people tell me that, of every illegal drug distribution chain in this country, at least one link in that distribution chain is someone who is here in the United States unlawfully. Many times, the whole chain is a chain of custody of illegal drugs going from Mexico through and up into the United States--pick Chicago--and all the way to the end user, and the drugs never go into any hand except of somebody who's here illegally in the United States. Imagine, 90 percent of the illegal drugs in America come from or through Mexico. Headless corpses are showing up by the dozens in Mexico, and they're starting to show up here in the United States. I went to a meeting in Columbus, New Mexico, a town hall meeting. There were people there who, on their way to church, drive parallel to the border. On their way to church on a Sunday morning, four heads were on display for them to see, which was a warning to, apparently, the other drug cartel. This is spilling over into the United States. Those heads were on the Mexican side, I'll point out, Mr. Speaker, for the point of accuracy, but they're showing up on the U.S. side of the border. The drug trade here in the United States is extremely lucrative. I've been trying to get these numbers from the drug enforcement personnel, and they've been very hard to get. Yet Fox News reported that the illegal drug trade in America is a $40 billion industry--$40 billion. It has been reported that at least $60 billion is wired from the United States into points south. A lot of that may come from the wages of people who are working here in the United States--and a lot of them working here illegally. There are around 8 million illegals working in America, taking jobs that legal immigrants or American citizens should be doing. But there is $60 billion a year wired south. Half of it, $30 billion, goes into Mexico, and the other $30 billion goes into the Caribbean, Central America and some into South America-- $30 billion into Mexico, the other $30 billion scattered around in the rest of the southern part, south of us, in the Western Hemisphere. We don't know and they don't speculate on how much of the $60 billion is just laundering illegal drug money. I don't know the basis of the $40 billion number that Fox News reported on the value of illegal drugs that are consumed in America. That's just the only number that's out there that I can find. I don't think we have the basis of enough intelligence to be able to bring a real solution to this. I don't think our people at the top have done enough work to quantify the problem. They're not talking about the problem. Instead, I see an emphasis on our southern border, a shift that took place under the Obama administration, that causes some of our Border Patrol to pivot. Instead of looking south to say, Hold it. Don't come into the United States illegally, they started to turn around and look north and try to interdict cash and guns that are coming from the United States and going into Mexico. A lot of these guns, by the way, are perfectly legal in the United States but not legal in Mexico. So do we have the personnel to filter that at the Mexican border? It's fine to interdict the cash, because that raises the transaction costs of those who are smuggling drugs into the United States, and it's fine to work and cooperate with the Mexicans if they need a little help on guns that become illegal when they get across the border; but we need to focus on people who are smuggling illegal drugs into the United States. We need to focus on illegal people who are being smuggled into the United States. The value of this has not quantified the loss in American lives. Quantifying the loss in treasure is one thing: $60 billion wired south, $40 billion worth of illegal drugs consumed in the United States, violence in Mexico, and headless corpses by the dozen. I began to ask these questions some years ago, have finally had some response, Mr. Speaker. It's as a result of two studies that I've commissioned over the years by the Government Accountability Office, GAO studies. One came out in April of 2005, and the other one came out just this past month--released within the past few weeks, actually, but it's dated March of 2011. We've had witnesses come before the Immigration Subcommittee. First, they'll say America is a Nation of immigrants, as if that's the be all- end all of the conclusion we should draw and that we shouldn't try to limit illegal immigration into America, let alone eliminate it, because America is a Nation of immigrants. My response to that, Mr. Speaker, is: Yes, sure enough. Could you point out for me a nation on the planet that is not a nation of immigrants? I asked that question of witness Ms. Hernandez some few years ago. I asked if she would care to tell me of a nation that is not a nation of immigrants. She sat there at the witness table--under oath, mind you--and presented as an expert witness. Her eyes kind of rolled a little bit back in the back of her head; and she said, Well, that would be the Incas and the Aztecs. So I said, Who, according to an anthropologist, came across the Bering Straits about 12,000 years ago. Would you like to try again, Ms. Hernandez? Of course, she didn't want to try again, and no one has succeeded in pointing out a nation that is not a nation of immigrants. The closest you could come is with the Japanese, and there are two ethnic groups in Japan that are identified by their locales and by the accents and the languages that they have. They believe that both of them came from Polynesian origins centuries and centuries ago. Every nation, Mr. Speaker, is a nation of immigrants. People have migrated around this planet since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, and they always will. So we don't carry a certain responsibility towards setting aside the rule of law in America because we are a Nation of immigrants. We have a responsibility to preserve, protect and defend the pillars of American exceptionalism--and of course, the rule of law is an essential pillar of American exceptionalism. So that question of, first, are we a Nation of immigrants, yes, we are; but we are a Nation of laws, and we must adhere to and protect the rule of law. When we look at the policies that we have, it's important for us to shut off the jobs magnet here in the United States, not only control/ stop the bleeding at the border, but we have to shut off the jobs magnet here in America. One of the ways that we do that is to enforce our laws, of course. E-Verify is an important tool. It's a Web site- based software program that allows an employer to run, I call it, the name, rank and serial number--the Social Security number--of an employee through that database. It will go back, and it will search the Department of Homeland Security's database, the Social Security database, NCIC, and come back and tell you if that information represents that that individual can lawfully work in the United States. We use it. I've tried to fool it and I've tried to scramble it, and the longest delay I can get out of it is 6 seconds. It's very fast. It's very accurate. The software package is only as accurate as the data behind it, and when we find a mistake in E-Verify, it's almost always because someone got married and forgot to change their name or some piece of information like that that needs to be upgraded. Easily fixed. The only way you make E-Verify even better is to use it and use it and use it so that database gets cleaned up, and it's set up to do that with a 72-hour notice of cure. So using E-Verify is a good tool. I have a better tool out there that I will soon be introducing, Mr. Speaker, and I have introduced it in previous Congresses. I've been waiting for the right time, and we will set up a press conference and roll out a bill called the New IDEA Act. Now, they say there are no new ideas in this Congress, that it's a just repackaging of old ideas. This one I think actually is a relatively new idea, and it comes from this concept that, well, who enjoys enforcing the law? Who's effective in it? Who do the American people believe will come forward and enforce the law? And as I was thinking that through, it occurred to me that the IRS probably has the maximum respect of all of the law enforcers in America. They have better tools to work with than many of the other agencies out there, and we expect they will come in and they will conduct an audit, and they're going to look to see if they can find something wrong with your tax return. Anybody that's been through an audit doesn't want to go through another audit. Frank Luntz put out some numbers that showed that a majority of Americans would rather be mugged than go through an IRS audit; 58 percent would rather have a root canal than go through an IRS audit. I'd like to have the IRS helping us with immigration law. So I drafted legislation called the New IDEA Act. It's the New, and the acronym IDEA stands for Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. What it does is it clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax deductible, and then it gives the employer safe harbor if they use E-Verify. So, if the employer in good faith runs their employees through E-Verify, it will give the employer that credit that he used E- Verify, and he can deduct the wages if E-Verify should happen to be wrong, for example, and it won't be. But otherwise, if the IRS then comes in during a normal audit--we don't accelerate audits, we don't initiate any more audits than we'd normally have--but if the IRS comes in during a normal audit, they would run the Social Security numbers and information of all the employees through E-Verify, and if any of those employees were kicked back at them as not lawful to work in the United States, the IRS then would take a look. They'd give the employer an opportunity to cure, but they would look at that data and say, all right, I'm sorry, the wages that you paid this illegal are not going to be a business expense for you, so they come off the Schedule C and they go over into the profit column in your tax form. Imagine if you're an employer and you paid $1 million to illegals and the IRS came in to do the audit and they said, I'm sorry, that $1 million that you had as a business expense is not an expense. You can't expense wages and benefits paid to illegals. So now that $1 million goes over into the profit side, and the IRS looks at that and says, you know, you're going to have to pay interest on that. You had a tax liability that you unlawfully claimed. You're going to have to pay interest on that tax liability, and you're going to have to pay a penalty, and you have to pay the principal, which is a tax liability. So if it rolls it over to a 36 percent tax rate, plus the interest, plus the penalty, the net result is that turns your $10 an hour illegal into about a $16 an hour illegal, which means that there will be Americans out there that will be taking those jobs at $12, $13, $14, and $15 an hour that didn't have an opportunity to do that before because illegals were in there working for $10. This will open up jobs for Americans. We saw a big number of new jobless reports pop up today. This unemployment number is not getting better. It is just zigzagging and stagnating at a number that hangs in there close to 9 percent. This is a very, very slow recovery. One of the things we can do to help recover is to pass the New IDEA Act, let the IRS come in and do their normal audits, and employers will decide that they don't want to wait for the IRS to get there. They will want to clean up their workforce as soon as they practically can. That's part of the beauty of this. This isn't a hard and fast piece of legislation that requires employers to fire all their illegals at once. They can make their decision on when they will take the risk, but what it does do is accumulates a 6-year statute of limitations. So that if an employer gets by this year without an audit and he keeps illegals on the payroll the next year without an audit, he has to go a full 6 years before that first illegal year drops off, and he's still liable for the IRS to go back through the books a full 6 years, which means that employers are going to look at this, and they're going to think, I'm paying $1 million out to illegals; if I get to the end of a 6-year cycle and the IRS comes in and audits me, they're going to deny $6 million that I have written off as business expenses, put that over into the profit side, and you could be looking at $6 million worth of income, and all of that with interest and penalty attached to it. And so your $6 million probably becomes something greater than $3 million in penalties out of the $6 million that were formerly a writeoff. That's how this liability accumulates with a 6-year statute of limitations. That's why employers, even though they may not be able to transition their workforce into a 100 percent legal workforce the first year, the pressure to do so every year will be so great because getting through 6 years without an IRS audit and knowing that you're going to carry with you a full 6 years of risk will cause employers to clean up their workforce on their own. One of the problems we have is trying to get the administration to enforce immigration law. We can pass a law. We can make it mandatory that everybody use E-Verify. I will probably have an opportunity to vote for that, and I will. But we cannot require the executive branch to enforce the law. The President of the United States takes an oath to take care that the laws are faithfully enforced. That's part of the Constitution, and it's true for the executive branch employees, including Eric Holder, the Attorney General; including Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security. But we can't make them enforce the law. I've been in the business of seeking to embarrass the administration into enforcing the law now into my ninth year here because we don't have the tools. We can call them forward now that Republicans have the majority. We can have hearings, bring the press into the hearings because the press helps us a lot. They convey that message back to the American people, and the American people understand that there are things they should be outraged about. But we have no tool other than to cut their budget or embarrass them, or I guess there's more Draconian methods that would not be used, and I won't mention those for fear that they will start an unnecessary rumor. But all of that said, Mr. Speaker, the IRS will come in and do this work, and it won't be about us trying to embarrass them into enforcing the law. It will be about the IRS coming in to turn it into a revenue generator. It will be. The New IDEA Act, Mr. Speaker, is a tool that can do the most to bring our immigration laws in this country under enforcement and to reduce the numbers of illegals that are in the United States the most dramatically with the least amount of cost. In fact, it's a plus-up because it will generate more revenue for the Internal Revenue Service. Another point on the border, to roll back down to the southern border, Mr. Speaker, and to make this point is that we have a tourism industry that has to do with anchor babies. Anchor babies are babies that are born in the United States to an illegal mother, and the practice over the years has been to grant automatic citizenship to babies born on U.S. soil. It is not a law. It is not a constitutional requirement. It's just a sloppy practice that began that's getting worse and worse and worse. We have now in this country somewhere between 340,000 and 750,000 babies born to illegal mothers in America that get automatic citizenship. They're anchor babies. They sneak into the United States, many of them, for the purposes of having the baby. They get the little birth certificate with their little footprints on there. Then they either stay here or they go back to their home country and wait until that child comes of age, and they use that child to apply to bring in the family, the nuclear family, then the extended family, and it's out of control--340,000 to 750,000 a year automatic citizens to America that have essentially unlimited ability to bring their families into the United States. We have testimony before the Immigration Committee that shows us that if you look at immigrants, legal immigrants, and base it on merit, you would think a country would want to establish an immigration policy that was designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well- being of the United States of America. Wouldn't any country have an immigration policy that was designed to help them? I mean, it is not selfish of America to want to have an immigration policy that's good for this country. We cannot be the relief valve for all the poverty in the world. For every some 6.3 billion or so people on the planet--maybe it's more than that--they can't all live in America. There are more than 5 billion that have a lower standard of living than the average Mexican. So if we think we're going to be the relief valve of poverty in the world, and we bring into America 1 million to 1.5 million legally, and across the border comes--there are numbers that I have seen testified to that show as many as 4 million illegals in a year. Many go back and forth. They are carrying drugs on their back. Maybe they're visiting family. The net number I guess we don't know. It seems to shake out pretty odd that you can have that much border crossing, and the numbers don't accumulate. When I came to this Congress 8-plus years ago, the number was 12 million illegals in America. Now they're giving us estimates that there are maybe 11 million illegals in America. How does that work? Did that many people die? Did we give that many people citizenship that came in here illegally? So I think that number is significantly higher than 11 million or 12 million. I think it's been growing every year for a generation. I think it continues to grow. Anchor babies, babies that are born to illegal mothers in the United States that get automatic citizenship, cause people to sneak into the United States to have the baby because they see citizenship in America as cashing in to the giant ATM, the giant ATM which is America's welfare cash machine. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has done a lot of research on welfare benefits--he has broken it up in a number of different ways--that go to households where there is at least one illegal that's in it. I need to come back at a later date, Mr. Speaker, and take up the cost to the American taxpayer of benefits that go to households that are oftentimes headed up by an illegal. When we look at what has happened on the floor of this Congress in the last 4 to 5 years, when the SCHIP legislation passed this Congress, they weakened their requirements of proof of citizenship for Medicaid. So free medical care for people who are lower income is being provided to people that should actually be deported back to their home country because the standard that you had to show proof of citizenship that was written into the old Medicaid legislation was struck and replaced with a requirement that you attest to a nine-digit Social Security number. That's the standard. They lowered it that low because the people on that side of the aisle wanted to pay Medicaid benefits to illegals. They want to give them a path to citizenship. They want to give them an opportunity to vote. I look back at what Ronald Reagan said: What you tax, you get less of; but what you subsidize, you get more of. If you reward people for coming into the United States illegally, and you reward them with welfare packages and plans, you are going to get more people in the United States illegally, and you are going to get more people that are signing up for more welfare. We have in this country 77 different means-tested welfare programs in the United States of America. There isn't one person in this United States Congress that could stand down here on the floor without a cheat sheet and name every one of them. And there isn't one person in this United States Congress that can actually understand how each one of these 77 means-tested welfare programs interrelates with each other, let alone how it affects the decisions of individuals on whether they are going to get a job or sit at home. If you are on rent subsidy and heat subsidy and food stamps, and list all the other Federal programs that are there, why would you work when you are rewarded for not working? I look at the labor situation in America. There are 8 million working illegals in America. There are a number of others out there that we probably didn't find in the data that we have. So here we are with the unemployment numbers of about 15 million Americans who are registered as unemployed. There is another 6 to 8 million that are past the data. They've quit trying, so they're no longer technically called unemployed. They just quit looking for a job. There is another 6 to 8 million of those. You are up to over 20 million Americans that are on unemployment, drawing it, or have given up applying for it. But when I start to add to that number of roughly 20 million, 22 to 23 million Americans that are unemployed or have given up trying and aren't working, and I go to the Department of Labor's statistics, their own statistics that come from the Department of Labor, and I begin to add up the American workforce--that workforce number is a little foggy in my memory--it's 140-some million people in America's workforce. If you start adding those who are not currently working--and I start at age 16 because that's a legitimate age. You can collect unemployment at age 16 if you have earned enough that they paid in on your behalf--the teenagers between age 16 and 19, there are 9.7 million that aren't in the workforce at all, not even a part- time job of any kind. Yes, they may be students; but there's nothing wrong with working and going to school. That's what a lot of people did, and it builds character. You add to that those that are from 20 to 25 years old, and you go on up the line in different age categories. I went up to age 74 because we pay unemployment at age 74, and Wal-Mart hires at age 74 and so do a lot of other employers. So the age of the workforce I am using is 16 to 74. It's a legitimate bracket. We could narrow that in a little bit, and we would have fewer numbers. But here's the point: Of the 8 million working illegals in America, there are 80 million Americans of working age that are not in the workforce; 80 million people of working age that are simply not in the workforce. They might have checked out. They are sitting back on some of the 77 means-tested welfare programs. They might be independently wealthy and decided to retire. If so, good on them. But they are not in the workforce for one reason or another, or they are working in the black market. It might be that some of those people are selling drugs who are not in the workforce. But if people say there are jobs out there Americans won't do, name one. Name one job that Americans won't do. I can take you and show you an American that's doing every single job definition that there is in this country. The reason that you see people here illegally and they're out- competing Americans is because they'll work for less. They'll pile up in a house with many more people living in the same dwelling. They are not a threat to the employer to file workmen's comp or an unemployment claim. So they are a lower liability for the employer. The employer can bring in a crew of illegals, get a job done, dispatch them down the line; and once they leave that job, they are no longer a liability to them. So it's like being able to lease a machine to come do a job. You say, take the machine back, and park it in the lot, and you are done. You don't have to worry about the depreciation or the maintenance. That's what has happened. In a way, it's a bit inhuman to see this going on. If we enforced our immigration law, it opens up at least 8 million jobs for Americans or legal immigrants; and if people say there aren't enough Americans to do those jobs, nuts. We have to hire one out of every 10 that's sitting now on the couch and put them to work. Why wouldn't you want to increase and enhance the average annual productivity of our people? Why would you not? What if we were on a big cruise ship, but it was powered by sails and oars? So many people have to be trimming the sails. So many people have to be pulling on the oars. Somebody has got to be in the kitchen cooking. Somebody has got to be swabbing the deck. Somebody has got to be up there in the wheelhouse navigating, and somebody has got to be steering. With all of that going on, if you didn't have enough people at the oars to pull the load, would you pull that cruise ship off on an island somewhere and load on a bunch more people to pull on the oars? Or would you go after the 80 million people that are sitting on the couch now and have some of those people get up off the couch and grab an oar and pull? I want to increase the production of America. I want to increase the average annual productivity of Americans. If we do that, we increase our standard of living. If not, if more of us sit back and don't go to work and don't produce anything, and we bring others in to do the work that we say we are now too good to do, then our broader standard of living goes down, and you need more and more welfare programs to pay the people that are not working, and you still have to carry the social costs for the people that are working underneath the market value. You can't sustain a household for some of the wages that are being paid to illegals. That's why they are tapping into welfare benefits. That's why they use their child that has been born in America as an anchor baby as a means to get access to the welfare program. And so here we have an America that's underemployed, 80 million people of working age that are not in the workforce. A lot of them are living off of the sweat of the brow of somebody else in the form of the 77 means-tested welfare programs that are out there. They don't have an incentive to go to work, but we pay them with tax dollars if they'll just stay peaceful, stay in their houses, don't cause any trouble. Let's not have any violence in the streets. If you do all that, then we'll hire these other people that are in the United States illegally at substandard wages and subsidize them both. What sense does that make, Mr. Speaker, for a Nation to not be upgrading its standard of living by increasing the average productivity of our people? And why would we not be defending the rule of law? And why would we reward people that sneak into the United States to have a baby so they can tap into all this giant ATM? We've got to put an end to anchor babies. I have the legislation to do it, Mr. Speaker, and I have scores of cosponsors on the anchor baby legislation that I introduced very early in this session with some good gentlemen from Georgia, in particular. Rob Woodall came in and was ready to step up on that, and there are others. Tom Graves is part of that. I appreciate the work that they are doing, and I'm happy to join with them and work together on those issues. But we have to have a Nation of laws and a Nation that respects the rule of law. We have to shut off the bleeding at the border. We need to get more of our Americans to work. You notice I didn't say back to work, Mr. Speaker. We're sometimes into the third and fourth generation where they didn't work at all. They have learned how to game the system, and we've accepted it. We no longer require the welfare-to- work part of this; that you get 5 years total and then you have to go to work. What we see happen is 77 means-tested welfare programs. Nobody can monitor all of that. And the will of the American people isn't such because now half the households don't pay income tax. But they go vote. And they vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. They vote themselves welfare benefits. There are people here that pander to that, and they understand that their political base is expanded when they expand the dependency class in America. So what did they do? They passed legislation in here under Speaker Pelosi over and over again that expanded the dependency class in America because it strengthened their political base. ObamaCare is a huge key of expanding the dependency class. It says we're going to promise you that every American has access to health care, every single one. It wasn't an issue. But they conflated the two terms, the term health care and health insurance. Anyone in America can show up in the emergency room and be treated. That's access to health care, and it's probably superior to most nations. I'm sure it's superior to most nations in the world. I don't know a nation that it's not superior to. But then it was the promise that, well, it's really not very good. It's expensive that you show up in the emergency room without insurance, so what we really want to do is give everybody their own insurance policy and insure another 30 million people. So I look at that, and I do the math and I ask the question, who's really not insured and doesn't have affordable options? These numbers came from the United States Senate, the Republican Senate Conference, the Senate staff, and it came down to this. You start with about 306 million Americans, and then you begin to subtract those that are insured, those that are on Medicare, those that qualify, those that are on Medicaid, those that are qualified for Medicaid but don't sign up, those that are covered under their employer, and those that are eligible under their employer and don't sign up, and you begin to reduce this number of 306 million Americans down. First you take the insured, subtract that from 306, and then you begin to identify the Americans that are uninsured. That was those that are here illegally. I'm not interested in funding their health insurance package. I think it's wrong and immoral for us to do that. They're not on my list. When you boil it down, Americans without affordable options numbered 12.1 million. Now, that is a lot of people, but it's less than 4 percent of our population. Yet ObamaCare sought to disrupt and transform and change and socialize the health insurance industry in America, 100 percent of it, the health care delivery system, 100 percent of that, in order to reduce the number of uninsured Americans without affordable options from some number that's less than 4 percent down to some other lower number. At what cost? The cost of American liberty, cost of the United States Constitution. The cost of our freedom. ObamaCare is a malignant tumor, and it is metastasizing in the heart and soul of the spirit of the American people. We are a vigorous people. We are a people that have skimmed the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization on the planet, Mr. Speaker. The vigor that came from people that had a vision and a dream, that came here across the pond in one way or another because they wanted to access the liberty and the freedom that we have here is a different kind of a vigor than saying, well, we got good vigor from Great Britain, and we got it from France and Germany and Italy, wherever else, Eastern Europe and around the planet, Greece, name it. No, we got the best of every donor civilization. We got the vigor from every donor civilization. We got the dreamers from every country that sent legal immigrants here, that gives America a unique vigor. It's different than any other country in the world. That's the reason why we succeed. It's the reason why we can take free enterprise and do something with it. It's why America has risen to become the unchallenged greatest Nation on the planet. We have all of the rights that come from God that are defined so clearly and well, not just in the Declaration, but in the Constitution and especially in the Bill of Rights, and you add to that free enterprise, and you add to that this vigor that comes from legal immigrants from all over, from every civilization, and you have an America that has a spirit and an attitude that's unique on the planet. It is unsuitable to take a free people and tie the yoke of ObamaCare around their neck. I will draw the line. I want to see shutting off all funding to ObamaCare tied to the debt ceiling bill, Mr. Speaker. Before we even discuss the debt ceiling, I want a guarantee that all of our troops get paid on time. In the event of a debt ceiling limit or a shutdown of any kind, uniformed troops in the United States or anywhere in the world serving Uncle Sam need to know their paycheck is going to be wired into their account on time every time, no matter what is going on here in the United States Congress. Second point, Tom McClintock's full faith and credit bill that sets up the priority on how we would pay our debts in the event of a debt ceiling limit being reached. We can set those priorities, and it needs to be, pay the interest on those who have loaned money to America first and move our way on down the priority list. Do those two things, send them out of this House, send them over to Harry Reid in the Senate, and he can decide. Pick them up and send them to the President of the United States and let him sign, let the President sign both of those bills, the Gohmert bill, the McClintock bill into law. That, Mr. Speaker, would be the qualifier before we'd even begin to discuss what we would do about the prospects of raising a debt ceiling. But for me, I'd put the cutting off of all funds to ObamaCare on that debt ceiling bill and say there can be no raising of the debt ceiling here by the House of Representatives unless we shut off all the funding that's going to implement or enforce ObamaCare, at least until such time as the Supreme Court should rule. The President is delaying the action of the Supreme Court. He could have asked for an expedited review of ObamaCare. We all know it's going to the Supreme Court. The President is delaying the decision in the Supreme Court the same way that he delayed bringing his birth certificate out. Mr. Speaker, it is so important that we not chase good money after bad, that the Supreme Court rule on ObamaCare. At least then, then let Congress decide when they might appropriate rather than these automatic appropriations. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I appreciate the privilege to come here to the floor and stand up for the rights of the innocent unborn in this country. At the root of this issue is the question of what is human life and is it sacred in all of its forms and at what instant does it begin, and I think all of us with a conscience will recognize that human life needs to be sacred in all of its forms and it begins at the instant of conception, and once we come to that conclusion we stand up to defend every voiceless innocent miracle that's on its way into breathing free air into this country. And to think that we are compelling the American taxpayer to fund abortions across this country and in foreign lands on occasion, because we can't quite hear that voice--Henry Hyde heard that voice, and we're standing up with and for Henry Hyde. I so much appreciate him and Chris Smith, who is the principal author of the underlying legislation. I rise in support of this rule, Madam Speaker, and I rise in support of the innocent unborn. The conscience of America must be heard in this debate today, on this rule and on the underlying bill. The voice of the voiceless need to be heard, that of those people who were not heard in the life we will hear from in the next, as Henry Hyde so eloquently said. But an America that is a pro-life America, with over 60 percent that oppose Federal funding, taxpayer-funded abortions, this is a consistent position that reflects the will of the American people. We must draw this line not just with Planned Parenthood but every abortion provider in the country. If they can't make it in the market on their own, we have no business subsidizing them without regard to the impact on our overall economy. Madam Speaker, I'm pleased and proud to be here today to take this stand, and I'm pleased and proud of the entire Pro-Life Caucus that's here in the United States Congress, both Democrats and Republicans alike, who have done so much over the years to bring us to this point of consensus. And this is a consensus that will be reflected on this vote on the rule and on the vote on the underlying bill, a consensus of the American people with their resounding support for this rule and the underlying bill.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding, and I also thank Dr. Burgess for the leadership role that he has taken nationally in opposition to ObamaCare. His voice is essential to this and putting this unconstitutional bill behind us one day, taking us down the path of liberty and freedom with a constitutional path. I rise in strong support for H.R. 1213, Mr. Chairman. I would point out that much has been made of $105.5 billion in automatic spending that was written into ObamaCare. That is a number that was kind of like a mirage; it was hard to pin down. Over time and working with CRS, we produced, finally, that number: $105.5 billion in automatic spending written into a bill that I don't think any Member of Congress--in fact, I am certain not a single Member of Congress--was aware of that figure when ObamaCare was passed about 13 months ago. However, this bill, H.R. 1213, doesn't address that $105.5 billion in automatic, irresponsible, unconstitutional spending. It addresses an open slot where the drafters of ObamaCare just simply overlooked writing a figure in when they granted, there, unlimited authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, to spend the amount of money that she sees fit to carry out the provisions of this section that are repealed by H.R. 1213. It wasn't just a blank check, Mr. Chairman. It is a series of blank checks--in fact, an infinite number of blank checks that an infinite amount of money could conceivably be written into. That is how bad this is. That's how unquantifiable it is. I know that CBO has attempted to put a number on it, but it requires some assumptions to even do that. The 112th Congress has been bound by the 111th Congress by this term we call ``mandatory spending.'' I don't concede that there is anything such as mandatory spending in this Congress. No previous Congress can bind a subsequent Congress. This Congress has to approve all spending of every Federal dollar before it can be expended, and we need to stand on that principle, Mr. Chairman, this unlimited and mandatory spending that is unconstitutional.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. I would make the point also that the funding that would go to set up the State exchanges, we need to be very well aware of what that can be. If the States take this free money, so to speak, from this unlimited slush fund of Kathleen Sebelius and set up the State exchanges, even though they believe they have control of these exchanges, it sets them up to be nationalized by a far more powerful Federal Government. And even though they oppose ObamaCare, they might be complicit in its implementation if they accept this money. I urge adoption of H.R. 1213, and I thank the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chair, on rollcall No. 276, I was detained by two (2) elevators which were in use by non-Members during votes. Had I been present, I would have voted ``nay.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for his work and for yielding me time. I want to also thank the gentleman from Montana, who has drilled into this deeply, and it is a big reason why we are able to be here today. I appreciate his representation of seniors in Montana as I may well have the privilege of representing the most senior congressional district in all of America. I've watched what has happened not just with Medicare but with ObamaCare entirely, and when I hear the comments about the whims of the health insurance industry, that may well have been what helped write this bill in the first place--large health insurance companies. Yet we had 1,300 of them when we started this process over a year ago, and we have fewer today. We had 100,000 possible health insurance policy varieties. We have fewer today. We are looking at $2.6 trillion in outlays over ObamaCare for the first full decade of its implementation, and we have seen two Federal courts rule ObamaCare unconstitutional. We have uncovered what I think were intentionally hard-to-find numbers that were hidden in the automatic appropriations of ObamaCare to the tune of $105.5 billion to be laid out. We are sitting right now on top of $23.6 billion that is being used intensively to implement ObamaCare, all the while we expect, and the President surely must expect, the Supreme Court will rule it unconstitutional. ObamaCare has been rejected by the American people. It sent 87 freshmen Republicans here to Congress to repeal it. Every Republican in not only the House of Representatives but in the United States Senate has voted to repeal ObamaCare in H.R. 2 and voted to cut off everything that could be ruled in order on the floor in H.R. 1 that would be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. This is the language that cuts off the automatic spending to ObamaCare. It puts a freeze on it so the courts can decide, so the will of the people can be reflected not just in the House of Representatives, but eventually in the United States Senate. And also, let's bring a President that will sign this repeal, this unconstitutional taking of American liberty that is known as ObamaCare.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to remove the name of the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) from H.R. 1093. It was added inadvertently due to a clerical error.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and to once again bring a case before you that I believe will be overheard in an effective way by the American people and responded to you by, of course, your good judicial and prudential judgment. I came here to the floor to talk about a number of things. I should always bring up the number one thing that is on my mind first. And I know that it's impossible for me to exhaust the subject, but I have given it a significant endeavor over the last year and a half. And now, as things move towards a head, with the continuing resolution negotiations and debate that is taking place and the major decisions that will be formed over the weekend by the leadership in the House and in the Senate in consultation, presumably, with the White House, we expect to see some kind of a proposal come before one or both Chambers next week before the clock ticks down on the continuing resolution that is temporarily funding this government in a piece of shell appropriations that should have never have happened. But that's a subject matter perhaps outside of what I should bring up today, and we should focus on the issues at hand, and they are this: There was a strong pledge that was made that if Republicans win the majority, Mr. Speaker, that we would cut $100 billion out of this fiscal year's budget. I will submit that, recognizing that we were 5 months into this fiscal year before we had an opportunity to begin that process, that calculates out to be about $61.5 billion if you annualized $100 billion. Even though the initially proposed continuing resolution did not include those kinds of cuts, there was an intense debate here in this Congress driven by the 87 freshmen Republicans to get that number up to a number that was either $100 billion or $100 billion if you calculated it on an annualized basis. We did come together on that number, and this House did pass H.R. 1, which included in it $61.5 billion worth of cuts out of fiscal year 2011, even though, let me say, the function of the House was not functional during the last 2 or 3 years at least of Speaker Pelosi's time, and there was no appropriations process that one could bring forward, and there was no budget that was brought forward and, therefore, government was being run on stopgap measures of continuing resolutions. During the lame duck session--the lame duck session being the period of time when Congress comes together to meet after an election. I have said that lame duck sessions should only be to take care of the urgent issues that need to be handled before the new Members of Congress can be sworn in. The old Congress, at least in theory, is delegitimized by the elections that take place. Last year, it was on November 2. They no longer represent the will of the American people. That has been reflected in the election results all across the land. And this House was designed to be a quick reaction strike force to be responsive to the American people. So our Founding Fathers put it within the Constitution, never amended out, that House Members are up for election every 2 years. And every 10 years there will be a census, and that census is designed then to be used to redistrict the districts. And we have now agreed that 435 is the maximum number of House Members. And as the population moves and as the population grows, every 10 years, we reset the congressional districts to as accurately as possible reflect the new population distribution in America. That goes on, along with every 2 years, there is an election. So the elections have two purposes. Every 10 years, it is to reflect the population change; and every 2 years, including that 10-year census year election, which comes up in 2012, it's the quick reaction response to the will of the American people. Because our Founding Fathers understood that, if you put people in this office and let them have tenure for life like we are hearing about in States like Wisconsin or Ohio what tenure does to a person's due diligence, then there would be people that would sit here forever and never be responsible to the American people. They recognize if they would set the Senate up in 6-year election cycles that the Senate wouldn't be accountable within a short period of time, not within 2 years or 4 years, but in 6 years. That was intentionally so the Senators would be more inclined to make long-term visionary decisions, and House Members could come in as the shock troops, so to speak, to bring the quick reaction if the Congress got out of sync with the people. Well, it's pretty clear, Mr. Speaker, that the Congress got out of sync with the people last year. Actually, they began to get out of sync with the people well before that, more than 4 years ago. But when President Obama came in he had huge majorities to work with in the House under Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and in the Senate with Harry Reid as leader, even to the extent that they had a massive majority in the House of Representatives, and they had a filibuster-proof majority in the United States Senate. And so they felt their oats, so to speak. And their ideology, drove them, I think, to--maybe they didn't know it. I think some of them knew it, and I believe the Blue Dogs that were in this House of Representatives that lost their elections last November knew it. They knew they were walking the plank. They knew they were going down into political Davy Jones' locker if they voted for ObamaCare. But they did, because of leverage, because of legislative shenanigans, because--and I'll say it, Mr. Speaker, that to understand this, that ObamaCare, for a long time here in the House of Representatives, was H.R. 3200, a bill that came through the Energy and Commerce Committee in a fashion that was, at least envisioned, to be a functional fashion through our Constitution and by our Founding Fathers. But it came through, and there were long, long debates in committee, but H.R. 3200, which was the product of the House, didn't make it to the floor for a vote. What came to the floor for a vote under ObamaCare was a bill that was written in Speaker Pelosi's office of 2,600 or so pages, plus or minus 100. It depends on the font type. But 2,600 or so pages of a bill that no, not one person had an opportunity to read it all before it came to the floor for a vote. And as much as it was studied by many, there are quite a few Americans now that have read it all. But, Mr. Speaker, I'll submit this, that it has so many convoluted contraptions within it, that there isn't a single person on the planet, no matter how intellectual they might be, no matter how much experience they might have, there's not one person that has the capability of reading the ObamaCare bill and understanding all of the activities of that bill where it references other sections of the code and you have to read it and switch back and forth, zigzag in and out of existing code and look at the ObamaCare piece of legislation and, at the same time, understand the implications to Americans. It's one thing to understand what a bill does technically, and it's another to understand how people have to live underneath that legislation. So H.R. 3200 kicked off to the side. The product of the actual committee didn't come to the floor. The product of the Speaker's office, her staff, many of them young, junior people writing up a bill that they thought was right for America, dumped down on us here to be on a short period of debate and a vote be passed by the House, and could not and would not have passed the House the day it was brought to the floor for a vote except for a couple of little promises. One of those promises was that the Senate would pass a reconciliation package, which put other pieces into it in order to avoid the filibuster rule in the Senate. So in order to get that done, they had to bring some things that couldn't get passed under the filibuster rule in the Senate, write them up in a separate bill. Well, somehow that bill couldn't have been amended to the one here on the floor because that wouldn't have passed. And furthermore, the ObamaCare bill that was written in Nancy Pelosi's office couldn't have passed here on the floor because Bart Stupak had a dozen Democrats that locked up with the Republicans and said, we aren't going to vote for a bill that funds abortion. Nancy Pelosi wrote a bill that funds abortion. Harry Reid wrote a reconciliation package that they promised to send over to the House that did the things that his Senators needed to have happen and that House Members needed to have happen, and the piece of ObamaCare that was written by Nancy Pelosi that funds abortion was going to satisfy the Stupak dozen if the President signed an Executive order that amended the legislation that was before the House. Now, Mr. Speaker, I wouldn't expect every American to be completely understanding this convoluted process. In fact, I'd expect most of them to be very confused about this. This was designed to be a confusing process. And the idea, the very idea that the President of the United States would take an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, that everybody in this Chamber would do the same thing, and everybody in the Senate would do the same thing, and then believe somehow, all you have to do is read article I of the Constitution, and one can easily conclude that the President cannot amend a piece of legislation by signing an Executive order. He does not have the authority to do so. That is a constitutional violation. And I have, in the very similar, if not exactly identical language that is in the Iowa Constitution, gone to court to prove exactly that when former Governor Vilsack thought that he could rewrite the code of Iowa by executive order. And the case of King v. Vilsack is in the books, Mr. Speaker, and the Court vacated the executive order of the Governor of the State of Iowa because he thought he could legislate by executive order. I said he couldn't. We went to court. The judge said he couldn't, and it's resolved in that issue, and the point is conceded by former Governor, now Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack. That same tactic was used by the President of the United States, Barack Obama, when he signed an Executive order that was designed to amend the bill that was about to pass, actually he signed it after the bill passed. And the bill that passed on the condition that the President would sign an Executive order to take care of the funding for abortion and that the Senate would pass a reconciliation package that fit the other needs. Why couldn't we do this under what we call here regular order? Why couldn't we have a committee process that would work a bill through? Well, they did, but Nancy Pelosi dropped that one in the trash, wrote her own. Why couldn't they allow the reconciliation package, if it had any merit, to be amended on to the ObamaCare legislation, even if it's the legislation that was written in Speaker Pelosi's office, and rejected that out of committee? Why couldn't that have been an amendment that could have been voted on up or down here in the House of Representatives attached to the same piece of legislation? Why couldn't they have put the language of Barack Obama's Executive order that supposedly says the Federal Government's not going to fund abortion. Why couldn't they have put that into the bill too and had an honest debate on an honest piece of legislation? Why not? Well, because it wasn't. Because they could not pass it under an honest process. It had to be a legislative shenanigans process. That's what we got. And as that bill went to final passage that night, I got a little bit of sleep that night, not much. I drafted legislation to repeal ObamaCare. Probably at the same time, me not knowing it, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota drafted legislation to repeal ObamaCare. We each got our legislation drafts down and they came to us shortly after 9 o'clock that morning, exactly the same 40 words, within 3 minutes of each other, that said we're going to--now, I'm going to do this a little bit in summary, but only 40 words--that this Congress would repeal the act of ObamaCare. And it references the two sections that are the components by number, by bill number, and the last words of that repeal bill is as if it had never been enacted. So we introduced that legislation, actually separately. I joined on hers and she on mine, and we went to work to get signatures to move the repeal bill. That turned into a discharge petition with 173 signatures on it, and that would be throughout the summer and into the fall of last year that we were getting signatures on the discharge petition. And Mr. Speaker, you will know that if there's 218 signatures, a majority of the House of Representatives on a discharge petition that represents a bill, that bill bypasses committee, and the Speaker can't block it, and it comes to the floor to be voted up or down without amendment. That's what a discharge petition does. Well, it took us a long ways down the line of a commitment to repeal ObamaCare, and it was a tool that was used by several, and I'll say many candidates for Congress who now, some of them elected to this Congress, part of the 87 freshmen Republicans, all of whom ran on the repeal of ObamaCare. And I believe, and don't know this, and I've heard no exceptions, but I believe it's also likely that all of them ran on defunding ObamaCare, cutting the funding off, because we knew that a Republican majority here in the House could pass the repeal of ObamaCare, which we did in the second week here, under H.R. 2. The second highest priority for Speaker Boehner was the repeal of ObamaCare. H.R. 1 was funding the government; H.R. 2 was repealing ObamaCare. That legislation passed the House with a resounding solid bipartisan vote and went over to the Senate, where every Republican in the Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare. We committed to cutting off the funding to ObamaCare, and that's the next step. And I said, since last July at least, to cut off all the funding to ObamaCare in every appropriations bill that comes out of the House of Representatives. Well, H.R. 1 was the single piece of legislation where we had the maximum amount of leverage. That is the funding for the duration of the year for all of the functions of government. We learned sometime last year that there were automatic appropriations deceptively, I believe, written into ObamaCare that are designed to create this perpetual money machine that funds the implementation of ObamaCare. Some call it mandatory spending. I do not. I call it automatic spending. There is automatic spending in ObamaCare written into it. And the number is still on my hand in Sarah Palin fashion, $105.5 billion automatically appropriated, spent in an authorization bill completely outside of regular order of this Congress, with a handful of exceptions, in short term and few dollars. But in scope and in magnitude, no one has ever tried, no one has ever had the audacity to try to impose an automatic appropriation on this Congress that would be $105 billion. Some of that money goes beyond that. That is just 10 years. Some of it is appropriated, Mr. Speaker, in perpetuity; $1 billion a year here and $1 billion there that goes on every year that can't be stopped unless Congress goes in and shuts it off. And that is what we need to do, Mr. Speaker. We need to do this in every bill. This continuing resolution that is before us now must include within it the language that cuts off the funding to ObamaCare, the current and the previous, the language that cuts off the automatic spending in ObamaCare. There is $18.6 billion for fiscal year 2010, most of it not spent yet, that implements ObamaCare, $18.6 billion of the $105.5 billion, and there is another $4.95 billion in 2011 that automatically appropriates to ObamaCare. That is $23.6 billion, Mr. Speaker, that goes in to kick ObamaCare in. It has been found unconstitutional by two Federal courts, and it has been rejected by the American people who sent 87 freshmen Republicans here to repeal ObamaCare, and we are sitting here looking at $23.6 billion in automatic spending. We are struggling to cut the budget by $61.5 billion. Well, let's do that. But over here is $23.6 billion in automatic spending that goes on. And if, as I believe, Harry Reid is committed to shutting our government down--and by the way, the majority leader in the United States Senate speaks, I think, as a proxy for the President. What does the President want here? Well, he wants to delay, or he would be telling Harry Reid to pass something. And I believe Harry Reid wants to delay and then shut down. They have convinced me that their intention all along was to shut down this government. That is why they agreed to a short-term continuing resolution until March 4, so they could posture themselves to be in a position to force a shutdown of the government. They think that they can blame it on Republicans, and then the public will punish Republicans at the polls. Well, Mr. Speaker, I will submit that is not the way it is and not the way it will be now, because John Boehner and Eric Cantor's leadership have demonstrated clearly that this majority in this Congress, the Speaker's office, the majority leader's office down the line have three times--H.R. 1, 2-week CR, 3-week CR--demonstrated there are the dollars for the legitimate functions of government. There are the dollars for it. We have provided it three times here, and three times the Senate hasn't moved on anything of their own initiative. So they have convinced me that their goal all along was to shut down the government. And if I didn't believe that, all I had to do was listen to Senator Schumer or Howard Dean or some of the language coming out of Majority Leader Reid. I am convinced that they are committed to shutting this government down. If they do that, we need to say to them: Here are all the resources, again, and no money to implement ObamaCare. If there is no money to implement ObamaCare but all the money that is necessary for other fiscally responsible, legitimate functions of government and they go in and shut this government down and point their fingers at us, the American people will know differently. They will understand that it always was the strategy to shut the government down by the Democrats in the Senate, and the White House, and that we are committed to keeping it open. But we cannot be allowing the funding to go forward to an unconstitutional taking of American liberty, which is ObamaCare on its face. It is unconstitutional in four different ways: It is irresponsible; it is unsustainable; it can't be funded; and we can't find the funds to fund it all. It is $2.6 trillion in outlays in the first 10 years. We must, Mr. Speaker, cut off the automatic funding to ObamaCare, and any funding going forward to ObamaCare let the courts decide. And we decide here in the House of Representatives to draw a line, draw a bright line and stand firm. That all needs to happen in that way. And history tells us this, Mr. Speaker: That when there was a government shutdown, the argument last time was over spending, most of it within either Medicare or Medicaid. If my memory serves me correctly, it was over $300 billion in cuts. Whether it would be a plus-up or a plus-down from that, you can't take a stand on a money figure. You can't say, I'm going to stand and fight on $300 billion. But if they lower my cuts down to $299 billion, I'm going to be a ``no.'' Or, if they take it up to $301 billion, I will be happier yet. You cannot stand on a principle that is a dollar figure, because whatever you pick it is always going to be on a sliding scale. It is not a principle. We are standing on $61.25 billion right now. Well, if they lower those cuts down to $61 billion, do we say ``no''? I think that the Democrats on the other side understand that. That is why they have floated this number of $33 billion in cuts. They haven't said whether they were willing to accept it yet. They got to $33 billion in cuts this way: They took $61.5 billion, divided it by two, and rounded it up to $33 billion. That is how they arrived at the number. There isn't any question in my mind about that. And they want to be able to say, well, we met you halfway and a little more, so you should be happy that we are willing to compromise. To them, compromise is: Take the number, cut it in half, and then, if you can't get agreement, cut it in half again. And they call it compromise. Well, I have said money itself is not a principle. You can't stand on something strongly unless you are standing on a principle. Well, a principle is an unconstitutional 2,600-page taking of American liberty, the nationalization of our skin and everything inside it called ObamaCare. That is a principle. It is completely unsuitable for an American people that live with the liberty and freedom that God gave us, that our Founding Fathers so well articulated in the Declaration and in the Constitution, that is part of our tradition, part of our history, and part of the inspiration for the entire globe to be knocking on the door wanting to come to the United States of America. Because of what? Liberty, Mr. Speaker, listed out in the Bill of Rights: Freedom of speech, religion, and the press. Freedom to peaceably assemble, and petition the government for redress of grievances. The Second Amendment, to keep and bear arms. The right to own property. Protection from double jeopardy. To be tried by a jury of your peers. The philosophy of Federalism that devolves the powers down to the States or the people respectively. All of this and going on. Equal protection under the law and the 14th Amendment. On and on and on. These are the inspirations for a vigorous people, a people that have a belief and a common cause and a common culture, a cultural continuity of belief in our liberty. And they would impose us, what? Socialized medicine? A Federal taking of our right to manage our own health care? And part of that management would be to buy a health insurance policy that is driven by the marketplace that people demand and want? That would have any of the bells and whistles that the market demands and have every bell and whistle that the market demands, and should not have mandates imposed on it by the Federal Government that are imposed within the States. People should be able to buy their own health insurance policy across State lines. The protection for the monopolies of State health insurance companies is anti-market, it is anti-free market, it is anti- freedom. And John Shadegg's bill that he pushed so hard while he was here needs to be something that goes to the President's desk, that allows people to buy insurance across State lines; so that a young man 23 years old paying $6,000 a year for a typical policy in New Jersey, laden with mandates, could instead go buy that typical policy in Kentucky for not $6,000 but $1,000. Doesn't that help our costs? Doesn't that get more people insured? Doesn't that do the right thing and protect people? That is just one. I could take you down through a list of seven or eight or nine good solid Republican ideas, most, if not all, of which can come to this floor as standalone pieces of legislation and be sent over to the Senate, where Harry Reid would push them off his desk into the trash can. They wouldn't have the respect of going in his desk drawer. Why? Because they are liberty oriented; they are free market oriented; they are constitutional; they are principled, and it gives people back their liberty. But this country, the United States of America, this vigorous people that we are, we have a vitality that is unique. We have all of the vitality that comes from the rights that I have talked about. We have the vitality of the free enterprise system, which is the foundation of our economic system. I would point out that there are flashcards that newly arriving immigrants, or those, I should say, that are studying for their citizenship test, mostly that is 5 years in, studying for their citizenship test, flashcards. On one side it will say, Who is the father of our country? You snap it over, it says, George Washington. Next card, Who emancipated the slaves? Snap that card over, Abraham Lincoln. Next card, What is the economic system of the United States of America? Free enterprise capitalism. That is an axiom of faith of the American people, that we are free to spend our money as we choose. ObamaCare commandeers our paycheck, Mr. Speaker. It takes it over. And they say you must buy this health insurance policy that is approved or produced by the Federal Government, and if you don't do that, we are going to send the IRS in to punish you, to fine you. It is a punishment if you don't buy it. If they can pass a law that requires you to buy a product that is produced or approved by the Federal Government, if they can commandeer 5 percent or 10 percent, or in many cases 25 or 40 or even 50 percent of your payroll to pay for a health insurance premium, if they can commandeer any part of your earnings and force you to buy something, the next step is they can commandeer your money to buy a General Motors car because their investment may not be doing so well, or a Chrysler. Or maybe you could buy some shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They took that over, too, didn't they? Maybe they can force you to invest in the student loan program. They took that over, too, didn't they? They could force you to buy a certain kind of washing machine, a certain kind of shoes. And they can also force you, at that point, you have to buy so much diet pop instead of non-diet pop, so many ratios of carrots versus candy bars. If they can commandeer 1 percent of your paycheck and force you to buy a product, they can commandeer 100 percent of your paycheck and force you to buy all products, to the point where you are enslaved by the Federal Government. How can that be constitutional for a free people? Mr. Speaker, I will submit it is not and it cannot be, and that is why this House voted resoundingly to repeal ObamaCare. That is why every Republican here and in the Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare. That is why we must cut off all funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare in every appropriations bill, and that is why they deceptively plugged into ObamaCare the automatic appropriations of $105.5 billion, and that is why they front-loaded it with $18.6 billion in the FY 2010 budget to intensively implement ObamaCare, and that is why there is another $4.59 billion in this fiscal year. There is $23.6 billion sitting there in the pot. And think of this, Mr. Speaker. If they are successful in forcing a shutdown of this government, and while they are busily trying to point their fingers at those of us who provide the resources to keep it open, we would still see $23.6 billion hard at work implementing ObamaCare. The lights could go off in Federal offices all over America because of a shutdown, but you could drive down and look at where the lights are on. Guess what? That is the $23.6 billion still there, still implementing ObamaCare, like Santa's little elves, making sure we have socialized medicine before the lights come back on. That is what we are faced with, Mr. Speaker. That is where we must draw a line. We must stand and do this fight. The fight is inevitable. So choose the ground when the army is the strongest and on the ground that we can stand and fight on, and that is this: Provide the resources for the legitimate functions of this government, not for the illegitimate functions of this government. And if the President of the United States working through his mouthpiece, Harry Reid, or directly brings about a shutdown, it will be about a bright line between all of the legitimate functions of government versus perhaps a legislative tantrum, an act of audacity and narcissism that his signature piece of legislation called ObamaCare means more to the President of the United States than all of the functions of government put together, Mr. Speaker. For all those reasons, I say, this is the week to draw the line. This is the week to do the fight. This is the week to do the battle. We have to have it. We can't avoid it. Let's get it over with so we can get on with the legitimate functions of the United States Government.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas, the good judge, who has taught me a few things about all of this. One of those things is sitting on the Judiciary Committee with the gentleman from Texas is, and I haven't learned it very well, but at least I saw the demonstration on how to listen. One of the common denominators of the judges from Texas that we have serving in this Congress is they are all good listeners. They also have heard a lot of stories, some the truth and some not, and they sort that out pretty well. When I hear Judge Carter come to the floor to tell us how it is, I'm pretty confident that he has listened really carefully and drawn a judgment as to what's the truth and what isn't and boiled it down to the essential facts of Constitution and law and common sense and rendered a verdict. So as I hear this verdict emerging here from the presentation this evening, it calls me to the floor to say thank you to the gentleman from Texas for bringing this up, for all the times that you've come to the floor and sometimes fought a lonely battle that turned out to stand on a good cause. That's the way good things get started. It's usually one person starting this out and then truth seems to attract more people to a truthful and good and a just cause. I am interested in the gentleman's presentation here and not particularly informed but I came to listen. I would be happy to continue my listening.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. As I listen to this presentation, a number of things occur to me about what happens when you have the Federal agencies and the Federal agencies are passing rules and regulations that even though there is a broad authority that's granted to those agencies by this Congress, some of the things that they do are beyond the imagination of the people that debated or voted for the bill in the first place. I look at the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, which are more than 30 years old by now. They've turned into something way beyond the imagination of the people that passed them. The environmentalists that supported them then seemed to be on the edge of what would be considered mainstream. Looking back on that, they would be considered mainstream now. But the problem that we have, and particularly with EPA, would be that the mothers and fathers of the EPA employees that first implemented the rules and regulations of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, now their children have picked this up and others from outside, a second generation of people. They have come into these professions now with--like many young people do--and it's a very good thing to be idealistic and have a sense of a cause--but if you look at a law that was written in 1978, and you apply it with a vision of having a cause that you want to be championed for in 2011, quite often the second generation environmentalist is something entirely different than the first generation environmentalist. And they will interpret the law and write rules beyond the scope of the imagination of those who drafted it and ratified it and the President that signed it. And so I deal with things back in an environmental perspective, having spent my life's work in the soil conservation business. We have gone out and done some drainage work. Mostly, it's been surface work, permanent practices--terraces, dams, and waterways--and I've envisioned that we would want to send all the raindrops down through the soil profile to purify that water in nature's intended way and keep the soil from washing down stream and ending up in the Gulf of Mexico. And yet the regulations that come from some of the EPA initiatives are things such as--I can think of protected streams, an issue that came to many States, but it came to Iowa. It was one of the things that drew me into political life. They wrote a rule that said that these waters for these streams, these 115 streams that were designed to be protected for their natural riparian beauty, to quote the rule, some of them were drainage ditches that I had floated and walked those streams all through western Iowa. And some of those streams were just drainage ditches. There was no natural riparian left-over beauty because they had all been changed. But they wanted to preserve them and protect them and call them endangered streams. And so I began going to the hearings for the rules. And in the rules they wrote that these streams, and according to the geographical boundaries that are defined here, and--``waters hydrologically connected to them'' shall be declared protected streams and shall be under the purview of the Department of Natural Resources, which regulates for the EPA. And I began to ask the question. And here's how language gets stretched. I asked the question, What does ``waters hydrologically connected to'' mean? And the regulators would stand before the public meeting and they would say, We don't know. You're here presenting a rule and you don't know what it means, ``waters hydrologically connected to them.'' No, we don't know. Then take it out. We can't. Why can't you? We can't. How do you know you can't if you don't know what it means? Well, we're here to defend this rule. So I followed that road show around the State, and they knew when I walked in actually the second meeting who I was and what I was there for. And I asked one question and I didn't get an answer. I just opened my mouth for the second question and they said, Only one question per person. And I said, I drove 2\1/2\ hours to get here. It's going to take me 2\1/2\ hours to get home. And I've got a lot more than one question. I'm going to stand here until I get them all answered. Anyway, it came to this. They had decided what amounted to every square foot of the State of Iowa under rules that were ``slipperly'' deceptive. And it was the language that said ``waters hydrologically connected to.'' I know that moist soil will have in it a water content of 25, 28, 30 percent and still be fairly stable. So that would regulate us all the way up to the kitchen sink. Two water molecules touching each other are hydrologically connected. And that's one of the things that environmental extremists sought to impose upon us in the State that gave them all kinds of latitude. And another one would be when they decided to declare wetlands by aerial photographs. And the aerial photographers would look down, take a shot, and if there were a certain amount of vegetation growing in the field, they declared it to be a wetland that otherwise would have been farmed. And so there could be somebody missed with the herbicide on top of the hill and the foxtail would grow. It would show up in an aerial photograph. The Corps of Engineers would declare that to be a wetland on the top of the hill where water drained completely away. This is how government regulation gets out of hand and starts to take over the property rights of the individuals who have a right to use that property in a responsible way as a means of an income to produce crops, even if it happens to be cotton, which we don't have much of in my district. So I just think here that this Congress should do this: we should bring every rule before this Congress for an affirmative vote before it can have the force and effect of law. We can do it en bloc. Bring them all in together. We need to give any Member an opportunity to divide a rule out and force a separate vote on it, and we need to give Members the opportunity to amend them. And the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Davis) has a bill that addresses this in this fashion. It's not as broad in scope as I would go, but it is a very, very good start on getting this Congress under control and the regulators under control and giving Congress the authority that's vested in us in the Constitution rather than subcontracting it off to the agencies and letting them run this government at will. So I appreciate the gentleman from Texas giving me an opportunity to vent myself on these frustrating issues. I appreciate your leadership.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman would yield.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the title of that bill is the king's X bill, I'm going to be very interested in signing on.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady for recognizing me here on the floor of the House, Madam Speaker, and appreciate the privilege to address you. I came to this floor, one, to hear from Judge Carter and to listen to the presentation that he made. And the other component of it is I came here to talk about one or perhaps two subject matters. One of them is ObamaCare, as one might imagine. I would make this point that--first, Madam Speaker, if it's possible that there's anybody that doesn't know why ObamaCare is so bad, if they maybe haven't heard the argument in some time and they're forgetting about how bad ObamaCare is, and if they're starting to hear the language about what is redeemable about ObamaCare, I want to make it real clear: nothing. There is not one single component of ObamaCare that is worthy of us making any effort to do anything except to repeal it all, eradicate it all, pull it all out by the roots. I listen to some Members of this Congress that will say, Well, don't you want your children to be on your insurance when they're 26? No. I raised them to grow up. I want them to take their own responsibility. If they can be elected to the United States Congress when they're 25, then I think that's a pretty good age to at least say you are free, on your on--well, first, you got your car keys when you were 16--your license, anyway. Then you get to vote when you're 18 and choose the next leader of the Free World. Then you get to go out and, let me say, go into the tavern legally when you're 21 and get elected to the United States Congress when you're 25. Then they kick you off of Mommy and Daddy's insurance when you're 26? Somehow I think that delays the growing-up process. I think that we need to have people growing up and taking personal responsibility at an early age rather than delaying it to a later age. If the States want to have it at 26, let them have it at 26. If insurance companies want to provide for that market, let them write the policies to provide for that market; but the Federal Government should not stick a mandate on this that requires all health insurance policies to keep the kids on until they're 26. Let's just say there's a young person who gets elected to Congress, like--well, yes, I would think that there are some Members of the new class that would fit very close to that category. Would one really think that they would come in here at age 25 and transition from their parents' health insurance on over to the Federal opportunity of health insurance that they can access and pay their share of the premiums that come with this job of working in this Congress and maybe never have a window where they were responsible to go out in the marketplace and buy their own health insurance? I think that's actually a bad idea, but if people want it, let them drive that through their States. Some will say that we want to cover preexisting conditions so that children cannot be denied insurance on policies that their parents have. Well, that's a good idea, and it's one that can be sustained by demand in the marketplace. If that doesn't do it, it can certainly be sustained by mandates within the States, but it does not require, Madam Speaker, that the Federal Government get involved in mandating to the States, actually mandating to everybody in America, what shall be done with insurance. So now I've used up, I think, the two things that had some popularity in ObamaCare. That's it--insurance for 26-year-olds and no denial because of preexisting conditions to children whose parents have policies. If I want to go out and buy a policy that ensures that my children could stay on it, that policy is available in the marketplace. I will say this, that before ObamaCare wrecked the markets and drove out a number of health insurance companies, we had 1,300 health insurance companies in this country which were viable in the marketplace, competing, providing all kinds of policy varieties for customers to choose from--in fact, over 100,000 health insurance policy varieties and 1,300 companies. There were 100,000 policy varieties. We had plenty of competition. ObamaCare has driven out competition. It has not added to it. It has driven out competition. It has made it harder. It has driven up the cost of health care. The indecision and the fear of what's happening has caused the entire health care industry to be frozen in place. Now they come along and say, Well, if you're not going to repeal it, can you accommodate me in some way?--perhaps in some way like granting them a waiver. I'm hearing individuals say, I want my waiver. They know that there have been 1,040 waivers to ObamaCare. Madam Speaker, I know that there are people out there who are listening who maybe don't understand what that means. It is this: ObamaCare is the law of the land. It is imposed upon everyone in America. A law is to be applied to every individual in an equal fashion. We might sit in different categories. We might have Medicare that applies differently to somebody who's 65 than it does to somebody who's 60 years old; but these are waivers to statutes and to individuals and to entities. From my standpoint, it's unheard of, and where that authority came from I did not see coming; but this administration has found out that they pushed a law that's so bad--so bad--that they are granting waivers to companies, to entities, and to entire States, like the State of Maine. Now we find out that one of the people who has taken credit for helping to write ObamaCare, the gentleman from New York, who, I believe, is a candidate for the mayor of New York City, is now calling for a waiver for the City of New York to ObamaCare. So maybe, if he gets his way, it won't be 1,040; it will be 1,041 waivers. That's appalling to think that you would sit in a strategy meeting/ session and try to drive a policy that, I believe, is flat out socialized medicine and argue that it's good for everybody in America because they're too ignorant to take care of their own health care and now find out that the policy is so ignorant you want a waiver from it for the largest city in America. That's appalling to think that that would happen. 1,040--1,040 waivers. Let me see. The IRS will enforce this. It will punish people with an extra penalty if they don't comply. Let me see. The E-Z formula. The E-Z form for the IRS is the 1040EZ. We've had 1040 waivers, 1,040 waivers. It's E-Z for them, Madam Speaker, but it's not going to be easy for anyone who doesn't get a waiver. We have this thing called the equal protection clause. It's in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment. Everybody is going to be protected with equal protection. ObamaCare, itself, violates the equal protection clause because it gives some American citizens a different standard than others. I'm thinking of Florida and their Medicare Advantage, which they have an exemption from under ObamaCare. Even though the cornhusker kickback was removed because, actually, Nebraskans rejected it--to their great credit--Floridians didn't reject their exemptions so that they kept their Advantage. That was an existing policy that exempted them from the wipe-out of Medicare Advantage, which happened to people like Iowans, for example. The equal protection clause? Not hardly. It's a violation of the equal protection clause. It's an unconstitutional bill, ObamaCare. But I forgot to tell you, Madam Speaker, all of the reasons why it's bad. It cannot be afforded. It's a $2.6 trillion total outlay for the first full 10 years once it would be implemented, and it increases taxes almost to that much over that period of time. It cuts Medicare, which is going to have a huge increase from 40 million to 70 million recipients of Medicare over the next few years. That huge increase cuts Medicare by $532 billion. It purports to reform Medicare. While this cut we know has got to actually happen, it just simply calculates it into the CBO score. We can't afford ObamaCare. It's unsustainable therefore. It will reduce the research and development. It will increase lines and delays. It will ration care, and it will take that care out of the cost of many people and put it on a mandate that will force more people into Medicaid, and there will be companies that will be forced off the coverage they now provide for their employees and force those people onto a program that's federally subsidized, where there is a fund that will fund their health insurance premiums, which is also unaffordable. All these things are bad. There are so many bad things about ObamaCare that I don't think there is any one person in the country who could stand up in 30 minutes and list all of the bad things about ObamaCare. It boils down, though, to this: it's unaffordable. It's unsustainable. It reduces research and development. It reduces the quality and lengthens the lines. It delays the service. It rations the care. It takes away one more thing. The most important thing about ObamaCare is this: I believe it is the unconstitutional takings of American liberty. It is unconstitutional in numbers of ways, three or four ways at least. American liberty is something that is precious; and to think that the Federal Government would step in and commandeer, usurp, the God-given liberty and right that we have to manage our own health care and turn it into a rationed service, according to formula, in which only government would decide who would get what service and when and who would be on the waiting list for surgery and who would be on the waiting list to die without surgery, is a result of ObamaCare. It cannot be argued or refuted. They put you on a waiting list for a hip replacement, or they put you on a waiting list to die without. That's one of the things that happens. They don't seem to think that's what they're doing willfully, and I don't accuse them of willfully wanting to do that. It's a consequence of the thick-skulled action of people who believe that there is a Socialist model to produce their version of Utopia rather than the individual dynamics that come from people who have free choices. But we are a vigorous people, Madam Speaker. We're a unique people. We're the kind of people who recognize from the beginning that our rights come from God. We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That pursuit of happiness wasn't the pursuit of hedonism; it was the pursuit of perfection, just the pursuit of perfection--both intellectual and physical improvements. That's the pursuit of happiness in the Greek form, and that's what our Founding Fathers understood. They're unique, vigorous people with rights that come from God, and of all the things that flow through with this, these rights, many of them laid out in our Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, religion, and the press; freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances; the right to keep and bear arms--the right to keep and bear arms; the property rights that are the Fifth Amendment; the right to protection of trial by jury, to be tried by a jury of your peers, and the right to protection against double jeopardy; the rights that are endowed to the States and then the people, respectively, in the Ninth and mostly the Tenth Amendment. All of those are unique things to Americans. They don't apply to Western European democratic socialist states or, should I say, social democratic states. They don't apply to people in Canada. They don't have that same level of rights. They don't apply to people in Mexico or anyplace in this hemisphere or anyplace else on this planet. These rights, as understood and envisioned by our Founding Fathers, apply only to Americans. And they are the foundation of why Americans are a unique and vigorous people, and they're the foundation of why we are the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. And we have a unique vigor, and that vigor comes from the foundation of these rights. But, Madam Speaker, I would take the position this, that you could take all of these rights that we have, that we identify as coming from our Creator, from God, and you can bestow them upon any other people on the planet and ask them to go out and build a vigorous society that would match and mirror that of America, and I will submit that that effort would fail. It would fail no matter if they had unlimited natural resources, if they had free enterprise to no end, if they had a reverence for the Constitution the way we do. You could take this package, this vision of American rights and Constitution, you could put it in the richest land in the world or the poorest and offer it to any people on the planet, and I will submit that they could not succeed in producing another country that has the vigor and the success that this country has. And I'm not standing here, Madam Speaker, taking credit for this. I'm standing here giving reverence to this gift that we have that is America. And I will continue, that of all of the rights that are foundations of those beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism and the free enterprise component that goes along with it--property rights, freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and the list goes on-- there's one other component that no other nation can have, and that is the unique vigor of the American people. And we are a people that have been blessed by the vigor of every contributing, every donor civilization on the planet, no matter the country. The people that came here, the legal immigrants that came to the United States, came here with the vision of the American Dream. They were attracted to the vision of the American Dream. And so we were able to, by good sense of circumstance and forethought and vision, skim the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization on the planet: the people that had a vision, that had a dream, that had a vision, that wanted to test themselves, that wanted to build something that went beyond their generation; people that wanted to leave the world a better place than it was when they found it; people that wanted to prepare the ground for the next generation to farm, so to speak, and in some cases literally, these are the people that we got that came to America from every country, whether it would be England or Scotland or Wales or Poland or Germany or Italy or any of the countries on the planet, all across Asia, all across Central and South America; people that had a vision that they wanted to live free and breathe free and build something and have children and grandchildren that could benefit from their labors. And their vision and their intuitiveness and their creativity and the entrepreneurial nature, they came to America, and that set up a natural filter, natural filter for people to save up enough money and to get passage to come to the United States. Some of them sold themselves for as long as 7 years of labor just to pay the passage to get here. That's a dream. You don't get any calls that come like that. You get people that are vigorous, and we attracted them, and that's the American spirit. This vigorous American spirit is totally unsuitable for a social democracy or socialism or hardcore leftist communist Marxism or any of those other utopian philosophies that many of them emerged out of the non-English speaking portion of Western Europe, and their philosophies permeated a lot of the components of the globe because they're built upon class envy, but they're not built upon the truths of human nature nor are they built upon our rights coming from God. And so here we are in this country, fantastic that we are the recipients of such gifts, and the gifts that we have and the vigor that we have, we need to understand what it's rooted in. And it's rooted in these freedoms and it's rooted in the filter, the filter that filtered out people that wanted to come here but didn't have quite the ambition to make it happen. It was hard to get here, and you had to have a dream to want to come here; and when you came here, we respected hard work and smart work and people that planned and invested and they were rewarded, and we admired them and raised our children to emulate them. How many people like Donald Trump today, even though--like I said, I don't have anything bad to say about Donald Trump, not here into the Record. It's because he's been successful, people admire him. Bill Gates, because he's been successful. Steve Jobs, they admire him because he's been successful. They've been successful because they've been entrepreneurs. They've been creative. They've worked within the free market system. They have made our lives better and improved the quality of our lives and lowered the cost of the services that we need for our quality of life to be upheld and made those contributions and gotten rich in the process. That's the free enterprise system. So here we are, these vigorous people, and some of the nanny state advocates here in this Congress--actually, it was a majority of them last year--decided they want to impose ObamaCare on us and take away our personal vigor. They wanted to take over the responsibility of managing our health care. What they finally did was, because ObamaCare is right now the law of the land, they nationalized our skin and everything inside it, a government takeover of my body. The government took my body over and the body of 308 million Americans, and now they're going to tell us when we get health care, under what conditions we get health care, that we must have their health insurance policy that they prescribe for us. They've taken away our individual responsibility. They've nationalized our skin and everything inside it. And they had the audacity--and the President's fond of that word ``audacity.'' It was in the title of one of his books, ``The Audacity of Hope.'' The President of the United States had the audacity to impose a 10 percent tax on the outside of the skin that he nationalized inside of if you go into a tanning salon to turn yourself a little browner. That is a reach of the nanny state to impose a tax. They wanted to tax your non-Diet Coke. They want to manage our lifestyles in such a way that they will tax us if we eat fat foods and then presume we should get a discount if we eat healthy foods. This is a nanny state personified. ObamaCare is so bad. It's bad because of all the things that I've listed about the cost and the quality and the lines and the rationing and the net result of all of that, Madam Speaker, but the worst part is it is an unconstitutional taking of American liberty. It takes from us the ability, the right to manage our own health care, and it must go. And when that legislation was passed and signed into law--I believe the anniversary date was March 23 of this year--I laid awake most of the night and slept a little bit and got up in the middle of the night and drafted a piece of legislation to repeal ObamaCare. It was waiting at the door of the service team to be formally put into the form of a bill when they opened up that morning. Very interestingly, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota had done the same thing, and her legislation came down within 3 minutes of mine, exactly the same 40 words that said we're going to repeal ObamaCare and, ``as if it had never been enacted'' were the last words in the bill. Forty words, repeal ObamaCare, gives the names of the bill, the numbers of the bill, et cetera, the last line, ``as if it had never been enacted.'' Rip it out by the roots, Madam Speaker. Now, that was not necessarily unheard of, but there aren't many precedents in the history of Congress for repeal legislation to be filed actually the next day after a huge piece of legislation has been passed. But that is what we did, and we started down that path immediately, working to get signatures on the bill and building up the support to repeal ObamaCare. By mid-summer we had a discharge petition. By the end of the 111th Congress, going into the election as the only part that counted, we had 173 signatures on my discharge petition, people that wanted to see ObamaCare repealed come to the floor, bypass the committee process, bypass the Speaker's ability to kill the bill before it got here, and bring it to the floor for a vote. We had 173; we needed 218. And the message that went out across America was useful in that some Members of Congress that are here today will say straight up they wouldn't be here if it were not for the discharge petition and they could challenge their opponent to sign it. And almost every Democrat refused to do so. And now there are 87 new freshmen Republicans. Every single one has run on the repeal of ObamaCare. As far as I know, everyone has run on the defunding of ObamaCare. And I know that every single Republican in the House of Representatives voted for H.R. 2, which is the repeal of ObamaCare. And I know that every single Republican in the United States Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare. The language that we generated then is the language that emerged into H.R. 2. And today every Republican and some Democrats are on record voting to repeal ObamaCare. Now, that didn't stop there. The strategy that I put together almost a year ago was this: that we needed to win the majority, which we did; bring the repeal of ObamaCare, which we did. It didn't succeed in the United States Senate, but behind that always was this majority here in the House of Representatives has an obligation to cut off all funding that would be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. And I have been consistent with that language all the way through last summer into last fall and past the election and beyond. Repealing ObamaCare, then cut off the funding to ObamaCare. Stop the implementation of ObamaCare and stop the enforcement of it by shutting off the budget dollars and hold this waste of money to this unconstitutional bill of ObamaCare until such a time as we can elect a President who will sign the repeal. The date for that to happen in my strategy is January 20, 2013, Madam Speaker. And that's the date that the next President of the United States will be inaugurated out here on the west portico of the Capitol Building. And when that President stands there and takes that oath of office, it's my vision and my dream and my commitment to work towards it, I am going to ask him take your oath of office with pen in hand, Mr. President-elect, and I'm going to ask you to solemnly swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States to the best of your ability so help you God. And once that statement is made and it's completed and the oath of office is finished and he's formally the President of the United States, and before that new President on January 20 of 2013 shakes the hand of Chief Justice John Roberts, I want that pen in his hand to come right down to the parchment, and I want him to sign the repeal of the ObamaCare right there on the podium of the west portico of the Capitol, right out there as the first act of the next President of the United States. That's my vision. That's my commitment. But until then shutting off funding to ObamaCare is a must-do. And most of America knows by now that there is $105.5 billion automatically appropriated in a deceptive way by the way the bill was drafted up in Nancy Pelosi's office, not going through committee, not having the work of the will of this Congress, but drafted up in her office and dropped on us with hardly any notice and certainly no time to inform the American people of what was in it, automatic, unprecedented in their scope, appropriations to the tune of $105.5 billion, Madam Speaker. And already it automatically appropriated in the 2010 budget. So that's $18.6 billion and $4.95 billion in the 2011 budget. It totals up to $23.6 billion, already appropriated, almost all of it set aside for the purposes of implementing ObamaCare. We must have a showdown. We must face the President down. If the President demands that ObamaCare be funded, what are we going to do? Say, no, Mr. President, that he vetoes legislation that would otherwise fund all of government? And if President Obama does that or if Harry Reid continues to perform as his proxy and shuts off anything that we send over that way even though we've demonstrated our desire to keep the legitimate functions of government, all of them, functioning, if the President shuts it down or Harry Reid shuts it down and this government comes to a halt, here's the irony. The irony is this: lights would go out in Federal offices around this land. Not all of them because essential services will keep going. But lights will go out. And as the lights go out in the nonessential service Federal offices, what will be going in the other offices? ObamaCare will continue even in a government shutdown to be implemented because there's $23.6 billion sitting in their pot to spend out of to implement ObamaCare, and we could have shutdown after shutdown, and ObamaCare is implemented and implemented. We must hold the line. We must stand on this principle. It is our obligation. It is unconstitutional. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution too. And that includes defending the Constitution and opposing unconstitutional legislation with every tool at our disposal. The President and the Democrats, I believe, Madam Speaker, plan to shut this government down. That's why they agreed to a continuing resolution in December that funds the government until March 4. It was to bring this to a head. They wanted to box us into a corner and then blame Republicans for shutting the government down. Well, it's real clear: Republican leadership wants to avoid a shutdown. It's clear to me that Democrats are determined to provide a shutdown and try to blame it on Republicans. And it's clear to me that if we fund all the functions of government except ObamaCare and if the President brings about a shutdown, it won't be the House Republicans; it will be Harry Reid as proxy for the President. If that happens, what we're going to see happen here is the President of the United States could veto an appropriations bill that funds everything except ObamaCare. It would be a Presidential executive tantrum that he would be throwing. That tantrum that he would be throwing would be saying this: that his signature piece of legislation, ObamaCare, means more to him than all of the other legitimate functions of government combined. That's the scenario that we are in. The American people will render a verdict when that day comes that there is that kind of a showdown. And it must come. The American people will render a verdict. They will side with us. They are not going to side with the President who has imposed ObamaCare when 62 percent of Americans want it repealed, 51 percent intensely want to do so, and only 24 percent want to keep it in any kind of a vigorous way. So, Madam Speaker, I will say this: we have an obligation to stand and hold our ground. This showdown will come. It must come. If it doesn't, we will be capitulating to the President in every way that he's willing to fight. I say let's stand our ground now. Let's have our fight now. Let's get it over with, and let's get on with the business of the 112th Congress. With that, Madam Speaker, I would yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady. Of all the data that we've seen, we still had not absorbed the real culture of NPR, until we saw the video of that dinner, those 2 hours that day. So I stand in support of this act and this resolution, and I believe it's time for us to draw a bright line in our budget and cut this funding. I will be voting to adopt the cutting of the funding, as will my colleagues.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Tennessee for yielding time. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor to rise in support of this bill. The Federal Government has a few constitutional duties, and we seem to have taken on a lot of Federal responsibilities. As time goes on, every time we see a need, we think we have to tap into the taxpayers and create another government function. But this is not one of those functions that is an enumerated power of the United States Congress. It is not something that we are compelled to do. It is something that is discretionary. We are into operations at a time of austerity, a time when we see what's happened as a prelude to the American economy, if we just look over to Europe, in places like, oh, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain, for example. That's the direction we're heading with our economy. And as we see this discretionary spending grow along with our entitlements grow and our economy contract, we also need to take a look at these items that are at our discretion as to whether or not to fund. I think that the image that we have seen on the videos tells us something about the internal culture of NPR. If you haven't seen the videos, or if you've just seen the little text in there, that doesn't give you the real sense of what was going on in that conversation with Mr. Schiller at that table for 2 hours that day. If you look at the whole video, you'll see, the cast of the character and the content reflected, the culture of NPR; in the same way, in my view, that the videos of ACORN reflected accurately the actual internal culture of ACORN. We shut off the funding to ACORN for that reason. Of all the data that we've put out on ACORN, you couldn't be convinced to shut off the funding until you saw the reality of the video. Then we looked into Planned Parenthood, and of all the data that was brought out here to the floor of the House, Mr. Speaker--and I compliment Mike Pence for doing so and all of those who stood with him and for life--still, the American people didn't understand the real culture of Planned Parenthood until they saw the video.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Georgia. I tend to agree with all the Republicans from Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I am here on the floor to speak to this issue of what frames this rule and the continuing resolution that flows behind it, Mr. Speaker. And I would remind the American people, I am here to talk about ObamaCare, about cutting off the funding to ObamaCare, and keeping our pledge. We have 87 new freshmen Republicans here in the House of Representatives. I believe all of them ran on the repeal of ObamaCare. I know all of them voted to repeal ObamaCare. And I know this House has the authority to cut off the funding to ObamaCare. We passed H.R. 2, the repeal. Every Senate Republican voted to repeal ObamaCare, and H.R. 1 was the will of the House. We stood here, and we debated over 90 hours. And the components of that that affect the policy of this country within the rule of H.R. 1 are not part of the negotiations of this CR, not the 2-week CR that passed that we are operating on now, and not the 3-week CR that is the subject of this rule that we are debating here, Mr. Speaker. So I lament that we don't have the will of the House reflected in this CR, and it is trying the patience of at least the Republicans in this House. A growing number have said that they are not willing to vote for another temporary spending measure in order to bridge it over until we get some kind of resolution. But the House can draw the line. There is not a dime that can be spent by this Federal government without the approval of the House. And my position that was reflected by the gentleman from Massachusetts is this: I'm willing to face the President because if we're not willing to face the President, he will get exactly everything he is willing to fight for. That means we have to confront the idea of the President eventually shutting the government down or giving him what he wants. It is more important that we stand on the Constitution and fiscal responsibility than it is to hand over to the President of the United States, who has the audacity to send us a budget with a $1.65 trillion deficit, and that level of irresponsibility, to just capitulate his demands. We must shut off the funding to ObamaCare, and I am ready to do that. I will vote ``no'' on the bill but not the rule.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and also to have listened in on the presentation over the previous hour, the Republican Women for Life, led by Congresswoman Schmidt, who has relentlessly stood up for the innocent unborn. I certainly support that cause and lend my voice to it, although I don't know that there's much to be added after the presentation that I've just heard. I'm just thankful that it's in the Congressional Record and that your ear has been tuned to it, Mr. Speaker, and that the ear of the American people is tuned to that message as well. I have a couple of subjects that I wanted to discuss here within the upcoming 30 minutes that's been allotted. The first one is to speak to the vote that we've just had here on the floor on the continuing resolution for extending the funding for this government for an additional 3 weeks. It is known as a clean CR. This House came together to work its will on H.R. 1. We debated that continuing resolution, which would be designed to fund this government for the balance of the fiscal year. Mr. Speaker, I think it's really important that you and the American people are reminded that we're in this condition of this debate over this continuing resolution because the Pelosi Congress didn't do business as directed and as framed under the Constitution of the United States. The Pelosi Congress continued to digress when it first opened up here in January of 2007, after the majority and the gavel was passed right behind me where you are, Mr. Speaker. This Congress functioned for the first few weeks pretty much the same as it had under the previous Speaker. But in that transition that took place, the rules began to get changed, and there were fewer and fewer opportunities for Members to weigh in. The committees began to function less and less. More and more bills were written out of the Speaker's office, and as this unfolded, the rules changed. They took away--one of the things was an open rule under the appropriations process so that Members couldn't offer their amendments and force a debate and a vote on an issue of their concern. The appropriations bills have always been the tool that allowed Members to work their will on the package that came from committee. Well, that went away. That was taken away, I just presume it was, by order of the Speaker, Speaker Pelosi. So the House was no longer able to work its will. Bills came down under a closed rule. Appropriations bills came down under, well, modified closed rule, and then they didn't come down at all. Then they turned into omnibus spending bills or they turned into continuing resolutions, and this government limped along, without having the opportunity to gather together from across this country the collective wisdom of the 435 Members of Congress, as informed by our constituents. So the Congress became dysfunctional. One of the things that is a result of that is the legacy today of having to be in this business now of seeking to put Congress back on its tracks again in the fashion that the Constitution frames and the tradition of functional Congresses direct us. That has been the mission of Speaker Boehner, and he has been very clear about this to make this Congress work again. Because of that commitment, it brought about the debate on H.R. 1, which debated all the funding of the Federal Government for the balance of this fiscal year and allowed it under an open rule. There were hundreds of amendments that were offered by Members that had 4 years of pent-up frustration, Democrats and Republicans alike, that had a voice that wanted to be heard, votes that we wanted to see cast, and a message that helped shape, let's say, the political consensus of this body before a bill goes over to the United States Senate. We worked through that bill for over 90 hours of debate. Of the hundreds of amendments that were offered, there were a good number that were passed, and some of them shut off funding to certain pieces of policy. But it was the will of the House wrapped up in the result of the passage of H.R. 1 that went over to the Senate. That was the first offer, and it was the best offer of the House so far, and it reflects the will of the House of Representatives and the House of Representatives designed, by definition, to reflect the will of the American people. So I want to make it clear, Mr. Speaker, that we are in this debate and in this discussion over continuing resolutions: the continuing resolution that was passed in the lame duck session that carried this Congress until March 4 of this year and the 2-week ``clean CR'' that funded this government for 2 weeks that is set to expire on the night of March 18. They've extended now a 3-week ``clean CR'' that extends the funding an additional 3 weeks under similar terms, not identical terms, to the previous continuing resolution. That is the scenario that we are in, Mr. Speaker, and we are in this scenario because Congress wasn't doing its job from 2007 on up until we gaveled in here in January of 2011. There is a 4-year period of time where, in 2007, it wasn't too bad when it started. It digressed progressively until it became as close to completely dysfunctional as the Congress has been, at least in my understanding of the history. And I would say, Mr. Speaker, that I have lived a fair amount, and I have studied the rest of it, although I wouldn't present myself as being a congressional scholar and historian on all of the detail, but that is generally what has taken place. Now we have Speaker Boehner putting this Congress back on the tracks. And, yes, there were some growing pains going through those 90-plus hours of debate on the continuing resolution under an open rule. And, yes, some of us compromised. Many of us actually compromised to take our amendments down and negotiated a unanimous consent agreement that was negotiated in good faith. I appreciate all the effort that went into that. It was a very, very good exercise. Democrats and Republicans alike, I heard no one argue that the process of open rules and open debate was a bad process or that it wasn't fair or that it somehow should not have been done, that we should have engaged in a closed-rule process. No, Mr. Speaker, that was the right thing to do. And the subsequent continuing resolution, the first one for 2 weeks, was designed to buy some time for the Senate to digest H.R. 1. The one that passed here on this floor, over my vote when I voted ``no'' on it, is an extension of a similar philosophy with another little slice out of the cuts. So maybe, just maybe, the Senate will swallow this one bite at a time when the whole loaf seems to be too much. But, on the other hand, the leverage is diminishing as the pages on the calendar turn. Mr. Speaker, I didn't come here tonight to belabor this issue but just to make the point that there is a reason that we are at this position with debates over continuing resolutions, and it is because the Congress didn't function in previous years and handed over this CR scenario to be taken up by March 4. We are trying to resolve this with a Senate that has been cooperative and complicit in the downward spiral of the functionality of the House of Representatives. I am not speaking on the functionality of the Senate; although, I might not be complimentary of that either, should I dig into that. So that is the scenario that we are in. It has brought about some leverage points. It puts the House in the position where, if we choose to, we can hold our ground, and we can direct policy across to the Senate and through to the President of the United States. We should all understand that when the majority leader in the United States Senate speaks, he is speaking in such a way that is designed to be, in a way, a mouthpiece for the President, a shield to protect the President from public criticism and to protect the President from the initiatives that start here in this House. If Members of this House will make the argument that we can't pass legislation here that we believe in because Harry Reid won't take it in the Senate, we should be thinking in terms of: The proxy for the President in the Senate is resisting the Republican initiative, which is the will of the people that was brought about by the 87 new freshmen that have come here to support the incumbent Republicans. All the gavels in the United States House of Representatives were passed from the hands of one party into the hands of the other party. That is what has happened, the will of the people. Mr. Speaker, we have the obligation to carry out this will of the people in conformance, though, with our best efforts and our best judgment. And that works in consultation with Democrats, as it should. It hasn't always been the case working across the aisle, and there have been times that I have been accused of that myself. I will be a little more open than I have in the past, but in the end, the House should work its will. I stand on that principle, and I compliment the Speaker for laying that standard out. It is not going to be an easy banner to carry. He knows that. He understands this organism of the House of Representatives. And, in spite of all of the stress that is going on here, the House is positioning itself to work its will on the Senate. Working its will on the Senate is working its will through the proxy for the President and on towards the White House. If the President of the United States believes that all of the functions of government don't match up to his desire to protect his signature issue, ObamaCare, the American people need to know that that is his priority. My priority is to repeal it and defund it until such time as we can get a President to sign the repeal of ObamaCare. That has been my effort: to first kill the bill and then work to repeal it. We are about 1\1/2\ years into this effort, and I will continue my effort as intensively as I need to and for as long as it takes until the day comes when we can actually celebrate: free at last, free from the yoke of the socialized medicine policy called ObamaCare and free to exercise our liberty that I believe has been unjustly taken from us by the legislation. And something, too: two Federal courts have found it unconstitutional. Now, Mr. Speaker, that is my little editorial here. I haven't worked out a smooth transition into the next subject matter, but it occurs to me, as I stand here, that it has been a little while since I addressed you on the subject of immigration and that it has been a little bit quiet in the House of Representatives on the subject of immigration. So I want to raise this point and have this discussion, and it is this: We are looking at numbers that show still millions of illegals here in the United States, about 60 percent of whom came across the border illegally, about 40 percent of whom overstayed their visas. And it is odd that the number of illegals is reported by the Department of Homeland Security to be less than it has been over the previous 8 years that I have been here in this Congress. When I came here, the number was 12 million illegals here in the United States. I have gone down to the border many times. I have sat in on hearings year after year, week after week, where expert witnesses come forward and testify, and they will testify that, of the net numbers of people that are interdicted coming across the border, they would perhaps stop one out of four of those. And it is not too hard to extrapolate those numbers: 3 to 5 years ago would come to 4 million illegal border crossings in a year, of which they contend that they stop about one out of four. I think they said perhaps they catch one out of three or one out of four. That would be the under-oath testimony of one of the representatives of the Border Patrol. I think that number may or may not be higher now. But I would go down to the border, and the agents down there would tell me, 25 percent? 10 percent has to come first, a 10 percent effectiveness rate. Now, one could argue whether 10 percent is the right number, and I hear numbers less than that, too, or whether 25 percent is the right number. What it says that, I don't think anybody contends that the effectiveness rate of the full list of Border Patrol officers we have all across our southern border is interdicting a number that would be approaching even half of those that attempt to cross the border. And those attempts to cross the border are probably down from the data that I have given you from 4 or 5 years ago. But think of 4 million illegal border crossings. Think of those attempts. Think of stopping perhaps 1 million, and now there are 3 million in the United States in a year. And that 3 million number is going to grow. Now, some of them go back to their home country again, and they cross multiple times; that is true. But if we had 12 million illegals in 2003 and we have less than 12 million illegals today, according to Janet Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security, what happened to all those people? We were accumulating people for all of these last 8 years. And if somehow by some miracle or some mystery of nature of humanity we don't accumulate illegals in America when we have large numbers of them coming in here, I suppose you could chalk it up to a death rate or a self-deportation rate. But, Mr. Speaker, we got to 12 million somehow. They came from somewhere. And people agree that 12 million was the illegal number--at least it was the floor, not the ceiling. I have always thought it was higher. But if in the years prior to 2003 we accumulated 12 million illegals, and if we are watching 4 million illegal border crossings a year, that might even be a peak, and maybe that number is down by a third or so now, and a large percentage get into the United States, and a significant percentage of them stay here, the 12 million gets to be a bigger number, not a smaller number. How did Janet Napolitano come up with a number lower than 12 million? That is a question I would like to ask her, if she would stop before the Immigration Subcommittee so we could have that conversation. But I think the number is larger than 12 million. I have always thought it was larger than 12 million since I have been in this Congress, and I don't think that reduction shows the real population that is here. And as we look at the enforcement ratio that they show us on the southern border, it will show that they are stopping fewer and fewer illegals on the border. The Department of Homeland Security contends that because there is less interaction with our agents and illegals, that that says that there are fewer illegals. Well, that might be the case. But it also might be the case that there are just less arrests, fewer interdictions. But I do think that when you double the number of Border Patrol agents, which we have done and then some on the southern border, they are out there competing to be able to make those arrests and make those pickups. So I think the natural order of our law enforcement officers, they will still be doing the enforcement. But also it pushes people out away from those highly concentrated enforcement areas, those areas like El Paso, for example, and puts them through places in the desert that aren't watched as closely. So I ask the question: I used to hear testimony that would show that there were several hundred people that died in the desert trying to sneak into the United States, and as that number would grow, it would be 200 a year, then 250 a year, and a number that I recall that went up to 450 a year. Now, that is data that is more than 5 years old, and I haven't been able to get my hands on that old data, but I do remember. So if the number of deaths in the desert is going down, that would indicate that there are fewer people going through the desert, if the climate hasn't changed and other factors being all the same. But if the number of deaths in the desert of illegals is going up, that would indicate the traffic is going up. So in a number of the sectors we have seen those deaths go down, but in the Tucson sector most recently we have seen the number go up, which would indicate a larger number of illegals coming into the United States through the Arizona desert. As I traveled across New Mexico, the people there in a town hall meeting in Columbus, New Mexico, said almost unanimously that they believe there are more drugs coming through and more illegals coming through than they have seen before, and they believe that it is more dangerous for them than it has been before. That, Mr. Speaker, is the circumstance on the border. In any case, whether we have 11\1/2\ million illegals here or whether we have 20\1/ 2\ million illegals here, I don't believe the number is shrinking. I think the number still grows. We know we have a significant number of illegal entrants into the United States. We don't have operational control of the whole border. We may have operational control of segments of the border, but there is much of it that we do not have. We've got a long ways to go. But I do believe, I believe that we can get operational control of the border, and I mean operational control of the border as defined in the Secure Fence Act that was pushed through this Congress by Congressman Duncan Hunter of California, whose son now serves in this Congress, and I am grateful that he does. I want to do honor to Duncan Hunter's work that passed the Secure Fence Act. I want to complete that project, because there are some other things I know. We are spending about $12 billion, let me see if I can get these numbers right, about $12 billion on our southern border, and that turns out to be about $6 million a mile; $6 million a mile. Mr. Speaker, I think about, what is a mile? That is four laps around an old track. Where I live in Iowa, it is to my west corner, or any other corner, for that matter. Our roads are laid out in a mile grid pattern, every section, a mile to the corners, and there is a survey pin in the center of every intersection that is a mile apart each way. They surveyed the old way, and they got a lot of it very, very close. A mile, $6 million a mile for every mile, all 2,000 miles of our southern border. Six million dollars a mile. And we are guarding that border with a 10 percent or 25 percent or maybe even a higher efficiency rate, but not up to 50 percent. And we think we are getting our money's worth in doing that? It doesn't mean that the agents aren't doing their job. It is, tactically, are we investing the right dollars into the right resources to get the best results that we can? So I look across my west mile, for example, and I think what if Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano came to me and said, Steve, I'm going to make you an offer. I'll make you an offer for a contract for you to guard a mile. How about a mile by my house? Guard that so that people that want to cross it cannot cross it unless they are authorized, and, if they are, direct them to a port of entry. And I'm going to pay you $6 million next year to see to it that no more than, say, oh, 75 percent of the people that try get across. That's what we're looking at. If it is a 25 percent efficiency rate at our southern border, that means that 75 percent of those that try are getting through. I admit, it is a little bit of old testimony, but not that old, Mr. Speaker, and it has changed in some of the sectors, but not all of them. So I am thinking in numbers that is the most recent congressional testimony that I know of, and that is a 25 percent efficiency rate, which was, some thought, a stretch then. So it is a 75 percent inefficiency rate. So if Janet Napolitano came to me and said, I have this offer for you. Here is $6 million. Guard that west mile of your house, and you can only let 75 percent of the people that illegally want to cross it go across. The other 25 percent, you've got to turn them back. Would I take that deal for that level of efficiency, especially if it's a 10-year contract? So now it's $60 million for 10 years? I would just hope I could live long enough to spend it all. Yes, I would take them up on that. Now, if the offer was, you're going to get your $60 million for your mile, $60 million over 10 years for guarding a mile of the border, you'll get your $60 million, but you have to provide efficiency, and you don't get to build empire, and you're not going to grow an empire that gives you political clout by hiring a lot of people and giving them good benefits packages and marketing it off in that fashion. You're going to have to make the best efficiency with it you can. I would look at that mile, and here is what I would do, Mr. Speaker. I would pick up the Duncan Hunter proposal and I would say, let's build a fence, a wall and a fence. Let's build a fence, a wall and a fence across that mile. And I would put the capital investment in it, and for a couple of million dollars, I would have that all done. For about a third of my first annual budget I would have that all done, and it would cut my costs on the guard and manpower costs for the duration of the decade and beyond, if you build a fence, a wall and a fence, when you amortize it and depreciate it out about for 40 years, and it would yield benefits every single year. They built that kind of a barrier in Israel, and it is 99-point-something percent effective. If you look around the world, there is fence after fence after fence. The people over on this side of the aisle as a rule will say, Don't you know that we don't do that? Don't you know that the Berlin Wall is abhorrent to us? My answer to that is, how did you get history so distorted in your mind that you would compare a fence to keep people out with a fence to keep people in? They are two opposite proposals, two opposite reasons. You can't argue that the Berlin Wall is like building a fence on our southern border unless you want to argue that the people that were in the west wanted to get over that wall into the east. They did not. There was no traffic sneaking in behind the Iron Curtain. It was the other way around. So we are trying to keep large masses of people out of the United States and force them all through the ports of entry and let them come in here the legal way. And there is no country in the world that is more generous than the United States. In fact, all of the countries in the world don't match up to the generosity of the United States from an immigration perspective. So we are generous. We bring in about 1.5 million people a year legally, and we watch as every night we have dozens and hundreds of people that come into the United States. One calculation showed during the peak of this 11,000 a night, 11,000 in a 24-hour period. Most of that is at night. Santa Anna's army was only about 5,000 to 6,000. It is nearly twice as large as Santa Anna's army every single night. No, they weren't in uniform, and a lot of them weren't carrying guns, and maybe they weren't a physical threat to us in a general sense. But that is a pretty large group of people, every night to see twice the size of Santa Anna's army coming into the United States illegally. And I will tell you, I believe it is at least the size of Santa Anna's army now, every night. And we are letting this happen day by day by day, and we turn a little blind eye to it, and we watch as we tragically pick up the bodies in the desert of those who are sneaking into the United States illegally that don't make it across that desert. As the summer comes along, the numbers go up and up. But I asked the question a few years ago when they were testifying before the Immigration Committee about how many lives were lost in the desert while they were sneaking into the United States. How many Americans died at the hands of those who made it into the United States? How many times have we seen fatalities on the highway of someone who didn't have a driver's license? didn't have an insurance policy? that was in the United States illegally that didn't understand our laws? drinking and driving? had been picked up and had been interdicted by law enforcement? We lost a nun in Virginia last year very close to home. Corey Stewart knows about that, the county supervisor down there in, I believe, Prince William County. That's an example. We lost several kids in a school bus wreck in southwest Minnesota, north of me. That happened with an illegal that had been interdicted several times and turned loose into our society. And those families grieve for their lost children in a school bus wreck that would have been avoided if we'd enforced our laws at the border, if we'd enforced our law with local law enforcement here in the United States when we come across people in the United States illegally. This is not a big ask. A sovereign nation has to have borders. And what do borders mean? They mean that you control the traffic that's coming into those borders. And we can actually decide. You control the traffic going out of the United States. But we don't have to do that because we've developed a pretty good country here, but we're going to lose this country if we don't adhere to the rule of law. And the rule of law is that, when this Congress acts, the executive branch is bound to enforce the law. It's a prudent decision that reflects the will of the American people. The American people have said, We want our borders secure, and we don't want workers in the United States illegally taking jobs away from Americans or legal immigrants who become Americans. We want to have a tighter labor supply than that. If we wanted to up our 1\1/2\ million immigrants into the United States, we could do that. We could double this. We could triple it. We could go tenfold. We can say that anybody could come to the United States. All you have to do is sign up at the U.S. Embassy in your home country, and we'll give you a visa to come to the United States. We could say that. We could bring anybody in that wanted to come in. But why do we say no? Because there's a limit. We have asked the question here in this Congress, and a previous Congress has asked and answered the question: How many are too many? And what kind of people do we want to encourage to come here? And what kind of people do we want to discourage from coming here? These are the questions. We have all kinds of people involved in this debate that don't have the slightest idea how to begin to answer those questions. They just say, Oh, my compassion compels me to be for open borders. My heart bleeds for people that aren't as fortunate as Americans are. So, therefore, I'm just going to be for turning a blind eye or granting amnesty so that I don't feel guilty that everybody can't live the American Dream like we all do. Well, things have changed. Things have changed. There was a time when we had high levels of immigration into this country and a zero welfare state. When my grandmother came over here in 1894, we weren't a welfare state. They screened people before they got on the boat, and they checked them out physically; they checked them out mentally. If they had a lot of resources, they got to ride first class and got unloaded in a different dock, but the rest of them went to Ellis Island. And even though they screened a good number of the people out before they boarded the ship--and, remember, they didn't want to haul them back to Europe. It was Europe primarily at this time. But even still, after they were screened and they arrived at Ellis Island, they gave them a physical. They looked in their eyes. They gave them kind of a quick mental test. They looked underneath their eyelids to see if they had a disease that put little white spots underneath there. And if they weren't of physical ability or mental ability to be able to take care of themselves, they put them back on the boat--I should say ``ship''-- and sent them back to the place where they came from. About 2 percent were sent back. Now here we are. We're interdicting 10 percent, 25 percent. We don't even get that many sent back because it's round robin. For a long time, we did catch and release, and we said, Come back and appear. Of course, they didn't appear. Then we did catch and return. We'd pick them up at downtown Nogales, take them up to the station sector location, and they would come in with their little Ziploc bag. We fingerprinted them, took the digital photograph of them, and sometimes we saw that same person came back. The peak one that I know of down there was in 27 times. We had a really good return trade going on with people that were coming into the United States illegally. We'd pick them up, give them a ride up to the headquarters, and all they had to do is just have their prints taken again, get their picture taken again, and then they got a little van ride down to the port of entry where they turned that little white van sideways, opened up the side door, and they'd get out and walk back to Mexico. The van would take off and go get another load. Around and around and around we went. It was round robin, and it wasn't accomplishing very much. Now we're at least bringing prosecution against most of them, which is providing a little more of a deterrent, Mr. Speaker. We've got to do a lot better. We've got to understand this mission. The mission is to protect our borders for this sovereign Nation. You can't have a border if you don't control the border. We need to control the border--all of it. We need to force all traffic through the ports of entry. We can do it if we build a fence, a wall and a fence. Yes, we need to put sensory devices up there and use some of the other technology that's there. And yes, we have to have Border Patrol agents that are there that are manning the fence and running to the locations where they need to to make the proper interdictions. All of that needs to take place. But we need to use our resources smartly, and we can. We can shut off all illegal traffic that's going to come across our southern border if we do these smart things. And I have not advocated, I will point out, Mr. Speaker, a 2,000-mile fence. I simply advocated that we build a fence, a wall and a fence, and build it until they stop going around the end--that's the standard--and force all the traffic through the ports of entry. Then we have to widen our ports of entry, beef them up so we can handle the increased traffic that's there so that it's not a significant impediment. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Judge Carter. It's with honor I take the floor tonight. I very much appreciate your yielding, and I understand your great respect for the troops and the pain that you suffered down at Fort Hood and the involvement that you have had in each and every engagement standing up for our military, standing up for our country, standing up for our national security. Tonight, I step to the floor with your acknowledgment, Judge Carter, to honor a real American hero. This American hero that we honor tonight here on the floor of the United States Congress is an American hero, Corporal John Michael Peck, who's with us here in the audience tonight up in the corner and watching the proceedings here in the House of Representatives. Corporal Peck is a United States Marine, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Division. Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor this American hero who is from Rockford, Illinois. Corporal John Michael Peck is a member of, again, the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Division. His mother, Lisa Peck, is here with us tonight. She was a single mother for 16 years. Michael was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. After graduating from Antioch High School, he went into the Marine Corps. On August 23, 2007, in Iraq, he received his first Purple Heart after an explosion and he received a TBI injury. Then, on May 24, 2010, he was in Helmand province in Afghanistan, where he received his second Purple Heart after an IED explosion nearly cost Corporal Peck his life. John lost all four of his limbs. Against all odds, and with the help of his mother, he climbed out into the light. His progress has been incredible. His fellow marines talk of his prowess in the weight room. He is truly a man possessed. His attitude and his courage have made all the difference. Like all these young men and women, the ones who do the best are the ones whose loved ones are there with them each day. And Lisa has been there from day one. There should be a medal of honor for those who stand by their children and put their lives on hold to help them rebuild theirs. John is one of three quads who are over at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital. The other two are Brendon Marocco and Todd Nicely. Their heart and their souls are something of beauty to behold. I ask that this Nation continue to stand with and for those troops who stood up for us; those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, those heroes, such as Corporal John Michael Peck, who paid such a high price, and who rewards us with his indomitable spirit. And the strength of family and the love of a mother, all here in this story, however sad, however tragic, it lifts my heart to know that we have Americans that will serve us in this way, and Americans who inspire us with their spirit in the aftermath of such a service. God bless you, Corporal. I ask that this poem penned by Albert Caswell in honor of Corporal Peck be placed in the Record. What I Gave On battlefields of honor bright . . . . There are but all of those Magnificent's, who so fight! Who but so bring their light . . . . All in what they gave! Who now so lie in such cold soft quiet graves . . . . Teaching us all how to behave! Whose family's pain, is something that only heaven can take! And then, there are all of those who are so left . . . . So left with such pain, so close to death . . . . living day by day! All because of what they gave! And the ones who live without arms and legs! Without eyes and ears, and strong faces . . . . as they . . . . All . . . . for . . . . what . . . . they . . . . gave! Whose, most brilliant valor no one can ever so take away! And all of those children, who now so live without moms and dads . . . . who wake! And all of those parents who've so lost the greatest loves of all, as have they! As it's for them we now so weep, this very day! All because of what they gave! So in the night, as you lay your head down to rest . . . . While, all of your loved ones you so caress . . . . And you realize why you are so blessed, and what you have . . . . Remember, all of America's very best! And what they gave! And John, on that morning after when you awoke . . . . And somehow so tried to cope . . . . And so saw, all what this war had invoked . . . . As your great heart, to you so spoke! So spoke of what you gave! Quivering, so back then . . . . oh how the tears you made! As they rolled down your fine strong chin . . . . And your brave heart so began to pound, yes back then! As somehow you so tried to comprehend! Wishing somehow that it would all so go away! All for what you gave! As you I had to so make a choice! Should, I live or should I die? As you who so heard that most inner voice . . . . Telling you . . . . telling you to somehow stay! As it so spoke to you, all about faith and courage! Telling you, to somehow not to be discouraged! As you, United States Marine . . . . so marched off all out on your way! While, your mother with tears in eyes . . . . so began to pray! And she stood behind you John, each and every blessed day . . . . All so you could have a fighting chance, and find your way . . . . As you Marine, all in your magnificent shades of green . . . . got up on that very day! As you took your very first steps, with your most courageous heart leading the way! The way to recovery! As you so chose life on that day! As your new war had just begun! As from out of the darkness, you so marched . . . . our Father's Son! To so represent him, until your last and so dying days . . . . To So Teach Us All! To So Reach Us All! To So Beseech Us All! So Each, and Every Day! With what you gave! For you were so surely put upon this earth . . . . To so teach us all what comes first! All in your amazing grace! As our tears roll down our face! Because, each new morning as you awaken . . . One more step forward, yes dear John you so take! All out there upon your most magnificent ways . . . . Because, you will walk. . . . and you will run . . . . And it's no over, and your are not done! You United States Marine, one of the best things this country has ever seen! Yes, arms and legs we all need! But, without a heart one can not so surely breath! As with your heart you now so lead! Just moments are all we have! Just seconds, to so find the path! Our way! To crush hearts! To turn the good into the bad! All in our thoughts, and deeds! To win wars . . . . all in our parts we play . . . . To but give to this our world, but a better day! Don't cry for me! For I am the one who so made that choice! And so raised my hand, and with my voice! All for liberty . . . . And for something far . . . . far . . . . greater than me . . . . But, to be A United States Marine! Oooha! All to defend, my sweet Country Tis of Thee! And I'd do all again you see! For there are no regrets inside of me! For wearing those most magnificent, shades of green! As a United States Marine! And, for all of my brothers who have so died . . . . Who in such cold dark graves of honor now so lie! I live for thee! As I go out upon my way! I carry you all in my heart and soul but with me each day . . . . Listen closely, as you will hear God's voice inside of me . . . . As I make the best of what he has so left to me . . . . And . . . . What . . . . My . . . . Life . . . . Has . . . . So . . . . To . . . . Say . . . . As a hero a was not trying to be, but this is what my Lord has chose for me! Yea, I'm not half the man I used to be! For my true sum, has grown far much more greater don't you see? All with what is so left inside of me! As this is but the high price we must pay to be free! Were but my fine gifts . . . . my two strong arms and legs . . . . And all of this I so gave! Don't cry for me! Yea, Spider Man . . . . aint got nothing on me! In life . . . . what steps, have you so taken? What difference is your short life, upon this earth so making? All in the steps that you are taking! Upon, your way! You see, I rather run in Heaven with my Lord . . . . And limp, here upon this earth each new morn! For in Heaven, you need not arms or legs! And, that's where I'm going when I finish my last and most final days! All because of . . . . What . . . . I . . . . Gave!

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I have come to the floor to raise some issues here, to address you and hopefully be able to penetrate with some rationale and logic that I think is essential that the American people benefit from, and that is this, that, for some time now, we have been making the case that there are automatic appropriations in ObamaCare in an unprecedented fashion with regard to the magnitude and the duration of them. These automatic appropriations were written into the bill in preparation. The automatic appropriations were written into the bill in preparation for and anticipated, I believe, the loss of the majority by the Pelosi Congress, because I think they expected that this Congress would be handed over by the American people to a Republican majority that had been assigned the task by the American people to repeal ObamaCare, to defund ObamaCare. That's what everyone ran on. There are 87 Republican freshmen here, all of whom have voted to repeal ObamaCare, and I believe all of whom, if they spoke to the issue at all, Mr. Speaker, also pledged to cut off the funding to ObamaCare. I have sought to facilitate that happening and taking place. In doing so, I have drafted legislation that's patterned after the language that was written into a continuing resolution in April of 1974. That's the language in a continuing resolution that shut off the funding to the Vietnam War. It says something very similar to this. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds made available in this act and no funds heretofore appropriated shall be used for offensive or defensive operations in Vietnam or the countries adjacent to it. In other words, it's not really an exact quote, but it is the compression of the language, and it's an accurate depiction of what it said. What it did was it shut off all funding for anything that was used to support the South Vietnamese military, including M-16 rounds, 105 rounds, MREs, anything that was going to support a military operation offensive or defensive was shut off by this Congress by language in a CR. Now, who could conceive, Mr. Speaker, that this Congress couldn't figure out how to write language on how to shut off funding to ObamaCare. They didn't find the Vietnam War unconstitutional. Two Federal courts have found ObamaCare unconstitutional. I hear arguments that say, well, there is an obscure rule somewhere that says that this is written into a legislation that makes it what they call mandatory spending. Therefore, this Congress, this 112th Congress, is prohibited from getting their hands on that and can't shut off the automatic $105.5 billion. Please, Mr. Speaker. We all know that no previous Congress can bind a subsequent Congress. None of our predecessors can put up a vote in 2010--or 1810--that binds us here. We set the rules and we appropriate the money here. Automatic appropriations written into an authorization bill of the largest magnitude of any legislation that I know: ObamaCare. We expected the authorization, the authorization that says, we open the door up now and the discretion of the appropriators in the subsequent Congress will decide if those authorized categories are funded. Forty-eight places in ObamaCare, there's authorization written right in with appropriations. Unprecedented. Yes, it does happen in small little ways. Ironically, National Public Radio has in the past gotten an authorization/appropriation that went in out-years as far as way out there to 2 years, Mr. Speaker. Some of the ObamaCare automatic authorization/appropriation language goes in perpetuity. There's a billion dollars set in a category that says Medicare Modernization Effort that is a billion dollars every year, that automatically spits out a billion dollars and goes to CMS to do Medicare modernization to the end of the world. In perpetuity. It takes it out of the hands of Congress. And this Congress is going to sit here and wring their hands and say, there's a mandatory piece of spending language that's here and we can't stop it in an appropriations bill? This Congress stopped the Vietnam War in an appropriations bill, Mr. Speaker. Can't we stop an unconstitutional, irresponsible socialized medicine policy in an appropriations bill? Yes, we can. There is no rational reason why we cannot. I have faced straw man argument after straw man argument. These little things, they stand up a straw man and he's supposed to look like a whole demon himself that rules the road. And it might be an argument such as, ``King's language will violate the rules of the Senate. Therefore, they will never take it up.'' Not so. You take the language down to the Senate and they say, Bring it. We want it. We want the House to send language to the Senate that shuts off the automatic funding to ObamaCare. And then they will say, ``No, the language isn't accurate enough. It isn't precise enough. It doesn't get at what we want.'' Show me some better language. It's patterned off the language that shut off the Vietnam War. That worked. They don't have an argument as to where there's a hole in my language. There isn't a hole in my language, Mr. Speaker. It says, no funds in this act, ObamaCare, and I list the two of them actually. It is 111-148 and 111-152. That's ObamaCare and the reconciliation package that came from the Senate to circumvent the filibuster rules that they have in the Senate. In both of those, we shut off any funding that's automatically appropriated. And it says: No funds in any previous act and no funds in the continuing resolution or in any fiscal year shall be used to carry out the provisions of ObamaCare, patterned exactly off the language that shut off the funding to the Vietnam War. If we can end a war in an appropriations bill, we can shut off an unconstitutional, irresponsible, $2.6 trillion in irresponsible spending bill, Mr. Speaker. And that's what we must do. We pledged to the American people that we would repeal ObamaCare, and we won a huge majority here in order to repeal ObamaCare. Mr. Speaker, we have to act on it. We need to act on it now. Every day, every minute that goes by, we're seeing that $105 billion spent to send the tentacles of ObamaCare down, send the roots down. They're working night and day, 24/7, Mr. Speaker, they're doing that to establish and expand the dependency class in America and tell us that we can't live without ObamaCare, that we can't take responsibility for our own health care, and that the money that's spent and invested keeps our private sector and our doctor-patient relationship from functioning and growing and adapting to the markets that they must do so. We're losing huge health insurance companies across the country. Principal in my State laid off hundreds. And that's true across the Midwest at least, on down to Texas. Insurance company after insurance company is pulling out because there's no certainty out there in the market anymore, and they understand that there are going to be fewer insurance companies if ObamaCare is implemented. They're calling upon this Congress, shut off the funding to ObamaCare. Yes, we passed the repeal. Every Republican and with Democrat support, bipartisan, passed the repeal of ObamaCare, H.R. 2, sent it to the Senate. Harry Reid found a way to force a vote on it where it didn't succeed over there, but 47 Republican Senators voted to repeal ObamaCare. And I cannot be convinced that those same legislators, House and Senate, would not vote to shut off all the funding to ObamaCare if provided the language in a continuing resolution. I believe that we can look the President in the eye and say, Mr. President, we've demonstrated that we will keep the dollars there for the legitimate and prudent function of government available, as we have in a short-term CR that expires March 18, as is proposed by a short- term CR that is likely to be released later on today--after the whip team has already whipped it, by the way. We've demonstrated we want to keep the government open. But if the President, speaking through Harry Reid, decides that all the functions of government can be shut down unless he has his pet project, ObamaCare, the American people will side with those of us who side with them. We want an America that has liberty and freedom and vitality, where people make their own choices, where we have the selection of 1,300 health insurance companies, 100,000 health insurance policies, and not government-at-the-Federal-level intervention into those decisions that are made by individuals and doctors and families and businesses. America wasn't built by government plans, by one-size-fits-all, by socialized medicine. America wasn't built by people who sit in their lofty liberal towers deciding that they've been gifted with an intelligence and an intellect so that common, ordinary people can be taken care of by elitists. We were built by individuals, individuals that make individual decisions, to start a business, end a business, take a job, quit a job, to make a purchase or not make a purchase, to provide a service, to stop and help their fellow man. We're an America that lives on the American Dream, to leave this country a better place than it was when we found it. Mr. Speaker, ObamaCare diminishes the future of all Americans. It shapes and diminishes the arc of history in a way that cannot be forgiven by those who follow behind us. This is a destiny issue for this country. This is a pivotal issue for this country. I stand and I have written a letter and I have joined with Michele Bachmann. I see my friend from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is here. We agree that a continuing resolution that does not include the language that shuts off the funding that is automatically implemented in ObamaCare, we will vote ``no'' on that continuing resolution, Mr. Speaker. And I will continue to do so until such time as ObamaCare has met its end. Some will say, the President will never sign a bill that repeals ObamaCare. He would never sign an appropriations bill that shuts off the funding for ObamaCare. I'm not suggesting that that's an easy decision for him. But when I look back through the arc of history and I think what Socrates did at the end of his life, I think the President can make a hard decision here. If Socrates can drink the hemlock, the President can sign the repeal of ObamaCare. Mr. Speaker, I would be so glad to be able to yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is again a privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And it's a privilege to sit here in this Chamber and listen to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) talk about these critical issues for the United States of America. Each of us that come down here on so many days come here for the purpose of bringing up these critical issues and informing you, Mr. Speaker. And while that's going on, there are people all across America that are listening in and deciding for themselves the priorities and deciding for themselves what kind of job we're doing here in Congress. I'd love to step in on the immigration debate and burn up about 30 minutes talking about that, but Mr. Speaker, I need to have this discussion with you about ObamaCare. There are a fair number of different strategies that are working here in the House of Representatives--and perhaps a number of different strategies, to some degree, going on in the United States Senate--but the circumstances are this: Almost 1 year ago, ObamaCare passed the United States Congress and was messaged to the President, where he eagerly signed the bill. It was a combination of legislative shenanigans that took place. The bill itself that came to the floor was not a product of committee; it was a bill that was written by Speaker Pelosi's staff and her office with who knows what input and it was dropped on us in a fashion that didn't allow us an opportunity to evaluate it there, then, or on the spot. It was a combination of two bills. One of them was ObamaCare as it went out of the House over to the Senate. The Senate then promised, on the condition that ObamaCare be passed--and the votes that were necessary to pass the basis of ObamaCare were generated because the Senate decided that they would, under a reconciliation plan, avoid the filibuster rules of 60 votes in the Senate. They sent us a reconciliation plan that altered and amended ObamaCare itself. And in that package was a promise from the President of the United States that he would issue an Executive order that would take care of the concerns of the pro-life Members--pro-life Democrats who wouldn't vote for ObamaCare as long as it funded abortion. And so the audacity of the President of the United States to take the position that he could amend legislation that passed this Congress by Executive order--which is not a constitutional position, Mr. Speaker-- but that audacity was swallowed by enough people that they voted ObamaCare out of the House marginally. The reconciliation package that came from the Senate squeaked out of there because of the promises that were made and came over here and was passed because of the promises that were made. And the final cap on it was the President's Executive order that was supposed to amend ObamaCare. And what do we have in all of this mess? We have 2,500 or so pages that are so convoluted--and if anybody in this Congress, any lawyers out there that propose to be experts, anybody that's staff on Energy and Commerce, or former Speaker Pelosi, or anybody else out here, I don't think there's a single person on the planet, no matter how good their background, no matter how intelligent, no matter how well read, no matter how many research books they might have to work with, if you would shut them in an office and cut the wires and the wireless to the outside world, not a single person out of these 6-plus billion people on this planet could read ObamaCare and be able to analyze all that it does or its implications on the lives of 300-plus million Americans. It's not possible to do so. We did, I think, a very good job of analyzing what it was in broad terms. Some of us knew going in that there was deceptive language written into ObamaCare that automatically appropriated funds that would set up the implementation of ObamaCare--even if Congress appropriated no money to it, that would put the implementation in place and churn it on in perpetuity, Mr. Speaker. Some of that information I believe came out of some of the members of the Energy and Commerce Committee that had been analyzing this bill last fall. I believe that we had some verbal discussions on it--not here on the floor necessarily, but on-the-side conversations that I had with some of the better-informed Members of this Congress, and they aren't all here any longer in this 112th Congress. But as we came into January, I'm thinking about how we unfund ObamaCare. And it has been my argument all along, Mr. Speaker, that the strategy is this: That first, a lot of us used all of our energy to do the best we could to kill ObamaCare. In spite of all of that, in spite of the tens of thousands of people that came from every single State in the Union to come in here and surround this Capitol and tell them keep your hands off of my health care, still the former Speaker of the House marched through the crowds with her over-sized gavel in her let-them- eat-cake moment and imposed ObamaCare on America. Shortly after the moment that that vote went up on the board I went down to the people that had--and I say surrounded this Capitol; it wasn't just a human chain around the Capitol, it was a human doughnut around the Capitol. It was six and eight people deep all the way around the United States Capitol, unbroken, human doughnut around the Capitol, still with thousands of people left over in the corner, so to speak. If you envision a circle--there isn't one, I understand, but they were standing in clusters by the thousands. Still, not part of that human doughnut, they came here and said keep your hands off of our health care. That bill finally passed here on the floor and was messaged to the Senate. And I went down with that group, as did Michele Bachmann and several others--Pete Hoekstra of Michigan comes to mind as another individual that was back and forth communicating with the people that came here to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances, exactly in line with the First Amendment to the Constitution. And I promised them, as did Michele Bachmann, that I would introduce legislation to repeal ObamaCare. That happened the very next day, and it happened for us within 3 minutes of each other. So I laid out, though, the strategy over the next few days and weeks to repeal ObamaCare. And I'm going to refresh this now, Mr. Speaker, for the minds of those who are paying attention, and it's this: First, all energy was focused on killing ObamaCare. I didn't burn up 1 minute of media time that I can think of talking about what to do if it passed. I remember people asking me out here in the crowd, what will you do if it passes? And my answer was, ``I'm focused on killing it. We'll worry about that, that's another subject for another time, I'm focused on killing it.'' Well, it did pass. And we turned the focus, then, on repealing it. And the beginning of that was that opening of business--actually same day because this passed after midnight on a Sunday night, so it was Monday morning. This Congress opened for business at 9 o'clock. At that minute, there were two requests waiting in place to bring the legislation to repeal ObamaCare. Then I began to lay out this strategy which was, get as many cosponsors on the repeal as possible. And as that number grew, sometime in June, or towards the summer, I introduced a discharge petition. That discharge petition was designed to gain 218 signatures. With that, the Speaker of the House and no one can block it. It must come to the floor, no amendments, for an up-or-down vote. Well, we got to 178 signatures on the discharge petition, which is pretty good. I believe that number was 178. I question that, because there were six Republicans that did not sign it, but all but six signed it. We had one Democrat that signed it. So I guess that takes it down there to maybe 173, looks more like the number. I would just correct that for the record, Mr. Speaker. Let that be 173 signatures on the discharge petition. We were working for 218, is the point. Yet the discharge petition that, if it had been brought to the floor, would have been voted on and could have passed, and if it had been forced to the floor under a discharge petition, it would have passed and we would have repealed ObamaCare from the House then. But it always was a way to get people on record so we knew who was for repeal of ObamaCare and who was unwilling to go on record for repeal of ObamaCare. And it always was something that candidates for Congress could look at that and challenge the individual that they were running against: ``Why didn't you sign the discharge petition. Are you really against ObamaCare? Your name's not on there.'' It was useful for a good number of candidates, and some of them have said they wouldn't be here in this Congress today if they didn't have the discharge petition to measure their opponent with. So it always had a utility in two ways: seeking to repeal ObamaCare, and putting a marker down so that the American public could discern, who's for ObamaCare and who's against it and who's afraid to take a position. All that was taking place last summer, all the way on up through August, September, October and into the election on the 2nd day of November, where, through the summer, continuing the strategy. It was not just the discharge petition. It was use it and other things, and win the majority here in the House. When we have the majority in the House, then we can bring the repeal of ObamaCare. And I said for a long time: Repeal of ObamaCare needs to be H.R. 1. That's the highest priority for the Speaker of the House. The Speaker traditionally gets the first 10 bills to name, H.R. 1 through H.R. 10. You can look at the priority by their number. So number 1, I believe, needed to be the repeal of ObamaCare as the highest priority, Mr. Speaker. Well, it turned out that H.R. 2 was the repeal of ObamaCare. All right. There's no complaint on my part. That's a very high priority, in any case, and we did pass the repeal of ObamaCare, consistent with the strategy that I laid out way last summer. And then, way last summer, I was making the case that no money can be spent by the Federal Government unless the House of Representatives agrees to it. We can shut off all funding to ObamaCare here in the House of Representatives, and if the Senate disagrees and the House says no, then no money gets spent by the Federal Government, until we reach an agreement. That's what's going on right now, Mr. Speaker. So, I argued then and I argue now that part of this strategy to undo ObamaCare has to be to unfund ObamaCare. To defund ObamaCare, to phrase it a little bit differently. It was always part of the strategy going back almost a year. And as we move forward to defund ObamaCare, we need to understand that there were automatic appropriations that were written into ObamaCare, and that's part of the dialogue that was going on last fall in a very quiet little way but no one had drilled into it that I know of and looked at all of the pieces, on our side. On the other side, they wrote it in. So I'd like to hear from someone who was involved in that on the Democrat side, I'd like to hear from former Speaker Pelosi, or maybe I'd like to hear from the whip, Steny Hoyer: Did they know it was in there? Of course they did. Did they direct their staff to write it in there? Probably. Who on that staff devised this strategy to put in all of these threads that add up to $105.5 billion? I would like to know the answer to that question. That will emerge over time, as history has a way of uncovering these things. But, in any case, the automatic funding was there. Another way to phrase it would be self-enacting funding was there. And I drafted language to cut off the funding to ObamaCare patterned off of the funding that was shut off to put an end to the Vietnam War. That's in the Congressional Record and in the media record some time back. But about 5 or so years ago, I got curious as to how I remembered the Vietnam War being ended versus what actually happened. I went back and read the Congressional Record and the debate on that, Mr. Speaker. The Congressional Record reveals this: There were about three different places and perhaps more, but we uncovered three different places in appropriations bills where Congress shut off the funding to carry out the war in Vietnam. It began in 1973. The most significant was on a continuing resolution in the spring of 1974. As I read through that language, maybe 5 years ago, it gave me an inspiration on how to bring language to shut off the funding to ObamaCare. I'm going to go from memory here. It's in the Congressional Record. So it won't be precisely accurate but it thematically will be right. The language that was written into a continuing resolution in the spring of 1974 that shut off the American support in the war in Vietnam reads close to this: Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds in this act and no funds in any act heretofore appropriated shall be used for offensive or defensive operations in the land of Vietnam, in the skies over it, the seas adjacent to it or in the adjacent countries, and it names at least Laos and Cambodia along the side. I believe they also said Thailand. But it named the countries next to it and it said, no funds shall be used for offensive or defensive operations, Vietnam, the skies over it, the seas adjacent to it or the countries adjacent to it, and no funds in any act heretofore appropriated shall be used for such purpose. In other words, whatever money was in the pipeline got shut off. They shut off all involvement. And you can imagine, and I don't know it to be factually true, Mr. Speaker, that there were bullets and grenades and munitions that were being unloaded on the dock at Da Nang that were loaded back up again on the ship and hauled away. I don't know that to be fact, but figuratively that's what happened. They shut off everything. With language written into a continuing resolution, they shut off a war here in the United States Congress. Now if we can shut off a war here in the United States Congress and stop all the money that's in the pipeline and any money that might be coming at the same time and all the funds that are in the act, none of them can be used to conduct the operations in Vietnam, we can sure as the world in a continuing resolution write legislation that will shut off all of this automatic funding that was written into ObamaCare. How could anyone imagine that somehow because the Congressional Research Services defined the spending that is automatic spending here in the ObamaCare act, they called it mandated appropriations and fund transfers. Mandated appropriations and fund transfers have been defined by some folks as mandatory spending. And then they go on to argue that mandatory spending cannot be addressed in an appropriations bill. I would remind them, this is the United States Congress, and the former majority in this Congress wrote all this into a bill. And it's automatic funding. It's self-enacting funding. It's not completely unprecedented as a tactic, but it is completely unprecedented in its magnitude. Therefore, this Congress can't be hiding behind a rule or defining a piece of legislation as mandatory spending. We're not mandated by any previous Congress. No Congress can bind a subsequent Congress. If this House of Representatives says no, then ``no'' means ``no.'' We sometimes have to remind the Senate over and over again, and we would have to do that under the proposal that I'm making. But I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that this is an unconstitutional bill. It's been pushed through this Congress in an unprecedented fashion, with a series of shenanigans that this country has never seen before. Two Federal courts have found it unconstitutional, Judge Vincent found it completely unconstitutional, and it's on its way through the circuit and to the Supreme Court and it should be expedited directly to the Supreme Court, except the White House is holding the ball. The White House is holding the ball because their tactic is to try to get ObamaCare implemented to the maximum amount before such time, so that it becomes too late to pull it out by the roots. That's part of the tactic. So from the litigation standpoint, the unconstitutional components are the unconstitutional mandates, compelling States in violation of the 10th Amendment that they have to comply with an act to provide these services, and compelling individuals that they have to buy insurance even though they're not participating in the system whatsoever. That's never been done before. It's completely unprecedented, Mr. Speaker. So we see the Obama administration now offering a little carrot out there to the States, to the Governors, saying we will waive the mandate for the States. Now, the caveat is you have to provide an equal or better policy yourself in order to be able to qualify for the waiver, and you've got until 2014 to do that. But that act, which likely won't come to any kind of fruition, is a means, I believe, to take away the argument that it's an unconstitutional mandate on the States. The White House has also had language that came out a couple of weeks ago that they would consider or entertain the alteration or perhaps the elimination of the individual mandate. Now, that's the second component that might come out of the White House that would, if those two provisions were altered in practice, they can go before the Supreme Court and argue that it's not a constitutional violation because it's not really a mandate. And that's how they hope to walk through this thicket of constitutional prohibitions and hopefully they can find a decision at the Supreme Court level that will allow them to impose ObamaCare on the rest of America. That's their litigation tactic, Mr. Speaker. Their legislation tactic is this: The pressure that grows, they're trying to take the pressure off. So when the House played into their hands a week or so ago by bringing legislation on the 1099 component of this, this outrageous requirement that people report to the IRS any cumulative transactions with any entity that meet or exceed $600 in a year, which means if you pay somebody to mow your lawn you have to turn in a squeal form to the IRS. And this is something that was put into ObamaCare, these extra requirements, because they were able to score it as, my memory is that it was then $17 billion it was supposed to generate in taxes because the IRS was going to go in and audit these squeal forms, the 1099 forms. Well, in any case, that was the most objectionable component in the short term that came with ObamaCare. Therefore, this House picked this up and sent it to the Senate. And what happens? The Democrats in the Senate are going to take it and send it to the President. Why? Because they think that people shouldn't be required to file the 1099 forms and they can find another place to come up with $17 billion? No, Mr. Speaker, that's not it. It's this: They understand that the objections to the 1099 squeal forms that were written into ObamaCare are the most egregious of all in the short term, and they want to take the lid off the pressure cooker, let some steam out, put the lid back on, and they want to continue to frantically implement ObamaCare with the $105.5 billion that is written into it and the self-enacting automatic spending that is there. So as the pressure builds against ObamaCare, they're willing to take a little piece off here, lift the lid off the pressure cooker there, and drain that heat down so that they can hang on to the major components of ObamaCare and get it implemented. And while we have a whole series of different initiatives that are going on around here driven now by the new Republican majority, five different proposals within Energy and Commerce to change the language from mandatory spending to, I suppose, optional spending or something, all of those are authorization pieces of language. There is no leverage to get them passed. If Energy and Commerce passes that legislation, it goes over to Harry Reid's desk where it probably goes directly into the trash, not into the desk drawer. So we can't produce leverage to change the definition. We have to look at the leverage that we have, the leverage that we're gifted with. And it's this: This government comes to, runs out of money at midnight, March 18. We are all staring at that deadline. And the House of Representatives has demonstrated clearly that we want to avoid having the President or Harry Reid shut this government down. We want to keep this government functioning in a responsible fashion. But I will say, Mr. Speaker, that functioning in a responsible fashion is not turning a blind eye to $105.5 billion. It is not wondering where this number came from. This number is in this CRS report. This is a Congressional Research Services report titled, ``Appropriations and Fund Transfers in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.'' It's written by C. Stephen Redhead, specialist in health policy, and it's dated February 10, 2011. In this, now that the numbers are in here, when you go through and highlight the numbers, we put it into a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet, Mr. Speaker, this spreadsheet shows the total of all these automatic appropriations. They come to $105.464 billion, and that's over a decade period of time. This is the minimum. This is the threshold number. It's not the maximum amount that can be spent. Just to give an example, here is one of the items in here of automatic appropriations, self-enacting appropriations that shows this. Let's see, it totals $10 billion through FY19. But this is for Medicare innovation. Medicare innovation. This is funds that goes to Congressional Medicare or Medicaid Services, CMS, FY11 it's $1 billion. And it's written in such a way that it's $1 billion every year, and here's the language, in perpetuity, Mr. Speaker. This is one example of Medicare innovation that gets appropriated automatically, written and hidden into the bill, a billion dollars every year for Medicare innovation that goes on in perpetuity. And it doesn't require an act of Congress. It's not an act of an Appropriations Committee in the 112th Congress that funds the FY12 or 11 or any subsequent year. This is the perpetual motion machine that keeps spitting out money. It will spit out money forever. It will spit out money until Congress conducts an affirmative act to shut off this funding. That's what I sought to do with the amendment that I offered in H.R. 1, which said, patterned off of the Vietnam War amendment, it said--and I'm going to do this in summary, too--notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds in this act, and no funds in any act previously enacted, shall be used to carry out the provisions of, in summary, ObamaCare. That language pulls out by the roots everything that's here in this CRS report and shuts off the automatic appropriations. There is an issue, also written into ObamaCare, another sleight of hand that took place. There are many others, but this one is particularly egregious that grants the authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to do transfers to fund the implementation of ObamaCare essentially at her discretion, and probably out of the U.S. Treasury, just to do the automatic appropriations; to grant that kind of authority to a bureaucrat, to circumvent Congress, to set up that authority, a transfer authority, which is the equivalent of an appropriations authority that goes on in perpetuity to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. While there are automatic appropriations to the tune of $105.5 billion for a decade that also go on in perpetuity without--so binding the future Congress in a way that requires an affirmative action on this Congress's part to shut it off. So, Mr. Speaker, where I am is this: I am done dancing around with all of this. I've looked at it. I've analyzed it. I've joined with some of my colleagues. I thank my colleague Michele Bachmann for raising this up in the media and doing as much media as she has done over this last week or so. I drove this with all that I had back when we were working on and building up to and passing H.R. 1. I will continue to do so. We must shut off this funding. We must do it affirmatively. We need to do it where we have leverage. There are only two places where there is leverage: that is in the continuing resolution in one place, and the other one is the debt ceiling. But what I have said is I will vote for no appropriations bill that funds Planned Parenthood. I will vote for no appropriations bill that should be shutting off the funding, the automatic funding especially to ObamaCare. That's where I stand. That's where I will stand. If enough Members of this Congress stand with me, we will put an end to ObamaCare. And we need do so early. We've got a lot of good work to do in this Congress. We can either look forward to a long, protracted battle, a war of attrition over this that goes on over the entire 112th Congress and on through the elections of 2012, including the Presidential election of 2012, or we can pull this tumor out by the roots, this malignant tumor called ObamaCare that is metastasizing as we speak while this automatic funding is being poured in and likely being transferred. We can put the brakes on it. We can pull it out by the roots, every bit of it, get rid of it lock, stock, and barrel. That's what we must do. It's our obligation, our pledge, and this House has voted to repeal it. This House has voted to unfund it, and every Republican in the House and every Republican in the Senate has voted to repeal ObamaCare. Two Federal courts have found it unconstitutional. It is irresponsible to tolerate the funding to ObamaCare while it goes on on our watch, while we have the power to shut it off, and while we understand that it is unconstitutional into the bargain. So, Mr. Speaker, I came to this floor tonight to urge this House to stand together, to write the language into the CR that I asked be written into H.R. 1 so we can go forward and join with the American people, the supermajority of the American people that have rejected ObamaCare, that want their liberty back, that want constitutional legislation coming out of this place. The very reason that there are 87 new freshman Republicans in this House of Representatives: Every one of them ran on repeal of ObamaCare. Every one of them voted to repeal it. They brought a new mandate here. Many of us have been standing here fighting it. I welcome them, God's gift to America, and I ask all, Mr. Speaker, to join with me. Let's shut off all of this funding to ObamaCare; that that is in the existing appropriations and that that is automatically appropriated, whether some might want to call it mandatory spending--I call it self-enacting automatic appropriations--written in a deceptive fashion, must be shut off, and I will continue to work on this cause with every effort that I have, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate your attention and your indulgence.

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. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is an honor and a privilege to address you here on the floor of the House. And I would say after listening to the presentation of my colleague from Illinois, it's been a little while since I've heard that; and I'm glad to hear the delivery you gave tonight. A little more time here on the floor would be good for this whole Congress. I appreciate the reference to our Founding Fathers and the years in the earlier foundation of our country, the principles that we agree on. I'm happy to be here. I came here to speak about some subject matter, Mr. Speaker, that I think it's important that you turn your ear to and that the Members of this Congress turn their ear to and that the people in the United States do the same thing. We are in very dramatic times in the history of this country. They encompass quite a continuum of a ride that we've been on. To go back and capture some of that, to frame the present moment that we're in, I take us back to a time, let's say back to a time in 1995. In 1995, shortly after Republicans won the majority for the first time in 40 years in this House of Representatives. There was a real test that took place. There was a test that took place on the determination on the part of the new majority after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, so to speak, that had determined that they wanted to bring this budget under control. They wanted to cut spending and put us on a path to balancing the budget. That was initiated in 1995 with a real determination, and also with the benefit of having a majority to work in cooperation with in the United States Senate. That determination to balance the budget brought about a challenge from President Clinton, a number of vetoes on the part of President Clinton that brought about the shutdown in the Federal Government. I remember those years. I was not in government at the time. I was a full-time owner of the construction company that I formed in 1975 that continues to this day. As I watched this in the news and I watched the debate on C-SPAN, I was inspired by the leaders that we had, the statesmen that we had, that stood and laid out the financial circumstances that we were in and the necessity to get Federal Government spending under control and the plan to bring forth a balanced budget. While this government was shut down because of the vetoes of President Clinton, my recollection is that it was over a $300 billion proposed cut in Medicare that was the crux of this matter, where the whole issue pivoted on it and a Nation watched as there were threats that there were parts of the Federal Government that wouldn't be providing services and others were scared that they would lose theirs; that Social Security checks wouldn't be coming in on time, et cetera, the American public began to roil and boil and rise up and push back. And over a period of time, and I don't think at the fault of the Members of the House of Representatives but by the circumstances of the life and time, the public began to have a higher level of anxiety about what would happen if the Federal Government continued with the shutdown process that they were in. At a certain point there was a request made for a unanimous consent agreement to go ahead and approve the funding in the Senate side. When that happened and the Senate passed a unanimous consent agreement, it washed over the House here and the majority in the House was compelled to accept what had been delivered from the Senate on that day. It was a sad day for me. As a businessman and a father and a person that was working to make my little part of the world as good as I could, I was disappointed that this Congress couldn't hold the line on spending, couldn't hold the line on this growth in government, and I believed that until I understood it from this perspective of standing here on the floor, Mr. Speaker, that the House had let us down. Today, I think it's a little bit different equation. I think they did as much as they could have done and under the circumstances because of the UC agreement in the Senate, the House didn't have much choice but to concede to the push that came from the Senate. But here is the point that I've learned on that day and I stand on at this day, Mr. Speaker, and that's this: There's not a time that the Federal Government can spend that's not agreed to by the House of Representatives. We start the spending, we start the taxes, and if we say no, it won't be spent, which means that if we hold our ground here, we can shut off the spending to anything that we choose to shut off. That's the way it was designed to be by the Founding Fathers, as was referenced by the gentleman from Illinois a little earlier. That's what the Constitution says. By the way, it's our obligation because we're the closest to the people. Every 2 years, we're up for election or reelection, and if this House is going to change hands, it can change hands within a 2-year period of time. It's a 24/24/7 campaign, meaning for 24 months, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week, we go on in perpetual campaign mode because we are always up for reelection. That means that the House here is more responsive and more sensitive to the people than is the Senate, which has a 6-year election span of time. They could put up a contentious vote, one that runs against the will of their constituents in the first couple of years or 3 or 4 years of their terms and can trust that the people might forget about it by the time they're up for reelection. Not so in the House. What we do here people are not going to forget about, and they should not. I want us to be accountable all the time, and I want a public that has a long memory, one that is very astute and very well informed and very well engaged. We've been watching a populace that has been fitting that mold more and more. We've watched, Mr. Speaker, as the tea party groups across the country have brought themselves forward and filled up the town squares and filled up the town hall meetings and surrounded this Capitol, have physically surrounded the United States Capitol, I believe, for the first time in the history of America. We couldn't put a helicopter up there and take the picture because of air security concerns; but I walked around this building, and I saw Americans here surrounding the Capitol--yes, holding hands. It wasn't just a human chain around the Capitol but a human doughnut around the Capitol. It was six- and eight-people deep all the way around the Capitol--no thin spots in it--and thousands of people in the corners who weren't part of the human doughnut but who were around this Capitol. They came here to say, Keep your hands off of my health care. We reject ObamaCare. We want no part of it. This went on for days and days. There were people who wouldn't leave these Capitol grounds. Finally, on that sad day last March, when ObamaCare finally passed with all of the legislative shenanigans that enabled that to happen--and they were considerable and they were unprecedented, Mr. Speaker--the people around here put up a groan, not necessarily of despair but of agony, because they'd seen American liberty ripped out by its roots and taken over--our bodies nationalized by the Federal Government, our health care; the Federal Government taking over our bodies, nationalizing our bodies and our skin and everything inside it and putting a 10 percent tax on the outside if you go to the tanning salon. That's what happened with ObamaCare--a nationalization of the second most sovereign thing we have. The first most sovereign thing we have is our soul. The second most sovereign thing we have is our body, our skin, everything inside it, our health. In the United States of America, we must have the right to manage our health to the maximum of our ability and not have the Federal Government diminish the options or take away the numbers of insurance policies we might buy or diminish the health care providers that are out there and put this into a one-size-fits-all. That's what ObamaCare did, and it's what it does if we let it continue to exist. The circumstances of the government shutdown in 1995 were within an economic environment that brought us to where we are today, and we should understand what that is, Mr. Speaker. We should know that, during that period of time, there was a dot-com bubble. There was this unnatural growth in the economy that was brought about because we had learned how to store and transfer information faster and more efficiently and more effectively than ever before. So there were millions of Americans who were investing in these dot-com companies who were involved in the technological era, in this modern dot-com era. They were investing because we could store and transfer information more effectively than ever before. They were investing in our ability to store and transfer but were not adjusting it to the necessity that that information and information transfer and manipulation ability helps our economy only to the extent that we can use it to provide a good or a service more effectively than before to provide efficiencies in our economy. We found a lot of ways over those last 15, 16 years to produce more efficiencies because of the technology that had developed, but a lot of dot-com companies went under because they didn't add that substance to add to the value of our overall economy. It isn't enough just to be able to store and transfer information better than ever before. You have to store and transfer it and help the efficiencies so that companies can provide profitability. That was the only thing other than if you could market this information for recreational purposes. That was the other component. Only two. So this dot-com bubble grew out of an overexuberance, an unnatural exuberance, that came from an optimism that we were going to take this economy someplace it had never been before. That bubble was bound to burst. I think it would have burst on its own, but there was a lawsuit filed against Microsoft which lanced the bubble, and the dot-com bubble burst. As it burst, it was like a blister on your skin, where it settles down into the hollow place underneath it. There was a dip in the economy, and I believe there was a concerted effort at that point to fill this hole created by the bursting of the dot-com bubble with unnaturally low interest rates and long-term mortgages that would allow people to build or buy houses that they otherwise couldn't have afforded, and it created a housing bubble. If you think of the dot-com bubble that burst, then when it collapsed, it went into a trough, Mr. Speaker, and that trough was sought to be filled by an unnatural bubble of the housing boom which was created. It was a housing boom that was in the process of unfolding and, I should say, of stretching itself to its max while President Bush was elected in 2000. Then the 2001 September 11 attacks came on our financial centers and this assault on America. That all came with this transition of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, with the growth of the unnatural housing bubble, with the assault on the United States on September 11 of 2001 on our financial centers, and with the attack on the American economy. That was coupled with all of the spending we needed to do to go to war in Afghanistan and subsequently in Iraq. Then in the middle of all of that, we spent billions on standing up the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, and all of the other security provisions that we put in place to make sure that America could be protected from more and more attacks from al Qaeda. All of this was going against our economy. Within all of that, there was also the passage of No Child Left Behind, which took more money, and there were other components of the growth in the compassionate conservatism that was driven by the Bush administration--all of this while we were at war. Now, if I add this all up, it's not a very good formula for a balanced budget, and we had that balanced budget in the late 1990s and rolling into the year 2000. When I came here to this Congress, elected in 2002 and sworn in here in January 2003, I came down here and said to the chairman of the Budget Committee, Where is our balanced budget? He said to me, We can't balance the budget. It's not possible to balance the budget, and you'll not have a balanced budget to vote on. I went back to my office, Mr. Speaker, and I began to put together a budget that would balance. My green staff was tasked with the job of putting together a budget that we could offer that would be balanced. We didn't get it completed. At that time, it was about a $2.7 trillion budget. To try to rewrite that in a balanced fashion as a freshman in Congress and with a staff that was at that point not yet experienced was a very, very difficult task. I got to the point where I wasn't confident enough to offer it. I wish now, looking back on it, that I would have offered a balanced budget, and I wish every year I would have offered a balanced budget. The red ink that we had was getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and the American people have not been informed as to how difficult it is to bring this budget to a balance. One of the important components of offering a budget that balances in this year tells us how big the problem is, and it has been getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I stood here and sat in this Chamber, and listened to the debate engaged in, and listened to the 30-Something Group. Night after night after night, they would come down here on the floor and make the argument that, if we'd just put them in charge, if they'd just have the gavels, they would fix this country. So eventually, over time, the Republicans lost the majority. The Democrats won the majority in 2006. Nancy Pelosi came in as Speaker. Now they had what they wanted. They were going to fix this country--and they did all right. They began to take that rather minor deficit and turn it into a huge deficit. They began to make energy more expensive and to take the prospects of success in America down instead of up. They were working on their vision of America, which is the transfer of payments, to tax the rich, and to transfer those payments to other people who aren't as fortunate--or I'll just say not as productive. They may or may not be as fortunate. While this was going on, the deficit was growing, the dependency class was growing, and that's what was going on. There was a concerted effort to borrow money from the Chinese and transfer that money over into the pockets of a growing dependency class to create a bigger dependency class because that was the political base that was supporting the Democrats--and still does in this Congress. And we watched this effort to expand the dependency class in America take place during the Pelosi Congress that began in 2007 through 2008. In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President and now this Congress went on steroids because they had a President that would sign the legislation instead of veto the legislation that was sent out of this Congress. And what we saw happen was an accelerated debt, and more and more money borrowed from the Chinese and the Saudis, and that $2.7 trillion or $2.8 trillion budget raised on up another $1 trillion. We've seen an additional $3 trillion beyond our means that has been spent under this Obama administration, supported by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. The American people rose up, Mr. Speaker. They knew that it was irresponsible and they filled up the town hall meetings. They saw what was happening. The summer of, I guess, two or three summers ago--and the year might come to me and I can be confident enough to speak it into the Record--but we had an energy crisis. We had gas at $4 a gallon. I believe that was the summer of 2008 that gas was at $4 a gallon. I went back and did town hall meetings that filled up with people. And they saw what was happening. And there was an effort in this Congress to shut down access to energy, a belief that if energy costs went up, people would use less. And I remember the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, saying ``I'm trying to save the planet, I'm trying to save the planet.'' Well, I think she believed that she was trying to save the planet. And what I saw happening was the actions were driving up the cost of energy. That $4 gas issue finally broke and it started to spiral back downwards by the time of the election in 2008. But we had, in August of that year, a monthlong energy debate taking place here on the floor. When we were ready to go home for that August we had several Special Orders that were cued up for the end of business that day. Democrats offered a motion to shut the place down, which would have shut off the Special Orders about energy. Some of the Members here decided we're going to keep talking, and so we came one after another. Eventually the Speaker shut the lights down--not completely off--shut the microphones off, shut the television cameras off and turned them sideways. And still we stood here for the month of August all the way into Labor Day every day making the case that we needed all energy all the time. Now that argument diminished when gas prices went back down again. It's before us again. And we must do an all-energy-all-the-time bill. I want to compliment Congressman Devin Nunes from California for all the work that he's done on legislation that I believe he'll introduce tomorrow on all energy all the time. America needs to have cheap energy. We need to have cheap energy in a way that--everything that we do costs energy. If you move anything, it takes energy. If you have any product, it takes energy to produce it, energy to delivery it, and energy to go pick it up and bring it home. And so the cost of energy is tied into the cost of everything that we have and do. America cannot be competitive with the rest of the world if we have high energy prices. And yet, that 2008 year drove energy prices up to $4 a gallon gas. We saw crude oil prices go way over $100 a barrel, and we're looking at that happening again. We've had the President move to shut down drilling offshore by Executive order. We've seen Democrats, in large numbers, oppose opening up ANWR for drilling, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I've been for drilling up there for a long time. I've gone up there. We drilled the North Slope in the early 1970s, and if it did anything with the environment it enhanced it, it didn't diminish it. And the strictest environmentalist we had couldn't fly over that country and point to a well and tell you how it had even defaced the landscape or broken up the scenery. The wells are submersible, they don't show up. There are not roads to each of them. They go out on ice roads in the winter time to service them. It's a good place to go and develop oil in the North Slope, and we need to go get it. We need to drill offshore. We need to drill in the Bakken region in North Dakota and Montana, and it spills over into Canada. And we need to continue to bring Canadian oil down into the United States and refine it here and be the best trading partner for the Canadians that they could possibly ask for. If we fail to do so, they will build a pipeline to the west, and they will pump that oil and the oil stands out to tankers that will take that oil over to China, Japan, and places in Asia. They will do the logical thing. We need to make sure the logical thing is here in the United States. Mr. Speaker, that's just the energy issue. And as this rolls forward, another summer we had the issue of health care. And as the effort came to pass ObamaCare here in the House of Representatives, the American people began to realize what was happening to their liberty, and they filled up the town hall meetings. We had town hall meetings in Iowa that got so big that they had to be moved outside because there wasn't room inside the biggest rooms we could find for all the people that came to, in a constitutional fashion, petition the government peacefully for redress and grievances. And they came, and they were well informed. Some of them had read the whole bill. And with great passion--and sometimes with little tact and sometimes with great deference--they made the case to me over and over again, they didn't want ObamaCare. They still don't want ObamaCare. And when it was passed here in the House they rejected it. And so I spent not quite a year of my life fighting the passage of ObamaCare. And since that period of time I introduced legislation to repeal ObamaCare immediately after its passage on that late night last March. We're coming up on a little past 11 months since it's been passed into law. The American people still reject it. They want their liberty, they want their freedom. They want to manage their own bodies, manage their own health care. They want a free market system. They want a doctor-patient relationship. And they sent 87 new freshmen here to the House of Representatives to ensure that ObamaCare would be repealed, that the funding to ObamaCare would be shut off, and that we would see no more implementation or enforcement of ObamaCare. And what has it brought us, these 87 new freshmen that stand together on that one square? Here's what it brought us, Mr. Speaker: H.R. 2, presumably the second-highest priority of the new Speaker of the House--it brought us a new Speaker of the House, Speaker John Boehner. And he sets the priorities, at least by tradition, for the first 10 bills that come out of the House, H.R. 1 through 10. And H.R. 2, the second-highest priority, was the bill that repealed ObamaCare. The legislation that I introduced almost 1 year ago and teamed up with Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and others, including Connie Mack of Florida and Parker Griffith of Alabama--no longer in this Congress--and a number of others that were part of this original effort to introduce legislation to repeal ObamaCare, and many others that signed on as cosponsors, and 178 that signed the discharge petition to repeal ObamaCare--the message was very clear. H.R. 2 was debated and passed the House of Representatives in the early stages here in the 112th Congress in January, when it sent it over to the United States Senate. That's an important step. Another important step is to do as I've said since at least the middle of last summer: At every appropriations bill introduce language in that bill that cuts off all funding that would be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. That's an essential part of this. I had gone back and read through the history of how this Congress shut down the funding for the Vietnam War and shut off a war that had gone on for over a decade. They did so by putting language in a continuing resolution that shut off the Vietnam War. And it was language that said, in 1974--and they started some of this in 1973, but in 1974 they said, Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds in this continuing resolution for appropriations during the Vietnam War, notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds in this act and no funds heretofore appropriated shall be used to carry out offensive or defensive operations in the air over the seas adjacent to or the land of Vietnam or its adjacent countries. It's a bit of a paraphrase, but it makes the point succinctly, I believe, Mr. Speaker. When I read the debate on that appropriations bill and when I read the language, that ``notwithstanding'' language that was put into the continuing resolution that shut off the funds going to Vietnam to the point where bullets that were being unloaded on the dock at Da Nang presumably were loaded back up again. None of the funds could be used to carry out offensive or defensive operations. It cut off the supply support for South Vietnam's military. And we wondered why was it that they ran in the face of the North Vietnamese that spring in 1975? They had nothing left to fight with, Mr. Speaker. Their munitions were gone. They were played out. They didn't have heavy weapons; they didn't have light weapons that were well supplied. And it brought about the collapse of the South Vietnamese self-defense. And millions died in the aftermath--not just in Vietnam. In Cambodia and other places in Southeast Asia. I disagreed with the decision that this Congress made, but I do agree that the language in the continuing resolution was effective in shutting off the funding to the Vietnam war; and similar language to the language that I've crafted to go into the appropriation bills from this point forward that says, essentially, notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds in this act and no funds previously appropriated shall be used to carry out the provisions of ObamaCare. That's the language that I sought to introduce and asked the Rules Committee to grant a waiver for--unsuccessfully, I might add. That's the language that I asked be written into H.R. 1, the continuing resolution. It's the language that I tried to get offered here on the floor during H.R. 1 that was ruled out of order. And the amendments that I was able to get passed worked in compatibility with Denny Rehberg of Montana and others--Denny Rehberg, who did very, very good work on this appropriations bill, on H.R. 1. Without his work, we might not have had anything that was in order. Because of his work, we had eight amendments that were in order that were voted on. Each of them cut off funding to ObamaCare in some version or another. I compliment all of my colleagues who worked on that. But now we've reached this point where we've got to draw a line. H.R. 1 took the hill. It said none of the funds in this bill are going to be used to implement ObamaCare. No funds are going to go to fund Planned Parenthood. No funds are going to be used to fund abortion anywhere in the world out of this continuing resolution. But that language was not included in the continuing resolution that was passed night before last here in the House--or maybe it perhaps was last night. My nights blur together. That language was not included. We need better language that I'm suggesting here included in the next CR. This government shuts down March 18 if we don't now extend its funding again. I'd like to get a solution that takes us to the end of the fiscal year. But standing on the hill and defending the hill to shut off all funding to ObamaCare since every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted to repeal ObamaCare, everybody in the House has voted to cut off all funding to ObamaCare at every opportunity--and that's eight of them--we have this opportunity now to write a new CR and to write the language into it that does unfund ObamaCare. Not just what's in the CR, but what is automatically appropriated. There are automatic appropriations, Mr. Speaker, that are in the ObamaCare legislation--I will say deceptively written--that appropriate funds that go forward whether or not this House acts, goes forward in perpetuity. Perpetuity. That means forever, if anybody out there is wondering what it is. And for a 10-year period of time, there are automatic appropriations of $105.5 billion over 10 years that automatically fund the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare. If this House doesn't act to shut it off, ObamaCare is implemented if we do nothing. Even if we pass the repeal, even if we don't authorize any new funding, $105.5 billion gets spent to implement it, which means that the roots of ObamaCare go deep. The deeper they go, the harder they are to rip out. And I've said it must be ripped out by the roots. Let's rip it out, Mr. Speaker, in this next CR. Let's retake the hill that we took with H.R. 1. Let's hold the hill. Let's stare the President down. Let's stare Harry Reid down. If we're not willing to do that, they will get everything that they're willing to fight for. This is the time for this new House with these new 87 Republican freshmen. Every Republican that's voted to repeal and unfund ObamaCare now needs to help us take the hill and hold the hill and stare the President down. Let's fund the government so it functions legitimately, but let's not cave in to a President who may well shut down the entire United States Government in order to preserve his pet project, ObamaCare, which has been rejected by the American people and this Congress resoundingly. With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your attention and 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. Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Iowa is pleased to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House, and I want to express my disappointment in the gentlemen who spoke before me. I usually come here to pick up my material for rebuttal. And as I listened to you talk about your affection for the Peace Corps, I didn't come up with a single thing that I seek to rebut here tonight. So I'll go off on the subject matter that I came to address, Madam Speaker, and that is the situation where we are in this country today with debt and deficit and the growth in government and the things that we must do to turn this country back around and put it on the right track. This House here this afternoon voted to pass a continuing resolution that has within it an aggregate of about $4.1 billion in cuts over a 2- week period of time that if you multiply or extrapolate that out to the end of the fiscal year, it comes in that neighborhood of about $61 billion in cuts which arguably holds the reductions in place. But it did specifically go in and make the cuts in areas where the President had recommended those cuts. It dialed down the contention and tried to find a way to find a solution and a resolution. A list of the President's recommendations I have, but I don't think I'm going to take the time or the trouble, Madam Speaker, to read them into the Record. I'll just say that it suffices to show that a number in the neighborhood of $2.7 billion would be to earmarks savings, and the termination of programs saving is about $1.25 billion, so we get to that number that's just slightly more than $4 billion. It's perhaps a victory. It's perhaps a success. It's perhaps a temporary one. I think most likely that it is. These cuts that were offered here today will, most likely, be met with an agreement down on the other end of the Capitol Hill building in the Senate that is run by Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. I think I saw some language in this appropriations bill that might directly affect him. That might be what helps convince him as well. Madam Speaker, this is a short-term piece that was designed to be a period of time that would allow the Senate to mull over the House position, which is H.R. 1. H.R. 1 is the bill that has the highest priority for the Speaker of the House. It's been traditionally the case. And 2 weeks ago, this Congress negotiated, debated, and offered amendments. Some 500 to 600 amendments were filed. Nearly 200 of them were debated and voted upon. And many of them that went in were cuts in spending or prohibitions from using that spending to implement certain policies that have been since rejected by this Congress. And, Madam Speaker, we need to remember that there was an election last November 2 of 2010. And to quote the President of the United States, he famously said after the election of November, 2008: We had an election, and we won, which means that he dictates the policy. Well, Madam Speaker, to the President of the United States, I would say, we had an election November 2. You didn't win that one, Mr. President. In fact, you declared it to be a ``shellacking.'' It was a shellacking. And the Republicans won the majority in this House by huge numbers. We're looking today at 87 new freshman Republicans and nine freshman Democrats, to give you a sense of the poor proportionality, or the disproportionality. The seats that were picked up have dramatically changed. The gavels all changed hands in the House of Representatives. The agenda changed. It has gone from an agenda that has been driven under the speakership of Nancy Pelosi for 4 years, of an agenda of accelerating spending, increasing government and pushing socialized medicine--which is what I have long declared ObamaCare to be. That doesn't shock anybody, Madam Speaker. It is common vernacular out in the central part of the United States at a minimum. And so we saw this push to grow government. We saw the President participate in, as a United States Senator, and accelerate his efforts as the President of the United States in the government take-over, first promoting a $700 billion TARP bailout program that was designed to pick up toxic assets that could have been far better picked up by the private sector if he would have just identified them and we would have exempted capital gains taxes on the profits that would be have been made. We would have seen private money go in and pick up these toxic mortgages in a large way and be managed--managed for a better result that would have kept more people in their homes. The list of good things goes on that might have happened had we had more free market solutions and less government intervention. But that $700 billion TARP plan was a mistake, in my view, Madam Speaker. And behind that came the call for the economic stimulus plan which was $787.5 billion that rolled up to around $816 billion for the economic stimulus plan. Not all of it was spent, but it was to keep unemployment below 8 percent. We know that it sailed up into the upper 9 percentile, 9.7 and above. It has dialed down now to around 9. But we have a lot of people who have given up and stopped trying. It is clear that the stimulus plan didn't stimulate the economy at all in the way that it was described or the way it was promised to us, but it surely added to the debt. We have seen about $3 trillion in unnecessary spending driven by this President. We have watched as proud companies went into hock to the Federal Government and found the Federal Government engaged in managing some of those companies. Three large investment banks were taken over by the Federal Government, at least by the power of management or influence--AIG, the insurance company, over $180 billion that flowed into AIG to protect other investors that had an interest in AIG, the insurance company, or in policies that they had offered that were guaranteeing the return on mortgage-backed securities, Madam Speaker. So there is $180 billion there. Three large investment banks and AIG, the insurance company. We saw Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac transition from quasi-government to government, to taxpayer guaranteed, stepping in to play a role in the majority of the mortgage loans in the United States, guaranteed by the taxpayers. I recall standing on this floor, the floor of the House of Representatives, October 26, 2005, listening to the most immediate past chairman of the Financial Services Committee arguing that he was never going to participate in bailing out Fannie and Freddie. And if anyone was considering buying stock in either one, they should not do so under the consideration that Barney Frank from Massachusetts would be engaged in bailing them out. And so he later became chairman of the committee, and that's what happened. We saw Dodd-Frank become law, which gives the Federal Government massive regulatory control over the financial institutions in America. We saw the government, the White House, takeover of General Motors and Chrysler. And we saw ObamaCare pass, which I have declared to be the nationalization of our skin and everything inside it. And by the way, it includes a 10 percent tax on the outside if you go to the tanning salon. That is over 51 percent of our economy swallowed up by the Obama administration and supported by the Pelosi House and the Reid Senate. And we come to this point where America can't take it anymore, Madam Speaker. We can't take it anymore. And all over the world they know that too much spending has put America in debt. It has put our currency in question. It has put our economy in an unstable position, and it guarantees that we will be in a long, drawn-out recovery because we have the overspending. We have the debt to service, which is pay the interest. And then we also have to eventually pay off the principal. And we are borrowing from the Chinese and begging them. And we are borrowing money from the Saudis and begging them. Yes, it affects our foreign policy. We are watching a foreign policy that is a conflagration in the Middle East. Country after country is blowing up and seeking to throw off the yoke of its long-term dictatorship ruler and replace it with--we are not sure what their ideals are, but they have hit the end of their patience line. So here we are. Here we are with a continuing resolution that the government is operating on today that was negotiated and passed here in the House and in the Senate in December. It extended the funding for the government over until March 4 of this year; midnight, March 4, which is somewhere around Friday night, I think. Maybe Thursday night. So there has been an action here on the floor to pass a continuing resolution to do temporary stopgap funding to keep the government running for another 2 weeks, up until March 18. And that CR has now been messaged to the Senate. And the Senate can decide if they want to take it up tomorrow or the next day, get it to the President's desk. If the President signs the CR, the government keeps running; if the President doesn't, the government shuts down. I am watching as my colleagues seem to think that there is one data point of message for them to learn from, that because there was a government shutdown in 1995, it was one that was pushed for by Republicans, it was driven by Republicans. They wanted to face President Clinton down and insisted that they pass a balanced budget and to get to a balanced budget. In spite of all of the things that happened in 1995 and in early 1996, that was the result, Madam Speaker. They shortly had a balanced budget, and that balanced budget came a lot sooner than it would have otherwise and it lasted at least until such time we were hit by September 11 and the calamity that sent this America into an overspending binge. I think we could have faced the calamity of September 11 without having to blow our budget in the way we did, but that is not what happened. But what did happen in 1995, if that is the only data point, I want to make this point, Madam Speaker. First of all, there are thousands and thousands of students all over America who are studying political science. Some of them are watching tonight. Some of them are reading in the paper the things that we say and we do, and they are analyzing it. They are listening to their professors analyze what goes on here in Congress, and they are listening to the instruction of the rules, the standards, the axioms that come from certain data points along the line of continuum of political history. And that one data point on that line of continuum of political history is the government shutdown of 1995, and some of it drug over into very early 1996, and the argument is that House Republicans lost that because they had to concede their position to the President and to the Senate. Well, it is a fact that the House had to concede. They did concede. It is also a fact that the Republicans that controlled the Senate at the time passed a unanimous consent agreement to go ahead and spend the money that was demanded by Bill Clinton and send it over here to the House. The House was in a position where they couldn't push that chain back uphill and President Clinton and the Senate got their way and imposed it over the House. But I will still say that there is not a dime that can be spent by the Federal Government if the House of Representatives insists that it not be spent. We have to concede and go along with it at some point, or it won't be spent. And the negotiating position that was there for the House Republicans in 1995 was one that was marginally stronger because they had at least a majority in the Senate. That is the difference in the dynamics. But it was also about $300 billion, as I recall, on Medicare spending. So whenever you put down a dollar figure and you try to stand on that as a principle, it is a different stance than if you put something that is principle down and stand on it. For example, whether we are going to spend $300 billion on Medicare in 1995, or 250 or 200 or 150 or 100 or no more, you will lose or gain people along that line of that continuum. If you want to cut Medicare by $350 billion, you would lose some people that might be with you at 300. And if you move the line up $400 billion, 450, you lose some people who might have been with you at 350 or 400. Money is something that there is a sliding scale. You cannot find a principle there that you can stand on. It is like going to an auction and seeing something that you want. And maybe you go to the auction and you decide I want to buy a bicycle and I am willing to pay $100 for that bicycle. If you go to the auction and the auctioneer is crying out he has a bid for $100, now he wants $101, do you pay that extra $1 and go home with the bicycle, something to show for it? Or do you say, no, that was my principle. My principle was I am not going to spend more than $100. Well, some people live by that principle. I do, occasionally. But it is not a principle that is tied to anything that is definable from a sense of right and wrong. It is a percentage scale. If $100 was the right number, it is only 1 percent wrong to pay $101. If you get it for $99, do you have any more virtue? No, you just got a bargain from what you anticipated. But when you stand on a principle, it is a different story. The principle here that is better for the House to stand on than the principle of the $300 billion in 1995 is the principle that we must not be funding ObamaCare willfully with appropriations bills here in the House. We must not do so because every Republican and a handful of Democrats, and there will be more, voted to repeal ObamaCare. We passed the repeal and sent it over to Harry Reid. Furthermore, now that that has happened, every Republican, with H.R. 1, has voted to shut off any funding that can be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. That is also a fact. They are principled votes. They are not votes that are measured on the dollar figure. In fact, most people who voted in that fashion didn't know how much money it actually saved us for voting to repeal ObamaCare. And it is hard for me to take a position on that. I'll just say that the chairman of the Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, has used the words about $2.6 trillion is the spending that is saved by repealing ObamaCare. That is the best number we have, and I don't disagree with that. I accept that number, but it is hard to come down to something and then argue are we doing it because of the money savings. Did we vote to repeal ObamaCare because it would stop the spending of $2.6 trillion? I think not, Madam Speaker. I think it's part of it. It's part of the equation--and we can't afford it--but there are many other principles. The most important one is: ObamaCare takes American liberty, and puts it into the hands of government to manage our, I'll say, the second most sovereign thing we have, which is our bodies and our health. That's what's wrong with ObamaCare; it's a matter of principle. It's the takings of American liberty that must be stopped. No, we can't afford it, and it's money that's better spent by doctor-patient relationships and by individuals making decisions on their health insurance and moving on down the line with those conservative principles. We need to stand on principle. We have this opportunity here in this 112th Congress to stand on principle. The stance needs to be that we will not vote to fund ObamaCare. I'm going to add to this that neither shall we vote to fund Planned Parenthood, and I shall be looking for ways to unfund every other entity like them that promotes abortion or provides abortion as a matter of practice in their facilities. Planned Parenthood has invested in promiscuity, but that's a longer discussion than I will engage in tonight, Madam Speaker. I do think these two issues are tied very closely together going forward in that ObamaCare funding must be shut off, and we cannot be asking our Members to vote again to appropriate funds that can be used to fund ObamaCare. Some will be saying we didn't have ObamaCare funding in this short-term CR, just as they said there wasn't ObamaCare funding in the CR that passed at the end of December that takes us to the 4th of March, but here is the answer to this: There are at least 21 different components to ObamaCare that are beneficiaries of funding that go into the various departments. There is no prohibition for that money going into or for being used to implement or to force ObamaCare. There are at least 21 different areas. Then when you look at the money that's in there, we discover altogether the automatic appropriations. There was something like $4.9 billion for the balance of this year that was automatically appropriated. That's not prohibited in this CR. We didn't get it into H.R. 1, actually, either. But the 21 programs are there, and the money is there for them. I can roll those into the Record, Madam Speaker, but there is another component to this that is a blanket component: It is language in ObamaCare that gives the authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, to do intradepartmental transfers so that she can use that money to implement and force ObamaCare at her discretion. We failed to shut that language off, too. So this appropriations bill that passed today, H.J. Res. 44, the 2- week CR, has 21 places in it that could fund ObamaCare, and it still allows for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to take intradepartmental transfers to use at her discretion, at will, which funds ObamaCare. Then the Pence language, the Pence amendment that he has worked on so valiantly and for so long to shut off all funding to Planned Parenthood, was passed by this House in H.R. 1. It became a component of the position of the House that was delivered here at about 4:30 on a Saturday morning, a week ago last Saturday morning. Those components, I believe, need to be part of everything we do going forward. I will stand and promote those, and I will stand with those who will stand for life. I simplify it when I say the Pence language shuts off funding to Planned Parenthood, but there are other components that also were left out. One is the Dornan amendment, which prohibits funding for abortions in D.C. There is the Mexico City policy that shuts off funding to abortions in foreign lands, which we've always done, which is not part of it. The international population control and planning fund gets money still, along with Planned Parenthood. This is what has taken place, Madam Speaker, in this short-term CR. Boy, it's hard for many Members to vote for it. They want to be team players, and I appreciate that sentiment. From my standpoint, I have an obligation to my constituents and to God and country to do the best job I can to serve, and it goes in the opposite order: God, country. Constituents are right up there with country. Sometimes the best interests of my district are not always going to be the best interests of America. I haven't had that conflict that I can articulate yet, but if that comes, I'm pretty confident my constituents will understand the priority. We have to do the right thing for the long term for our country, and the right thing is for us to stand on principle and to shut off this funding to ObamaCare, to shut off this funding to Planned Parenthood, to make sure that we are standing on solid, moral, principled ground so that we have a firm place from which we can then negotiate those things that are negotiable with the Senate, which, by the way, is a proxy for the President of the United States. So, if it can be negotiated with the Senate, it's also negotiated, in my view, with the President. In a moment, I'm going to look forward to yielding to my friend from Texas, who has just arrived on the floor, but I want to also add this: For weeks now, the Democrats in the House and the Democrats in the Senate have been clamoring for a government shutdown. They seem to be determined to shut the government down. They seem to think that, if there's a government shutdown, they're going to win that debate, and they're going to maybe pick up seats in the House and pick up seats in the Senate, and they'll be able to impose their government growth/ government spending/expansion of debt proposals that they've been pushing for the last 4 years, which have failed and which the American people have rejected. We should not be deluded into believing that Democrats somehow want to go through this period of fiscal austerity. They want to drive this spending up, and they want to have more excuses for increasing taxes. If government grows and taxes grow, at some point the taxes grow to the point where they consume everything, and then those business entities that I talked about being taken over by this White House become the small part of a long list of business entities that are taken over. I've spoken of this before. On the Web site, the Socialist Web site, they say: We don't want to nationalize everything like the Communists. We're just Socialists. We only want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies. Thanks a lot. Give the barber, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker some relief. Thanks a lot for that. They want to manage the Fortune 500 companies ``for the benefit of the people affected by them.'' That's the unions. The President handed shares in General Motors and Chrysler over to the unions, who had no skin in the game, no equity invested, but he handed the shares over to them anyway. It's right off the Socialist Web site, and the Progressives that are left in this Congress adhere to the agenda of the Socialists, which is on the Web site. But Democrats who are clamoring for a shutdown fail to understand that the American people are more sophisticated today than they were in 1995. They've seen this movie before, and they fear it ends with Republicans giving in to the demands of tax consumers. I have that same fear, but I'm encouraging all of us on this side of the aisle and those discerning Democrats who remain--and there are some--to join with us in putting an end to ObamaCare, in putting an end to funding for Planned Parenthood, in putting an end to overspending. Let's get serious about real cuts. Let's get serious about holding the line. When every Republican in the House voted to repeal ObamaCare and when every Republican voted to unfund ObamaCare, then, by golly, that's our obligation. That's what we must do. That's what we shall do. Madam Speaker, I'd be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas, my friend Judge Gohmert.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas. He sparked some things in my mind that in about the 6 minutes we may have, a little bit of dialogue with regard to that. One point that I wanted to make about what's going on with the strategy on ObamaCare is that I've spoken significantly about how this House has voted to repeal it, this House has voted to shut off the funding to it at every single opportunity. And if there's a strategy out there that says we're going to do death to ObamaCare by a thousand cuts, I'd ask those folks that are concerned about a real showdown with the President on ObamaCare to think about what really happened not so much in the 1995 shutdown, which I said earlier I don't think is applicable under these circumstances. There's a better issue to understand. And that is in 1998 when the impeachment of President Clinton was brought up, when America found out about what was going on in the Oval Office and in the room next to the Oval Office in too stark of detail for the children of America to be so rushed in to the birds and the bees discussion in the way that they were, Madam Speaker.