Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized by you to address you here on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. I came to this floor this evening to take up a topic that I think is essential to the future of our country for our moral foundation. Yet, as I have listened to the gentleman from Maryland's presentation, there are a few moments I would like to spend with the other perspective before I move into the topic I came to address. I go back as far as the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), who used the reference and said that stare decisis is binding precedent. Well, Mr. Speaker, I want the American people to know that stare decisis is a Latin term, a legal term that means, once the case is decided, it deserves deference. It has already been decided; it deserves deference, but where it has never been a binding precedent. There have been a number of times that the Supreme Court has turned 180 degrees on what the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee) has called a binding precedent. I could go through a list of those, Mr. Speaker. I think it is important to note that accepting a decision of a previous Supreme Court as if somehow it were binding precedent and then settled law and then incorporate it into the Constitution itself would be a very erroneous concept to carry into the Supreme Court itself, because we have to go back and evaluate that these were mortals that made the decision in the Supreme Court and the other courts and they aren't always right. And if a case is not soundly reasoned, it needs to be reconsidered. So I appreciate Justice Clarence Thomas' view on stare decisis. Essentially, it doesn't exist. If you want to evaluate the reasoning of a previous Court, that is a good thing to do because they have already thought it through and they have already written on it. There are already majority opinions and dissents that are generally written. Yet, to be bound by that, really handcuffs any future decisions. So it is worth looking at the decisions of the previous Court, but we can never be bound by them. So I take issue with the gentlewoman from Texas' position that stare decisis is binding precedent. It is never binding precedent. Stare decisis is an indicator, and it is informative. We have to go back to the text of the Constitution and the various amendments, and we have to understand what they were understood to mean at the time of ratification. Otherwise, the Constitution no longer is a guarantee from generation to generation. It is just simply an artifact of history that allows the Justices to hold up and say: Hey, we are bound by stare decisis; we can only make a decision that narrows things down; and we are essentially trapped into a funnel of reason that brings about a predictable conclusion that might be completely erroneous. To give an example, Mr. Speaker, I would say that the series of decisions that were made by the Supreme Court--and the first one I would start with, and I am going to get to abortion in this decision: Griswold v. Connecticut. In the early sixties, the Court had a case before them where the State of Connecticut had banned contraceptives, not just contraceptives in the school, as one might say today, but contraceptives that would be used in marriages. So there was a case. Griswold took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled that it was a right to privacy of married couples to be able to purchase contraceptives. There is no right to privacy that is stipulated in the Constitution. But it was a decision that was made by the Supreme Court that, if respected as stare decisis, now the next Court would be bound by it, and the next Court was. So the Supreme Court ruled that Connecticut couldn't ban contraceptives to married couples because they had a right to privacy to purchase those--as illogical as it sounds, even as I say it, Mr. Speaker, married couples had a constitutional right decided by Griswold v. Connecticut to purchase contraceptives within the State of Connecticut and the Nation, as the decision turned out. Well, that decision didn't flow over into unmarried couples. So unmarried couples went to court, and they sued. And it became the Eisenstadt decision, which concluded that any rights that are bestowed upon married couples with regard to right to privacy in purchasing contraceptives also must be available to unmarried couples who might be cohabiting or having a relationship in whatever way and they should be able to purchase contraceptives, too. So this right to privacy established by Griswold, expanded by Eisenstadt--see, how this is bringing us down to an irreversible conclusion, Mr. Speaker? This right to privacy was then argued before the Court in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. And the Supreme Court of the United States concluded in the emanations and penumbras that there was this right to privacy that extended to abortion itself. So when I hear the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee) say stare decisis is binding precedent--if we are going to accept as binding precedent that there is a Court-manufactured right to privacy in Griswold, reinforced by Eisenstadt that is the foundation for the irrational, illogical, and unconstitutional reasoning that has brought about the abortion of 58.5 million babies since 1973 and all because a Court chased the rationale down a narrower and narrower path that they were bound to make decisions only on the judgment of the previous Court--it left very little of the Constitution to be reviewed. If we would have had nine Justice Thomases on that Court, they would have concluded this: first, that precedent didn't count. Eisenstadt, look at it if you like, look at the reasoning if you like, but they are not bound by it. Griswold v. Connecticut, they are not bound by it. In the case of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, I might add, the combination of those two cases together gave abortion on demand in America for any reason or no reason at all from an irrational foundation that began with a stare decisis view that came from an activist Court that, I believe, wanted to come to that conclusion anyway. I think they believed that society was moving along and that society was going to get to the place where they supported abortion. They just thought they would just go ahead and beat the Congress to the punch or beat the State legislatures to the punch and impose a right to abortion on America, and that is what they did. We saw this happen in our country. We saw this happen in different places around the world, and now it is still being pushed in some of the countries in the world. Mr. Speaker, if there is anybody listening from the nation of Chile, I would suggest to them: Back away from that push to legalize abortion in your country. We have seen what has happened in America. Twenty percent of the pregnancies in America now end in abortion, and the death toll of a bell that would ring for 58.5 million babies that have been aborted since 1973. It is a missing component of two going on three generations. And those little babies today, Mr. Speaker, had they been given that right to life that is guaranteed to any born person in the United States--if someone commits mass murder in the United States of America, mass serial murder in the United States of America, mass serial murder in multiple locations in multiple States in a ghastly and ghoulish and blood-thirsty way, we take them to court and say: You are innocent until proven guilty. You may have, by my description, committed capital crimes that would be facing the death penalty. Federal murder, it might be, in multiple States that have the death penalty. No matter how ghastly a murderer we have, we give that murderer first the presumption of innocence. They are innocent until proven guilty. We give them an opportunity to be tried by a jury of their peers. They are sometimes tried in the court of public opinion on top of it. If they don't have their due process--and often it is concluded by a judge along the way that they don't--they can appeal their death penalty all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States. Why? Because they have a right to life because they are deemed and legally are a person not only in the eyes of God, but in the eyes of American law. In the eyes of American law, the most ghastly murderer that I can describe has a right to life and a right to due process until such time as the full appeals all the way up the board have been heard. If they are sentenced to death, then it must be the most merciful death that we can possibly devise in this country or the judges will rule that it is unconstitutional, cruel, and inhuman punishment. That is how we treat the most ghastly murderers in America. But the most innocent among us, those 58.5 million little babies that are there curled up in an innocent little fetal position in their mother's womb with little fingers, little toes, feet, hands, eyes, nose, ears, and a mouth--no teeth yet, but that mouth has an expression on it; it smiles; it frowns; it twists itself around--those babies can feel pain. They can put their hands together, and they can move around. The expressions on their faces, we now see them through 4D ultrasound. Mother after mother, father after father, grandparents, brothers, sisters, uncles, even before the baby is born, they bond with that little baby through the ultrasound. We have always known, the Catholic church has always known, and so have many of the other Christians organizations and many entities around this country and around this world have always known that that baby's life began at the moment of conception. If you look at our society, we don't have a lot of sympathy, as our society is concerned, for those beings that can't scream for their own mercy. That baby is silent. That baby can't cry out from the womb. The ring of that baby's cries doesn't echo in our ears. We turn our mind away from it. We turn our eyes away from it. And we listen to people say: Well, it is choice. Well, the baby is never given the choice. This little baby that could be the next Einstein, the next Lincoln, the next Ronald Reagan, the next Billy Graham, how many of those gifts to the world are in that mountain of guilt that is poured upon the United States of America that numbers now over 58.5 million? We will never know the answer to that question, Mr. Speaker. We will never know. We cry out to the conscience of the American people, the conscience that especially now knows because of ultrasound that that baby's life begins at the moment of conception, and science can prove it when we can detect a heartbeat. When we can detect a heartbeat, we know that is life and we know that it is innocent human life. For the purposes of the law today, it is innocent, unborn human life not protected by law, not even close to the first protection we offer the most heinous murderer that we can devise. Yet, they are the most innocent. I remember Father Jonathan Morris was speaking one day as I was watching him in the morning, and he was talking about the ladies in the church. When a baby cries, they pick the baby up and they go outside the church in order to get that baby's cries away from the congregation so the rest of them can hear the sermon. He said it doesn't bother him when there are babies crying in his church because those are the only innocent voices in that church, the voice of babies. The most innocent that we encounter are actually in the womb, not yet born, not yet with an opportunity to fill their lungs full of air and scream for their own mercy. We have to speak for them. We have to defend them. We have to protect them. We know by our conscience, we know by our science, we know by natural law, we know by what is innate with us in our intuition that life has to begin at a moment. You can't take a life by accident. If there is going to be an error, it must be on the side of life. I know that when I was able to hold our firstborn, I looked at him, and there was an aura about him. I was so amazed that that miracle was in my hands, and that was an extension into another generation from the long line of families that we all have and share and enjoy. I looked at him, and I thought, could anybody take this little baby's life now, now that he is here, now that he is minutes old; could anybody take his life now? Of course they could not. Well, some can, and we do our best to lock them up or send them in the next life. But to take the life of a newly born baby is one of the most ghoulish things that I can think of, and so I thought, this little life is sacred. I know there is a soul in him. I know there is. And so could anyone take his life the minute before he was born? Is he any different? What transformed him as he came through the birth canal? He is not transformed. He is the same baby. He could be born by cesarean. His life is as sacred, and as unique, and as much created in God's image, and as much as a soul within him, born by cesarean as if he comes through the birth canal. So could anybody take his life the minute before he was born, or an hour, or a day, or a week, or a month, or a trimester, or two, or three? What transforms this child through that period of time that I have described as 9 months? What transforms them? So if you think back through from the minute before a little boy or an innocent little baby girl is born to the hour of the week, the hour of the day, the week, the month, the trimester, there is no dramatic moment from the moment of conception, because conception is the dramatic moment. It is the instant, the moment life begins. At that moment, if God doesn't already put the soul in that little baby, I am completely convinced that it happens at that moment of conception when the genetics of the father and the mother are joined together in a unique being has begun, that has such a robust growth that if we think of it in terms of the multiples of size from the fertilized egg until the 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-pound baby is born, the dramatic growth that is there, that little baby has a soul in it from that moment. And that is human life. It is nurturable, and it must be protected, must be protected in law. So what we have done is, we have introduced the Heartbeat bill here in the United States Congress, and we have two-and-a-half dozen or so cosponsors on the bill. This is the first time I know of that this legislation has been introduced in the United States Congress, but it protects the life of every little baby who has a heartbeat. It requires that if any abortionist seeks to commit an abortion, that they first check for a heartbeat. That heartbeat can be discovered as early as 16 days from the moment of conception. I would like to have a bill that protected life from the moment of conception, and I would support such a thing. We can't scientifically prove conception, but we can scientifically prove heartbeat, and everybody knows, every mother knows, every father knows, every human being knows that if a heart is beating, there is life. And you can't describe this life as anything other than human life. It is human life. It is innocent life--nothing more innocent than a conceived little baby. We need to protect human life in all of its forms, from conception to natural death. This bill, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017, protects those babies from the moment their heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. And if an abortionist is determined or decides to commit an abortion, they must first check for a heartbeat under this law, and they must keep the records to demonstrate that they have done so. If they fail to do so, they would be facing a Federal penalty of a fine, imprisonment up to 5 years. The mother is not penalized in this. She is not subjected to this. It is the abortionists who are subjected to this statute. I would reiterate: if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected. Mr. Speaker, some people will be wondering--and they will be wondering, well, what kind of support does legislation like that have across the United States of America? So we have a poll here that is on this easel, and this is the question about the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, and we went to over 1,000 adults in America and asked for their opinions. Those 1,002 interviews were conducted, as a matter of fact, and this has a sampling error that is about as small as you get in a legitimate poll. Sometimes you will see them in 5\1/2\ percent or more, but this is down to a little over 3 percent accuracy, and it says: Do you agree or disagree or have no opinion on supporting the Heartbeat bill that would outlaw abortion in America? If a heartbeat can be detected, it would outlaw abortion unless there was a physical threat to the physical life or health of the mother. Sixty-nine percent of Americans agree with this legislation. That is across the spectrum. It is across the board, Mr. Speaker. That includes Democrats, no party, independents, and Republicans, and it includes 13 percent of the people who had no opinion. Those that disagreed are 18 percent over here in the orange, Mr. Speaker. So we are sitting here with 69 percent of Americans who support legislation that would protect innocent, unborn human life from the moment that a heartbeat can be detected. Because we know that life is precious, and every one of those lives contributes to the well-being of humanity. No matter what kind of life we may think they experience, they are a blessing to their father, they are a blessing to their mother, they are a blessing to their family, they are a blessing to this country. And I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that when you break this down, 69 percent in favor that support the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, only 18 percent oppose. And I think some of them will do that for political reasons, but they would have a hard time making the argument if they are looking in the eye of someone who has survived an abortion. I have never heard one of the pro-abortion people look at one of the survivors of abortion and say: You should have never been born. No one does that. They don't have the nerve to do so because they know that each one of us contributes to the well-being of society, and each one of us are a gift from God. And His gift to us are the tools that we are born with, and our job is to develop them and utilize them for the well-being of everyone else. Here is the breakdown politically: 86 percent of Republicans support the Heartbeat bill, only 6 percent of Republicans disagree. I don't know why they do, but 6 percent do. I don't know what their argument is. In the center, we have the graph of the Democrats; 55 percent of Democrats--they are the ones who would be lined up against this, I would think, but it is a significant majority. In fact, if this were a political election, Mr. Speaker, that would be a landslide at 55 percent of Democrats supporting the Heartbeat bill. Now, we are looking for some Democrats to sign on it. Maybe they will reflect the will and wishes of their constituents. Fifty-five percent of Democrats support the Heartbeat bill, 25 percent oppose--more than 2 to 1. The undecided are in orange. That is 25 percent. So it is well over 2 to 1--2\1/2\ and actually, bordering on 3 to 1, support among the Democrats for this. If you go to the Independents, 61 percent of Independents support the Heartbeat bill, and 13 percent of the Independents oppose, and 27 percent of the--so it is 61 percent support among Independents, and 55 percent support among Democrats, 86 percent support among Republicans. That is the party breakdown for those who think of this in politics. I think of this in human terms, Mr. Speaker. I think of this in terms of picking up little babies and holding them in my arms, and feeling that love, and that special smell that a little baby has, and the gurgle, the laughter, and the crying. It is all part of life. When I think of the privilege of being able to go to church with almost my whole family and taking up, well, I guess last Sunday, parts of three pews and not all of all three. And I think of this little baby that got passed back to me, and he is kind of an in-law shirttail relation. I had never held him before. He snuggled up in my arms there at the end of mass, and I was able to carry him out. We have also little children who come out of the pews to run up front at the beginning of the collection to carry their dollar bill up and put it in that basket. They are being raised right, those little kids. They will be fine. But I see them bubbling out of the pews and coming, pouring down the aisle, and lining up there. Sometimes they trip and run into each other, and knock each other down, and help each other up, and little big brother or sister will go help the little 2-year-old back again. When you see that joy and you hear that gurgling laughter, and you think: 58.5 million babies never even had a chance to do that--never had a chance to learn, to love, to laugh, to play, to fall in love, to have their own children, to feel that joy of family, to experience this life in this wonderful country that we have. All denied them, denied them because the Supreme Court came down with a ruling that said: Well, stare decisis, the right to privacy, extended right to privacy. In the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution is a decision that they would support abortion on demand. Well, we know that the Court has also left room--and we will have a new Court soon--the Court has left room for us to make this argument before the Court. And if anyone should stand up and say that we shouldn't move this legislation to save the lives of the next 58.5 million babies because a Court might rule it unconstitutional, my challenge back to the Court, Mr. Speaker, is: it was an erroneous decision in Roe v. Wade. It was erroneous in Eisenstadt, it was erroneous in Griswold, and it was erroneous in Doe v. Bolton. And all of those together are bound up--don't be hiding behind stare decisis, Supreme Court. Let's look at this right to life that we have, and the right to equal protection under the law that is guaranteed to us in the 14th Amendment, and that is extended out to all of the States. And if we can't execute the most heinous murderer without a due process all the way to the Supreme Court, and then do so in the most painless and merciful way possible while babies are being torn apart in the womb, then what have we come to as a nation? We have the chance to rectify this, Mr. Speaker. We have an opportunity, an opportunity to move the Heartbeat bill, an opportunity to send a message from the House to the Senate and to all of America. Americans have an opportunity to weigh into us--to sign onto this bill, to move this, to save the lives of all of the babies who are born who have a heartbeat. If a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected. That needs to be our rallying cry across this country and across this land. Forever. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time from the gentleman from Texas, I appreciate the approach that you brought to this Congress. It is not hard for me to get behind, and I support legislation that is brought by Mr. Babin. He has been looking at the safety and security of the American people and coming up with good, solid, principled ideas on how to restore and strengthen our national security. Each of those two pieces of legislation, the numbers which I did not know until now, H.R. 81 and H.R. 82, are pieces of legislation that I and many other conservatives have signed on to in our endeavor to make Americans safe again. This great America, making it great again, part of it is to make America safe again. I would add to this, Mr. Speaker, that I am appalled at the audacity of the judges who are either out on the left coast or well beyond the left coast, as far west as Hawaii, who would just step in without any kind of a constitutional, foundational background in their arguments or decisions, without citing the statute is this, that Congress has the authority to control immigration in the United States of America. If we want to pass a piece of legislation and it is in law that says the only people that we will let come into America are green Martians, then that is the law, and that is what a judge is obligated to determine when they read the law. But on top of that, not only does Congress set the terms on what legal immigration is into America--and it is clear and it is defined-- but we grant the President of the United States the authority to determine those who will not be allowed to come into America, just like any other sovereign nation-state in the world that controls its borders. And if we don't have the authority, if Congress doesn't have the constitutional authority that is clearly defined, and if the statutes that are produced by Congress and signed into law by previous Presidents do not set that statutory authority on who comes into America but a judge someplace in Seattle or Hawaii can supercede the will of the American people, can supercede the supreme law of the land, the Constitution of the United States, can supercede Federal law just because, in their whim, they think a law might mean something that it doesn't say, that is what we are dealing with, Mr. Speaker. I intend to move further on this and examine these judges more closely. As a matter of fact--and I thank the gentleman from Texas. But we had a hearing either earlier this week or last week--and my weeks run together, Mr. Speaker--and this hearing was a hearing where we discussed some of this statutory authority. In fact, it was this week. I remember one of the witnesses, and the witness was a Sheriff Hodgson out of Maryland; and he testified that a State legislator in Maryland had learned that there was likely to be an ICE raid into a particular community, and the representative posted on their Facebook, essentially: Don't go out of your homes. Be careful because you might be picked up and deported if you are illegally in America. That heads-up from an elected State official, I asked him this question, and his answer concurred with my opinion, that it is a direct violation of 8 U.S.C. 1324, which is a Federal ban on harboring illegal aliens. To harbor them, to encourage them to come here or stay here-- and it can be either willfully or for financial purposes. If that is the case, they are facing a Federal felony of up to 10 years in a penitentiary; that is, if it is for profit. But if it is not for profit, then they are only facing 5 years in a Federal penitentiary for facilitating illegal immigration, harboring illegal aliens. When I read the statute into the Record before the Judiciary Committee, it was clear to me that Sheriff Hodgson had read that statute multiple times. I don't know that he had it completely memorized, but he knew exactly what it meant; and he concurred with me that I believe the Justice Department should be investigating, should be looking into State legislators or any citizen--they are subject to the same laws as all the rest of us--who is harboring illegal aliens. We should bring this on the highest profile level that we can. And furthermore, we have a judge out in Washington, again, who, according to news reports, helped facilitate an illegal alien who was before this judge's court to go out the back door when there were ICE agents waiting, guarding the front door. That also is a violation of 8 U.S.C. 1324, harboring illegal aliens. So Congress passes laws, and these laws are to be respected; and we cannot be a real civilization if we don't have respect for the rule of law, Mr. Speaker. And not only has respect for the rule of law been so eroded, we had a previous President, and that is President Obama, who openly and blatantly violated the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, according to his definition. Twenty-two times Barack Obama said he didn't have the authority to grant a legal status to the people who are defined as DREAMers, the deferred action for children of--I guess they say--well, it is children of aliens is what it really is. But President Obama, 22 times on videotape and who knows how may times it wasn't on videotape, said: I don't have the constitutional authority to change the law. Congress has to do that. When he was pressed to change the law and he said he didn't have that authority those 22 times, then he concluded that he could get away with it anyway. He issued the order, the DACA order--two of them that are really openly and blatantly unconstitutional. DAPA, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, that is how they called it. Again, it is parents of those who were born here to illegal parents, and we need to move the birthright citizenship bill to put an end to that. The President knew he didn't have the authority for that DAPA program, and he knew he didn't have the authority for the DACA program, and he said so at least 22 times. Then he issued those orders, and the executive branch of government began to carry out the President's orders, which are in violation of the law. So he has commanded the executive branch of government to violate the law. Subsequent to the DACA order going out, President Obama went to Chicago and gave a speech and said publicly--and this is on videotape, too. He said this: I changed the law. Mr. Speaker, no President ever had constitutional authority to change the law. It is Congress that writes all the laws in the House and in the Senate. The President gets an opportunity to sign them into law, and, as President, he is free to lobby the Congress to change the law. But no President should have the audacity to stand up in front of his hometown and the world and say: I changed the law. Now, do we remember, Mr. Speaker, that there was a big national outrage over that statement or over the constitutional violations? No. There wasn't a great outrage. I am greatly outraged, and I remain outraged, but the American people were relatively complacent about this. Now, there were plenty of them that did some work on this, true, but it wasn't like a big cultural movement. I would remind you about what happens when we are extremely offended by violations of law and decency. That is when Republicans and Democrats get together and do something about it. One of those things I can think of, Mr. Speaker, is this. I reach in my pocket and I pull out--this is an acorn. I carry an acorn in my pocket every day, and I have done that for, oh, I don't know how long now--pretty close to 10 years. But I brought an amendment to the floor of the House of Representatives to cut off all funding to ACORN about 2 years before we heard of the videotapes that came out of ACORN that were collected by James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles because I knew what was going on. I had had an investigator that was feeding me information. And I came to the floor and made an effort to cut off all the funding that was supporting ACORN, which admitted later on to 440- or maybe 444,000 false or fraudulent voter registration forms that they paid people commissions to produce. Some of those forms included Mickey Mouse and the entire Dallas Cowboys football team, all registered to vote. ACORN employees were paid on commission to collect the voter registrations. They were subverting our electoral process. They were advocating all kinds of things from within ACORN and helping to facilitate, as we know the allegation, prostitution and others. This was so bad--this was so bad that Democrats were outraged. I know, Mr. Speaker, it is hard to fathom this now. But Democrats were outraged. Republicans were outraged. And when those videos became replete throughout the American consciousness, you--and I say, Mr. Speaker, I say the American people rose up and they called their Members of Congress, and they did interviews on TV, and they wrote letters to the editor. It was the talk of the coffee shop and the church and the school and the work and the town. America revolted at the idea that we would be sending hundreds of millions of tax dollars to an organization that was so immoral and so corrupt. Underneath that was the corruption of our electoral process. So we came together here with moral and constitutional outrage and cut off all funding to ACORN or any of their affiliates or subordinates or successors, and that has been part of the appropriation process here ever since. I carry this acorn in my pocket to remind me, to remind me not to ever let something like that happen again. But also, it is a point of pride for me when I hold this in my hand because I am proud of the American people, Mr. Speaker. It was the American people that got that done with bipartisan outrage about what was happening to our Republic and to the legitimacy of our elections in this Republic. And I would remind people, Mr. Speaker, that we have a Constitution that I have said is the supreme law of the land. It is the foundation upon which our country is built. But that foundation sits on something. It sits on a bedrock, and the bedrock that it sits on is legitimate elections. We can watch our Constitution erode by decisions in the Supreme Court and by loss of understanding of what its original meaning is and what it is to be a constitutional and contractual guarantee to succeeding generations, we can lose our Constitution that way, or we could just lose our country by allowing the bedrock that our Constitution sits on, legitimate elections, to be eroded and destroyed. That is what I think the American people understood, maybe instinctively, maybe intuitively, maybe intellectually, what was happening to our country. All of that went together to build a giant snowball of public outrage that ripped the funding out from underneath ACORN, and we will hold that now for a long term and, hopefully, for the very long and increasingly healthy life of this Republic. That is what needs to happen when we are outraged, when we see our Constitution being undermined. We did that with ACORN, and it is a symbol of what the American people should be doing. But when you have a President of the United States that takes an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States so help him God, and in that oath it is specified in another section of the Constitution that he, meaning the President, take care that the laws be faithfully executed--we call that the Take Care Clause--well, the President, President Obama, did not take care that the laws be faithfully executed. He refused to enforce the law. He refused to enforce the immigration law, and he issued orders that ordered his subordinates throughout the executive branch of government, including the Border Patrol, custom border protection, ICE, and USCIS, to defy the law. The law of the United States says that, when law enforcement encounters someone who is unlawfully present in the United States, they shall--not ``may,'' but ``shall''--be placed into removal proceedings. That is the law. Had that been the case and if the law had been followed, if the law had been followed ever since Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty act in 1986--which, by the way, was a legal act. I thought it was poor judgment on the part of President Reagan. He let us down on a principle of the rule of law. Thirty-plus years ago I knew that we would be fighting for a long, long time to restore the respect for the rule of law, particularly with regard to immigration. When I watched the debate take place here in this Congress and in the House and in the Senate and I read what I could read about that, I reasoned that, even though we were losing in the House, the rule of law was losing in the House on the amnesty debate in 1986, and even though the rule of law lost in the Senate, I was confident that Ronald Reagan understood the principle that, if you reward people for breaking the law, there would have been more people that break the law. If you say that this is the last amnesty ever, you also will have to continually fight the argument of we didn't really mean that; there are these other circumstances. The three--well, it actually started out to be 1 million people that were going to get amnesty in 1986. And the rationale, which I don't actually think was rational, was we can't enforce the law against these million people that are here illegally, but we need to have the rule of law. So what we will do is we will grant an amnesty to the million people that are here illegally. Then our promise will be, from this point forward, everybody who enters into the United States, or is unlawfully in the United States will have to face the law, and we will deport everybody that has violated our immigration laws. We will enforce the law from this point forward, from 1986. Ronald Reagan believed he was going to get that; and, by the way, he did command the executive branch of government, and the Republicans did run the executive branch of government not only from 1986, but all the way up until 1993, when Bill Clinton took office. But what happened was they didn't get the enforcement. There was fraud. It was well over a million people--it was closer to 3 million people--who received amnesty under the 1986 amnesty act; and those 3 million people then were legalized in America, by law. And I don't dispute the validity of the law, but they were rewarded for breaking the law. That is what the amnesty did. So I have talked to a number of them along the way, and they will argue: Yes, we deserved amnesty. We came to America. We wanted to live here. It is a good thing. My family is better off. Well, is the rule of law better off, is America's Constitution better off, is our civilization better off because we decided that we would ignore the law and reward people for breaking it? By the way, is the debate over? Did we restore the respect for the rule of law since 1986, Mr. Speaker? Or, instead, have we seen the respect for the rule of law be eroded day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, over the last 30-plus years since the amnesty act of 1986? That is what happened. Ronald Reagan saw it in his lifetime. He recognized that and would have liked to have had that bill back again. I have had the conversation with a glorious American, then-Attorney General Ed Meese, III, who also recognized that the advice that President Reagan got from his Cabinet on whether to sign the amnesty act in 1986, whether that advice was good, and I will tell you that the Cabinet members that I am aware of would like to have reversed that decision after they saw the actual results. Well, it is not that I am the most clairvoyant Member of the United States Congress, but I can assert with great confidence here into this Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker, I saw this coming in 1986. I wasn't in public life. I just wanted to raise my family and run my business and live with the freedoms that are guaranteed to me as an American citizen under the Constitution, but I wanted the rule of law. I had been raised with a deep and abiding respect for the law. My father would sit me down at the supper table with the Code of Iowa on one side and the Constitution on the other side, and he would lecture to me how this fits. He would say over and over again: This is the law, and you will abide by the law. If you don't like it, if you think the law is not right, true, or just, there are means by which you go about changing it. You can go lobby your State Representative. You can lobby your Congressman. You can run for office, which is what I ended up doing. And I am here defending the Constitution and the rule of law. But we also are a First World country. We are the leaders of civilization for the world. We are the leaders of western civilization for the world. We are the American civilization. The American civilization is a dominant component of Western civilization, and if we take the values that formed America out of the values of the world, we don't have a lot of science and technology in progress to work with. We don't have a lot of economic dynamism. I know that there have been wars and there have been dictators that have popped up within Western civilization. But, fortunately, we haven't had a dictator pop up in our American civilization. And one of the big reasons for that is because of our Constitution, and because we have public debate, and we come here to the floor of the House, and over there to the floor of the Senate, and across America, again, in our coffee shops, in our churches, in our workplaces and out on our parks and our streets, and we discuss this openly. We should listen to other people's ideas and we should consider what they have to say and we should evaluate that. That is what our Founding Fathers envisioned. And as these ideas merge, what will happen is that sometimes there will be people on the right that are never going to compromise, and there will be some people on the left that are never going to compromise. Maybe that doesn't matter so much because the people in the middle get to hear both of those arguments and make their own decisions, and they can move left or they can move right. But over time, we build a consensus. And when we get to that consensus, that is when we can move legislation here in the House and over in the Senate and to the President's desk for a signature, and then America continues to become an even better place. But we have to have open dialogue to do this, and we have to have the rule of law that gives order to our society. If the rule of law is sacrificed because people are ruled more by their hearts than they are their heads, I would say: Come back to the history of America. Study our Founding Fathers. Read the Federalist Papers. Deliberate on this Constitution that we have, deliberate on this supreme law of the land and understand how deep the thought that went into the words that are there that are our guarantees. Our Founding Fathers understood that we had to continue to educate each generation and raise them up not only in an understanding of the Constitution--and I double assert its original meaning--but they needed to be raised with an American experience. That is why it is required that our President of the United States be born in America. And that ``born in America'' is essentially shorthand for we want to ensure that all of our Presidents are raised with an American experience. That is how to interpret that. I am not here to slice or dice, Mr. Speaker, the actual locations of birth of any President. And we have seen that Congress has some authority to address it by statute, should we choose to do that. But I am asserting that it is essential that the American civilization be preserved, protected, and expanded; and that we have leaders that are raised with the American experience that will come here and defend the American culture and civilization. And that is so important, that the leader of our thought process, the leader of the destiny and the direction of America is the President of the United States, our Commander in Chief. The words that our President says reset and redirect America. We saw it happen under the 8 years of Barack Obama. We are seeing it begin now under the beginnings of the 65 or 66 days of the Trump administration, Mr. Speaker, and we have noticed that the dialog in America immediately shifts to: What is the President thinking about? What is the President talking about? What is the President tweeting about? I think there is a high degree of anxiety on the part of the mainstream media, because they are never really off the clock because this President might wake up at 3 in the morning and send out a tweet that resets things. And so I am fine with that. I think it is important that we understand the thoughts of the President. By the way, he isn't all-powerful. I used to say to the previous President: You are only the President. It is the American people that run this shop, and through a lot of different mechanisms. But the President does have a lot of authority and he gets to set the tone for the debate and he gets to define many things, but especially the foreign policy. But we still have this constraint, and the power of the purse exists here, especially in the House of Representatives. If the House doesn't appropriate money, nobody gets any money. That is kind of like when they say: If mama ain't happy, nobody's happy. Well, if Congress doesn't appropriate money, nobody gets any money. So that power of the purse was designed by our Founding Fathers to be the controlling factor of the things that go on in this country. And if a President is out of line, we are obligated to shut the money off to those things that are out of line. Of course, the Senate will have to concur with any spending that the House should initiate, but just the same, it is the power of the purse that controls much of this. But we are to be guided and bound by the Constitution. Earlier this morning, as the chairman of the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, I held a hearing on constitutional rights, in particular the Kelo decision that came down in--if I get my date right--June 23 of 2005. That decision was about property rights in New London, Connecticut, that the local government had decided that they were going to act by condemning the private property locally so that they could hand that private property over for a private interest to do expansion and development on multiple homes within the area of New London, Connecticut. I recall my outrage when the Supreme Court ruled that that was constitutional; for a local government to condemn private property for private use, all it had to do was be facilitated by local government. I had not read the decision at that time. In fact, I hadn't read the dissent. I had read part of the decision. But within a week, we brought a resolution of disapproval of the Supreme Court's decision on Kelo to the floor of this House. And, yes, I was engaged in that debate and some of the shaping of the resolution. But the Supreme Court of the United States, which is there to protect the Constitution itself, to interpret the Constitution and the law, effectively stripped three words out of the Fifth Amendment of our Constitution. The Fifth Amendment reads like this: `` . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' Well, the people in New London Connecticut, particularly the Kelo family, had their private property, their home condemned, confiscated under eminent domain and handed over to private use and through the entity of local government. So I was outraged. America was outraged. By the way, that is another time like I showed you the acorn, Mr. Speaker, but the Kelo decision was another time that the American people rose up and said: We disagree with this decision. And it was--the polling that I recall from the time, 11-1, opposed the Supreme Court's decision that would allow local government to confiscate private property. I came to this floor to add to the debate. And at the time I was queued up to speak, the speaker ahead of me was over at this podium, the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Barney Frank. Now, he and I had a history of disagreeing on a lot of issues, and I expected to disagree with Mr. Frank on that issue. So I sat here in a chair in front with my notepad to take notes on Mr. Frank's statements so I would be prepared to step up and rebut him because my turn was coming next. I am writing notes furiously, keeping up with his quotes. And while this is going on, and he was almost finished with his speech before I realized I agreed with everything Barney Frank said on Kelo. Everything. So I spoke, I came down here to this podium and gave my speech, but my speech fully supported the statement by Mr. Frank. And I added to that, that the effect of that decision was to strip those three words out of the Fifth Amendment ``for public use.'' I made that argument as emphatically as I was prepared to do, that now the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution that guarantees our property rights says: ``Nor shall private property be taken without just compensation.'' In other words, they have to pay you for it. But you don't get to keep your home if there is a private interest out there that can convince a local government that they will pay more taxes on that property than you are paying on that property. Stripping those three words out of the Fifth Amendment was the exact effect of the Kelo decision. I did not know it at that time because later on is when I picked up the dissent, one of the last dissents written by Justice O'Connor, who had exactly the same analysis in her dissent as I had in my speech and, as I believe without utter clarity of the statement, that Mr. Frank would have agreed with it if he didn't say it or not. So here we are. The American people have risen up and we have said: We disagree with the Supreme Court. We want to restore our Constitution, but amending it is pretty difficult. By the way, if you wanted to amend the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to fix Kelo, to have the Fifth Amendment mean ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation,'' if you want the Fifth Amendment to mean that--I asked a witness today: How do you rewrite the Fifth Amendment and amend our Constitution when the Supreme Court has so, I will say, subverted the meaning, they had de facto stricken those three words out? How do you rewrite it? Do you start with: We really mean it this time that ``nor shall private property be taken,'' we really mean ``without just compensation,'' we really mean it ``for public use without just compensation''? Do we keep adding? Do we really mean it? Or are there words in the language that can prevent a court from doing what they decide to do from an activist standpoint? I don't think so. And a number of times I have tried to write amendments to the Constitution to fix problems that have been created by an activist court. So I will say the Kelo decision in 2005 was a precursor to things that happened by the Supreme Court, although they are not connected and cited; and that would be June 2015--June 24 and June 25, 2015, as a matter of fact. It was King v. Burwell, the decision when the Supreme Court, on a Thursday--I believe if you look at the calendar, Mr. Speaker, it will be a Thursday, June 24, 2015, when the Supreme Court concluded and issued a decision that they could rewrite ObamaCare, that they could rewrite the statute--the law that was actually passed here by hook, crook, and legislative shenanigan, but still within the boundaries of the Constitution. The law gave no authority to the Federal Government to establish exchanges under ObamaCare, but the Court considered this, and they concluded that: We must have really meant to say ``or Federal Government'' when Congress wrote that the States may establish exchanges. The de facto result of the King v. Burwell decision was that the States--and added these three words, in effect--``or Federal Government'' may establish exchanges under the law. The Supreme Court added words to the law. If they can add words to the law, then they can also subtract words from the law. So I am appalled by this. This is Thursday, and before I can get my feet back underneath me, having been essentially knocked over by a Supreme Court truck believing that they would be bound by something within the Constitution, before that can happen, I am pulling into a Catholic church in Logan, Iowa, to do a 10 a.m. meeting with some priests and members of the parish synchronized just by providence or happenstance with former Senator Rick Santorum, who has been a definitive voice on marriage. We were both listening to the radio as we pulled into that church to do a joint event, and for the first time we had heard about the Obergefell decision, the decision that came down on Friday, June 25, 2015. That decision goes even beyond the idea that the Court can insert words into Federal statute that was previously duly passed by Congress and signed by the President. And now under the gay marriage decision of Obergefell, the Supreme Court not only found a new right in the Constitution, they created a command in the Constitution--a command. It is not in the Constitution about same-sex marriage. Our Founding Fathers never envisioned such a thing. There is no one that can assert that it was even in the imagination of any Founding Father. Neither can they assert that it was in the imagination of anybody that was in this Congress when the 14th Amendment was passed out of this Congress--out of the House and the Senate--and ratified by the American people with 75 percent of the legitimate States at the time. No one can assert that that ever was out there in, let's just say, the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution or especially the 14th Amendment, the equal protection clause of the Constitution. They can't assert that. They asserted in the Roe v. Wade decision that this right to privacy becomes a right to abortion under any circumstances to speak of--almost any circumstances, Mr. Speaker. They asserted that it was in the emanations and penumbras, and they kind of made it up. They found it in that shadowy area along the edge of the clouds that we all see something different if we see anything at all, but they could see something that nobody else had seen, and they wrote that into the decision. But this Obergefell decision goes even beyond that, even beyond the audacity of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Griswold v. Connecticut, and the Eisenstadt decision. It goes beyond all of those. It is this: the Supreme Court created--not only found a right, but they created a command in the Constitution. And here is the command: if you are a political subdivision in America that recognizes civil marriage, then thou shalt conduct same- sex marriages and recognize same-sex marriages, regardless of where they might take place, but they shall take place in your jurisdiction as well. That is the Obergefell decision. Now, if this had been a decision of the United States Congress, it would have been litigated and found unconstitutional. We don't have the enumerated power or the constitutional authority to impose same-sex marriage on America. That is outside the reach of this Congress, and I think there are Democrats that will agree with me on that, Mr. Speaker. But if the States were to pass same-sex marriage laws, they do have that constitutional authority. If that had happened in a statutory way, I would accept that. I don't agree with it, but I would accept it as a constitutional function of a legitimate subdivision within the United States. That is how we need to do things in this country, in a constitutional fashion, not bypass the will of the people and allow the Supreme Court to assert an authority that they do not have constitutionally. I can chase this all the way back to Marbury v. Madison and have to take that argument apart, I know, with some of the people that would carry on this argument. But in the end, it is this: We get into big trouble when we start establishing special rights for immutable characteristics. If you look at Title VII of the Civil Rights Act--and I don't have it committed exactly to memory, but in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, there is protection there for religion, but that is a specific constitutional protection in the First Amendment. Beyond that, it is protection for immutable characteristics that have to do with race, ethnicity, and national origin. I am fine with putting in disability. That is an immutable characteristic. Age is another immutable characteristic. And sex is an immutable characteristic. Gender is not, and sexual orientation is not. When you go into that zone, then you are giving special protected status for characteristics that cannot be independently identified and can, at least potentially, be willfully changed. That is a zone that is too blurry a zone for law, and it is a zone then for our culture to accept, embrace, and love people of all walks of life and recognize that we are all God's children, we are all created in His image, and because of our immutable characteristics, they are tied to our origins. By the way, our rights do come from God and not from government. If we think somehow that rights come from government, then it is okay for government to take our rights away. But they don't come from government. Our Founding Fathers understood that. In fact, they articulated that better than anyone ever had. They had a tough job. They had to first understand this divine right of humanity, natural law, as they described it. They had to first understand it, then they had to articulate it, then they had to debate it among themselves. They had disagreements amongst themselves, but they reached a consensus that got to the Declaration and a consensus that got to the ratification of the Constitution. We fought a gruesome and a ghastly civil war to put away the sin of slavery. That also was a movement that came from the people of America and the people of Western civilization and the world. Slavery is an institution that has been part of every ancient civilization back to the beginning. America stepped up pretty early in this process. Great Britain was ahead of us. Not many other nations beat us to that punch. It was a brutal thing that America went through, but it was a consensus of America in the end that ended that. So, Mr. Speaker, I am making this point that this America that we are is built upon the pillars of American exceptionalism. Those pillars are inherited from Western civilization whose roots go to Western Europe, they go to Rome, they go to Greece, and they go back to Mosaic law. We have been a wise-enough civilization to adopt those values from outside of Western civilization that give us vitality, just like our English language has this unique vitality. One of the reasons for it is that it is adaptable, it is flexible. We are not stuck in time and place. We take on words into our language. Every year there is a list of new words that go into the dictionary because we create them to take care of the meaning that we need. Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament from the United Kingdom, has written a book about the English language. I think of Winston Churchill's book, ``A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.'' I read that book carefully forward and back and digested it so to speak. When I finished it, I remember I looked up at the ceiling, and it was about 1:30 in the morning, and I thought: My gosh, wherever the English language has gone, freedom has accompanied the language. Now, Churchill didn't ever write that, that I recall, in his book, but that was a conclusion that came to me. I would call it an inescapable conclusion that might only mean ``if you think like I do.'' But he laid the case out without saying that the English language has carried freedom. Well, Daniel Hannan's book--the title of which I forget at the moment, Mr. Speaker--goes further. He says that, as he sits in the European Parliament--and he is multilingual--he will have earpieces on listening to the interpreter while he is listening to another language in this ear, and the language he gets interpreted into his ear doesn't necessarily carry out the same values and meaning. His analysis is that the English language not only is a carrier of freedom, but it is a language that articulates freedom unique to any other, and that you can't really understand God-given liberty without having an understanding of the English language that has such a utility in our carrying out and talking about our values of language and liberty. Liberty means something different from freedom. We have got two words, liberty and freedom. Many other languages only have one word, and they just use that word universally. But in our spirit is this-- freedom is this: a wild coyote has freedom. He can jump the fences and go wherever he wants to go. But freedom is different. He has that freedom. But liberty is bridled by morality. We have liberty in America. We are bridled by the morality of the obligation that we are a civilization and a culture that is part of Judeo-Christianity, descended, at a minimum, from Judeo-Christianity, and our values that are rooted in there, as I said, are traceable back to Mosaic law. We have to have a morality within America if we are going to be an America that achieves and that we can aspire, that the arc of history takes us to soaring heights instead of flattening that arc of history out and perhaps diminishing into the Third World. So I revere this country, Mr. Speaker, and I revere our Constitution and our rule of law. The people in this country, all of us who are part of this civilization and part of this culture, all of us who get up every day and go out and do things to lift others up, all of us who scrub out some of the things that aren't so great and elevate those things that are great and pull ourselves together, whether it is a mom and a child, a dad and a child, whether it is a church group, whether it is home school, public school, or parochial school, whether it is work, whether it is your volunteer group, if you are out there handing out pamphlets to advance your cause and adding to the civil dialogue in America, keep a moral foundation behind it, and add to that civil dialogue, if we continue to do that, and if we protect, understand, and teach the values of America, and in particular the understanding and the original meaning of our Constitution, we will continue to be an even greater country. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I am privileged to serve here and privileged to have the opportunity to go home and carry out some of the things that I have talked about here in this last hour. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to once again continue this dialogue that we have with you, all of our Members and staff and the American people. To initiate this dialogue, I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Gallagher) of the Eighth Congressional District, born in Green Bay. American Exceptionalism

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for his statement here and for bringing up the topic of American exceptionalism and bringing us back through some of this history that we need to revisit from time to time. That statement is very valuable to us. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Babin), an exceptional American in his own right. Terminate Grants to Sanctuary Cities

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I would like to pose a question to the gentleman from Texas. The bill that you have proposed that mirrors the President's executive order to limit people coming in from those six countries, do you have the bill number for that? H.R.?

Mr. KING of Iowa. 880?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Okay. And you also have H.R. 82.

Mr. KING of Iowa. For the record, I believe I am a cosponsor of both of those pieces of legislation.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the chairman for yielding to me. Seven years ago today, I brought the first repeal of ObamaCare here to this Congress. Forty words, to rip it out by the roots as if such act had never been enacted. I would like to be here today passing the full repeal of ObamaCare. We are not, but this is the first bite at the repeal apple in a process to hopefully get all of this thing done in one day. If I thought we could do it all in one bite, I would stand for that, but instead, here is what we have got. We have got a $1 trillion tax cut. We have got a $1.15 trillion spending cut. We have got a $150 billion deficit reduction. We have got a bill that eliminates the employer mandate, eliminates the individual mandate, and it eliminates Federal mandates in the essential health benefits package of those 10 mandates--that I despise, by the way. It expands health savings accounts--doubles them--it allows for us to pass selling insurance across State lines, and it enables catastrophic health insurance. That is a pretty good list, and that is the list of things that I am going to support here when this goes up for a vote. Mr. Speaker, I urge its adoption.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I missed three votes due to a meeting at the White House with President Trump. Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 182, NAY Roll Call No. 183, and YEA on Roll Call No. 184.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``nay'' on rollcall No. 150.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for yielding. I especially thank him for bringing this legislation before this Congress. I rise in support of this rule and the underlying bill. We are addressing the topic that we used to call fraudulent joinder. I like the title of this bill better, as pointed out by Ms. Slaughter last night. We call it the Innocent Party Protection Act. It is more accurate and it is more descriptive. The other fraudulent joinder piece tends to put people to sleep who aren't operating in this arena. I know that the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Buck) has operated in this arena. He has significant experience and frustrating experience watching innocent parties being drug into litigation just so that an opposing attorney can utilize that jurisdiction within a particular State where they think they have a friendly venue. First, Mr. Speaker, I make the point from the beginning, which we don't often enough do here, and that is our pledge we made some years ago that all of our legislation would be indexed back to the Constitution. We don't always address that in the debate. I just turn my pocket Constitution to Article III, section 1. It says: ``The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.'' We agree with that. I have made this point that all of the Federal courts are completely under the jurisdiction of the United States Congress. If we decided that we wanted to abolish a Federal district, we could do that. In fact, it happened 200 years ago, two districts. I don't propose such a thing, but I am just asserting the power of Congress, which hasn't been questioned or challenged, I would point out. Under section 2, it says: ``The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising . . . between Citizens of different States. . . .'' This is a tool, then, that the fraudulent joinder attorneys use to drag people into litigation who may have nothing to do with it whatsoever. It is a problem. It is a problem, we know, not just because there are complaints out there from innocent parties that have been wrapped up in litigation and required to defend themselves and hire attorneys and spend thousands of dollars--tens of thousands--hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to protect their economic interests even though they have zero involvement in the case and perhaps zero chance of having any judgment brought against them. So apparently the judges who make these decisions look at rule 11 and they find enough latitude in there that they allow the defendants to stay on the case, and I will call them being fraudulently joined to the case. We need to tighten up these rules. We need to send a very clear message to the courts so that they have got some guidelines to live by because it is their job, of course, to read the law, take their directions from the United States Congress, and act accordingly. I think just this debate and the debate we had in the last Congress help us in that cause. The next thing I pick up from the Constitution, the next thing is the bill itself, and prevention of fraudulent joinder is under section 2. It sets out four different categories that would be cause for the court to release a defendant. And it says the joinder of the defendant is described in this paragraph. It says it is fraudulent if the court finds that in one of four different categories there is actual fraud in the pleading of jurisdictional facts, which, with respect to that defendant, if there is actual fraud, that is pretty much a no-brainer, should be released from the case. That is pretty simple. I am glad it is now an opportunity to go into statute. Second is if it is based on a complaint and the materials submitted under the paragraph, it is not plausible to conclude that the applicable State law would impose liability on that defendant. In other words, if it is implausible for the defendant to have a liability, then the court can release that defendant under this act should it become law. That is also, to me, a no-brainer. As one who has been a defendant in lawsuits, I would reflect, Mr. Speaker, that when I first ran for office, there were some people who thought that I should just simply capitulate to whatever their legal demands were. Even though I have only been in the courtroom a couple handful of times throughout the 40-some years of business that we have done as King Construction, I had four of them lined up against me at the same time. They thought that I would just have to settle out of court. It is a frustrating thing to not see a liability but have that leverage brought against you. I have experienced that, and that animates me on this. The third component is if a State or Federal law clearly bars all claims in the complaint against that defendant. All right, that is also a simple provision. But the fourth one is another one that deserves consideration, and that is that there be a good faith intention. Otherwise, if there is no good faith intention to prosecute the action against that defendant or to seek a joint judgment which would include that defendant, then that defendant can be released from the case. We need to streamline our courts, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I would just summarize this case in that it is not only me, it is not Mr. Buck alone, it is not Mr. Sessions alone, it is the American people who are calling out for this kind of relief. It is not just the American people--we might consider them to be laypersons in this--but it is also the courts. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Harvie Wilkinson, as Mr. Buck quoted, spoke to this issue. The Supreme Court of the United States has spoken to this issue under ``plausible'' versus ``speculative.'' Professor Martin Redish also has spoken on this subject matter. The Third Circuit spoke to the Briscoe issue. The final piece is the Fifth Circuit has essentially adopted a very similar, if not identical, policy. We need to codify this. This is our chance to do so. I urge adoption of the rule and support of the underlying rule.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I have a number of topics I would like to bring up this evening. First, I would comment that I heard the words ``Affordable Care Act'' multiple times in the previous hour, and it just caught me each time I heard that. Abraham Lincoln would have had a difficult time saying such a thing being Honest Abe, and George Washington probably couldn't have said it at all. As we know this, it is not affordable care and that is the reason that we have to address it. We knew this was going to happen. Of all the horrible stories we have heard about ObamaCare--this thing they call the Affordable Care Act--many of them were predicted here on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker. I predicted quite a lot of them myself, as did many of the Members who fought against that piece of legislation that was jammed down on us by hook, by crook, by legislative shenanigans. We could see what was going to happen with this. It was slammed together by trying to circumvent the majorities, by pushing some things through on reconciliation. And we ended up with a piece of legislation that was the biggest bite they could get to create socialized medicine. The worst part of ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, was this: That it is an unconstitutional taking of God-given, American liberty. We are--and at least used to be and believe we are to be again--the freest people on the planet; and that our rights come from God; and that government can't take them away. Many times here on the floor, I have said, Mr. Speaker, that the Federal Government hasn't figured out how to nationalize or take over our soul. That is our business, and we manage that. Our souls are the most sovereign thing that we have and are. The second most sovereign thing we have and are is our skin and everything inside it. It is our health. It is the management of our health. And if Americans are not capable of managing their own health and making their own health decisions and pressing the marketplace to produce the health insurance policies that they desire, if Americans can't make those decisions, then it would just stand to reason, if that is true--and that is what Democrats seem to think--then there aren't any people on the planet who can manage their own health. What I am pretty sure of is that if we don't think that regular, red- blooded Americans--especially those who are out there punching the time clock, running their business, starting a business, or working on commission, whatever they might be doing, the salt-of-the-Earth Americans--if they can't manage it, I am really sure that a bunch of leftists who are elected to office out of the inner cities of America aren't going to be able to do it. And we have seen the success of that, the leftist agenda of ObamaCare, imposed upon America, commanding that we buy policies that are approved by the Federal Government. They would have liked to have established the Federal Government as being the single-payer plan and abolished all insurance whatsoever and simply taken care of everybody's healthcare needs so that one size fits all, and we could drift down into the mediocrity that most the rest of the world has exhibited for a long time. This all started back in Germany in the latter part of the 19th century, when Otto von Bismarck decided that if he was going to get reelected, he had to make the Germans dependent upon him. And so he devised this plan called socialized medicine and he, more or less, trained the Germans to expect the federal government to make those decisions for them, pick up the costs for them; and, in doing so, that sense of dependency got Bismarck reelected in Germany. Well, it is not that old a country in Germany, but this idea of Marxism comes right out of there. By the way, there is a bench in Berlin that honors Karl Marx, and a number of other statutes and monuments as well. That is where this came from, and we watched as other countries adopted it. I once picked up--Mr. Speaker, I had a World War II veteran who came over to an event that I was doing in Hospers, Iowa, and he had gone up to his attic and he brought down these Collier's magazines. They were original Collier's magazines that started right at the end of the Second World War and went on through those years, for 2 or 3 or 4 years, and they were yellow and, of course, they were dated, and he presented them all to me. He said: I want you to have these. I want you to read down through these magazines and see what it was like in those days shortly at the end of World War II and in the Reconstruction era afterwards. So I actually accepted all of those magazines, copied them, and gave him back the originals. I didn't feel right having them in my possession. But I read through them; and there were pictures there of doctors and nurses and healthcare providers in Great Britain that were haggard and tired and worn, and stories about how, because of the socialized medicine they passed in the United Kingdom, they had to see so many patients a day in order to make a living, and they couldn't pay attention to the patients so much as they had to pay attention to their schedule and turn them through quickly through the turnstiles in the healthcare system in Great Britain because health care was rationed in that way. I have a friend who is a radio talk show host--and, actually, it is WHO Radio, one of Ronald Reagan's original radio programs where Ronald Reagan got his start--who comes originally from Great Britain; proud American. But both of his parents are gone, and both of his parents deaths can be attributed to the failed national healthcare system, socialized medicine that the United Kingdom has. He had told me several years ago: Once socialized medicine is established, you will not be able to undo it. So, Mr. Speaker, I bring this up this way because this is our last best chance to turn this country in the right direction. It is our last best chance to throw off this mandate of socialized medicine that was established by hook, crook, and legislative shenanigan by the Democrats, and passed through in the final component in this Congress March 23, 2010. That event that took place, as I recall, I believe it was dated March 23, but it actually rolled over past midnight, but the Record showed March 23. I went home that night worn out from days of fighting ObamaCare and doing all that I could do to put an end to it, to kill it off before it did what it has already done to the American people. And I laid down, thinking I would sleep the sleep of the dead, but I woke up in about an hour and a half and I got up and I wrote the repeal of ObamaCare, and it turned out to be the first repeal draft that emerged after ObamaCare had passed. I certainly wrote it well before Barack Obama had signed the bill, although they hustled it out to him, I think, the next day, and that is when he signed it. The repeal bill that I have introduced here--and it has passed the floor of this House a number of times; I have lost track of how many times, Mr. Speaker--it is only 40 words. And the last words in that bill are: ``As if such act had never been enacted.'' That is, Mr. Speaker, what we need to do. We need to send the full, 100 percent, rip-it-out-by-the-roots-as-if-it-had-never-been-enacted repeal out of the House and over to the Senate and set it on Mitch McConnell's desk and let Mitch McConnell figure out--Majority Leader McConnell, Senator McConnell figure out then how to get the votes put together in the United States Senate for a full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. The House will pass such a bill. It won't be hard to put those votes together. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Democrat or two that was worried about their seat that would join us in such an endeavor. Then, once that bill is over through the Rotunda and over on the desk of Senator McConnell, then we should start down through with the individual repairs to the healthcare system that we need to do, that we all know we need to do and that we have talked about for a long time. Some of these have been out here debated for 10 years in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and, instead, we have got a different configuration that has been served up to us. But I submit that it is not too late to do it right. Send the full repeal over. That repeal can have an enactment clause of, say, a year from now. That is enough time for people to make their adjustments for their own health insurance and get it taken care of, especially under the provisions that I propose. I would point out that my ObamaCare--and, yes, we Members of Congress are obligated to own our own ObamaCare policies and pay a substantial portion of the premium. By the way, mine went up when ObamaCare was imposed upon me by not quite $4,300 a year additional. That was my privilege to own an ObamaCare policy, but we are compelled to own that policy. For me, I got the letter, dated last September 28, that said, as of December 31, at midnight, my ObamaCare policy was canceled. And it turned out that I would have been without insurance from New Years, from the stroke of midnight, auld lang syne, until whatever time it would take me to get that put together. So we went to work, and there was only one policy that actually qualified under ObamaCare, only one. Of all the counties in America, roughly a third of the counties there is only one choice available to the American people; compelled by law to buy a policy or be penalized by the Federal Government. And your options are not that you get to keep the policy that you like or that you get to keep the doctor that you like. You don't even get to choose from a menu of what kind of health insurance policy you want. Instead, for a third of the counties in America, you only have one choice, and that is buy the policy that is the only option that is available to you. So there is no shopping for prices. There is no looking at the kind of options you might want covered by your health insurance policy. There is no freedom to go out there in the marketplace, and there is no marketplace that actually exists because the consumers are not making the demands for the kind of policies that they would like. Instead, it is the Federal Government dictating by mandate what the policy shall cover. And when that happens, the premiums go up--which anybody could figure out--and the coverage goes down. Now we have people that--I would just look back to shortly before the election. The Thursday before the election we had an event south of Des Moines on a farm, and there, soon-to-be Vice President-elect Mike Pence arrived, as did Senator Ted Cruz, back to Iowa. I'm grateful to both of those gentlemen and friends. As I gave my speech, I pointed out that I have seen people's health insurance premiums go from $8,000 a year to $10,000 a year. And then as I saw people in the crowd started waving their arm, and I say $12,000 a year, $14,000 a year, we had an auction going on, Mr. Speaker, and it came up to $20,000 a year. Looked to me like these were ``Ma and Pa'' family farm operations that were facing $20,000 in health insurance premiums, where not that long ago they would have been looking at 6 or 7 or $8,000 in health insurance premiums. That has swept across this countryside. I talked to a gentleman here on the floor tonight whose health insurance premiums were $24,000. That is just not sustainable. You have to finally decide: I am going to take a risk and go without health insurance with those kind of costs. That is driven by ObamaCare. It is driven by the mandates in ObamaCare. It is driven by the guaranteed issue, no consideration for preexisting conditions, and it is driven by a mandate such as you stay on your parents' health insurance until you are 26. It goes on and on and on. OB care, maternity coverage, contraceptive coverage, you can name it, and also, no additional cost for your medical checkups. All of these things cost money, and they are built into the premium, and every time you add another bell or whistle or accessory to your health insurance policy, the premium goes up and up and up. When the insurers find out that they are losing money, they start to drop out of the marketplace. They drop out of the marketplace, and when they do, there is less competition. When there is less competition, prices go up, Mr. Speaker. This is what we have seen happen over the years since the implementation of ObamaCare. It is a calamity. It will sink ObamaCare. If we don't touch it, it will sink and it will be gone. It will implode upon itself. It cannot be sustained. We know that on this side of the aisle from about here on over. They know it intuitively over on this side of the aisle from about there on over. But the difficulty is that politically they have embraced ObamaCare and they have decided they are going to hold onto it and protect it. Why? I think part of it is they want to hold on and protect the legacy of President Obama, who, if all had gone well, would have ridden off into the sunset. He doesn't seem to be doing that, Mr. Speaker. But now we are at this place where we have the votes in the House to do a full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare, and that is what we should do. Tomorrow, I understand that the gentleman from Ohio, and perhaps others, will introduce legislation that will be described as a full repeal of ObamaCare. I wish it were so, but it is designed to fit within the reconciliation standards. It is a legislation that once made it to President Obama's desk and received a veto. This time, presumably, it could go to President Trump's desk and receive a signature. That is good. I favor that as an improvement in the right direction. But the full right thing we need to do is the 100 percent repeal. We shouldn't be sustaining any kind of mandate whatsoever. Let the States determine what the mandates might be, but don't let them lock people into their States and refuse to let them buy health insurance from outside of those State lines. And it looks to me that the bill, as introduced by leadership, doesn't really allow for the facilitation of buying insurance across State lanes. So here is what I suggest we do, Mr. Speaker. Send the full, 100 percent repeal over to the Senate. Pick up the bill that was a repeal just about a year ago, send it over to the Senate, too. Then, what we have is Mitch McConnell can choose from the menu on what he can get done, but the pressure for the full repeal will build if the House sends it to the Senate, and the odds of the full repeal get greater and greater. Then the House, doing its job--and we are not obligated to negotiate a deal out of the House and the Senate and the White House. It is the judgment of the House that needs to be reflected here in this Chamber. This most deliberative body that we have, the voice for the American people, we should never be trapped into thinking that we can't pass anything out of the House if we don't first have a handshake with the President and the majority in the Senate. That has handcuffed us for the last 8 or more years. The strategic thinking has been that we don't even try to move anything out of the House unless we know they can take it up in the Senate and unless we know that we can get a signature from the President, because anything else is a waste of time. Well, it is not necessarily a waste of time, Mr. Speaker, not necessary at all. In fact, we need to send out of here our highest aspirations. So I say this: send the full repeal over to the Senate, and then pick up the repairs, the replacements, and the reform, those things that we know we need to do, and they can stand alone with or without the full repeal of ObamaCare. For example, we need to send Paul Gosar's bill that repeals components of the McCarran-Ferguson Act that allows for insurance to be bought and sold across State lines. Paul Gosar has done a lot of work on that bill, and his predecessor out of Arizona, John Shadegg, pushed that bill for about 16 years here in the House of Representatives. In his last week or so here in the House, he said: I have one regret, and that regret is I should have pushed harder for the repeal of McCarran- Ferguson so that we could be selling and buying insurance across State lines. He should have pushed harder. I recall John Shadegg pushing very hard on that, and he just couldn't get it there. We all couldn't get it there. Now Paul Gosar has that bill out of the Judiciary Committee. We passed it out a week and a half ago, and it is hanging on the calendar now, and it should come to this floor. The votes would be here to pass Paul Gosar's repeal of McCarran-Ferguson, and we should send that over to the Senate. Passing that piece of legislation would enable insurance to be sold across State lines, and that would set the competition up between the 50 States. I recall the debate here on the floor of the House in 2009 and 2010 when the data came out that a typical young man in New Jersey at the time, a healthy 23-year-old, would pay an average of about $6,000 for his health insurance premium for the year--$500 a month, $6,000. A similarly situated healthy young man in Kentucky would be paying $1,000 a year. Now, what is the difference between those two States? The cost of providing that care and the far fewer mandates in the State of Kentucky and a lot of mandates in the State of New Jersey. So why wouldn't we let a young man in New Jersey buy a health insurance policy in Kentucky? What are the odds that he is going to be insured if he can get a policy for $1,000 as opposed to $6,000? We know that far more Americans would be insured if they had the options and didn't have to buy all the bells and whistles. He probably doesn't need maternity. He probably doesn't need contraceptive. Maybe he is not too concerned about the preexisting condition component of this. If he is 23 years old and on his own, he is not worried about a 26-year slacker mandate. So that is the comparison of what could happen if we passed Gosar's bill and repealed McCarran-Ferguson and allowed people to purchase insurance across State lines. That should be number one. Number two would be full deductibility of everyone's health insurance premiums. Today there is something like 160 million Americans that get their health insurance from their employer. When the employer sets up a group plan as a rule and they negotiate those premiums, whatever that premium might be, let's just say it is $10,000 a year per employee, they lay that $10,000 on the barrel head, pay that insurance premium, and that goes into the books as a business expense, and it shows up on the schedule C as a health insurance premium. But if you are a sole proprietor, if you are a partnership, if you are a ma-and-pa operation and you have one part-time employee, that makes you an employer. If you are an employer, you can deduct the premiums to your employees, but you can't deduct your own premium. There are 20.9 million Americans similarly situated in that scenario, Mr. Speaker, where that 20.9 million Americans are compelled under ObamaCare to pay for health insurance premiums and meeting those standards, and maybe they have only got one choice like one-third of America's counties; maybe they only have two choices like another third of America's counties; or maybe they have more than two choices like the other third. But at least 1,022 counties in America have only choice: buy the insurance policy--that is your only choice--or be in violation of the law and be fined and be punished, but do it with after-tax dollars instead of before-tax dollars. That is the burden that they are carrying right now. Mr. Speaker, 20.9 million Americans are disenfranchised in that way. Yet they would be employers and they would be in the effort of trying to provide health insurance for themselves, trying to start up a business perhaps with maybe one part-time employee, with now this big disadvantage that they don't get to deduct their health insurance premiums. Maybe they are that couple that is $20,000 or even $24,000 for a premium after-tax dollars, and by the time the Federal Government steps in and taxes the first, say, 36 percent, and the State steps in and taxes another 9 percent, now we are at 45. You can add a few more various and sundry taxes in there, but a round number is half. So your $20,000 premium takes $40,000 of earnings in order to break even with that premium. But the employer gets to write off the $20,000 as a business expense, so they have that advantage, and you are seeking to compete with an established larger employer. This is wrong. So the second bill we should pass out of this House is the full deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums. The McCarran-Ferguson repeal under Paul Gosar, then the full deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums--oh, that is the King bill, by the way, Mr. Speaker, and I am hopeful that that can be passed through and become law. It is a superior approach to providing refundable tax credits. We need to learn some things. For example, when we hear tax credits, it really means in this discussion refundable tax credits. What is a refundable tax credit? That is when the Federal Government sends you money whether you have a tax liability or not. So that would be that if--and the range in this proposal that emerged yesterday is between $2,000, $4,000, up to $14,000 in refundable tax credits to help people pay for their insurance premiums. Well, that makes me feel good, the idea of trying to help people that can't afford it, but in the process of doing that, we are also helping a lot of people that can afford it. Nonetheless, when you are paying people's health insurance premium, that becomes an entitlement. If everybody is entitled to having a health insurance policy, and if you don't have the money to do so--and I think they use the standard of $75,000 or less--then the Federal Government will subsidize your policy and conceivably buy your policy. Now we have another new entitlement that grows the Federal Government, raises taxes, and spends hundreds of billions of dollars because we don't want to say no to people. They had a policy handed to them by ObamaCare, which the taxpayers cannot afford. We have $20 trillion in national debt right now, Mr. Speaker, and we have a debt ceiling crisis coming at us within just a matter of days or, at a maximum, weeks. This Federal Government needs to get a handle on its spending and it needs to get back to balance. We will never get there if we keep growing entitlements here on the floor of the House of Representatives. So that is two items that need to be brought through. The first is the full repeal. Item number one, the repeal of the McCarran-Ferguson Act, sell insurance across State lines. Item number two, pass the King bill for full deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums so that everybody paying for health insurance is on the same standard as employers are. Then the third thing is the medical malpractice reform, and that is the tort reform legislation that passed out of the Judiciary Committee on the same day with Paul Gosar's bill, Mr. Speaker. That legislation puts a cap on medical malpractice settlements of $250,000 in noneconomic damages--a lot of us would call that pain and suffering-- and pay for pain and suffering. That is a component of it, but it is not the whole picture. So we adopt language that is actually borrowed from California which passed this medical malpractice reform 40 years ago and capped it at $250,000. By the way, that is still the law in California today. The individual that signed it into law, his name is--at that time he was the Governor of California, Mr. Speaker. Maybe people don't remember who the Governor of California was 40 years ago: Jerry Brown. The Governor of California today: Jerry Brown. Is there an effort to repeal the tort reform legislation that has been part of California's law for 40 years? No. In fact, Texas has borrowed from those ideas and implemented that into law, and they are finding that they have got doctors and medical practitioners moving to Texas now because they are not subjected to the outrageous medical malpractice claims that they have been in multiple States across the country. So this tort reform legislation that just passed out of the Judiciary Committee a week and a half or so ago is another prime piece of legislation that should come to the floor for debate and vote, and I am confident it would pass the House and send it over to the Senate, and then give Mitch McConnell some tools to work with. That is not the end of it, Mr. Speaker. I know that under the legislation that has been proposed by leadership and just rolled out yesterday, they expand health savings accounts. I think they nearly doubled them, as I understand, $6,000-some for an individual, maybe $12,000-some for a couple. That is close, but I know that it is not precise, Mr. Speaker. I agree that we need to expand health savings accounts. I think we need to expand them more. My legislation expands them to $10,000 for the individual; $20,000 for the couple. But health savings accounts need to be expanded, and they need to be expanded so that people can use them and manage them. They can put money in tax free, take money out to pay their premiums, take money out to pay their healthcare costs, and grow the health savings account so that when it grows to a point where it becomes $50,000, $100,000, $400,000, $500,000, double that by the time of retirement or more. With that kind of money sitting in a health savings account, then there will be people that will negotiate a health insurance policy, but as a catastrophic policy. They will conclude that they want a policy that has got a high deductible, a fairly high copayment, and that they will take care of their own incidental healthcare costs out of pocket and try to grow their health savings account. In the process of doing that, if you have got the capital in your HSA, then you can negotiate the premium or your monthly health insurance premium down by negotiating for a catastrophic plan, taking care of the incidental costs yourself out of your health savings account. To some degree, you become your own insured for the lower dollar items while you still have catastrophic insurance for the big things. We have done the numbers on this. Even when it was down to the cap in 2003 that rolled out of here that was capped, the HSAs were capped at $5,150 for a couple. We did the math on that. If a couple started out at, say, age 20, worked for 45 years, round numbers, worked out to be age 65, Medicare eligibility, then they would conceivably be sitting there with $950,000 in their health savings account. I have well over doubled this. In fact, take it up to $10,000, $20,000 for a couple where 5,150 was the opening bid in 2003. So we are not quite four times that amount, yet healthcare costs have gone up. So I am not proposing that we end up with $4 million in the account, but maybe some number that is 2.5 or so million. Arriving at Medicare eligibility with six--well, seven figures times some number in their health savings account leaves these couples in a position where they could go out on the open market and purchase a paid-up Medicare replacement policy for life, pay for that up front, and then the Federal Government wants to tax anything that comes out of the health savings account as ordinary income. But my answer to that is no, don't do that. If they will take themselves off the entitlement roll by buying a Medicare replacement policy, then let them keep the change tax-free. Now this becomes a life management account. Not only is it a health savings account, it is a pension plan, and it is incentive to manage your health insurance premiums and your healthcare costs to get your checkups, to get your tests, to watch your weight, get your exercise, and manage your life because you are going to have a nest egg at the end of your working life that you want to be able to spend doing enjoyable things. If your health is a bad experience, then you have got the money there to cover it to make sure that you are taken care of. This is where we need to get people in this country. We are just awfully short of people willing to think outside the box and to think about what we should do here in America. We are not just some regular, ordinary, humdrum, run-of-the-mill country, Mr. Speaker. We are the United States of America. We are the unchallenged greatest nation in the world. We didn't become this way because we are dependent upon government. We became this way because we have a robust appetite for freedom. People have gone out and blazed their own trails. In a lot of cases, settling this country, they literally did that, blazed a trail through the timber and went out and settled the West. When our original Founding Fathers arrived here on our shores, they arrived in a land that had, as far as they knew, unlimited natural resources. They had unlimited freedom because they were a long ways away from King George. They came for their religious freedom as well. They were farmers, they were shopkeepers, they were individual entrepreneurs with a dream, and they forged the American Dream. They did it on religious faith, on free enterprise capitalism, and on God- given liberty. That created this robust country in this giant petri dish that was the only huge experiment that the world has ever seen: a nation that is formed on ideas and ideals. Here we are, the descendants, the recipients, the beneficiaries of their risk and of their dream, beneficiaries of their ideals. All we have to do is preserve them. Our Founding Fathers had to hammer them out. They had to conceive of these ideas about God-given rights, and then they had to articulate it. They had to write these ideas over and over again in many different configurations so that the populace began to understand what it really meant when you have rights that come from God. Then they had to sell this to the colonists. And then they had to defy King George and fight for that freedom. All of that took place with the desks that were there and those who gave their lives for our freedom and our liberty. And what is our job, Mr. Speaker? Hang on to it, maintain it. Now, in this case, with ObamaCare, we have got to restore it. That is what we are faced with. In my view, it is not that hard, if we just come together here and do that which we know is right, send the full repeal of ObamaCare across the rotunda to the Senate, pass Paul Gosar's bill selling insurance across State lines, the repeal of McCarran-Ferguson, make our health insurance premiums fully deductible, and expand our health savings accounts. Do those things and pass the tort reform legislation which will diminish the malpractice premiums that our doctors and practitioners are paying. If we do that much and eliminate the mandates that tie us down in such a way that we don't have the latitude to work any longer, we don't need a mandate that requires every insurance policy to keep your kids on until age 26. There are a lot of other ways to manage that. If you as a family want to buy such a policy, the insurance companies will provide it. You don't need to have the law. The preexisting condition component of this, yes, we have compassion for people who are uninsurable. In fact, 37 of the States, by my recollection, had policies before ObamaCare, Iowa included--and I helped manage that as former chairman of the Iowa Senate State Government Committee--37 States, by my recollection, had established high-risk pools. These high-risk pools used tax dollars to buy the premium down so that those who had preexisting conditions and could not be insured could have their health insurance premiums subsidized by the taxpayers. Now, some States are more generous than others. That is how it will be. But it is a far better solution than the Federal Government being involved in preexisting conditions just because they think that is the right political answer, Mr. Speaker. We will see how this unfolds as the days and few short weeks come forward here. I am hopeful that we will be able to get together in conference and the Republicans can hammer out a solution that can be signed off on by, hopefully, all of us. I am hopeful there will be some Democrats that understand you don't want to go back home again and tell your constituents that you fought to defend ObamaCare, this thing that my colleagues, scores of times--in fact, thousands of times here on the floor--called the Affordable Care Act. We know, Mr. Speaker, it is not affordable and that the premiums are way out of sight; the coverage can't be used, in many cases, because the deductibles are too high for most people; and that the insurance companies are bailing out one after another. And perhaps a year from now, if we don't do something, there will be great chunks of the American people who will have no options whatsoever. So I suggest we do this the prudent way: do the full repeal and send single components of the reform rifle shot out of the House over to the Senate. Let the Senate take them up. Or, if they think it is prudent, package them up and send them back to us as a package. If the House has once passed it, and it comes back to us in a package, I think we will pass it again, Mr. Speaker. So these are intense times, and America's destiny is being determined. It is being determined because we have elected Donald Trump as President of the United States. I think about what it would have been like if I had woken up on the morning of November 9 and we had someone other than Donald Trump elected to be President, and how the optimism that just poured forth since that day has been terrific. You can recognize, right after the election, that people had a spring in their step, and they are more optimistic and more outgoing. If you would walk into the grocery store, people would come over and start a conversation. If you walked into a restaurant, they would do the same thing. They were just more outgoing and more friendly and they wanted to engage with each other. They still want to engage with each other. The stock market has soared up over 21,000, and there has been over $3 trillion in wealth created just in the stock market alone, Mr. Speaker. So this high level of optimism that we have brings with it a high level of responsibility. It is not only to the ObamaCare change, but the pledge that was made by Donald Trump many times throughout the campaign was a full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. I always say 100 percent repeal will rip it out by the roots as if it had never been enacted. The language is a little different, but the meaning is identical. The meaning is identical, Mr. Speaker: a full repeal of ObamaCare. President Trump has said many times we need to be able to sell and buy insurance across State lines. That is another Trump promise. Of course, he has got people he is working with. Tom Price is head of HHS. He is a good man whom I first met here on the floor of the House of Representatives when he came in as a freshman a number of years ago. I watched as he paid attention to the healthcare issues then. And the constitutional issues, I might add. My first encounter with Tom Price was on constitutional issues, and it was a positive one. So we are at this place with a new President that has, halfway into his first 100 days, a number of campaign promises that he has yet to live up to, but a great many that he has lived up to. It looks to me like Donald Trump has at least somebody in an office somewhere in the White House that has a list of all the campaign promises, and they are checking those off one by one as he accomplishes the promises that he has made as a candidate. That is a laudable thing, Mr. Speaker. Yet, he is being bogged down by a series of stories that have, to some degree--I don't want to quite say handcuffed his administration--but it has made it difficult to operate in a flexible and a fluid way. This has to do with, I think, it is leakers within; people who should be loyal to the United States and, hopefully, loyal to the President of the United States, who have been leaking information out. When The New York Times is publishing that they have got inside information that has been leaked to them from the intelligence community, nobody seems to be troubled that The New York Times is going to people in the intelligence community or receiving messages from them and taking information that is about classified activities of our Federal Government and printing the stories about that classified information in their paper. It is not only The New York Times. I see Heat Street here, The Guardian, The Washington Post. That all comes to mind. McClatchy. Here is a series of things that have taken place that bring into question the integrity of some people that work within government and some of them that work within our intelligence community. Here are just a string of events, Mr. Speaker, that bring us to a conclusion about what is going on in our Federal Government. It was in the summer that Heat Street reported that the FBI applied-- in June it is reported--applied for a FISA warrant wiretap to survey people in the Trump campaign who had ties to Russia. Roughly late June, this report came out. FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Special warrants have to be achieved in a FISA court. These warrant requests are classified. The activity around them are classified. So, if it is classified, how is it that Heat Street reported that the FBI applied for FISA warrants to wiretap people in the Trump campaign last June? Well, that is because classified leakage went into the ears of the Heat Street reporters, or I suppose we could say they made it up. And if it were the only story out there, that might be the most likely, but we have a number of other stories. The Guardian reported that a FISA warrant request was made to monitor four Trump campaign staffers for conflicts or for communications with Russia and Russians. That story in The Guardian matches up with the story in Heat Street roughly last June that there was a FISA warrant request to monitor four of Trump's campaign staffers for their communications with Russia. So there is story number one and two. Heat Street writes one; The Guardian writes another. Both of them are writing about what, if we had the real information in front of us, would be classified: the application for FISA and the results of that. The report comes back and says those applications were denied. They were not based upon a reasonable suspicion that there was, I will say, collusion with Russians. So here is item number three. McClatchy reported that the FBI and five other agencies were investigating Russian influence on the U.S. Presidential election. So we have two stories--one from Heat Street, one from The Guardian--that says that there was an application for a FISA warrant. That FISA warrant was presumably turned down, by reports, but then there is a report that there is the FBI and five other agencies that are investigating the Russian influence on the U.S. Presidential election. That is a McClatchy report. Now, this is starting to add up. I am starting to see here is a sign there is something going on and there is a leakage of classified information--a sign something is going on and leakage of classified information. Then, the report of the investigation of the FBI and five other agencies. Now, here is the next story. The New York Times reports that the FBI is investigating Russian Government communications with Trump campaign, but there is no evidence of those communications resulting in any kind of collusion, at least. That is a New York Times report. So these stories have been dropped in: Heat Street, McClatchy, The New York Times. Here is another New York Times report. The Obama administration allowed the NSA to share globally intercepted personal communications with 16 other Federal agencies without a warrant. That, I believe, refers to a January directive that came from Barack Obama that opened up the ability to communicate between the intelligence agencies so that they could share classified information among them, rather than compartmentalize and share that information on a need-to-know basis. That is item number five. Item number six, the Obama administration officials tried to spread information to media showing Russian involvement to help Trump and his election. That is a story that was pushed out and perpetuated. It was pushed out by, of course, the Hillary campaign and others. So the weight of this cumulative effect of these stories is adding up. I would add, also, that on October 31 of last year, just a little over a week before the election, Hillary Clinton sent out a tweet that said--I am trying to remember the words that she used--it was communication specialists or intelligence officials. It was a reference to experts in communications and computers and that they had identified that there were investigations going on and there were communications between the Russians and the Trump campaign. It looked to me like that was an effort on the part of the Clinton campaign to spread these rumors that had been planted all the way along throughout the summer by Heat Street's report that there was a FISA wiretap warrant that was turned down, and by The Guardian's report of presumably the same event of a FISA warrant turned down because they didn't show that there was any activity there that was worthy of a warrant; the McClatchy report that said the FBI and other agencies are investigating Russian influence. Then you have got the two Times' reports. Here is the third New York Times report. They reported that General Flynn talked to Russian officials about how Trump would handle Russian sanctions. This is presumably from a wiretap of the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Mr. Speaker. Now, if that surveillance is taking place of a Russian official, a Russian Ambassador in the United States, if those activities are typical surveillance activities that would go on in most any country that had the capability, then that information is still classified. And if the conversation took place between General Flynn and the Russian Ambassador--and we all, I think, believe that it did--that conversation and the contents of it would be classified. So how did this leakage come out to The New York Times about the phone call or calls that General Flynn may have had with the Russian Ambassador? The leakage of that information would be a Federal felony because it is classified information, facing 10 years in a Federal penitentiary as a penalty. Yet America is hyperventilating about a tweet that Donald Trump sent out that said that Trump and Trump Tower had been hacked or wiretapped by the Obama administration. I know he said President Obama. He put the responsibility on President Obama. It is pretty easy to conclude he may have also just meant the Obama administration. Do we think that this wiretapping is taking place? I think so. I think the evidence, at least, of the telephone conversation between General Flynn and the Russian Ambassador is pretty strong. Since it has not been denied by General Flynn or by Vice President Pence, I am going to assert here in this Congressional Record that that took place, that it was surveilled, and that the information in the exchange, which they claim there is a transcript of the conversation, was leaked out to the press. The press didn't release the specific language that had been used but wrote the general narrative about it in much the same way that a Member of Congress might if they walked into a classified briefing, listen to the briefing, and come back and talk about their general understanding of what they saw in there rather than the specific language that was used and uttered. I submit, Mr. Speaker, that we have at least one Federal felony that has taken place, that it likely is because of leak or leaks that came from the intelligence community. It is pretty clear that President Obama granted the authority--I don't know if I can quite say ordered-- granted the authority that all of our intelligence community, all 17 of them, could exchange classified information freely, and that vastly multiplied the number of people who had access to this information and dramatically increased the odds that there would be leakage about these communications that appear to be surveillance of--perhaps it looks like the Trump team, at least people who were on the Trump team, the Trump campaign perhaps, and that there was an effort that goes back as far as last June. This team of the FBI and the five other intelligence organizations, agencies that are there, did they form that team in June? It looks likely. Did they get any real information due to lack of a FISA warrant from that point on? We don't know, but we have got a pretty good idea that there was a FISA warrant that was approved in October and that information came out of that and maybe other sources that was leaked for the purpose of hurting this Presidency and hurting the effectiveness of then- President-elect Trump and now President Trump. I submit that President Trump should purge from the executive branch all of the political appointees for whom there is any question about their loyalty. Any of those whose loyalty is beholden to Barack Obama, any of those who can't embrace a conservative government that is bringing us back to constitutional principles, they should all be gone. And those civil servants whose jobs are protected, there have been a good number of Obama people who have burrowed themselves into civil service jobs in order to handcuff President Trump. I say for them, when you can identify them, get a room somewhere, put them in it, pay them their wages. They will get tired of their job over time, but the damage they will do if you let them have a desk will be far greater than what we get out of them for the paycheck we are giving them. I say purge as many as possible, Mr. President. Put those people in place who are loyal to you, who want to carry out your agenda. Here is another news report. The Washington Post reports that U.S. investigators examined Jeff Sessions' contacts with Russian officials while he was a campaign adviser to Trump. This report from The Washington Post says that U.S. investigators examined Jeff Sessions' contacts with Russia. So he was under surveillance. He was at least under investigation, it sounds like, if this story is right. Here we have a seated United States Senator, a stellar individual. If I were going to try to compare the character that I know Jeff Sessions is, and I look around this town, I ask: Who matches the character of Jeff Sessions? Not many. I would say Vice President Pence, and then the list gets pretty short after that. Jeff Sessions has a very high degree of character, and he is imminently a constitutionalist, an adherent to the rule of law, a dedicated patriot, and one who makes his decisions within the bounds of the Constitution, of the law, of the rules that exist. He is a great respecter of the order of a civilized society and a terrific Attorney General. There was no better choice that could have been reached by Donald Trump than Jeff Sessions. But here he is, subject to this kind of--at least a report that there is an investigation, Mr. Speaker. I think if I wanted to know about Jeff Sessions' activities, if I thought that it was my business, I would just ask him. When he answered the question from Senator Franken, the question was in the context of did you have any discussions with Russians with regard to any campaign activities that you might have cooperated or colluded with? If Al Franken had asked that question precisely, then the answer would have been precise as well. I can understand why Jeff Sessions' answer came back no, that he hadn't dealt with the Russians. I do a lot of meetings, and if I am asked a question about the context of a subject matter, I will answer within the context of that subject matter. I think that is what Jeff Sessions did. Most of the Senators--I will say all of the Senators sitting there on that committee who heard those questions asked and saw the answers of Jeff Sessions, and then they and their staff and the public, weeks went by, not a peep about anybody being concerned about the answer that Jeff Sessions gave. Why? Because all of those Senators sitting on that committee listening to his testimony and the other Senators who were watching that testimony either from in the room or around the Hill on C-SPAN, and their staff who were monitoring those hearings all understood that you have people from multiple countries come into your office on an irregular basis, and in a matter of months one might meet with the Greeks, the Russians, the French, the Germans, pick your country in South America or Asia. There is a constant flow of people coming through my office, and I know there is a constant flow of people from other countries coming through the offices of probably every United States Senator. So when Jeff Sessions said that he hadn't met with the Russians within the context of discussing the campaign, which was the heart of the question asked by Senator Franken, no Senator was concerned about his answer that he hadn't met with the Russians because they understood the context within which he was answering that question. Had that not been the case, some Senator, like Chuck Schumer, would have woken up the first day instead of after they were able to gin it up and turn it into a media story, Mr. Speaker. We have a country to save. We have an ObamaCare to repeal. We have a healthcare policy in this country that needs to be rebuilt logically by preserving our doctor-patient relationship, encouraging competition between insurance companies, letting people be in charge of the policy they want to buy, providing full deductibility, fixing the lawsuit abuse, being able to sell insurance across State lines and expand health savings accounts. All that needs to happen. I am hopeful that it can happen within the next couple of months, Mr. Speaker. While that is going on, we need to look over at the White House and encourage this President: Purge those people from your midst who owe their loyalty to Barack Obama. They are undermining your Presidency. You have to fight the moles from within, the media from without, the George Soros-organized protesters who are on the streets of America every weekend with a different cause. They will continue this until the public gets tired of it. Mr. Speaker, the President needs to understand that he has a lot of enemies in this country and a great big job. His ability to take on the mainstream media has been demonstrated. Now it is a little bigger hurdle that needs to happen, too. The intelligence community from within, there are a lot of good, dedicated patriots there. They need to purge those people from their midst as well who are not loyal to the United States of America and those who are working against the foreign policy agenda of this President. We need to rebuild America. We need to make America great again. We need to restore our economy. We need to get our tax cuts done. We need to get some more regulatory reform. Let's have this robust, growing economy kicked off and see that 3, 3\1/2\, 4 percent growth that this country can do with the freedom that has been delivered to it, much of it by the pen of our new President, Donald Trump. I am optimistic about our future, although we have our challenges in front of us, Mr. Speaker, and I urge that my colleagues step up to this task, keep it constitutional, keep it free market. Remember the individual freedom, the God-given liberty, and the legacy that we are leaving for succeeding generations. Let's get this job done and make America great again. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, due to traffic delay surrounding a Vice President Motorcade, I missed two votes. Had I been present, I would have voted Yea on Roll Call No. 95 and Yea on Roll Call No. 96.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. The answer would be a fair amount, and I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry) for his presentation here today, his friendship, and the job he has been doing for a long time representing the eastern third of Nebraska, generally speaking. I would point out also, Mr. Speaker, that we actually first met on the pro-life issue. As I was looking at the primary candidates that were vying for that position in eastern Nebraska, I wanted to measure their character, the content of their character, the value of their faith and their commitment to principle and planning and Constitution, but especially life. In looking at the candidates, it didn't take very long to figure that out. I think Nebraskans have done very well with the representation that they have sent to this Congress, especially in the case of Mr. Fortenberry, who has exceeded my expectations. And I am pleased to say that here. As the gentleman indicated, I came to the floor here this afternoon, Mr. Speaker, to speak about life, about innocent, unborn human life. To start with, I will put it this way, Mr. Speaker. There are a series of values that we hold dear. Many of the debates here on this floor and in the committees and the various committee rooms around the Hill that we have are more or less working around the edges of the central issue. Sometimes, though, we do get to the central issue. The central issue was debated here on the floor earlier with a different piece of legislation. When young people are growing up in America and they are listening to their parents, their teachers, other friends and relatives and schoolmates, the question will emerge--and you can't grow up in America without the question of abortion emerging; and sometimes they are counseled on one side of that question and sometimes on the other--but when I am talking to young people, I want them to shape their values around the most solid principles, as our Founding Fathers shaped the values of America around the solid moral principles. It doesn't do to simply pass off the idea of abortion and say: I am not going to think about it; or I am going to leave it up to God to decide. He calls on us also to contemplate these things. Our Founding Fathers wrote into the Declaration of Independence that we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When I contemplate those words and the order of those words, often it is conflated together as equal or equivalent values as if life and the pursuit of happiness are equivalent values, with liberty in the middle of all that, and you can stir it up and no one's pursuit of happiness should be diminished by someone else's search for liberty or the exercise of their liberty or that no one's life should trump that of someone else's pursuit of happiness or liberty. Mr. Speaker, in understanding the Declaration of Independence, the foundational document that undergirds our Constitution and the most beautiful document written in the history of the nation-state--and I believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were inspired with divine guidance, just a little bit lower standard of true than divine inspiration; a divine guidance--I believe our Founding Fathers thought deeply about that message that was coming to them from above and the words that were put down on that parchment by Thomas Jefferson. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were rights that were considered carefully to be prioritized in their order of what was the most important down to the least important of the three. Life came first. They didn't say right to pursuit of happiness, to liberty, to life. They didn't say right to liberty, pursuit of happiness, and then to life. They wrote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To understand what that means, think of this. First, the definition of pursuit of happiness is understood by our Founding Fathers. Our Founding Fathers didn't see this pursuit of happiness as let's just say a tailgate party on a Saturday noon or early Saturday afternoon. It wasn't about going off to a party or sitting in your backyard with your family or doing the things we enjoy to do, enjoying sports, watching or participating; or being out on the water or down the ski slopes. That was not imagined at all as the pursuit of happiness because they understood pursuit of happiness to be the definition of the Greek term that I pronounce eudemonia, pronounced with a Greek accent. But what it means is: in pursuit of happiness. Happiness under the Greek understanding of the term was the whole person; to develop one's self as the whole person. That would be to develop yourself physically. As you grow into adulthood, keep yourself in shape, build your muscles up, eat healthy, sleep healthy, do the healthy things, make sure that this temple of our body is taken care of and respected and appreciated. That is the vessel through which we carry our values and are able to carry out many of the things we do in our lives. So physical health was part of the pursuit of happiness, but also the mental development. And it is not just pursuing knowledge, not rote memorization alone, which has its value--always has, always will have-- but also the understanding of a philosophical person and an intellectually complete individual to complement the physically healthy and in-shape individual, philosophically sound, intellectually sound, but also theological sound. That is eudemonia. That is the complete human being. That is making the most out of God's gift to us and developing ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, theologically, and psychologically. The whole human being. The understanding that our Founding Fathers had was that you have a right to pursue this. You have a right to develop yourself. In fact, the implication is that we have an obligation to do so. That means we have got an obligation to evaluate the moral questions in front of us with the brain that we are given and the values that we have developed and the education that we worked to earn. That is pursuit of happiness. But that is the lowest of the three on the priority, Mr. Speaker. The next value is liberty. With that value of liberty, there are certain things that are liberty. We take liberty with our speech. We take liberty with our religion. We take liberty with the press. We have our right to assemble and all of those things. If someone is in pursuit of happiness, they are not going to take away our rights to our liberty. Most of our rights to liberty are wrapped up in the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment catches the most important ones early. Also, the liberty to keep and bear arms, the property rights that come along in the Fifth Amendment, the components of liberty that we have and the provisions that allow us to face a jury of our peers and no double jeopardy. Those are liberties. The liberties that are defined trump the pursuit of happiness. In other words, someone else can't take away our freedom of speech because they are in search of a good tailgate party. We go from the lowest priority, the pursuit of happiness, to the next level up, liberty, and to the highest level up, which is the right to life. Life itself is sacred. When I talk to young people, I ask them the question: Do you believe that human life is sacred in all of its forms? They look around each other in the bleacher seats in the gymnasium, if it happens to be a school in that fashion, and they come to a consensus: Yes. And I will ask them: Is your life sacred? How about the person sitting next to you, is their life sacred? After a little while, they start to nod their heads and agree. It is no trick question. Human life is sacred in all of its forms. Once we understand that and we accept that universal consensus that is here in this society of America, then the only other thing we have to say is: Well, if human life is sacred and we protect it with all that we have, then we need to know when life begins and we need to know when life ends. We know that in 1973, 44 years ago, the Supreme Court came to a conclusion. Well, actually, they didn't know, but they spoke of viability and they used a vague, mushy definition of viability and trimesters, but that is not a way to define life. When you deal with something that is sacred in all of its forms, you don't use a definition that says maybe it is or maybe it isn't a life; maybe it is viable, maybe it isn't; maybe it has actually crossed this threshold of this trimester or this one or this one. So what they ended up in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the combination of the two was abortion on demand and the person's right to life. That personhood that begins at the moment of conception is subject to the judgment of the mother, who may think that this life is inconvenient to her liberty or her pursuit of happiness. That was when they crossed a moral line that needs to be examined by everyone in this country who goes to the polls and votes or conducts themselves in a fashion that is affected by the abortion industry itself. So I say to them, students especially: Is human life sacred in all of its forms? The answer comes back: Yes, it is. And then I say: Then you have to choose a moment that life begins, and that moment, there is only one moment that we know, and that is the moment of conception. That moment of conception that life begins is a moment that I believe that God places the soul in that little being that is a full complement of a combination of the DNA of the father and the mother, the full complement of the human being, a unique human being, a unique human being that there will never be another one exactly like that little baby that is conceived. There will never be another one. Even identical twins have their distinctions, Mr. Speaker. Mothers can tell them apart. Not always easily, but they can tell. Fathers can tell little babies apart. Even though they have got matching DNA that is exactly the same DNA, they are still unique. They are still a little bit different in certain ways. Their personalities develop in different ways, and they have physical characteristics that become more and more apparent as the years go on. There are no two human beings exactly the same. That is because God made it that way. Think of how unique this is. There are over 7 billion people now on this planet. Our population has gone over 7 billion people. Of all the people who have gone to their graves throughout history from the beginning of time, from the Garden of Eden until today, and all the people who live on the planet, 7 billion today, and of all the people who will come, likely by the billions, into the future, there are no two faces that are the same. They sometimes look a little the same--more than a little--but there are no two faces that are the same. There are no two faces that anybody who knows them can't tell the difference. Think how genius it is to create a species, Homo sapiens. We each have a unique visage that will never be matched again throughout the duration of time. It has never been matched before from the beginning of time, and no matter what any scientist might do in a laboratory, there is never going to be anybody exactly the same, even if the DNA matches exactly. That is a unique approach to this. Think about this: The thing that we measure ourselves by and recognize ourselves by, our face, our visage, carries with it the package of all of the emotions and the thoughts and the expressions that bypass so much need to use the words in this very excellent language that we have. Think of how you interact with your friends, your family, your neighbors, when you are sitting at a meeting, when you are giving facial expressions that don't require a sound. People read those facial expressions, and they react off of them. I think of the days that I am out, as Mr. Fortenberry said, working on a crew, maybe laying pipe with my three sons, and we may not even have to speak all day long because facial expressions, a nod here and there, we know each other, we can communicate with our facial expressions, and that is enough. That is a unique thing that we have been blessed with. Every one of us is unique. Our lives begin at the moment of conception. We can't measure and we can't prove scientifically when that moment of conception is. We just know. We know that that is when that baby, when the components of the DNA of the father and the mother come together in that fertilized egg. That is the moment of conception; that is the moment that life begins. I would like it if we could identify scientifically, if a little bell went off and we knew, here is conception. There is a unique little life here in the womb of the mother--and, by the way, she is a mother at that moment. But we can't do that yet. We have come a long way. When our family was born, at that time, we couldn't tell whether it was a boy or a girl, and so it was nice, in my opinion, to have a surprise on whether it is a boy or a girl. Of course, I always prayed that they would be mentally healthy and, after that, physically healthy, but never began to ask whether it should be a boy or a girl. But today we know. We can measure if it is a boy or a girl. We can tell facial characteristics. We can see the personality of these little unborn babies in the womb. When they make faces, you can see them grimace. You can see them smile. You can see them suck their thumb. There are many, many people in this country today who have a 4-D ultrasound of one or more of their children that is taken well before they are born. I can think of one of my district personnel who has, in his office in Sioux City, a framed picture of the ultrasound of Joseph Dean Anderson, my godson. It is there, framed, the ultrasound of that little baby boy months before he was born. Now he is about 7 years old or so, perfect little towheaded, blond-haired kid running around, full of happiness, love, and energy. But he was first known in his mother's womb and first recognized as a family member there and his picture framed. It still is there in the office in Sioux City. He is about tall enough to see it straight on these days. That happens all over America because we know that life begins at the moment of conception. We hold it; we cherish life as sacred to us. These little babies are the future of America. They are God's will, and they are the future of America. Yet, nearly 60 million of them have been aborted over the years since 1973 and Roe v. Wade, nearly 60 million. Think of that, 60 million babies in 44 years. And we are watching a nation that has a birthrate now that is lower than the replacement rate. You hear debate on this floor, Mr. Speaker, that says that we have to go to foreign countries to bring people in here to do the work that we don't have enough people to do. I don't accept that as a rational thing for a country to do in that way. What we need in this country is we need good people to have more babies and raise them right, and yet we are missing 60 million. That doesn't include the second generation of those who were aborted in the first half of the 44 years of Roe v. Wade. Thomas Jefferson concluded that a generation was 19 years. It is probably a little longer than that today. Generations turned over, by his estimation, in 19 years. It is just convenient for me, 44 years since Roe v. Wade, I am going to call that, divided by two, two generations, 22 years a generation. Two generations, a third of Americans, gone because of a court decision that unjustly found, unconstitutionally found, immorally found, irrationally found, and the guilt that this Nation carries for tolerating a Supreme Court decision and accepting that Supreme Court decision. But it is not everybody in this country who carries that guilt because we have armies of pro-life workers who are out there on a daily basis doing all they can to bridge the gap for, let's say, a mother who is in a crisis and can't care for the baby that is on the way; the crisis pregnancy centers that are there; the lives that have been saved by the thousands and thousands by the pro-life workers, the lives that have been saved by the inspiration that comes from seeing hundreds of thousands of pro-life marchers come to this city and make that march from around the Washington Monument on up to the Supreme Court and to the west side of the Supreme Court to plead for justice for those who are voiceless in the unborn. Well, Mr. Speaker, it is time for this Congress to address this. It is time for Congress to move along the issue. And so because we cannot medically prove when a conception begins, we believe profoundly that personhood begins at the moment of conception, and personhood needs to be protected in all of its forms. The closest we can get to verifying that personhood, that conception, is the measure of the heartbeat. We all know that a beating heart is life. When the heart stops beating, life ends. Now, we can detect a heartbeat as early as 16 days from conception, and often the number is published to be 18 days from conception, Mr. Speaker. It may not always be detectible in every pregnancy that early, but it is entirely detectible early on in the pregnancy. So I have introduced legislation, Mr. Speaker, to protect these innocent babes, these babes that can't speak for themselves, that can't cry out for their own mercy, but they are already formed in their mother's womb, and the unique individual that grows from the matching of those two DNAs. And when that heart starts to beat, a physician can detect that heartbeat, when they can detect the heartbeat, we need to protect the baby. With the understanding that when a heartbeat can be detected the baby must be protected, I have drafted and introduced legislation that is H.R. 490, Mr. Speaker. Now, this bill is titled the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017. It makes a lifesaving stride in enshrining the rights, the rights of the unborn, into U.S. law. It ensures that no child for whom a heartbeat is detectible is aborted unless the life of the child's mother is endangered in fact by a physical disorder, by a physical illness, or by a physical injury. Any abortionist who performs an abortion under this legislation, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017, any abortionist who performs an abortion in spite of a detectible heartbeat and outside of the exceptions that I have defined, which is for a physical disorder, a physical illness, or a physical injury, any physician who performs an abortion outside of those exceptions would be subject to a fine or imprisonment--and that is for a period up to 5 years--or both. This is a serious piece of legislation, and it needs to be, because life itself is the number one thing that is sacred here on this planet, especially in this country. This legislation, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017, will require all physicians before conducting an abortion to detect the heartbeat of the unborn child; and that means they have to maintain the records of their endeavor to detect a heartbeat, and if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected. That is the center of this law. Ever since Roe v. Wade, which was unconstitutionally decided in 1973, 44 years ago, these 60 million babies--almost 60 million babies that have been ended by the abortion industry--have received a rubber stamp from the courts, from the Federal Government, not from this Congress and not from the States. The Supreme Court overrules the efforts in the States to protect innocent, unborn human life. The Supreme Court overrules this Congress to protect unborn human life, and we have been trying to find ways around that decision ever since 1973. But I have introduced the bill, and it will protect the lives of the voiceless innocents. Then to make a point now, Mr. Speaker, there are probably some people who are thinking this is a little bit too big of a leap for where we are on the topic today. I would submit that it is not, that we have been working too patiently with what I will call incrementalism. When I came to this Congress more than a decade ago, I had been, at that time, already working to try to help pass legislation that banned partial- birth abortions, and the Supreme Court had found the partial-birth abortion ban to be unconstitutional based on a couple of things. One of them was the Supreme Court ruled that it was necessary to save the life of the mother or the health of the mother, and the other one was that Congress hadn't defined the act precisely enough. So we went to work in the Committee on the Judiciary. I want to thank Congressman Steve Chabot of Ohio for taking the lead on this issue. We held hearing after hearing, and Congress had findings that a partial- birth abortion was never medically necessary to save the life of the mother; and that is with much, much testimony of experts before the committee for a long period of time definitively concluding such, and then the act itself was more precisely defined. Then it went back before the courts, and each of the Federal districts that heard the case, three of them, simultaneously, all of them turned it down as unconstitutional. But it went to the Supreme Court, where the ban on partial-birth abortion was upheld. It has saved some lives but has put a small dent in this huge 60 million aborted babies industry. We began to go to work on this in other ways. We have legislation that is introduced before this Congress that bans sex-selected abortions. We know that there are mothers and fathers that will use the ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby. If they want a little baby boy and it is a girl, sometimes they will abort that little girl and try again for a boy. We know this is happening in places like China, where they have had, up until recently, the one-child policy, and the proportion of boys to girls is way out of whack in China because they are aborting little baby girls because they would prefer having a boy. That happens in America, too, but not as statistically evident. It is immoral to do that. That piece of legislation has 77 percent support. That is the strongest support we have, statistically, for abortion legislation that exists, as far as I know, in this Congress. Then we have pain-capable legislation, little babies that can feel the pain of abortion when that needle with a saline solution is stuck into--Mr. Speaker, I am just going to bypass the details of how this functions. Babies can feel pain. They can experience joy; they can experience pleasure; and they can experience pain. We have legislation to prohibit abortion from the time that we can determine that that baby feels the pain of being aborted. But that is a definition of pain, not a definition of life. If this is a unique life, as I have described at length here, then this unique life must be protected. We don't say this unique life which has this soul--and God put in this soul from the moment of conception-- doesn't deserve to be protected unless they feel pain. What we are saying is it bothers our conscience too much to have a baby killed that can feel the pain and suffering. I support these other two pieces of legislation that I have described: the ban on sex-selective abortion and the ban on pain- capable abortion. But, Mr. Speaker, that doesn't get at the heart of this. The heart of this is this: sacred human life. Human life, sacred in all of its forms, begins at the moment of conception. We need legislation to protect that personhood. And when we can define and clearly detect a heartbeat, a heartbeat in a baby from as early as 16 days, we must protect the life of that innocent baby. So that, Mr. Speaker, is my conviction, my deep conviction, my very profoundly held conviction. But I wonder: What does the rest of the country think? Sometimes I find myself out there right without a majority. Sometimes they will say: Well, you didn't have a majority because you weren't right. And this one, I have no doubt, Mr. Speaker, human life is sacred in all of its forms. So we ask the question in polling across America: What do the American people think of the proposal to ban abortion once a heartbeat can be detected? Mr. Speaker, the polling that we have out there is very carefully done, and I am going to give you the numbers first. This is the general number that asks the question, if the heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected, and here is how the polling came together. Sixty-nine percent agree with the position that I have just taken here in the bill that I have introduced, which is H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017. The data contained in this polling report are responses to a question that was commissioned by Faith2Action. That is in a Barna Group OmniPoll. 1,002 interviews were conducted of U.S. adults nationwide. The sampling error for this 1,002 interviews is plus or minus 3.1 percent. That is about as accurate as you get with polling. That means that there is a 95 percent confidence level that these numbers are right. The data is weighted in the national distribution of U.S. adults. They took minimal statistical weighting and they used it to calibrate the samples--so, of known population percentages--and it is in relation to the demographic variables of age, gender. I bet it is age, sex, education, and region, so that it is scientifically applied. It is a poll that was run from January 19 until January 27. This is pretty fresh information, about as fresh as it gets. These interviews were conducted over a majority landline--60 percent or so off landlines and 40 percent off cell phones or other mobile devices, so that we got a good cross section of people throughout that. They were conducted by experienced, trained interviewers. They were supervised at all times. They were monitored. They were computer- assisted telephone interviewing to make sure that the balance of this thing was as good and as objective as it could get, Mr. Speaker. So this polling result says, among U.S. adults nationwide, a slight majority, 55 percent, agree strongly that, if a doctor is able to detect the heartbeat of an unborn baby, that baby should be legally protected--that is the core of the question that was asked--and 18 percent disagree either strongly or somewhat with this. So when I look at the numbers here, 69 percent overall are packaged up within the agree strongly component--fifty-five percent. Now, that is landslide in a political election, 55 percent. And this will be a landslide in the polling that says 55 percent strongly agree that, if a doctor can detect a heartbeat, the unborn baby should be protected by law, a 55 percent landslide majority, Mr. Speaker. And then you add to that the 14 percent who agree somewhat with this. So, from a general agreement standpoint, 69 percent, or as close as you can get and not exactly hit the number, 7 in 10 Americans say let's protect those lives of those innocent, unborn babies when you can hear their heartbeat. The people who disagree strongly are only 10 percent. And then those who disagree somewhat are another 8 percent; 18 percent disagreeing on the other side, but only 10 percent disagree strongly. So 55 percent say they strongly support a ban on abortion, once a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected, and only 10 percent disagree with that strongly. I am going to say that they are probably some of the hardcore leftists that I am engaged in debate with on almost a daily basis with here, Mr. Speaker. But you can divide 10 percent into 55 percent and say, for everyone out here who says we should not protect that innocent, unborn baby whose heart is beating, for everyone who says that, there are five and a half Americans who say we have to protect, we have got an obligation to, and they believe strongly that we protect the lives of those innocent, unborn babies with a heartbeat. That is a huge majority on the side of life. I am very gratified to know that that is the position of the American people, with only a 3.1 percent margin of error in a scientific poll that I am happy now is part of the Record in the United States Congress. I would say there is another way to analyze this poll. I am looking at this one that says there are 13 percent undecided, Mr. Speaker. So you have 69 percent who agree altogether, and you have got 18 percent that disagree altogether, and 13 percent that neither agree nor disagree. Now, I always wonder, when we are doing polling, why do we measure those without an opinion? If they don't agree or disagree, that is about the definition of ambivalent. They call that mox nix where I come from. So if I take that out of there and calculate it the other way and put it together, you add together 69 percent and 18 percent, and then you say what percentage are those that agree, well, it is actually 79.3 percent say we should not abort a baby whose heart is beating, and 20.7 percent say, well, it would be okay with them if we did. That is another way of measuring this. And that is a 4-to-1 measure--5.5-to-1, 4-to-1 Americans are ready to protect innocent, unborn human life. Mr. Speaker, think what this means. Think what it means that we are a society that seems to have plugged our ears to the understanding that life begins at conception. I have known this for a long time. It wasn't a mystery to me. I see the beautiful little baby going out now. Mr. Speaker, that is a very gratifying thing to see from down here, parents raising their children right. But from my standpoint, I have this memory. Marilyn and I were married in 1972. I remember sitting there in card club, and the discussion at that time was we have all these babies being born in Central America and why do they have these babies if they can't feed them? Why don't they just abort them? I remember that discussion around card club on a Friday night. It didn't really trigger me at the time because we hadn't been very far into the abortion debate. I hadn't thought about it very much. We weren't parents, and Marilyn wasn't pregnant at the time. We were just married. So I remember that discussion though, and it just didn't hit me. It just kind of went through. I don't even know if I engaged in it. I just remember that somebody at the table said, well, if they can't feed them, why don't they just have an abortion? Well, not very long after that our first child was born. And I picked up that little baby--actually, he wasn't little. He was just a little bit short of 9 pounds. But I looked at him, and I was in such awe of the miracle of that little boy, that little baby boy named David. There was an aura about him. He was a product of Marilyn and me from our love. And there he is, a miraculous little child in my hands, warm and squirmy and soft and beautiful and a miracle. It is different if it is somebody else's child, I suppose, because it hadn't hit me like that. But there was an aura about this little baby, and you could have convinced me he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, himself. And I looked at him and I thought, how could anyone take this little miracle's life? How could they kill this baby now? He is minutes old. How could they take his life the minute before he is born? No one could do that--well, almost no one. Could they take his life the minute after he was born? Or could they take it the minute before he was born? Or could someone take his life an hour before he was born or a day? Or could they take it a week before he was born or a month or one trimester or two trimesters or 8 months or 36 weeks or 37 weeks before he was born? What changed? What changed throughout that time? In a matter of minutes, it all fell into place for me. From the moment of conception he was formed in his mother's womb, and from that point on he is growing on the genetic configuration that he is, blessed with a soul placed in him at that moment. That little boy grew from that point on, and now he is the father of three of my grandchildren. They are all miracles to me. And our other sons are all miracles to me, and our other grandchildren are all miracles to me. But I can't conceive of doing anything except sacrificing, if I needed to, my life to protect them because they are unique human beings, worthy of all of the protection that society can give them, just like every American is; and, in fact, everybody on this planet is seen in God's eyes. There has to be a moment that our lives begin. We have to choose that because we can't have an immoral position coming out of law that says, well, it is up to the mother to decide whether this baby is going to have an opportunity to fill its lungs full of free air and scream for its own mercy. They can't do that from the moment of conception, but they can do that from the moment of birth. And if we could hear that inner womb scream at that moment of abortion, we would plug our ears in terror and fright at the crime that abortion is. So it is our moral obligation to protect all human life from the moment of conception until natural death. That is what this bill does, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017. The polling that we have here says clearly that the American people agree. And it is not only, Mr. Speaker, the American people--well, it is actually in the polling. But I separated them out into categories so we could understand how people think about this and how they think about it from the categories of being Republicans and Democrats and no party or Independents. As you can see, among the Republicans, 86 percent agree that, if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. That is 86 to 6 percent disagree. Eighty-six percent of Republicans, that is about as high a number as you see on anything. I should run a little measure sometime when you ask, does the Sun come up in the east. That is probably about only a 97 percent issue. But it is 86 percent want to protect a baby with a heartbeat-- Republicans. Democrats, still that landslide majority of 55 percent of Democrats want to protect a baby from the moment a heartbeat can be detected--25 percent say no, 55 percent say yes. It is more than a 2-to-1 support among Democrats to support the language that is in this bill for H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act. And then when you go among Independents, they are a little more pro- life than Democrats are. I shouldn't be surprised at that. Sixty-one percent of Independents want to protect a baby from the moment that their heartbeat can be detected. This is a huge issue for America. America is not yet informed enough about this legislation that is available. And sometimes we get stuck in a rut and we decide, well, we have been working on the sex-selective legislation or the pain-capable legislation, or we have been trying to get Planned Parenthood defunded--which this Congress must do--and we need to do it perpetually, not just annually. Those are all things that we need to be working on, but it is time now for this Congress to swing for the fences, to move legislation that is based upon a clear and distinct principle of life. If that heartbeat of that little baby's heart, that innocent little baby can be detected, we have a moral obligation to protect that baby. Then how do we measure the end of life? And how has it been from time immemorial? When the heart stops? When the heart can no longer beat? Yes, we measure brain waves and we do other things. But when that heart stops and it can't be started and we can't sustain life, we call that death. And when an abortion is committed, that little baby's heart is beating. And you know that the abortion stops a beating heart. That is on posters by the Knights of Columbus and others all over this country. Abortion stops a beating heart. We need to protect the lives of all of those little babies with beating hearts. We can detect them now with the ultrasound and the science that we have. It is time for this Congress to move. In our March for Life here that I mentioned a little earlier, Mr. Speaker, when we have hundreds of thousands of people that come out here and gather on The Mall and then march to the Supreme Court building to plead for the court to protect innocent, unborn human life, what is happening is America is waking up. America is feeling the guilt, and we pray for the mothers who have had abortions. But America is also understanding that there is a life that begins at the moment of conception. So of all of the families that have first bonded with this little unborn baby by seeing the ultrasound--sometimes by framing it, as exists in my Sioux City office for Joseph Dean Anderson's ultrasound-- but millions of those cases across the country are raising the awareness of the American people, and it is not just the mother and the father that see that ultrasound. They see it in realtime, and they hear the sound for real. It is not just a picture that goes up on the wall that is framed, but it is a living, breathing, moving organism where you can see that innocent little baby squirming and moving around inside in the amniotic fluid, and you can see the expressions on their face and the movement that is there. That this is a real human being and you want to get your hands on that little baby and hold them and love them, but you have to wait until they grow enough that you can do that. But family after family has this, and little brothers and sisters are shown that ultrasound and they say: This is your little brother or little sister that we expect on such and such date--we have become pretty close with that date. And so kids, brothers and sisters, the siblings are recognizing their brother or their sister, acknowledging that they are an innocent unborn human being well before they are born. And they grow up knowing this. Now, for the 44 years since Roe v. Wade, we have millions of millions of pro-life people and millions and millions of anti-abortion people who understand this. They grew up understanding this. And no one can any longer tell them that it is just a blob of a tissue and that it is not alive. I recall a World War II veteran, one who I admired and respected. He has passed away now, as many of them have. His name was Vic Lunsman. We were having this discussion while we were talking about building terraces and tiling, and he said: When the pro-abortion people say that this baby is not alive--if this baby is not alive, why then do you have to kill it? Why do you have to kill it? I thought he put that into a package about as compressed as it could be. We know that abortion ends an innocent life of an innocent human being that is created in the same image that we are recreated in, in God's image. And now we know from 16 days on that--it is not just that we know that there is a heartbeat, but we can hear it. We can hear the beat, beat, beat, beat, beat of that little heart. And to think of that little heart struggling for life; to think of that baby squirming to try to avoid the abortionist; to think of that baby feeling the pain; to think of that baby being aborted because the mother or the father wanted a boy or a girl; or because somebody told them that that baby wasn't going to be exactly perfect, none of that measures up against innocent, unborn human life, sacred life, that life that we have to protect from the moment of conception to natural death. That is what is wrapped up in this heartbeat bill. And if we had the science to prove the moment of conception, I would be standing here with a moment of conception bill. We don't have that science today, but we do have the science of detecting a heartbeat. And we know the sound of a beating heart is the sound of life. And if you can detect a heartbeat, if you can hear that heart beating in any of us, you know that person is alive; you know there is a spirit within us; you know that our soul is still within our body; and you know that there is a hope for us--at least whoever that might be whose heart we are listening to--to get up and to move about, to live, love, laugh, learn, reproduce, and contribute, to glorify this Earth in a way that we are challenged to do. Yet, 60 million babies have been denied that opportunity and have been denied that gift of life. What might they have done? What might they have done for America? What might they have done for the world? How many Presidents, how many Mother Teresas, how many Billy Grahams? How many people have lost their life before they ever had a chance to breathe and fight for it that might have solved the problems that we are facing today here in this United States Congress? We can't deny that potential. We carry that guilt today, but the best we can do is end it as soon as we can end it. And we would end 90 to 95 percent of the abortions in America with H.R. 490 the Heartbeat Protection Act. Mr. Speaker, I want to remind you here in this Congress that this is a bill that has strong support in the polling that we have rolled out here. Eighty-six percent of Republicans say that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby should be protected. Fifty-five percent of Democrats agree that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. Sixty-one percent of Independents say that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. And of those who oppose it--at least those who oppose it vigorously--only 6 percent of Republicans, 25 percent of Democrats--and I am going to suspect that a fair amount of these 25 percent of Democrats, Mr. Speaker, are more for political reasons and that they wouldn't be able to sustain themselves in a moral debate on the topic. I think that may or may not be the case for the 27 percent of no parties. But to put this back into summary, Mr. Speaker, here are easier numbers to remember: 69 percent of the American people, with only a 3.1 percent margin of error, believe that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. That is 7 in 10 Americans that take that stand. And that is one of the strongest pieces of support you can get for any bill that would ever come to this floor or any discussion that we ever have if you get up to that level of 7 out of 10, and only 18 percent disagree vigorously. So, Mr. Speaker, I hope that the people that listen in on this conversation between us have contemplated the central points that I have put into this debate and this discussion here this evening, and I hope they have thought about the principles that are involved. I hope they are able to carry this message along to their children and grandchildren, and into our schools and our classrooms, our churches and our synagogues all across this land, this profound belief that if Americans share; that we believe that human life is sacred and it needs to be then sacred in all of its forms. The second question is: At what moment does life begin? There is only one moment in the full development of a full human being, and that is the moment of conception. The closest we can scientifically get to proof of that conception is the sound and the detection of that heartbeat, which we all recognize to be the sound of life. That sound of life, that beat of that heart cannot be extinguished by a moral human being who believes that a human life is sacred in all of its forms, and knows that it begins at the moment of conception. And then we can measure the heartbeat and protect that baby from the moment that that heart has begun to beat. Any doctor that fails to follow the directive in this legislation, in H.R. 490, any doctor that fails to search for a heartbeat and conducts an abortion without--or conducts an abortion in spite of that beating heart is facing a fine and a prison term up to 5 years, or both. That is a respect for human life. By the way, we hold the mother harmless. She is also protected from any touch of this law. It is only the abortionist that is the subject of this piece of legislation that I have introduced. But it aims to protect human life from at least the moment that the heartbeat can be detected; the baby is protected. And this will gain momentum as we go forward. The American people will understand what this means. I am hopeful that across our churches, across our schools, across our families, they begin to talk about the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017. And our little kids that grow up, as mine did--having once seen the film, that families grow up respecting the heartbeat of innocent, unborn human life. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention this evening. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, this great deliberative body. To start this off, I yield to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry).

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to have the privilege to participate in this great deliberative body that we have and are. On occasion, I come down here and listen to my colleagues from the other side of the aisle. They have been known to change the subject on me, or I have changed the subject that I came down here to speak about because I have listened to the things that they had to say. It is good for us to have that kind of debate, Mr. Speaker, because certainly I disagree with the conclusions that have been drawn here. I want to take this from the top, and I will get to the wall situation along the way. I think those numbers are a long ways off, myself. I will start the immigration issue, Mr. Speaker. There has been a long battle that has gone on. For me, it goes back into the early part of this millennium when we had a group of Senators who decided they were going to solve the immigration problem back in about 2006 or so, and so they brought their big immigration bill and pushed it hard. Here in the House we brought an enforcement bill and pushed that back against the Senate. We held hearings for that enforcement bill around the country, in places like Arizona and Dubuque, Iowa, as I recall. There were a number of others around the country. We made the case that we have to be a nation of laws, and the rule of law has to prevail, and that the effort on the other side was to waive the application of the law. They said: We want to be able to tell people that we feel sorry for you. Therefore, we are going to sacrifice the rule of law out of our sympathy for the condition that you left in order to come in to America. Well, that fits some people, but it doesn't substitute for the rule of law. It doesn't substitute for the respect for the law that we must have if we are going to be a law-abiding, first world nation. Plenty of Third World nations don't have respect for the rule of law. Most of the nations that these illegal aliens come from are coming from countries that don't have respect for the rule of law. One of the things they are trying to get away from is the erosion of the law that they have had in their home country. I mean, think of Mexico, for example. Driving down the street in Mexico, you might be pulled over by a police officer there and they will leverage a thing called mordida against you, which is you pay the police officer on the spot and he will let you go. Well, that is paying off the law enforcement. They use that to generate income for themselves, and they get by with it in a country that is corrupt. Mr. Speaker, when I travel to Mexico and to some of the worst places in the world, and when I look at the circumstances there, whatever they may be, I can generally put together--and I will say almost always put together--a proposal, a strategy on how to put that country back in shape again and get it functioning the way it should function. In Mexico, for example, they have a lot of natural resources. They have good, hardworking people. They have got a continuity of family. They have got a culture that goes deep back for centuries, but they can't make it work, and they haven't made it work for a long time. I don't know if they have ever made it work. At the heart of this is the corruption that exists. The corruption is there due to lack of respect for the rule of law. If we import that contempt for the rule of law and if we adopt it as our national policy, which would be amnesty, we would be adopting the policy of accepting the violation of law and rewarding the lawbreakers for their objective that they had when they broke the law. If we do that, America, the shining city on the hill, continues to devolve downward toward the Third World from the first world. Our job should instead be lift up the Third World to the standards that we are here in the first world. And one of those things would be to promote the rule of law in the countries where they don't have it, as in Mexico and many of the Central American countries. That is the center of this immigration debate, Mr. Speaker. Out of all this discussion that goes on, I hear the individual narratives, I hear the heartbreaking stories, I hear all of the laments that are out there about, oh, woe are somebody's constituents because they are subject to the application of the rule of law and they want to be exempted from that. Meanwhile, as soon as they are exempted from the rule of law, if that should happen, and the destruction of the rule of law in this country, they are going to be asking for the law to protect them in some other area. That is how this is going on in this country. I would take this back to 1986, more than 30 years ago, Mr. Speaker, when this debate was going on. It is the same debate that has been going on in this country for more than 30 years. There were approximately a million illegal aliens in the United States, as far as the estimates were concerned, at the beginning of the debate when the House and the Senate eventually passed the 1986 amnesty act; a million. The discussion was: Well, we can't possibly address these million people that are in America and we can't possibly deport them all, so let's make an accommodation to them. Let them stay, give them a fast track--it turned out to be a path to citizenship--then what we will do is we will promise America that there will never be another amnesty again ever. That was the language that was used. There will never be another amnesty again ever. At least at the time, they were honest enough to admit it was an amnesty. So they set about passing the legislation in the House and the Senate that granted amnesty, they thought, to a million people. That amnesty legislation went to the Ronald Reagan's White House, where he was surrounded by a group of people in the Cabinet who were his advisers. I am sure they had the best interests of the country's and the President's in mind, but they had decided to advise Ronald Reagan that he should sign the amnesty act because he could put this issue away, well, maybe forever, but for the duration of our Republic because we were always going to enforce immigration law from that point forward. And Ronald Reagan, I don't have inside knowledge on what he was thinking on the deliberations that went on. I just know that most of his Cabinet advised him to sign the Amnesty Act. He ultimately signed the Amnesty Act. Consequently, when they began processing these illegal aliens, there were only going to be--I say ``only.'' They thought it was a huge number--1 million. There were going to be 1 million of them to process. Well, they processed 3 million instead of 1 million. Why? One, they probably underestimated and undercounted. The other half of the equation was there was a lot of fraud that got in the door that was processed also. And so we end up with about 3 million newly amnestied Americans that have a pass to citizenship who have been rewarded for violating America's immigration laws, many of them rewarded for committing the crime of unlawful entry into the United States of America and many of them operating with false documents. That was the path 30 years ago. After that bill was signed and the results of it became evident, then President Reagan reversed his position and announced that he regretted that he had signed the Amnesty Act of 1986. I remember those days. And I have since had the conversation with then-Attorney General Ed Meese, who has informed me about the inside workings of this to a degree. I lament that that decision was made in 1986 by President Reagan to sign the Amnesty Act because it started us on a 30-year debate. Once debate was out there and once the public understood and once people in foreign countries began to believe that if they could, once, get into the United States, there would sooner or later come along and be another Amnesty Act that would include them and they would have their path to citizenship and lawful presence in America and all of the benefits that have grown massively since 1986, once you put the carrot out, once you break the mold of the principle of protecting the rule of law, then after that it is easier the next time and the next time and the next time. Our virtue that we had a respectable virtue on enforcing immigration law in `86 has been ratcheted downwards because of the `86 Amnesty Act and at least six much smaller but subsequent amnesty acts since that time. I looked into the language in the early part of this millennium more than a decade ago, and they say, well, first of all, it is not amnesty, and they tried to redefine it. I have had this discussion with Karl Rove during the George W. Bush administration: Well, it isn't amnesty if they pay a fine. It isn't amnesty if they get a background check. It isn't amnesty if they abide by our laws. It isn't amnesty if they learn English. Well, I am not very thrilled about that. I would say the proposal then was a $1,500 fine in order to waive the criminal charge of unlawful entry into the United States of America. Under that argument, somehow that mitigated violating the law, so you wouldn't be able to call it amnesty. And I defined it then. I said: No, whatever the penalty is on the books when the crime is committed, if you waive that penalty, you have provided amnesty for a class of people. So the more precise definition of amnesty, to grant amnesty, is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their violation or their crime, as the case may be--pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. What is this proposal with DACA and DAPA that President Obama so unconstitutionally advanced forward? It is just that. It is the most blatant form of amnesty for the largest classes of people that has ever been created in the history of the United States of America. Of course, we only have to look back to 1986 to find the first amnesty, and then there have been the six or so subsequent amnesties that I have mentioned. But Barack Obama, constitutional scholar, at least as high a standing as Mr. Panetta from California who spoke here on the floor a little bit ago, but Barack Obama, constitutional scholar, 22 times on videotape, in different speeches in various places around the country, said to America that he didn't have the constitutional authority to waive the application of the immigration law against people who claim that they came to America before their 18th birthday and presumably were brought in by their parents. If you look at the DACA language that has been advanced here in the House--or let's go across the rotunda to the Senate and look at Dick Durbin's language there. It is, if you have come into America before your 18th birthday, for any purpose whatsoever, then you get amnesty. And some of those people now, according to the older drafts of the bill, would be 38 years old, getting amnesty to stay in the United States of America at age 38. People believe that that is the humane thing to do, to reward them with the objective of their crime. Now, they could have carried a backpack of marijuana into the United States the day before their 18th birthday--I have been telling the truth about pretty much all of that, except they are supposed to not commit any other crimes--and they would be granted this level of amnesty under DACA. The President's DACA acronym stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. So that policy that he advanced, after Barack Obama, 22 times, told us he didn't have the constitutional authority, he was right. Just a couple of weeks before he issued this DACA policy, he stood over here at a high school in Washington, D.C., and explained to them that he didn't have the authority. He said: Congress passes the laws; I, in the executive branch, enforce the laws; and the courts interpret the laws. Pretty simple. That is a nice, concise description of the balance of powers that we have in this country. But he said he didn't have the authority because he can't write law. Two weeks later, the President announces the policy to grant work permits and Social Security numbers to illegal aliens that are in the United States who assert that they came in before their 18th birthday. So he created an entire class of people. I read carefully through the Morton memos. I read the memo that launched all of this. It was signed by Janet Napolitano, then-Secretary of Homeland Security. Janet Napolitano's memo said, seven times, on an individual basis only--on an individual basis only--in this page and a third of the document that established the policy. I remember her testimony before the Judiciary Committee. She knew very well that they had to make an argument that this was on an individual basis only in order to try to sustain any kind of facade before the courts, when they would almost certainly be sued for DACA and later on for DAPA. Well, it was never on an individual basis. There were huge classes of people that were created. They created four separate classes of people in those memos. Still they assert that they have a right to do this, and now I hear the gentleman say it is unconstitutional. It is unbelievable to me that anybody could argue when President Obama said it was unconstitutional--he was the last one that was going to admit this--and he went ahead and committed an unconstitutional act. So that takes care of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Then Obama came with the policy DAPA, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans. That is an illegal who has a baby in America. If they sneak into America and they have a baby, they call that birthright citizenship. The President grants them a legal presence because they violated our laws, and some of them, many of them, for the express purpose of coming here to have a baby that would be granted the practice of American citizenship. We see between 340,000 and 750,000 of those babies born in America every year. Think of the population that America is carrying that doesn't have a moral claim to citizenship, doesn't actually have a legal claim to citizenship, just can point to the practice that we began awarding citizenship to babies born to illegals many years ago. There were only a few of them. It wasn't significant. By the time it gets around to where it is significant, now they have created their own constituency group here in America. But both of those policies, DACA and DAPA, are clearly unconstitutional. And DAPA, Texas brought that case against the United States of America and has prevailed so far in court before Judge Andrew Hanen. The DAPA policy is now at least suspended and held in place because one wise judge in Texas decided to draw the line. He had the clearest constitutional understanding DAPA is unconstitutional and the President can't write the law. Mr. Speaker, I am not speaking from a lack of experience on this or lack of knowledge on this. I am not here speaking off of talking points that came from anyone other than a handful of notes I scribbled a few minutes ago, but here is one of my experiences on the separation of powers. When I was in the State Senate in Iowa, our newly elected Governor at that time was Tom Vilsack, who served 8 years and did a respectable job as a Democratic Governor in those 8 years. Very early in his term, he issued an executive order also, Executive Order No. 7, that granted special protective status for sexual orientation and gender identity. When that executive order came down, I looked at that. I was appalled that a Governor would think that he could legislate by executive order. I made my calls to my Republican attorneys and made my case. They all told me I didn't understand it, that it was drafted in such a deft way that it fit with nuances such that it was a constitutional executive order and that I had to submit to it. My answer was, no, the Iowa General Assembly has, within the boundaries of its State constitution, the same legislative authority that this Congress has and that it was clear to me that he was legislating by executive order. I initiated legislation to push on it and I initiated a lawsuit. That lawsuit is easy to look up. It is King v. Vilsack, and it was decided exactly on the same kind of principle: whether an executive officer, a Governor, or a President can write law. Our Founding Fathers would agree with no concept that said that either the executive branch or the judicial branch of government could write law. Instead, they separated these out and they gave us Articles I, II, and III of our Constitution. Mr. Speaker, it is pretty clear. They didn't write it someplace later on in the Constitution. They put it right up front, Article I, section 1: ``All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States''--not a President of the United States, not a judicial branch of the United States, but a Congress of the United States--``which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.'' Then they set about laying out the structure of the Senate and the House of Representatives, all legislative powers. And then the Congress has delegated some legislative powers. There is no delegated legislative power here for the President of the United States to write immigration law, but he did that. Then we had to bring two lawsuits. The one is Texas v. The United States, decided by Judge Hanen. That decision stands. It was appealed up to the Supreme Court, where there was a 4-4 tie, which means that the Fifth Circuit decision by Hanen prevails. Well, good. Congratulations. It is held in place now. But DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals--and that is kind of an odd acronym that doesn't necessarily match somebody that is 38 years old--I pulled the people together to initiate that lawsuit. It turned out to be Crane v. Napolitano. That case is still being litigated. It has been pushed off onto a side rail. The president of the ICE union has been directed to litigate against the Justice Department because it is a grievance with their employees rather than getting at the constitutional question. It has been pushed off on the side by a judge. So that case is still being litigated, but it remains unconstitutional. The former President of the United States knows that. Not only that, our current President, Donald Trump, knows that. He has said many times during the campaign that very early on in his Presidency he would eliminate the unconstitutional executive orders that bring about these components of amnesty. That includes DACA and DAPA. It needs to also include the Morton memos. I have got a nice little packet I can send to the White House. I really did expect that very early in his administration he would address DACA and DAPA and the Morton memos. So it was a bit of a surprise to me to learn as far as, I will say, as recently as January 23--and this is the only confirmation I have of this--that United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is still issuing DACA permits and still extending DACA permits. That is a number that runs up to about 800 a day at the pace, at least, that they were doing, with tens of thousands in backlog yet. The simple thing to do would be to freeze any action on DACA and DAPA. I would rescind the executive order and invalidate every DACA permit and every DAPA permit. We have got a database also to address that, Mr. Speaker. The simplest thing right now would be to just simply suspend any action that is affirmative in continuing this unconstitutional act. From my standpoint--and I think it should be the standpoint of the President of the United States and of the Vice President of the United States and all who have taken an oath--his oath is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States; and the Constitution requires that he take care that the laws be faithfully executed. I think he was very sincere when he gave that oath, and I think that Vice President Pence was even more sincere when he gave his oath. It was very moving to me to witness that testimony out here on the west portico of the Capitol. I want to remind the administration that this action continues, at least as far as the report is concerned; and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services may just need a memo from the White House to cease and desist the unconstitutional actions taking place at USCIS-- very simple, very abrupt, and not very traumatic to anybody in this country--and then start the process of undoing the lawlessness that we have had to submit to under Barack Obama's regime. My strongest encouragement: the earlier that DACA and DAPA are addressed by this President in the keeping of his solemn oath--and that is to the American people--the easier it is going to be. I am encouraging that it happen early and that it not be delayed, because the problems created by Barack Obama are now being compounded by USCIS. I want to also, Mr. Speaker, speak in favor of accelerating the construction of this wall. That is another solemn pledge of President Trump's. By the way, of that agenda that he laid out for America that Thursday night in Cleveland, as I listened to plank after plank after plank in his platform, it was a solid and a strong agenda. He has people in place who are listening to all of the pledges that he has made, and he has been going down through that list in an impressive fashion, keeping his oath time after time after time, keeping his promises to the American people time after time. I am looking at the exceptions, but the rule has been a very consistent and a very aggressive approach to keeping these promises. I know that a week ago Saturday, President Trump sat down at a table with a small group of people behind him and he went through three executive orders. One of them was a reorganization of the National Security Council. The second of the three was for the Department of Defense to produce a strategy to defeat radical Islamic jihad--or at least ISIS--and to produce that strategy within 30 days. When it was over, I realized three executive orders had been signed, and I thought: How long did that take? I backed my television up; set my stopwatch on my iPhone; and in a minute and 40 seconds, the President of the United States had signed three executive orders and moved this country dramatically in the right direction again, again, and again. So I am not here in broad criticism. I am here with targeted encouragement. I am not concerned that the wall hasn't moved quickly enough. I am here, though, Mr. Speaker, reinforcing that promise to the American people, who, by the tens of thousands and event after event after event, chanted: ``Build the wall. Build the wall.'' We even had an individual come to an event in Iowa who had a ``wall'' costume on. It looked like he was made out of flexible cement blocks. It is a movement in this country, and it is a promise to America. Mr. Speaker, I would point out that Donald Trump never said, ``I think we will build some fence,'' or ``we are going to do something virtual.'' He said that we are going to build a wall--it will be a big wall; it will be a beautiful wall; and the Mexicans are going to pay for it. That is the line. I have said that I think that Donald Trump has been an expert at building things big and that he has been an expert at building them beautiful. I am going to leave it up to him to figure out how to get the Mexicans to pay for it, but I am pretty confident he is going to get that done, and I am intending to be supportive of that effort. But when I hear the gentleman from California speak about how expensive the wall is--and his numbers were $15 billion to $30 billion, I think he said, to build 1,300 miles of wall--we have got 2,000 miles of border, and we have got, oh, a few miles built that are adequate barriers right now, but much of it that we even call a fence or a wall needs to be completely reconstructed so that we have an effective barrier. Of the estimates of about $15 billion to $30 billion or the numbers that go, on the Republican side, even up to $25 billion, if anybody is telling you it is a number that is $15 billion or higher, you should understand they don't want that wall built at all. That is why they have an inflated number in their heads. So who gives them that number? I read those documents, and I have questioned those numbers considerably, but I don't know if there is anybody in the United States Congress who has more years and more experience in building things and in being in the construction business than I do. We are in our 42nd year of construction with King Construction, and we do a similar kind of work that gives us the ability to make a legitimate estimate on the cost of this wall. I have designed a wall. Many people know, Mr. Speaker, that I built it down here on the floor more than 10 years ago and that I put an estimate into that, which is now on YouTube, that has gone semi-viral. That estimate that I uttered then that night holds up pretty well when I put our modern software estimating to work and--I will say this-- thanks to my oldest son, David King, who owns that company today, as he committed some days of pro bono work to put together an estimate on what it would take to build a concrete wall with at least a 5-foot-deep foundation in it and a wall that comes up to be a minimum of 12 feet functioning in height, with wire on top. An estimate of a wall of that nature is sophisticated. It is about six pages of spreadsheet--five and a half to be a little more accurate--but it is all built into the interrelational databases that are necessary to add your materials and your labor and your overhead and your costs to be able to build a wall. Now, here is what is really going on. We are spending, Mr. Speaker, $13.4 billion a year in defending and protecting our southern border-- $13.4 billion. That turns out to be $6.7 million a mile. The Border Patrol has come to the committee on numerous occasions and given testimony. I have asked them: What percentage of those who attempt to cross the border do you interdict successfully? Their answer before the committee has been: We think about 25 percent. They get about one in four who try to get across the border. So, presumably, three out of four make it in. I would call that a 25 percent efficiency rate. Then I go down to the border and I talk to the officers and the agents down there. This includes Border Patrol and ICE. I ask: So you are stopping about 25 percent? Their answer that comes back to me as the most consistent is: No. Ten percent has to come first. I have had estimates by ICE officers who operate near the border who will say they think it is closer to 2 to 3 percent. Now, I don't know that that is the right number, and I don't want to assert here, Mr. Speaker, into this Record that I think we are only stopping 2 to 3 percent of those who attempt to get across the border. I am suggesting that that is certainly a number that is plausible. It comes from the people who should know the most, and if the Border Patrol on the border says 10 percent has to come first, they might be thinking that 2 to 3 percent sounds all right. I am not even focused on those numbers of 2 to 3, up to 10 percent. I will take it to a 25 percent number and say that could be an inflated number, but it is still an awful number to consider for return on investment if you are going to spend $13.4 billion a year every single year and get 25 percent efficiency on $6.7 million a mile. I need to put this into a context so that people understand what it really is. And that is that a lot of us live out in the country on gravel roads. And in the flat country in Iowa, we have a gravel road at every mile. Now, let's just say General Kelly came to me now--and I really would have said Janet Napolitano or maybe Jeh Johnson--and said: I have a proposal for you. I want you to secure a mile of country road--a gravel road out there--and I am going to offer you $6.7 million a mile to secure that for each year on a 10-year contract. So here is $67 million in contract, and you are going to have to guard this mile for a year, and you can let 75 percent of the people through who are trying to get across that road, and I am still going to pay you. Does that sound like a good deal? There is hardly any American who wouldn't take that deal. That is not a very good deal. President Trump will recognize how bad a deal that is. It is a terrible deal. Yet we are stuck with that $13.4 billion, 25 percent efficiency, and $6.7 million a mile. Now, these numbers, probably, are blurring some people in their minds, Mr. Speaker; so I take it back to this: $6.7 million a mile. We have built a four-lane Highway 20 across Iowa, with just a few miles left to go, and we will finish it very soon--the stretch through the expensive Iowa cornfields, crossing rivers with expensive bridges, and building that four-lane highway that is everything, except in name, the equivalent of an interstate highway: four lanes, a median in the middle, fences on either side, seeding, signage--all of the things--the bells and the whistles--that it takes to build an interstate highway. I am going to pause for just a second while people think: $6.7 million a mile to guard our southern border, and we are building nothing down there? How much does it cost to build that interstate highway across expensive Iowa cornfields? $4 million a mile in the books and nearly completed. It will come in right at that number, and that is with buying the expensive cornfield; it is doing the archaeological and the environmental and the engineering; the land acquisition; the grading--and I have spent over 40 years in the earthmoving business--and the paving--and we do structural concrete work. By the way, I scooped some of the concrete into the last forms up there in Highway 20, and I am proud of it and am happy to have had the privilege to have done it--painting the stripes on the highway, shouldering it, seeding it, fencing it. We shouldn't forget that this is four lanes of highway and a fence with a median in the middle and all of the bells and whistles that go on with an interstate highway for $4 million a mile. And they are telling me it is going to cost what to build, $15 billion to $30 billion? Let's see. $13 billion is 6.7; so you are at about $8.5 billion or so. So he is suggesting a price per mile that is multiples of the cost of what it is costing us to build an interstate highway. I don't have any doubt that we can go down there and build a concrete wall. I want to build a fence, a wall, and a fence. So we have two no- man's-lands--one on either side of the wall--and I have it wide enough that you can turn a patrol vehicle around in that no-man's-land. If you catch anybody in that no-man's-land, I want it to be the presumption that you are unlawfully present in the United States of America, and then they will get an immediate deportation. If they want to appeal the deportations, they can do so from their home countries and not be sitting here on welfare in the United States of America. That is the objective of what we can do. As for the number that I put into the record back in 2005 that, I said, upholds today, I will just say this: it is less than $2 million a mile. If we reached into that $13.4-billion-a-year budget and just carved out $1 billion a year until we get the fence, the wall, and the fence constructed, we would soon have this done. We would have it done in a reasonable time, and we would have it done with a little squeeze into the budget. If they want to go into another account, that is okay with me, but let's get this done. We can do slip form concrete with a slip form notch in the center of that to drop precast panels in. We can pour those precast panels right down there on the job site. We can make them any height that the President wants it to be. They can be tongue and groove. They can be latched together. We can build fixtures right into that concrete to mount any kind of devices we like for monitoring. Here is what America needs to understand, Mr. Speaker: it is not a fence. It is a wall. The wall is the centerpiece--a fence, a wall, and a fence. The centerpiece is a concrete wall that is designed to keep people out, not to keep people in. My colleagues on this side of the aisle constantly are bringing up the topic, asking: Do you want to create another Berlin Wall? I looked throughout history. In fact, I asked the question of one of America's best historians--among the top two favorite authors that I have--Victor Davis Hanson of southern California. I asked him as I have asked the question many times: Do you know of any barrier in history--a fence or a wall--that was designed to keep people in that was a national boundary or a barrier that was built by a nation-state other than the Berlin Wall? He thought for a while, and he said: You might say that the fence and the structures in between North and South Korea are at least, in part, designed to keep North Koreans in. I will concede that point. There is a fence and a wall between North and South Korea designed to keep the subjects of Marxism in their country because they want to escape to freedom. And the Berlin Wall was designed to keep the people in East Berlin from a Marxist society because they wanted to escape to freedom. Those barriers are immoral for those reasons, because they are fencing people in that want to escape to freedom. But when you are a nation-state, and you are having a flow of people coming from without, there are many examples in history where there have been barriers, particularly walls, that have been built to keep people out. It is fundamentally different to have a wall to keep people out rather than a wall to keep people in. If we forget the history of what built the Great Wall of China, think of this: the Great Wall of China was built originally to keep the Mongols out of greater China. As they were running raids down and doing the things that happen with raids--raping, pillaging, stealing, and heading back to Mongolia--the Chinese decided that they only had a couple of things they could do. They could submit and be raped, murdered, and robbed incessantly and relentlessly; and the fruit of their labor would be taken by the people who would kill them and assault them. They could mount raids to go back up to Mongolia and punish the perpetrators and maybe they would quit coming back in. They concluded that that wasn't going to stop it. The punitive raids that were coming down into China were not going to end. So they began building the Great Wall of China. They had many segments of the Great Wall of China. It wasn't a continuous 5,500 miles, as we used to declare it to be. It is now 13,000 miles long. It was segments where they thought it would do the most good. Then, by 245 B.C., that is Before Christ as Western civilization counts time, the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, came to power. He decided that he would connect the segments of the Great Wall of China so it was one continuous wall. He sent the laborers to work doing that, and they completed the Great Wall of China. In the last few years, the Chinese have examined that wall with satellite images and concluded it was longer than 5,500 miles. It was 13,000 miles long altogether, which means it had to be ziggity-zaggity or it would have run a long ways from there. That is an impressive structure. We are not talking about 13,000 miles or 5,500 miles. We are talking about 2,000 miles. And we are not talking about something that you can march troops on top of, which the Japanese surely did when they invaded China. Instead, we are talking about a barrier that is roughly 6 inches thick of concrete that goes up as tall as the President wants it to go with wires on top that have a signal in them. And if anyone attempts to breach the top of that wall, that signal will send it to our control stations. It will immediately focus enforcement to that location. It will have vibration sensors so that if anybody tries to dig underneath it, it will pick that up as well. It will have monitoring cameras and all the bells and whistles, the accessories necessary for us to protect all of it. It will pay for itself, and it will pay for itself likely before we even get it completed. Here are some of the reasons why. I had some law enforcement officers in my office today, and they are fighting the drug problems that we have in the United States. They would assert that in the upper 90th percentile is the percentage of some of the illegal drugs that come into the United States of America, like the opioids, the heroin, the methamphetamines. The ratios of those are in the 90th percentile and above. Marijuana is a little bit lower than that because Colorado and California are taking some of that market. Thanks, Colorado and California, and a number of other States. What they have done is spread marijuana in big numbers across this land, and it is a gateway drug. The illegal drugs consumed in America, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, are 80 to 90 percent. And these categories I am talking about with heroin, opioids, and methamphetamines that are in the 90th percentile, they come from or through Mexico. So it doesn't mean that they are producing them all in Mexico, but they might be produced south of Mexico. They might be produced in China and come on into Mexico and then be brought into the United States because the border is so porous. It is not just the illegal aliens. It is also the criminals, the drug smugglers, and the drug trade. The Mexican Government has announced, in less than a decade, they have had 100,000 people who were killed in the drug wars. The drug wars are coming about because there is a huge demand in the United States for these drugs, some $60 billion market for illegal drugs in America. So that demand is being met by, in many cases, Mexicans, but also Central and South Americans who set this network up and this drug distribution chain. I asked the Drug Enforcement Agency: What happens if magically tomorrow morning everybody wakes up in their home country and there is not a single illegal alien in the United States of America, not one person unlawfully present in America; what happens to the illegal drug distribution system then? They tell me it severs at least one link in every distribution chain of illegal drugs in America. It severs at least one link and, in some cases, every link and, in most cases, many links. That means that we have an illegal immigration problem and an illegal drug problem that are tied together, it creates the stream within which this traffic flows, and it brings about the crime and the death. Mr. Speaker, we have people now who are sitting in there thinking: Well, but how did 100,000 people become victims of a drug war homicide or drug wars? How did 100,000 people get killed in Mexico? We don't have anywhere near that level of death in the United States. Oh, we don't categorize it that way is why. There were 762 homicides in Chicago last year. How many of those were drug related? Well, I would say most of them, to some degree or another. When I ask our law enforcement personnel: How many people would be in prison if there was no abuse of illegal drugs or alcohol? Would there be 10 percent? Their answer is: Probably not. Probably fewer than 10 percent would be the population of our prisons if we could put an end to drug abuse. Also included in that is alcohol abuse, substance abuse. So a lot of lives were lost in Mexico distributing the $60 billion worth of illegal drugs into the U.S. economy. How about the lives lost in Chicago and the major cities when you have the drug wars, the gang wars that are fueled by drug abuse and fueled by the drug distribution? That is only a small part. The 762 homicide victims in Chicago are a small part. The National Institutes of Health has some data out that shows that over 55,000 Americans died in the last fiscal year due to drug overdose. So the Mexicans lost 100,000 people in the drug wars over a period of less than a decade. In America, we are losing that many people in 2 years just to drug overdose; and that doesn't count the homicide victims who are part of these drug wars that are going on in the streets of America. There is a disaster in this country. We can't tolerate the lawlessness that exists in this country. We have to address the border security. And for those who say that we don't need to build a wall, we can build a virtual wall, well, if you look up the word ``virtual,'' do you know what it says? ``Not real.'' It is not real. So that means, if they want to build a virtual wall, they want to build a not real wall. I recall being down there to weld some landing wall on the Arizona border with then-Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, who I happen to appreciate his personality. He was a good enough judge to pick up the welder and weld some of that himself with his own hand. But I welded some, and that is more my trade than it was his. I handed the welder back, and I said: Now, I have welded the literal wall here. Why don't you hand me that virtual welder, and I will weld the virtual wall with that? I wanted to make my point that it didn't work. They promoted the virtual wall under the Bush administration, and I don't know if they actually even tried to even do that under the Obama administration. They came in and set up cameras and towers. They had ground-based radar, and they were going to track everybody that came into America and chase them down and abduct them. They ended up with cameras laying out in the desert that were never installed and a software package that was supposed to coordinate that never happened. And, in fact, hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted trying to build a virtual wall. So I say this: If you want a virtual wall, if you want to put balloons in the air, if you want to do vibration sensors in the ground, if you want to run electric signals up on top of the wall, if you want to set cameras up there, I am fine. Do all of that. Let's build the wall, as the American people demanded and chatted and as President Trump promised. Let's build a solid, structural, reinforced, concrete wall that is thick enough and tall enough and deep enough so that it is difficult to get over, under, around or through. If we do that, we have to man it and defend it. And if we put on the accessories, the bells and whistles, the vibration sensors, the cameras, and we build a fence, a wall, and a fence so that there is a double no-man's-land--one on either side of the wall--we can do that with far less manpower. If I am assigned to guard my one-mile road that runs west of my house in the country in Iowa, and they hand me a contract for $67 million, I can tell you, I would build a fence, a wall, and a fence right down through the middle of that road. I would have a patrol road on either side. I would have the fences and the road ditches the way they are. I would grade that thing out so I would have fast track to patrol it. I would have sensors along there. I would make the infrastructural investment that would not be $4 million a mile. It would be someplace around that zone of a couple million dollars a mile. Then I would monitor that, and I would have some people who are assigned to patrol it just enough that I could call in the reinforcements when we needed them. We would get a lot more than 25 percent efficiency out of that wall. We would get someplace equivalent to Israeli-level security efficiency if we build that entire structure end to end. Now, I have said that we don't have to build a full 2,000 miles of it, but we have to be certain that we don't equivocate on the mission to build it until they stop going around the end. If they stop, fine. If they don't stop, we have got to be committed to add another section and another section until such time as we have completed this in the same fashion that the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, did when he completed the Great Wall of China, 13,000 miles long which the armies marched on top of. Build a wall and enforce the laws that we have on the books and bring into play local law enforcement so that we can work in cooperative fashion. Every level of law enforcement has always cooperated with the other levels of law enforcement. I grew up in a law enforcement family. I believe that the men around me all wore uniforms. It just was a natural thing to see. And if they weren't in uniform, they weren't at work. If they were either on their way or at work, coming home from work or at work, they wore uniforms. Each level of law enforcement, whether it was city police, whether it was county sheriff and deputy, whether it was highway patrol division of criminal investigation--DCI in my State or DPS in a State like Texas, for example--or whether Federal officers, Federal Marshals, FBI, they cooperated with each other. No one took the posture that said it is not my job. When they encountered somebody violating the law, they enforced the law against them. There is Federal statute that reinforces such a thing. Who would think that we could get to a place in this country where city police, county officers, or State law enforcement officers would be directed to plug their ears and close their eyes--and I am saying this figuratively--and essentially not gather any information on people who are unlawfully present in the United States of America, bringing about the circumstances where a Kate Steinle would be murdered or where a Sarah Root would be murdered or where a Dominic Durden would be murdered, or where a Jaz Shaw would be murdered? All were murdered by criminal aliens who had no business being in this country, all who were murdered by those who had been encountered by law enforcement and who had later on turned them loose onto the streets of America resulting in the death of these innocents, including Brandon Mendoza. There are many, many others. There are thousands of others. President Trump has said thousands of families are grieving the loss of their loved ones at the hands of illegal aliens who are violent, who should have been deported. They were not deported; they were turned loose on the streets of America, usually in sanctuary cities, sanctuary counties, sanctuary States. Now we have the emergence of sanctuary campuses or sanctuary school districts. I will make the mention that it is a quarter after 6 p.m. in Iowa now, Mr. Speaker. And in an hour and 45 minutes, the Des Moines public school board is preparing to pass a sanctuary resolution that tells all the employees of the school district that you can't work with, cooperate, transfer, disseminate information, or allow access to students or family to any Federal immigration officers. It all has to go through the superintendent, and he has to approve it. They won't even allow an ICE officer to talk to a parent of any of the students there, unless the superintendent approves it. Of course, it is designed for him to say: No, sorry. We are going to close the door in your face, and we are a sanctuary school system, and we are going to defy Federal law. Well, Mr. Speaker, we have existing laws to address this, and I want to remind the school district that there are a couple of sections of the code that apply, and one of them is U.S.C. 1324, harboring illegal aliens. There is a penalty of from 5 to 10 years for violation, depending on whether it is a class D or a class C felony. Anyone who harbors or shields from detection, including in any building or any means of transportation; anyone who encourages an alien to come to, enter, or reside; anyone who engages in any conspiracy; anyone who aids or abets the commission of such crimes is guilty of a class D or a class C felony, facing potential penalty of a maximum of 5 or 10 years, depending on the class. I have the section of the code here, Mr. Speaker, and I include in the Record this copy of 8 U.S.C. 1373 and also 1324. 8 U.S. Code Sec. 1324--Bringing In and Harboring Certain Aliens (a) Criminal Penalties (1) (A) Any person who-- (i) knowing that a person is an alien, brings to or attempts to bring to the United States in any manner whatsoever such person at a place other than a designated port of entry or place other than as designated by the Commissioner, regardless of whether such alien has received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States and regardless of any future official action which may be taken with respect to such alien; (ii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, transports, or moves or attempts to transport or move such alien within the United States by means of transportation or otherwise, in furtherance of such violation of law; (iii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation; (iv) encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law; or (v) (I) engages in any conspiracy to commit any of the preceding acts, or (II) aids or abets the commission of any of the preceding acts, shall be punished as provided in subparagraph (B). (B) A person who violates subparagraph (A) shall, for each alien in respect to whom such a violation occurs-- (i) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(i) or (v)(1) or in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(ii), (iii), or (iv) in which the offense was done for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain, be fined under title 18, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both; (ii) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(ii), (iii), (iv), or (v)(II), be fined under title 18, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both; (iii) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), or (v) during and in relation to which the person causes serious bodily injury (as defined in section 1365 of title 18 (/uscode/text/8/1365)) to, or places in jeopardy the life of any person, be fined under title 18, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. (iv) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), or (v) resulting in the death of any person, be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, fined under title 18, or both. (C) It is not a violation of clauses [1] (ii) or (iii) of subparagraph (A), or of clause (iv) of subparagraph (A) except where a person encourages or induces an alien to come to or enter the United States, for a religious denomination having a bona fide nonprofit, religious organization in the United States, or the agents or officers of such denomination or organization, to encourage, invite, call, allow, or enable an alien who is present in the United States to perform the vocation of a minister or missionary for the denomination or organization in the United States as a volunteer who is not compensated as an employee, notwithstanding the provision of room, board, travel, medical assistance, and other basic living expenses, provided the minister or missionary has been a member of the denomination for at least one year. (2) Any person who, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has not received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, brings to or attempts to bring to the United States in any manner whatsoever, such alien, regardless of any official action which may later be taken with respect to such alien shall, for each alien in respect to whom a violation of this paragraph occurs-- (A) be fined in accordance with title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; or (B) in the case of-- (i) an offense committed with the intent or with reason to believe that the alien unlawfully brought into the United States will commit an offense against the United States or any State punishable by imprisonment for more than 1 year, (ii) an offense done for the pupose of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or (iii) an offense in which the alien is not upon arrival immediately brought and presented to an appropriate immigration officer at a designated port of entry, be fined under title 18 and shall be imprisoned, in the case of a first or second violation of subparagraph (B)(ii), not more than 10 years, in the case of a first or second violation of subparagraph (B)(i) or B(ii), not less than 3 nor more than 10 years, and for any other violation, not less than 5 nor more than 15 years. (3) (A) Any person who, during any 12-month period, knowingly hires for employment at least 10 individuals with actual knowledge that the individuals are aliens described in subparagraph (B) shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both. (B) An alien described in this subparagraph is an alien who-- (i) is an unauthorized alien (as defined in section 1324a(h)(3) of this title (/uscode/text/8/ iii.usc:t:8:s:1324a:h:3)), and (ii) has been brought into the United States in violation of this subsection. (4) In the case of a person who has brought aliens into the United States in violation of this subsection, the sentence otherwise provided for may be increased by up to 10 years if-- (A) the offense was part of an ongoing commercial organization or enterprise; (B) aliens were transported in groups of 10 or more; and (C) (i) aliens were transported in a manner that endangered their lives; or (ii) the aliens presented a life-threatening health risk to people in the United States. (b) Seizure and Forfeiture (1) In general My conveyance, including any vessel vehicle, or aircraft, that has been or is being used in the commission of a violation of subsection (a), the gross proceeds of such violation, and any property traceable to such conveyance or proceeds, shall be seized and subject to forfeiture. (2) Applicable procedures Seizures and forfeitures under this subsection shall be governed by the provisions of chapter 46 of title 18 (/ uscode/text/18/lii:usc:t:18:ch:46) relating to civil forfeitures, including section 981(d) of such title, except that such duties as are imposed upon the Secretary of the Treasury under the customs laws described in that section shall be performed by such officers, agents, and other persons as may be designated for that purpose by the Attorney General. (3) Prima Facie Evidence in determinations of violations In determining whether a violation of subsection (a) has occurred, any of the following shall be prima facie evidence that an alien involved in the alleged violation had not received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States or that such alien had come to, entered, or remained in the United States in violation of law: (A) Records of any judicial or administrative proceeding in which that alien's status was an issue and in which it was determined that the alien had not received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States or that such alien had come to, entered, or remained in the United States in violation of law. (B) Official records of the Service or of the Department of State showing that the alien had not received prior official authorization to come to, enter, or reside in the United States or that such alien had come to, entered, or remained in the United States in violation of law. (C) Testimony, by an migration officer having personal knowledge of the facts concerning that alien's status, that the alien had not received prior official authorization to come to, enter. or reside in the United States or that such alien had come to, entered, or remained in the United States in violation of law. (c) Authority to arrest No officer or person shall have authority to make any arrests for a violation of any provision of this section except officers and employees of the Service designated by the Attorney General, either individually or as a member of a class, and all other officers whose duty it is to enforce criminal laws. (d) Admissibility of videotaped witness testimony Notwithstanding any provision of the Federal Rules of Evidence, the videotaped (or otherwise audiovisually preserved) deposition of a witness to a violation of subsection (a) who has been deported or otherwise expelled from the United States, or is otherwise unable to testify, may be admitted into evidence in an action brought for that violation if the witness was available for cross examination and the deposition otherwise complies with the Federal Rules of Evidence. (e) Outreach program The Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, as appropriate, shall develop and implement an outreach program to educate the public in the United States and abroad about the penalties for bringing in and harboring aliens in violation of this section. (June 27, 1952, ch. 477, title II, ch. 8, 274,66 Stat. 228 (http://uscode.house.gov/statviewer.htm?volume=66page=228); Pub. L.95-582 (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/ L?d095:./list/bd/d095pl.lst:582(Public_Laws)), Sec. 2, Nov. 2, 1978, 92 Stat. 2479 (http://uscode.house.gov/ statviewer.htm?volume=92&page=2479); Pub. L.97-116 (http:// thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/L?d097:./list/bd/ d097p1.lst:116(Public_Laws)), Sec. 12 Dec. 29, 1981, 95 Stat. 1617 (http://uscode.house.gov/ statviewer.htm?volume=95&page=1617); Pub.L. 99-603, title I http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/L?d099:./list/bd/ d099pl.lst:603(Public_Laws)), Sec. 112, Nov. 6, 1986, 100 Stat. 3381 (http://uscode.house.gov/ statviewer.htm?volume=100&page=3381); Pub.L. 100-525, (http:/ /thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/L?d100:./list/bd/ d100p1.lst:525(Public_Laws)), Sec. 2(d), Oct. 24, 1988, 102 Stat. 2610 (http://uscode.house.gov/ statviewer.htm?volume=102&page=2610); Pub. L. 103-322, title VI (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/L?d103:list/bd/ d103pl.lst:322(Public_Laws)), Sec. 60024Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 1981 (http://uscode.house.gov/ statviewer.htm?volume=108&page=1981); Pub.L. 104-208, div. C, title II (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-104publ208/html/ PLAW-104publ208.htm), Sec. Sec. 203(a)-(d), 219 title VI, Sec. 671(a)(1), Sept. 30, 1996, 110 Stat. 3009-565 (http:// uscode.house.gov/statviewer.htm?volume=110&page=3009-565), 3009-566, 3009-574, 3009-720; Pub. L. 106-185 (http:// www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-106publ185/htm/PLAW- 106publ185.htm), Sec. 18(a), Apr. 25, 2000, 114 Stat 222 (http://uscode.house.gov/statviewer.htm?volume=114&page=222); Pub. L. 108-458, title V (http://www.gov.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW- 108publ458/htm/PLAW-108publ458.htm), Sec. 5401, Dec. 17, 2004, 118 Stat. 3737 (http://uscode.house.gov/ statviewer.htm?volume=118&page=3737); Pub. L. 109-497, title VII (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-109publ97/html/PLAW- 109publ97.htm), Sec. 796, Nov. 10, 2005, 119 Stat. 2165 (http://uscode.house.gov/ statviewer.htm?volume=119&page=2165).)

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, 8 U.S.C. 1373 addresses sanctuary cities, and it prohibits the sanctuary jurisdictions by Federal law. And that is exactly what they intend to carve out at 8 o'clock tonight in Des Moines, Iowa, to establish themselves as a sanctuary jurisdiction for the entire school district, the largest school district in the State of Iowa--not the most proficient in educating our precious Iowa students, but the largest. So they make a political statement just at the time when the President has said that he is prepared to suspend all Federal dollars going to sanctuary jurisdictions, and that would include school districts and it would include, of course, cities and counties and States and any campus that decides they want to be a sanctuary campus. This President will keep his word. I would equate this showdown that they are building here, thinking that they can stare the President down and that he will blink and that somehow he won't have the nerve to address sanctuaries, the law-defined jurisdictions in America, the hole-in-the-wall gang holed up in San Francisco with more people being murdered in San Francisco--when I say ``hole-in-the-wall gang,'' I want to remind people, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they had a place in a canyon where you ride through a hole in the wall, and then they had a sanctuary for robbers and murderers and killers, but they had a code among them that they didn't kill each other very often. So they lived in this sanctuary. They were protected from the law; and they guarded and protected each other, and they guarded the notch through the stone wall in the canyon. That is what these cities are and what the campuses are and some of the States and the counties, sanctuary jurisdictions like the hole-in- the-wall gang where they are harboring lawbreakers. Somehow, we are supposed to let this grow in America and not address it? We had a Presidential election that focused exactly on this. And, by the way, I brought amendments to the floor time after time to defund these sanctuary jurisdictions. Every one of them here in the House of Representatives since I have been here has succeeded. There is no unconstitutional act and no amnesty act that has been unchallenged here in the House of Representatives--by amendment, at least--that I and others have brought. Every time the rule of law prevailed. Now we have elected a President on the rule of law, and this President will not blink. I will remind the public as I speak to you, Mr. Speaker, that when Ronald Reagan was elected President, the air traffic controllers decided they would go out on strike. The President warned them: If you go on strike, you have got a contract, and you are, by law, prohibited from striking because it puts too many people at risk. They said: Too bad. If we don't get what we demand, we are going on strike anyway. They challenged the President of the United States. And what did Ronald Reagan do? He said: If you don't go back to work on the date that I tell you, I will fire anyone that doesn't show up. And so they called the President, thinking it was a bluff. Mr. Speaker, it wasn't a bluff. Ronald Reagan fired every air traffic controller that didn't show up for work in defiance of the Federal law, and he put the military air traffic controllers to work to control the skies over America without one single fatal accident brought about by any of that. Ronald Reagan was called out by the air traffic controllers. They thought he was bluffing. He was not bluffing. Now we have jurisdiction after jurisdiction that think they are going to be leading a national movement to accelerate the sanctuary city jurisdiction endeavor, and they think that President Trump is going to back up from them because there are a lot of them and somehow he won't be able to take this on. I will submit this: If Ronald Reagan had blinked in the stare down between the air traffic controllers union, his Presidency would have collapsed. His power base would have diminished. He would have been an asterisk in history except for the snickers behind the hand of people that would have laughed at him because he would have caved in the face of first adversity. Donald Trump faces a similar circumstance here with sanctuary jurisdictions. He has no choice. If he is going to have an effective Presidency--and I guarantee you, he is committed to an effective Presidency--there will be no sanctuary jurisdiction left in this country within several months or a year as this grinds through and as people like Mayor Rahm Emanuel are brought to bear and they begin to be reminded by, hopefully, the new Attorney General, maybe as soon as tomorrow, Jeff Sessions, that 8 U.S.C. 1324 means what it says: It is a felony to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection or attempt to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection any such alien in any place, including a building or transportation--meaning anywhere. It is a serious felony. 8 U.S.C. 1373, sanctuary cities, just the policy is a violation of Federal law. And then when you have control of the purse strings, Mr. Speaker, and you cut off the Federal funds going to these jurisdictions, there isn't hardly anybody that is going to face this. I think I would start with maybe the mayor of Chicago, then the mayor of New York. I bet he can communicate with Mayor de Blasio. The center of it all is this: Restore the respect for the rule of law. You have to enforce it if you are going to have laws. Once we do that, we will respect each other and America can go back to its constitutional foundation, and we can turn our focus to building our families, restoring our country, and helping other countries get up to speed into the first world. Mexico can get to the first world, but they can't be there if it is going to be corrupt. They can't be there if they are going to be the main provider of $60 billion worth of illegal drugs in this country. They can't face another 100,000 people murdered, we can't face 55,000 drug overdose deaths in this country every year, and I haven't yet mentioned even the terrorists that are sneaking across that border on at least an irregular basis. Mr. Speaker, it is serious business, and I urge that we get this done. I urge that the American people follow through and encourage the President of the United States, let's end DACA, let's end DAPA, and let's end the sanctuary jurisdictions. Build a wall. America will be in a better place. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the attention and your ear this evening. It has been my honor to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reserving my right to object, I would just like to note that we knew where the clock was going on this, but I made a speech today in the Judiciary Committee, and I want to stand by my word and acknowledge the gentleman and not object so the gentleman can complete his statement.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I do now object because I have been waiting for a half hour.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I regret I wasn't able to work with all of the speakers here tonight they wanted to pack within that hour. I understand that they have prepared themselves to give this speech tonight, and there will be opportunities in each succeeding day. I just wanted to recognize their right to speak on this floor under the rules and be as lenient as I can, and also, of course, defending my own rights at the same time. But I would acknowledge that we did have a discussion before the Judiciary Committee today, and I want this Congress to have the level of comity so that we can exchange ideas and bounce them off of each other. And I have long believed that if I can't sustain myself in debate, I have got two choices. One of them is go back and do more research and build enough information that I can to sustain myself; and the other is adopt the other fellow's position. I am not very inclined to do that, but I am inclined to listen to their positions. So, as I have listened to these positions here for more than an hour here on the floor, things come to me and I hear these words recurring over and over again. I didn't get a full count on it, but I know I heard 7, 8, 10, or maybe even more, times saying that the President's executive order is a Muslim ban. Now, looking through that executive order--and I haven't read it thoroughly word by word, but those who were vetting that executive order, to use that term, tell me the word ``Muslim'' is not used in that executive order. I am going to assert that is the case, that President Trump did not use the word ``Muslim'' in his executive order, and that the executive order is not a Muslim ban, but is a ban on travel from seven countries that are Muslim majority. If it was his intention to try to block Muslims from coming into America, he would have started with Indonesia rather than Iraq and Syria and the war-torn countries. So I will assert it is not a Muslim ban, except that the words ``Muslim ban'' are in the talking points of the Democrats, and they will repeat it over and over and over again, as if somehow they could amend the executive order to have the words ``Muslim ban'' in there so they can have their grievance to the executive order. I saw this unfold on Friday, when the President issued his executive order. It was a big day, I admit. He has had a lot of executive orders, and they have been raining down pretty fast on this country, and I am glad of that. We should objectively deal with the directive that is there. It is a temporary travel ban that focuses on the seven countries that President Barack Obama identified as the most dangerous countries, I call them terrorist-spawning countries. It is a prudent thing on the part of the President to temporarily suspend travel from those countries. I would have added a few more countries in the suspension of the travel to the United States. It is his intention, and I think it is clearly stated within his executive order to evaluate the security circumstances coming from each of these countries and determine how we can have a better policy, especially to do extreme vetting on the travel people that are coming from not only these seven countries, but other countries that do send terrorists to us. And I won't start down that list, but we know it is extensive. I will say some of the countries that are not on this list are Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries that would be listed as Arab countries, but including Indonesia, which is the largest population of Muslims, but the lowest concentration of terrorist production per Islamic society that I know of in the world. So I think this reflects the danger and the risk to Americans and a prudent approach to this. It is not only the ban on travel that is not a Muslim ban, not a Muslim ban--if I had to say that enough times to negate the times that that has been asserted here on the floor, I suppose I could; but we are going to hear it in the news every day because that seems to be what pays off politically. The argument that it was a religious test; this executive order is not a religious test. It doesn't reference religion. In fact, when I have asked questions of the officials of the Obama administration, I have said to them: Why is it that Christians don't seem to be allowed into the United States as refugees under the Obama administration? We saw one group that was 1,500-some-strong that had one Christian in there. So I traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, and sat down with the lead on UNHCR, the United Nations Council on Refugees. And there, I believe her name is Kelly Clements, I asked: Do you determine when you are vetting refugees, what their religious is? She says: Yes, we do. And she said they had 115,000 refugees that they had run through their process that they had vetted. And of those 115,000, I said, how many of them are Christians? And she said: 15,000. So the rest of them, roughly the 100,000, she said almost all of them would be Muslim. But they fill out a form. They attest to their religion. They are in the database. We can identify Christians. They are the ones that are persecuted. They are the ones that are being targeted because of their religion. The Assyrian Christians, the Chaldean Christians, and then not Christians, but the Yazidis, they are the three groups that are targeted the most. We should establish an international safe zone for them in their neighborhood. When the word comes out that these countries have accepted a list of refugees, such as Lebanon or Jordan, there are also countries that haven't accepted any significant number, like Saudi Arabia. Why shouldn't the neighbors accept refugees, Mr. Speaker? They are the ones that have the most security at stake. They are the ones that are most invested in trying to establish stability in that part of the world. Don't we want people who have lived, say, in the Nineveh Plains region since antiquity to be close to home so that when security circumstances and economic circumstances settle down, they can come back to their homes where they have lived since antiquity? Of course we do. We see data from last year that says $64,000 is about the typical cost of resettling one refugee in the United States; $64,000. But that same amount of money will take care of a dozen people over in their neighborhood rather than one person here in America. Why shouldn't we get a 12-to-1 return on the taxpayers' investment and help people in the region where they live so that they can go back to their homeland again and grow their families and grow their population and their industry and re-establish their roots rather than let ISIS push the Christians out of the Middle East and push the versions of Islam out that they hate the most? If we take people out of there and resettle them in large numbers, we are giving them the region that they would like to have ethnically cleansed of the people they disagree with. So we are helping out their war effort by pulling people out of the way and bringing them here. They need to stay close to home. Especially the young men need to take up arms and defend their own country. I went over to the Middle East and I walked in that river of epic migration, that river of humanity that is flowing into Europe and has been flowing into Europe for 2 years, nearly solid. As I walked in that river of humanity, I asked them a lot of questions and I was able to communicate with them; sometimes an interpreter, sometimes hand signals, sometimes a word here or there of English or something else. Here is what I asked them: Where are you going? This was in Serbia. In my mind, as I watched them board the trains in Serbia--1,000 at a time and day and night, I might add--I would say: Where are you going? Germany. Do you have family there? No. Do you have friends there? No. Do you have a job there? No. What will you do? I don't know. How will you live? Germany will take care of me. That is the answer that I got over and over again. Eighty-one percent of that human river were, let's say, military-age males. They left their family? They leave their family in Syria and Iraq to go into Europe? What responsible father does that when he should be home defending his country and defending his family? They are not going because they are war refugees, for the most part. That wave is over. They are going primarily because they are economic refugees. They are economic refugees because we hang the carrot out in front of them and we say: Come to the United States. We will bring you over here and we will make sure that we take care of all of your needs. You don't have to worry about anything. We are competing with countries like Germany, Austria, Sweden, and the Netherlands because they offer a standard of living. The law in Germany is that there is a baseline standard of living that every human being receives, work or not. Angela Merkel says: Come to Germany, and we will take care of you. I recall a 10-minute-and-49-second videotape of her in a townhall meeting speaking to a blonde German lady who stood up and said: Why are you doing this? They are killing us. They are raping us. They are taking German jobs. Why do you do this? Chancellor Merkel's answer was: We cannot be ruled by fear, and your voice is a voice of fear. So she just devalued or denigrated the voice of the grief-stricken German woman. She said: We cannot stop them. We must take care of them. The violence that they are perpetrating against Germans is not going to be as great as that which we have perpetrated against others in our most recent history. That is the statement, Mr. Speaker. The constitution in Germany says they have to accept refugees. We put that in there post-World War II. Because they had created so many, we required that they take them. In their law that they have written there is a baseline standard of living. The other part was Nazi guilt. So Chancellor Merkel opened that all up because of those roughly four reasons that I have given you, and 1.6 or so million poured into Germany. The last two New Year's Eves have seen rape after rape after rape-- many of them not even investigated--right there next to the dome of the Cologne Cathedral. It is an annual event now: New Year's Eve in Cologne, migrant men come and rape German women there. That is the last 2 years, and you hardly find that in the news unless you know where to look. I do look, and I talk to people over there. This is not a Muslim ban. This is not a religious test. You can read the executive order and determine that. The difference is my constituents will check to see if I am telling them the truth. Others' constituents apparently don't hold them accountable. It has no reference to whatever color people are, whatever race they are, whatever ethnicity, or whatever the national origin--I guess in a way because it says if you are coming from these nations. I will agree, we have Iraqis who have helped us and saved American lives, and we have Afghans who have helped us and saved American lives. But, on balance, this has been blown completely out of proportion. Here is another statement that was made about the refugees. This is a quote from the gentleman who spoke here, ``an executive order banning Muslims.'' Again, it is an executive order, and it bans travel from seven Muslim countries--primarily Muslim countries--but it bans Christians as well as Muslims coming from those countries. As for the Christians, I think we should have been allowed in because they are the ones who were targeted. By the way, Egypt is not on this list, but the Christians were targeted there. They blew up the church where the Coptic Pope presides. I visited him there. They killed 50 or so Christians, and they have blown up churches all over the place. That is, by the way, Muslims attacking Christians, just for the record. When the gentlewoman spoke here of the 3-year-old who washed up on the beach, that is the one that troubles me a lot. I saw that image. I watched that picture, and it went right into my heart like it did most everybody else in this country. That has been several weeks ago that America was mobilized by that little boy lying face down on the shores of the Mediterranean after the boat had capsized and many of them had drowned, including his father. But it came out a couple of days ago that that family had been living in Turkey for 3 years, and that the father of that little boy's sister had been sending money to them so that they could slip into Europe because the father needed a new set of teeth. They were motivated so the father could get dental work perhaps most likely in Germany. It wasn't because they were running from the war. They had stabilized themselves in Turkey for 3 years. They were going to Germany for the dental work of the father. That is a matter now of public record that has been exposed by Kerry Picket who did the research back on this and corroborated by a number of other news outlets as well. So it isn't always what we see. It isn't always what it seems. The people who speak into the megaphone in the airports aren't always telling us the truth. We find out sometimes it is anything but the truth. What is the truth is that there has been a tragic war in the Middle East, and it continues. The civilian population has been decimated in Syria, and there are refugees going in all directions. A lot of it is because we have created and we have allowed for a power vacuum--a power vacuum in Syria. That brought Putin into that power vacuum, and he was able to assert himself and, so far, at least, protect al-Assad. In doing so, we see the operations of the invasion that has come out of Baghdad and gone up towards Mosul and taken the east side of the river in Mosul. The west side is still held by ISIS. I think that is a shortsighted strategy to have Shia militia, Iranian-supported Shia militia going in to take Mosul when Mosul is populated by Kurds in the suburbs and Sunni Muslims in the inner city. How are the Shias going to govern a city that doesn't, in any substantial way, include their population? So I am troubled by shortsighted decisions that don't seem to take into account the tribal connections that we know have been so much a part of the sectarian strife that has been a part of Iraq, Syria, and also Iran in the Middle East. I want people to be self-determining. I want people to be able to determine their own government and rule their own countries. This is going to take a prudent knowledge of those tribes, and it is going to take input from them. We need to build alliances in the Middle East with the moderate Muslim countries that will join with us in bringing out stable governments that respect the autonomy of the populations that live within the various regions. That is the best solution that can come about, and it doesn't put a lot of American boots on the ground. So I hope we can step back, Mr. Speaker, and take a deep breath and recognize it is not a Muslim ban, and it is not a religious test. But I want this statement to go into the Record with clarity, and that is that the President of the United States not only has the constitutional authority to bring about this suspension of travel from these seven countries because of security reasons, he is specifically authorized to do so by the United States Code, by Federal Law. So he is operating within the law; he is operating within the Constitution; and he is operating within the realms of prudence, at least on a temporary basis. I am hopeful that the input that we have is an input that will help bring about the dialogue in this country. The debate we have here on the floor hopefully causes people to think about this, go back and read the executive order, look for the word Muslim or Muslim ban, look for any kind of religious test. There is none. But I think we ought to know. I mentioned and didn't go deeply enough into this that when the executive branch of government, the USCIS in particular, and ICE included, when I asked them: When you have these applicants for refugees that you say you are vetting, then do you know what religion they are? They say: No. Do we ask them? No. We don't ask, but the information is there in the database at UNHCR, at the United Nations. They had vetted 15,000 Christians, and one got through in a list of 1,500. I think that was probably a mistake. I think there was a religious test for refugees under Obama, and I think it was a preference for Muslims, and it was discriminating against Christians. I hope that we can have a stable policy that brings people relief, but I think the prudent one is give them a place to live in the Middle East, protect them, and create an international safe zone so that they can live in peace where they have lived since antiquity. Mr. Speaker, I have addressed the topic of what I heard as I sat on the floor tonight. I really came to the floor here to speak in favor of Judge Neil Gorsuch.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland and welcome him to the United States Congress.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, in addressing both of those topics, the gentleman's data that says that more Christians than Muslims have been brought in as refugees, I have heard that as an Obama administration information that has come out. That doesn't match up with the data that I have seen when I traveled to places like Geneva and looked at that or looked at the data that came out before that release. The data up to that release indicated entirely the opposite which I have identified. And the data that came out in the last weeks of the Obama administration asserted that they had a significant number of Christians who were part of that. I appreciate the gentleman's point that the executive order references religious minorities, and I appreciate that it does, because I think they are the ones that are targeted. But the gentleman's point about the origin of the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 is an accurate point, and the largest number of them came from Saudi Arabia. I would just assert that because Donald Trump has done business in three of those countries, I would be surprised if he didn't do business in a place like Dubai where they have developed a wonderland out of the desert, and his business in each of those countries. How many other countries has he done business in? I don't think we can correlate that. But what we can correlate is that these seven countries are the countries identified by the Obama administration. So, maintaining my time, we can have conjecture on this back and forth. But the facts are that it is the Obama administration that identified these seven countries, and it is the Trump administration that brought them forward with the travel ban on them. I believe it is a coincidence that these other countries are places among many countries that Donald Trump has done business in. I know that I only have about 7 minutes remaining to take up Judge Gorsuch, but I would yield to the gentleman briefly, simply out of the comity that we discussed earlier today.