Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, it is conjecture that any of the Trump businesses had anything to do with this decision. It is pure conjecture. If the argument is that Donald Trump didn't do business in Somalia, I wouldn't blame him one bit. If anybody watched ``Black Hawk Down'' then they would know a good reason. It is essentially a terrorist state in Somalia. So I will thank the gentleman for his comments, and I am going to turn then to Judge Neil Gorsuch and see if I can make that point yet this evening, and it is this: We had this vacancy in the Supreme Court. It is a vacancy that is brought about by the tragic death of Justice Antonin Scalia, a man whom many of us have admired for a long time and enjoyed his friendship, his company, his sense of humor, his gregariousness, and also especially his dissenting opinions that were written for the law school students whom he always understood would have to read the dissent when they studied the cases. He wanted to write them in such a way that they would read them, hopefully enjoy them, and remember them. He has been a speaker before the Conservative Opportunity Society which I have chaired for some time, and he has done it a number of times. We really enjoyed his company. We had very engaging debates and discussions. There is a huge hole in the United States Supreme Court created by the loss of Justice Scalia. I am grateful that we have taken serious time in filling that hole and seeing a nominee come forward that has the chance to grow into the shoes of Justice Scalia. As I went to the White House a couple of nights ago to be there to witness the ceremony of the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch, we were all briefed on a lot of things that had to do with his bio. I am just quickly going to touch on some of the high points in Judge Gorsuch's bio. His undergraduate school was Columbia University, with honors, Phi Beta Kappa; Harvard Law School, cum laude; a Truman Scholar, where he received his juris doctorate; then went to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and received another doctoral degree, a Ph.D. in philosophy. Then he became a clerk for Justice White, and then, later on, for Justice Kennedy. If he is confirmed, it will be, we think, the first time that there has been a clerk that became a Justice on the Supreme Court serving with the Justice whom he clerked for. So that is a unique component of Judge Gorsuch. He is a man of the West. He has a strong work ethic and common sense. He is an outdoorsman. He loves to fly-fish, and he raises animals in his barn at home. His background, he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but worked blue-collar jobs and worked his way up. We know that he accelerated his education very well. For his 10 years on the bench, he clerked for the judge on the D.C. Circuit, and then from there, clerking for the Supreme Court Justices, whom I mentioned, White and Kennedy. He was then appointed by George W. Bush on May 10, 2006, after a decade in private practice where he became a partner in a large law firm. They must have liked him there. They took him in as an associate, and he became a partner for a decade. Then in his heart was that he wanted to be a judge, and he wanted to protect the Constitution and the rule of law. After a year at the Department of Justice, George W. Bush appointed him to the D.C. Circuit. There, he was confirmed by the United States Senate, without dissent, by a voice vote on July 20, 2006. He served for more than a decade as a district court judge. His record is stellar. When I asked questions about Judge Gorsuch, I learned a number of things. One of them was that, of the 21 candidates that were listed by, first, President-elect Trump and, now, President Trump--he would draw from that list and nominate, and then seek confirmation and appoint from that list--each candidate was asked the question as they were interviewed: Who would you name for this position if it isn't going to be you? A tough question. So, it is like saying, I would interpret that as: Who do I think is second best? That is the only reason I would be there is if I thought I was the best choice. I would think that is what all of them must have thought as they were interviewed. There were 21 candidates. You take one out of that number, because that is Judge Gorsuch himself. We don't know how he answered this question. When the other 20 were asked, if it is not to be you, who shall it be, everyone said Judge Neil Gorsuch. There can't be a stronger endorsement than that. It shows a respect from all of his competing peers. I believe that they believe he will do the best and the clearest job of preserving, protecting, and defending our Constitution and read the letter of the Constitution and interpret it, as Judge Scalia did, to mean what it says and to be understood to mean what it says and was understood at the time of ratification of the body of the Constitution or the various amendments, whichever the case may be. That is the strongest and most profound. When I asked the question what is his level of respect for stare decisis, the people who know him and studied him say he has more respect for the text of the Constitution than the decisions that have been made along the way. I think that he will recognize those decisions. I asked that question, would he look into them to determine if that rationale has helped his rationale but always anchor it back to the Constitution and the original understanding. This is secondhand of the people that know him, but the best answer I can get from that is yes. The next one is the Chevron doctrine. He has written about the Chevron doctrine. It is pretty clear that he thinks that the Chevron doctrine is unjustly created by the courts and that you shouldn't give administrators of undue legislative authority the benefit of the doubt. So those things sound really good to me. I am looking forward to the confirmation hearings. Hopefully, an expeditious confirmation of Judge Gorsuch. I am very, very happy with the selection that President Trump has made, and I really appreciate what I saw there that night as I watched Judge Gorsuch. In the middle of his speech, he turned and looked at his wife, Marie Louise, and there was that significant eye contact that told me that they are a bonded couple that are a team together. The friends of the family tell me she is more conservative than he is. So I look forward to his confirmation. I think the President of the United States has made a terrific choice. Let's get the judicial branch of government up and running again, along with the executive branch, and let's keep up pace here in the House. We have got some work to do, too. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is my honor to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. And I came here to the floor with a bit different topic in mind, but as I listened to the gentleman from Texas, I thought it would be a good idea, while there still was a captive audience on the topic, to refresh some things with perhaps a bit different perspective. And that would be that, from my time and experience, I have traveled most every mile of the southern border, that would be 2,000, all together. I think it would be true that I have traveled every mile of California and Arizona and New Mexico, and most all the miles in Texas. I have flown a lot of it. I have driven a lot of it. I have been out on the water on some of it. And I have spent some nights down on the border, a number of them in some of the dangerous crossings, like San Miguel's crossing on the Tohono O'odham Reservation. It is one of those without any night vision and without what we would call official security. So when I hear that the border is as secure as it has ever been and that there is no security threat to the U.S., which is what we have just heard here in this previous hour, Madam Speaker, I absolutely don't agree with that. And if there is no terrorism that is any factor at all, that there has never been a terrorist attack on the southern border, I would point the gentleman to the five heads that were lined up on the Mexican side of the fence across from the people that were driving to church in New Mexico a few years ago. I think those children that looked out the windows of their cars as they were getting a ride to church were victims of the terror that was created by heads stacked along the side of the highway within feet of our U.S. border. As I spend time with the Border Patrol agents that have made a career out of protecting our border down there, they tell me that there are murders on the Mexican side of the border, where they just throw the body over the fence on to the U.S. side; and other cases where they identify bodies on the Mexican side of the border, and they will call the Mexican security people, whom they have good relations with, as a rule, and they will see the equivalent of an S-10 pickup pull up and just throw the body in the back of the pickup and drive away, with zero forensics and very little attempt to identify who the perpetrators might be that have committed these murders there so close to the border. I have made surprise visits down to the border on a number of occasions, and I make it a point to drop in and see what is going on and talk to the people that are there protecting and guarding our border. I recall one of those visits down to Sasabe, Arizona, at a relatively rural crossing there. I pulled into that port of entry and port of exit for us, and I got out and I decided on the spot that, well, I should let them know who I am for reasons of courtesy, and so I introduced myself. Madam Speaker, I said: I'm Congressman Steve King from Iowa. That agent immediately said: I can't talk to you. And he turned and walked away. And so I went to the next agent and I introduced myself: I'm Steve King from Iowa. And he said: I can't talk to you, but talk to Mike. Mike is the supervisor here tonight, and he's ready to retire, and he has terminal cancer. He will talk to you. And I went and spoke to Mike. The gentleman's name is Mike Crane. It was Mike Crane. He did have terminal cancer. That is verified. And he has since passed away. But as we were speaking about the difficulties in securing the border and the illegal crossings, both one east and one west of the crossing at Sasabe, he got a phone call, and he said, Excuse me, and stepped away, and he was gone for a couple of minutes outside the circle. He came back in and he said: There's been a knifing on the Mexican side of the border, and so there will be an ambulance coming through this border and this crossing in a few minutes. And I've called in U.S. ambulances with oxygen on them, and I've called in a helicopter to fly this victim out and to the Tucson University Hospital. So we waited there for a few minutes. The Mexican ambulance came across the crossing. I did have an EMT with me and I asked him to do what he could to lend a hand to help save this victim's life, so he was in the middle of that process. In the Mexican ambulance there was only one glove--just one glove-- and a roll of gauze and nothing else, no oxygen, no medical equipment. It was an ambulance as far as the shell of it was concerned, and the painting on the outside said ``ambulance,'' but inside, it was just the same thing as an old home bread truck. So they took him out of that Mexican ambulance. The U.S. ambulances had arrived fairly close to that period of time and they put him on oxygen and stabilized him, and then we loaded him off on to a helicopter and flew him up to Tucson University Hospital. I went to Tucson that night, and the next morning I went to Tucson University Hospital and, essentially, talked my way in to visit this victim that had been stabbed in the liver with a knife or a shiv that was--I just recall it was 3\1/2\ inches wide at the hilt. That was the width of the wound in him. I went to the room that he was in and they said: Okay, here he is behind this curtain. It was a two-patient room. When I walked behind the curtain, the individual there who had been knifed the night before was not the one that I had seen and been part of taking care of at Sasabe. It was a different victim that had been wounded under the same circumstances, probably a different location in a different fight and brought into Tucson University Hospital to be stabilized. As I was, I will say, looking at the situation, the patient whom I knew had been wounded the night before was rolled down the hallway in a wheelchair. He had been stabilized. He looked a lot better. We didn't know if he was going to live. So then I assessed the situation and, Madam Speaker, I then met with the chief financial officer of the Tucson University Hospital and other leaders there in the hospital and collected a whole series of narratives about the cost of the medical care that has been assumed by the United States, even from people who have injuries in a foreign country. This cost on this particular incident was $30,000 to bring the wounded Mexican into the United States--parole him into the United States is the legal term that we use--and then to send him back to Mexico once he was stabilized. And they had to post an agent with him to guard him during that period of time. Now, I am not here on the floor tonight taking a position on whether that is right or wrong. From a moral standpoint, it is right. But we should be aware of what is going on. This is not a stable border. It is not a safe border. I have sat on the border at the other crossing in Tohono O'odham Reservation, San Miguel crossing, and there, throughout the night, I heard vehicles coming through the mesquite brush, and you can listen and hear the doors open. You hear the individuals get out and drop their packs on the ground. They will close the door and you can hear them talking and whispering to each other; pick their packs up and walk off through the brush. I sat there and tried to count the shadows, and I won't give you those numbers because none of us are sure what we see when it is pitch black out, but I know what I heard. And we counted a good number of people that were delivered down there to that crossing who came through the fence, which it would be rare for that to hold an old cow as they walk a four-barbed wire fence with the barbs pushed down where they have been continually crossing in the path through there, you can easily see. When the gentleman from El Paso tells us that we are down to the low crossing level of kind of a modern history lowest crossing level of roughly 400,000 people last year, compared to not quite 1.6 million in the year 2000, I would point out that we count those who we can count, those who we see and those who we willingly see. If we are not looking for them, if we are not guarding the portion of the border that they are pouring through, and we say we have counted 400,000 attempts coming into the United States, that doesn't mean that there are only 400,000 attempts; that only means we counted 400,000. The same goes with the interdiction of roughly 1.6 million. They were more aggressive then. And I will say that Bill Clinton was successful in interdicting more border crossing attempts than any other President. I don't know that that was his goal or his objective, but I believe that was the statistical results. To that extent, Madam Speaker, I don't disagree with the gentleman from Texas. And I agree that the border crossings have slowed down. Ten years ago they were greater than they are today, but it is not logical, in fact, it is not rational to assert that the border is as secure as it has ever been. Neither is it logical or rational to say that it is no security threat. In the times that I have been on the border, I have encountered the incidents of seven different persons of interest from nations of interest. That is our vernacular that we use when we see people that are coming from--I will call them--terrorist-spawning states. If an Iranian or an Iraqi or a Yemeni shows up at the southern border and they are interdicted by our Border Patrol, they are then placed into the hands of the FBI. At the moment that that happens, it becomes a classified incident. I doubt if the gentleman from El Paso encounters this. I am down there for the purpose of hearing some of those things, one of the purposes. And I have seven of them that I have logged in my time that I have been down there. And if there have been seven incidents of persons of interest from nations of interest, and I am only going to learn about that in that window between the time they are interdicted and the time that they are taken into the custody of the FBI. So how many hundreds are there and perhaps more that are terrorists that are crossing into the United States? We know the easiest way to get into the United States illegally is to cross our southern border. So these assertions that we don't have a border security problem and that it is not a security threat are false. Their idea is that we should just simply leave the border open. I heard hire more agents not to secure the border, but to facilitate crossing through legal crossings. I think there are some things we can and should be doing with facilitating legal crossings to and from the United States of America. I don't disagree with the full breadth of that statement, Mr. Speaker, but the facts are 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico--80 to 90 percent. It is more than a $60 billion annual business pouring into the United States. Out of that $60 billion worth of drugs, a lot of that is laundered in the United States and brought back into Mexico and points south down toward--and for cocaine, for example, from Colombia. We saw a big bust of Colombian cocaine that was smuggled into the nose of an airplane that was found by the maintenance crew when they diverted the plane for maintenance. But 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs come from or through Mexico. It is an American problem. It is a demand we have on the streets of America for more than $60 billion of illegal drugs that kill thousands of our citizens. We have seen the addiction. We have seen the heroin addictions that have emerged in the United States and become part of the news in the last few years, but the people who die from overdoses of drugs has accelerated to more than die because of car accidents in the United States. Now, that is alarming when you consider most all of us travel in cars in this country. Not a very big percentage of us are addicted to drugs, but it is a very high percentage of those who are drug addicted that are dying because of the drugs they are getting and the overdoses and the bad drugs that they are getting, and we need to shut that down and shut that off. It isn't a final solution, I would agree, because, Mr. Speaker, there are two sides to this equation. One of them is that we need to address the supply of drugs, the transport of illegal drugs into the United States and the delivery of them in the United States to their retail destination. But the other side is we need to shut down the demand on those illegal drugs. That is a topic that this Congress has not taken up in the time that I have been here. I have stood here on this floor a number of times and discussed the need for us to shut down the demand for illegal drugs. Mr. Speaker, I will set that component aside for a moment and acknowledge that part of this problem is the United States' demand for illegal drugs. The deaths in the United States aren't solely the responsibility of the drug dealers. It also is the responsibility of our society to restigmatize illegal drug use and abuse and to clean up our society using a number of tools that we haven't yet developed: the will in our society to address the drug consumption problem in America. Nonetheless, we have developed the will, I believe, especially with the election of Donald Trump, to address the illegal drug supply coming into America and to shut off the smuggling of drugs into the United States. So when I hear from the gentleman from El Paso that he wants open borders and he thinks walls and fences insult people and they damage the relationships between us and Mexico, what about 100,000 dead Mexicans that die in the drug wars? Doesn't that damage our relationship between the United States and Mexico far more than the size of a wall that would probably save tens of thousands of Mexican lives by drawing a line, creating a barrier, and keeping the illegal drugs on the south side of that border away from the $60 billion-plus demand in the United States? I think that damages our relationship a lot more if we continue to allow that to happen. The flow of illegal drugs flows this way into the United States. This is from the Drug Enforcement Agency. I said to them that I want to know about the drug distribution in America, who controls it. I know the answer, but I asked the question so I have got their response. It is the Mexican drug cartels that control almost all of the illegal drug distribution in the United States of America. They are the cartels that operate in every major city, that control the illegal drug supply in nearly every major city; and if there is a significant exception, it is the southern tip of Florida--Miami--where more of those drugs come out of South America, across, through Haiti, and are smuggled into the United States. A lot by boat come through the Caribbean and into Miami and points along Key West. That is more a Haitian connection, South American connection, and to some degree a Cuban connection. But the balance of illegal drugs distributed in America are done so by the Mexican drug cartels. I asked the Drug Enforcement Agency, I said to them: What would be the result of the illegal drug distribution chains in America if, magically, everyone who is illegally in America woke up in their home country tomorrow morning, what would that do to the illegal drug distribution system in the country? Their answer is: It would sever at least one link in every distribution chain of illegal drugs in America, at least one, and in many cases every link of that chain of distribution of illegal drugs. In other words, for a brief time, if that magical miracle thing happened that everybody woke up in their home country, say, tomorrow morning, there would be an instantaneous suspension of the transfer of illegal drugs through that chain into America and into the hands of the users, where tens of thousands are dying because of the drug abuse that they are committing. That is how bad this drug stream is in America. I cannot be convinced that it is not a national security problem. I can't be convinced that it is not a social problem, a law enforcement problem, a criminal problem, and an economic problem. We are allowing these crimes against the humanity of the United States and turning a deaf ear--a deaf ear--because we don't want to speak about how bad this is because somebody over on that side will start calling names again. Well, I don't think I ever got up in the morning without a bunch of them calling me names before I ever got up--no matter how early--and I am immune to that, but I think we need to speak the truth. With regard to the offensiveness of fences and walls, and having traveled almost all of this border and examined it for the prospects of the need to build a fence, a wall, and a fence on our southern border, I would recount, Mr. Speaker, to you what I saw from the helicopter over El Paso. The gentleman spoke and said that El Paso is the safest city in America. I have to check the data on that, but I do recall that El Paso is unusually safe in comparison to the other border cities between Texas and Mexico or even between New Mexico, Arizona, California and Mexico. Why would El Paso be an unusually safe city if it sits on the border in the fashion that it does? And it does. The gentleman from El Paso recounted that it is because they get along with each other and because they have 25 percent immigrants in his constituent population, and somehow they have reached this balance of comity that they get along and so they don't commit crimes against each other. I didn't hear him address the drug problem at all. He may have and I missed it. But I will submit that is not the reason why the crime rate is low in El Paso. Anybody who would like to fly over the border and take a look at that in El Paso can see why the crime rate is low. I recall President Obama going down there and standing within about a mile of the border a few years ago and making remarks. He said that some people want to build a wall on the border, some want to build a fence, some want to build a moat, and some way want to put alligators in it. That was President Obama's statement. He was standing there, by the way, facing north with his back to the border. Not very far away is a fence, a canal, another fence, a security road, the Rio Grande river, another fence, another security road, and another fence. So if you have to get through all those fences and two bodies of water that were flowing--when I looked at it--at a pretty brisk pace, and I know it slows down during the low season, that would be the reason they don't have a lot of illegal activity in El Paso because they have probably the best security structures that we have between us and Mexico. It is a testimony to why we need to build a fence, a wall, and a fence. It is not a testimony as to why we don't, but a testimony as to why we do. If anybody wanted to look, and look at this objectively, perhaps the gentleman from El Paso would show us the crime data on what the crimes were in El Paso before they built the fence, the canal, the road, the fence, the river, the road, and the fence. It is pretty hard to get through that. You have got to be able to climb, swim, and maybe burrow underneath one or two, and then you have got the traffic, the security traffic that travels inside of that. The Border Patrol has that traveled with their white with green striped vehicles there. This is a secure barrier between El Paso and Mexico, and it has kept El Paso safer than other border cities. I believe you will find, if you look at the years before the security was built, that the crime rate was higher than it is today in El Paso. So if we want to really do this from an analytical perspective, perhaps we could extrapolate some of those numbers and project that kind of security to, oh, Laredo, for example, McAllen, Brownsville, and maybe San Diego, which already has better crime rates now after they built their barriers across Smuggler's Gulch. Everybody who has a fence admits they are safer than before they had one. There is another tragedy, Mr. Speaker, that I recall the gentleman speaking to. He said that we should tear down the 600 miles of barrier that we have. Well, it is the opposite. We need to build them up. But, in any case, he said that those who study walls say they don't deter illegal traffic coming across them. Indeed. I wonder if the gentleman studied what was going on in Israel, the fencing that they built in Israel, and if he happened to even notice the tweet that came out from Prime Minister Netanyahu just a couple days ago. He said that they built a barrier to protect them in Israel, and it is nearly 100 percent effective. Their lives depend upon it. So they built an effective barrier, Mr. Speaker. Anyone who is watching history knows this. I hear the other side refer to a wall that we will build on the Mexican border as they compare it to the Berlin Wall. I wonder if they know enough about history to relate any other walls that have been built in history. Not quite a year ago, we had Victor Davis Hanson, one of my top two favorite authors in the country and one of the deepest, most thoughtful, well-read, and prolific writers of history that goes far back to the Greek Peloponnesian era and beyond. He has a terrific understanding of the history of the globe and how it unfolded, especially to Western civilization and came to us. I said: Mr. Hanson, I would like to know, I can think of the Berlin Wall as a wall that was built to keep people in. It was built by Communists to keep people in. Can you think of another wall in history that was built to keep people in? I look across the history that I know, the rest of the walls were built to keep people out. Victor Davis Hanson thought for a little while. He said: Well, one could note the wall, the fence, the barrier between North and South Korea is at least in part built to keep people in North Korea. I don't disagree with that. It is just another case where Communists had to lock their people up to keep them from freedom. So I would challenge anyone who is listening, Mr. Speaker, dig through your history books, Google this to the end of the Earth if you like. I would like to know if there is another example of a fence or a wall that has been built by a nation-state on its borders that is built for the purpose of keeping people in--other than Berlin and the barrier between North and South Korea. In both cases, it was keeping Communists locked in a Communist nation and keeping them from accessing the God-given liberty and freedom that we enjoy here in this country. The rest of the walls throughout history, including the Great Wall of China, were built to keep people out. The examples of that, in the Great Wall of China, would be that the segments of the Great Wall of China were built by different emperors. In fact, they were not a unified China during those years. I am going back several hundred years before Christ. Different emperors built different segments of the wall. They built them because they concluded the Mongols were coming down from the north and were raiding the Chinese. The Chinese decided they didn't want to be the subject of those raids any longer. When you are not defended like that, you have a couple of choices. One, of course, is to submit and be killed, and that is not an option for the survivors at least. Another is you can run raids up into the Mongolian area and provide them a punishing deterrent to ever coming back into China again. A third alternative was to build the Great Wall of China. They built it in segments. It had gaps in between it. By about 245 B.C., the first emperor of China, the unifier of China, Qin Shi Huang, decided to connect all of these segments of the Great Wall of China, so we have got one continuous wall. You could pull a chariot on top of it, it was so big and so well built. That wall--we believed up until the last few years--was 5,500 miles long, at least 2\1/2\ times as long as we need to build on the Mexican border. He connected that together. I am sure he had cheap labor. I don't have any doubt about that. They may have worked for free and board and room, but they connected the great walls of China. Their emperor, Qin Shi Huang, established the continuity of that wall that now, by satellite, Chinese scientists have identified it as it really was-- 13,000 miles long. That is 13,000 miles. We need to build a dinky, little 2,000-mile wall here--a fence, a wall, and a fence--and people say it is too expensive. It doesn't cash flow. We can't possibly do that. It is too hard. There are mountains on the border. There are complications. There are little toads that need to jump across the border. There are long- nosed bats that get confused if they have to fly over the top of it. There are these little species out here that we should worry about. And we have got an Indian reservation that spans both sides of that border. That is Tohono O'Odham. All of these complications right away would be too expensive. The woe-is-me people come out. They have been manufacturing all these reasons why it doesn't make sense to build a fence, a wall, and a fence on the southern border, creating every kind of difficulty that you can imagine. I will just tell you, Mr. Speaker, in my lifetime, I started a construction company in 1975. We are in the business of earthmoving and structural concrete work. We do underground utilities of all kinds. We know pretty well what it takes to do a job. We bid jobs nearly every week, and we are out there with, let's say, two underground utility crews, a farm drainage crew, and an earthmoving crew, mix and match, according to the needs of the job we are doing. Throughout the last more than 10 years, I have drawn up a design that I think is the most effective way to build a wall on the southern border, one that is cheap and effective and that will stand and last a long time with very low and very little maintenance. I will just briefly describe that for the Record, Mr. Speaker. We have an ability to slip formed concrete. A lot of the curbs and gutters that you see around on our streets aren't forms that are set up and poured any longer with a concrete worker with a board pulling that up on the edge of that 2-by-12 on the back. Instead, it is slip form, where you simply drive the machine along, it scrapes the concrete off, and you pour it with a low enough slump that it will stand in the mold that you leave it in. I propose that we go in and trench that 5 or 6 feet deep, and as we do so with the trencher, we pull the slip form along with that. Pour the trench full of concrete, 5 to 6 feet deep, so it is hard to dig under it, and it also becomes a wall that stabilizes the vertical sections that will go up above the Earth, and leave a slot in there so we can drop in precast panels. When that is done, you have got a footing that is 3 to 4 feet wide. It has got a notch in it that drops down a foot or 18 inches that has a 6- or 7-inch gap to receive the precast concrete panels. The precast concrete panels are poured pretty much on site, where they don't have to be moved very much. As you do that, you move along and pour the concrete panels. When they are cured, you just take a crane or an excavator and pick them up one at a time to drop them into the slot. Drop the next one into a slot. They are tongue and groove. You lay that all out along the border. And yes, you have to tie it in so that it doesn't tip on you vertically. You have to engineer it. The strongest force on that wall isn't going to be people trying to get through or over it, it is the wind force on the full face of the wall that you have to design for. We can do all of that, and it is simple. Then, with that kind of a pace, even the crews that we have today in our little, old construction company--and I will say for the record, Mr. Speaker, I am not proposing that King Construction build this, but I am asserting that it is not expensive, it is not complicated, and many companies in America have the full capability of building a good wall on the border that will stand for a long time. But, in any case, we slip form that footing foundation with the open slot in it, and then we drop the precast panels in. They can be whatever height the President of the United States would like. If he wants a 12-foot wall, we can build that, and I can price that out and put an estimate in place. As I mentioned to the Secretary the other day, we are not proposing that we build it for the price I put into his hands, but if you call my bluff, we will. His answer was: Well, will you build 10 miles? I said: No, we want a thousand miles. That is how good I think my estimate is. Our word would be good. But we will find cheaper bids out there if we put this together right. So we can put this together for substantially less than I am hearing from this gentleman. I don't know where he is getting his numbers. Mine are real. We cranked them out in the sophisticated software bidding package that King Construction uses for multiple jobs that are going on. Every week, we are bidding some kind of jobs. When I stood on the floor here 10 years ago and said that we will build a wall with a 5-foot foundation in it, a slot in it, and precast panels, a functional 12-foot height, 6-inch wide concrete with wire on top, and we can do that for $1.3 million a mile. That is for the foundation, the wall only. That is not for right-of-way acquisition, that is not for maintenance roads, that is not for all the bells and whistles that we need, or for the fence on either side that I believe we need, but that is what the wall would cost--roughly in the area of $1.3 million a mile. If that doesn't sound plausible, Mr. Speaker, I will put this in a perspective for everybody that is listening here. We are just finishing up, and will here, I guess, a year from this fall, almost 300 miles of highway across the middle of Iowa through expensive cornfields. It is interstate-equivalent. It is four lanes. It is all built with the medians and the ditches. When you look at an interstate highway, first, you have to by the right-of-way. Then you have to do the environmental and archeological tests. Then you do the engineering. Then you have the contracts. Then you have to do the clearing and grubbing. You strip the topsoil, stockpile it, move the Earth, and then when that is done, you go in and put in any subgrade that you have got. Then you pave, then you shoulder it. Then you seed it. While all this is going on, then you paint the stripes on it, put the signs up, and you put a fence on either side of that. Then you cut the ribbon, and it is open to traffic. You are hearing people talk about a $20 or $30 billion project to build a 2,000-mile wall on the southern border. I will submit, Mr. Speaker, this: we built that highway through the center of Iowa for roughly 300 miles for an average cost of something slightly less than $4 million a mile. That is buying the right-of-way going through Iowa cornfields, not the desert, and that is all of the engineering, the earthmoving, the paving for our highway strength structure. Can anybody think that, at $4 million a mile to build an interstate, you can't build a fence for about $1.3? I will tell you that, in the $2 million a mile category, we will have a fence, a wall, and a fence on 80 percent of that southern border. And there will be maybe 20 percent of that, and probably not more than 20 percent of that, that is tougher than that, and that is rock and it is mountain. Some of it is semivertical. What I have long said is: Let's build that fence, the wall, and the fence until they stop going around the end. You don't have to commit to a thousand-mile barrier right away and build it out into the Gulf at the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico where the Rio Grande dumps in or run it into the Pacific Ocean in San Diego, although those are probably good places to have it. You build it until they stop going around the end. If you build it into the mountain and the stone and they decide it is too hard to travel all that way and climb those mountains, you don't need to build it any further. But when they start going around the end, then you build it. We can build right over the top of the mountains, if we need to. We can put that foundation in there and drop the panels in right up nearly vertical face, if we need to. It is a lot more design and is expensive. Or, we can build the wall around the base of the mountain, where it makes more sense to do that. In some places, we probably won't need to build one for a long time, if ever, but let's build it where it's cheap and fast and where there is a lot of traffic. Let's shut it all off, Mr. Speaker, and let's do so for a cheap and economic price of a good concrete wall that will last for a century or more standing there with very little maintenance. And yes, I think we should have vibration sensors, and I think we ought to have infrared where we need it. I think we ought to have cameras where it makes sense. We need people to patrol that. That all goes with the package. I will say, as I said to President Trump more than a month ago, we build the wall until they stop going around the end. This is the centerpiece of our border security. And then all of the other things we do with sensors and lights and sensing wire on top of the wall, all of that are accessories to the centerpiece, which is the concrete wall. Donald Trump never said a fence. I am going to build you a fence. He said wall. Some of his people, usually it is the ones that come from more to the left of the Republican center than those who come from the right of the Republican center, will say: Well, he really meant virtual. He didn't really mean that we are going to build a wall. It might be a fence, or there might be places where we don't really need to do anything. You will hear all of that. They are saying that because they never believed in border security. If you remember, Mr. Speaker, there was a document that was put out shortly after the election in 2012, in November of 2012, called the autopsy report. That autopsy report gave an assignment to Republicans that said you have to do outreach to certain groups of people, and you have to play identity politics. Don't be caught pandering, but play identity politics, and we shouldn't be securing the border because that offends people that want to cross it legally. That was the message that was driven out of there. It wasn't based on polling and data and statistics--at least not the data that I watched. Instead, it was a product of the party itself. I bring this up not to turn any heat up on anyone but to illustrate that the very election of Donald Trump as President of the United States refutes that autopsy report received in 2012. It says that all people want to live in a lawful society, except for the people who are breaking the law. We want to live in a lawful society. We want a peaceful society. We don't want violence. We don't want drugs. We don't want heads lined up on the border. We don't want to have the kind of slaughter over drug wars in the United States that has been taking place in Mexico far too many years. When they report 100,000 people killed over the last decade or so in the drug wars in Mexico, and, by the way, the $60-plus billion of drugs a year that come into America, there is also that same amount of money that is wired back to Mexico. That is either laundered drug money or the fruit of the wages of people who are working in America sending their wages out of the United States. That is not necessarily an economic boon for us when you see $60 billion worth of drugs ruining the lives of American drug addicts and $60 billion worth of wages or drug money going back to funnel into and fuel the economy of Mexico. That is stupid for the United States of America to accept that kind of transfer of a massive transfer of wealth and that destruction of our own people. As bad as it is, 100,000 Mexicans killed in the drugs wars over the last decade or perhaps a little less than that, many more Americans have died because of drug overdoses in that period of time. And do we shed a tear for them? We should. And there are others we should shed a tear for, Mr. Speaker. There are others like Kate Steinle, a beautiful brown-haired, blue- eyed, 32-year-old lady out with her father along the wharf in San Francisco. If I can remember his name--Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez is his name--was deported at least five times from the United States for committing felonies. And what did he do? He came back into the United States, and he went to a sanctuary city, San Francisco, that had put out the beacon in the advisement that said: Come to our city. We will protect you. We will not let Federal immigration officials disturb your life here. We have hearts for people who are criminals, who are felons violating American laws with impunity being deported and coming back into America. So he is living in a sanctuary city in San Francisco. He shot Kate Steinle in the back, and she fell and died in her father's arms, this beautiful young lady. When I saw that story, when it came up on my Twitter account that day, I looked at that and re-tweeted the story with a quote that said: This will make you cry, too. Just sitting alone, reading my email, when I saw that story, it made me cry, Mr. Speaker, because I know that Kate Steinle is not 1 of the 124 who her father, Jim Steinle, spoke of when he so courageously testified before the House Judiciary Committee. I give him great credit for having the courage to do so, and to commemorate his daughter's life. She is not 1 of 124, which were essentially undocumented who were documented to be released who committed homicide after they had been released by our previous administration. That number is not 124. Mr. Speaker, that number is in the thousands. It is in the thousands--the Americans who died at the hands of criminal aliens who are in the United States illegally committing crimes against. And I call them Americans. Sometimes they are green card holders, lawful permanent residents. Sometimes they are here on a visa. They are legally in the United States. Sometimes they are illegal aliens that also crept into America that die at the hands of those who should not be here. Now, from where I stand, every life that has been sacrificed, that has been taken at the hand of someone who is unlawfully present in the United States of America, every life could have been saved. Every crime is a preventable crime, and I have lived that and believed that for a long time, Mr. Speaker. As I came to this Congress some 14 years ago, I listened to the witnesses before the Immigration Subcommittee, and the witnesses would continually testify about how many lives were lost in the Arizona desert as people were trying to sneak into America. Having snuck across the border and they are trying to creep through the desert, often the heat will affect them, and they will be without water and they will die of exposure or exhaustion. The numbers went from roughly 200 a year in the Arizona desert, I recall them going up to as high as 450. That testimony would come almost every hearing, someone would come in and testify to the number of lives lost on an annual basis in the Arizona desert. I began to wonder, as I would hear the news stories in the United States of the Kate Steinles and the Jamiel Shaws--Jamiel Shaw's son, Jas Shaw, a 17-year-old high school football star who was killed on the streets in southern California at the hand of a Mexican drug gang member who had been given the assignment to go out and kill a Black person. Jas, the son, had just spoken to his father on the cell phone and said: I will be home in just a few minutes, Dad. But he never came home because he was shot in the head and killed up the street a block or two from his home because he was Black, because the assignment to his murderer was to go kill a Black person. Jamiel Shaw will never, never forget those days. Neither will Jas's mother, who was serving in the military and, I believe, deployed at the time. Both of them have testified here in the United States Congress. There are others. Sarah Root from Modale, Iowa, a perfect 4.0 grade point average, studying criminal investigation at Bellevue University in Omaha. I believe the date that she graduated would have been January 30, 2016. The next day she was run over and brutally killed by a drag racing, illegal alien, Mejia--Eswin, I believe his first name was, Mejia--who had 2\1/2\ times the legal blood alcohol content. He was drag racing, and he ran Sarah Root, this perfect young woman with the beginning of her adult life set up perfectly in front of her, the only daughter of her father, Scott, and her mother, Michelle. She had a brother, Scotty. Sarah's parents have both testified also before the House Committee on the Judiciary. This is personal, Mr. Speaker. It is personal to these families that have lost a loved one that they know would be alive today if the administrations had enforced existing immigration laws. When I read the very, very sad story in Cottonwood, Minnesota, southwest Minnesota, not very far from my district, several years ago where a schoolbus full of kids was taking kids home from school, from after school, and an illegal alien who had twice encountered law enforcement and twice been released on the streets because the local law enforcement decided ``it is not my job,'' ran the schoolbus off the road and into the ditch, and the bus rolled over. Four grade-school children were killed up by Cottonwood, Minnesota: a brother and a sister, and then separate children from two other families. Three families grieving at the tragic, horrible death of their grade-school children. If we had enforced our immigration laws, those children would be alive today. They would be living, laughing, loving, studying, maybe teaching. They would be falling in love and doing all of the things that we want them to do as Americans, but their lives were snuffed out because we had an administration that refuses to enforce the law. Others would say: Well, Congressman King, you cannot assert that it is because of illegal activity or illegal aliens in America that brought about the death of those four children in Cottonwood, Minnesota, or the death of Sarah Root from Modale, Iowa, or the death of Kate Steinle in San Francisco, or Jas Shaw, or Brandon Mendoza, or Dominic Durden. All of their lives and thousands more have been lost because we refused to enforce immigration law. They tell me: No, crimes will be committed, bad things will happen; it has got nothing to do with not enforcing immigration law. My answer to them is, Mr. Speaker: Then you go tell those parents in Cottonwood, Minnesota, that their children would still be dead if we had deported the perpetrator who killed them. You go tell the parents of Kate Steinle that she would still be dead if Juan Francisco Lopez- Sanchez had been effectively deported or locked up for a mandatory 5- year sentence, as we have written into Kate's law, that Kate would still be dead if we had enforced such a law on Sanchez. Or go tell the mother of Brandon Mendoza that her fine and proud law enforcement son would still be dead if we had deported the illegal who ran him down that day. Or tell Jamiel Shaw that his son, Jas, would still be dead if we had deported the illegal alien who murdered his son on the street in his neighborhood. We know better, Mr. Speaker. This is personal. It is personal in the lives of thousands of families in America who are suffering thousands of incidents of their grief that will be part of their lives. For generations, they will look back, and they will grieve for those lost family members who will not be there on Easter or on Christmas or on Thanksgiving, and they will grieve for the grandchildren who were never born, and they will call upon their surviving brothers and sisters: Now you are responsible to be the parents of the grandchildren for the parents who lost their daughter or lost their son. That is what is at stake here, Mr. Speaker. We are a nation of laws, but we are, today, a nation of not yet fully enforced laws, and we have had a President in the past who seemed to want to bring in the maximum number of illegal aliens and leave them here and keep them here. He never demonstrated a desire to enforce the law as he opened up the borders of America to people who are coming from terrorist-spawning countries. Now, thankfully, we have Donald Trump, who has stepped up to close those borders back down again and get a handle on this migration so that the American people can be safer. But we will be a lot safer with a fence, a wall, and a fence on our southern border. By the way, at this point now, the United States is spending, annually, $13.4 billion a year--that is billion with a B--to secure our southern border, and we are getting perhaps 25 percent enforcement efficiency in that southern border--25 percent. That, by the way, is the testimony of the Border Patrol before the Committee on the Judiciary. It is not a number that is brought up from someone who wants to be critical of them. I salute the Border Patrol. They have got a tough job. But their operation has not been managed for the purpose of securing our border and achieving border security. They have tried to redefine it as to something else. Oh, $13.4 billion a year spent on our 2,000-mile southern border. Now, somebody out there, Mr. Speaker, has done the math on that and divided 2,000 miles into $13.4 billion. That comes to $6.7 million a mile to secure our southern border, $6.7 million a mile for every mile every year, day and night--$6.7 million. I would just ask people, contemplate that cost, that heavy cost, $6.7 million a mile. What can you buy for that? Well, you can buy an interstate highway, and you can have $2.7 million left over and change per mile. We can take one annual budget of our southern border--if we do what Mr. O'Rourke wants to do and open the border, we can lay the Border Patrol off for a year, take that $6.7 million a mile, the $13.4 billion, and we can build an interstate highway the full length of that and have $2.7 million a mile left over. That is how much money is being spent on the southern border to get 25 percent efficiency. You cannot convince me that if we spend $1.3 million a mile for the wall--if we dial that up to 2 or a little more than $2 million a mile so we can cover a fence on either side of that wall and access roads that would be built out of necessity to build it and to maintain it and to patrol it--a couple million dollars a mile on that, wouldn't give us something pretty close to Israeli-level border security. That is nearly 100 percent. That is up into the 99 percentile and beyond that into the efficiency of the security of our border. Of course we could get that kind of security on our border. It doesn't mean we just build it and walk away. People on that side would like to have you think that, that somehow we would just build a wall and walk away and we leave the ladders put up on the south side of the border. No, we would maintain that. We would patrol it. We would fly it. We would patrol it with vehicles. We would have vibration sensors. We would put wire on top, and that wire on top would signal to us if anybody grounded that wire, tried to breach that, touch that wire, brought it to the ground. It would tell us in the control centers exactly where that breach was attempted to take place. We would zero our enforcement in on them and we would enforce it, and we would maintain it so that it functions 100 percent all the time. I see the fence we have got on the border now, and sometimes they will come on the other side, take a set of wire cutters, cut themselves a gate through a chain-link fence. I believe I saw this in Lukeville, Arizona. There they take a chain and thread it through the chain-link fence, put a padlock on it, and it is their personal gate to come and go into America whenever they see fit, with a great, big huge brown mastiff on a bigger chain yet laying there by that gate with a growl under his throat waiting for anybody who might decide they want to walk through that gate in the fence. We can do a lot better. We will do a lot better, $6.7 million a mile. Let me pose this another way for people who have a different way of putting images in their head. For me, I live out in the country in Iowa. We have gravel roads every mile, in the flat country at least. From where I live, my west road runs a mile out there to the intersection where it goes on in four directions, gravel road. So let's just say that General Kelly, Secretary Kelly, came to me and he said: Steve, I want you to guard your west mile, and I want you to secure that border so that 25 percent of the people that are trying to get across there will be interdicted and won't be able to get across that border. So what would you take to give me that level of security for a mile of road and, say, a mile, the west gravel road from my house? He said: I have got a bid. I will give you $6.7 million--that is the average going rate for a mile--and you will get that every year. By the way, we do our budgets on a 10-year contract, so I will give you $67 million to secure 1 mile of Iowa gravel road. Do you think I could secure that border for $67 million for 10 years? And do you think that I would hire a lot of people to sit there in their humvees and talk back and forth on the radio and let people walk around them coming across that border if my job was to secure it? No. I would build a fence, a wall, and a fence on that mile. I would spend less than $2 million for that mile. Yes, I would hire a border patrol, and I would put the bells and whistles, the accessories on that wall so that we had the warning signals that are there. I would minimize the labor; I would maximize the technology. But I would put the resources there to get the job done 100 percent, not 25 percent, and I could do it for, you know, a lot less than $6.7 million per mile per year. It wouldn't take a $67 million contract for a 10-year contract to secure that border. Infrastructure does its job. You build the wall. Remember President Obama, he said he had prosecutorial discretion, and so he created these great classes of people and violated the Constitution and granted a waiver for the application of our criminal laws against people who had come into the United States illegally. And he said: Well, we are doing this on a case-by-case basis. Janet Napolitano wrote the memo. We have got the ICE memo or the Napolitano memo that lays out the exemptions to the law. Seven times in there she wrote, ``on an individual basis only.'' That is in there because she knows that the court case turns on prosecutorial discretion, which can only be applied if you are not going to enforce the law, the prosecutors do have discretion. If it is not practical to do so, if you don't have the resources, they should use the resources to their best advantage. You can do that on an individual basis and be within the law and be constitutional. But once you have a President Obama creating huge classes of people that number in the hundreds of thousands--in fact, in the millions-- then what you have, Mr. Speaker, is a violation of the law and the Constitution, and it is the executive branch, the President of the United States making up law as he goes along and violating the separation of powers. Well, through that, when the President says: I have prosecutorial discretion, and anybody who walks across the border is not going to be troubled. We will meet them with the welcome wagon and fly them to any State in the Union they choose--that happens, Mr. Speaker--it is real. That is not a fabrication or an embellishment. It is even worse than that. But what benefit does a wall have? In addition to, it provides security of the United States of America. A wall doesn't have prosecutorial discretion. We make up its mind when we build the wall. And if they can't get across there, and we maintain and protect it, then we get the effectiveness of it, regardless of who the President is. And if we get a President in the future who doesn't secure and maintain and enforce the wall, then we have a serious cause that we can point to rather than a vague legal argument manufactured by a former adjunct professor who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. And so, Mr. Speaker, building a fence, a wall, and a fence on our southern border is a wise and prudent thing to do. It will pay for itself before we can even get it built. It will dramatically slow down the illegal drugs that are coming into America that come from or through Mexico. Remember, 80 to 90 percent of them. Dramatically slow them down. The illegal traffic that is coming in, it will shut off most all of that. I would agree with the gentleman from El Paso that we should then beef up our ports of entry so we can facilitate a faster flow of legal traffic in and out of America. But the American people need to decide who is coming into America and who is leaving America. We should not have an immigration policy that is established by the people who live anywhere but America or by the people who are anything but citizens of the United States. The citizens of America should make this decision through their elected representatives by exercising the enumerated power in the Constitution that Congress has to establish immigration laws. Internally, our domestic laws need to be enforced. And we need to recruit local law enforcement by expanding the 287(g) program and the Secure Communities program. We need to incorporate the city police, the county sheriff and deputy force, and the highway patrol, or Division of Criminal Investigation--Department of Public Safety officers, as Texas has--all to work with our Federal officers, so it is a seamless network working together to provide secure communities in America, restore the respect for the rule of law, shut down the flow of drugs into the United States, shut off the illegal traffic into America, shut off the terrorists who are sneaking into America because the easiest and most reliable way for them to get here is across our southern border. If we do all of that, there will be respect for both countries that will be established. And I would say this to President Trump. And that is, he is a builder, I am a builder. I don't have any doubt about how to build that wall or to build the fences on the south and north side of that so that we have two no-man's lands to patrol. I don't know that he has any doubt about it either. He has said that he will build a big, beautiful wall. Well, I am looking for the architect's ideas on beauty. That is not my forte. But the structural functionality and the efficiency of its construction is my forte. And I encourage that we draw up the plans and designs for this and let contracts to those contractors who can effectively and efficiently do this in a competitive low-bid fashion with a proper inspection, and we will build that barrier that can stand for a long time, designed to keep people and contraband out, as every other wall in the history of the world, including the Great Wall of China and the walls that were built in northern England and those across northern Germany. The Romans built walls there to protect themselves as well. Each wall, with the exception of those designed by communists to keep their subjects in, has been designed to keep people out. There is a huge moral difference between a wall to keep people in and a wall to keep criminals, terrorists, and also decent people, and contraband out. It is a simple equation. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention here this evening on this topic. I look forward to the construction of the fence, the wall, and the fence on our southern border, and the restoration of the respect for the rule of law. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you and the privilege to address the House here, and I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for recognizing me to say a few words here. This week, when we go down to the Mall to March for Life, we will see the tens of thousands of faces, many of them young people, especially young ladies that are there to stand up and defend life. I hear the debate here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I have listened to the gentleman who spoke on the Democrat side of this aisle who lamented that there would be 18 million people pushed off of their healthcare if we repeal the Affordable Care Act. If you want to use the technical term, it is named the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and it is not the right name for it. It won't be 18 million. It won't be half of that. But to listen to the lament that some people might go without--not health care, that is another misnomer--health insurance for a little while, that is their concern? Well, we are here talking about more than 58 million little babies-- little babies that are created in God's image and formed in the womb, as we heard Tim Walberg speak a little earlier. They are the love of our lives. I have never known anyone who had a baby in their arms and felt that little baby--that little baby is forming, that little baby cooing, that special little baby smell, to witness the miracle of that little baby, I have never known a mother or a father that said: I wish this child had never been born. But that is what has happened to more than 58 million little miracles. We are here; we are a moral standard. People say you can't legislate morality. Well, a reflection of morality is in the Federal code, and it is in the State laws all across this land. The question that doesn't seem to be answered generally by people on the other side of the aisle--and I am grateful for the pro-life Democrats that we have who have joined us year after year. I would pose the question to those who oppose the pro-life movement: Do you believe that human life is sacred in all of its forms? Is there anybody over there that would deny that, that human life is sacred in all of its forms? Not one of you. Not one of you will stand up and wave your arm and say: let me yield to you and say why that is not true. It is true. We know. Human life is sacred in all of its forms. Once we understand that--now, you can stipulate that. You have by your silence--that human life is sacred in all of its forms, there is only one other question: Since we have to protect human life in all of its forms then at what moment does life begin? At what moment, ladies and gentlemen? Well, we know that we can only identify a single moment. As much as we know about biology--and we know plenty--one single moment is the moment of conception. From that moment, it is a unique life with the chromosomes matched up and the DNA that will never change for a lifetime, that unique individual. Did you ever think that God's creation of us--there are over 7 billion human beings on the planet. Each one of us is created in his image, each one of us is unique. Think of 7 billion faces and no two of them are alike. Every face on the planet is distinct and unique, and it matches up with none of the faces that are in the grave today. And nobody's face matches up with any of the faces that will be born in future years or millennia. Each face of God's creation is unique. What is the best way we can tell each other apart? Look at the visage of our faces. It is a uniqueness that God created within us that is part of how we interact with each other. It is how we should love each other and appreciate each other and draw those distinctions so that we can respect everyone as having their own unique life. So you have stipulated that human life is sacred in all of its forms. So the next question I have to ask you is: Well, at what moment does life begin? What moment, what instant does life begin? If you can pose another instant, another moment, other than conception, I would listen to that. But I am not seeing anybody who wants to step down and say that there is a distinct moment that life begins, other than conception. So I will make this case again: human life is sacred in all of its forms; you stipulated that. The second is that it begins at the moment of conception. Your silence has stipulated that. So we have the whole argument wrapped up here, packaged in this today. We need to defend human life in all of its forms. It is God's gift to his creation. It is our obligation to defend it, and we can defend it. We can defend it through legislation as we did today. We should honor and respect the life of Henry Hyde, who contributed a great deal to this Congress in his lifetime. We are working on the foundation that he has laid down for us, and Representative Chris Smith has assumed much of the role that Henry Hyde played here in this Congress. We each had the privilege to serve with Henry Hyde. His legacy remains, and we have the unique privilege and opportunity to build on it. I suggest we continue to do so in every piece of legislation that we can pass. We anticipate appointments to the Supreme Court that will honor life and recognize, also, as our Founding Fathers did when they drafted the Declaration of Independence, that we have a right to life, to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Don't try to package that up as three equal values. They are not. They are prioritized rights. The right to life supercedes the right to liberty, and the right to liberty supersedes the right to the pursuit of happiness. No one in the pursuit of their happiness can trample on someone's liberties. And no one can claim they have the liberty to take the life of a baby because life is paramount. That is the package. That is the argument that is here. We need young people to grow up with that understanding and those values. As we stand here tonight, Mr. Speaker, and as we work together in the coming days and months--and I pray it is not years--one day we will see this Nation that respects life from the moment of conception until natural death.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. ``No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Marino).

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

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I would inquire as to how much time may be remaining for each side.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, first, I want to say that I have been a long and strong supporter of the REINS Act. I want to compliment Congressman Geoff Davis of Kentucky for introducing and crafting that legislation. While he was doing that, I was drafting a bill that I named the Sunset Act, and I looked at this from the broad scope of this, that we have a lot of regulations that exist and have existed for decades. Some of them are burdensome and some of them are not. The effect of the REINS Act, which I certainly will support on a final passage, hopefully with the King amendment adopted in it, but the REINS Act de facto simply grandfathers in existing regulations. So it is only prospective. It addresses the major regulations going forward, but not those that we are stuck with, such as the Waters of the United States, the Clean Power Plan, the overtime rule, the fiduciary rule, the net neutrality rule, the Dodd-Frank rules, and, heaven forbid, the ObamaCare rules if we should fail to repeal ObamaCare. So what the King amendment does is it directs and allows the agencies and the executive branch of government to send a minimum of 10 percent of their regulations to the Congress each year for the duration of a decade encompassing a full 100 percent of all the regulations in place at the time of passage and enactment of the underlying legislation. That gives Congress, then, authority and a vote over all of this. It gives us an ability to amend that legislation. We can pass them all en banc, we can amend them accordingly, or we can do what our Founding Fathers envisioned we should do. That is the essence of this. By the way, President-elect Trump has made some strong pledges on dramatically reducing regulation in the United States. He doesn't have the tools without the King amendment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, first, I would say that yes, we can blame a lot of debt and deficit on a burden of regulations. We can blame it because there is a huge cost to our executive branch of government. That cost, much of it, the unnecessary component, all that goes against our debt and deficit. We saw, as Barack Obama came in as President, we had a $10 trillion debt, which he was very critical of throughout his campaign in 2007 and 2008. Now, as he leaves office here, thankfully, in a couple of weeks, it is a $20 trillion debt, and we can start to ratchet this thing back down. Looking at the Obama administration and their reports on the costs of regulation, they come up with this number reported to the Heritage Foundation that the annual cost of regulations to the United States, according to the Obama administration, is $108 billion, Mr. Chairman. So that is what we are looking at here for costs. But I want to get at the real meat of this. Article I of the Constitution says Congress shall make all law. Yet, we have the courts making laws across the street, and we have regulations coming at us at a rate of--and I expressed to the gentleman from Georgia--ten-to-one. For every law we passed in the 114th Congress, there were at least 10 regulations that were poured over our head, and we are sitting in a place where we don't have the tools to undo them. Now we have a President that is ready, and he wants to undo these regulations. If we make him march through the Administrative Procedure Act, it is heavy, it is burdensome, and it is time-consuming. But the King amendment gives the tools for the next President of the United States to work with Congress to trim this regulatory burden down. And the most important part is, it makes all of us in the House and the Senate accountable then for all of the regulations. The APA was allowed to dish off this legislative responsibility to the executive branch. Congress took a pass. They ducked their responsibility of being accountable for all legislation and found a way to be producing less than 10 percent of the legislation that exists even in a given year. The King amendment says that over the period of a decade, 10 percent a year at a minimum, Congress will have to review all the regulations. The people from across America--we the people--will weigh in on that regulation. And then an even better part is not only will we be accountable here in Congress--and we should be--but when the nameless, faceless bureaucrats are across the desk from our constituents and they refuse to listen to our constituents, there is going to be a little bug in the back of their ear that is going to be saying to them: You know what? This constituent that may be losing their business over this regulation, the next stop they make is going to be with their Congressman. These regulations that we promulgated are going to be subject then to being repealed by the United States Congress, as they should be. Support the King amendment. It puts the authority back into the hands of Article I, we the people. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to address you and my privilege to be recognized by the gentleman from Georgia. I wanted to address this rule, and I share some of the sentiment that came from the gentleman from Massachusetts. I like to have open rules. I like to have open debates. I would like to have more than one debate on what we might do with this resolution that is before us. I would like to have a debate on the one-state solution versus the two-state solution because I believe that the two-state solution has run its course and we need to pack up our tools, ship those off to the side, and start all over again with a new look. I believe we needed to have a resolution that refreshes this in such a way that it completely rejected Resolution 2334, that vote that took place in the United Nations and said to the Trump administration: Let's start this fresh with a new look rather than a direction of being bound by implication to a two-state solution. But that is not what we have ahead of us. What we have ahead of us is a resolution that has come to the floor under a closed rule that sends a lot of a good and right message to the rest of the world that America and the United States Congress reject what happened in the United Nations the other day and that decision to abstain from that vote. On the other hand, we really don't have the focus here to take on the rest of this issue. I am hopeful that we will. I will be introducing a resolution later today that addresses the two-state resolution in a way I would like to have done it with a resolution here. As I said to the gentleman from California, it is not my intent to blow up his bill or his initiative. I want to see the best success we can on what is going on here today.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor and privilege to be recognized to address the floor of the United States House of Representatives. It was quite interesting to listen to the gentleman from North Dakota and the stress that they have up there; in particular, with regard to the pipeline being built through there. I would just want to reinforce the statements made by the gentleman from North Dakota and point out that the permits are there, the process is there. We have tens of thousands of miles of pipelines in the United States of America, and we have very, very few problems with leaks or other circumstances that would cause one to think that there is a safer way to transport oil. There is not. The safest way is with the pipeline. I am one who has actually started out in the construction business building pipelines. We have been in the construction business for 42 years. We dig in the ground, and we are doing underground utility work every day, except for Sundays, and we go deep sometimes. We go into hydraulic soil from time to time. Water tables are above where we are working. We do well points. We are working with the flow of water in the soil and underground, and we have got as good a look at this as anybody I know. I would point out to those that are detractors that say: well, we can pollute the underground aquifer if we have a pipeline that we build and if that pipeline should leak. And I would point out something that they ought to know if they ever saw a movie of a shipwreck: oil floats on water. Therefore, it cannot penetrate down into the aquifer. You are not pumping off of the top-skimmed surface of the aquifer. You are pumping down below. And if you should get a leak, which is extraordinarily rare, the oil pools and floats on the top and can be pumped off. There is no safer way to transfer petroleum products and no more efficient way. It is by far the best way, which is why we have tens of thousands of pipelines all over this country moving all kinds of product, including crude oil, but also anhydrous ammonia and a number of other products across the country. I have built the pipelines. I have been down in the trench. I have been tossed into the air and slammed to the ground and climbed down the machine. The wind, the dust, the noise, the heat, the cold, has all been around me. What I don't understand is why anybody would take people seriously that think that oil doesn't float on water, or that there is a better way to transport oil, or that somehow if they just get organized and people fund them, we are going to pay attention to them as if they were logical. They are not. So that concludes my statement on the oil pipeline. I am hopeful, though, that in the upcoming Trump administration the future Secretary of State signs that permit that opens up that they need one section of pipe to go across the 49th parallel, Mr. Speaker, in order to facilitate the Keystone XL pipeline. We can build that pipeline down to the Canadian border from the north, and we can build the pipeline up to the Canadian border from the south. But what has always been short on the Obama administration is a Hillary Clinton or a John Kerry signature on the document that says: we have an agreement with Canada to connect these pipelines together at our border. That is one section of pipe that would need to go in there. I believe that happens under the Trump administration. And we should set aside these ridiculous arguments earlier rather than later. But America looks ridiculous in the world if we are going to argue against that very logic that, if petroleum needs to move and we are going to use it to move product around America and heat our homes and generate electricity and all the things that we do, then we need to do it as effectively and efficiently as possibly or we will become noncompetitive for the rest of the country. So, Mr. Speaker, I emphasize the points made by the gentleman from North Dakota, and I urge that the Corps of Engineers accelerate the operation up there, and they can commence to finish their work that goes across what is the reservoir and river, the Missouri River, get that connected and get it done. This demonstration isn't going to be over till you get done, so bore on through would be my advice. The Death of Fidel Castro

Mr. KING of Iowa. I made myself a promise yesterday, Mr. Speaker, when I stopped in to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's office to congratulate her; and I would do that with many of the people who are related to, from, or descended from folks who had to leave Cuba, especially those who are there today who weren't able to leave Cuba. We have been looking for the biological solution, which would be Castro being transferred into the next life. The very definition of the biological solution in the vernacular around this town was the eventual death of Fidel Castro. Well, it happened, finally happened, Mr. Speaker, and so I had a celebratory cup of Cuban coffee in the office of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. And now I would make this call, that it is time for the Cuban people and it is time for the incoming Trump administration to put together what amounts to the need for a regime change on the island of Cuba for the 11 million people that are free-spirited, hardworking, happy people, given all the circumstances that they have to fight against in the poorest country in all of the Western Hemisphere as far as their spirit is concerned. I would pass the message along. There is a wonderful, wonderful nun in my district named Sister Marie. She served under Mother Teresa for 27 years. She served in Cuba for a long, long time, but she has been to all the--well, maybe not all, but many of the worst places in the world to serve the Lord and to help people. She used to sneak into Cuba with seeds sewn in her clothing, into the seams of her clothing, so that she could plant a garden, and that garden then could grow and prosper and help feed the Cuban people that were living off of their monthly supply of the ration of rice, beans, and sugar. She told me that, of all the places she has been, Cuba is the poorest place--$20 a month for income, but the poorest place because of their spirit. The spirit of their Christian faith has been so suppressed by Castro, who has closed so many of the churches, the cathedrals. I walked into a cathedral down in Cuba, and you could see that where the pews were, that there was dust there and there weren't tracks by the pews. But the line down through the center aisle was all polished from people walking down through the center aisle. And when you look at that, you realize the reason that there is dust out in the pews and there is not a path of people's feet moving back and forth down through the seats and the pews of this cathedral in Cuba is because that church does not function any longer as a church; it is functioning as a museum. Castro shut down many, many of the religious institutions throughout Cuba and did his best to suppress Christian faith on that island. Occasionally, a little chapel pops up here and there, and you can see, if you are looking closely, you will see a little bit of it. But he has been an aggressive opponent to our Christian faith, which is the foundation of the faith in Cuba. So I am not sorry to see the end of the life of Fidel Castro. And I have made a pact with some of my Cuban friends that one day we will return to Cuba and we will swim ashore at the Bay of Pigs. And that would be the ultimate symbolic act that, when the day comes, that it is possible for, let's say, Cuban exiles to come towards the shore. I will say, I would want to dive out of that boat and swim ashore and wade out onto a free Cuba. That is our pact. That is our mission. I am going to do my best to stay in shape to be able to accomplish that mission. Here are some things that I saw in my trip down to Cuba, Mr. Speaker, and I think it is important that the body here pay attention to some of this. I hear a lot of stories about how good the health care system is, about how good the educational system is. Well, we went to visit some of the educational system, Mr. Speaker, and one of them was a country school. They had, oh, I don't know, 15 or 18 kids sitting at desks in this little shack out in the country with the teacher up front looking like this was a country school from 150 years ago in my home State of Iowa. There, when we walked in, of course, everything stopped and the kids all paid attention. They didn't get to see Americans very often. I suppose we look a little bit different, on balance, than they do and their parents do. But we had a pretty good handful of pencils there, and that handful of pencils was swept up immediately. They couldn't wait to get their hands on pencils so that they could write. That is one of the examples of the shortage of supplies that are there. The educational system, also, we took a ride up to the top of the mountains about 70 kilometers from Santa Clara in Cuba. There is an extension college up there that teaches agriculture. This was a ride up there that took, oh, at least 90 minutes to get up the mountain. We were sitting in the back of a Russian deuce and a half that gave us a ride up the mountain. When we got there to this little campus built into the mountains, we had the equivalent of--we had about 40 people on this tour altogether. And as we were standing there, they brought out--the Cuban minders brought out the spokesmen for the university, and they stood there in their gray smocks, and the Cuban minders began transferring our questions to them. So I was asking questions of the faculty at the extension college in the mountains there, and as I would ask the question, then the Cuban minder would translate the question from English into Spanish and ask in Spanish a question of the representatives of the university. They would hear the question. They would answer in Spanish. The Cuban minder would interpret it back into English, and he would tell us what he supposedly said. Well, I am trying to learn the things I came there to learn, and the interpreter standing next to me, he was on the tour and he was not designed to be the interpreter, but he was the best interpreter I have ever had. His name was Ed Sabatini, and his parents owned real estate in Cuba that had been nationalized by Castro, taken away from them, and they had escaped from the island and lived in Miami. But Ed Sabatini, the son of the refugees that had gotten out of Cuba, he said to me, as I am listening to the responses to the questions that I think are being asked, he said: You realize, don't you, that these Castro minders are not asking the questions that you are asking, and when they get the answers back, they are not giving back to you the answers that were given to them by the faculty here at this university. And I said: No, I didn't realize that. Of course, I didn't understand enough Spanish to realize that. So he began to interpret this for me, and he was interpreting not only what was said, but he was interpreting what wasn't said, what body language was there, and filling me in on the things that he was soaking up in that encounter. So after a little while, we realized it doesn't pay for us to stand here and talk to these people because we are not going to get the truth out of them anyway. They are just putting us through this exercise. And so we stepped away from the group and went down and spoke to some students who were sitting on the curb. I had already asked the faculty: Do you have Internet services up here on the mountain? And the faculty had answered back, or at least through the minder: Yes, we have Internet services. So we began to talk to the students, and we got straighter answers. Well, they did have Internet service. The had a computer class going on right then up in a building adjacent to where we were. And so I asked them: So, if you want to access the Internet, how do you get to that Internet? Tell me how that works. Their answer was: Well, if we have research or a question that we want to get resolved, we write that question down on a piece of paper, and then we hand that to our instructor. Our instructor decides whether to approve our request or not. If he approves it, then that goes into a packet that goes down the mountain, in a Russian deuce and a half, 70 kilometers to Santa Clara, where the Internet connection is. It is run by Castro's people. Then they look at the request. They type that request out onto the Internet if they are approved that the question can be allowed to be asked and answered, and then the question goes out on the Internet. They download the response that they are looking for. If they approve it, they will take that response down and then redact the things they don't want the student to know, but print the document, put that document back on a Russian deuce and a half, and it goes 70 kilometers back up the mountain. It takes days or even weeks to get an answer from the Internet. I asked them: Tell me about your Internet service. Their answer was: Oh, yes, we have Internet service here, good access to Internet service. That is what it is. Give a piece of paper a ride down a mountain on a Russian deuce and a half 70 kilometers, going through the minders and through the censors and out to the Internet, back again, redacted, back on the deuce and a half, back up the mountain. Now, how long would it take you to research anything on the Internet if you have to process things through that means? It was amazing to me that anyone could even seriously suggest such a thing, that it was Internet access, when it had to take two rides in a Russian deuce and a half and go through a censor and a couple of minders. That is what we saw down there at that university. So I said: I want to go look at this computer class that is going on. As I headed up that way, the leader of our tour group was gathering people together, and I said: I am going to go look at this computer class up here. He said: We are going to leave. That meant we were supposed to jump in these deuce and a halfs and take our ride back down the mountain. I said: I am going to go up and see the computers. He said: Well, we are going to leave you here. I said: Then I will see you in Havana. So I thought they were bluffing, and they were, but Ed Sabatini and I went into that classroom, kind of down in the basement of a school building there, and there sat about 12 computers, all old 386s or maybe even earlier, and they had two or three male students all sitting in front of each computer. And there on the screen was the five points of why capitalism is bad and Marxism is good. They were teaching the lesson of Marxist ideology right there on the screens of those old computers while these students sat there sharing a screen to look at. When we walked in, it kind of took over the room. And once they found out that we were from America, the students had questions they wanted to ask, and they began to ask the questions. They were interpreted through Ed Sabatini, and then to me, and I answered them. After awhile, it became so rapid-fire that Ed just answered the questions and he told me what happened as we walked out of there. But they were asking questions like--and this was agriculture. I said extension. So they were asking questions like, let's see: Who sets the price on the markets for, say, grain? And they are probably thinking rice and sugar, maybe beans, and I am thinking corn and soybeans. Who sets the price? And we say: The market sets the price. Well, what is the market? Well, it is supply and demand. Buyers come in and they make an offer, and if they can buy what they want at that price, then that is the price. If they are getting more than they want, they lower the price. If they are getting less than they want, they raise the price. Pretty big idea. You could see them try to figure out what that meant. Then they said: How many times does the price--when does the price change? They were thinking that there still was some government that set our commodity prices, our grain prices, maybe once a month or twice a year or whatever they might do. I said to them: That price can change, actually, several times a minute. It is kind of a living, moving market because it reacts to the bids that are out there. Hard to think of what that means. Who sets--they wanted to know what are our land values, and I told them. Who set the values on land? Well, the buyers and the sellers set the value on land. They just didn't have a concept of that. And then it would be: Why would anyone sell land if they owned land? Well, there is a concept of real estate ownership that doesn't exist in any significant way in a Marxist economy that controls and owns everything. So we went through that. It was a fascinating time for them, and it was fascinating for me to see how they reacted, the inquisitiveness of those young students that had an opportunity to hear what it is like in America. And you heard from them: I want to go to America. I would say everyone in that room wanted to go to America. That is the sense of not only the deprivation that is there because they are on rations of rice and beans and sugar, but deprived, also, of ideas, the opportunity to have access to information, to exchange ideas. That has been crushed by Castro. So the potential of the people in Cuba, which I think is terrific, has been so badly damaged by the oppressing oppression of Castro, who threw thousands of his political enemies into prison. He tortured them, he beat them, and he executed many, many of them. I remember, Mr. Speaker, the vision, the images that I saw on television back in 1959, 1960, and beyond when Castro and Che Guevara took over Cuba and they executed the political enemies. They took them up against a wall. Many of them were wearing white slacks and white Cuban shirts that hang outside their belt, and they were put up to the wall, blindfolded. They stood there with their hands tied, and they were shot. That was back when television showed the reality of what was taking place. We hadn't gotten so sensitive that when there was murder that was picked up on cameras, it went on television without being blurred out as if somehow we are too sensitive to see things like that. It was an awful sight. I recall a man who was about to be executed, one of Castro's enemies, and he insisted that he not be blindfolded, he insisted that he not be tied, and he insisted that he give the order for them to fire. So, Mr. Speaker, he stood in front of that execution wall in his white Cuban shirt, his white slacks, and his sandals. He raised his hand with no blindfold on him. He looked at that firing squad, he raised his hand, and in a moment of, I will say, just an amazing display of courage and nerve dropped his hand, and that firing squad fired and executed that probably very innocent Cuban there in front of that wall. He became one of thousands who were put into their graves because they were political opponents of the Marxist, the Communist, the dictator, the tyrant that had turned Cuba into a prison island; and it has been a prison island ever since 1959. Finally, the biological solution has kicked in, and Fidel Castro is no more. There is one more to go, and that is Raul. The Cuban people need to know that when they go to their grave, their grip on the island of Cuba is letting go. It has got to let go, and the free spirit that exists within the hearts of the Cuban people needs to be released. They need to be freed up on that island so they can control their own destiny, they can live their own lives, they can become prosperous by their brains and the sweat of their own brow and have the opportunities that we have here in this country. This new administration needs to be about regime change in Cuba. The Western Hemisphere has been terrorized by the policies of Fidel Castro and by his support for the Marxists throughout a number of countries in Central and South America. That includes Nicaragua, and it includes Venezuela with Hugo Chavez and now his successor. It includes a number of other countries. Castro has engaged in trouble in Grenada and also over into Africa. He has fomented that kind of terror and sent his army out there for hire to take freedom away from other people. If we had been absent his influence in this hemisphere, chances are South America itself would be much more free than it is today. That is Castro. I recall visiting the Hotel Nacional. In there, when you walk inside, that was a place where the rich and famous from America used to play down in Cuba at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. It looks out across the sea, and there is a gun emplacement there, a cannon that sits down in a bunker that was used to defend the shores of Cuba back during the Spanish-American War--they say the Spanish-Cuban-American War--in 1898. There in that hotel, you will see pictures of the celebrities of the time: Marilyn Monroe, Stan Musial, Rocky Marciano. When you walk through, you see the people that I will say lived in black-and-white fame in America. Their pictures are on the wall in the Hotel Nacional. Also, there in the parking lot was the 1959 Jaguar station wagon that was the vehicle of the previous dictator, Batista's, wife, who had that green 1959 Jaguar station wagon. But things have stopped. They are frozen in time. The most typical taxicab in Havana was a 1954 Chevy, and it had a 3-cylinder Russian diesel engine under the hood. If you look around the island, you would see Russian tractors that were parked, and they had been stripped for parts. I didn't see any of them out there running. It is the only place in civilization that I know that once went from animal husbandry agriculture where they used beasts of burden to till the fields to Russian tractors when the Russians were subsidizing the Cubans, and then when the Soviet Union imploded, Mr. Speaker; and that ended Christmas Day 1991, when the Soviet Union went under and was no more. Over a period of time their subsidy for the island of Cuba dried up. They were subsidizing Cubans this way. Cubans then were producing sugar. The open market on sugar was 6 cents a pound. The Russians were sending them oil for sugar, making a trade. The sugar that was going to Russia was costing the Russians 51 cents worth of oil. So you have a more than eight times multiplier effect sugar for oil, and that profit that was in there was what was propping up the failed, failed, failed economy of Cuba. The Soviet Union imploded. That subsidy ended, and those Russian tractors broke down and finally died. So you end up with brahma oxen that are out there doing the tillage in the field. They would tie them on a piece of rope, and they would have what I called a pivot grazing system rather than a pivot irrigation system. I happened to plow behind a team of brahma oxen out there just kind of for sport. He was out in the field working. I asked him: Can I take a round? So I got to do that and got a picture of that, Mr. Speaker. That island had regressed so much that the tractors were parked and the animals had been put back to work. Hugo Chavez decided he would prop up the Cuban island with the wealth of his oil. Of course, when Chavez himself went to his Maker, thankfully, and the prosperity that Venezuela enjoyed collapsed around the failed ideology of a Marxist-controlled economy, that then shut down the subsidy for Cuba. Who should come along to save the day? Barack Obama, who decided he is going to open up trade with Cuba, establish an embassy there, and let American dollars come down into Cuba so the island could become prosperous again. We needed to let the Marxist regime finally be starved out. That was the purpose of the sanctions against Cuba, and that is why it has never been wise to open up free trade with Cuba. Now it is wise for this incoming Trump administration to promote regime change in Cuba. Raul can't last much longer. Freedom must come to the Cuban people, and I want to swim ashore at the Bay of Pigs and walk out on a free Cuba. I have done that at GTMO, but I want to do that at the Bay of Pigs, Mr. Speaker. Another way that Cuba was propped up would be any foreign currency that came in--tourists could come into Cuba, and they would come into Cuba especially from Europe. They would go to the beaches at Varadero and other places, and so they spent their euros there. Americans would sneak into Cuba by going through the Bahamas and get their passport punched out there and take a separate flight and fly into Cuba. They might also come in through the south or come in through Mexico, but American dollars came down. Now, here is the rule: we think we are helping Cubans by doing business with Cuba with American dollars. Here is how it was when I was there--and I don't think it is any different today--the exchange rate of the Cuban peso to the dollar was 21 pesos to the dollar. Cubans could earn American dollars, they could hold American dollars, but they can't spend American dollars unless they go to a Cuban bank where they have to take their American dollar, lay that down on the counter and get an exchange for Cuban currency. But the Cuban currency doesn't give them 21 pesos, which is the exchange rate for their American dollar. It gives them one peso for the American dollar, and 20 pesos go into Castro's bank account to prop up Cuba. That is how he is raking the vigorish out of those transactions that are there. Or they could go into a Dollar Store where their dollar would only get them a peso. That is how that money went back into the hands of Castro. He is raking up the foreign currency and using that to prop up the military, keep his prisons open, and suppress and repress the Cuban people. Mr. Speaker, we are in a place in history here where I am glad to see that the Trump administration understands what needs to happen in Cuba. I am hopeful the Cuban people have enough of that spirit left in them to understand what they need to do. Mourn for Fidel is not what they need to do, but replace him with a leader of, by, and for the Cuban people, and a constitution that protects the individual interest and rights of the Cuban people is what needs to happen. I fully support the effort of the free-minded and free-spirited Cuban people to one day also be free, all 11 million of them. Mr. Speaker, I will do my best to stay in shape so I can swim ashore and wade out onto a free Cuba. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the privilege to have been yielded to from Chairman Goodlatte of Virginia, who I know laments the departure of three very esteemed members of the Virginia delegation and people I have had a privilege to serve with. I certainly tip my hat to, bow to, and salute all three of them: Congressmen Randy Forbes, Scott Rigell, and Robert Hurt. I came here this evening to focus a majority of my remarks on that of Representative Randy Forbes because, as Chairman Goodlatte said, I have had the privilege to sit next to Randy Forbes on the Judiciary Committee--and our memories are never always exactly right--but it could be for the full 14 years that I have been here. We have been either next to each other or within one seat of each other all that period of time. I have long viewed Randy Forbes as my wingman on the House Judiciary Committee. He is the anchor. He is a man who we know is a man of faith. He led the Prayer Caucus here for a good number of years. We know that he is a constitutionalist. He served on the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee also with me for many, if not, all of those years. When a man puts that kind of commitment and effort into defending the Constitution and defending innocent unborn human life and defending the values and the anchors of our faith, of our families, of our Constitution and--by the way, on the Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations Subcommittee--defending the rule of law and bringing about appropriate punishment for people who violate that law, that is the life of Randy Forbes. I may be wired a little tighter than Randy. I would come and sit down on the Judiciary Committee, and I might be all wound up. Randy was always the calming influence on me. I am sure Chairman Goodlatte appreciates that; that Randy would reach over and put his hand on my arm and he said: Now, Steve, here is where we are, here is where we are going. There would also be times, though, he would turn his ear and he would listen to the arguments that I would make. We had hundreds and hundreds of conversations that helped shaped me as a Member of Congress, and they always were anchored in the right values. These are values you know come from a man who has demonstrated that here in the House of Representatives. I thought, too, that Randy was one of the best cross-examiners of a witness that I have seen in this United States Congress, and those among the best do serve on the Judiciary Committee. Those issues seem to come to us, and they refine your skill sets. Randy would be sitting there. And as the line was coming down toward us on where we sat on seniority, I might want to talk about what is on my mind and chat with him a little bit on the other side. I always knew that when Randy had his pen up and he would have his research paper there and he would be taking notes in between that, what he was really doing, Mr. Speaker, was preparing himself to take--most of the times we only had 5 minutes--to take that witness down to the base facts that were necessary. Randy did that as well as anybody that I have seen. It always was anchored in the rule of law, the Constitution, the faith, freedom, values and, of course, his strong support for the military and strengthening our military. I wanted to put into the Congressional Record tonight, Mr. Speaker, something that impressed me about Randy. It was after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and Randy Forbes went down in that area 6 months or a year afterwards. He came back with this data, which I wrote down and typed into my notes because it was something that just really gripped me. The murder rate in New Orleans post-Katrina had risen to the point that it was 90 out of each 100,000 people who were victims of murder in New Orleans at that time. Only 1 out of 83.33 murders resulted in prison time, and only 1 in 10 murders resulted in an arrest. And of those total murders, only 1 in 8.33 resulted in convictions. So roughly 1 in 8 murders were solved. And that was a rate that is astonishingly high when you compare those numbers--90 of 100,000 murders, the violent death rate or the murder rate for New Orleans--where in the United States broadly it is around 6 per 100,000 as opposed to the 90 per hundred thousand. Randy brought that kind of information back to me. He was also a leader in the fight against gang violence and gang crime, and he brought that case before the Judiciary Committee a number of times for us. Each time Randy spoke, we did listen and it moved policy in the right directions. One of the other things, Mr. Speaker, that I cherish is my perspective of this: Jo Ann Davis represented Virginia's First Congressional District at the time and passed away untimely in the year 2007. I went down to her funeral. I had, of course, served with Jo Ann and traveled overseas with her into the war zones. She was also on the Armed Services Committee. Randy Forbes gave the eulogy for former Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis. I remember sitting in that church in Virginia, and Randy stepped up to speak about the life of Jo Ann Davis and, without notes, gave one of the most moving and deepest eulogies I have heard in my life. It would have been impossible for Randy Forbes to give such a presentation had he not respected, revered, and loved Jo Ann Davis the way that he did and watched her moves. The things that she did in her life reflected upon him in a way that he could honor her life at a time like that that had to give comfort to the family and friends that were in that church that day. I would express this about Randy--and I hope he has a long time to serve America--but he has affected my life in a similar way. He has made me a better Congressman, and he has done so with dignity and with class. The time that Randy spent in public life, Mr. Speaker, from the time he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1990 until 1998, and then to the State Senate of Virginia in 1998 until 2001, when he came here midterm in June of 2001 and served in this Congress, and he will serve in this Congress until January 3 of 2017. That is going to add up to somewhere really close to 27 years--26\1/2\ years, at least-- of service to the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States of America. His wife, Shirley, is a class act and anyone that knows her knows that. Their four children--Neil, Jamie, Jordan, and Justin--I hope they know tonight that they hit the jackpot when they were born into the family of Randy and Shirley Forbes. I hit the jackpot when I had the privilege to be seated next to Randy Forbes, and I hope that I can do my best to carry on that kind of legacy that he is leaving with us. He has made us all better. The United States of America is better, the Commonwealth of Virginia is better, and I appreciate the service that Congressman Randy Forbes has given to our country.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, Monday, October 10 is Taiwan's National Day--also known as Double Ten Day. As the House will not be in session that day, I would like to take this opportunity now to offer my early best wishes to the people of Taiwan. As my colleagues are aware, Taiwan is a both close friend and security partner of the United States. Accordingly, the United States has declared its support for Taiwan's meaningful participation in international organizations where its membership is not possible. One of the organizations in question is the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which works to secure the development of civil aviation throughout the world. As a key aviation hub in East Asia, up to 58 million people each year enter, leave, or pass through the Taipei Flight Information Region, and Taiwan is connected to over 100 cities around the world with hundreds of air-passenger and air-freight routes. If an organization is to set the standards and regulations necessary for aviation safety and security, then surely everybody must be at the table. Taiwan's absence neither serves Taiwan, nor the international community. Mr. Speaker, again, I wish the people of Taiwan a Happy Double Ten Day. I hope we may also celebrate Taiwan's presence at ICAO in Montreal this year as well.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives this evening, as we move toward a September session that perhaps gets concluded in a way that we go back to the November elections and, hopefully, we are bridged over any great big decisions that might come in a lameduck session. Something that I wanted to address to you, Mr. Speaker, is the circumstances of lameduck sessions. I look back on the history of them and it is hard for me to find happy conclusions that are drawn during lameduck sessions. I recall that Thomas Jefferson once made the statement that ``large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities.'' What he meant by that was, if you have a large initiative and it is going to move this country and it is going to stress a lot of people in this country, then, if you move that large initiative and its margins are essentially close to a jump ball, you are going to have almost half the people unhappy--maybe more than half the people who are unhappy. So that large initiative should not be advanced on a slender majority, because you get so much pushback, you don't get public buy- in. If you have a large initiative, you need to have a public that embraces it; one that, hopefully, we can get to a supermajority on large initiatives, because then we go forward in lockstep in defending and promoting those decisions that were made by this country. Worse than advancing a large decision on a slender majority is pushing large decisions in lameduck sessions. The reality of it is, however long and nobly Members of the House and Members of the Senate have served and however long and nobly the President of the United States may have served, when they are leaving town after the election, for them to come back here after the November election and push large initiatives in a lameduck session, they are not held accountable for it any longer. You have the people that are retiring, those that we voted out of office, and a President who is term-limited altogether packaging things up and shoving them at us, the American people, sometime after November 8 and before Christmas, where we have cliffhangers that go on until Christmas Eve. I remember Christmas Eve in about 2009. In fact, it was 2009. The ObamaCare legislation was hanging in the balance in the United States Senate. There, I recall my communications with the esteemed gentleman who is now the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I said: Procedurally, you are down to the last piece here. This is the eve of Christmas Eve day, December 23. I had sent an email over, which often and almost immediately is responded to by my senior Senator, and I said: Procedurally, you are going to hold ObamaCare until 9 o'clock tomorrow night on Christmas Eve. But it looks like the question is: Will the ObamaCare legislation be brought before the Senate before--earlier in the morning on the 24th--so that everybody can catch their plane and fly back home and get home in time for Christmas? The price for sacrificing God-given American liberty to move a leftist agenda, Mr. Speaker, was what was going on over in the Senate. They brought this leverage right up until Christmas Eve day. But the deal was they had a couple of judicial appointments that they wanted to get in a vote on, as I understood, that could come along in January, as a promise that they allowed the ObamaCare legislation to be voted on before 9 o'clock on December 24, Christmas Eve day. That agreement was reached and the Senate conferenced in some negotiated fashion or another and the last delay that was hanging onto God-given American liberty in the face of ObamaCare's hook, crook, and legislative shenanigans, which they used to pass that through the House and Senate--in components, by the way--the last one was removed and they allowed that vote earlier in the day so the Senators could get to the airport, get on a plane, fly home, and be with their families on Christmas Eve. I said: If you are going to take away a God-given American liberty, then make them pay that price. Hold that vote up until 9 o'clock on Christmas Eve. Let them stay in Washington, D.C., on Christmas Eve. If they love their socialized medicine that much, let them pay that price of being away from their families to impose that on the American people. But that wasn't the agreement. So I sent the email back, which said: What are we going to do now? The answer I received was: We are going to pray. We are going to pray for a legislative victory in the special election in the Senate race in Massachusetts. Scott Brown. I thought that was a bit of a reach, to have the audacity to ask for that. We ended up with that. Scott Brown, for a time, did delay the socialized medicine program that we call ObamaCare. George Washington could not have called it the Affordable Care Act because George Washington could not tell a lie. It is not the Affordable Care Act. It came upon us in a lameduck session. Probably the worst example of a lameduck session that we have seen. Well, at least it was a December session rather than a lameduck session because it technically was not an election year. Now we are sitting in an election year. We will elect a new President. By the time the sun comes on the morning of November 9, odds are we will know clearly who the next President of the United States is going to be. We will probably have a good idea that evening before we go to bed. Maybe the polls will give us a strong indication going into that day and the exit polls during the day will be released as the polls close and give us a sense of how this thing breaks across the country. It is an exciting time. Whether the next President of the United States is going to be Hillary Clinton or whether it is going to be Donald Trump is a question that no one at this point knows. Now, this Congress will take conclusive acts predicated upon a presumption of one or the other, or, acting as if they don't have any consideration for who will be the next President and asking that those decisions be made, supported, ratified by people who are going home, retired by their own choice, retired by the voters, or retired, in the case of Barack Obama, by term limits. So what good could possibly happen in a lameduck session on large decisions that might bring forward--and I am not going down through the list, Mr. Speaker, because if I do that, that will add to the level of expectation on what might come. It is wrong for this Congress to make large decisions, especially on slender majorities, and it is wrong for this Congress to make decisions that are predicated by a presumption of who will be the next President of the United States. And it is really wrong to come into this Congress and make big decisions in here while people are on the way out the door; deciding votes while they are on the way out the door to go home for their retirement, whether it is by choice, whether it is by the voters, or by constitutional term limit, whatever the case may be. That lameduck session should be used only to do that which couldn't be accomplished before the election and that which must be done before the new Congress is sworn in in the first week of January 2017. We have that period of time. We can prepare for that. But it looks to me like there are some people in this Congress who are salivating over the idea of being able to exercise more leverage by moving an agenda through in a lameduck session that will be at the disadvantage of the will of the voters. If you can't put that up here on the floor for a vote in the House of Representatives between now and November 8; if you can't sell it to the America people, Democrats and Republicans; if you can't get the support of one of the likely next Presidents of the United States, then who are we to impose it on the American people now? By the way, who is the current President, Barack Obama, to be negotiating and leveraging and reaching legislative agreements with the House of Representatives and the Senate today on legislation that would not be signed by the next President and legislation that can't be subjected to the light of day prior to the election? Lameduck sessions that move large initiatives are wrong. Lameduck sessions that take care of emergency issues are okay. The public will know the difference between the two. This is just a component of the discussions that we will have the rest of this month of September, Mr. Speaker, and, hopefully, the American people will have all the way up until November 8 and beyond. I want the American people to be well informed. We owe the American people--every one of us, all 435 of here in the House of Representatives--everyone around this Chamber here tonight and everyone who is watching on C-SPAN, Mr. Speaker, our best efforts and our best judgment, and that judgment should not be something that can't be subjected to theirs. The American people need to agree with the judgment of the United States Congress. So I look at the issues that are unfolding here and that we will be taking up perhaps in the month of September, but also issues that have been seminal issues all along, throughout the Obama Presidency and prior to that and all the time I have been in this Congress, and I am seeing the pressure come forward to make a decision on a continuing resolution. We have to make a decision on a continuing resolution--a CR, as we refer to it here. I would like to have seen this Congress go through regular order. I would have been very happy to go back to the times that I remember when we had 12 appropriations bill, perhaps a supplemental appropriations bill--maybe 13, at the most--and we would see that our Appropriations subcommittees would do their work and the Appropriations Committee would do its work. And then the appropriations bill would come to the floor. They would come to the floor within the Budget Committee's resolution and the House's vote on a full resolution of the budget. Once that budget comes down, the Appropriations Committee goes to work and they look and see what their allocation is allowed in the budget resolution and they move the appropriations bills within that. Then the appropriations bills, Mr. Speaker, come to this floor under an open rule. I don't care if it takes all night for us to debate appropriations bills. If you don't care enough to stay up all night to offer your amendment, then just don't offer your amendment. Let somebody that cares more do that and have that floor. But Democrats and Republicans should be allowed to and have the opportunity to weigh in on every spending bill that we have. And sometimes through the appropriations process is the only way that we end up with an open rule that allows a Member to bring the will of their constituents to the floor of the House of Representatives. Otherwise, the Rules Committee constrains that on policy bill after policy bill, standing bill after standing bill. The appropriations process is our opportunity to reflect the voice and the will of the American people. And when that is subverted, when that is circumvented, when we get to a place where we don't have the regular appropriations process that is going on, then we end up with leadership negotiating a continuing resolution or an omnibus spending bill or a minibus spending bill that is packaged up in a room somewhere, not out in the open, but it doesn't have the opportunity to be amended in the process by the will of the Membership. The more that process is narrowed down, and when a Member of Congress is required to go up to the Rules Committee and subject themselves to what can be a less than complimentary scenario of pleading with the Rules Committee for them to allow you to amend a spending bill up or down, or strike a spending line in there, or eliminate some policy, all within the rules that are there, why does a Member of the United States Congress whose constituents deserve every bit as much representation as the constituents of the leadership, or the constituents of the members of the Rules Committee, Democrat and Republicans, why does that Member of Congress have to go up and make that request to have an opportunity to make their argument to ask this floor to vote on an issue that funds or defunds policy? When we get to that point, the voice of the people, Mr. Speaker, is muted, and the will of the people, then, when it is muted, the will of the people is not carried out. I am all for open debate here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I am for open debate in committees. Let's have a verbal donnybrook here. Over time, it sorts itself out, and the will of the people is designed to bring itself forward here in the United States Congress. I would suggest also that, from a leadership perspective, anybody that holds a gavel, and whether that is the Speaker's gavel, Mr. Speaker, or whether it is a gavel of a committee or a subcommittee, wherever that might be, the job of that leader--chairman, usually--is to bring out the will of the group, not to impose their will on the group, but to bring out the will of the group. So when I see this discussion that comes forward here in this Congress that contemplates a CR, a continuing resolution, of roughly 90 days or so that funds our Federal Government out till December 9, I look at the calendar, December 9, and I think, okay, that is just about how long it is going to take for them to bring pressure on people that are reluctant to agree with the CR that will come then, because people will want to go home for Christmas, just like they did when ObamaCare was passed over in the United States Senate. That is what we are looking at. December 9, tight little time there. Get done, compromise, go home for Christmas. That is what that says to me. I would say, instead, I am all right with a CR. I am all right with a continuing resolution. No, I don't want to fund any of the President's unconstitutional executive amnesty acts, and I don't want to fund Planned Parenthood. There are a number of things I don't want to fund. But as far as the decision to move the funding of this Federal Government from midnight December 30 to a date in the future, I would suggest that that date be January 31, probably not any later than February 28, because we need to get that, bridge that funding over into the next Congress for the next President, whomever that might be. It is time to do this transition and move this government to the next Congress, to the next--hopefully, it is the same majority. It may not be in the House. Hopefully, it is the same majority in the United States Senate. It may not be in the Senate. The next President will be a different President, and the will of the President does itself upon the will of this Congress. We have been very much subjected to that over the last almost 8 years, Mr. Speaker. It has been an object of clarity that when the House majority has decided not to fund, let's just say, at least one of the President's projects and the President has said, I will shut this government down first before I will be denied the funding for my pet projects, in the end, the majority in the House of Representatives capitulated to the will of the President. We have that to contemplate going forward into the next Presidency. We have watched as the power of the House of Representatives has been diminished. The power of the Senate has been diminished and, I will say, significantly and dramatically. And it didn't just happen under this Presidency. It began in a significant way clear back in the thirties. I don't know the exact year that the Administrative Procedure Act was signed, but that would be, probably, a pivotal moment that one could point to on the calendar and conclude that the balance of the three branches of government that we had--that was designed by our Founding Fathers, and I would submit that the judiciary branch was always designed to be the weakest of the three branches of government. But our Founding Fathers envisioned that those three branches in government--thinking of it in a triangle, Mr. Speaker: the legislative branch, Article I; the executive branch, Article II; and then the judicial branch, Article III of your Constitution--they set them up to be a balance of powers, a triangular balance of powers. And even though it is often taught that it is three equal branches of government, I would argue that the legislative branch comes first--that is Article I--because we are the voice of the people. The House of Representatives comes ahead of the Senate when it comes to spending, by design, by Constitution, because our Founding Fathers wanted to give the control of the power of the purse into the hands of the people as closely as they could possibly get it. And that is why we here in the House are up for election or reelection every 2 years and why the Senate is up for election or reelection every 6 years, because they wanted the Senate to be insulated from the highs and lows of public opinion. They wanted the House of Representatives to be reactive and responsive to the highs and lows of public opinion, and they wanted that power of the purse to be in the hands of the House, so that we start the spending bills. By extension and by interpolation and by precedent, the House starts the spending, and the House takes care of initiating any taxes as well; and the Senate then can react to those things that are advanced by the House. But if there is a single spending bill over in the Senate right now, they have expanded in authority, historically, to be able to simply add anything spending to that spending bill they would like. And we are poised here in the House wondering: Are they going to send us a bill that is this continuing resolution that fits their wants, their wishes, and their will, which could be a CR till December 9 that funds Planned Parenthood and ObamaCare and the President's executive amnesty? All of that could come at us, Mr. Speaker. This balance of powers that is here, though, it was expected by our Founding Fathers, they believed that the people elected to serve in the Congress, the House and the Senate, and they believed that the President of the United States would all jealously protect the constitutional authority that is granted to them within the Constitution. They knew that no matter how good wordsmiths they were, it was impossible to define the distinctions, the bright lines between the three branches of government in such a way that there would never be an argument because, after all, words themselves get into a debate on what the definitions of those words mean. So our Founding Fathers precisely drew the difference as much as they could within the language that they had. And the data at the time, and the Federalist papers at the time, and the decisions that were made and the Congressional Record that was debated along the way, and of all of the debates that had to do with the Constitutional Convention helped flesh out the meaning and understanding of this great and wonderful Constitution that we have. But they also knew that, no matter how precisely they fleshed it out, that there would be disagreements, and they expected that each branch of government would jealously protect the power and authority granted to it within the Constitution. Well, this House of Representatives, and the Senate included, has not done a very good job of protecting and defending the authority and the power granted to it in the Constitution. Article I authority says all legislation shall be conducted in the United States Congress--all legislation, Mr. Speaker. And yet we have a President who has legislated from the Oval Office. He has legislated by speaking words into law. He has legislated by a third-tier Web site in the U.S. Treasury that essentially amended the effectiveness of ObamaCare. This Congress didn't step up in the way of that and take on that fight and challenge the President and ball up this government to the point where the President had to give in to the words in the Constitution, the meaning of the Constitution, the intent of the Constitution, and concede that the power and the authority in the House of Representatives, in particular, but in the legislative branch, would assert itself over the executive branch. It didn't happen because of a lack of will at the House of Representatives to better define the legislative authority that we have. It began, as I mentioned, with the Administrative Procedure Act, which granted rulemaking authority to the executive branch of government. And so rules, rules that once they meet the criteria that are defined within the Administrative Procedure Act--publish it, open it up for public comment, go through those conditions--if that rule as proposed reaches those conditions, then that rule is then enacted, implemented, and it has the force and effect of law as if it were law. Today, it is a lot easier to publish a rule and have that rule take effect and be and provide the force and effect of law than it is for Congress to actually pass a law. So if the President decides that he wants to see, let's say, environmental regulations, let's say, the WRRDA piece, the waters of the United States regulations that give the EPA and the Corps of Engineers the equivalent of legislative authority to regulate all of the waters of the United States through some ambiguous language that they had written into a rule, and it is so bad that it says these waters--the old language back from the nineties was these protected streams, as geographically defined, and waters hydrologically connected to them shall be protected streams. When I go to them and I ask them: What does ``hydrologically connected'' mean? Their answer is: Well, we don't know. And I said: Well, then take it out of the language. Well, we can't do that. How can you know you can't take it out of the language if you don't know what it means? Well, we know that we can't change or amend the language. That is what we are publishing here, and that is what is open for public comment. So you are either going to have to live with it or oppose it successfully. Which is it going to be? Well, try opposing a rule successfully. Try convincing the EPA that there is enough public comment and criticism that they ought to change that language when they are not accountable to the people. The EPA, the Corps of Engineers, any one of the dozens of agencies that are out there, their bureaucrats aren't up for election or reelection like Members of Congress are--only their President. Their President has given them orders, or at least a philosophical guideline that they are following, and so we end up with waters of the United States, now, language that says the navigable waters of the United States and any waters that are a significant nexus to the navigable waters of the United States. Well, think of that. The ambiguous language of waters hydrologically connected to was litigated down to the point where the courts finally ruled that it doesn't have an effectiveness because it is too ambiguous. And so they cooked up some other ambiguous language to litigate for another couple of decades, this ambiguous language of significant nexus to the navigable waters of the United States-- significant nexus. All right. What is nexus? Well, that is anything that intersects. Well, is it 1 intersection? is it 2? is it 3? is it 10? is it 50? is it 100? If you could go down to New Orleans and track the Mississippi River up to the headwaters, how many significant nexus do you have that are tributaries that run into the Mississippi? How many of those tributaries can be traced up to creeks and streams and tile lines and wells and water lines that go up to the kitchen sink? They have defined ambiguous language that allows them to regulate the entire United States of America all of the way to the kitchen sink under requiring a significant nexus with the navigable waters of the United States. And we sit here and take this. And they can write rules like this that have the force and effect of law and put a chilling pall on the economy of the United States of America. That is what we are faced with, Mr. Speaker. And the legislative power that has been asserted--and to a large degree, successfully asserted--by the executive branch of government reaches into the Article I authority of the United States Congress. What are we to do about it here? We are to jealously protect this power. Our Founding Fathers charged us with that. And how do we jealously protect that power? We have only two things we can do: impeachment, which nobody wants to do, including me; the second component of that is the power of the purse--the power of the purse that James Madison spoke about and wrote about eloquently, and it is a powerful, powerful tool. But this Congress has declined to use the tool of the power of the purse, with the exception of what turned into the shutdown of our Federal Government in the first day of October of 2013, because they don't want to face the criticism that might come from the public of the American people. There is a tremendous amount of authority that needs to be clawed back to this Congress, Mr. Speaker, a tremendous amount of constitutional authority that needs to be clawed back. When I see a CR being prepared that looks like it is going to reflect some of the continuing resolution from last year, I see a continuing resolution that may be coming to expand, for example, immigration standards within the United States of America under the guise of, well, we are just going the kick the can down the road and do some spending that is going to get us into December 9 or on into, hopefully, February 28 or maybe a little later, and some want to go out to September 30. I think that is too far. I don't think we ought to give a blank check to the next President of the United States if we don't know who that is going to be--even if we know who that is going to be. We ought to be, instead, establishing a scenario by which the new Congress--House and Senate--can pass appropriations bills to get to the end of this fiscal year and get a signature of the next President of the United States, not this one. By the way, I don't want to give this President of the United States a blank check on anything anymore, but Barack Obama said 22 times--not just 22 times in the interviews, 22 times overheard, or 22 times reported--he said 22 times on videotape that he did not have the legislative authority to grant executive amnesty to illegal aliens in the United States of America--22 times. The most recent time that he did that was just about 10 days before he changed his mind. He was here in Washington, D.C., giving a speech to a high school here in Washington, D.C. He said to them: You are smart students, and I know that you have been studying your Constitution. You will know this, that I don't have the authority to grant executive--he didn't use the words--but executive amnesty. I am the President of the United States. Congress writes the laws. My job as President is to enforce the laws, and the job of the judiciary is to interpret the laws. I don't think that you could put it more concisely than that in a matter of two or three sentences. I think the President did a good job of describing that to the students there. But within about 10 days, he decided that he would reverse all of that, and all of a sudden he had the power to grant an executive amnesty--an unconstitutional executive amnesty, Mr. Speaker. President Obama unconstitutionally granted an executive amnesty to people who at least assert that they have come into the United States under the age of 18. Apparently, if you are under 18, you are not responsible for your actions, even though that is not true among the States, even in the case of homicide. So the excuse that it was somebody else's fault, it was their parents' fault or somebody else's fault, never held up. It didn't hold up in law. We write the law here in Congress, but the President granted an executive amnesty. He called it DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. You are a child, apparently, up until the moment that you turn 18, and we will take your word for it even if you are 35 today or older, by the way. That was DACA. Then there was DAPA, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, he called it. That was another unconstitutional reach. Now, these things have--at least the one has been effectively enjoined by Judge Hanen in the Texas District. Now the President has been blocked, I think, effectively until the end of his term on continuing this amnesty process of executive amnesty. Meanwhile, the DACA executive amnesty continues. We have seen evidence that there has been circumvention of the court's order with regard to the DAPA amnesty piece. While we are watching this unfold, we are a Congress that has allowed for funding to continue with unconstitutional acts of executive amnesty on the part of the President of the United States. I recall a discussion before the Rules Committee before a previous appropriations bill when I made the assertion, Mr. Speaker, that we all take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Every one of us in here, all 435 of us, and every Senator of the 100 Senators on the other end of the Capitol here through the rotunda all take that same oath that we will support and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help us God. We should take that oath seriously. Our Founding Fathers imagined that we would always be electing serious representatives who when they took their oath that they would take that oath with their hand on the Bible, and they would know that they had to answer to their contemporaries, their colleagues, their constituents, the American public, and ultimately to God for that oath. Now, the Constitution means what it says. It has to be interpreted to mean what it was understood to mean at the time of the ratification of the Constitution or the subsequent amendments. Our oath needs to be an oath of fidelity to the text and the understanding of that Constitution. If it doesn't mean that then our oath means nothing at all. Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, taking an oath that is: I pledge to support and defend the Constitution of the United States whatsoever I might interpret it to mean at any convenient point in the future? No. The oath is not to support and defend the Constitution in any way it might be subverted or perverted by any other authority. No. We are taking an oath to support and defend the Constitution according to the text of its clear meaning and understanding as understood at the time of ratification. If we don't like what that Constitution means, Mr. Speaker, then we have an opportunity to amend the Constitution. It is simply defined and difficult to do for good reason. Simply defined, it just takes a two- thirds majority in the House and Senate to pass a constitutional amendment out of here. The President has no formal say in the process. Although, he will have an opinion, and then that constitutional amendment goes out to the several States as it was referred to in the Constitution, and there, if three-quarters of the States ratify that constitutional amendment, it becomes a component of the Constitution. Our Founding Fathers gave us a tool to amend the Constitution because they knew they couldn't see into the crystal ball by the centuries. They wanted it to be difficult because they wanted to protect the rights of minorities against the tyranny of the majority, and they wanted to protect God-given liberty. They had a vision, they were well educated, and they had a sound and faithful foundation within them. They laid out a brilliant document that would only maybe be second to the Declaration itself when it comes to the brilliance of documents that are written, at least by Americans and perhaps by mortals altogether. We are an exceptional nation. God has given us this liberty. We have an obligation to protect it, an obligation to restore the separation of powers, and an obligation to assert the constitutional authority here and say to a President that overreaches: I'm sorry, we are not going to fund your unconstitutional activities. We are going to stand on the principle itself of the Constitution. Whether or not we agree with policy, we need to have fidelity to the Constitution. We don't get a pass because the Supreme Court errs in its interpretation of the Constitution. We don't get a pass because the President says that he has a different opinion. We don't get a pass no matter which side of this aisle we are on, on the right or on the left. We have an obligation to God and country and to have fidelity to this Constitution. So now this expansive immigration policy that has been delivered by the President has set a goal of 10,000 refugees coming out of Syria. At this point, I will concede that he has the executive authority, as granted by Congress, to bring in refugees in numbers and under consultation with the House and the Senate. I have sat in on some of those consultations in previous years, and, in fact, with Hillary Clinton for that matter, and we have arrived at, I will say, a reasonable approach to the numbers of refugees. But this President had set a goal that he was going to bring in at least 10,000 refugees out of the Syria and Iraq region. When I look at the numbers that are there and the costs that we have, if we want to provide relief to people, we can provide refugee relief to a dozen people in their home country, and that would be Iraq or Syria in these circumstances, for every one that we bring into America. When you clean that area out, when you bring people out of that area, you are handing it over to ISIS. That is part of what the President has been doing. He has been bringing people out of there and handing that region, the real estate, over to ISIS. They are glad to get rid of them. They killed thousands of people who didn't agree with them, and there are those that are on the run from ISIS. ISIS has been committing a genocide against Christians and against Yazidis in the Middle East, especially in the Nineveh plains region. I have seen the devastation that is taking place there. Mr. Speaker, I have gone into those regions and gotten as close to the ISIS front lines as possible, and that is just outside their artillery range. I went looking for Christian refugee camps, Mr. Speaker. I couldn't find Christian refugee camps in that part of the world, into the edges of Syria, into northern Iraq, into the Kurdish region, and into Turkey for that matter. The place to find Christians in that part of the world is go to church, and there you will find Christians. I have met with the Chaldean bishop twice in Erbil in the northern part of Iraq. In my last trip in, I went into the Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church in Istanbul, and I met with a good number of Christians there. Then I went down into Erbil the following morning. It was a Saturday night mass and then a Sunday morning mass in Erbil, and there I met a good number of other Christians. I sat down with a family that was a refugee family out of the Syrian region and met with the Chaldean bishop there. Here are some things that I learned from them and others: The Assyrian Christians are under attack. There is a heavy assault of genocide against them. Chaldean Christians, same way, they are subjected to genocidal attack from ISIS. The Yazidis, who are technically not Christians, are under genocidal attack from ISIS, and their home region is the Nineveh plains region. The Nineveh plains region runs along, I will say parallel or next to, Mosul in Iraq in that area. In my discussions with the Barzanis, who are essentially in charge of the semiautonomous region of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq and the Erbil area and all across, I pressed them that we need to establish an international safe zone for Christians and for the Yazidis, the native minority, so that they can live there in peace and be protected. I made that case rather extensively to him. He repeated it back to me probably two or three times greater in detail and in conviction than I had delivered it to him. I said to him: Mr. Barzani, you sound like you have said this before. His answer to me was: I have said it before. That is my public opinion. We will support an international safe zone in the Nineveh plains region. We will support it, we will help defend it, and we are committed to it. That is my public position. I was awfully glad to hear that. It is a lot better solution for refugees to give them protection in their home region and protect them from the genocidal ISIS people than it is to try to bring them out of the Middle East and bring them into the United States, or other places in the world for that matter. But we do have refugees that are looking for a place to call home around this world. So I stopped in Geneva a couple of months ago, Mr. Speaker, by the way, with Chairman Goodlatte of the Judiciary Committee, and met with the number two on the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. In that meeting and in that discussion, I learned a few things. I thought that it was a good meeting. It was a very constructive meeting with a lot of information that poured back and forth. I have this report that I probably will not put into the Record. ``Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2015,'' which flows, of course, into 2016, Mr. Speaker. I noted a report that we had that showed some--and I am close, but maybe not exactly precise on this top number--1,562 refugees out of the Syrian-Iraq region that had come in in a group into the United States. Of that 1,562, roughly, number, I can give you the exact number of Christians that were included in that: one. Only one. We have seen other larger groups--several thousand--where there was only a little more than 1 percent Christians that come out of there. Christians in that part of the world, as far as refugees are concerned, grow into a number of 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 percent. So why is it that this administration can bring in more than 10,000 refugees out of that part of the world--now approaching 12,000, looks like will be the number even greater than that by the end of this fiscal year on the last day of this month, Mr. Speaker--and not have any statistical representation of Christians that are emerging from that part of the world? I asked our director of USCIS, under oath before the Judiciary Committee: Do you ask these refugees that you claim that you are vetting, and I don't believe can be effectively vetted, do you ask them what their religion is? He said: No, we don't ask. How would we have any way of knowing? Even if we asked them, we don't know. So that is not a statistic that we collect or keep. Well, it seems to me to be foolish and imprudent not to be taking a look at the religion of people. We would want to be accelerating bringing Christians into America if we are going to bring refugees at all into America. They are the ones that are targeted. They are the ones that are subjected to genocide. I would like to carve out that international safe zone and let them live in peace in the area that is their home of antiquity. If that is not going to be the case, why would we be then seeing a misrepresentative sample coming into America, unless there is a preference of, let's say, a bias against Christians coming into America, one out of 1,562, roughly 1 percent out of 3,600 or so? Then on top of that, when I began to ask the representative of UNHCR, the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, in Geneva--who gave a very impressive presentation, I would add, Mr. Speaker--when I began to ask those questions: How many refugees do you have cleared to come out of the Middle East that could be going to any of the designated countries that are accepting them? And we know that Germany, Austria, Sweden, and France, to a degree, are picking up refugees. We watched them pour in. I walked with them pouring in that epic migration. Many of them are not cleared, but of those that have been cleared by the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, how many do you have? Her answer was: Well, we have 115,000 who have been cleared under a refugee status that have, roughly, a background check--she didn't use the word ``roughly''--but a background check done on them that we say are ready to be transported to host countries--115,000. I said: Do you keep track of what religion they are? Well, absolutely, yes, we do. How many Christians? Fifteen thousand Christians out of 115,000 refugees. I didn't do the math, but I am going to say that is 12 or 13 percent. Now, if 12 or 13 percent of the refugees that are approved by the United Nations are Christians and 1 percent, or maybe even one out of 1,562, are Christians coming into America, does that mean that this administration set up a filter to filter them out and only made mistakes? I would support, instead, an effort that if we are going to accept refugees from that part of the world, let's make sure it is the refugees that are subjected to a religious genocide. By the way, I think they are more likely to be assimilated into America judging by the responses that I have heard from them. I looked at some of the results in this report that I have referenced, Mr. Speaker, and I was surprised, not quite shocked, to see the number of refugees per 1,000 inhabitants in these countries who have been flooded with refugees. I want to tip my hat to the countries that have taken on a high number of refugees that is also a high percentage of their overall population. Lebanon is at the top. Out of every 1,000 inhabitants of Lebanon, 183 are refugees. They have been stretched to the seams in Lebanon. Jordan, 87 out of 1,000. And then you go to Turkey, 32; Chad, 26; Djibouti, 22; on down the line getting down to the end, Malta, 17 per thousand. That is a high number, especially for a small island, but it is still a per capita basis. Out of all of the countries in Europe, or the United States for that matter, Sweden, 17 per thousand. That is the highest rate out of Europe in its entirety, or the Western Hemisphere for that matter, or Oceania for that matter. The Swedes continue to take a lot of refugees in. We have a national destiny, a national security, to be concerned about. We know that it is a very difficult task to vet refugees. I am supportive of an effort to suspend refugees coming out of that part of the world that produces terrorists until such time as we can get a handle on the vetting of them, on the background checks. Many times when they leave their home country and when they enter a foreign country, they will destroy any identifying documents that they might have so that they can't be sent back to their home country. This is a big problem for Europe. We have watched as the attacks have emerged in country after country. And it is a big problem for the United States. We are challenged with this vetting process that cannot possibly uncover those who will turn to violence. We can look at polling that shows what percentage of people from terrorist-producing countries that settle in the United States are supportive of Sharia law, are supportive of violence to promote Sharia law, that are, at least philosophically, supportive of organizations including and like ISIS. Those numbers are shocking. They are far too high, which caused our Director of the FBI, James Comey, to make the remark when asked to be responsible for the vetting of the refugees: You are asking us to identify the needles in the haystack. That is a very difficult task to identify the needles in the haystack. But if we could get that done, the far more difficult task is to identify the hay that will become needles. We have seen that pop up second generation, I will say, immigrants from that part of the world that adhere to the philosophy that believes that they can impose Sharia law on America through violence. And even James Comey has said: You are asking us to sort out the hay that would become needles later on. That is the second generation terrorists that have attacked us. So it is a difficult task in a war, Mr. Speaker, that has gone on for 1,400 years. We don't recognize it as a war that has gone on for 1,400 years, but they do. Then I see legislation that is coming at us in the form of, first, H- 2B legislation in a continuing resolution, Mr. Speaker--H-2B legislation. That is low-skilled workers. The highest unemployment rates we have in America are the lowest skilled workers that we have. Double-digit unemployment in the lowest skilled workers that we have in this country. The last thing we need in America are more people that have less skills, but that is what is pouring across our borders in legal and illegal immigration. We are essentially a welfare state. We have 94.6 million Americans of working age who are simply not in the workforce, and there are another--not quite 9 million--that are on unemployment. So we are 103 million or 104 million Americans of working age who are not in the workforce. Yet, we are watching the entitlements grow and grow and grow and swallow up our budget. So Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security-- all of them--are on autopilot for spending. What do we do when we are trying to keep up with the spending from those three? We go borrow the money from the Chinese or borrow the money from the Saudis. By the way, half the money that we are borrowing that is this $19.4 trillion in national debt, half of that is borrowed from the American people who have bought the bonds and decided they are going to invest in America's future as if somehow this was an all-out effort like World War II was. Well, it may be because we are under historically low interest rates. If interest rates should double or triple--and they could easily do that, and they would not be in historic places if they did that--we would watch a collapse on our cash flow and a collapse in our budget. Yet, this Nation has got its borders open and this Nation is bringing in more and more legal immigrants and this Nation is not protecting its borders from illegal immigration. They have turned the border patrol into the welcome wagon. And now we are poised here wondering: Is our leadership going to want to serve up an expansion of H-2Bs as they did a year ago in the C.R. that came down? I oppose that, Mr. Speaker. We can't be expanding legal immigration. We don't know who the next President is going to be, but if it is Donald Trump, he is not going to be for this. So is this an effort to try to hustle something through that Barack Obama will sign that the next President may not? That is H-2Bs. H-1Bs, for example, are being abused and they are being abused grossly. We are seeing examples of sometimes hundreds of employees who are being laid off that are charged with the responsibility of training their foreign immigrant replacement that is coming in on an H-1B because the employer can hire cheap labor out of places like India and bring them into the United States and lay off more Americans after those Americans train their incoming workers that will work for a cheaper rate. This is the kind of country that we are building. So we end up with more and more people in that 103 million to 104 million people who are of working age who are simply not in the workforce while all of that is going on. We are requiring companies like maybe Disney, for example, to those employees on their way out of the door: We are laying you off, but, first, do you want to train your employee, your replacement that is coming in on an H-1B? The H-1B program is abused. The H-2B is bringing in more of a surplus of what we already have, a surplus of unskilled workers. The H-1B program is being used and it is laying off American workers and green card holders that are sitting there now doing jobs that Americans will do. By the way, there isn't any job Americans won't do. They are doing jobs by definition that Americans will do, being required to train their replacements. I think that is wrong. I think it is a crime for a company to require an employee to train their replacement worker while their worker is being replaced by a visa program that is designed to bring in high school people to establish a need that presumably exists within our economy. How could there be any need for employees in our economy when you have over 100 million people that are of working age and simply not in the workforce? And then we get to the EB-5 program, Mr. Speaker, the EB-5 program, the investors visa, that was set up a quarter of century or so ago and said that if you have $1 million and you can create 10 jobs investing and establishing an enterprise in America, we will give you a pass coming into the United States. A quarter of a century ago, $1 million was real money. Today it is still real money to a lot of people in America, but not so much as it was then. If you are going into a stressed area, an economically disadvantaged area, you can get by with half a million dollars. I am seeing programs like here comes--let me see--here comes 30--no, say 29--29 Chinese each with half a million dollars that bundle that money all together and maybe team up with one American. Now they have a business enterprise. Now we have 29 new Americans--Chinese--it will be the rich Chinese that are buying a path to citizenship here. Once they do that, then they can begin that family reunification plan and begin bringing their family back into the United States, too. I am seeing enterprises where an investment in, let's say, a commercial building takes a pool of--it is a $30 million investment and it takes a pool of 60 Chinese with half a million dollars each to build this commercial building, they then become conceivably partners in that, and they have a path into the United States. We are selling citizenship. There is a price on it. And on top of that, we have birth tourism, Mr. Speaker, birth tourism that these numbers will be a little old, 3, 4, or 5 years old where-- and I am focusing on the Chinese at this point--a turnkey operation. If you have $30,000 and you are a pregnant Chinese woman, you can fly to, conceivably, California, most likely, and be put up there in housing and have your baby. Your baby gets a birth certificate. You can fly back to China. And when that baby becomes 18, then can begin the family reunification program and the extended family and all can be hauled into America--a $30,000 turnkey. But you have to wait for 18 years before that baby is old enough. If you can't wait, don't want to wait, and you have got the money, you can lay $500,000 down on the barrelhead, cash on the barrelhead, and get a path into America, a green card and citizenship. These programs are just wrong. The EB-5 program should be ended; it should be sunset. If we have to make concessions on H-2B, we don't need to make them. We should not make immigration decisions in a CR. We ought not make them in a treaty. We ought not make them in a CR, and we ought not make them in a lameduck. Immigration decisions should be made subject to the pen, the signature of the next President of the United States. They need to have the considered judgment of the House of Representatives and of the Senate, Mr. Speaker. I will push that we do only the minimum in a lameduck, if we have to do anything at all. I would promote that a continuing resolution could kick us into the early part of next year, when we have a new Congress seated, when we have a new President that is inaugurated and sworn into office, and that the will of the American people can be reflected in the large initiatives that would be advanced by the House of Representatives, by the United States Senate, and by the next President that should reflect the will of the people. All of this, Mr. Speaker, is our charge and our responsibility because we have taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. It is our duty, and we owe the people in this country our best effort and our best judgment. Our best effort and our best judgment includes: we listen to them; we gather all the information that we can; we look into the crystal ball of the future as far as we can; and, with good and clear conscience and good judgment, we make those decisions that reflect their will that is within the confines of the Constitution, that fit within free enterprise, then lay down a foundation for America's destiny so that we can be ever-stronger in the future and so that we can have an ascending destiny rather than a descending destiny. With all of that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your attention. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to address the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I intend to take up the topic of the commemoration of the life of Phyllis Schlafly. General Leave

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I would ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days on which to revise and extend their remarks and insert extraneous materials on the topic of this Special Order here this evening.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, this sad news came to me this past weekend that the relatively long and extraordinarily productive and impactful life of Phyllis Schlafly had come to an end at the age of 92. I got to know Phyllis throughout the political activism of the country among conservative politics. It goes back for me quite a ways now, too, I might add. But I didn't pay a lot of attention to what was going on in the early `70s when Phyllis Schlafly's eyes went on some of the transformative shifts that were taking place in America. Phyllis was a pro-life activist before Roe v. Wade. She saw it coming. She knew what it meant. She became one of the strongest pro- life voices in all of America and, I would say, the most persistent, the most consistent, and the most relentless voice for the longest period of time. Phyllis was active on the public scene from at least as far back as 1952, all the way up until the last days of her life, which ended this past weekend. I would like to go through some of those milestones of Phyllis Schlafly's life, and then perhaps have some comments about those milestones along her life. As I review some of that material, Madam Speaker, I look back on her impact, particularly in Republican politics. She was a campaign manager for a successful Republican candidate for Congress in St. Louis in 1946. It was for Claude Bakewell. She served as an elected delegate to eight Republican National Conventions. I don't know that there has been a more consistent or persistent voice at our Republican National Conventions over more than a half a century than we have heard from Phyllis Schlafly. She was an elected delegate to the Republican National Conventions in 1956, 1964, 1968, 1984, 1992, 1996, 2004, and 2012. You might wonder what she was doing in those missing convention years of 1960, 1980, 2000, and 2008. Well, she was an elected alternate in those conventions. And I would suspect that her choice was similar to that of what I had made a time or two in the past as well--that I wanted to make sure that there were young people that had an opportunity to be a delegate and that young people had an opportunity to come up and be active in politics. Phyllis Schlafly had facilitated thousands of young people to come into active politics. Phyllis attended the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this last July where it was the last time that I saw her as she came into the Republican reception, the Members reception upstairs. I had an opportunity to speak a few words with her and see that radiant smile on her face. She was dressed in just a very, very colorful and gracious dress and seated in a wheelchair. The brightness in her eyes told me there was a lot of spirit left in Phyllis Schlafly. Phyllis has played an active role in every Republican National Convention since 1952. The earliest real impact--when people began to notice who Phyllis Schlafly was--was when she published on May 1, 1964, the book, ``A Choice Not an Echo.'' It was a small little book that gave us an understanding about how presidential candidates are selected. It was a description of some of the backroom deals that were made about the dynamics of the presidential process. She called it for 1964. She identified who the backroom supporters would be, how they would try to stop Barry Goldwater from being nominated. The book, ``A Choice Not an Echo,'' holds up to this day. She wrote a supplement to it as well to bring it up to speed, and published that book sometime in the last year or two. ``A Choice Not an Echo'' was an impactful book, and it was one that is one of the foundational documents that identifies the basis of modern-day conservatism. Phyllis Schlafly was one of a very few original conservatives here in America. She has been one of about three voices that were still active in the public scene that go back to the era in the early `60s. For Phyllis, it goes back as far back as 1946, when she managed a congressional campaign. Phyllis' life has been deeply engaged in this kind of activity. She was elected first vice president for the National Federation of Republican Women, 1960 to 1964. She was a candidate for Congress in 1952 and 1970, in two different districts. Phyllis received numerous awards. She founded the Republican National Coalition for Life in 1990 with the specific mission of protecting the pro-life plank in the Republican platform, and no one has been more active and had more voice on the pro-life movement and more effective than Phyllis Schlafly throughout these years. Her voice on this public scene will sorely be missed. She was a volunteer and a founder of Eagle Forum. The people that worked with and for Eagle Forum out across through the States came as volunteers. She also established offices in all of Illinois and here in Washington, D.C., and kept a voice and a presence here. Phyllis Schlafly became a conscience for conservatives. As we are trying to clarify the meaning of the Constitution, understand our place in history, and stand up for those principles that matter, often the voice of Phyllis Schlafly was echoing in our ears here on the floor of the House of Representatives. She would gather the young Eagles to come here at least once a year, usually twice a year to hear from them and give a number of us an opportunity to speak to the young people and take questions, but the bright lights that she identified, that she brought into activism have made, I think, a dramatic difference across America as that conscience of conservatism has multiplied across hundreds and then thousands of young Eagles that I had an opportunity to meet with and exchange ideas with and listen to. One of my stories about Phyllis Schlafly, I will start it first with this. When I arrived here in this Congress 14 years ago, one of the first days that I was here to walk out on this floor to vote, I walked back through the back of these Chambers, and one of the Members from Missouri, Todd Akin, came over to me and introduced himself. He said: I want to talk to you about Court stripping. And I said to him: You mean Article III, section 2 of the Constitution? And he said: Yes. How do you know that? Well, the reason I had paid attention to that was because it was Phyllis Schlafly who had written about it. In my years that I had been working in my construction office, all I ever really wanted to do was raise my family and run my construction business. I didn't really think about being involved and trying to be in the middle of public policy. I thought there were good, reliable people who would be here making those decisions. But I would send off for what, at that time, were little articles that I would call--you had to sign up for them, and you had to send off a check, and they would send you the mailing of her Forum document. Phyllis was all over the newspapers. I can't count all the publications, but I know she has published at least 27 books. I would read these articles that would show up in these publications. Maybe the headline caught me, but I would skip the author. I would read the story, I would read the article, and, boy, that is clarity of thought, utter clarity of thought. And then I would look up: Who wrote that? Phyllis Schlafly. Time after time after time. Before I really knew who Phyllis was, I was reading her material. She was impacting my thinking, and I am wondering: Who wrote this document? Phyllis Schlafly. Hundreds and thousands of documents, hundreds and thousands of analyses that she had done. And not only that, she was not disciplined to stick to a particular topic. I was looking through some of these topics that Phyllis had written books on. Of the 27 books, she picked a few topics: family and feminism, her book on family and feminism, ``The Power of the Positive Woman'' and ``Feminist Fantasies,'' those things that won't come true. Phyllis Schlafly, her comment on the judiciary, the book called, ``The Supremacists: The Tyranny of Judges and How to Stop It.'' I have it here. I have a story about that I might tell if we have time a little later. On religion, her book, ``No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom''; her book on nuclear strategy, ``Strike From Space'' and ``Kissinger on the Couch.'' Then her book on education, ``Child Abuse in the Classroom''; her book on child care, ``Who Will Rock the Cradle?'' and on phonics, ``First Reader'' and ``Turbo Reader.'' That is an example of the kind of work that Phyllis did. She wasn't narrow at all in her scope. She understood her faith, her Christianity, her religion, her role as a mother of six, a grandmother, a great-grandmother. She understood her role as a wife; she understood her role as a student, as a law student with a law degree; and she understood her role here in America. When the ERA came forward--and it was a mistake then, it would be a mistake now--Phyllis Schlafly, when they thought it was all done and the Equal Rights Amendment was going to be ratified--there were a few States left--Phyllis Schlafly started the battle to shut down the ERA; and it was almost singlehanded for a long time, but she mobilized a nation and put an end to the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have ended up with drafting women into the military. There is much going on today that she didn't agree with, but we have slowed down this train of liberalism. She has been a significant player in it. I see that we have some Members who have arrived at the floor that I believe would like to add some words to this. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Davidson), if he is prepared to offer some words.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio for his presentation here. I not only appreciate the kind words about the life of Phyllis Schlafly, but the voice of commitment to conservative cause that emerges as we listen to the gentleman's words from Ohio. I would like to now, if I could, yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Weber), who has arrived. I would note also that our great friend Michele Bachmann from Minnesota is here on the floor of the House of Representatives tonight, and that adds a tremendous amount of joy to me to what otherwise is a sad occasion, but we have to be also celebrating the glorious life of Phyllis Schlafly. It helps commemorate it here to know that one of the people who was closest to Phyllis has made the trip here to be on the floor as we discuss her life and celebrate her life.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for coming down to help memorialize the life of Phyllis Schlafly. Madam Speaker, the things that come to mind as I listened to Mr. Weber talk about Phyllis Schlafly and I look across at Michele Bachmann, I think about a time that Phyllis took us back into a room in St. Louis to sit and talk to both of us about the future and the destiny of the country. It was three of us sitting there having a little snack and chatting away on the Constitution and the value of life and marriage and the current and the destiny of America. Phyllis always saw it, as I think somebody mentioned, from 30,000 feet. The time I spend here in this Congress, the time I have the privilege of dealing with people at some of the highest levels in the country, the longer I am at this, the fewer people I am able to identify who can see with clarity the big picture and understand the currents of the course of history and the cultural movements that operate within this course of history that are actually driving it. Phyllis always saw it. She always saw it with a clarity, and that is what drove her to put 27 books out, and one of them was in support of Donald Trump. She had time in the last years of her life, ``The Conservative Case for Trump'' that is published. I think of the work that she got done. If somebody said to me: ``Well, Donald Trump is going to be the nominee''--and we maybe know this about the time of the Indiana primary--``why don't you just go out and write a book and publish that?''--to pull that off and get that done, to do that when you are 92. I recall the time when Phyllis broke her hip and she was in a hospital in St. Louis. So, I thought, I need to talk to Phyllis. I just want to wish her well. I call her up and, yes, she is in a hospital bed all right, but already, first thing when she comes out from the anesthetic, she asked for her laptop. She is at the hospital bed with a laptop, no doubt writing, producing documents, printing things, moving public policy in America from the hospital bed. On another occasion, I had the privilege to be named to present an award to Phyllis here in Washington, D.C. It was at an event at a hotel here in town. So, I am thinking: How do I make this work? Actually, my schedule wouldn't work for that. I thought: I can't let Phyllis down. Then, I learned that Phyllis had hurt her back and she had gone in for back surgery. I said: I think I know how to do this. I will tape a video for the people that are there to commemorate Phyllis, and then I will go visit her in St. Louis on my way back to Iowa. I flew to St. Louis and went to the nursing home where she was recovering from this back surgery. Her lap was covered with books and works and things we know. She sat there and told me how, yes, they had to put some cement in her back. I said: Just like it comes out of the truck? Well, pretty much, she said: They just go in there and fill in the gaps that I have, and now I have to take a little therapy and I will be fine. Well, she was fine, mentally. This woman had an aura about her. There was a radiance about her. I can only name three people that I have laid eyes on in my lifetime that when they were in the room you knew it; and you knew there was something emanating from the character, the spirit, the soul, and the intellect of Phyllis Schlafly. It is extraordinary. It is an extraordinary life. I know that one of her close friends was Louie Gohmert, who is here tonight on the floor. I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) to say a few words about Phyllis.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would interject; when I disagreed with Phyllis, I started with the assumption that I was probably wrong.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas for a very moving presentation here. I know that it means something very deeply in his heart, as it does in ours here on this floor and across this country by the thousands. A couple of things that I want to just quickly inject into this discussion. She would want me to say on article 3, section 2, Court stripping, we don't need to genuflect to the supremacists. The Court has gotten out of control. The Constitution is set up to where they are to be the weakest of the three branches of government, not a superior supremacist branch of government. Phyllis handed me the manuscript to this book, as I had a lot of long plane flights to do. The manuscript was just printed off a copy machine and kind of clipped together. I worked through all of that. I wrote my edits on it, my notes in the margins, red ink. I worked through it for hours--in fact, it was days. It got lost on the plane on the way back from Africa. I went to her and said: Phyllis, I need a little more time to work on the edits of your book because the manuscript has been lost in the luggage. She looked at me and she said: Well, Congressman, I didn't intend for you to edit my book. I just intended for you to have an early copy. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. The book stands out. She knew exactly what she wanted to say. That is a lot about her intellect and her personality. With utter clarity, the clearest political thinker of our time, based in Biblical values, values of Christians, constitutional values, a clear understanding of people and humanity and faith and family, she wrote on so many topics with utter clarity on topic, after topic, after topic. She lived a life of 92 years and was a player in the public arena since immediately post-World War II, and she is a player in our lives to this day. She is in our hearts, she is in our souls, she is in our conscience, and she affects our thinking and our actions--and she will for a long, long time to come. This is a woman who has redirected the destiny of America. I can't think of any woman who had more impact on the course of the history in the United States of America nor weighs more heavily on our sense of duty of what we need going forward to continue to honor the glorious life of Phyllis Schlafly. Rest in peace, Phyllis. God love you. We do. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding, but especially for his leadership here in the United States Congress, and especially on the FairTax. And that introduction, Mr. Speaker, it flashes back to me some of the things that I haven't really spoken to recently and how far we haven't come over the years that this became, obviously, the best thing that we could possibly do from a tax perspective in America--or anywhere in the world, for that matter. I have often told the story, but I should say I used to tell this story often, and that is that I am running my little construction business that I started up in 1975, and we have completed 41 years in business. I was audited one too many years in a row by the IRS, and I had learned that--we didn't have copy machines in those days, so if they could ask for data, I would have just said: Here, I will run all these copies. You can analyze them. I will go out and start a machine up and go to work, make a little money so I can pay my taxes. What it really did was it shut me down. It shut me down because I had to sit there in my office and serve papers out to the auditor because I was the one who knew where the papers were, and they were in my filing cabinet. And I had learned in previous audits that I didn't want to just say: Here is the filing cabinet. I am going to work. Let me know what the bill is when you are done. It didn't work out too well for me. So, I sat there for 4 days, and I served papers to the IRS. I would say: I will give you a paper. You can look at it. You can take your notes. Do what you will. When you are done with that paper, hand it back to me and I will put it in the file, and then you ask for another record and I will give it to you. We did that for 4 days. At the end of that period of time, we had an intense negotiation. It came down to a number. I remember it clearly. It doesn't seem so big today as it did then, but it was big then, and it was wrong. I paid the taxes that I owed and had done that with good intent as well. I complied with the law, and I had intent to comply with the law. But they seemed to have intent that they were going to justify the 4 days of being drug through--I thought I was drug through that, not them--but when it was all done, I had to go to the bank to borrow the money to pay the IRS that I believe to this day I did not owe. If I had otherwise borrowed the money to hire a lawyer to defend myself against the IRS and the Federal Government, the odds of success were so infinitesimally small that I had to decide do I want to stand on principle or--if I stand on principle, I can sacrifice my company--or do I want to borrow the money and pay bondage to what was an unjust principle and try to keep my business alive? That is what I decided to do. Those who know me for the time I have been here know how hard that is--for me, especially. I had to swallow as hard as I have ever had to swallow. But I went back out to work, and I fired up that old bulldozer and I climbed in the seat and the smoke went out the exhaust stack and out of my ears. This is the way that a person has to do business in this country. My oldest son owns that business today. He told me a narrative--not telling me the message I would get out of it--that he was joining up with an engineering firm to start a new business venture in addition to our construction work. They had a 90-minute meeting. At the end of that meeting, David King said to the engineer: Mike, did you realize that we have just talked business for 90 minutes? Yes, I surely do. Do you know what our topic was for 90 minutes on this business venture? Taxes. Ninety minutes of human resources were burned up on how to set up a tax structure to start a new business rather than figuring how to produce a good or a service that has a marketable value here or abroad. That is what is wrong. It is the waste of human resources that are consumed in compliance with the IRS, and it is the waste of human resources that could be far better used in producing that good or service that has a marketable value here or abroad. I have come not full circle on the issue. I stand exactly where I did in that time back in 1980 when I was audited one too many years in a row. But we are in the second generation of King Construction today, and I have to go back and look. Just yesterday, I had a 1-hour meeting with a Commissioner of the IRS, Commissioner Koskinen, who is facing a privileged motion as well as a filed motion to face impeachment for malfeasance within the IRS; and the violations, I believe, happened directly under the watch of Lois Lerner. So, I never imagined, Mr. Speaker, that day that I climbed in the seat of that old bulldozer and the smoke came out of the exhaust stack and my ears, and I began to think, I want to be rid of the IRS. I went through the process of, if you abolish the IRS, then what to do you do to replace the revenue? I spent weeks thinking that through. There was nobody to talk to in those days. I would go to, I called it my OshKosh B'Gosh caucus, the guys in the overalls at 6 a.m. in the morning, and I would sit down and I would tell them we need to have a national sales tax; we need to replace the IRS; we need to abolish the IRS. Give people their freedom. Let them make their choices on their taxes when they purchase, not have somebody looking over your shoulder second-guessing all the decisions you have to make while you are in business. For weeks, we went through that, and they got a little tired of hearing me talk about going to--I didn't call it a FairTax; I didn't have a name for it except national sales tax. Finally, they said, well, if that were such a good idea, we would already have done it by now. Anybody that served much time in Congress knows that is a laugher. We have lots of good ideas that we don't do by now because there are competing interests here. I have taken this policy to Alan Greenspan, the former chairman, shortly after he retired. I went to his Spartan office in downtown D.C., and I asked him if he would be the national spokesman for the FairTax. It was my mission to be a good salesman--and I am a good salesman; I have a good-looking wife, and that is proof positive--for the FairTax. We went through the FairTax, and he said: Congressman, this is not an economic question. You are asking me, as an economist, to be your spokesman. It is not an economic question. You will not find serious economists that disagree the FairTax does these things that you say. He said: It's a political question. So economists should not be selling a political question. Politicians should sell a political question. That is you. You go sell it. I said: Well, let me try this on you. I want to go through this list of things that I say the FairTax does that is good, and I want you to interrupt me and challenge me at any point along the way of any component that I have said that can't be sustained in an economic argument, an economic forum. So, I went through the list. I will just hit some of them, not all of them. The FairTax abolishes the tax on productivity. We are punishing productivity in America. People on that side of the aisle believe that consumption drives the economy. Well, if you don't produce, it doesn't. It is the production that drives the economy, especially when you are importing or exporting it, and we need to get that back. It eliminates the tax on production. It eliminates corporate income tax, personal income tax, estate tax, capital gains tax. It allows for the repatriation of the U.S. capital that is stranded overseas by the trillions of dollars that would be reinvested in the U.S. I went through this vast list of things the FairTax does that are good, and I stopped and I said: You are not interrupting me, Mr. Chairman. He said: I don't need to do that, but you left something out. You didn't mention that the FairTax provides an incentive for savings and investment, and this economy desperately needs an incentive for savings and investment. It wasn't that I left it out on purpose. I just forgot to say it. So he said: Add that to what you are saying, and keep saying everything else. And so I turned it into this. Now I just tell people the FairTax does everything good that anybody's tax policy does that is good. It does them all, and it does them all better. And that is pretty close to the final word on the topic. Now, America needs to come to her senses, and if we want to have a stimulated economy, if we want to reverse this imbalance we have in trade and bring it back to where we have an export surplus instead of an import surplus, if we want to stabilize our currency, if we want to stimulate manufacturing and production in America, if you want to have a stable currency, a stable economy, an America that is a robust economy in the world again, we go to the FairTax. That little island of Ireland that has attracted over 700 former U.S. companies that were domiciled in the U.S., now domiciled in Ireland with their little flat tax over there--it was zero for 10 years, became 10, then 13 percent or so. The dynamics that they have seen on that little island of Ireland, with the FairTax in America, would be multiplied by a factor that I hesitate to guess at here on the floor of the United States Congress. But it would be an awesome, dynamic change to our economy, and we wouldn't need to be importing millions of people from foreign countries to do these jobs Americans would do, because the wages would go up, the benefits would go up, our competitiveness would go up, and America would be back in the preeminent place in the world again. That is how good this FairTax is. That is why I am here on the floor to support Mr. Woodall, and I thank the gentleman for his leadership on this issue and the opportunity to say a few words.