Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, this amendment that is before the House this evening is an amendment that shuts off the funding within this continuing resolution to what we know as the Davis-Bacon Act. The Davis-Bacon Act is an old and archaic act that was generated during the Depression era, the early years of the Depression era, in about 1931. It was designed to keep the African American workers out of the trade unions in New York. That's the source of it. I have dealt underneath this law for my working life as a construction contractor, so my hands-on experience with Davis-Bacon, I believe, is as strong as anyone's in this Chamber. The costs that are added to our construction projects are what we should be thinking about here in this 112th Congress, in this Congress of austerity, on this night that we've had of cutting spending and cutting spending, and it's this: According to Heritage Study, the extra wages that are paid out unnecessarily total $10.9 billion. I have done this study within my own construction company, and have looked at the difference in the cost of the Davis-Bacon Federal wage scale. They will call it ``prevailing wage.'' I will tell you we know it's union scale, mandated by Federal law, and there is no reason for us to adhere to a union scale mandated by Federal law. My numbers show this: It increases the cost of a project between 8 and 35 percent depending on how much is materials and how much is labor. Other data out there show an increase of 9 to 37 percent. Our numbers match well. The costs of compliance for contractors are over $190 million a year, and it distorts the relationship between management and labor. We are, Mr. Chairman, in an era where our question becomes this: Do we want to create jobs or do we want to cost jobs? Do we want to build 4 miles of road under Davis-Bacon or do we want to build five? Do we want to build four schools or do we want to build five? Do we want to have an inflation of wages by an average of 22 percent, which is according to some of the wage and hour studies? Do we want to see the price go up? Do we want to see a construction industry that reduces workers by as much as 25,000 a year in minority workers? I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield myself 15 seconds to announce to the Chair that I have just been called a ``bottom-feeder''--a bottom-feeder for providing 12-months-out-of-the-year work, health care benefits and retirement benefits for my employees. I take it as an insult, but I am not going to ask to take the lady's words down. Mr. Chairman, I now yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Broun).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Stutzman).

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield myself 2 minutes. I want to point out to the body also, Mr. Chairman, that I have lived under the Davis-Bacon wage scale for years. I've met payroll for 28\1/ 2\ years--over 1,400 consecutive weeks. I've worked for a wage underneath Davis-Bacon wage scales, and I've worked in merit shop operations. I've worked in shops in the wintertime and on construction projects in the field before it froze up, from the spring to fall. I've been on all sides of this. I've been a laborer on the pipeline. I've been a heavy equipment operator. I've been an owner and I've managed people, and I've watched what Davis-Bacon has done at every single level along the way. It distorts the relationship between management and labor. It takes away from the individuals the ability or the willingness to contribute to the decision-making process. When the government comes in and says, ``on one side of the road, you're going to pay your laborers $14 an hour, but on the other side of the road you're going to pay them $21 an hour, and if they climb in the seat of a motor grader it's going to be $35 an hour, but if it happens to be a finish machine then it's going to be $40 an hour,'' you watch your crews jockeying for the highest paying job there is. What happens if you sit back at a bird's-eye view? They will be scrambling over to climb onto the machine that's the least useful but that pays the most money. Then if you go away for a few days, you'll come back and find out they've rolled all the clods, that your wage price has gone up and that you're no longer competitive, and you'll have to go back on the job and essentially get out--this is figuratively speaking--the whip and make sure you crack it so you get people pushing as hard as possible. It raises the tension, and it takes away a lot of the pleasure of taking pride in your work because now management is pitted against labor, and labor is pitted against labor in jockeying for the highest paying jobs. This is no way to run a business. It's no way to run a company. It's no way to run a country to think that we here in this Congress should be one of the ones deciding what someone should get paid, or at least writing the rules for it, knowing that it's not prevailing wage but that it's union scale, and it takes 2\1/2\ years to get a ruling on what's prevailing wage and what isn't, and so we just don't know what it is for 2\1/2\ years. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield myself the balance of my time. I will point out that there has been a misunderstanding here with regard to an agreement on the length of this amendment discussion. We'd agreed to take it down to 10 minutes each, but when the announcement was made, I think it was confusing to both sides. So what I'd like to do is try to wrap up my side of this in 1 minute and yield to the gentlelady from Connecticut for as much time as she may think is appropriate to consume in order to close, if that would be agreeable. I'm going to move ahead with my part by picking up where I left off. Mr. Chairman, the inefficiencies that are created by Davis-Bacon are multiplied in the costs that are in the jobs that we do. It is an 8 to 35 percent increase in the overall costs of our construction projects. We need to keep people at work. It means fewer people are working for more money, and it means a more distorted economy and inefficiencies that are built in that completely distort the cost of these wages. So it is important for us to know that this isn't the first debate before this Congress but that it is the first intense debate that has taken place since the Republican majority took over here in 2011. Back in 1995, some of the cosponsors of the original Davis-Bacon repeal, a similar amendment, were Boehner, Bartlett, Coble, Dreier, Goodlatte, Herger, McKeon, and Wolf. I would urge adoption of this amendment and a strong vote to cut the funding off to anything that would be enforcing Davis-Bacon wages under this CR. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would like to thank the gentleman from Louisiana for addressing the House and for yielding to me, and all of those who have spoken on this issue. I recall back here on this floor in the early part of the session in 2007 when the Mexico City vote came up, and I remember that debate here on this floor. I remember watching the vote go up on the board, the language that would compel American taxpayers to fund abortion in foreign lands. For the first time in years, the Democrats lost the debate but won the vote. And I saw Members over on this side of the floor jumping up and down, hugging themselves, cheering, cheering because of what? Because you had taken a step to compel Americans who are conscientiously objecting taxpayers to fund abortions in foreign lands. How could anyone cheer something like that? What was the moral standard that brought about such elation? It is a complete confusion to me to think that we can't even describe what this is. I brought some posters to the floor of the House Judiciary Committee last week that showed what dilation and evacuation is. It is dismemberment. Abortion. I don't know if there anybody in this Chamber that could actually witness a real abortion and stand there, let alone lend their hand to such a thing. But I remember buying the movie ``Silent Scream'' for my children when they were about 9, 10 and 11 years old and sitting on the floor in the living room and watching 8 minutes of parts of babies being put in a stainless steel pan and having an inventory done of a little foot, a little arm, a little leg, a little torso, a little crushed skull, until all the things added up, and then they sucked out the pieces that were missed. That is what is going on. And we are asking Americans to fund this through Planned Parenthood, or any other organization? Here is where I would agree with Mr. Cohen. I would go further than this. And he made the point--I know he wouldn't agree. I would say no funds should go to any entity that should perform such a ghastly, ghoulish and gruesome procedure, and this House cannot compel American taxpayers to do so. And we will stand tonight and we will put an end to the Federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and we will move on and we will shut off all of the funding to those entities that do that to our unborn children in this country.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Georgia, and I'm very glad to welcome him to the United States Congress. He knows a little bit about what's going on around this organism that we live and work and breathe in. I come to the floor during this rules debate to raise a subject that I think needs to be brought before this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and that's this: that even though this House in H.R. 2, the second priority of the Speaker, voted to repeal ObamaCare and sent that bill over to the Senate where it was taken up and every Republican voted to repeal ObamaCare--so every Republican in all the United States Congress has voted to repeal ObamaCare. It was bipartisan in this House, by the former Speaker's definition. And even though that took place, we did not shut off the funding to ObamaCare because in a--I won't say a legislative sleight of hand--there was written in the ObamaCare bill automatic appropriations that just last week we were able to pull all those pieces out and add them up and we received a CRS report last Friday that shows that $105.5 billion are automatically triggered for spending that will implement ObamaCare whether or not we shut off the funds in this CR going forward. These are automatic appropriations. I believed--and I've seen it for a long time and worked on this thing ever since mid-last summer--that we need to shut off all funding to ObamaCare in every appropriations bill going forward. And we had the assurance that we would have regular order. Well, the regular order that we have is an open rule that closes out an amendment that would shut off the funding that's automatically appropriated by ObamaCare. If we'd actually had a full regular order, I could have brought that amendment before a subcommittee of Appropriations--asked someone to do--or the full Appropriations Committee. And actually, at the request, I followed all those paths until such time it wasn't written into the bill, as was shutting off funding to transferring people out of Gitmo or cutting off the 1099 or the stimulus plan of the President's. All of that is written out in the bill, but nothing is in the bill that allows us to write out the automatic $105 billion dollars. So we're faced with the automatic institutionalization of ObamaCare even while we cut this budget $100 billion. So I went to Rules last night and asked Rules, Protect my amendment from a point of order so this House can work its will. Even though I have great respect for all of the members of the Rules Committee, and the tone and tenor of the debate and the dialogue in there could not have been better, the Rules Committee declined to do that. I am here on this floor now, asking myself: How do I vote ``yes'' on a rule that I so oppose? That's my position, Mr. Speaker. I think that, if we fail to act now, now while we have the maximum amount of leverage and the one of two pieces of must-pass legislation--that is the CR, and next is the debt ceiling bill--to shut off the funding to implement ObamaCare, we will have missed our chance. By the way, every appropriations bill will come to the floor with the same kind of rule that will block out anyone from offering any legislation that will shut off the funding, the automatic appropriations to ObamaCare. So as much as it pains me to be standing here at this point, I can't figure out how I can vote ``yes'' on a rule that I so oppose.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. And there's been some dramatic changes that have taken place in this country and dramatic changes that have taken place in this Congress. I believe that as we move forward we're going to have some significant debates here on the floor. I look forward to the regular order component of this that's being initiated by Speaker Boehner, the process of using the committee process, the hearing process before committees, the markup before subcommittees, the markup before full committees, and bills going up to the Rules Committee after they've been approved by the actual standing committees, and that be the same bills that are passed by the committees that arrive at the Rules Committee where the Rules Committee can work their will and, wherever possible, provide for an open rule so that we can have the maximum amount of debate on the floor, so that Members can have their will debated and require an up-or-down vote, recorded vote on their issues. That's not something that has been going on in this Congress. It's diminished each of the last 4 years. And the more than two centuries old, not necessarily a rule, not necessarily something written into the rules, but the practice and the tradition of open rules on appropriations has been essential to allow Members to have their voice. And I am thankful that that's the new tone of this Congress. It's been a great frustration to me and many other Members, Democrats and Republicans alike. So we're here today, Mr. Speaker, on the cusp of a great big decision for this Congress; and as we make this transition from the era of Speaker Pelosi to the era of Speaker Boehner, and as he lays out the parameters of let the House work its will and let's go back to a regular order as it was devised and approved in the constitutional structure by our Founding Fathers, with all of those parameters in mind, we have coming up before us a continuing resolution. And the pressure points that we have, the opportunity to bring leverage has been envisioned as the Constitution sets up article I, II, and III of the Constitution. And here we are. Taxes and appropriations need to start here in the House of Representatives. And, Mr. Speaker, I'd just make this point, and it's an unequivocating point, and that is that unless the House approves of Federal appropriations, there shall be not a dime spent by the Federal Government otherwise. So whatever we do here, and we will bring a budget through and it will be a far more fiscally responsible budget than the nonbudgets that have been processed in previous Congresses and the extension by CR, not by the legitimate appropriations process, but there will be a budget and that budget will cut current spending significantly. And it probably won't be enough to satisfy me, but the budget process is another essential component of what we're doing here. And another component of it is to be able to legitimately fund the balance of this fiscal year. If we do nothing, if this Congress doesn't act, if the House of Representatives doesn't act, Mr. Speaker, then the Federal Government will go into an immediate and automatic shutdown at midnight on the night of March 4 of this year. That was the provision that was written into the continuing resolution last December, when Democrats and Republicans got together and compromised. If you remember, the Senate was going to pass that huge omnibus bill, all of the wish lists of the departing Senators and those that hadn't been up for election, the big spending bill that was just grotesque in its vision when you look through all the dollars they were going to spend in the Senate and send it over here. Thankfully, the American people rose up, jammed the switchboards in the Senate, and even those hanging on the fence decided that they would get a hold of their better responsible nature and they decided to pull down that huge omnibus spending bill. And so we ended up with a small continuing resolution, a continuing resolution that funded the government from, I don't remember the exact date of the expiration of the last one, but in December, whenever we passed this, through January and February and into the 4th of March. Now, some of us anticipated they would try to pass a CR for the end of the fiscal year, and that didn't happen. And a lot of us would have liked to have spent less money up to this point. But in that CR there isn't any funding that funds ObamaCare. Even though ObamaCare has passed and it's been signed into law and it's the law of the land, there's not funding going forward in the CR that we're operating the government on today. If that had been, the funding that was called for had been in the CR, there would have been about a billion dollars appropriated in the continuing resolution that passed last December and expires this March 4. That money was not put into the bill because they needed the votes of then the seated Republicans and some Democrats to vote for the continuing resolution. So the old Congress, the 111th Congress, didn't vote to willfully fund the implementation of ObamaCare. Now we're faced with the prospect of a continuing resolution coming before this Congress that's been announced to be five times greater than any appropriations bill ever voted on by this Congress before, and perhaps four times greater than any cuts that have been offered before. Well, that's because the whole string of 13-or-so appropriations bills gets packed up into one, and all that spending that's normally spread out over about 13, and perhaps a supplemental or two, packaged up into one bill with all that money in it. That's why it's that big. Now in it, well, I think it's unlikely that there will be a line item anywhere in it that will fund ObamaCare. But I don't see resistance either from someone bringing an amendment that would declare that none of the funds in this CR shall be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. That's pretty close to the language that I have advocated for, oh, ever since last March when I first introduced the repeal legislation to ObamaCare. And by the way, Michele Bachmann and I were within 3 minutes of each other in exactly the same language to initiate the repeal of ObamaCare. We've worked together on this, with others, Connie Mack and others. Jerry Moran of the United States Senate today has been one of the leaders on repealing ObamaCare without hesitation and actively and aggressively. There are a lot of supporters across the board. But, Mr. Speaker, I want to lay out the strategy that I have planned here on the repeal of ObamaCare in sequence so that people that think chronologically like myself can put this into the right context, and that is this: I spent about a half a year of my life fighting the passage of ObamaCare. When it finally passed and was signed by the President, the night it passed here, I went out off the balcony and down into the lawn on the south lawn where there were thousands of people yet there pleading, keep your hands off my health care. And I said to them that night that we would start the repeal process the next day. Now, I went home exhausted, thinking I would sleep until I was rested up. That didn't last very long. I got up and wrote the request for the repeal, as did the Congresswoman from Minnesota, Mrs. Bachmann; and we submitted those repeal requests at the opening of business that same day because it was after midnight when ObamaCare passed. It was on that time, the strategy that I put together then was that we would file a repeal bill, seek the maximum number of cosponsors to repeal ObamaCare and then, Mr. Speaker, move forward with the discharge petition to seek to get 218 signatures on that so that then-Speaker Pelosi couldn't block the repeal from coming to the floor. We followed through on all of that to the point where we peaked out at 178 signatures on the discharge petition that could have circumvented the Speaker seeking to block the repeal of ObamaCare. That discharge petition was one of the tools that was useful in winning the majority on November 2 of this past year. And there are Members here that openly say they wouldn't be here if they didn't have the discharge petition to point to their opponent and say, sign the discharge petition if you're serious. If you're against ObamaCare, here's the vehicle to repeal it. Sign it. A number of those who did not and would not were voted out of office, and we have a new freshman class here that is 96 strong, 87 of them are Republicans, and I know of none of the 87 that did not run on the repeal of Obamacare. I don't have confirmation, Mr. Speaker, but I believe that every one of the freshmen Republicans, the 87, ran at least in part, if not centrally, on working to repeal Obamacare. After winning the majority, so we could actually bring legislation to repeal Obamacare, the next phase was to bring a repeal bill here to the floor of the House. I wanted it to be H.R. 1. It turned out to be H.R. 2. I don't know what H.R. 1 is yet, Mr. Speaker, but I'm very, very happy that the leadership took that high a priority to hold a vote here in the House to repeal Obamacare so early in the first session of the 112th Congress. We saw a vote here that was bipartisan and it was unanimous among Republicans to repeal Obamacare. That is a very sound, a ringing, sound rejection of Obamacare by the American people as a result of the election of November 2, by the people they sent here, 87 new freshmen Republican, many of them very, very solid. Then, after H.R. 2 passed the House with unanimous Republican support and bipartisan support, Mr. Speaker, it went over to the Senate, where they said, ``It could never pass over here, and it's a symbolic vote.'' Well, the Republican leader Mitch McConnell did force a vote on the repeal of Obamacare. It would have taken 60 votes to break the filibuster under those rules. Well, every Republican in the United States Senate voted to repeal Obamacare. So we are in this situation today, Mr. Speaker, where, if you look in the House and in the Senate, with far larger Republican numbers than we have had in past years, every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted to repeal Obamacare. Every single one. They are serious, and they want to get the job done, and their constituents insist that we get the job done as well. So now that we have taken this position that we are, all of us, for repealing Obamacare, and consistent with two thirds of the American people, if we voted to repeal it, it would be completely inconsistent for us to vote then to turn around and fund Obamacare. Well, if the CR has language in it that allows for funding of Obamacare, then a vote in support of the continuing resolution is a vote that funds the very thing that we voted to repeal, which would be inconsistent. And I do not believe that we will have inconsistent members here in the House of Representatives. I think they voted to repeal Obamacare, I think they are happy to vote to cut off the funding to Obamacare, and I believe that we will have universal support for that among our conference. And I believe the Senate, if they have an opportunity for the vote, would do the same thing. Down party lines, perhaps, but they would do the same thing. But herein is the difficulty, Mr. Speaker, and it's this: That the funding that might otherwise be in this continuing resolution or may perhaps actually come out tomorrow in it is not very large in comparison to the overall cost. The chairman of the Budget Committee has said that the spending under Obamacare is $2.6 trillion--$2.6 trillion. Now, there are taxes enacted by it, and we know how the CBO scored the information that they were given. But $2.6 trillion in spending would be shut off if we repealed Obamacare today. We have voted to do so in the House. The Senate wasn't successful. The President likely would veto. It is his signature bill; it is his identity. He is the one that called it ``Obamacare'' at the Blair House February 25, and now it's in our dictionary. My spell check spells it out for me: Obamacare. But in any case, the $1 billion or so that might be cut out of Obamacare in the CR, if we say none of the funds that are written into this bill can be used to implement or enforce Obamacare, that $1 billion pales by comparison to the funds that are automatically appropriated that are written into the Obamacare bill itself, and it is an unusual practice to have that happen. When you have a large authorization bill like Obamacare come through, generally it authorizes the appropriations. They are authorized to be appropriated under this section, X many dollars, to go to implement or enforce the various provisions of Obamacare. That's where the money is. And the real money that's up in that, that's automatically appropriated, Obamacare anticipates and authorizes trillions of dollars to be appropriated to fund it, and it authorizes the collection of, I believe, trillions of dollars in fees and taxes to fund it over time. But the automatic appropriations that are unusual but written into Obamacare that a lot of people didn't know was in there when it was voted on, they will automatically appropriate a number that approaches or exceeds $100 billion in automatic appropriations. We are crunching these numbers now, and I have to qualify these numbers, Mr. Speaker. Our low number is down around $65.3 billion; our upper number is up around $107 billion. CRS doesn't have a number, CBO doesn't have a number. Apparently, nobody has pressed them to produce the numbers of the automatic appropriations in Obamacare in all this time. So we are taking this apart and putting it back together, and that's why the range is, it's my shop doing the math on this range, $65.3 billion on the low side, $107 billion on the high side. Let's just call it around $100 billion for round figures, Mr. Speaker. We could come here on the floor next week and debate a CR, and we could see an amendment come that's in order that would cut off all funding in the CR that would be used to fund Obamacare. If we do that, we are cutting off about $1.2 billion in spending. If we bring an amendment that shuts off all the funding that's automatically appropriated in Obamacare, and if we are successful, we shut off maybe $100 billion that would be used to implement and enforce Obamacare. One billion versus $100 billion. A 1 percent solution versus a 100 percent solution. And if we don't use the 100 percent solution, then $100 billion, as much as or perhaps more, will be aggressively used by the Obama administration to implement and enforce Obamacare. And if they do that, the cancerous tumor that's growing because of what it does to our liberty and our freedom sends its roots down deeper, and it gets bigger and stronger and harder to eradicate. That is part of the strategy. So, Mr. Speaker, I am hopeful that leadership and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee will get together, and sometime tonight, as they put the finishing touches on the CR legislation that they say will come out tomorrow, that they will write into the bill the language that I have proposed. And since we deal with 2,500 page bills here in the House, and we are chastised if we don't read and understand every word of them, I have an amendment here that I can read every word of, and perhaps it could be understood by everyone in America. This is the amendment that shuts off the automatic appropriations to Obamacare. It is this, and I quote: ``Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds made available in this act or any previous or subsequent act may be used to carry out the provisions of Public Law 111-148, Public Law 111-152, or any amendment made by either such public law.'' That's the amendment, Mr. Speaker, that shuts off not just the funding in the CR to Obamacare, but it shuts off the self-enacting automatic appropriations that were, I believe, inappropriately written into the Obamacare bill and the reconciliation package that came over from the Senate as part of their deal. That is why I gave you two bill numbers instead of one, but they encompass what we commonly refer to as Obamacare. That is the amendment that needs to be made in order here on the floor that allows the House to work its will, that allows the House to work within order under the rules. And, by the way, regular order is holding committee meetings, holding hearings, holding subcommittee markups and subcommittee appropriations. Chairman Rehberg would be seated at one of those markups, I would think, and that would be useful, a full Appropriations Committee markup at all of those stops. There would be an opportunity to introduce this language in committee, and then succeed, I believe, in dealing with a parliamentary challenge. Or, if it's written into the base bill, certainly there would be no parliamentary challenge. And if this goes out of the Appropriations Committee up to the Rules Committee and doesn't have my language in it, at that point the Rules Committee can protect this language, Mr. Speaker, from a point of order. But if I bring this language to the floor under an appropriations bill, I know that I am facing a parliamentary challenge to this language. And it will be hard for the House to work its will if we get to the point where we have a parliamentary challenge on a piece of language that mirrors the will of the American people, mirrors the wishes of the American people, and mirrors the will and wishes of the Members of Congress, the majority of the Members of Congress, and mirrors the will and the wishes and the votes of 100 percent of the Republicans in the United States House and the United States Senate, and is bipartisan, at least in the House. That is the endeavor that we need to be successful with, Mr. Speaker, and I am very determined to have this kind of debate and find a way to have this vote. If we are blocked from a vote that is essential to work the will of the House, how then can we say, how then can we say that the House has worked its will, if the House has been denied an opportunity to work its will? I know there are arguments on both sides, Mr. Speaker, but I would point out that the language that I have read into the Record is not a precedent. It doesn't stretch the rules or the history or the traditions of this House. It doesn't stretch any written rule that I know of, and it is this. There is ample precedent, ample precedent in the form of the appropriations bills that were used to shut off the funding for the Vietnam War. Now, I disagreed with the decision back then. I remember reading about it in the news in 1973 and 1974. In fact, my recollection says also 1975, but I don't happen to have those notes, Mr. Speaker, but I do have the notes to draw from a report by CRS out of the Congressional Record. I am saying that we can bring an amendment that shuts off all funding, notwithstanding any other section. All of the automatic funding that was enacted by ObamaCare can be shut off in an appropriations bill in a continuing resolution. It can happen next week in the United States Congress, and we can put an end to ObamaCare then until such time as we elect a President who will sign the repeal as, hopefully, the first act of office in January of 2013. That is my hope and my wish and my work. But for those who might wonder that this is language that stretches the parameters of tradition, it completely does not; and here are two examples of the House of Representatives and the Senate concurring. Here is one, a supplemental appropriations bill, not a CR, but a supplemental appropriations bill that is in 1973, and actually the date on it is August 15, 1973. It says this: ``None of the funds herein appropriated under this act may be expended to support directly or indirectly combat activities in or over Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam and South Vietnam by United States forces, and after August 15, 1973, no other funds heretofore appropriated under any other act may be expended for such purpose.'' So, Mr. Speaker, this supplemental appropriations bill that is dated enactment of August 15, 1973, and signed by the President July 1, 1973, says that none of these funds and no funds in the pipeline can be used to support directly or indirectly combat activities in Vietnam. If there were bullets that were on the way to be unloaded on the dock at Da Nang, they put the brakes on them and they went back. Those funds were on the way. They shut them down. That doesn't mean they stopped everything, but none of those funds that were unobligated, would be a better way to put that, were allowed to be used by this act of Congress in a supplemental appropriations bill. Yes, the precedent exists. Yes, we can do this. Yes, it is a common practice, Mr. Speaker. Those who might think this is a rare exception, I would go on down the line to another piece of legislation which actually was a CR, a continuing resolution. This is dated 1974, July 1, 1974; and this language in the continuing resolution then says this: ``Notwithstanding any other provision of law, on or after August 15, 1973, no funds herein or heretofore appropriated may be obligated or expended to finance directly or indirectly combat activities by United States military forces in or over or from off the shores of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia.'' There is the language again: ``No funds herein and no funds heretofore appropriated may be obligated or expended directly or indirectly.'' That is an all-encompassing example of language that we have used as a template to shut off the funding that is automatically appropriated within ObamaCare and, I think, inappropriately automatically appropriated within ObamaCare. That is where I stand on this, Mr. Speaker. And for those who think that is an ancient piece of legislative history and something that hasn't been used in the modern era and so therefore isn't a model or precedent, we go back 200-plus years for those things. I don't have trepidation about the Constitution that was ratified in 1789. But just in the 110th Congress, the first 2 years of Nancy Pelosi's Congress, Mr. Speaker, she forced 44 votes. They might have been some in the Rules Committee, most of them came to the floor; 44 votes by this United States Congress that were designed to unfund, underfund or undermine our troops. I have those all on record and spreadsheet with hyperlinks to the language and the vote results. We stood here and fought this off through the 110th Congress because the effort by the then-Speaker was to end the war in Iraq by shutting off all the funding and forcing us to bring our troops back home again. I am very thankful that George Bush prevailed in the surge and we have the optimistic situation in Iraq that we have today because of that decision that was made by George Bush. But it wasn't with any help from Speaker Pelosi, who forced 44 votes. Many of them, and I have not scored it in this fashion, but probably most of them follow down the same lines as the legislative procedure that I am advocating here. So, Mr. Speaker, this is a very sound practice. It is a very constitutional practice. It is tried and it is true and it has been effective. It put the end to the Vietnam War, and we can put an end to ObamaCare if we bring language either as written into the bill or if we go back and have an Appropriations Committee, which I don't expect will happen, or if the Rules Committee protects my language so that the amendment can be legitimately debated here on the floor of the House and we can have a recorded vote. We can shut off 100 percent of the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare. If we don't take those steps, this Congress will not be allowed then, will not have been allowed at that point to work its will; and we have at best the chance to shut off $1 billion, which amounts to 1 percent of the overall appropriations that are automatically enacted by ObamaCare. So we can come with a 1 percent solution and posture ourselves as we provided a solution, or we can come with a 100 percent solution with the best tools that the House has now to do the best job, to write the toughest bill that we can, send it over to the Senate, because we know this: it is going to get worse in the Senate, and they are going to leverage back on us. If it were just me, we could hold our ground. But; it isn't just me. So, Mr. Speaker, my advice to my colleagues whom I adore the privilege of serving with and whose judgment and statesmanship I greatly respect is this: We can't have people blink in this Congress, not when the destiny of America is at stake. And if you are wondering about blinking, just sign up with me, wait until I blink, and when I do, I guarantee my eyeballs will be dry and so will yours. But we must hold our ground. We must not blink. We must send the language over to the Senate that cuts off all of the funding of that up to and perhaps exceeding $100 billion that would be used to implement and enforce ObamaCare, that will be used aggressively by the Obama administration to send the roots down and grow this malignant tumor and metastasize this malignant tumor. We can pull it all out by the roots. We can do so if we move my amendment and make it in order under the rule or write it into the bill. If not, the America people will look back on this time and say, Where were you when it was time to stand up for the will of the American people? Mr. Speaker, I have had my say. I appreciate the privilege of addressing you here this afternoon, to be on the floor of the House of Representatives. I entreat my colleagues to join with me, and let's get this job done. Let's repeal ObamaCare; let's pull it out by the roots, lock, stock and barrel, a 100 percent repeal, not a 1 percent repeal.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the honor to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives. Listening to my colleagues in the previous hour has been very interesting to me and, I think, informative to the American people at the same time. We are here now today, the first day after the House has voted to repeal ObamaCare. I noted yesterday, although not in the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker, that yesterday, the day of the big vote that came up, that passed the repeal of ObamaCare here in the House, was the 1-year anniversary of the election of Scott Brown from Massachusetts to the United States Senate. I would like to take you back, if I could, Mr. Speaker, to that time. Where we were a year ago today, 13, 14, 15 months ago. In fact, I would like to dial us all the way back to, let's say, the beginning of August of 2009. That was the time that the town hall meetings lit up all across this country. And as we watch and the intensity of the issue of the health care policy unfolded before us here in the House of Representatives, the national debate, the media debate, the talk in the coffee shops and across the backyard fence and in our churches and in our daily lives was focusing on health insurance and health care policy in America. I would remind you, Mr. Speaker, and those listening into this conversation we are having, that the President of the United States had consistently said that we were in an economic downward spiral. We were in a bad economic fix. If you remember Henry Paulson coming to this Capitol on September 19 of 2008, and telling us that he needed $700 billion right now without any strings attached to solve what he predicted could likely be the collapse of credit and currency globally, and this Congress, over my objections, most vociferous, and votes, did send that money to Henry Paulson; and some of it got spent the way he intended to. But this fear of this economy brought about to some degree an increase in the number of Democrat seats in the House of Representatives, and it contributed to the election of Barack Obama as President, and he has said that he inherited some of the worst economic times ever. And the President of the United States told this country over and over again we are in an economic problem and a downward spiral, and he said, first, we couldn't fix the economy unless we first fixed health care in America. So he made that an issue that went into the middle of the economic calamity, conditions that we had. I didn't accept that analysis; but he also said that the problem with health care was we spend too much money in relation to other countries in the world, in relation to the overall size of our economy, in relation to the individual dollars that are spent on individual patients. There is some degree of truth to that, in fact, I think a significant degree, but in areas that the President didn't want to address. So he said we have to fix our economy, and we can't fix it unless we first fix the problem with health care. That includes when they use that term, that means health insurance and health care all together. They have conflated those two terms. His solution for spending too much money on health care was spend a lot more money on health care. And now we have an ObamaCare piece of legislation that has been pushed through this House, and we had to vote to repeal yesterday, that spends a lot more money. Mr. Speaker, you don't solve the problem of spending too much money by spending a lot more money. That would be the health care equivalent of Keynesian economics, wouldn't it, Mr. Speaker, Keynesian economics being that philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, who was an economist and a very influential one in that period of time when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to be our President of the United States, and a similar economic time of downward spiral. Their belief was that you could borrow money and send that money out into the public and get people to spend that money; and if you do that, it would stimulate the economy. In fact, John Maynard Keynes, perhaps facetiously, in fact--I believe it was facetiously--but I think it's worthy to tell the story that he told--he said, I can solve the economic problems here in the United States. I can solve the unemployment in America by doing this, go out to an abandoned coal mine, drill a whole bunch of holes out into that abandoned coal mine. Fill those holes up full of cash, U.S. greenbacks. Then fill the abandoned coal mine full of garbage. Now think of that image, Mr. Speaker, an abandoned coal mine with holes drilled in a random pattern all across the face of the abandoned coal mine, deep holes shallow holes, big holes, small holes, fill them full of cash. Then backfill the holes, fill the abandoned coal mine up with garbage. Then he said, turn the entrepreneurs loose. The entrepreneurs will go in--now I have to fill in the blanks, because that's the only part of the quote that I know--the entrepreneurs would then go in and start to dig the garbage out, haul garbage out to make way to dig into the holes to come up and pull up the cash. Somebody has to support the industry of the people that are hauling the garbage out and digging back down into the holes. Somebody has to exchange the cash, the garbage-covered cash for clean cash. It's like an industry that would begin in a similar way that a gold-mining town might begin if somebody discovers gold in Colorado, California, or maybe even Iowa one day. But the idea was if you could get money into people's hands, they would spend it and it will create multiple iterations of an economic activity; and John Maynard Keynes believed that would stimulate the economy. The President believes this also, our current President, Mr. Speaker. He told us that on February 10, 2009, when he spoke to the Republican Conference; and he said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal actually did work, that it was working. But it was in the second half of the 1930s President Roosevelt lost his nerve. He got too concerned about spending too much money and he pulled back. And in pulling back, that brought about, according to our current President, a recession within a depression. And unemployment numbers went up in the second half of the 1930s because they should have borrowed and given away and spent more money at the Federal Government level. And he convinced me on that day that this President would not make that mistake. And we're talking, Mr. Speaker, all within the confines of Keynesian economics, which I want to make it very clear I completely disagree with that philosophy. The President does not. And he did not, by his view, make the mistake that FDR did. He has continued to push for more borrowing and more spending and growth in the debt and the deficit. And we continue to see unemployment numbers that push at double digits, 9.8 percent, then down to 9.4 percent. And it looks like that may be a permanent condition until we can get free enterprise to kick back in again. But this is the approach economically. The President sees this in a downward spiral when he takes the oath of office and goes out and pushes to spend more and more and more money. And, yes, Mr. Speaker, there will be those who are sitting at home or perhaps in the gallery who are thinking, but some of this started under George W. Bush's Presidency. And it did, Mr. Speaker. But it was all supported by Barack Obama. And it was significantly accelerated after the election and the inauguration of Barack Obama. And so his approach to solving the economic problem was borrow more money, spend more money, drive this Nation into debt believing that he could stimulate an economy that somehow would come back and pay the taxes to offset the interest and the overhead that this government now has. That's the Keynesian approach. Well, he used the same approach when it comes to health care, the Keynesian approach to health care, which is this thought: we spend too much money on health care. We can't afford it. We have too many people uninsured. So let's go out here and impose a health insurance policy on another 32 million or 47 million Americans and send the IRS in to enforce the law so that they compel every American to buy a health insurance policy that is either produced or approved by the Federal Government. Remember, the President wanted the public option. The President is on record in previous years of being for a complete takeover of the health insurance industry which implies the complete takeover of the health care industry in America. They had the debate during the nomination process between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton carried the best credentials of her proposals on health care into that campaign. Barack Obama had to offset her strong liberal health care credentials with some of his own. That's what ginned this up. This is what convinced America that we were in a health care crisis, and the President grabbed it and went into the arena of an economic crisis using the Rahm Emanuel philosophy which is ``never let a crisis go to waste'' and sought to bring about the beginnings of socialized medicine here in the United States. That's the foundation and the backdrop for what we have; and that brought about town hall meetings in August of 2007 and early September, I would add, that were jam packed all across this country. My town hall meetings have never been so full. I had some that were standing room only. Senator Grassley in the same area that I represent had to take one of his meetings outdoors because there wasn't room for people inside the huge building that they had set aside for the town hall meeting. That's just a part of Iowa, but that's a snapshot of the broader picture of the entire United States. There was intensity. We saw it. We saw it in YouTube. We saw it in the news. We saw Senator Specter I will say getting a message delivered to him utterly clearly in his town hall meetings. We saw Members of Congress that were, to some degree, disrespected in their town hall meetings, which I regret. We also saw many, many Members of this House and the Senate that did jam-packed town hall meetings and listened to constituents for hours on end and did tele-town halls on the phone so those that couldn't or didn't come out had an opportunity to weigh in. We read the mail. We took the phone calls. We took the emails and the snail mail, all the messages that we could. Wherever I went, the subject of health care was brought to me starting intensively in August of 2009, carrying throughout the fall of 2009. And as the subject came to this floor and was voted on on November 7 of 2009, that was a Saturday night, when this House passed the House version of ObamaCare over the strongest of objections, the 5th of November, 2009, tens of thousands of people poured into this Capital City, Mr. Speaker, to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances in a very constitutional fashion. They were out there in red, white and blue, all the colors of the rainbow, so to speak, making their own signs. They were here on their own dime. They came from every single State. And we know they came from every single State. I've talked to people from most of those States, and the States that had a gap. For example, I didn't talk to anybody from Hawaii. Well, why do I say they come from every State? I met people from Alaska. People from Hawaii went to Michele Bachmann's office as she was out working against the ObamaCare bill and presented and laid on her desk a lei that they brought from Hawaii. They came from every State to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances exactly in a constitutional fashion. Fifth of November, 2009, on a Thursday we did a huge press conference out on the West Lawn of the Capitol with numbers of people that ranged in the 30,000 to 40,000 people, small side, up to perhaps 50 to 60,000 people, outside, calling for this Congress to listen to them, to keep this Congress' hands off of their health care. Well, still their hearts were hardened; and we had another press conference the following Saturday just 3 days later that had thousands of people at it. And still on that Saturday night they brought a vote to the floor that moved the ObamaCare legislation out of the House of Representatives, down the Hall all the way through the end of the Capitol into the United States Senate. That was November 7, a Saturday night of 2009. And the Senate took it up, and they were looking for a way to, I'll say the Majority Leader Harry Reid and others, were looking for a way to pass ObamaCare in the Senate. And as the maneuvering unfolded, it came to Christmas Eve, Mr. Speaker. On Christmas Eve, most of the procedural maneuvers that the Republicans had in the Senate were exhausted Christmas Eve day. They had 12 more hours that they could have used to delay the vote and 12 more hours of debate that could have been extended. But they decided to shake hands with Harry Reid and allow ObamaCare to come to a vote on December 24 about 9 a.m. Well, that let everybody get a plane ticket to go home. I wanted them to use every single minute to delay it until as long as they possibly could until 9 o'clock Christmas Eve night. And we know there aren't planes flying out of this town anymore after that. I would have thought if anybody wanted to impose that version of socialized medicine on the American people, if they wanted it, they believed in it that strongly that they had to do it on Christmas Eve morning, they could have just as well done it Christmas Eve night at 9 o'clock and spent their Christmas here in Washington D.C. after they put that great big lump of coal in our stocking, the stocking of the American people. When I saw that, that was a tactic that energized me more. And I asked one of the well established and very respected Republican Senators what do we do now. What do we do now? Where is our next line of defense? We had 12 more hours. We could have fought this. His answer was, pray, and pray for a victory in the special election in Massachusetts. That was my email back on the morning of December 24 from that exchange. And I thought, I don't think I have the audacity to pray for an intervention in a Senate election in Massachusetts. How could there possibly be a Republican victory in Massachusetts? We know the politics of Massachusetts, and it's 100 percent Democrats--was--in each of their eight congressional seats and in their two Senate seats and had been for a long time. So I thought about that and deliberated on it and thought, that's the only real choice that I have. And I found myself in Massachusetts the last 3 days of the Scott Brown election; and I found a lot of patriots in Massachusetts, residents of Massachusetts, tea party groups, constitutional conservatives, 9/12 Project people, independents that are constitutionalists with a cause and discerning Democrats that have come over from the other side. I met a couple that had always walked the streets for Democrats, a union couple, both husband and the wife. And they told me that they were done, that they were working for the Republican side, and they would always stay on the Republican side. I met people there with the deepest amount of patriotism and went to look at Plymouth Rock. And there, of course, in Boston Harbor was the real Boston Tea Party. And why would I have thought that the State that could launch the Revolution and have an actual real tea party, why would I have thought that the Bay State couldn't deliver us a measure of defense and relief from ObamaCare? And so yesterday--I do the fast forward point now, Mr. Speaker--but yesterday here on the floor of the House of Representatives was the 1- year anniversary from the election of Scott Brown. And I don't think anybody said it into the Record, but this Congress, having gone through all of that and seen 87 freshman Republicans elected, the majority turn over, and the American people rise up and send their message in the fashion that was imagined by the Founding Fathers themselves, that this would be the quick reaction body here in the House of Representatives, voted on the anniversary of the election of Scott Brown--which we thought saved us from ObamaCare and ultimately did not--but voted to repeal ObamaCare lock, stock and barrel with no vestige of it left behind, to remove that malignant tumor before it could metastasize and consume the liberty of the American people. Now, that vote yesterday on repeal, and I mentioned to my family and some people around that I should have been euphoric and I should have been ready to dance the jig. Truthfully, it was satisfying; it was pleasing. I had a good feeling about what we had accomplished, but it is maybe similar to climbing a mountain, and when you get up there into the altitude and you have reached a place along the way to the summit and the altitude gets a little thin and the effort to get to that point is so great, that effort, that energy that it drains off also drains off some of the euphoria. And if you look up at the balance of that peak and you see you have to scale some pretty steep cliffs to get there, and even though you can see the path and you know you have the ability to do it, you don't feel that euphoria as you go up in the same way you might as you imagined the climb in the first place. And that is how it was here yesterday. You didn't hear a noise come up out of the Republicans on this side. We were respectful of people on the other side of the aisle. We have a legitimate disagreement and a difference of opinion. But the American people have spoken. They filled up this side of the aisle, and every Republican, every freshman that I know of ran on the repeal of ObamaCare. It was a big vote for them yesterday, and it is keeping faith with the American people. But the better way to describe this vote yesterday to repeal ObamaCare, I think, was described by Winston Churchill at the beginning of the Battle of Britain, and I should have checked the history book, but it was in the early part of World War II. Winston Churchill, speaking to brace up the British people in the war against the Nazis, said: ``Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.'' I think that is where we are in the repeal of ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning that we accomplished yesterday, and now we have a long, hard slog, to quote a previous Secretary of Defense whom I greatly respect, and that long, hard slog amounts to this: The resolution that passed today directs the committees to begin the project of writing replacement language, shaping bills and legislation for replacement language so that we can apply free-market ideals, constitutional ideals, protect the doctor-patient relationship so that we address the abusive lawsuits that are driving up the cost of health care, both in two forms: the cost of litigation and the money that goes to trial lawyers, as well as the cost of defensive medicine and unnecessary tests as doctors try to avoid and minimize the potential for lawsuits. Actually, there is a hearing going on in the Judiciary Committee that I left to come over here to deliver this message, Mr. Speaker. We will do all of those things, and the work has started here in the House. On top of that, though, we must, as the appropriations process unfolds, we must unfund ObamaCare. It is a constitutional method to put a stop to the development of authorized legislation. It would freeze in place the development of ObamaCare until such time as we can complete the repeal. Mr. Speaker, I am for and will work to put language in every appropriations bill that prohibits the use of those funds for the purposes of implementing or enforcing ObamaCare; and to do that on every appropriations bill, especially the bill that will come here near the end of February that is necessary to keep our government functioning beyond the expiration of the continuing resolution, which is March 4, coming up in a month and a half or a little better. We will put language in that continuing resolution that we likely will have to extend this funding. It doesn't have to be for the duration of the fiscal year. If it is for a month or 2 months or for the balance of the fiscal year until September 30, that is fine. But every appropriations bill must have the language in it that shuts off the implementation or the enforcement of ObamaCare and prohibits any funds that were heretofore appropriated from being used for the same. That is the language we need in each appropriations bill. If we do this, then the President of the United States will, at a certain point, need to sign an appropriations bill to keep the government funding. He will have to agree with the people of America and the voice of the House of Representatives. I also think he has to agree with what I believe is the majority in the United States Senate, Mr. Speaker. The majority leader in the Senate said that the bill is not coming up. The repeal of ObamaCare is not coming up in the Senate, that he will block it, that he won't bring it up. I think his job is to bring out the will of the Senate, to reflect the will of the Senate, because the people in the Senate are the representatives of the people of the United States of America. Every Senator over there would agree with me in this: Their constituents deserve every bit as much representation as Harry Reid's constituents do. When one Senator holds the rest of the Chamber up for his own personal will, for his own political agenda, and doesn't allow the will of the Senate to be reflected, that happens in certain leveraged positions over in the Senate, and the nuances of that are not something that I want to comment on. But I will comment on this tonight, Mr. Speaker, that I will challenge the majority leader in the Senate this: Put the repeal of ObamaCare up on the floor of the Senate for a vote. Give the American people a vote in the United States Senate. Let them hear where everyone of the United States Senators are. Put them on record. If they like ObamaCare so much, vote against the repeal. If you stand where I do, vote to repeal it. I predict that the majority votes are in the Senate today to pass the repeal of ObamaCare. Mr. Speaker, I believe the American people will put their request over to the United States Senate over and over and over again until that very hot potato, that very large, hot potato gets larger and hotter as it sits in the lap of the majority leader, Harry Reid, until such time as the American people get a vote in the United States Senate. Yes, I recognize that the President would veto such legislation. But we would then know--and we already know where every Member in the House of Representatives stands. We would then know where every Member in the United States Senate stands, and we would be able to see how much resolve the President has to protect his signature legislation, and whether he cares more about his signature piece of legislation that the American people have rejected than he does about the government of the United States and the broader well-being of the people and the security even of the United States, the functions of government. So I will go back again, Mr. Speaker, and say, reiterate, the strategy now is this: That this is not the end of our efforts to repeal ObamaCare. It is not even the beginning of the end of our efforts. And it is not the beginning of the end of ObamaCare. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. We launched this off yesterday and the day before. We had the vote that went up last night. Now we know that Republicans stand unified 100 percent in opposition to ObamaCare. And anybody who will vote to repeal ObamaCare also should be on good solid ground to vote to block any funding that would implement or enforce ObamaCare. That's the stand we need to take in every appropriations bill while the authorization committees work on the replacement policies, as is reflected by the resolution that passed here in the House of Representatives today. We have a large task in front of us. I am not daunted by the difficulty of it. I realize it will take a lot of energy and a lot of commitment over the next couple of years to finally accomplish the end of ObamaCare as we, Mr. Speaker, elect a President in 2012 who I hope and trust and believe will run on the ticket of plank number one in his platform, sign the repeal of ObamaCare. I look forward to that day, Mr. Speaker, when we see the effect of the resistance to the will of the people in the United States Senate. I believe that will put more ObamaCare opponents in the United States Senate during the 2012 election. I believe it will strengthen the ranks of ObamaCare opponents here in the House of Representatives in the 2012 election, and I think that it will also elect a President of the United States who will be taking the oath of office on the West Portico of the Capitol on January 20 in 2013. Mr. Speaker, here is the image I have in mind. First, earlier in January of 2013, the House will have to repass the final repeal of ObamaCare. The Senate then, I believe, will take it up and pass that repeal of ObamaCare. And send it where? Message it where? I hope we message it out to the podium on the West Portico of the Capitol for January 20, 2013, where I hope to be at a good vantage point where I can see the next President of the United States, and tell him, Take the oath of office with pen in hand, and take the oath this way, Mr. Speaker: ``I do solemnly swear to the best of my ability to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.'' Then, before that new President shakes hands with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I would like to see him take his hand down, with pen in it, and sign the repeal of ObamaCare right there during the swearing in ceremonies of the next President of the United States, which will set the tone for the new era that we will be working towards throughout 2011 and 2012. So, when the Sun comes up on the morning of January 21, 2013, we will be free at last from the burden of socialized medicine, and the freest people in the world will have rejected dependency, will have stood up for independence, and will have stood up for the vitality of the American people. That, Mr. Speaker, is the vision I have in mind, and I will work on that every day until that is accomplished. That is my pledge to you, Mr. Speaker, and the American people. It is my privilege to address you here on the floor, and I thank you. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. It is a pleasure to serve on this committee and come here and speak in support of the repeal of ObamaCare. It's something that I have worked on every day since it passed last March. It's legislation that I introduced, actually asked for the draft the same day that it passed. People thought that we couldn't get to this point. We are. But this is Judiciary Committee subject matter. And the bill didn't go through the Judiciary Committee. We didn't address the tort reform that's so essential if we're going to do something to put health care back on track here in this country. And when I look at this, and serving on the committee, I believe it was in 2005 we passed legislation in the House that addressed the lawsuit abuse that drives up the costs of our health care. It didn't get taken up in the Senate. And here we are with a huge ObamaCare bill, ready to vote to repeal it, and part of the discussion needs to be why didn't it have tort reform in it. We are prepared to take a look at this as we go forward. When I look at the numbers that are produced in part by the health insurance underwriters, they and others will tell me that somewhere between 3.5 and 8.5 percent of the overall cost of our health care goes because of lawsuit abuse and the defensive medicine that's associated with it. I have a friend who is an orthopedic surgeon who tells me that 95 percent of the MRIs that he orders, he knows exactly what he is going to see when he gets inside to do the surgery, but he has to order them anyway to protect himself from that 5 percent that might end up being in litigation. And he said that in his little practice that's an additional million dollars a year in unnecessary tests. That's just one small piece of the lawsuit abuse that drives up the costs of health care that we must address if we're going to have managed costs. And then the other component that is a Judiciary Committee component of this ObamaCare legislation that is about to have a vote on repeal here that we are debating is the components that are unconstitutional. The individual mandate is the most egregious component of ObamaCare that compels Americans to buy a policy produced or approved by the Federal Government.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the chairman for yielding time. I listened to this delivery ahead of me. I spent 28\1/2\ years in business. I met payroll for over 1,400 consecutive weeks. I never saw a regulation that made my job easier or allowed me to make more money. This is 2,400 pages of legislation. It's thousands more pages of regulation. It's oppressive to small business. It should be called the ``Entrepreneurial Extinction Act,'' not this health care plan. This is ObamaCare. It must be pulled out completely by the roots. The American people know this. That's why there are 87 freshman Republicans on this side and nine freshman Democrats on this side. The American people have spoken resoundingly. It is our obligation to go down this path. It's not symbolic. It's very important. Because without this vote on this floor, we can't move forward with the rest of the scenario to eliminate ObamaCare. The language in the bill is pretty simple, and it concludes with this language, ``act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such act are restored or revived as if such act had never been enacted.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I very much appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House in this leadership hour designated by the majority leader. There are a number of subjects I wanted to take up this afternoon, but I am first inspired by the statement made by the gentleman from Texas, Judge, Congressman, Mr. Poe, about Marine Mike Merola. This is one of these recurring stories that we hear across the country. Somebody that is an ACLU individual, somebody that thinks somehow they get indignant because there is something somewhere that would allow them to vent some of their prepackaged hyperventilation against patriotism or the truth or life or the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or American values or the values of Western Civilization or Judeo-Christianity, all those people out there are full of indignities. So an American flag and a marine flag offends somebody? I say tough. I am glad you are there. Fly that flag. Fly it proud and fly it long. I especially appreciate the statement made by Mr. Poe about the sound of that flag. My flag is on a flagpole about that same height, 20 foot. I step out my door in the morning, I check the wind and the weather and I look at that flag, and I listen to that sound. And there is times I am sitting there in the dark at night on my deck and I am hearing that flag from the light that shines on it around the corner just a little bit, and I hear that ripple of Old Glory. It gives me comfort and it gives me pride, and it reminds me of the privilege of serving here, anywhere you can serve Americans anywhere on this globe. I think of a time also on March 18, 2003, where I went out here to Pershing Park, this side of the White House, when there was an antiwar demonstration that took place. I actually walked around through the Mall, around the Washington Monument as they prepared their demonstration. I remember former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, standing on a little stage there with great big speakers calling for the impeachment of President Bush because it looked like there was an impending liberation of Iraq. And I saw a man there. Every kind of discontented, counter-cultural, anti-American group was represented in those thousands of people that came here that day. I saw the Japanese communist flag. I saw Vegetarians for Peace. I saw every counter-culturalist group you can imagine. And I saw a man there, an aging hippie. He had on a jacket. He was a photographer, you could tell, and he was taking pictures with great pride of this anti- Americanism. He reached in his pocket of his jacket, a worn leather jacket, and pulled out of his pocket a flag, an American flag, a silk American flag, a small flag, and he used it to wipe the lens of his camera. That is an image I will never forget. But no one stepped up to say he couldn't do that. Where were they then? Where were the critics of Mr. Merola then? When flags are used as grease rags to scrub the lens of a camera that is taking pictures of anti-Americans joined together to protest the saving of our freedom that Marine Merola has stepped up to defend. Those actions against him are offensive to me, and I say guard the flag, defend the flag, and I will stand with you, and I know Judge Poe will too. Thanks for bringing this up. I appreciate it, Judge. I came here to talk about a number of things tonight. One of them is the repeal of ObamaCare. Freedom-loving Americans fought this for a long time. It began to roll out at us in the summer of--I've got to roll my years back now--in the summer of 2008, when President Obama was elected. I should actually take you back through a little bit of this history, Mr. Speaker, because there's some of these components that the American people forget about. There was a relatively unknown State senator from Illinois named Barack Obama, and he gave a speech before a national convention of the Democratic Party. That elevated him into some level of national prominence. There were those that decided they wanted to move him forward to become President of the United States. Hillary Clinton also decided she wanted to be President of the United States. And these two found themselves--actually, after John Edwards, anyway--locking horns, the two of them, for the nomination of the Presidency of the United States under the Democrat Party. I know a little bit about this. Barack Obama's movement began in Iowa. He brought his people over from Chicago and they started a movement and they did battle with Hillary Clinton in Iowa. John Edwards was there, of course. That went on for 4 years. But we have to remember that here, in 1993 and 1994, when Bill Clinton was elected President, remember, he said you get at twofer--you get Hillary and you get Bill. Well, I wasn't all that happy getting Bill, let alone Hillary. But he assigned Hillary the job of writing a national health care act. And this was a complete takeover of our health care in the United States. Socialized medicine in an even purer form than ObamaCare is today. We watched as this unfolded and she set up closed-door meetings and they cooked up this bill. And I recall the flow chart of the HillaryCare bill. I had a laminated copy of it in my office, my construction office in Odebolt, Iowa. And it gives me chills to think yet about the expansion of government that emerged from the HillaryCare proposal. But we need to remember, Mr. Speaker, the relevant component of that is yes, a government takeover of health care that had been advanced and advocated in this country for quite a few years. But America's rejection of HillaryCare was resounding. And if Bill Clinton were going to maintain his capital as a President, they had to pull that bill down. The American people were against HillaryCare. I was against it. It actually animated me into getting engaged in politics. I do not think I would be here today if it weren't for Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton deciding they were going to step in and take our liberty. But, in any case, Hillary Clinton's credentials, now Secretary of State--and with all due respect, and I mean that honestly--her credentials on health care were greater than those of Barack Obama. He had to build himself foreign policy credentials and he had to build himself health care credentials. And so they turned the Presidential nomination debate into a health care debate, a health insurance debate. And as they battled their ideas out, they had to find ways that they could separate themselves from each other and still remain Democrats. And so we heard all kind of statements out of Barack Obama as he competed for credibility on the policy of health care. And in the process of doing that, they convinced the American people that they were in a health care crisis in America. They intentionally and willfully, and I'm talking about Democrats in general, conflated two terms. They ended up duping the American people. They conflated the term health care and the term health insurance, to the point now where, when we hear someone say health care, we don't know whether they're saying health insurance or whether it's actually taking care of someone's health. I recall then the newly elected Governor of Iowa, Chet Culver, now just voted out of office, came out here to the Capitol to sit down with the congressional delegation meeting, the Iowa congressional delegation. We sat in a conference room over in the Senate. And he said, There are 40,000 kids in Iowa that don't have health care. We've got to get them health care. And I looked at him and I said, Governor, I don't think that's true. I don't think there are any kids in Iowa that don't have health care. Could you give me an example of a child in Iowa that doesn't have health care. Well, no, he couldn't do that. Neither could he actually even tell me that he really meant health insurance. I had to feed that line to him so he could understand the difference. It was so embedded in his head that health care and health insurance, the conflated terms, could be used interchangeably. Mr. Speaker, if people are having trouble understanding this, I'd use another example of conflated terms--the difference between immigrant and illegal immigrant. I was asked earlier today what do I have to say about people that accuse me of being anti-immigrant. I said, That's offensive. There isn't anybody in this entire Congress that's anti- immigrant. And the reporter stopped. Well, what kind of a statement is that? Surely there are. I said, No, there isn't anybody in this entire United States Congress that's anti-legal immigrant. Everybody I know in here--and there's a new class I don't know that, but I suspect they'd fit the same mold--everybody I know in here is supportive of legal immigrants. We cheer them. We're proud of them. When they take the oath of naturalization, I often go and give a little speech and welcome them to being citizens of the United States of America. It is a proud time. I present them Constitution, and I sign. I want them to revere it the way I do, the way many of us do. But they have conflated the term ``immigrant'' with ``illegal immigrant'' and then they have the audacity to accuse people of being anti-immigrant, when everybody I know is pro-immigrant--pro-legal immigrant. And everybody in here ought to be anti-illegal immigrant. But that's how they use the language to distort the argument and get people confused on where they stand on the issue. So they did that with health care and health insurance. And when Barack Obama was establishing his credentials on health care, they began to convince the American people that we had 47 million people in this country that are uninsured. Well, that actually may be true. It may have been true. And you can start down through the list of 47 million and start to subtract from that the numbers that are here that are here illegally. That's at least 12 million, 12.1 million. I believe it's more than 20 million, but I'll take the 12 million. And I have to guess at the totals here because it's been a little while since I've run through these. But, generally speaking, you take 47 million that are listed as uninsured by the Democrats and you subtract from that those that are here illegally, those that qualify for Medicaid but don't bother to sign up, those that make over $75,000 a year and presumably could provide their own health insurance, those that qualify under their employer but have turned down that opportunity for that health insurance. And when you get done subtracting those that do have options, including affordable options, and you narrow the 47 million down to those who do not have their own health insurance policy and do not have affordable options, that's 12 million. That's actually the 12.1 million number I reached to remember. That's less than 4 percent of the United States population without their own health insurance policy and without an affordable option. Less than 4 percent. What percent of the health care industry did they want to take over in order to address that less than 4 percent, those 12.1 million? A hundred percent. Barack Obama proposed to take over 100 percent of our health care industry in America in order to get at those less than 4 percent that are uninsured, without an affordable option. He told us--remember these things--We're in an economic crisis. We're in an economic crisis, and we can't fix this economic crisis--Barack Obama--unless we first fix health care. And how do we do that? Well, the argument against it by him, and Hillary Clinton as well: We spend too much money on health care. What's their solution? Spend a lot more. Throw a trillion dollars at health care. He also argued that if you like your policy, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, can you keep him. And when he said it, he knew that that commitment could not be kept. You can't keep your health insurance policy if the policy doesn't exist any longer. You can't keep your health insurance policy if the company doesn't exist any longer. The President said we needed to have more competition in the health insurance industry. The demagoguery's been going on here for the last couple of days about not turning over this country to the health insurance companies, again who get accused of being vipers. Well, they're in a free market system. They need to be able to compete against each other. The President wants to have--and was not successful in this component--wants to have a Federal health insurance policy, a program, to compete against the health insurance companies. He argued that there needed to be more competition in the health insurance industry. And so, what does he do? He wants to have the Federal Government do that. Does the President even know how many health insurance companies we have or had at the passage of ObamaCare? Probably not. He's probably not watching C-SPAN right now, Mr. Speaker, but if any of his staff are out there, I can tell you what that number was: 1,300 health insurance companies in America. 1,300 companies competing against each other. Not all of them against each other, not one competing against all the other 1,299, because there's a McCarran-Ferguson Act that allows the States to protect the insurance companies within their States and set up monopolies or quasi-monopolies within the States. I think we should repeal that. If we repeal that, we will allow then people to buy insurance across State lines, and we would instantly put those 1,300 health insurance companies in competition with each other. That would achieve the goal to lower the costs and increase the options and provide for people to have more choices themselves, and it would help sustain the doctor- patient relationship at the same time. Mr. Speaker, of the 1,300 health insurance companies, how many policy varieties existed a year ago? 100,000 health insurance policy varieties existed a year ago. That's not enough competition--1,300 companies and 100,000 policies? The President wanted a new Federal company to compete against them. Now, that's because he understands this pattern. We've seen this pattern happen several times in the past. It happened most recently with the Student Loan Program. The Federal Government took it all over. They started out with the argument that they needed to have another option--a public option--for school loans, student loans, so that they could provide a little more honest competition with the free market. What do we get out of George Miller, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid? We get the complete takeover of the Student Loan Program over a little period of time. A great, giant leap came down this hallway in a reconciliation package from the Senate, actually threaded right into this ObamaCare bill. What's another pattern? There was a time--let's just say, oh, at about the time of the Bay of Pigs--when the Federal Government wasn't engaged in flood insurance. All of the property and casualty flood insurance in America was privately provided in the marketplace. We know what free enterprise does. If there is a demand, somebody will come up with a business idea to supply that demand. That was going on in the early part of the 1960s until the Federal Government decided that, really, they needed to get in and compete with that a little bit, so they set up the Federal Flood Insurance Program. So what did they do? They drove out all of the private sector competition. Today, if you're worried about your house being flooded or your factory being flooded, you have to buy flood insurance from the Federal Government. In order for them to compete with the private market, they passed legislation that, if there were a real estate loan from a Federal bank, they were compelled to buy flood insurance. So they wired in a customer base; they set the premium rates, and they drove everybody out of the flood insurance industry. While all that's going on, what do we get out of that? We get a Federal Flood Insurance Program that's $19.2 billion in the red and no private sector competition whatsoever and no way to judge, actually, the risk because the industry hasn't developed. You know what government does: it atrophies. Anybody who doesn't have competition atrophies. They don't develop the technology. They don't develop the new approaches and the innovative ways to market, and they don't streamline. They don't have to find savings. They just raise fees or borrow money from a general fund. That's where the $19.2 billion came from. Then, of course, that's the American people going into debt for $19.2 billion. Why? Because the Federal Government decided they wanted to go in and provide a little competition so that they could keep the private sector flood insurance industry honest because the people who passed that are not free market personnel. They are anti-capitalists. They are not capitalists. They are not free enterprise people. So we have some of the pattern that's there. We've got the flood insurance pattern. We've got the pattern of the student loan program. Then we have the pattern of the President wanting to step in and drive out the competition in the health insurance industry. The American people have watched that component. They've watched the statements about: you can keep your health insurance policy. If you like your policy, you can keep it. Yet the Federal Government under ObamaCare regulates every single health insurance policy, and they will decide which policies you can keep and which policies are banned by regulations to be written later by a gentleman by the name of Berwick, who believes that we should ration health care and not spend money on the lives of people who may be at the end of their lives. Now, Sarah Palin called that ``death panels.'' If you have to put something down in a Twitter that explains it all, I think she did that. We've seen the manifestation of that out of the Obama administration--with his appointments, with the actions, with their taking the initiative to want to pay doctors to counsel people to accept death when there is medicine there that may save them or extend their lives. I don't think that's the business of the Federal Government to pay people to counsel others to die quicker. That's what turns out of that policy, and I'm glad that they rescinded it. I am hopeful that it isn't something that creeps back again, but if you've got a Dr. Donald Berwick there, it is going to creep back on us. That's his philosophy. He is there for a reason. ObamaCare cannot be allowed to stay in this code. It must go. It has got to be repealed, and we are about to do that. The first legislative steps on this took place yesterday with the rules debate upstairs--hours of debate on the rule, on how this debate would go on. We debated the rule here on the floor today, and it passed. The chairman of the Rules Committee, Mr. Dreier, did an outstanding job of ushering this all through; and he has been useful, I think, in also negotiating the types of language that allow for a legitimate debate on the floor of the House--far more legitimate than the debate that actually crammed ObamaCare down the throats of the American people. So, Mr. Speaker, I come here to celebrate the opportunity to begin taking back a significant measure of American liberty, that is, the repeal of ObamaCare--pulling it out by the roots lock, stock and barrel. We must pull it all out, and we can't leave one visage of it in. This ObamaCare the American people understand. They diagnosed it. They looked at it. They felt it and they ran the tests on it. They began to find out what was in it. Remember Speaker Pelosi saying we have to pass this bill in order to find out what's in it? Well, there is actually some truth in that because no matter how brilliant people are, no matter what their experience, there is not one person alive who could have shut themselves up in a room for I don't care how long they would want--a week, a month, a day, or a year--and read through those 2,500 pages of ObamaCare and actually understand each component of it and do an analysis and be able to comprehend the implications of that monstrosity that has now become the albatross around the neck of the President and the Democrat Party in the United States of America. No, no one could understand it. It is that complicated; but over time, we began to see the implications. Republicans predicted many of the implications that were in the bill. We pointed to a lot of the parts of it that were bad; but there wasn't time, and there weren't enough people and enough voices to raise all of the issues that are bad about something of this nature. When you take away people's liberty, that is a big deal, Mr. Speaker--when you take away the right of people to buy a health insurance policy of their choice. No matter what money they have, no matter what their health, you have to buy a health insurance policy that is approved by Uncle Sam. Now, I kind of like Uncle Sam. I like his image. I like his colors-- red, white and blue--but I don't like the tarnished image that he was given by ObamaCare. I don't like the idea of besmirching the memory of Madison and Washington and Franklin and Jefferson. I don't like the idea that these God-given rights that we have, that clearly our Founding Fathers defined with precision that do come from God, can be besmirched and can take away the freedom of a freedom-loving people. But the American people don't like it either. The American people rose up, Mr. Speaker. Those who argued that they wanted to offer a whole series of amendments on the repeal of ObamaCare said it's not an open rule; it's not an open process, that they want to come down here and be able to offer amendment after amendment under an open rule. Then they think that somehow, by doing so, they can perfect a bad piece of legislation. Well, in their piece of legislation, even they can only name four things that they are willing to defend in 2,500 pages. Of course, they'll demagogue us on every single one of those. The four things that they defend are: Preexisting conditions language. Republicans will address preexisting conditions, not with socialized medicine, but with a practical, constitutional, free market approach. That's fine. We need to have that debate and advance that kind of policy, and that has been part of our agenda all along, for several years now. That's the first one. The second one is they claim they closed the doughnut hole. Well, I thought the doughnut hole was a bad idea in 2003. It was there because of the constraint in the funding that was available; but they closed the doughnut hole by increasing fees and taxing others, and low-income people are already exempt from it. So it isn't of significance from a policy standpoint. It is philosophically and politically, and so they make their second argument, doughnut hole. Third one is they think that something that we just couldn't do without, that should take us all down because we're willing to repeal the idea that insurance policies must all have a Federal mandate in them that your children shall stay on there until they're 26 years old. Now, I'm astonished by this. I'm astonished that Republicans would think that's a good idea. I can actually name you two Republicans that were elected to Congress at age 25. Now, I don't know what kind of pride they would have in their newfound adulthood to walk down the aisle, like they did here a couple of days ago to swear into the new 112th Congress, and up until the moment they take the oath of office, they're still on Mommy and Daddy's health insurance. Now, that's how bad this idea is that we would raise kids up and give them the keys to the car at age 16, and give them the right to vote and choose the next leader in the free world at age 18, and give them the right to drink at age 21, and keep them on Mom and Daddy's insurance until they're 26. Why? I wanted my kids to grow up. I announced to them when they were 18 that I'm now legally off the hook, guys. We nurtured you as long as we can. We're still doing that. We don't have to anymore. I'm so proud of what they've accomplished and what they've promised to accomplish, but I wanted my kids to grow up, and that should be our goal when we're raising them, not to keep them children forever, keep them on our insurance until age 26. To what purpose? Can't they defend themselves and find a way? And by the way, insurance companies, if there's a market for this, isn't there going to be a policy out there that you can buy, at your own choice, that will allow you to keep insurance on until your kids are 26? If there's a market for it, keep them on there until they're eligible for Medicare. It's all right if it's driven by the free market. It's actually constitutional if the States want to impose such a ridiculous mandate, but it's not constitutional and it's not all right if the Federal Government imposes such a thing because it raises the cost of everybody's premium, and it limits our choices and it taxes people that don't have any kids, people that are on individual policies. So there's three things in ObamaCare that they are proud of, and I'm not particularly proud of any of those three. Actually, the fourth one may come to me and I'll bring it up in a moment, Mr. Speaker, but here's another rub. ObamaCare wipes out more than half of the health savings accounts opportunity that's there. We established health savings accounts in part D in 2003. A young couple could start in today with $5,150 in their health savings account, and let's just say they got married--fell in love, got married, age 20. I can do the math, which is why I use the age 20, Mr. Speaker. And they maxed out on their health savings account at $5,150 that first year. It's adjusted for COLA, and so we go up, that amount would go up each year as they went through their happy married bliss for the next 45 years until they qualified for Medicare. Now, I'd like to see that expanded, but here's how this works. If you look historically back over the last 30 or 40 years, you will see that that type of an investment like an HSA would accrue at a 4 percent compounded interest rate, not over the last 2 or 3 but over the last 30 or 40. That's a reasonable number to predict. And so your couple that started with an HSA with $5,150 and deposited the max in it every year and spent $2,000 a year out for normal medical expenses would arrive at Medicare eligibility age with about $950,000 in their health savings account. Boy, what a glorious opportunity that is. The Federal Government's interested in that $950,000 because they want to tax it. They want to tax it as ordinary income when it's taken out of the health savings account if it's not used for health along the way. I suggest this. Why wouldn't we say to that couple, take the money that's in your health savings account, buy a Medicare replacement policy, a paid-up-for-life Medicare replacement policy--be worth about $72,000 per person at this point, so $144,000 out of this $950,000, and so you get what, $806,000 left over. That's the change. I would say to Americans who had that kind of responsibility and prudence, Keep the change. Take yourself off the Medicare entitlement rolls when you're eligible by buying a paid-up replacement policy, annuitized policy. Keep the change tax free. Travel the world. Will it to your kids. Do what you want to do. And if we do that, we turn health savings accounts into life management accounts, Mr. Speaker, these kind of accounts that young people would savor the day that they could start their account in their health savings account, and they would nurture it and protect it and want it built up to the point where it's 20, 30, 40, $50,000, $100,000. They would be there in this private market of insurance that we must preserve and protect--actually got to go back and restore it by repealing ObamaCare. They would be in that marketplace saying, I want a $10,000 deductible policy. I want a major medical deductible policy. I can have a higher copayment policy. I need lower premiums. I have the prospect of good health. I exercise. I watch my diet. I watch my weight. I get regular checkups, and so I'm willing to--and, in fact, it'd be prudent to have catastrophic policies with high deductibles and potentially a higher copayment for people who have the funds in their health savings accounts so that they are protected by insurance for its proper form. Insurance should not be for hangnails. It should not be for the little things. Insurance should be for the things that we can't fund ourselves. That's why it's there. It's protection so that you don't go broke when something catastrophic happens. We would have people not only managing their health; they'd be managing their health insurance premiums. They'd be advocating for lower premiums. They'd be saving more money in their health savings account, managing their health for a lifetime while their health savings account transitions into a pension plan. This is a full lifetime management account, and why can't we do that in the United States of America? These free people that we are, why can't we do that in the United States of America? Well, ObamaCare goes in and cuts out more than half of the amount that they can contribute into their health savings account because ObamaCare is about, yes, a Federal takeover of our health care, and a health insurance industry eventually, but it's about also expanding the dependency class in America. It's about causing people to give up on trying and taking care of themselves and just finally sighing and get in the herd with the rest of the sheep and go submit to the government- run health care plan. And when they tell you you can't have a test, then you don't go for a second opinion; you've already been trained to accept the rule of the State. So they either test you or they don't; they give you treatment or they don't. You can look up to Canada to see the waiting list times for hip replacements, knee replacements. One of those, I believe it's the knee replacement, is 194 days that you wait. The hip replacement then is three-hundred-and-some days. It's possible it's the other way around, but we're dealing with half a year or more, almost a year in waiting time. I remember a presentation that was given downstairs in HC-9 a year or so ago. A doctor from northern Michigan, Dr. Jansma as I recall, has written a book on this, but he went up across the border to work within the emergency room in a hospital in Canada, and he had done a lot of orthopaedic surgery. And there was an individual that tore up a leg playing ball, came in. He looked at it, diagnosed it. He needed to have surgery. He said, I can schedule you for surgery in the morning. We should move on this quickly. Well, the surgery couldn't be scheduled. He didn't know it at the time, but he didn't meet the government regulations. They had to go through and get another bureaucrat to approve it, and they had to wait to get it approved, and then they had to wait to schedule the surgery. This young man, in the prime of health, had a job, couldn't do it with his leg torn up. It took 6 months to schedule this young man to go before the specialist to do the secondary diagnosis to approve the need for the surgery so that they could rationalize spending taxpayer dollars to fix his leg. So it's going to be free health care up there, but you don't get it unless the right doctor, the one who's appointed by the State, approves the surgery. So from the day of the time his knee was torn up and they took him into the emergency room, they had to patch him up, put him on crutches, and he had to gimp around for 6 months with a torn-up knee to go in and have the government doctor look at his knee and approve that he needed surgery. Well, then you would think that that surgery might happen, oh, the next day like it would in America. But it didn't happen until another 6 months. Mr. Speaker, 6 months to wait for government approval for surgery that would have happened the next day in the United States of America with this doctor, another 6 months just to approve, then another 6 months to get the schedule to work through to get the knee surgery. And how much rehab does it take to put somebody back in shape after their leg is atrophied for a year and they have drug it around on crutches? So he's out of work for a year and a half. His productivity has been stopped. And additionally, his development professionally has been diminished substantially. This is the kind of thing that happens when government gets involved setting up formulas. It's what the people on that side of the aisle want to do. And that's why the roof caved in, and there was a cataclysmic electoral change that took place on November 2, the election when the American people said, Enough, enough to the ruling troika, the Obama, Pelosi, and Reid ruling troika. Enough to the liberty-stealing legislation that was coming out of this Congress one after another after another, with cap-and-trade and government takeover of businesses, and the government takeover of the health care industry, including their massive regulation of the health insurance industry. The American people rejected ObamaCare. The American people came to this city by the tens of thousands to protest against ObamaCare. The American people, for the first time, I believe, in the history of this country, came to this Capitol in such massive numbers that they not only crowded out here on the west lawn by the tens of thousands, there were so many people, they surrounded the Capitol. They formed a human chain to surround the Capitol and say, Keep your hands off of our health care. And it wasn't just a stretched human chain where people were barely hanging onto each other by their fingertips. They were six- and eight-deep all the way around the Capitol building saying, Keep your hands off our health care. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, and they were six and eight deep, a full doughnut. Talk about the doughnut hole. The Capitol of the United States of America was in the doughnut hole of the freedom-loving, constitutional, and conservative people who came here to reject ObamaCare, to petition the government peacefully for redress of grievances. That's what happened. And still, their hearts were hardened. Still, the regal Speaker Pelosi marched through the throngs with her magnum gavel in her ``let them eat cake'' moment, and still they don't get the message. We swore in 87 new freshmen Republicans here, nine freshman Democrats. The majority changes, every gavel changes hands in the entire Capitol. It's amazing. It's amazing that it's so hard for them to hear the message from the American people. Do they still have the level of arrogance? Is it still an intellectual elitism of liberalism, the leftists that think that they have apparently some kind of gift of intelligence that supersedes the common sense and the wisdom of the American people? I reject that. The American people rejected that. And we have 87 new faces over here that I believe are God's gift to America, Mr. Speaker. And I so look forward to the impact. We have already seen the impact. We have seen the impact in the rules package vote. We have seen the impact in the rules vote here today. And we'll see the impact on the repeal of ObamaCare on Wednesday after this rule that provides for--I guess I didn't keep it with me--but this rule that provides for I believe 7 hours of debate, 7 hours. Nancy Pelosi would give us an hour split, 30 minutes on each side, no amendments. Seven hours of debate, a debate on the rule, full debate up in the Rules Committee. And we are going to start this process of repealing ObamaCare. It began with the rules votes here yesterday in the Rules Committee and here on the floor today. We have begun the long, hard slog of the repeal of ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker. It is, I believe, a new precedent to see the American people rise up this instantaneously to reject a piece of legislation that was passed. I recall when it was passed here November 7 out of the House, it went back to be worked through the--let me say worked through the procedures. I withdrew that ``shenanigan'' word and replaced it with the ``procedures'' in the United States Senate. But in an unprecedented fashion, they put that legislation together in the Senate. And on Christmas Eve morning, they circumvented the filibuster, and they pushed through on a reconciliation package, they called it, a piece of legislation that had to come through to marry up with the House legislation in order to, some say in the press, ``buy the votes'' to get barely enough to pass ObamaCare here in the House. Well, that legislation, their version of ObamaCare, passed in the Senate on Christmas Eve morning. Around 9 o'clock was when they opened the vote. They had a chance procedurally--the Republicans did--to delay that vote until 9 o'clock Christmas Eve. I argued vociferously that they should use every procedural tool at their disposal to delay that vote to the maximum amount, and perhaps something would happen. Like what if a blizzard would have come along and shut this Capitol down, and they wouldn't have been able to put the votes together? Look how close that came, if you look back upon it. But in any case, when ObamaCare passed the Senate, I asked a question to one of the senior Senators over there who opposed ObamaCare, and did so well: What do we do now? What's our next step? We had 9 more hours we could have fought, or 12 more hours we could have fought. We didn't fight all 12 of those hours. What do we do next? His answer was, Well, we pray, and we pray for a victory in the special election in the Senate race in Massachusetts. Well, at that time, a lot of people in America didn't know the name Scott Brown, and I thought that that was a pretty big reach, to think we were going to put our stakes in saving America's liberty in a special election U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts. Massachusetts had a full, at the time, 100 percent congressional delegation of all Democrats, the strongest Democrat State in the Nation that I know of. So I thought it was a bit of a presumptuous thing to talk about asking the Lord to intervene in Massachusetts, which was the message that I got. But I took a look and I decided, that's our best chance. I ended up going to Massachusetts, and I spent 3 days there. On January 19, Scott Brown was elected to fill what's commonly known as ``the Kennedy seat'' in the United States Senate, from Massachusetts. He had pledged to vote ``no'' and kill ObamaCare. That made it the veto-proof Republican minority in the Senate. Most people thought on that night that ObamaCare was dead, and that was January 19 last year. Well, subsequent to that, the President held a health care summit at the Blair House February 25. That's where he identified his health care plan as ``ObamaCare.'' And in that health care summit, there were certain selected Republicans who were invited to sit with the Democrats around this big table. And there were rules. Of course the rules applied to people differently. The President interrupted Republicans 72 times. Somehow he got his mojo back. Somehow they put together this legal maneuvering to be able to bring legislation here and say they got it--and actually, they got it passed. I'm not taking that issue. The then-chair of the Rules Committee wanted to just deem ObamaCare passed because they didn't want to take a vote on it. They couldn't get the votes out of their own conference because there were 12 anonymous individuals in a list called the Stupak Dozen that would not vote for a bill that would use Federal funding for abortion. So they sat with their coalition. The President of the United States promised to sign an Executive order that they seemed to think would amend legislation after it passed the House. And even that wasn't enough. They had to have their reconciliation package out of the Senate that would be married up with and effectively amend some of the ObamaCare legislation itself. So, Mr. Speaker, the convolution of all of this, it was a legislative circus of every legislative shenanigan that I can think of to put this together in such a way that they finally got stuff to the President's desk signed in the proper sequence and order so that the attorneys and the constitutional scholars could look at that and say, Well, actually there is a piece of legislation that somebody's going to have to follow the direction of. So we had a Presidential Executive order that was designed to amend legislation passed by the people's House and the United States Senate that was promised before the legislation was presented to the floor as a condition of its passage here so they could get the votes from the Stupak Dozen and others. And there was a reconciliation package from the Senate that amended the legislation. They passed it out of the Senate before the legislation was brought before the House. When do you ever bring legislation that is designed to amend legislation that's not yet passed? You only do that if you don't have the support of the majority of the people in either body. And I will tell you this, Mr. Speaker: On the day ObamaCare passed, as stand-alone legislation, that big 2,500-page package, if there are no extraneous issues, like promises of Executive orders from the President or a reconciliation package in the Senate that amends it, if it was ObamaCare stand-alone, 2,500 pages dropped here in the House of Representatives for an up-or-down vote, anybody that was here, any student of what was here knows, Mr. Speaker, they did not have the majority votes to pass ObamaCare. It was done on the condition that the President would sign an executive order and the Senate reconciliation package would be brought in the form that they demanded it. So, we watch all this process and we think it's making sausage. You don't want to eat the sausage when you watch them make it. I'm happy to eat the sausage when they make it. I really don't want to eat this one. The American people didn't want to eat this one either. The American people rejected it. The American people brought their voice and their effort. And I went home that night, the last one to leave this Capitol. And I told myself I will lay down, and I'm going to sleep until I'm completely rested up, and I'll wake up fresh in the morning, and I'll retool, and I'll start a new plan and see what I can do to save America, see what I can do to save what's left of America, because our liberty had been ripped out. Our Constitution had been violated. And I knew the bill was going to be signed eagerly by President Obama, which he did on March 30. So I laid down and slept for about 2\1/2\ hours, and it was the sleep of the exhausted. And I woke up. I sat down at my computer and I wrote up a request for a bill to repeal ObamaCare. That bill draft request went in at the opening of business that following morning. It was waiting for them to unlock the doors, my staff was. And that request turned into a draft within a couple of hours, and got back into my hand, 40 words, 40 words. And those 40 words are included in this repeal that is coming, that is now before this House that will be debated on Wednesday of next week. I introduced those 40 words into the legislation and ironically, coincidentally and perhaps providentially, Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota was doing the same thing at perhaps the same time and put in a bill draft request almost simultaneously, and our bills came down within 3 minutes of each other, exactly the same 40 words that said the same thing: pull ObamaCare out by its roots. That's not the quote; that's the summary, Mr. Speaker. And, actually, I'm not going to summarize the bill this time. We don't have 2,500 pages in this repeal, but I would just say a few more words about that. We started then the repeal process within hours of the passage of ObamaCare and it being messaged to the President within hours. And people said, well, that's just throwing a tantrum. You're just frustrated. You've lost. Why can't you just pack up your things and move on? We've got to move on. Put that behind us. That debate's over with. Well, the debate's not over with when a Congress defies the will of the American people. And this Congress, the 111th Congress, the one just passed, defied the will of the American people. And the result was 87 new freshmen Republicans courageous, bold, principled, constitutional conservatives, young, vigorous, with ideology, driven people, statesmen and women in the group that will emerge as national leaders. I believe there's a Speaker in that class. I know there are committee chairs in that class. I believe there's a reasonable chance that there's a President of the United States in this class that was elected in 2010. There may be more than one. We have leaders there. They came to this Congress to repeal ObamaCare. And the filing of the repeal of ObamaCare on that late March day, that early morning of the late March day, started the process. The start of that process began within hours of the passage of ObamaCare and well before its actual signing into law, it was introduced before the President actually signed it into law to repeal it. And Michelle Bachmann and I and Connie Mack and, let me see, Parker Griffith, they come to mind as people that have introduced legislation to repeal, and we worked that together with many others. There wasn't hesitation. Republicans wanted to sign on to the repeal, and they did so quickly. And over a period of time, the numbers of signatures accumulated to about 86, and 86 were ready to sign for repeal. Then we decided, let's turn this into a discharge petition. Nancy Pelosi won't let this come forward until it does. So we did that. And I filed a discharge petition here on the floor, Mr. Speaker, and Members began to go down and sign the discharge petition. And the numbers of signatures went up on the discharge petition, when they said it was impossible to repeal ObamaCare, all the way up to 173; and it became bipartisan with the signature of Gene Taylor, whom, I believe, would have been re-elected to this Congress had he not voted for Nancy Pelosi. He did lose his election. And he served well here in this Congress. But the result of this is that the existence of the bill to repeal ObamaCare in the last Congress was inspiring to new candidates that ran for office. It was inspiring to their supporters. It was inspiring to their constituents and their voters. And the discharge petition, with 173 signatures said, Republicans have the resolve to repeal ObamaCare. Republicans have the resolve. And so the inspiration and the resolve, along with a fairly long list of anti-free market, anti-freedom things that took place out of the Pelosi Congress and the Obama administration, all contributed to give us the inertia to get to this point to where we are today. But the legislation that I introduced then, actually amended at the end of the last Congress because it needed to consider the reconciliation package that came from the Senate after the bill was passed. It wasn't possible for me to introduce legislation to repeal that because it hadn't passed. So packaged it up together and put that in as a squared away, on point, full 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare legislation that I introduced, again with Michelle Bachmann on the last day of the last Congress, and on the first day of this Congress. And that's the legislation, that's the language that is considered before this Congress and will be voted on Wednesday of next week and will result in the House repealing ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker. And so it's a 2,500-page bill. I wouldn't presume to come to the floor and read a 2,500-page bill, Mr. Speaker. But I would do this: I think it's a delightful experience to read a bill that's short and to the point. And this is H.R. 2; H.R. 2, the repeal of ObamaCare. And I'm going to just read this into the Record, Mr. Speaker, aside from the titles, just down to the meat of the bill. And it won't take very long. It's actually, altogether now, 131 words. But it reads this way: ``Effective as of the enactment of Public Law 111-148, such act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such act are restored or revived as if such act had not been enacted.'' Boy, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Now, that's just the first part. And it repealed, effective as of the enactment of the law, ObamaCare, such act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended are repealed by such act are restored or revived as if such act had not been enacted. It doesn't take a lot of complicated language to say pull it all out by the roots as if it had never been there. That's what we get with the repeal that's before us now that will be debated on and voted on Wednesday of next week. This is the language that I introduced long back when people said it's just a frustrating, political exercise. You will never repeal ObamaCare. You can't get a vote on ObamaCare, so why are you going through the motions? It's just a legislative tantrum. No, it's not. It's tangible. It's not a tantrum. It's tangible. It's here. It's here before us now. Here's the second component of it. This is the reconciliation package that couldn't be addressed on the day it passed but can now. It says this: ``Effective as of the enactment of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010,'' the Senate Reconciliation Act, ``Public Law 111-152, title I and subtitle B of title II of such act are repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such title or subtitle, respectively, are restored or revived as if such title and subtitle had not been enacted.'' Once again, the repetition of that language, for the two major components of ObamaCare now, they are repealed, and the provisions of law amended or restored by such title or subtitle, respectively, are restored or revived as if such title or subtitle had not been enacted. Well, isn't that refreshing, Mr. Speaker, that we have a piece of legislation here that's not 2,500 pages. It's not so long and complicated that we can't read it here on the floor. It's not so complicated that anybody that might be sitting in the gallery or watching on C-SPAN or might be reading through the Congressional Record can understand what is going on here. This is in the full light of day with the support of the American people. Sixty percent of the American people, according to a Rasmussen poll here sometime back, support the repeal of ObamaCare, as do I. And, Mr. Speaker, I look forward to the debate on Wednesday. I look forward to the vote going up on the board on Wednesday. I look forward to the beginning of the repeal of ObamaCare. The press asked me a question on that earlier today: If you pass the repeal of ObamaCare--we will pass the repeal of ObamaCare--is that the end? No. To reflect back on Winston Churchill, it's not the end. It's not even the beginning of the end of ObamaCare, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning of the end of ObamaCare. That's what I believe is coming. I heard the gentleman from Texas bring up Churchill when he said, ``sweat, blood, and tears.'' There are some people out there that bring some quotes to mind that stand out for me, and one of them is the Congressman from Indiana, Mike Pence. His statement on our persistence and due diligence in bringing about ObamaCare is this--and I wrote it down because it impressed me, not the words but the manner in which he says it. It is always superior to my delivery. But it is this, Mr. Speaker. Congressman Pence of Indiana said, if House Republicans got the message from the American people last November, ``we won't just vote once to repeal ObamaCare; we will vote to repeal ObamaCare again and again until we consign their government takeover of health care to the ash heap of history--where it belongs.'' Nice quote, Mike Pence. It sounds like Ronald Reagan to me. ``We will vote . . . again and again until we consign their government takeover of health care to the ash heap of history--where it belongs.'' I intend to stay with this with an even heightened level of persistence, Mr. Speaker, to bring about the final and complete repeal of ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, to be able to one day watch as the President of the United States, the next President probably, puts an end to ObamaCare. It will take persistence on our part. It will take determination. We will pass this out of the House. We can pass it again and again, send it over to the Senate where Harry Reid gets a hot potato on his lap that gets hotter and bigger each time. We have appropriations bills coming through here. We have a CR that ends March 4th, and everything that funds our government, we should put into that language that prohibits any of the dollars from being used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. We can shut off all of the implementation of ObamaCare. If this House stands resolute and determined, there is not a dime that can be spent by the Federal Government without our approval. So we can shut off the funding that implements or enforces ObamaCare, and we must. And we must stick with it. We must stick with it with the determination that comes from people like Mike Pence, with the tone that comes from Ronald Reagan that comes from his mouth, and I think the determination that comes from Winston Churchill. We will fight on this. We will fight until the end. We have the majority to start with now in the House. We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength, whatever the cost may be. We shall never surrender. We will carry on this struggle until, in God's good time, with all His power and might, He steps forth to the rescue and liberation of our God-given American liberty. That's what will happen in this Congress. The day will come, Mr. Speaker, that the next President of the United States, I pray, stands on the west portico of the Capitol here in this building down that hallway and off to the left to take the oath of office. And when the Chief Justice steps forward and he takes his oath on the Bible, I want to see that next President of the United States take that oath with pen in hand, Mr. Speaker, and I want him to take the oath, ``preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.'' And before he even shakes the hand of the Chief Justice to be congratulated as the next President of the United States, I want that pen in that hand to come down on the podium and sign into law the final repeal of ObamaCare as the first act of office of the next President of the United States, and I will support the man or woman that's willing to do that. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention and the honor to address you. 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. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I can tell you that I am pleased to address you, Mr. Speaker, here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and welcome you to this great deliberative body which becomes instantly far more deliberative than it has been over the last 4 years. This is part of it. As I deliberate and I listened to the gentleman from Tennessee, I have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the leader, or another Member, there is an opportunity to rise to a point of order, there is an opportunity to make a motion to take the gentleman's words down. However, many of the Members are off in other endeavors. I would make the point that the leader and the Speaker have established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this Congress, and I don't believe it can be effectively challenged, and those who do so actually cast aspersions on themselves for making wild accusations. I came to this floor, though, Mr. Speaker, to talk about the weather, and as I listened to the speeches that have gone on before in this previous half-hour or hour, it actually changed the subject for me. I think there are many things that need to be brought out and clarified, given this, that we have debated this health care bill. We debated this health care bill for, oh, close to a year. It was announced in Rules Committee earlier today that there were, I believe they said, 100 hours of markup in committee. Well, it wasn't the bill that passed. It was 100 hours of debate and markup on a different bill. They switched bills at the end. That's a matter of public record and fact, also. But the American public understands what happened. They understand that the Speaker of the House said, We have to pass the bill--meaning ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker--in order to find out what's in it. When that bill was passed, to set the record also straight, I don't think there is another time in the history of this Congress that there was a bill of this magnitude--in fact I'm certain there is not--that passed the House of Representatives without the majority support of the House of Representatives for the bill that was before us. It is a fact of record, it's a fact of judgment, it's a fact of history, that there had to be conditions that were attached in order to achieve the votes necessary to squeak that bill by and pass ObamaCare here in the House on that day last March. If people forget, Mr. Speaker, what I'm talking about, it's this: Remember, there was a switch on the bill. The bill that was marked up in committee is not the bill that came to the floor, not the bill that had hearings on it and had markup. But there were also conditions. We should remember there were the Stupak Dozen, the Stupak Dozen who said we insist that there be an amendment brought forward that will protect so that the language that's in the bill doesn't fund abortion through a Federal mandate. They held out on that to get that vote. Little did I know up until that Saturday afternoon that the gentleman who was doing the negotiating had already committed to vote for the bill, and the Stupak Dozen were anonymous people. Furthermore, they had negotiated with the President of the United States who made a commitment and followed through on it to sign an executive order that would pacify or mollify the anonymous Stupak Dozen under the presumption, unconstitutionally and completely outside the bounds of the separation of powers, that the President of the United States could effectively amend legislation by executive order and promise he's going to do so before the bill was even brought to the floor for a vote. That happened in this Congress. Another condition of that was, this is a condition that came after the then-chair of the Rules Committee, the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter), had offered the idea that they should just deem that the bill passed so they didn't have to go on record of voting for this bill; because they knew how bad it was. They knew how politically vulnerable they were. They knew that Speaker Pelosi was making many of them walk the plank. A lot of those people are not here in this 112th Congress because of that action. But as I talked about why this bill didn't have the support of the Congress and in the form that was before us, why the majority did not support it, the majority votes that day in its form, because there also had to be another deal on top of this. This was the deal that the Senate had to pass a reconciliation package which was designed to amend the bill that had not yet been brought to floor of the House for a vote. I don't know that it's the first time in history that there's been a shenanigan like that played, but it's the first time in my knowledge that there has been a bill certainly of that magnitude that came before this Congress that was not the bill that came through committee, that was pledged to be, I put it in quotes, amended by a Presidential executive order, and further amended by a reconciliation bill that would later pass the United States Senate. That's what we have before us with ObamaCare. And it became the law of the land on that date of March 30, 2010; passed over here in the House, if I remember correctly, on the late evening of March 21 or the early morning of March 22, Sunday night. I remember my long walk home that night. I remember telling myself, I'm going to sleep until I'm all rested up and then I'm going to wake up and figure out what to do. I didn't sleep very long. I couldn't sleep with that policy imposed upon the American people with the realization that it would become the law of the land. And about 2\1/2\ hours later, I got up and went to my word processor and typed up a request for a bill to repeal ObamaCare. I filed that request at the opening of business that day, the first opportunity in the first minutes of that day. I want to thank and congratulate Michele Bachmann. I didn't know it, she was awake in the middle of the night doing the same thing, and her bill draft came down within 3 minutes of mine, exactly the same words. That bill draft was turned into a discharge petition with this huge Pelosi majority in the 111th Congress, and the discharge petition gathered 173 signatures, bipartisan by the Pelosi definition at least, Mr. Speaker. And that was part of the foundation that I think actually did shake this country. There was a statement made in the Rules Committee when they were deliberating on the rule for H.R. 2 that we had said that the sky would fall if ObamaCare became the law of the land, and they said the sky didn't fall. Well, Chairman Upton, now chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said, yes, it did. The sky did fall. When you look at the 87 freshmen new Republicans that are seated over on this side, the nine freshmen Democrats on this side, I think that any political pundit would tell you there was a political earthquake in America that was brought about in large part by the imposition of this liberty-stealing unconstitutional ObamaCare bill that is before this Congress now. This Congress was elected to come here and repeal ObamaCare, get a handle on the debt and the deficit and lay the foundation so that private enterprise can start to have faith in the future of this country again and they can create the jobs under the framework that we are hopeful we will be able to bring through. But we are truthfully not in a position yet where the House of Representatives can lay all of the economic foundation that is necessary for free enterprise to have enough faith and confidence to invest our capital in a robust fashion. What we are in a position to do now with a new Congress and a new Speaker is to be able to play an effective defense against the existing majority in the United States Senate and the President of the United States, who has frantically been digging holes through his Keynesian economics-on-steroids theory and dug such a deep hole that we have watched Nancy Pelosi preside over an additional $5.2 trillion in debt, and we have watched the Obama administration run that up under their term of only a couple of years of about $3 trillion. And it has got to stop. The American people did this. They were looking at President Gulliver Obama, and they were the Lilliputians that came to the polls on November 2 and tied him up with all their little electoral ropes and said to the new freshmen class, join those incumbent Republicans that are there and any discerning Democrats that are willing to join, and there will be some join on this vote tomorrow and on Wednesday to repeal ObamaCare, and take the shovel out of the hands of the President and certainly take the gavel out of the hand of Nancy Pelosi. That is what happened. Now, I take you back through this history, because it is being rewritten again. How can they go before the Rules Committee, stand here on the floor of the House before the American people, Mr. Speaker, and take the position that somehow if they just explain it one more time and one more way, that the American people will now have some left-wing light bulb come on in their head? It is not going to happen. The American people have seen clearly. They washed the lenses off and they have looked down through the lens of the Constitution and fiscal responsibility and common sense and they were appalled at that liberty- stealing bill of ObamaCare, and they said repeal that monstrosity, because the destiny of America will be forever diminished unless we do. This is the charge that this new Congress has. It is the voice of the American people, and it is the respect that we must have, and my gratitude for God's gift to America, the freshman class that was elected in 2010 and sworn in here right here on this floor yesterday afternoon, and they will affect the agenda of this country for many Congresses to come; and it will be a responsible agenda that brings us to a balanced budget and begins to reduce the deficit that this country has, not just the deficit spending, but reduce the national debt. We must get to the point where we can begin to pay down the national debt, and we start with this Congress. We start by rolling back the spending to 2008 levels. We started here today with a vote that cut our own budgets by 5 percent. It is not a lot of money; and, yes, it is symbolic, but it is the symbolism that compels us to follow through. If it is good enough now for those of us in this Congress that voted on that, it is also good enough to bring that policy back through the United States of America. Well, so what I have heard is the Members on the other side of the aisle that still stand here and defend ObamaCare, the ones that are left, they have four talking points about the bill that they think are compelling, and they must believe that it offsets all of the horrible things about ObamaCare. First they say that, well, remember, the President had all of these promises about what he was going to do with ObamaCare. And he is the first one that I know of that attached the word ``ObamaCare'' to it in a public way. It was at the Blair House during the health care summit, February 25, 2010, when the President of the United States referred to his own bill as ObamaCare. So that is the shorthand version for all this long thing. They don't want to say ObamaCare. I don't know why. That is how everybody knows it, and that is how everybody understands it. So under ObamaCare, they say there are four--they don't list only four, they just give you the four--four redeeming components to ObamaCare that apparently offset all the horrible things about it, and these four redeeming conditions are these: That it requires insurance companies all across America with a Federal mandate to provide for policies that must keep your children on there up until age 26. They think that is something that America has fallen in love with as a really good brainy solution. Now, I know there are Republicans that support the idea of insurance policies being extended to age 26; but, Mr. Speaker, what a lot of people don't know in this country is there are at least two Members in this Congress that were elected before age 26, and had ObamaCare been implemented before they were elected to office, they would have, could have, been on their parents' health insurance plan. Now, isn't that a nice thing, when you wean them off of their parents' health insurance plan and you transition them over and put a pin on their lapel and say, now, run the country. They haven't had a single minute of their own health insurance policy until we get here, and actually we have a responsibility for it here. We pay our chunk of the premiums, like any other Federal employee. But I just think it is ironic that there would be such a strong argument that people elected to Congress could come here, walk in that door, come down here before the Speaker's rostrum, raise their hand and take the oath of office, and at that moment still be on their mommy and daddy's health insurance policy. I wanted my kids to grow up. When they turned 18, I told them my responsibilities are now done. I am going to nurture you and give you advice and counsel you, and I will help you where I can. But I am not obligated, guys. We did our best for the first 18 years. We will do our best for every year. We will love you all our lives, but you got to start pulling your own load. Now I look at three grown sons in their thirties, all married, five grandkids, each an entrepreneur in their own right, pulling their own load, and I am glad that they didn't have to stay unweaned until age 26. But if the insurance companies want to do that, you should be able to buy the policy. If States want to mandate, I think it is not a good policy, but they can do so constitutionally, and then if a person is tired of paying those kind of premiums, you can move to another State and vote with your feet. There are some States in the Union here that I would move out of because I can't afford the health insurance in them. There are other States one could think about moving to because of the opposite. Here is the second point: preexisting conditions. They always tie this preexisting conditions in with the word ``discrimination'' because it is like a civil rights code word. So if an insurance company says I don't want to provide insurance policies to people who have preexisting conditions who wait until they get sick before they buy a policy, the health insurance purchasing equivalent of waiting for your house to be on fire before you go buy property and casualty insurance, how many rational people, Mr. Speaker, in this country, would make the case that we ought to have a guaranteed issue for our fire insurance on our house? Couldn't we then just, you know, set up our little BlackBerry with an automatic send and wait for the fire alarm to go off, and on the way down the steps to bail out of the burning house, you just click ``send,'' and automatically they have to give you a policy so that your house could be rebuilt if it is on fire. We wouldn't do that. It is ridiculous because it defeats the logic of insurance. The logic of insurance is you want to be insured against a catastrophe, and you want to share that risk with other people who want to be insured against a catastrophe. It is true for fire insurance, it was true for flood insurance until the Federal Government took it over, and it needs to be true with health insurance. But we will address preexisting conditions; and we will have a legitimate debate on preexisting conditions here in this Congress, in committee hearings, before committees, amendments offered, amendments allowed and amendments offered and debated and voted up and down. My position is that if the States want to prohibit the consideration of preexisting conditions, they may do so. Our State has a high-risk pool, and we fund part of those premiums with the high-risk pool out of the State treasury. I think that's a good idea. I have worked to develop that and expand that in my time in the State legislature. I think it's worthy of consideration that the Federal Government could take a look at those State high-risk pools and find ways to help those States provide those kind of backstops because there will always be people that are unfortunate. It won't always just be those that are irresponsible. There are also those that are unfortunate. And so we need to take that into consideration. But to have the whole debate about just those that are unfortunate and not take into consideration those that are responsible, those that are taxpayers, those that are funding, those that are the engine of our economy that are being discouraged by these kind of Big Government, socialized medicine, unconstitutional policies like ObamaCare. Here's the third one. A 26-year-old with insurance, preexisting conditions. Oh, yes, the discriminatory preexisting conditions policy. It's not discriminatory. It's logical and rational. Would you say that it's a discriminatory policy to not allow people to buy property and casualty insurance if their house is on fire? It's not discrimination. It defies common sense. So I'm not going to let them get by with that word. Here's a another thing, though. Doughnut hole. They say they fixed the doughnut hole and we would unfix the doughnut hole. The truth is that low-income people have that fix. There is a backstop for that doughnut hole. It's not the hole that they say it is. Furthermore, they raise fees elsewhere to fill the doughnut hole. So it's not fixed. It's just another transfer. So some people are beneficiaries and other people pay the extra money. I am not particularly animated about that, although I thought we should not have had that doughnut hole created here in 2003. In any case, their next argument is against lifetime caps. If States want to provide lifetime caps, let them do that. But if individuals want to buy policies that have lifetime caps because the premiums are lower, let them make that decision as well, Mr. Speaker. But I envision the day that we have free markets that are engaged in this. We want to preserve the doctor-patient relationship. We want to preserve the free market effect of this so that when people make decisions about their health and their lives, they have some tools to work with. I want to be able to in this Congress, this 112th Congress, advance the idea and seek to pass legislation that's pretty consistent with Chairman Dreier's. I would expand it a little more. He's advanced the medical savings accounts. I would add we need to advance health savings accounts, HSAs. In 2003, with the expansion of part D, we put language in that established HSAs, health savings accounts. It allowed in the first year for a couple to establish a health savings account with a maximum amount in it of $5,150, indexed for inflation so it could grow. I don't remember what those numbers are today, but that's the calculus, from $5,150 on up. Well, that's a good deal. ObamaCare slashed that in less than half and capped the HSA maximum amount at $2,500. Why? Because they don't want people to be independent, and they don't want them to be able to make their own decisions. If they do that, then they might undermine this effort of expanding the dependency class in America, which is what ObamaCare is designed to do, because expanding the dependency class expands the Democrat Party, and that increases the political base. And it seems illogical to the people. Well, there's the logic I've just applied to it, and now, Mr. Speaker, they do understand that this is about politics. It's about expanding the dependency class. And it's about diminishing the independence and the spirit of Americans. And so the lifetime caps piece is the fourth one. Twenty-six year olds, preexisting conditions, doughnut hole, lifetime caps. That's the things they talk about. Four things. That's it? Do they redeem those 2,500 pages of disaster? Do they then overrule and trump the Constitution of the United States of America? I say no, Mr. Speaker. They cannot, they must not, they should not. And I hear this debate also about an increase in our deficit of the number, I think it was $232 billion, if--not if anymore, it's when--we repeal ObamaCare. Well, that deficit, and they want to know, Will you offset that deficit with spending cuts? Yes, sir. We will be happy to offset a deficit with spending cuts. But I would make this argument instead. When you have an unconstitutional bill in front of you, and if you're weighing $232 billion and you want to debate whether or not that's a reason or not to repeal an unconstitutional bill. You can set no price on the Constitution of the United States of America. If it's a trillion dollars, you repeal the bill anyway because it's unconstitutional. And you don't sit back and twiddle your thumbs and wait for the court to resolve this for you. I'm glad that there's litigation going on in the judicial branch. I'm glad that Judge Hudson found with Virginia on the constitutional component of the Interstate Commerce Clause. I'm glad there are efforts out there in the States to deny the implementation of ObamaCare. All of these things going on. But we took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States here yesterday. We took it all in good faith. We said so. And when we have an unconstitutional bill before us, Mr. Speaker, it is our obligation to repeal that bill. Our judgment of the Constitution is not a judgment that defers across and down the line of Independence Avenue. We don't go to the Supreme Court and genuflect and say, If you change the meaning of the Constitution, my oath applies. Our oath applies to our understanding and conviction of the text in the original understanding of the Constitution and the various amendments as they were adopted. That's what the Constitution has to mean or it is no guarantee whatsoever to the people in this country. They rose up and they changed this majority in this House, and they did so because they're a whole group of millions of constitutional conservatives, including the Tea Party groups, and they said, Enough unconstitutional activity, enough of this theft of our liberty. We are not going to pass the debt and deficit on to the succeeding generations. And it was $230 billion was the point, not $232 billion, to make it accurate. But I noticed today in the Republican Study Committee that chairman Jim Jordan read from an article written by Tony Blankley in The Washington Times, December 20, 2010. And it caught my ear. And so I looked it up. And I'd like to just close with this concept that was delivered by Tony Blankley shortly before Christmas this year. He wrote about an experience in China and how they were worried that if they don't keep the growth going in China that they will create expectations and the peasants in China will be unruleable. If you give them expectations, then you have to meet those expectations. Well, we in America, we trust in our expectations. And so he writes this. He said what happened on November 2, was that the American people went to the polls and said, I want more liberty and less government. I want more liberty and less security about my future. And he puts it in these words. And I think they're excellent words. No other people in the world would have responded to economic danger by seeking more liberty and less government protection. No other people would have thought to themselves, if I have to suffer economically in order to not steal from my grandchildren, so be it. I pray we would have come to that decision a generation ago instead of a couple of months ago, Mr. Speaker. But this Congress has come to that decision at the direction and the effectiveness of the American people. And we will follow through on that pledge, and we'll ask them, Keep sending us more people like this freshman class to help get this job done so that in our time we can hand the keys of this Chamber and this government over to the next generation in sound fiscal fashion, sound constitutional fashion, not with diminished liberty, but with expanded liberty, and the pillars of American exceptionalism refurbished by our generation, thanks to the will of the American people.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it's always a privilege and an honor to address here on the floor of the House. And we're in the waning days, waning hours perhaps, of this 111th Congress as many are prepared to go home for Christmas, and by the count of the votes on the board tonight, some have gone home for Christmas. And I listened to the remarks of the gentleman from Colorado who spoke ahead of me, and I'm not of the spirit to directly rebut each of the points that he's made. I want to stay within the Christmas spirit here tonight, Madam Speaker, and simply address that there is another viewpoint, and that other viewpoint was heard. We have, over the last 4 years in this Congress, seen significant majorities for Democrats, and there were opportunities for Democrats to seek to pass their immigration legislation which they constantly refer to as comprehensive immigration reform. And that has become what the American people understand; comprehensive immigration reform is a euphemism for amnesty. And even though there were opportunities along the way over the last 4 years under the Pelosi speakership, there hasn't been a significant piece of their version of immigration reform that's passed. And, of course, neither has there been a significant piece of immigration enforcement that has passed, especially over the last 2 years with President Obama in the White House, having made those promises that he would be supporting and working towards the passage of some type of comprehensive immigration reform. And as we saw the majority shift here in the House of Representatives dramatically, where we have 96 new freshmen coming in, 87 of them are Republicans. And I don't think there's anyone out there that looks at the results of the election and believes that this House of Representatives is going to be persuaded by emotional arguments. The incoming House of Representatives, with the 87 Republican freshmen that are coming in and swearing in here on January 5, I believe, will be a Congress that sets the rule of law in very high respect and is not as swayed by individual anecdotes and more concerned about the empirical data and what really happens to a country over the long term that doesn't enforce its laws. That's what I think we can expect to come. I am the ranking member of the immigration subcommittee, and on that committee, over the last 2 years, with Chair Lofgren chairing that subcommittee, there have only been eight hearings in 2 years on immigration. That's fine with me because the agenda that they would have driven would have been, I think, an agenda that I would have opposed. But nonetheless, those eight hearings that have been held, only eight in 2 years, four hearings a year, that's all the activity that's really measurable in the immigration subcommittee. And so I think when the gentleman from Colorado makes his case, I think it's heartfelt, and I think he is deeply convinced that it's the right policy and agenda for America. As we move close to Christmastime, knowledge that he has is a viewpoint, and I think he'd acknowledge that I have mine. I will stand up, Madam Speaker, for the rule of law. And the implications of what goes along with the very well named but not very good policy DREAM Act, I think, became more and more aware to the American people. And as they spoke and weighed in and made their calls in the Senate, then this project, this vote that was held in the Senate failed. And when it did, that's the end of it for the 111th Congress. And it's pretty unlikely that it will be the beginning of it in the 112th Congress as the Congress is configured. And so, from my standpoint, I'm looking forward to the work that we must do and the work that we must do to address the immigration issue coming forward. There is something that I think is a bipartisan interest to us though, Madam Speaker, and that is, I hear on both sides of the aisle, and I began to hear this about 6 years ago, the concern about how employers were victimizing employees who were unlawfully here in the United States, working unlawfully in the United States. So I began to look at how can we address this in a bipartisan way. And even though it seems as though the Obama administration and Janet Napolitano included are unwilling to enforce immigration law against employees, they are willing to enforce it against employers. Note some of the enforcement action that has gone in and just gathered the information from the illegal employees, but not brought charges against them, nor started deportation, but brought just the charges against the employer instead. So I looked at this situation a few years ago and put together a proposal, and this proposal takes into account the Democrat viewpoint, the Republican viewpoint. Both of us are opposed, I believe, in principle, to employers victimizing employees, of them flouting the law and capitalizing on the cheaper labor that they are able to hire and compete against their competitors who would be complying with the law. And also it recognizes that this Federal Government has found itself sometimes where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. And sometimes the agencies within the government are working at cross-purposes to each other. One of those examples would be a Social Security Administration that deals with millions and millions of no-match Social Security numbers or Social Security reports that are duplicated multiple times, the same Social Security number used multiple times, maybe all across the country where we know it's impossible to be in two jobs at the same place at the same time. The Social Security Administration seems to turn a blind eye towards the implications of the illegal employment and the fraudulent documents that are used for people to work unlawfully in the United States because often those claims on the Social Security trust fund aren't ever filed. People are walking away from it. If they are working illegally in the United States, often those illegal workers will claim the maximum number of dependents so their withholding on their State and Federal income tax is zero. But they pay the payroll tax, the Social Security, the Medicare, and the Medicaid because they really have no choice with that. But then they aren't going to be in a position to tap into that as an illegal worker in America. So the duplications that go on and the money that flows into the Social Security trust fund, a significant amount of that is rooted in illegal labor. Social Security trust fund, happy enough getting those extra revenues coming in, and the Department of Homeland Security seems to want to secure some of the areas that are their due, but not reach out and actually put together a network that would address this thing in a broader holistic way. So I was looking at that thinking, which agency actually does an effective job of enforcing the laws that they have and which one is most respected by the American people? And as I cast my mind across these agencies, it came to the IRS. The IRS has the respect of every taxpayer in America. They don't want to be audited. They fear an audit. Was it 58 percent of the people would rather have a root canal than an IRS audit? Root canals may or may not be all that painful, but that's one of the measures that came out in one of the pollster's numbers, 58 percent would rather have a root canal than be audited by the IRS. I would be among them. I would rather have the tooth pulled myself. But the IRS does an effective job of enforcing the law, and they do an effective job of going down through a person's books and accounting and coming up with flaws that are there. So I put together a proposal, and it's called the New IDEA Act. The New IDEA. New IDEA stands for the New, and the acronym IDEA is Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. What it does is it clarifies that wages and benefits are not tax-deductible for Federal income tax purposes if they are going to an illegal employee. And it gives the employer safe harbor if that employer uses E-Verify. So if the employer in their hiring of employees runs the Social Security numbers, the identification information that's on the I-9 form into E-Verify, and it comes back and they only hire those employees that clear through E-Verify, then we give them safe harbor. But if they have employees that are on the list, the Social Security numbers will be on the tax form when the IRS comes in to do a normal audit. We don't accelerate the audits, just a normal audit. The IRS would then punch the Social Security numbers of those employees that are on the tax form into E-Verify; and if it comes back they are all lawful to work in the United States, no problem. If it bounces back that some of them cannot be confirmed to work lawfully in the United States, we give the employer time to cure, the employee time to cure. And if the employer uses E-Verify, again they have safe harbor. But the IRS then can conclude that the wages and benefits have been paid to illegals, and therefore those wages and benefits are not tax deductible. What that does then is it kicks that business discount, the schedule C business expense, over onto the profit column. When it does that, it makes that income, and the income then is taxable for interest and penalty. And so the net result will be roughly this: if an employer is hiring illegals roughly at say $10 an hour, and I can do the math on this, Madam Speaker, and the IRS comes in and does the audit and concludes that an employee is illegal at $10 an hour, by time the tax that's applied to that as a business income as opposed to an expense, and the interest and the penalty is applied, the $10 an hour illegal employee becomes about a $16 an hour illegal employee, causing the employer to make the rational decision with their capital, and that is clean up their workforce before the IRS shows up. There is a 6-year statute of limitations. It's cumulative. The clock would start to tick on that when the bill would become law. And then over a course of 6 years, there would be a cumulative 6-year statute of limitations. That means that employers the first year would see 1 year of exposure, second year 2, obviously, on up until 6 years. And the greater the exposure, the greater the risk and the liability and the greater the incentive to clean up their workforce as they move forward. But it doesn't pull the plug on anyone. It's not a dramatic change. It is a business incentive plan that I think will move thousands of employers into the legal employment business. And today it's New IDEA Act, it's H.R. 3580. And I believe it will become, in the upcoming Congress, the most useful and effective piece of immigration legislation that this Congress may consider. And it's likely to be referred to the Ways and Means Committee because there are tax components to it. And I look forward to working with people to get the cosponsorships on the bill and work it through the process and earn a hearing and perhaps earn a markup, and one day see it go over to the Senate, where I would be glad if they would take it up and onto the President's desk. It's something that should have bipartisan support again, Madam Speaker. H.R. 3580 the New IDEA Act, the IRS coming in. By the way, the bill also requires the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security to put together a cooperative team so that they are sharing information so that when the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, we put them together and require that they cooperate with each other so that the right hand and the left hand and the middle hand of the IRS, Social Security Administration, and Department of Homeland Security all know what each other is doing, all are cooperating towards a common goal of cleaning up the illegal workforce in America through the New IDEA Act. And I think that that has some promise and an opportunity to one day become law in this Congress. And I intend to work it pretty hard. That's something that I think can be proactive. Now, I wanted to speak, though, as I came here tonight, Madam Speaker, I wanted to address the situation of a lame duck session. A lame duck session, this lame duck session has been full of all kinds of issues that I think didn't have any business being in the lame duck session. A lame duck session is, of course, for those listening in, it's the session of Congress that takes place after the election. So the election took place November 2, and there was a dramatic shift in seats here in this Congress. And as in a shift in power, all the gavels are changing hands going over from Democrats to Republicans, including the Speaker's gavel. And this will happen on January 5 of this upcoming year, not very far from now. And as that happens and this dramatic shift is taking place, it's because the people in America have spoken. The people in America have spoken up, and they have said, we want to change course. They watched President Obama digging this hole economically, socially, I think a radical social agenda, I think a radical economic agenda, foreign policy agenda that I don't quite have a theme figured out for. But the President's agenda, the agenda of Speaker Pelosi, the agenda of Harry Reid, the American people said, Stop, you have been digging a hole. Been digging a deep hole with roughly $3 trillion in spending that's over and above what would be normal spending here in this Congress. And the American people went to the polls November 2, and they took the shovel out of the hands of President Obama by means of shifting the majority here in the House of Representatives and changing the gavels from the hands of Democrats into the hands of Republicans. When the people of America say stop, it's enough, the people that are serving in this Congress in this lame duck session, this session between November 2, the election, and January 5, which is the swearing- in of the new Congress, the people serving in this Congress need to understand when the American people said enough, that's too much, stop, this Congress needed to respect the will of the American people and stop. Stop digging, stop moving the radical social agenda. In fact, stop moving the radical socialist agenda. Harry Reid should stop, Speaker Pelosi should stop, Barack Obama should stop, and this Congress should have only dealt with those issues that were necessary to keep this government functioning in its proper fashion between November 2nd and January 5th. This Congress could have passed a simple continuing resolution like this House did today that would have bridged the gap through November, December, maybe even January and February, but have gotten a smooth transition over into the next Congress, a respect for the voice and the will of the American people, as Republicans essentially did in the year 2006, respected the will of the American people. This has not been to be. One radical thing after another. Don't Ask, Don't Tell comes through here on the floor. That is a piece of policy that had all the last 2 years to be brought forward, if that was the will of the majority. But the majority was afraid of the wrath of the American voters. They were afraid of the wrath of the American voters, so they didn't bring a budget. It is required by statute. Since 1974, the first time this Congress hasn't passed a budget, the House of Representatives since 1974. It didn't happen this year. The process was shut down, Madam Speaker, so that first the thing that went away was the open rule that allowed any Member to offer an amendment on an appropriations bill that could cut spending down or plus spending up and make some reasonable changes within the germaneness rules of the policy of the appropriations rules. But that was shut down in the second year of the Pelosi speakership. And then there were the appropriations bills themselves shut down, and they began to run this government on continuing resolutions, omnibus spending bills. The omnibus spending bill that was brought up in the United States Senate, $1.72 trillion, full of pork, chuck full of earmarks, 6,600 earmarks, pork that just dripped with fat in the United States Senate. And the American people finally rose up and they let the Senators know it is no longer going to be business as usual. The American people have risen. They have packed this Capitol with tens of thousands of people, and they come with their American flags, their yellow Gadsden flags, the Don't Tread on Me flags, Constitutions in their pockets, patriotism on their heart, tears in their eyes at what they see is happening in this country. The American people have done everything that you could ask them to do in a constitutional fashion. The American people have peacefully petitioned the government for redress of grievances. It is constitutional. And, Madam Speaker, this Congress' heart was hardened. They refused to listen to the American people. They rammed through out of this House the cap-and-tax bill, cap-and-trade some call it, a debilitating bill that punishes American industry and American investment and American entrepreneurs and rewards other countries, puts us at a disadvantage with emerging economies such as India and China. It passed the House and not the Senate, thankfully. I am thankful for the filibuster that exists in the United States Senate. There is a complaint that it has been used too much and that something needs to be done to put an end to the filibuster or to alter it. Well, I would submit, Madam Speaker, that the reason the filibuster has been used this much is because of the radical agenda that has been driven through the Senate, promoted by the President, promoted by the Speaker of the House and driven and managed by Harry Reid, the majority leader in the United States Senate, who looks like he will stay as majority leader in the United States Senate. Cap-and-tax out of this House floor. ObamaCare. We watched the President come in and nationalize the banks, the insurance companies, the car companies, Fannie and Freddie, the student loans. All of that swallowed up, 33 percent of the formerly private sector economy swallowed up by the Federal Government. And then ObamaCare, the nationalization of our skin and everything inside of it. The American people came and surrounded this Capitol. Not one deep with arms stretched out as far as they could go, six and eight deep all the way around the Capitol. We don't have a picture of that because of air security, or there would have been news helicopters up above taking shots of the human ring, six and eight deep all the way around the Capitol that was formed to tell this Congress stop. Stop. You are spending too much. You are taking away our liberty. You are passing legislation that is unconstitutional, or at a minimum constitutionally suspect. All of that taking place before the election. And then at the election, the American people poured forth and filled up the voting booth and put their mark down on their ballots, no, no, no, no, to the radical social leftist agenda that has been driven through this Congress, and that message should have been heard loud and clear before the stroke of midnight on the 2nd of November. And the new day comes forward, the new day came forward and we see nothing but dig in, drive that agenda and drive that agenda. I, Madam Speaker, am here to speak up against it, and I am hopeful that in any succeeding lame duck session that we have, whether it would be Republicans in the majority or Democrats in the majority, that we respect the will of the American people and stand down and bridge the gap between the election in November and the new Congress in the early part of January with just the minimum amount of legislation necessary to make that transition. If the majority holds the same and there is work that needs to be done and not very many seats have changed dramatically, then in that case it is a little bit different question. But when the majority changes and the majority changes dramatically, as it did this time in a way more dramatic than 1994 even and as dramatic as going back to 1948 and another previous election, then no. There have only been three or four times in American history that this Congress turned around the way it turned around this time, and at no time to my knowledge has there been such an aggressive agenda driven in a lameduck session, including the idea of taking up a treaty in the United States Senate. I don't believe that has ever been done. So, Madam Speaker, we have had the food safety bill today, the food safety bill that is a $1.3 billion bill or $1.4 billion bill that is another big reach in government that brings in about 17,000 new government employees and inspectors. We have the safest food in the world, and we need an army of 17,000 additional inspectors so that we can satisfy the urge to expand the nanny-state? It is the only reason I can think of that we would have a policy like that. The safest food in the world and the largest army to inspect the food, and now out of the House goes the food safety bill, another irresponsible safety and growth in government and unnecessary solution in search of a problem, Madam Speaker. Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, one of the few policies that Bill Clinton endorsed that I thought was a good policy that actually was working. Another solution in search of a problem. It is a political agenda. It is a social experiment in our military. Our military needs to be able to fight. We need to listen to them. And when we hear the modified positions of our top military officers, one can only suspect that it is a possibility they are taking orders from the commander-in-chief. How about that. What would that mean, if a multiple-star general was taking orders from the commander-in-chief and decided that he would have a position on Don't Ask, Don't Tell that was less clear than it might have been 2 or 4 years ago? The passage of ObamaCare, as I mentioned, is another piece that came along in this past year, although not in a lameduck session. I look forward, Madam Speaker, to the repeal of ObamaCare as it passed here in late March of this year, late into the night. I was the last one to leave the Capitol here at night, which isn't new, but it happened that night, I am confident. As I walked home, I told myself, I am going to lay down and rest. I am exhausted. I spent weeks fighting this with everything that I have. And the rest didn't last very long. After about 2\1/2\ hours I was up thinking about what can we do? It is extraordinarily unusual to have a piece of legislation, especially a high-profile, hard-fought piece of legislation like ObamaCare, extraordinarily unusual to ever see anyone introduce legislation to repeal the legislation that has just passed. But I got up and I drafted a bill draft request to do just that, to repeal ObamaCare. And, curiously, without coordination, the same thing was going on in the office of Michele Bachmann, and our bill drafts came down within 3 minutes of each other. Identically, the same 40 words that conclude with words pretty close to this: Repeal ObamaCare--a little more language--as if it had never been enacted. That's the quote, ``as if it had never been enacted.'' That's a pretty complete way of talking about repealing a piece of legislation. There were those that thought that it was just an act of protest, an act of frustration. They maybe thought that neither one of us were enough of a statesman that we could accept losing on a vote like that and walk away and fight on another issue another day. But, truthfully, it was simultaneously coming to the same conclusion, the same conclusion that America cannot reach the next level of its destiny if ObamaCare is going to be a component of that destiny because it ties us down, because it anchors us, because it takes away and diminishes our options as individuals, because it mandates that we buy insurance. There are, I think, four constitutional violations in ObamaCare itself, and some of that is in the middle of being litigated right now. The commerce clause is the clearest and easiest one, and I am happy to see the decision by Judge Hudson in upholding the suit that was brought by Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia, and others. And I look forward to the decisions that will unfold from the Florida suit. And it looks like about 25 States have joined in this litigation in one form or another. And I'm hopeful that when our new Governor in Iowa is sworn in, that one of the first acts in office he will have is that Governor Branstad will join in the litigation against ObamaCare in whatever capacity he is able to do that. There are three ways to undo ObamaCare, Madam Speaker, and one of them is through the courts and every means of litigation at our disposal, and that path is following pretty well. But we learned--we knew this actually going in, but it was very clear--McCain-Feingold was one of those examples, a piece of legislation that perhaps was signed by the President in anticipation that the courts would overturn it. I don't know that. I just say perhaps. But anybody that believed that the court was going to save us was disappointed in the short term and mildly pleased in the longer term. But one should never vote for and never sign a piece of legislation that they believe will be unconstitutional because that leaves it up to the courts to do the job that we need to be doing as a legislature. However, I believe the litigation needs to go forward on ObamaCare and that if the courts finally find all components of it unconstitutional, we can at that point perhaps wash our hands of it and we should pass, then, a repeal to get it out of the books so it's not sitting there waiting to be litigated again. But I'm looking at the courts for relief--short-term relief, injunctive relief--and I'm hopeful that all of ObamaCare will be ripped out by the court. I believe that it has enough unconstitutional components and no severability clause, so that would tell me there's a possibility that it all could be removed by its violations of our Constitution. That's one of the ways to address the repeal of ObamaCare. Another way is for our States, our Governors, to refuse to implement ObamaCare and to refuse to invest those State tax dollars in the high cost of increasing Medicaid that it imposes on the State and essentially throw a wrench in the works and resist the administration's determination to implement ObamaCare, and do that from all of our Governors' offices across the country where we have people that oppose it. That's another component of this opposition that can be effective. The third one, and the one that's the most essential and the one that, if it's completed, is the most certain is a statutory legislative repeal of ObamaCare. Since the tax bracket bill came through last week that extended the 2001 and 2003 tax brackets for 2 years that provided for a $5 million exemption for the estate tax and a 35 percent rate, fixed a few other things and caused a lot of other problems, but since that tax bill went through and there's an agreement that's made on it for 2 years, then I'll submit, Madam Speaker, that the most important piece of legislation that the new Congress can take up, and I'm hopeful that incoming Speaker Boehner will elect to make H.R. 1 the first piece of legislation here in the House of Representatives, H.R. 1, the standalone repeal of ObamaCare, a 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare; legislation that would stand on its own, that would be very clear, that would put up a vote in this House that would allow for a full repeal of ObamaCare in H.R. 1. Just to put a marker down and declare the approach that I support, since I have taken this issue on in a personal way and filed a discharge petition where I have 173 signatures on that discharge petition, I thought it was important that I articulate the legislation that I would like to see come forward in the 112th Congress. And in my consultation with Congressman Herger of California, I looked into the language that he put together after I had introduced the repeal language, and he did so after the reconciliation package that came from the Senate. There were two pieces of legislation that came together to make up ObamaCare. One was the bill itself, and the other one was a reconciliation package that passed several weeks later. That reconciliation package needed to be included. So I added the component of the Herger legislation repeal to the repeal language that I've introduced and the same repeal language that I added that Michelle Bachmann introduced. And she and I filed that bill last Friday, just to add some clarity and unity to the language we support for the repeal of ObamaCare, with the complete agreement of Congressman Herger from California, who agrees with the language and encouraged me to file the bill. So that's there as a marker, so anyone that wants to take a look at it and see what it is that we want to repeal, it's ObamaCare; it's the reconciliation package that came from the Senate. They did that in order to circumvent the filibuster. I thought that it was legislative sleight-of-hand myself. And that's what we got. I'm committed to the full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. I believe that our leadership is committed to the full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. And yes, there will be a lot of different ways to look at this strategically. But to march down through this beyond the repeal piece of legislation, which I anticipate will be very early in the new Congress, my proposal is that we shut off spending in every appropriations bill; that we put language in every appropriations bill that no funds and no funds heretofore appropriated shall be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. If we do that with all the appropriations bills going through the 2011 calendar year, the 2012 calendar year, by the time we arrive at the Presidential election in November of 2012, it will be pretty clear that ObamaCare has not been implemented, it has not been enforced, none of the dollars would be allowed to be used for that. And I'm hopeful that we will elect a President who runs on the ticket and calls for the mandate from the American people that the first order of business for the next President of the United States who would be inaugurated on January 20, 2013, would be to have Congress put on his desk the repeal of ObamaCare and sign that as a first order of business as the next President of the United States. That's the goal. It can be done. It isn't a futile effort. I've had some people say, Well, why do you think you can repeal ObamaCare? The President would veto it as soon as you pass the legislation. In the first place, if the House passes the repeal of ObamaCare, there's no agreement the Senate would take it up. But surely, they're not going to take it up unless we send it over there. So we need to pass the repeal, send it to the Senate, build the pressure so that they can perhaps find a way to take it up in the Senate. If they do so and the repeal of ObamaCare gets passed by both Chambers in the same form and it goes to the President, yes, I, like every other thinking American, would expect President Obama to veto such legislation, but we would have people on record. We would have an agenda that would be laid out. And that lays the foundation to unfund ObamaCare, and it lays the foundation then to take us to the point where we can elect a President who will sign the repeal. That's the strategy. It needs to be done. If the American people are going to reach the next level of our destiny, we cannot have ObamaCare as an anchor that's tied around our leg that continuously sinks the entrepreneurs, sinks the small businesses, grows the taxes, creates lines, rations care, prohibits us from buying the insurance policies of our choice. The list goes on. Mr. Speaker, I am well aware of the time of the season that we have here, and I am thinking about the families of all of those who are on their way home tonight and of those who will be on their way home tomorrow and perhaps the next day. All the staff that works here in this Congress and the people who are here as this team is tonight, recording every word that comes from any Member of Congress and who are in the middle of this debate constantly, making sure that everything is precisely, accurately quoted and coordinated in this Congressional Record, are top-notch and the envy of the world. Of the team that is here, many of them I have worked with for years, and I don't know if they're Democrats or Republicans. I know that they respect the institution and the people who serve here. I appreciate them, and wish all of them a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year. While I look around at my colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, and know some of their families and our staff from our offices, who toil sometimes in oblivion, I think of all of that contribution that's there, and I am grateful for them all. I also cast my mind's eye overseas to some of the places that I have gone to visit our troops and our personnel. It just so happens that, a little over a year ago, I missed a family event that was of high importance to us because of duty here, and even though there were quite a number of calls expressing sympathy for that, a month later, I found myself in Afghanistan. As I was seated in a late-night briefing, one of the generals--and I probably asked one too many questions, and got a little bit close to the personal side. He will know who he is, but I won't utter his name into this Record, although I have great respect for him as a patriot, as a warrior and as a servant for America. He said, though, in that night conversation in Afghanistan, I was deployed when they served divorce papers on me from my first wife, and I started a new family. I have a girl and a boy. My little boy is 5 years old, and I have been deployed for three of his first five Christmases. I sat there and listened to that, and it had been about a month since I had missed a very, very important family event in my own family. I listened to that officer tell me of being deployed when he received divorce papers, of being deployed for three of his son's first five Christmases. I think he is deployed right now. I think about the men and women who put on the uniform and who are deployed in harm's way around the world in Iraq, Afghanistan and in other places around the world. I was watching as the USS Harry Truman docked here in the last day or so. The sailors who got off of that ship were seeing babies born, their children born--babies they had never seen since they were born. Little babies were put in their arms. They'd kiss their wives quickly and pick up and marvel at a little miracle that would be 2 or 3 or 6 months old who they had never seen. Their own child. They weren't home for the birth of the child. They missed weddings. They missed funerals. They got back when they could, but they were deployed; they were at sea. They were serving America. That's true on the USS Harry Truman. That's true in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and other places around the world where we have our men and women in uniform--our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines--in harm's way every day, at risk of death, at risk of sacrifice, some losing their lives. While all of this is going on, sometimes we get wrapped up here, and we think ours is a sacrifice. Well, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that ours is a duty and a service and a privilege and an honor, and sometimes it is a sacrifice; but when we think about our sacrifice here, I ask all to think about the sacrifice over there, which is far greater--far more family time lost and missed, moments that will never be recaptured again, limbs lost, and lives lost . . . never to come back again. So, with all of that in mind and with the Christmas season upon us, I would like to close with a poem that was written by the greatest respecter of our warriors in this Capitol building--Albert Caswell--who can be seen around this Capitol, giving tours to the wounded on a daily basis with eagerness and enthusiasm and a profound respect for those who have served us so well and especially for those who have been wounded and for those who have been lost. Sometimes he sits up in the middle of the night and will write a poem. I think he gets started, and he can't stop until he finishes it and brings it to a conclusion. This is a poem that he wrote just a few days ago. It's called ``This Christmas.'' ``This Christmas . . . ``As the snow falls to the ground . . . ``And all the children dance, with songs of joy so all around . . . ``With stockings hung by the chimneys with care . . . ``With hopes and dreams, of Santa there . . . ``With Christmas dinners and fires all aglow, as before this family a feast lies so . . . ``'O Holy Night! A Child was born, for all to know!' ``Joy to the world, let Heaven and nature sing, but remember . . . remember . . . remember all of them, and all of those . . . ``Those families! Those patriots of peace! ``The ones, who'll this Christmas . . . will not so together be!! ``Who upon battlefields of honor fight! ``So far away from our country tis of thee, this night . . . ``Men and women of such honor bright, who for all of us so carry that fight . . . ``Why there can be peace on Earth, because of their light! ``Who now so live with such heartache and death . . . ``Who upon each new day, their honor our lives so bless! ``As they so bless us one and all, with all of their gifts of most selfless sacrifice . . . ``And all of those lost loved ones, who lie in soft, quiet, cold graves . . . ``Teaching us all the true cost, the price of freedom paid! ``Precious daughters and sons, husbands and wives . . . ``Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers who gave their lives . . . ``That last full measure . . . as for them we cry! ``Whose loved ones' pain, will never die . . . ``Who on this Christmas morning, sit with but tears in eyes . . . ``As they listen to their children cry, 'Mommy, Daddy . . . I wish you were by my side.' ``With one less place at the dinner table this year . . . they all so begin to cry . . . ``And all of those who have come home, without arms and legs, who did not die! ``Without eyes and faces, with burned in all places . . . in hospital beds they try!! ``Blessing us all with their fine gifts they gave! ``Making us all so see, just how magnificent and inspiriting a heart can be! ``And remember all of those, whose loved ones lie far across the shores . . . ``As with each new day, brings such great worry . . . so for sure! ``But, waiting . . . but waiting for, that knock on the door . . . ``That phone call, that they now so pray not for . . . ``Quiet heroes, one and all! ``Watching them from Heaven, the angel's teardrops fall . . . ``Lord God, Lord God . . . bless them . . . bless them all! ``For these are the families, who have paid the cost! ``Bore the burden, carry that cross, that cross of war! ``This Christmas, as you hold your families tight . . . ``And all seems so fine, and all seems so very right . . . ``And you see all of those smiles upon your children's faces, so bright . . . ``Give thanks! Give praise! As upon your knees as you begin to pray . . . ``For all of those families, who have so sacrificed . . . ``And remember their blessings, their gifts of freedom . . . this night! ``This Christmas . . . '' Mr. Speaker, I wish all of us a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. May we reconvene in the 112th Congress with a new spirit--a spirit that keeps in mind the price and the sacrifice paid by our veterans and our families that support them, the legacy that they have left for us, the duty that we have to honor their sacrifice. May we come back and join together in that task in January of 2011. May we go home and give great thanks for their sacrifice and the blessing of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Missouri for bringing his insight here to the floor of the House so many nights in a row when others might decide to call it a day. There are Americans that are lying awake that are worrying and concerned about what happens here in this United States Congress, this great deliberative body, and the future and the destiny of this country established here often on the floor of the House of Representatives, and that's why every word that's spoken by the gentleman from Missouri and others is essential and it contributes to the direction that America takes. And as I listened to the gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Akin, present this very cogent and factual presentation here tonight with the charts to back it up, and I remember my good friend from Minnesota, Congressman Gil Gutknecht, who used to say that if you have a chart to back it up you're 40 percent more believable. And of course I don't know how you improve upon being completely believable, which is the case with the gentleman from Missouri. But I was inspired as I listened to the gentleman's discussion about the estate tax and what happens, and I think it's so important that we think about the function of tax policies. And I listen to the class envy on the other side of the aisle. And there are many over there that are steeped in class envy and think that if a person works their entire life and compiles enough money to be worthy of the trouble of the tax man stepping in and taking a chunk of it, as much as they can get, that somehow there's a justice at the end of the generation to take the earnings of that generation and spread it out amongst the other people instead of allowing it to go to the next generation. And I think about my ancestors that came across the prairie in a covered wagon. I think about my great-grandfather who arrived here from Germany on March 26, 1894, and he had four or five of his children with him, and the balance of his nine children were born here in the United States, the ones that survived. And his dream was to be able to homestead, buy and build a farm for each of those children, nine children that reached maturity. And he bought nine quarter sections of land, 160 acres each, and that's what it took to support a family. You need to raise, oh, six, seven, eight, nine or ten kids on 160 acres. And he had a diversified farming operation that had a few milk cows, some sows. He raised some corn and later on some soybeans and some oats and some hay ground, and everybody went to work and they built their future and their destiny on that land. And the dream was: Can we hand that land over to the next generation? Can we take this unit and deliver it to the next generation? And his dream, with nine children, buying those nine quarter sections of land was, if he could set each of them up on 160 acres of land that they would inherit from him, that if they took care of the land, they took care of the livestock, it would all take care of them, and they could raise their children, and the next generation could go build upon the equity that was earned in his generation.

Mr. KING of Iowa. And if I would say that if he was sitting in Germany in 1893 planning his trip here in 1894, thinking he was faced with tax policy that would confiscate his life's earnings and pass it back to the government and distribute it to the people that were not engaged in the free enterprise--

Mr. KING of Iowa. Or 55 percent. Even if the ball drops at Times Square and we don't get this thing resolved, taking away half of what he'd earned in his lifetime, he would have not had that dream. He's unlikely to have even come to the United States. But he's really unlikely to have bought those nine quarter sections of land, because he would know that before he could hand it off to the next generation, the tax man would come in and swallow up half of it. And so here's the scenario. I mean, unfortunately for my great- grandfather, he lost all of that land when the stock market crashed in 1929. He didn't lament that. He'd engaged in free enterprise, capitalism, and commerce, and it didn't work out for him. The timing was wrong, and he lived the rest of his life in Pierson, Iowa, a lonely man in a tiny little house. But he had the dream. He had the chance to access the dream. And it didn't work out for him, but his children received the vision of his dream and they went to work and they built, and they raised their children with the same dream that brought him here to the United States. And so I think today, even though it hasn't worked out for my family in the way that it was envisioned, and there isn't wealth on either side of my family that counts as taxable in the estate tax configuration, no matter what it is, it inspired them nonetheless. They worked nonetheless. They invested capital anyway, and they went to work. And so--

Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, in the succeeding generations, the dream was passed on even though the equity was not, because they didn't build the equity but the dream was there. The obligation and the duty and the appreciation for America embracing my ancestors coming here was passed on to me, and it said stand up for this United States of America, this free enterprise dream. And today, the families that it's worked out for, those who have made that investment, that hung on to that land, that spent two or three generations or more building a family farm--and let's say now, today, it's not 160 acres that it takes to sustain a family but 1,000 or 1,500 acres that it takes to sustain a family. And that's more accurate. Let's just say that that unit that was put together, two sections of land now, 640 acres a section, 1,280 acres altogether.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, and I would ask the gentleman from Missouri if he would mind sticking around here for a seamless transition into this dialogue. And I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. It is always my privilege. And I would pick this narrative up where it was left off in the transition component of it, and where I was, with 1,288 acres now required to sustain a unit of operation, that would be these acres, and a home place that was built with grain storage and transfer equipment and livestock facilities and those things that make it a system and a unit. Maybe some rented land out there, some rented pasture, some hay ground, some rented crop ground that keeps this system that is a viable and effective unit. And now, let's imagine that.

Mr. KING of Iowa. And let's say five kids. That is a good number. Five kids, and they are raised on this farm. Now, two sections of land, paid for, and the 90-year-old patriarch of this family has reached the end of his life and he is watching how his life's work that is the legacy of his predecessors, the life's work of almost a century of his memory adding all up to this point where, if he passes away in the first minute of next year, the taxman hovers over the death bed and reaches in and pulls out, aside from the $1 million exemption, 55 percent of the asset value. That means that half of the land that has been accumulated goes to pay the taxman. The other half of that land, the five children that would inherit the balance of what is left, would have a 20 percent equity share in the land that is left, 20 percent equity share in 45 percent, roughly, of what was left. None of those children then, on that basis, have enough equity to hold that system, that unit, in place. And so they look at this and they would think, do I want to be in debt the rest of my life trying to retire this debt, trying to borrow the money to buy the section of land that it takes to pay the taxman and buy the 80 percent that is left that they don't have equity in, that goes to their siblings, and to be able to turn the cash flow to retire it to serve the interest and principal on those two sections of land? And the answer that they will come away with, and a rational banker will tell them: You can't hold this land. I am sorry, but you have got to put it before the auction, sell this land off, pay the taxman, and then distribute the rest of the proceeds amongst your siblings and you get your 20 percent that is left over after taxes. That means that a century of work, three generations or more that have compiled these assets, is gone, taken away, because of the class envy that comes from the leftists in this Congress and the people that think that the American dream isn't about building equity, and that you shouldn't be able to transfer wealth from generation to generation, and that somehow, because someone else worked and created the capital that this Nation thrives on, you should be punished in the transfer of that wealth into the next generation. The gentleman from Missouri knows this. I know this in the Midwest. They should know this all across America.