Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentleman is completely correct on this. I would add to this point. Let's just say that a entrepreneur has a bright idea, and let's say 10 kids. That is a good start on a family, I tell them. And this bright idea from the entrepreneur starts a business, and they build their equity base because of the creativity and the energy and the conviction and the productivity and the competition that they put into the marketplace. This individual reaches that age of 45 or 50, and they can look ahead and say: I can check out of this. I can sell out my business and I can make the rest of this on really solid, stable investments, and I don't have to worry about the rest of my life. And, furthermore, if I continue to work, continue to take risk, continue to produce and expand the capital base of America, everything that I work for, for the rest of my life, is going to go off to the taxman to be redistributed among people across America, and I can't even give it to my children. What does a rational person do in a case like that? And I will submit to the gentleman from Missouri and the Speaker that a rational person would come to the conclusion that it didn't pay to continue to produce once you reach the level that you could take care of yourself for the rest of your life, because you couldn't pass it along to the next generation. That destroys the American dream, and it blows the entire thing up. I see my friend, the Judge and the gentleman from Texas, who concluded that legislating from the bench was the wrong thing, and coming to Congress to legislate from here is the right thing. And I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. And a place in eternity.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, I thank the gentleman from Texas. Reclaiming my time, I look at the configuration of this proposal that is coming to the floor tomorrow and I am troubled by it. There are some good things in it. To ensure that the current tax brackets can run for 2 years, that is a good thing. It is not as good as it needs to be. It mitigates the damage of the increase that is impending in the death tax, but it doesn't address and fix the problem. It just makes it less egregious. So those are the good things about it. I am one who supports the credits for ethanol and biodiesel. I could make that argument, and it is not a bumper sticker argument. But the Federal Government has said we want you to invest your private sector capital in producing renewable fuels, and if you will do that, we will make sure there is enough there to get you started. Well, they invested, at least in my district, 3 years in a row over $1 billion in renewable energy, and now we are looking at that rug being jerked out from underneath the people that trusted the Federal Government. We may or may not agree on that policy here, but I think the government needs to be consistent. But in any case, here is what we are really looking at: We need to make the current tax structures permanent. We need to eliminate and abolish the death tax, because it is an immoral tax. And into this bargain, what do we get? We get an increase in the death tax that goes from zero on up to a $1 million exemption with a 35 percent tax, and that ax that is hanging over the head instead is a $1 million exemption and 55 percent. The current tax is zero. George Steinbrenner's heirs paid zero in death tax, and those who pass away in this year pay zero, no matter what the amount of their equity. Actually, these are the goods things about this proposal. But the bad things are this: That the unemployment extensions that are there take it out to 99 weeks. We have gotten along for about three generations with 26 weeks of unemployment. We know that that bridges people over a seasonal job, it gives them half a year to find a job. And when you look at the time that people that are on unemployment spend to search for a job, it is about 20 minutes a day in the first weeks of their unemployment, and as that unemployment winds down into the 26th week, it is about 70 minutes a day that they spend looking for a job. They are far more likely to find a job the first week after their unemployment runs out than they are to find a job in the first week that their unemployment starts. So there is a huge transfer of wealth that takes place there, paid for out of borrowed money that comes from the Chinese, the interest and principal that is dumped on our children, and that is about $56.5 billion that accumulated there. Then we have about $40 billion with the transfer payments. These transfer payments come in the form of refundable tax credits. Refundable tax credits is money that goes off budget, 100 percent of it is borrowed, and a lot of it from the Chinese, that pays people that are do not have a tax liability for the child care tax credit that is there and about two other credits that transfer wealth. You add this up, that is about $40 billion in that category, and $56.5 billion in the other category. So we are in the area of $101 billion or $102 billion in transfer of wealth, before you get to the pay control component this, which troubles me. They lower the payroll tax by 2 percent on the employee side, but not on the employer side, which distorts the equation of a dollar out of the employee, a dollar out of the employer. And most of us see this as that is all money that is earned by the employee. As an employer, I will make that case. But when you distort the equation, then you are presuming that the employer is making money and the employee is not, and the favor goes to the employee side of this. It will take awhile for economics to balance that one out. But in the end, we have a 2-year extension of current tax structure for personal income tax, which if you think about it from a business perspective, if you have a business plan and a business model and you are going to invest capital in order to try to get a return on that capital, which means make some money, and in the process of doing that you create jobs, if you have a business model that has a 2-year ROI, return on investment, if you have got that kind of a business model, you have already invested that as fast as you could come up with the idea and come up with the capital to invest it. But most of this on the other side, most capital investments are 10 or 15-year returns on investment. So if you have got a 2-year extension and a tax increase on the other side of that, it doesn't release the capital in such a way that it is going to create the jobs. So we don't get anywhere near the kick out of this for our economy that some of the economists say that we do. And the day will come at the end of these 2 years, we are in the middle then of a presidential race, congressional races, House and the Senate, and the debate then engages again, do we do President Obama's Keynesian economics on steroids, do we continue and add to the $3 trillion in wasteful spending that has come from that? And they are going to say, well, we gave you your tax model for 2 years and it didn't work. Therefore, we need to go back to spending money like Morgenthau admitted was wrong. I yield to the gentleman from Missouri. I see we have 3 minutes left.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, we have the 87 freshmen Republicans and however many Democrats are coming here who are the cavalry coming over the hill, and we ask them to bring the freshness of their convictions here and weigh in. I believe they need an opportunity to weigh in on this tax policy. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas and the Speaker for his indulgence.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and the opportunity to express some things that are on my mind, perhaps while others are sleeping and perhaps while others are having trouble sleeping, for they see what happens around this Congress. I am very, very grateful to the C-SPAN cameras and the transparency that exists here in the House. And I think back those years now, maybe as far back as almost 20 years ago, maybe even more, when I sat in my living room, and I watched what was going on in this room. And I listened to the speeches, and I analyzed the presentations that came from the various Members of Congress on either side of the aisle. As I sat back, as an American who was busy building a business and creating jobs and meeting payroll for 1,440 consecutive weeks, trying to build capital where there was none that existed and shape that together so that we could take care of the longevity of my family and that of the families of the people that I had hired that worked for me and did so well to help build the business with us all together, while all that was going on, I was watching what was going on in Washington, DC, in Des Moines, Iowa. And I saw and heard the voices of the people that came forward to tell America there was something wrong in this Congress. And as I listened to them, they inspired me. They inspired me to get more involved in public life, to get engaged in politics, that there were a lot of decisions that were being made in this city and in the capital cities in the States across the land that were affecting the very lives of the American people down into their families. And a lot of folks didn't know it. They weren't paying attention. So I started to pay attention. And from those years forward, I saw what was going on. The irresponsible spending that was taking place and the dysfunctional Congress that had rolled itself up into a point where it no longer represented the American people, but it seemed to exist for its own purposes and not for the purposes of serving the American people. And as this unfolded, personalities that were here on the floor--Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey and a number of others that stand out in my mind and cause me to think that I might be able to make a contribution at some level, whether that be the State level or the Federal level--but they convinced me that there was a broad philosophical disagreement in America. And on the one side of the aisle, you have people that believe in growing government, that government is the solution and that higher taxes are necessary in order to fund this growing government. And if there's a problem that exists out there, even if it's for a single individual, there is somebody over on this side of the aisle that will try to pass a law to fix that problem for a single individual, and government grows. And they won't look at empirical data, by the way. I offer study after study, and they turn a blind eye to those studies. They simply want to try to reach out and touch people's heartstrings and tell the anecdote, the single anecdote. And with 300 million people, we always have someone who got the short end of the stick. That's this side of the aisle. The case of the people with the ``poor me's,'' the ones that think that these greedy capitalists are victimizing the poor proletariat, and that it's a zero-sum game, and the glass is half empty, and it would have been maybe three-quarters or maybe, let me say, it would have been not as empty as half empty if these people that went out and got out of bed and went to work every day and produced something hadn't been taking from that glass. It might have been full from them, they wouldn't have had to do anything. But truthfully, Mr. Speaker, it's not a zero-sum game. And anybody that thinks their glass is half empty, their resolution of that is to go to government and ask government to tax the person whose glass has got the same level in it. But theirs, over here on this side, this is the half full side of the aisle. These are the people that believe and understand that it's not a zero-sum game, that this is a growing economy, that we don't have all of this capital that we have in the United States of America because it was a zero-sum game. We built things. We produced goods and services that had a marketable value to each other, yes, and to the rest of the world, certainly. We exported a lot of that, and America became more wealthy, and we developed our skills. This idea of a zero-sum game that's over here on the Democrat side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, is a self-defeating philosophy from which you could never build a great Nation. It's already a self-defeating philosophy. If you get up every day and you think you have a bad case of the ``poor me's,'' and somebody is out there working industriously and taking from this pool that you have some right to for not earning it--if you have that attitude, you're not going to be contributing to the whole. And our job--and it should be our job on both sides of the aisle--is to increase the average annual productivity of all of our people. Now, it doesn't mean that we won't have some people who aren't producing at all. Some can't, and we need to take care of them. Some won't, and they need to take care of themselves. And some aren't doing enough, and they need to do more. But if we increase our overall productivity, that increases our average annual productivity, that increases our gross domestic product, that strengthens us economically. It puts us in a position where we're no longer borrowing 41 cents out of every dollar we spend from somebody--often the Chinese. It puts us in a position where we can balance a budget. And, by the way, the people that are out there working and producing every day, every working day, at least--and hopefully taking Sunday off to worship-- those folks aren't putting pressure on government for services. They just say, Take the taxes you have to take from me and don't take any more than you have to take, and leave me otherwise alone. I will take care of myself and my family. That's the American spirit. That's the American way. It's part of the American Dream. And so as I use that word, Mr. Speaker, ``dream,'' the American Dream, we saw a bill come across this floor today, turned through this system with lightning speed. Who says the House of Representatives can't move quickly if the Speaker of the House determines it shall move quickly? Let's take the word ``American'' off of it and call it the DREAM Act. They can't call it the American DREAM Act, because that would be a high level of hypocrisy. They just called it the DREAM Act, which we described as the nightmare act. This is an act that's been churning through the publics here for a good number of years. And what it is, it's designed to give a path to citizenship to young people that came into this country before their 16th birthday, who have resided in the United States for perhaps as long as 5 years, who are willing to enter into an institution of higher learning or sign up for the military, and it would give them a path to citizenship, give them a green card right away. It would triple the number of green cards in America right away. And these young people, they were young maybe when they came here, but still it's an amnesty bill. And amnesty, to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. Now, somebody comes into the United States illegally on the day before their 16th birthday, this DREAM Act gives them amnesty. We have lots of people that sneak across the border that aren't 16 years old. Some of the accomplished coyotes are under 16 years old. Some of the accomplished drug smugglers are under 16 years old. You have got a murderer down in Mexico that was reported in the news who is--I will call him a serial contract killer that's just been arrested that apparently--I mean, it's alleged, and he is not yet convicted, that multiple times he has executed people in the drug wars, and he is 14 years old. So this DREAM Act would give everybody that came into the United States illegally, whether it was on the first day of their life, perhaps they were born across the border and they came into the United States on the first day of their life and were nurtured here and went to school here, gives them--the result is an in-State tuition discount to go to college or perhaps go off to the military in the United States on a path to citizenship and the ability to bring all their families in on the family reunification plan. All of that offered to somebody that maybe was brought into the United States on the first day of their life. But it also is the same reward for somebody who came into the United States on their own illegally, as well, on the day before they were 16 years old. And that's good up until such time as they are 30. So let's see. We can do the math on this. Fourteen years, and if this bill becomes law tomorrow, and it's possible, because it passed the House in lightning time. The Senate may or may not take it up. There is a cloture vote apparently that's scheduled. I don't think they have the votes. They should not have the votes. But in any case, if someone comes into the United States the day before their 16th birthday and this bill becomes law the day of their 30th birthday, they would be covered under the DREAM Act. They would be able to apply for an application--that's presumed that they would have entered into an institution of higher learning. So you don't have to be going into a 4-year college to go off and become a brain surgeon. You could simply be entering into a tech school to become a plumber or an electrician or a barber or a beautician or whatever it might be that would be a 12-month study or more. Enter into it. You don't have to get a degree. You have to have a high school degree, which can be gotten. A GED can be picked up, and then you could have never gone to school. You could pick up your GED and then apply to go off to beautician school. Those things are all that's required, and you would get approval for your permit that would give you immediately a green card, access to the welfare system, and the ability down the line in a little ways to bring in, through family reunification, all your family members. They could number in the scores, of your family members, all come in. This reward for somebody that next week might turn 30. And the chairman of the Judiciary Committee tells me never fear, because they have good background checks and they have good, solid biometrics that they are using--checking out his word here--biometric information that's there with a good background check with the FBI doing this good background check, Mr. Speaker. Well, I will tell you that it doesn't do lot of good to ask the FBI to do a background check on somebody that came into this country before or after their 16th birthday that doesn't have a legal existence in their home country. If they were not born in a hospital in Mexico, for example, it's almost all the time there is no birth certificate. And about half of the time they are not born in hospitals. So with no birth certificate, there is often not a record of their existence. And they could be anybody saying they were anybody coming here, declaring that they came here at any time without a record to back it up. All the way to 30. And they will say, well, I came into the United States. My parents brought me in against my will the day before my 16th birthday, and next week I am going to be 30. I am qualified. I am signing up. And they will give them protection under the DREAM Act. That's what they have passed off the floor of the House of Representatives tonight. It is a reward for lawbreaking. And it isn't for kids alone. These are old kids, a lot of them. Old kids that are in their twenties, kids that are in their thirties, kids that will perhaps be as near as--very close to or even possibly in their forties by the time that they would receive the citizenship that's promised to them under this DREAM Act. Would we do something like that? Mr. Speaker, Thomas Jefferson once said that large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities. Well, this was a slender majority here tonight. It came very close. The vote was tied up on the rule, within one vote for a long time. There were 37 Democrats voted ``no'' on the rule. Thirty-eight Democrats voted ``no'' on the bill, almost all of them Blue Dogs. A lot of the Blue Dogs have been defeated in the election last November 2, and they are here for this week and next week. And for most of them, and possibly all of them, it will be the last time they serve in the United States Congress. And most of them are pretty good people, and they were pushed into this hardcore leftist agenda by Speaker Pelosi. They had that San Francisco agenda shoved at them over and over again--to use the Speaker's expression, I believe it was--made them walk the plank. Well, the Speaker tried to get the Blue Dogs to walk the plank one more time tonight on this DREAM Act, this not aptly named, the wrongly named nightmare named the DREAM Act. It's a nightmare act. Tried to get the Blue Dogs to walk the plank, and they said ``no.'' They said ``no'' in numbers of 37 on the rule, 38 on the bill, because they are not going to go out of this town having handed the Speaker another victory that goes contrary to the best wishes of America and contrary to the American Dream. Now, I believe in an immigration policy that's designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States of America. I believed that for a long time. And I think that American leadership has believed that, perhaps not articulated that the same way, but believed that for a long time. And I reflect upon my grandmother coming over here through Ellis Island. And as I went through that tour at Ellis Island, it would be about 4 years ago--not quite--3\1/2\, I learned a good number of things. They gave everybody a very quick once-through physical. They watched them walk. They watched how they moved. If anybody was obviously pregnant, they put them back on the boat. If there were people that weren't good physical specimens, they went back on the boat. If they had signs of disease, back on the boat. If they had signs of not being mentally stable, back on the boat. They screened them before they got on the boat in Europe and looked them over and gave them all those same kind of tests before they even let them board, because the United States of America, even at the height of our immigration heyday, at the peak of Ellis Island--in fact, the peak of Ellis Island was April 15, 1905--excuse me. I have got to get this year right. Think about it. April 15, 1907, when they had the largest processing of legal immigrants in the history of the country poured through Ellis Island on that day. April 15, 1907, 11,557 were brought through into the United States across the floors on the Great Hall. On average, you could do the math, cut it down 2 percent, went back on the boat and went back to Europe, wherever they came from, because, they didn't meet the standards. Even though they had been screened before they got on the ship, they were screened before they could get off Ellis Island. And I don't know how many were screened out before they boarded, but I do know that 2 percent got sent back. Why do we do that? Because we had it in the immigration system that was designed for America. It was designed to improve the economic, social and cultural well-being of the United States of America. Because we believed in something then that the folks on this side of the aisle believe today. We believe, and I believe, in American exceptionalism. We are an extraordinary country, Mr. Speaker. We are extraordinary for a lot of reasons. There are a series of pillars of American exceptionalism, beautiful marble pillars, stable, solid pillars that have been carefully cut and hewn and polished and our Founding Fathers understood that and they set them in place. And I think God moved the Founding Fathers around like men upon a chess board to shape this Nation. When I look out across the world, and I think down through the heritage of nation after nation, and I look for a country that has a history that's even similar to the history of the United States--and I don't mean that as far as the chronology of the events that took place, the wars, the depressions, those things that happen--the foundation of our country. The foundation of the United States of America is absolutely and completely and utterly unique to any of that in the world. If you look over the last 250 years or so, the most successful institution in the world, part of it, has really been our religious institutions. But arguably the most successful institution has been the nation state, nation states that emerged out of city states when they were merged together. What did they come from? Peoples that had a common language banded together from city states into nation states and that's what brought about all of the myriad of nation states in Western Europe, for example. That's what has set up the boundaries of our nations across the globe. If you speak Russian, you lived in Russia. If you speak German, you lived in Germany. It's not true, Mr. President, if you speak Austrian, you don't actually have--no one speaks Austrian. But if you speak German in Austria, chances are you are home. And Czech in Czechoslovakia and the list goes on. French in France, Spanish in Spain--it's not too implicated when you think about it. But why do we have the nation states? Because people with a common interest, commonalities, banded together, protected their interests, defended their boundaries and their borders and made sure they took care of each other and they built their nation states. England, you speak English. United Kingdom, they spread their language throughout the United Kingdom all the way into Asia and out into the Pacific and over to the Americas. They believed in their culture and they did glorious things for the world. Wherever the English language went, freedom accompanied the language. But still no nation has been founded upon these principles of liberty and freedom like the United States of America. And you could say that we had a continent that needed to be settled, and you could argue that it was the quirk of history that brought this about, but, Mr. Speaker, it's far more unique than that. If we look around and we could think South America was a continent to be settled, so was Central America. And what's the difference between the United States and Canada? I could give you a few, they are pretty close to us. And then we could roll our vision down to Australia and see a continent there that's about the size of the United States that had to be settled, settled with a Western European influence. Still, they don't have the rights, they don't have the liberty that Americans have. The dynamics of their country, however good they are, they have been very good to us as allies, don't match that of the United States. The things that bless this country are completely unique. We are founded on a core of our Judeo-Christian principles. The settlers that came here came here for freedom of speech and religion, freedom to worship as they saw fit. They wanted to get away from King George, and they wanted to come to a place where they could be free to worship God in their way. It's true that Old English common law and these concepts of Western Civilization and the English-speaking component of the age of enlightenment were established there in old England. And that old English common law arrived here in the New World. In fact, there is a plaque down here at Jamestown, Virginia, I think I will get the year right, and may well have been 1607, or really close to that--that old English common law arrived in the New World, Jamestown, Virginia just down the coastline here a ways. All those things, gifted to this Nation, blessed this Nation, made us unique, is American exceptionalism. And the rights that emerged in the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, religion, the press, freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, the Fifth Amendment property rights, the right to be protected from double jeopardy, the concept of federalism that pushes those rights, rights of government that are granted to government by the people and rights that come from God. Now those are new concepts. Those concepts still don't exist in the world in the way they do here in the United States. So when we get into these debates where people want to undermine the rule of law and tell me that their version of compassion is worth risking these beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism, that we ought to have enough compassion that we could just, for the moment, set aside these values that made this a great Nation. How can people think like that? The thing that we should protect the most is our core faith and these beautiful, marble pillars of American exceptionalism. We must protect them. That's our oath. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. That's our commitment. You can't take an oath to a Constitution that's living and breathing. You can't take an oath to what some activist judge might decide it's going to be in a year or two or five or ten. The very last nine people on the planet that should be amending the United States Constitution are those nine Supreme Court justices. But occasionally they, in effect, do amend the Constitution. And I don't believe there should be anybody sitting on the bench that doesn't adhere to the deepest conviction that the Constitution means what it says and it means what it was understood to mean at the time of its ratification or the ratification of the succeeding amendments. That's what the Constitution is. It's a contract. It is a guarantee. And our Founding Fathers made it very clear, our rights come from God. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Our rights come from God, and the rights come to the people and the people grant the right to govern to their elected representatives and the Constitution guarantees us not a democratic form of government, not a democracy, as some would say. The United States Constitution guarantees us a Republican form of government, and I mean that as a representative form of government that's not designed to put our finger into the wind. It's designed to elect representatives who owe their constituents and everybody in this Nation their best effort and their best judgment, and we have to keep that oath to uphold the Constitution. These are just some of the foundational principles of this great Nation, and its concepts of American exceptionalism, which is at risk because of what we saw happen here tonight, the people that would undermine the rule of law and reward people for breaking it and give them a free college education at the expense of people who are having to pay for it and don't have the access to that benefit are undermining the rule of law. They are damaging the concept of American exceptionalism and rewarding the people that have undermined our rule of law itself, American exceptionalism, and it comes from these things that I said. They are the Bill of Rights, most of them. All of these rights, freedom of speech, religion, right to keep and bear arms, property rights, no double jeopardy. The list goes on. The Bill of Rights has most of them. It leaves a couple of them out. One of those is free enterprise capitalism, the ability to be able to--and I mentioned property rights, Fifth Amendment property rights. But the ability to own property and know that if you pay the property tax on that property, government can't come take it away from you and that the assets of that can be used as collateral to leverage, to invest in businesses and start jobs and do the things we choose to do. There are a myriad of individual decisions. That's another foundational concept. The free enterprise component of this, why is it, Mr. Speaker, why is it? At country after country, they don't form capital. They might start businesses, but they are in a little subsistence business where they are selling trinkets or selling snacks. But they are hand to mouth, getting by, not investing that capital, not building let's just say if you have the hot dog cart out there, they just go every day and sell the hot dogs. But they're not turning it into a franchise. They're not building a restaurant, not building a chain of restaurants, not getting an idea on now I have all this equipment in here; I can start a stainless steel shop that will build all this restaurant equipment and market it to the world. Americans are full of ideas. We're a dynamic people. We're not suitable to live under any other form of government because we are a robust, vigorous society. And since I've gone through this list of reasons for American exceptionalism, and it's not exclusive, I have this other piece, Mr. Speaker, and it's this: Americans are full of vigor. We're the cream of the crop of every donor civilization on the planet that sent legal immigrants here. We're the cream of the crop. The reason we are, when I say ``we,'' I'm a descendant of, but the biggest reason we are is it was hard to get here, but there was a great reward that you could earn when you got here. And some people came here believing the streets were paved with gold, and others came here and paved their own streets with gold because there was room to achieve in the United States. And the people that came here had an extra vigor because their dream drove them to do that. And so there's a filter that's been set up worldwide. It sets up at the borders of the United States, this the sovereign Nation, with our borders, and you can't be a nation state if you don't have borders and you can't call them borders if you don't defend them. But our borders were set up and people had a hard time getting here and getting through the system. They had a hard time, like my grandmother, walking across the Great Hall at Ellis Island, and getting, being granted entrance into the United States of America, but they had vigor and they had a dream. They had things they wanted to build, and they didn't waste time. They didn't let grass grow under their feet. They went to work, and they committed themselves so much to this country, that they expected that the first one of my family that passed away here, the rest of them will be buried around her, and to a certain extent that seems to be the case. And I don't know the whole history of it and so I'm cautious about speaking it into the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker. But I do know that my grandmother came here and sent some of her sons back to Europe to fight in the war against the fatherland. She was committed to America. She directed my father, who went to school, not speaking English, to never speak anything but English in the home so she could learn it because she said, I came here to become an American, and you shall go to school and learn English and bring it home and teach it to me. English needs to be the official language of the United States of America. A common language is what binds us together. And this vigor of Americans that comes from every country in the world and every walk of life, this unique vigor, because of this filter, kept the slackers out. The doers got here because it was hard to get here and it helped to be inspired by a dream, and they came. And so every donor civilization contributed to America, their vigor, the cream of their crop. And now here we are. We are--some people will disagree with this, but I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, we're a race of people. There is an American race of people. We're not just sometimes what we look like, all of these colors and different configurations of God's creation in his image. We're more than that. We're a lot more than that. We have common interests. We have a common bond. We've experienced a common history. We have common rights, common privileges and a common dream, and that's to leave the world a better place than it was when we came and pass it along to our children so they can do the same. It's in our culture. It's part of our being. It's who we are. We are a common race of people as far as looking at us as Americans, but we are uncommon as compared to the rest of the world because of all of these reasons that I have said. And we need to understand that. We need to understand what made us great. We need to preserve and protect and defend and polish those beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism. We need to understand what made us great and protect it and preserve it and enhance it. And these things that go on here in this House of Representatives, in this lameduck Congress still being driven by the repudiated majority, that can take a bill that they call the DREAM Act that's been rejected by the American people over and over again, at least in the polls and of those that understand what it is, and suspend the proper function of this Congress and bring a bill like that to the floor, how? Well, here's the proper way first, Mr. Speaker, in case that's not something that you've had an opportunity to evaluate. The proper order is this: some Member of Congress comes in, writes up a bill, says I think we need this in the law of the land. They go down here and file the bill here at the well at the Clerk's location here at the well, and then that bill is referred to a committee. Now, if it gets enough legs, if it gets enough cosponsors on it where you think it has some substance, there can be a hearing before a subcommittee or two or three or four. The subcommittee then can take action on it and perhaps vote it and pass it into the full committee. The full committee can then hold one or two or three or four hearings also to inform all the other members of the committee. And they can then, when I say pass the bill, at each point of committee action it's an unlimited number of amendments that are germane and in order, but an unlimited number of amendments that can be offered to seek to perfect the legislation. That's how it's been set up. It's got to be set up in such a way that you can actually fix a bad bill before it gets to the floor. And so a bill that's introduced goes through a hearing and markup process in the subcommittee. Then it goes through a hearing and a markup process in the full committee. Then it goes up to the Rules Committee, the hole in the wall up here on the third floor, where sometimes they run into a little trouble because those folks don't work out in the light of day. They work sometimes at night. There's no television camera in there. Reporters don't go up there; they think it's a little boring and maybe it's not really news. If they'd come up there more often I might go up there and make some news, Mr. Speaker, because I think it would be nice to let the American people know what's going on. So then the Rules Committee passes a rule that sends the bill to the floor. Actually, it sends a rule to the floor. We debate on whether we want to accept the rule. If we vote the rule down, it goes back up to the Rules Committee and we say get it right and send it back to us again. So we deport the rule back up to the Rules Committee in the hole in the wall, just to keep it descriptive in my language, and they come back and try again. It doesn't happen very often that a rule comes down, but once a rule is there it sets the parameters by which we debate a bill. And our Speaker-designate Boehner has told the world, and I'm very glad that he has, that we are going to have far more transparency and far more open rules on our bills. So that allows Members to offer amendments and try to perfect this legislation. That's how it's supposed to work. So a bill would come to the floor, in theory, under an open rule that would allow any Member to offer an amendment, debate it here on the floor, force a vote, force a recorded vote, or require a recorded vote. I shouldn't use the word ``force.'' It should be a process that people in this Chamber are willing to go through and are actually eager to improve legislation that otherwise might not be as good as it can be. And then, once the amendments are all heard and voted on and resolved, then the bill can be certainly debated in its form, final form, and placed upon its passage or, if the House passes that legislation, we message it to the Senate, right down that hallway, and they either take it up or kill it. If they take it up, they go through a similar process. That's how it's supposed to work. The DREAM Act, this nightmare act, had an entirely different experience than I've just described, Mr. Speaker, because it didn't really exist in this House of Representatives anywhere in the form that it came to the floor today. It worked out like this: Speaker Pelosi decided that she wanted to go along with the majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, and they would force a vote on the DREAM Act, whether it could ever become law or not. And so, instead of going through the hearing process and the markup process, subcommittee, full committee up to the Rules Committee and down, they just went to the Rules Committee. At some 3 this afternoon, this bill that I don't know that anybody had an opportunity to read it before it was presented to the Rules Committee. I know that I didn't, but I maybe could have caught up with it a couple of hours earlier. In any case, all these versions floating around, nobody can figure out what's going to move. Down from the Speaker's office comes a bill, dropped into the Rules Committee. They take this up. A little e-mail goes out to some of our staff to let us know that they're going to be hearing testimony on the rule. No amendments allowed. Some Members, myself included, go to testify before the Rules Committee. We know they're going to say no to any suggestions that we make, including any amendments that we might try to offer, even though there wasn't really time to configure them upon notice. They report out a same day rule that says, this Congress is going to hear this bill right away. So the Rules Committee meets on a bill we haven't seen at 3 in the afternoon. A few hours later it's here on the floor for a vote on the rule. A few hours later it's here on the floor for 30 minutes of debate on this side, 30 minutes of debate on this side. And an amnesty bill that's twice the size of the 1986 amnesty bill passes off the floor of the House of Representatives. Now it is messaged to the Senate where Harry Reid has asked for it. And this sunlight? This is a responsive Congress? No, this is an act of a Congress that has been repudiated for the same reasons. There is a reason why so many Democrats are going home. And I for one feel a little bad that some of the best are the ones who are going home. Some of the Blue Dogs are some of the best to work with. They reflect American values in my view more than a lot of the others. They have been defeated because of these kind of shenanigans, these kinds of tactics, these kind of acts that close the system down, lock the Members out so the franchise, and there are 435 Members of the House of Representatives, and there is not anybody who sits in these seats whose constituents deserve less representation than anybody else. Everybody's franchise deserves to be heard, and the will of the group should be brought up through the leadership and should be manifested in legislation here on the floor, sent to the Senate. If it comes back and it doesn't match, we should have our say as well. That is not what has been happening. The right way is around the corner--I think we take it up in January. But we Americans, we Americans that believe in American exceptionalism, we Americans who take an oath to uphold the Constitution, we Americans that adhere to and uphold the rule of law, which I believe is implicit in our oath to the Constitution, reject the idea of this nightmare act that I believe turned into an affirmative action amnesty act for 2 million or more people that could be tripled. And our immigration policy that we have here, Mr. Speaker, is already so bad. It doesn't reflect the best interest of America. It doesn't reflect the economic, social and cultural well-being or enhance it in the fashion I believe it should. Existing immigration law is set up in such a way that merit is almost out of the question. To evaluate the people coming across Ellis Island and turn 2 percent of them back after they had already been screened and filtered on the European side before they got on the ship tells you there was at least a merit system. But here in the United States, if you look at the legal immigration, and the legal immigration number will range up to 1.5 million a year, there is no country that is even close to as generous as we are with legal immigration. But of all of that, some place between, and this is testimony before the immigration committee, some place between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigration is based on merit. The balance of it is out of our control. So that means that between 89 and 93 percent of our legal immigration is in the hands of the people who are deciding they are going to come here rather than in the hands of Americans who would decide which people would come here. It is completely out of sync with the values of a lot of the other Western civilization countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. They have immigration policies that are designed to bring the best people into their country and not put burdens on the taxpayers and their society. I can't make the grade to go to Canada because I'm too old. I would be relying on the government to feed me too soon, and my education level is not high enough. I don't know about my years left to work, but you put it into the score system they have, I can visit but I cannot go live. That is how they would be. So if they reject Steve King in Canada, we should be able to say no to some folks that want to come to the United States, especially those who broke our laws. This legislation, this DREAM Act, this nightmare act, has a number of things in it that the American people need to know. It is a hardcore, leftist, liberalism piece of amnesty legislation. It provides for protection for people who have broken the laws in this way: They would still get a DREAM Act registration that would protect them from deportation even if they had been alien absconders, people that were set for deportation hearings and skedaddled and didn't show up, those people who were going to be adjudicated for deportation, alien absconders, they will be protected. They can sign up under DREAM, and then they are shielded from being prosecuted and deported. Even if they were an alien absconder, even if they were guilty of document fraud, no problem, we will give you a college education, sit you at a desk. If you have false claims of being a United States citizen, that is no problem either. You are still eligible under the DREAM act. We will give you a college education, too, even though you have lied about your citizenship. Even aliens who have been deported who would sneak back into the United States and the deportation records are there, they sign up for the DREAM, they will not be deported either. What a reward. So there will be all kinds of people who will sneak into the United States who will go ahead and sign up right away for this DREAM Act because they will be protected from deportation. Even though it requires that they be no older than 30 at the time of enactment and that they came into the United States before their 16th birthday and they have been here for 5 years, who is to know? Who is know whether it is valid or whether it isn't? Who is to know how old they are if they don't have a real birth certificate? Who is to know if they have a high school education, a GED? Who is to know if they have completed a 2-year education at a tech school? But I know that I did receive in my email a Web site tonight that is in the business of selling these false documents, these false diplomas, helping people be in a position where they can qualify already where the States have made these provisions. It is a big business. Fraud and corruption is a big business. It is a big business in the countries they are coming from, and it is becoming a bigger business in the country they are coming to, the United States of America. We have been a clean country that respects the rule of law. We are a proud nationality. We are a race of people. We have a common cause, a common belief system. We believe in the rule of law. It is our job to uphold that, and this bill, this DREAM Act undermines it. And it costs a lot of money. The Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, put out a score that has been touted by the other side that somehow it turns into a plus for the U.S. budget because some people will get a better education, and they will earn more money and pay more taxes. I don't think this thinks this through very far, but I can tell you in the second decade even the Congressional Budget Office says that it is going to be a cost of $5 billion to the taxpayer. And I can tell you that the Center For Immigration Studies, CIS, has done a study on the cost for State and local government, and that would be $6.2 billion a year. That is each year. That doesn't necessarily project out over a decade, a couple of years perhaps, maybe longer. They only did a couple of years: 6.2, so $12.4 billion is pretty close to what I think they will commit to. And the tripling of the number of green cards, the billions of dollars in debt, the people who get a safe harbor who are alien absconders, any alien who has a pending application will be protected from deportation. And this amounts to a de facto scholarship for those who, if ICE were required to deliver that de facto scholarship and before they handed it to them, they would have to apply the law and make sure that they woke up in a country that they were legal in within a few mornings. Those are the facts. And, furthermore, the most egregious aspect of this is this: this is going to provide for in-State tuition discounts for people who are today illegal in America. And they didn't all come in because their parents brought them. Many of them came in on their own, coming across the border at age 12, 13, 14, 15, turning 16. Many of them will be up to 30 years old saying they were brought into the country when they were 10 or 12. There will be no records to prove that. Here is what happens. Those people who are here illegally that are eligible for removal are today and would be under this act sitting in college classrooms with a taxpayer-funded college education, sitting at a desk. And in California, a resident of California, zero tuition. But if my son or daughter-in-law wanted to go to California to go to college, they would have to pay out-of-State tuition. Out-of-State tuition for California institutions annually would be $22,021 a year. Can you imagine writing a check for $22,021 a year to go to college in California, and sitting in a classroom at a desk next to someone who is unlawfully in the United States who is getting a free education paid for by the taxpayers? How much that would burn you if you are an American citizen in good standing, a taxpayer, an individual and a family that has funded and contributed to this government in the way that most of us do. There is no justice or equity there, and it cannot be reconciled. I would add to this that it gets even worse, and if this bill passes, I am convinced it will exist all over this country. People who are illegal here in America will have their taxpayer- funded and, in some States, free education. In Iowa, it costs them about $3,000 a semester, and it costs the out-of-State people about $9,000 a semester; but in some States, it's a free education. They'll be sitting at desks in a classroom, next to a grieving widow, who has lost her husband in Iraq or in Afghanistan and who has elected to go across the State line in order to go to college out of State, and she is paying out-of-State tuition. It's $22,021 in California. A grieving widow of an American patriot, who gave his life defending our liberty and our national security, a grieving widow who maybe has children who have lost their dad, maybe now is going back for training because she knows she is now the principal breadwinner in that family. She is paying out-of-State tuition, and is sitting at a desk next to someone who is unlawfully in the United States, someone who is getting a free college education that is paid for by the taxpayers. That is what this DREAM Act sets up. It is irreconcilable. It is an impossible conundrum that should not be visited upon the American people. This DREAM Act must be killed. We wounded it here in the House: 37 Democrats voted ``no'' on the rule, and 38 Democrats voted ``no'' on the bill. Due to health reasons, we had some Republicans who weren't able to vote. Otherwise, it would have been closer. I actually look out and think we were close to mustering enough votes to defeat this poorly named ``DREAM Act,'' which really is the ``affirmative action amnesty act in America.'' We should know better. We can do better. I am hopeful that the United States Senate will step up, will speak up and will vote down this DREAM Act when the majority leader in the Senate brings it up, which may be tomorrow. I suspect what will happen is that he won't have the votes, but he will try it anyway, because this has all been political from the beginning. He has realized it is not going to become law, but he made a promise to his constituents: If you will reelect me, we will give you a vote on this DREAM Act. The gentleman from Chicago, who had pushed on this so hard, got his vote today. We saw the results of it here in the House in this lame duck Congress, in this repudiated 111th Congress that has been led by Nancy Pelosi. I think about Thomas Jefferson, who once said large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities. Well, this was a slender majority, and this is a large initiative. This initiative of amnesty under the DREAM Act is so large that it's twice the size of the Amnesty Act of 1986, and we have seen the fraud triple the estimates. So, if that's the case, this could become--pick your number--3 million to 6 million people who would get amnesty. Then they will start bringing in their extended families over and over and over again, generation after generation. It gets out of control, and this poor America, which has between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigration based on merit, based on people who are going to encourage and enhance and develop the economic, social and cultural well-being of the United States of America, starts to fall apart a little more. It gets undermined a little more, and the principles that make us great are undermined a little bit more. We need to be in the business of refurbishing those pillars of American exceptionalism, of not getting out the jackhammer and chiseling away at them as was done here today by this Pelosi-led Congress. So, if Thomas Jefferson said large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities--and he did--he didn't contemplate about large initiatives being advanced by repudiated Congresses that have been voted out of office and by Congresses that should go meekly out the door in respect for the will of the American people. They should do nothing that violates a sense of decency and the will of the American people--nothing. Only provide the functions that are necessary to get this government bridged over to the other side so that the new Congress can be seated and so that those new 87 freshman Republicans and however many Democrats there are--nine or so--can take this oath of office here on the 4th day of January and go to work, go to work fixing and saving America from the debacle that has been visited upon her by a dysfunctional Congress that writes bills in the Speaker's office, that brings them zigged through the hole in the wall of the Rules Committee and zagged down to the floor, bills with no amendments and with 30 minutes of debate on each side to try to resolve an issue. There is no time to penetrate with a concept in 30 minutes. You can't fix a bill with talk and with being denied a motion to recommit, which is standard practice in this place. So there is no possible way to put up a motion that is going to fix a bill here. It is a bad bill. It damages the rule of law. It grants amnesty. It costs tens of billions of dollars. It rewards people for breaking the law. It gives them a tuition discount, an in-State tuition discount. If it's Iowa, it's $3,000 a semester versus $9,000 a semester in round terms. If it's California, it's free tuition versus $22,021. That's the America they are building. Americans saw what was going on--debt and deficit, irresponsible spending, damaging the rule of law, breaking down the American culture and civilization--a Constitution demolition crew at work every day. They said, You're digging us a hole, and we aren't going to take it anymore. The American people rose up and took the shovel out of the hands of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, and they made it a lot harder for Harry Reid. So what do we have going on? Nancy Pelosi is still digging because, technically, the shovel is not out of her hands yet. She lined up all of those Blue Dogs, and said, I'm going to make you walk the plank one last time before you go home for the last time. They said no. They stepped off the side of the plank, and voted against the rule and voted against the DREAM Act, and they sent a statement as they walked out the door. Well, I think there are a lot of them who deserve credit for serving America in the fashion they have. Those who stood up to the courage of their convictions deserve our thanks. Those who came to this place to work in good faith deserve the gratitude of the American people. As for those who disagreed with me and who made a good argument, I hope, if you're right, it prevailed. It is my privilege to have served with people on both sides of this aisle as I think that the debate is essential and important. From my standpoint, I will stand up for the things I believe in and will debate them with those folks who have beliefs that disagree with mine, believing as our Founding Fathers did that, in that debate, we will sort out the right policy for this country. But when you shut the debate off, when the iron fist of the Speaker shuts out the committees and writes the bill in her office and sends it to the floor with no amendments and no motion to recommit, you end up with a terrible piece of legislation. You break faith with the American people, and you break faith with the franchise of every other Member of this Congress on both sides of the aisle. That is what has happened here over and over again over the last 4 years, and it has gotten worse each year. This is one of the starkest examples. Who would have thought that in a lame duck session, when we had big things to do and big things to worry about, the Speaker would push an amnesty act out here in a lame duck session in a repudiated Congress and not give all of those freshmen an opportunity to weigh in on this? They are the new voices. They are the new voices for America. They are the new vigor. They are the convictions of this United States of America. I look for good things from them, big things from them. I want to see them empowered to the maximum. Their fresh ideas and their energy and the cohesiveness that I hope is that class. I believe they will put a marker down in history that will meet that standard perhaps of the 1994 class--of which some are here, still here--and take us on up to another level. In that class, I expect we will see committee chairs and we will see new majority leaders. Maybe there is a Speaker in that class. Maybe there is a majority whip in that class or a conference chair, maybe all of them. There might be a President of the United States that's coming into this Congress that will be sworn in here on January 4. All of those things are possible, and most of them are likely, Mr. Speaker. I look forward to the new breath of fresh air that is arriving in this Congress. I look forward to Speaker Boehner, who will be offering transparency here in this Congress. I look forward to the voice of every Member being heard with respect. And those ideas that can prevail in the arena of ideas, which is here in this debate on the floor of the House and in our committees, are the ones that are the best ideas for the American people. We will get there. We've got a lot of things to reconstruct. We've got a lot of undoing to do. And it's not going to be an easy job and it won't be a short job. We will be undoing perhaps for the next 2 years while we elect a President that will help us do in the following 4 years. America will never be chiselled to perfection, but it's our charge, it's our struggle to work on it every day, to get it as close to right as we mortals can so that when it's handed off to the next generation, they can be proud of the toil that we did here and understand there was a vision and a commitment, and that we kept, in this new majority, our oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence and attention here tonight and the opportunity to address you here on the floor and close out the business for the day, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlelady for yielding. I rise in opposition to this rule and the bill, H.R. 5281. I agree with some of the presenters before me. It is not a DREAM Act. It's a nightmare act. It's one of those pieces of legislation that if the proponents actually understood the components of it, some of them would peel off, some of them would change their mind, and some of them would wish they could but they're on record and can't. The nightmare act is amnesty. Now, we need to come to an agreement on what amnesty is. I have long said that to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. This legislation seeks to reward those who are, under the law, eligible for being sent back to their home countries. Now, it's everybody that says they came in on the day of their birth until the last day before they turned 16, but we don't have any way of verifying this. The certification and the background checks are completely impossible. About 50 percent of the people that come into the United States across our southern border don't have a legal existence in their home country, meaning they don't have birth certificates or a track of their life like we normally have here, so it's impossible to do background checks. They can say who they want to say they are. They can propose whatever they want to propose. They can say they were born in the United States or were brought into the United States. And they can say they had done so when they were 15 years old, they could have come into the United States when they were 29 years and a day old and still be eligible under this bill because there is not a way to verify. So this is the thing that is designed to tug at our heartstrings, and it opens the door for amnesty, and it lays the foundation for a whole series of other pieces of amnesty components. But truthfully, this process is illegitimate. This is a repudiated, rejected 111th Congress. The American people went to the polls in unprecedented numbers, and they voted an unprecedented number of people out of office and put new faces in here. This lame duck session should never be used for a large agenda, and it has already been invalidated. Keep faith with the American people. Lame duck sessions are to provide the functions of government that can't be legitimately provided until the new Congress is gaveled in on January 4. This process of no committee hearings, no subcommittee hearings, no subcommittee markup, no full committee hearing, no full committee markup, no access to this legislation that has changed four times-- there are four different iterations here on the floor--and now a same- day rule up before the Rules Committee that still is the only committee that I know of on the Hill that meets without cameras, without the public presence knowing what is going on up there. I look forward to an open door and sunlight on the Rules Committee. But this CBO score that they tout as actually a plus for the government ignores that the CBO score says it is a $5 billion deficit spending in the second decade and likely for each decade thereafter. It ignores CIS, the Center for Immigration Services score, which scores the cost to local government, State and local government, at $6.2 billion annually for the cost of providing education to the people that would otherwise be eligible for deportation. It triples the number of green cards. And it provides safe harbor, safe harbor for ``any alien'' who has a pending application under the DREAM Act. So if someone comes in, they can be 79 years old or 99 years old, they allege that they are younger than that, file the application under the DREAM Act, and now we have to go forward and adjudicate and determine you really weren't 16 or a day before 16 when you came into America, and you really weren't under 30 when you filed this application. But it is certain if this becomes law, there will be people into their late thirties and perhaps into their forties that would be granted citizenship underneath this because it takes that long to process. There are exemptions for fraud, exemptions that go so far as to reward it in a way that if someone falsely claims citizenship and was deported, they can't be adjudicated under this. This DREAM Act is an amnesty act, it is a nightmare act, and it must be opposed. There is more to be said in a broader debate, and I hope to engage in that.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. I rise in opposition to this bill, to this bill that has a nice name. But it is really not a dream; it is a nightmare. It is a nightmare to the rule of law. As the gentlewoman from California said, we do write the laws in this country, and we have written the laws that limit people from coming into the United States illegally. And it seems to be forgotten that under even this legislation that is proposed, someone who is one day short of their 16th birthday could sneak across the border in the United States, claim they were here for 5 years, they could go on a Web site, how about www.diplomacompany.com, get themselves a GED, and qualify for the DREAM Act if they were just accepted into a tech school, to, say, go to barber school or plumber school. That is kind of the minimum. And it isn't they are doing this on their 16th birthday. They can do so the day before their 30th birthday. They can lie about their age. The comments about there being biometric information and a background check, we can't do background checks on people that don't have a legal existence in their own country. About half of the people that are born south of the border don't have a birth certificate, unless they were born in a hospital. It is about 50-50, which means no legal existence. There is not a way to do a background check. The score on this, the cost, is a lot higher than the proponents would like to admit. They argue it is a marginal savings. It also says in the same CBO score that in the second decade it is estimated at $5 billion, and likely $5 billion for each decade after that. That is probably not a big deal in the context of this spending, Mr. Speaker, but it is a big deal when you look at the Center for Immigration Studies' score, a cost to local government at $6.2 billion. That is every year; at least the first couple of years they have estimated this. It triples the number of green cards, it provides safe harbor for those who file for a number of things, and ties up our courts and our litigation system that we have. There is an exemption for even fraud against immigration laws in the United States. So what we really have is this scenario, this scenario, Mr. Speaker. This is the moral and ethical conundrum that cannot be reconciled by anybody in this Chamber, or anybody in this country, for that matter. When you have the recipients of the DREAM Act, should this become law, sitting in a classroom, a community college, a university, being the beneficiaries of a de facto scholarship, and in California it is free, no tuition for a California resident, and next to them at a desk will be a husband or a wife who is aggrieved, having lost their spouse fighting for our liberty in Iraq or Afghanistan, paying out-of-state tuition, in California $22,021 a year, paying out-of-state tuition for defending our rule of law, while someone who is being rewarded for breaking it is getting free tuition. That is just California. In Iowa, it is a little different. It is about a three-to-one break, in-state versus out-of-state. That is what this necessarily brings. If you support this nightmare DREAM Act, you are actually supporting an ``affirmative action amnesty act'' that rewards people for breaking the law and punishes those who defend America.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. Mr. Speaker, when my grandmother came over here and landed at Ellis Island, 2 percent were sent back. We had a merit system, and you had to meet those standards. I believe in an immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United States of America. This immigration policy is for America. We can't relieve all of the poverty in the world. That is completely impossible. Today, our immigration structure is this: between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigration is based on merit, and the balance of it is out of our control as far as setting any standards. If we are going to be a great Nation we have to have a policy that is established to promote American exceptionalism. This bill does not. I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it's my privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives in this great deliberative body that we are. And it is a blessing and a gift to the American people that we can have our debates and our discourse that rages back and forth here on the floor of the House. And sometimes we're not so polite to each other. I regret that. But the passions arise here rather than have them arise in the streets of America. So in a way, we take a lid off the pressure cooker here in the House. And we vent these issues, and we find a way to at least sort out the policy that can be accepted or accommodated by the other side. And often we're able to come to a good product that's good and right for the American people. Madam Speaker, I come to you tonight with a number of things on my mind and the primary issue that concerns me is what took place here in the House yesterday with the debate on the rule and on the bill and subsequently the vote spent another $4.6 billion, unbudgeted, unauthorized, unacceptable--and not just 41 cents out of every dollar borrowed, a lot of it from the Chinese and the Saudis--but all of this money, all of this unbudgeted funding is a hundred percent borrowed money because it goes above that level. It was unnecessary money to be spent. So every bit of it was borrowed money. And by a vote of 256-152, this lame duck Congress, this invalidated Congress, this reputed Congress, this rejected Congress, has gone down the path over and over again of spending money that we don't have for causes that don't have the support of the American people spent by a Congress that's no longer the valid representatives of the people. That's why it's called a lame duck. We should have shot this lame duck a long time ago. It still limps along and it still flares up, and it still steps in and goes against the will of the American people. Now, I would submit, Madam Speaker, if this Congress had reflected the will of the American people, the gavels would not be changing hands come January 4 of 2011. They'd stay essentially in the same hands with a smaller switch in seats. But we can see this happen over the last 4 years as the San Francisco agenda began to manifest itself here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And it didn't really get enough traction that the American people really understood what was going on until such time as President Obama was elected and his agenda matched up so closely with that of the Speaker's agenda here--that San Francisco agenda--that the American people could see clearly. By the way, coupled with that of the gentleman from Nevada from down through across the rotunda on the Senate side, the three of them, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and President Obama. I said this more than 2 years ago, 2\1/2\ years ago, If you elect this ruling troika, they will be able to go into a phone booth and do what they will to America, and they won't be accountable to anybody. And I should have said, Until the subsequent election. Well, the American people did elect Barack Obama, and they sent Nancy Pelosi back here in a position to become the Speaker, which she was, and Harry Reid maintained his position as the majority leader in the United States Senate. And they did to the best of their extent what they could to America. There's a whole list of things that aggrieve me and very much that must be undone. Some things that passed the House that didn't make it through the Senate were painful votes for some of the Members that will be going home. And I regret some of the friends that I have made on the other side of the aisle that I'm saying goodbye to this week and the next week and the next week. There are some good Americans that have served this country well that were voted out of office because of the anchor that was attached to them by the San Francisco agenda. But there's this agenda, this agenda that I've called modern-day slavery reparations. And some think that might be a rhetorical stretch. But, Madam Speaker, I'll point out not only did John Conyers, as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, hold impeachment hearings for President Bush and Vice President Cheney--he said they weren't impeachment hearings but they were, in fact, impeachment hearings, the basis of it I still don't know but I sat in on them--not only did he hold those, he held hearings on a whole number of things including hearings on slavery reparations. And I made the argument that you cannot fix something that happened a century and a half ago. You can't go back and put the blood back in people's veins when they've paid in blood to put an end to slavery. And you can't hold the generations, six and seven generations hence, responsible for the sins of the great great great great great great grandfathers. And the chairman, Mr. Conyers, a respectable individual whom I count as a friend and have always had a good personal relationship with, told me, That's why we're having these hearings to find out. You think we can't fix these problems by providing reparations, and we're holding hearings and we're going to see if we can figure it out. Well, that's the mindset. I mean, if we're actually having a discussion about whether you can compensate people for labor that they did while they were slaves in the first half of the 19th century and earlier to those descendents, how do you sort out who's descended from slaves and who's not? They don't know how to answer that question. They just think somehow there should be a redistribution of wealth. Well, this redistribution of wealth is something that also comes out of the mouth of our President. It was very clear when he made the statement to Joe the Plumber when he said, Share the wealth. And it's been very clear as he's played the class envy card time after time after time and divided Americans against each other for a whole series of reasons--and a lot of it that has to do with how much money each of us make, forgetting that it is the American Dream to become a millionaire, to pile another million on top of that, the second million is easier since the first. How long has it been since we've heard that? It might be harder than the first because this President wants to punish that first million and the second million and the third million. Hopefully, that gets resolved this week. We've reached a bit of an impasse on it. But the redistribution of wealth goes on. The hard-core leftist agenda is still driven. The leaders and many of the Members of this lame duck 111th Congress, if they got the message, their message back to us is a spiteful message against the American people, which is, So you didn't like debt and deficit and you'd like to have jobs and a better growing economy. Well, on our way out the door-- you've thrown a lot of us out of office--on our way out the door, we're going to give you a little more of what you didn't like. They're saying to the American people, Oh, you didn't like what we gave you in the 111th Congress or the 110th Congress, you didn't like what we gave you under President Obama. Well, if you didn't like it, here's some more. That's what's going on in this lame duck Congress. If the American people don't like what's been served to them by Nancy Pelosi and President Obama and Harry Reid, they're saying, Madam Speaker, to the American people, here's some more. Well, here's some more that came at us yesterday: the Pigford Farms issue tied together with the Cobell issue that has to do with how resources were managed for certain Native American tribes. And I'm not an expert on the Cobell issue. I have been drawn into the Pigford issue. But, Madam Speaker, Pigford Farms is this: it is the largest class action suit in the history of the United States. And the single largest recipient of that, her name is Shirley Sherrod. You remember Shirley Sherrod. She's the lady that announced on July 22 of 2009 that she would be the largest recipient in the largest civil rights case in history, which turns out now to be $2.3 billion to compensate for discrimination--an amount that--I agree there was discrimination and I agree we should compensate people who were discriminated against. It's a very difficult task to quantify, however. But Shirley Sherrod received the news of the award of $13 million to her and whoever the people she might decide to distribute it to. We don't have access to those records. These cases are apparently sealed. On 22 July, 2009, Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, hired her 25 July 2009. Because she's the largest civil rights recipient in the largest case in the history of America, and the case is Pigford versus Vilsack--the Secretary of Agriculture. Timothy Pigford filed the suit and the class action lawsuit and so his name, the first plaintiff's name, is listed as the name of the suit versus the Secretary of Agriculture, which was Glickman, and it became then the successor Secretaries until it became Tom Vilsack. But it was Tom Vilsack that was named then in the suit as successor, Pigford v. Vilsack, and the largest recipient was Shirley Sherrod. And what does he do 3 days after the $13 million was announced that she would receive? Hires her. I can't fathom hiring somebody who had sued me, who had pushed for a settlement that turns out to be $13 million. The next piece is, what do they need the job for, and why would I reward them with a job? What else was going on in the mind of the Secretary and Shirley Sherrod that he would put her on the payroll and make her the director of USDA rural development in the State of Georgia? This all came to light because there was a YouTube clip of Shirley Sherrod's speech before the NAACP that in its edited version appeared to make some racist statements. And I saw the speech in the totality enough that I accept the overall message on what she learned from that. And so I am not taking issue with the totality of her speech. But she was fired apparently for the clip that was out. And the clip I think is a clip that was available to the Web site that posted it, what was available at the time. But in any case, $13 million recipient in the largest civil rights case in the history hired by the people she sued 3 days after the settlement announcement came down. And that's just a piece of Pigford Farms. Pigford Farms has been dragging on for years. And what happened was Dan Glickman, then Secretary of Agriculture under Bill Clinton as President, stepped up and announced that they had discovered that there was discrimination taking place by U.S. Department of Agriculture employees against black farmers primarily in the South, because that's where they lived. And when that happened, it opened up the class action. The lawyers went to work and they produced what's now Pigford I, the first settlement consent decree. It was approved by Judge Paul Friedman. I brought his opinion, Madam Speaker, with me to the floor tonight. And if those might think when I say this is a modern day version of slavery reparations, I would point out that in the case the first words in the opinion of Judge Paul Friedman are this: ``Forty acres and a mule.'' Forty acres and a mule. Madam Speaker, he goes on to lament that he can't fix all of the wrongs that come out of slavery and the segregation in one civil rights suit. One can read between the lines that he is sorry that he can't fix it all. One can read between the lines that he may well be glad to hear a Pigford II proposal come before him so that he could ratify it once Congress has appropriated an additional $1.15 billion. Here is what Judge Friedman wrote about the Pigford settlements, these $50,000 settlements that were paid out to black farmers for--they had to meet four criteria: had to be African American. They had to have farmed or wanted to farm. They had to have believed they were discriminated against. And they had to attest that they filed a complaint, that could have been verbal, to a USDA employee, a Member of Congress, a couple other categories. That's four criteria. Actually, the fifth one was then that someone, not a close family member, had to sign an affidavit that attested that they had not only believed they were discriminated against, but they had complained about it, not necessarily in writing, but it could have been verbally to any USDA employee under any circumstances. It didn't have to be a public meeting with witnesses. It could have simply been walking down the street and you meet someone who might be the director of your county FSA, and you say, I don't think your people treated me right. I should have had a loan. That would be all it would take. If you didn't get the loan, you wouldn't even have had to apply. You just maybe had to think you weren't going to be treated right and failed to apply for the loan. That's enough. You don't have to prove discrimination. You just have to allege it and get a friend to sign the affidavit. That's all that's required under Pigford I. And then according to Judge Paul Friedman, he writes this: ``The consent decree accomplishes its purpose primarily through a two-track dispute resolution mechanism that provides those class members with little or no documentary evidence with,'' and I am quoting from this opinion, Madam Speaker, ``a virtually automatic cash payment of $50,000 and forgiveness of debt owed to the USDA.'' And anybody who believes that that's not enough, they can actually sue on their own and prove it by the preponderance of the evidence. But there is no proof required to receive the $50,000 virtually automatic cash payment except to get a friend to sign the affidavit that says that you complained about it and you believed you were discriminated against. And then all it had to be was to allege that you were turned down for a loan or a farm program of some type or another. Madam Speaker, $1.05 billion was distributed under no basis beyond that, no requirement or proof for discrimination. And a very, very low level of even asking them if they actually ever complained or filed a complaint. And no verification required that they ever farmed or ever applied for a USDA loan or program. You didn't have to farm. You just had to say I am black, I wanted to farm, and I believe they discriminated against me, and I complained about it, and I have got a friend that will sign the document. That's it, Madam Speaker. And $1.05 billion was distributed on that basis. And virtually automatic payments, much of it debt forgiveness included. And if anyone actually was a farmer and actually did have debt with the USDA, all of their debt was forgiven also. And Judge Paul Friedman said a virtually automatic payment if you didn't want to go through track two and get a bigger check than the $50,000 and the debt forgiveness, which Judge Friedman calculates that the average settlement would be $187,500. Now, we don't have an accounting from the USDA on how large the average settlements are. We don't have the spreadsheet of the 22,500 applicants that poured in after the direction of this opinion by Judge Friedman and the consent decree that accompanies it directed that there be town hall meetings across the South, that the attorneys on this case, in order to earn their contingency fees, needed to go out and promote this. And they needed to put newspaper ads in and radio ads in. I believe there was also television. I can't verify that for sure. And hold meetings and call people to them. And we have reports from throughout the South that there were meetings that were held in churches, in town hall meetings, and they were told this is your 40 acres and a mule. You need to come and sign up for this. And this is what you have to attest to in order to get the $50,000 check. And if you have any debt, it will be forgiven. Now, if you present that, if you have attorneys working on contingency fees, you have the perfect mechanism for fraud. And so as we look across the South, I can't believe that all of the counties discriminated against their African American population equally. I would have to believe that if discrimination took place--and I believe it did--that it took place sometimes in a county there would be none, because the culture of that office in that county would be such that everybody gets treated equally, with respect and promptly, with all the help that they can give with the staff that they have. I believe that takes place in at least some of the counties in the South. And I believe it has for a generation or more. I suspect--and I don't have reason to believe, but I suspect--there were counties on the other side of that spectrum where they as a matter of practice discriminated against African Americans. And these are the cases that I believe needed to be compensated. But I can't believe that it was the same level of discrimination across all of these counties. And when I see applications, and I have a stack of these applications, most of which were paid out, and they name the same USDA employee as the one they complained to, and they give the location and the date, and that USDA employee was not at that location, could not have been at locations as far apart as they were claimed, as many dates as were claimed. And why would it be that one USDA employee had all of these complaints and yet nothing was done about the discrimination? It's this, that they offered the name over and over again. It's kind of like if you see an individual's name, and when you look through all these applications, and I have looked through stacks of them, when I look through them and I see often the same name of the USDA employee, I see the same handwriting on application after application, I can see the narrative has been changed just slightly from application to application. If they were numbered chronologically, I can just about tell you what's going on. There is an attorney's staff that is sitting there filling out these applications. They may actually be interviewing the individuals. The individuals had to sign because they were going to get the check. And the attorney's going to get a contingency fee out of that. And we don't know how much that is. And that's not in this opinion. It's not in the consent decree. But what is in there is that the IRS gets paid also as a matter of settlement. So if it's a $50,000 virtually automatic payment, as Judge Friedman says, there is also a $12,500 check that accompanies that that gets mailed off to the IRS. And so now it becomes $62,500. Judge Friedman estimated the average debt would be $100,000. And so the debt forgiveness at $100,000 would automatically send the check to the IRS for $25,000 to pay the tax liability that comes from the debt forgiveness that would become a tax liability for those individuals. Those things went on. His estimate, $187,500 per settlement, believing that the applicants, or at least presuming to believe that the applicants for the Pigford settlement were applicants that actually were engaged in programs within the USDA. Now I can tell you whether we can get a decent insight into whether there are actual farming participants that are predominantly part of these Pigford settlements, the 14,500 that have received their first payments under the first version of Pigford I. If we can go back and look at all the data, check their name, address, contact information, the amount of the check that they got, how much got sent to the IRS, how much debt forgiveness there was, how much got sent to the IRS. And we can look down through there, and we can see what percentage of them had debt with the USDA that was written off. And then we can take a look at the addresses and see--some of those who have analyzed this more deeply than I would tell me that if you take out a map of the United States and start down through these applications and start sticking pins in the map at the addresses of the applications, you will find that many of these pins go directly into the inner cities and into the urban areas of America. It's true that people can move from the farm to the city. They have been doing that for a long time. But the preponderance of the pins tell a story that doesn't appear to be consistent with the allegations of the depth and the level of fraud that they say are there. I sat down with USDA employees. I have had these applications handed to me. I have had them come back sick at heart that they had to administer these settlements in Pigford farms and tell me that they believe that the minimum fraud level in the applications that they were required to provide a virtually automatic payment for, a minimum fraud being at 75 percent. I hear numbers from USDA employees that dealt with more application of this that go into the upper 90th percentile. I want to look at these numbers and see. It's amazing to me that we can have 22,000 applicants, 14,500 settlements, payments that are made, and throughout all that time not have a single USDA employee that has been fired or disciplined or even identified as a perpetrator of discrimination. If we really care about ending discrimination in America--and we may have actually cleaned up the USDA, I don't allege that's the case today. In fact, I would argue that it wasn't nearly as bad as they would like to have us believe. And so if a discrimination took place, we should have been able to identify the perpetrators, and they should have been punished. And I think that it's irresponsible on the part of the secretaries of Agriculture, who have supported this Pigford settlement, to also say I can find not just 22,000 people that will apply; now we have applications and an additional 70,000 or so. Now we are looking at applications in Pigford II of as many as 94,000 altogether, an additional 70,000 or so, 72,000 added to the 22,000 original claimants. And we end up with a total number of claimants of 94,000 who say that they were discriminated against. That's a really effective and efficient marketing result on the part of the attorneys that have been set up on these contingency fees and who are charged by the consent decree, the original consent decree, of holding these town hall meetings and getting the word out to African American farmers so they know if they have been discriminated against they can apply. Again, no proof required that they were discriminated against. Early on they were required to prove that they were denied benefits compared to a similarly situated white farmer, and they complained that that was too hard. So they waived that similarly situated, and it turned out then there is no proof required that they ever farmed or applied for a program; they just have to say they wanted to farm, and that they believe they were or would have been discriminated against, and that they complained about it, and have their friends sign their affidavit. That's what up: 94,000 applications all together. Perhaps a few less, but these are the estimates I am working with: 94,000 applications. John Boyd, President of the National Black Farmers Organization that has pushed on this and actually was formed for the purpose of bringing forth the Pigford Farms issue, testified before the Judiciary Committee that there are 18,000 black farmers in America, 18,000. Now, granted there were more a generation earlier. There were more farmers a generation earlier. A lot of my neighbors went broke. I burned and buried a lot of farm sites across western Iowa in those years as the farm crisis went into its downward spiral, and there were people there that carried debt. There were people that were out of debt that took on debt in order to stay in business. And as the downward spiral came, the value of their land went down, their machinery went down. The commodities prices weren't there for their crops, and bank after bank closed. And, in fact, my bank closed April 26, Friday afternoon, 3 o'clock, 1985. I will never forget that day. I had a company to run, I had customers, most of whom were also customers of the bank that was closed--two branches shut down--a payroll to meet. I had 2 pennies in my pocket, literally 2 pennies to rub together, just almost a symbol of how hard it was. Rub those two pennies together and hope and wish and work and pray to figure out how I could meet payroll with my employees, keep the business running, find some customers that could pay because I had my customers, all their accounts were frozen like mine was frozen. We found a way to get through. It was difficult. But I watched that crisis hit, not just the bank closing in my neighborhood, all across the Midwest, especially. I watched it crush people. I watched family farms move off and load their things and move to the city. So some of those pins that get stuck in the city are pins of people that were on the land that had to move off in the farm crisis here. But my point is this: That thousands of farmers went broke during the farm crisis years of the 1980s. The entire decade of the 1980s--actually starting in 1979 and flowing through, were farm crisis years. These are the primary years where they alleged discrimination against black farmers. And where it took place, it's hard to quantify because its laid over the top of the disaster of the farm crisis years of the entire decade of the 1980s. Many people went broke. Many people were denied farm program benefits and loan programs. There were many that were not viable, and the USDA concluded that they couldn't work with them because they were going to go under. They were already upside down. And to put good money after bad was not a good decision, not when things were spiraling downwards. I saw banks close, new owners come in. I saw them interview the people that would come in with their loan application form, their financial statements. And I saw them go down through the financial statements. I mean I was a part of this, and I engaged with my neighbors that were going through this as I was. As they would look at the assets and they would say, let's see. You have got this nice new combine here. Well, you are going to sell it. And you have a pretty nice pickup that's 2 years old, we are going to sell it. And by the way all the livestock that's here, you know, it could die or get sick, but it's very liquid. It can go to the sale barn this week. We will sell all of that. And you won't need that feed so you can auction off all that hay you have got there for the cattle that are in the feedlot, you can sell them. And you don't need the horse, and you don't need your best tractor. We can get you down to a small tractor, and you can hire somebody to come in and custom combine, and you can borrow your neighbor's planter, and we will keep you on some of this land. We will take the mortgage on it. We will take a first and a second mortgage on it, and we will keep you operating for a little while, but you are going to work for the bank. Now I am not picking on the bank; that's what they had to do to keep some of these people alive and keep them functioning. That's part of the farm program, or that is part of the crisis. The farm program did come in, and it was helpful in 1983. It gave us another boost in 1985. It got us through that decade, and now we are relatively prosperous compared to those years. But whatever color you were, if you were farming in the 1980s, you were having trouble. And a lot of people went under, there was farm sale after farm sale. I remember the bills hanging up, the sale bills hanging up in the gas stations around, in the sale barn, where there would be farm auctions. You could go to farm auctions, several of them a weekend every weekend, and we did that for a long time, and it hurt a lot. And I saw tears run down people's cheeks because they were standing on the land that had been homesteaded by their ancestors, and they were losing it. And it was their identity. It's who they were. So I know, I know from personal experience how painful this is to go through those years. And to completely discount that component of the economy and argue that a lot of African American farmers that went under in the 1980s would still be farming today if it hadn't been for the discrimination in the USDA offices, it denies the starkest facts of the economy altogether. But they can't be untangled; they are tangled together. It's impossible to quantify. And so the leftists in the country have decided they're just going to pay everybody that applies. That's what Pigford I was. And there was a deadline. It was filed on April 14, 1999. So you get 6 months for everybody to sign up and go out and have all these meetings, do your fish fries, meet in the churches, advertise on the radio, in the newspaper, wherever you can, and hold all these town hall meetings. And they held them--42 of them in Alabama alone, 42 meetings. And people signed up. When the deadline came 6 months after that April 14 date, then they found they had things so ginned up there were a lot of other applicants. So even though $1.05 billion was paid out under this Pigford discrimination claim, there were Members of the House and the Senate that introduced legislation to open up a second one, Pigford II. And they tried to do it, but they didn't get it done. This Congress wouldn't buy it. We had already seen the level of fraud in Pigford I, and to open it up again and extend the closing deadline for the consent decree so that all of these other applicants could come pouring in, this roughly 70,000, at least 66,000 that had accumulated, wasn't bought by this House and Senate in the same form. It bounced back and forth. It passed in a couple of versions on one side or the other, but this Congress never got together on that, never got together on the authorization to extend the date. We did get together on one thing, Mr. Speaker. We got together on the 2008 farm bill to address Pigford in a way that the House and the Senate agreed, and the President signed it. It was brought forward here on the floor, right over there from that microphone, by the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson, a late amendment of language that came into the bill, into the farm bill that we worked on for a long time. And it's a hard job to bring a farm bill through this Congress. And I'm sure that the weight of that weighed a little on the chairman and weighed on all of us, more on him than on anybody else. It had to have. But I argued with him at the time, the language in the farm bill authorizes $100 million to close the Pigford issue so that if there were any remaining claims that had not been resolved, they would be put underneath the $100 million amount, and they would all be resolved. I argued, Mr. Chairman, you are opening up Pigford for an additional $1.3 billion in liabilities. And it's full of fraud. And I sat way into the night in a markup on the farm bill with a representative of the USDA who had lived this and went down through anecdote after anecdote, circumstance after circumstance, and convinced me completely that there's a very, very high level of fraud that was taking place. But yet the structure of this settlement was such that they couldn't look into the fraud because you didn't have to meet the standard of being discriminated against; you just had to say you believe you were discriminated against. So we had our debate, Chairman Peterson and I, outside the record of this Congress actually. I said it's $1.3 billion; this is a placeholder and a marker that opens up the door for $1.3 billion. He said, no, $100 million puts an end to it. And that's what we're doing. We're cleaning it up, and we're putting an end to Pigford. And I said, I don't think so. We went around on that dialogue which ended with him walking away. I don't know if I blame him for that. But here is what's in the bill. He says the maximum amount, farm bill 2008, H.R. 2419, the total amount of payments and debt relief pursuant to actions commenced under subsection B shall not exceed $100 million. That's what the chairman said. And here is the intent, intent of Congress as to the remedial nature of the section. It is the intent of Congress that this section be liberally construed so as to effectuate its remedial purpose of giving a full determination on the merits for each Pigford claim previously denied that determination. In other words, if there are 66 or 70,000 applicants out there that didn't get in before Pigford closed in October of 1999, if those Johnny-come-latelies wanted to pour their applications into this, this Congress said, here is $100 million, that's it, it's going to take care of all the claims and no more; this is the end by law. This is the section that's cited by the current Secretary of Agriculture that he says gave him the authority at the direction of Congress, actually, acting at the direction of Congress to open up and create a Pigford II settlement where he, Secretary Vilsack and Attorney General Eric Holder sat down with John Boyd, the head of the black farmers organization, and they cooked up Pigford II, not authorized by the House and the Senate and the President as would be required if he's going to act in the fashion that he told me, in fact, not authorized at all, $100 million cap put on this Pigford I to put an end to it. By the way, I disagreed with $100 million. I thought we went too far with the first $1.05 billion. But in any case, there exists no authorization that came from Congress and no legislation that was passed by the Congress and signed by the President that gave the authority to the Secretary of Agriculture and the Attorney General to sit down with the head of the black farmers organization and arrive at an agreement early last year in February that would tap the taxpayers for an additional $1.15 billion. But that's what they agreed to. They went on their own and had these negotiations. Now, where would this inspiration have come from? If Congress said it's capped at $100 million, how would Cabinet members, full Cabinet members, come to a conclusion that they needed to go sit down with John Boyd and tap the taxpayers for an additional $1.15 billion? Where would this come from? Well, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you where I think it may come from, and that would be from the President of the United States who, as a United States Senator, introduced the Pigford II language that opened up the filings for a second round of Pigford claims as the United States Senator, led by Barack Obama, and over on this side led by Artur Davis of Alabama and Bobby Scott of Virginia. They pushed that. They tried to push it through the Judiciary Committee. It didn't go. They slipped it into the farm bill at $100 million. They got their placeholder. Now I ask you, Mr. Speaker, who was right? Who was right? Was it Steve King or Tom Vilsack or was it Collin Peterson? Because we are here today lamenting what happened on the House floor yesterday, which was a vote to send $1.15 billion additional into this Pigford II settlement that I will tell you even though they have put some provisions in here still result in--still result in a virtually automatic payment to those claimants that will come. That's what will happen, Mr. Speaker. And so the chairman of the Agriculture Committee that said this is the end of it at $100 million, who would he disagree with? Tom Vilsack or Steve King? I'm sure he remembers the conversation. I'm sure he remembers that I said it's 1.13 billion, and this is just a placeholder that opens it up, this $100 million is a placeholder that opens it up. We disagreed we had that conversation. One of us is going to be right. Did he know when he brought the language to this floor that $100 million was going to turn out to be a placeholder for $1.25 billion? That's $100 million plus the $1.15 billion. Did he know that? Or was the chairman of the Agriculture Committee apparently was he misinformed by someone else? Did the President of the United States direct his Cabinet members to go negotiate and reach an agreement for an additional payout under Pigford II of $1.15 billion? Where would it come from? Would the Secretary of Agriculture take it upon himself if he could have ended this to open it up again? I don't think so. Would the Attorney General take it upon himself to open this up if it was ended by the farm bill of 2008? I don't think so. I think the American people, Mr. Speaker, will suspect, as I do, that since the President was the initiator of this Pigford II legislation as a United States Senator, it was the President of the United States more likely to order his Cabinet members to go sit down and negotiate with the president of the black farmers organization and then try to figure out how to get Congress to fund it. Because the deal, the settlement proposal, and it's not a consent decree, a judge hasn't ruled upon it, a settlement proposal was something that was agreed to be contingent upon, conditional to Congress appropriating the funds to pay. Well, last night Congress did that by a vote of 256-152. Now, if I were completely wrong on this--remember, this is a repudiated Congress. This is the lame duck Congress. This is the Congress that the American people have said enough already, shut it off. Take the shovel out of the President's hand; he's dug a deep enough hole. Stop your spending. We're going to send people to the Congress that will do the battle for fiscal responsibility and stop spending. Those folks have not arrived yet, those 87 new freshmen Republicans who will be here taking the oath of office on this floor on January 4, 2011. They are not here yet, so we have the old troika ruling. We have the old troika ruling, and still, still we produced 152 ``no'' votes on this Pigford funding of $1.15 billion that came through here yesterday. Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that I believe that all 152 who voted ``no'' on that either deeply suspect or are convinced that there was a significant amount of fraud in Pigford I, and that the fraud in Pigford II will be substantially greater than it was in Pigford I because those, at least in theory, who were most discriminated against are the ones most likely to have filed the application in Pigford I in a timely fashion. Those who got the news late, once the inertia of the recruitment went on across the South, they are the ones who lined up a little later. It is kind of a chain letter effect. There were 152 who voted ``no.'' It was a bipartisan objection to the funding of Pigford. It wasn't all Republicans this time. By Speaker Pelosi's definition, it would be clearly bipartisan. There were three Democrats who voted ``no.'' Those Democrats, I presume, were making a statement that they believed either that those who had been discriminated against had been compensated or were making a statement against the fraud that they must believe exists. I have not talked to them so I can't take a position as to what they believed and why they voted ``no.'' But it is curious to me that two of the three Democrats who voted ``no'' on Pigford were two that were defeated in the last election. So one can presume that they are votes of conscience that they put up on their way home from this Congress. I thank them for their service to this country. We have one that won his election who is seated from the South who also voted ``no.'' I would like to hear from him. He happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, a man with a brain and a conscience that voted ``no.'' So now it is up to us here in this upcoming Congress to take a look at these records, to go down and compile the spreadsheet and analyze the data and interview the people that were involved in administering this to get a real picture of what was going on. I am very well aware there are good, solid people who are responsible constitutional conservatives who don't want to touch this. I am very well aware of that, Mr. Speaker, but we have an obligation to the American people to shine a light on this. And I intend to move forward to do that within the limitation of the time and the resources and the cooperation I am able to get in the 112th Congress. There has been a massive amount of fraud defined to me in the interviews I have done with USDA employees. To the extent, as I said, that African American employees of the Farm Service Administration who worked within the offices, presumably if they worked there, they would not allow themselves to be discriminated against. And if they never farmed and never filed an application but received a check anyway, it is pretty clear that there is levels of fraud that need to be exposed. And so, Mr. Speaker, there is much to be said about Pigford II. It is not a consent decree. There is only an agreement that has been negotiated between Tom Vilsack and Eric Holder and John Boyd. They have negotiated that agreement. They have negotiated the amount. They have succeeded in getting it past the Senate after the Senate reached a point of exhaustion in fighting it. That is my reports from some of the Senators over there. They did pass it through the House after vociferous objections, 256 to 152, but with bipartisan objection; southern Democrats voting ``no,'' not urban but southern Democrats voting ``no.'' It is on its way and we are pretty sure the President will sign it because, after all, it has been his baby since he was in the United States Senate. It is really odd that a man from Chicago would take such an interest in an issue that he can't have personal experience with, not having personal experience that we know of in the rural areas. And here we are, Mr. Speaker, anticipating the President will sign it. When he does, if and when he does, then I believe they will take it before the same judge that started out the Pigford I opinion with these words, ``40 acres and a mule,'' and laments that he can't fix all of the problems of slavery and segregation in one class action suit. Well, he has got a second one now. It is likely to come to him. I am pretty sure Judge Friedman will approve this. And I am really confident that the Secretary of Agriculture, and if you can get the Attorney General to speak, will say that they put all kinds of safeguards in here, safeguards like lawyers have to sign off. Yeah, well, they had to sign off on the first one, too, and that didn't really resolve this issue. It is just to the best of their knowledge they think it is true. That is not a very strong statement. There is no requirement for evidence. They did put some language in there that allows the administrators, if they think there is fraud, to ask more questions and require more documentation. Okay. But if they are instructed not to think there is fraud, they will not find fraud. This administration does not think there is fraud or they would be looking for it. It is amazing to me--18,000 black farmers, 94,000 claims. Even if you presume that 100 percent of the black farmers were discriminated against, we still have four and a half claims for every black farmer. How does this work? It should be fraud. It can't be described any other way. And the percentages of these claims, there is no question that comes out of this administration, out of the White House or the Department of Agriculture or the Attorney General's office. They are not saying we are looking into the fraud. They are saying, if it exists, it is so low it is really not an issue. But we are going to satisfy your concerns by having an IG report come out in 6 months. The money is gone. You won't be able to get it back. If you want to learn something about how to protect against fraud in Pigford II, let's look at Pigford I. We already have the data. Let's dig into it. So what I think we have to do is dig into both. And we owe it to the American people not to be paying out 40 acres and a mule. You cannot right wrongs from a century and a half ago. But if they were righted, Abraham Lincoln told us how: For every drop of blood that was drawn by the lash be paid by a drop drawn by the sword. That's done. That is behind us. We have an American future. We can't be paying modern-day slavery reparations thinking we compensate what took place in the past. We have the future to worry about. Let's make sure everybody has equal opportunity and let's build for the future. I see my friend, the gentleman from Texas, Judge Gohmert has arrived. And when Judge Gohmert comes to the floor, I know that there is some real important input that the American people need to know, and so I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Texas, also my friend, I appreciate the subject matter that you brought here to the floor tonight. I would add to this: not only do we need to continue the tax rates that we have today, but I would make them permanent so there is certainty, so that people can do the investments that Mr. Gohmert talked about and will be able to plan their businesses and create the jobs and plan for the future. But there is another one that hangs over the head of many families in America today, and that is the estate tax. That one is the most ominous of them all. If we aren't able to reach an agreement on these tax brackets by the end of this lame duck session and if we are just in the condition that we are in today in that there is no certainty and where the $1 trillion or $2 trillion of capital that is sitting on the sidelines doesn't get released and invested into our economy, that's bad. We've already seen a lot of months of it, so another month of it doesn't devastate us completely, although it would be a great Christmas present. I know people would be sitting around the family shop, figuring out, We can add onto this production line. Let's hire this person here. Let's make this part of our operation go. Let's open up a new business over here. These things would be going on. That would all happen if we could get these tax brackets made permanent between now and the end of this wounded, crippled lame duck session that we have of this repudiated Congress that has been renounced by the American people. Another month of it isn't as bad as what happens if we go another month with the estate tax hanging over our heads the way it is, because I will tell you that what will happen is there will be thousands of Americans who are lying on their death beds--some in hospices around the country, some in hospital beds, some of them lying at home--and there will be decisions made by them and their families. Somebody who is lying there, who has got some years on him and a lot of life behind him, knowing he doesn't have much ahead of him, will say, Don't put me on life support. Don't give me any life-saving treatment. Let me pass away in 2010 because, if that happens, then you'll get the full inheritance of my life's work. That's what he will say. He'll make that decision. He'll tell his loved ones, Don't extend my life. Don't give me extra ways to feed me. Don't give me IVs. Let me lie here. Put me in hospice now, and let me slowly die. That's what will be said over and over again. There will be those who will go further. There will be those who will decide they want to end their lives so that their children don't have to pay an onerous estate tax that will have, as of midnight on December 31, a $1 million exemption. After that, there will be an up to 55 percent tax on the balance. I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, how that works in the neighborhood where I live. Let's just say there is somebody there who is 90 years old, and he went out and bought some land early on in life, and he leveraged it and bought another piece of land. He slowly paid for that, and ended up with a couple sections of land paid for. That's 2 square miles. That's 640 acres times two. That's 1,280 acres paid for. That's the nest egg that he worked all his life for. Maybe he worked 70 or more years to put that together. He paid the tax on the income, and retired the principal and paid the interest, and there it sits for his children. Maybe he has got five children there around that death bed. If he passes away in the first second of 2011--by the way, there will be death certificates that are backdated, too. They'll be back-timed, probably not backdated. They'll be back-timed past midnight so the estate tax won't apply. But let's just say there are two sections of land, five kids. He passes away in the first second of 2011, and the death certificate says so. Here is what happens to those two sections of land: The $1 million exemption doesn't really touch the value of those two good valuable sections of land, so you can take one section out of there. There's the 55 percent tax to pay the taxman, to pay the death tax. It takes one whole section of land, 1 square mile, to pay the Federal Government. The second component of that is the section of land that is split up five ways because of the five kids. So what they have is actually two sections of land--one that is essentially debt free because the other one has gone to pay the taxes, and it gets split five ways. Everyone has got 20 percent equity. They can't buy that land back and keep it in tact. It takes a long time to put a unit together, to put the building site together, to get the storage that's there for the grain and the livestock and all the pieces to work. It doesn't just work to go out there and say, Well, here's another piece of land that's the same or you can operate an operation that's half the size with only 20 percent equity. So it wipes out both sections of land. They sell out the whole legacy. A century of work or more goes out the window because we have a death tax that comes. The bell tolls on the death tax at midnight, December 31. It is cruel, unconscionable and, I think, a sin for this Congress not to address that before that time. So, Mr. Speaker, being very well aware of the clock and the duties that we all have here, I want to thank my friend from Texas for coming to the floor and for volunteering that valuable input that we have. I appreciate your indulgence here this evening and the privilege to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding. I come to the floor troubled, considerably troubled by--and in opposition to the rule--by this Pigford settlement proposal that we've heard about just now. It was brought to my attention sometime after I was elected to Congress. I had a number of Iowa USDA employees that were deployed to Washington, D.C., and other locations to assist in administering the Pigford I settlement. They distributed $1.05 billion to African American farmers, some of whom were discriminated against. All of those that were discriminated against I would agree, I think with all of my colleagues, that they should be compensated to the degree that is practicable by law. However, as I sat down with the individuals that were administering the Pigford I settlement, and one of them came back with a box of file forms and applications sick to his stomach and told me that he had been compelled to engage in a practice that he believed was 75 percent fraudulent at a minimum, I thought that was a high and shocking number and put the information away until it emerged again and again in this Congress. It emerged before the Judiciary Committee in hearings before the committee on Pigford II to open it up again. There, the president of the Black Farmers Organization, John Boyd, testified under oath that there are 18,000 black farmers. As I go back through the USDA records, I can find a peak of perhaps as many as 36,000, but his number of 18,000 sticks in my mind. We are up to 94,000 claims, Madam Speaker, and 18,000 black farmers. And if you presume that everyone was discriminated against--which I reject on its face--we are looking at something here that is a multiplier beyond what this Congress ever intended. And as the gentlelady from North Carolina said, an anticipated couple of thousand applicants turns into now 90,000-plus applicants, of which perhaps two-thirds of them may be successful in their $50,000 stipend. There was a statute of limitations. That consent decree was closed April 14, 1999, and since that time it has been opened up a second time. The Ag Committee is the other component of this. Myself and Congressman Goodlatte of Virginia are the only two that serve on Judiciary and on Ag. There, in the 2008 farm bill, the chairman of the Ag Committee, Mr. Peterson, put in $100 million to be the end, the settlement of Pigford. That was going to be the end of it for all time. We had an intense conversation on that. I said it will be an additional $1.3 billion; he insisted that $100 million would end it. I have the language here, Madam Speaker, that puts the cap on this at $100 million. Here we are, 2 short years later, with $1.3 billion, and the people that I'm talking to that have administered this at higher levels yet than those that first brought it to my attention tell me that the levels of fraud are higher yet. And it is not just $50,000, it's $50,000 plus 25 percent of that check that goes to the IRS to pay the tax liability, so there's another $12,500. Judge Paul Friedman estimated the debt that would be forgiven would be an average of $100,000 per black farmer and another 25 percent IRS checks. So we're at $187,500, and still this Congress has no access to the records other than those that have been spirited out of the USDA. So it isn't just that we should not fund this; there is no deal. There was no Congress directive that sent Eric Holder and Tom Vilsack to sit down with John Boyd of the Black Farmers and make a new deal and come to this Congress and say appropriate $1.5 billion additional dollars to fund the Pigford II. That was their elective. In fact, that was their elective in the face of Congress' direction that it would be capped at $100 million in the 2008 farm bill. There is no deal unless Congress authorizes this today. And if we do so, we are asking Members that haven't had access to the information to ratify an agreement that was put together by Eric Holder and Tom Vilsack at their own volition, not by the direction of Congress. The next Congress has an obligation to look into these records and check the data and follow through the threads of fraud and be honest with the American taxpayers and make sure that those that have been discriminated against are compensated. But the central point here is this, Madam Speaker: For the altogether $2.3 billion that the taxpayers have accepted this liability, there hasn't been one USDA employee that has been fired or disciplined, not one. And the Secretary of Agriculture tells me he's not willing to relitigate Pigford I, he's not willing to open up the records to allow us to look at it, and he's not willing to allow us to look over his shoulder to assure that Pigford II is less fraudulent than Pigford I. For all of these reasons, I ask my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the rule and ``no'' on the bill.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from California for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill. It is, I think, something that even though it's been vetted fairly well, on those that are paying attention it hasn't been vetted very well by this Congress. And, from my standpoint, I am one of the people that's actually read the consent decree from Pigford I. I brought a copy of it to the floor. It starts out with these words, ``40 acres and a mule.'' Now, we know what that started out to be in the aftermath of the Civil War, a promise from the Federal Government that there would be 40 acres for African Americans, newly freed slaves, provided by the Federal Government, by either federally owned land or southern land that had been confiscated by the Union, and there would be a rented mule to go along with that, or a loaned mule. That has been the promise of slavery reparations. Of course, it didn't come to pass. In a few cases it did, but not many. But in truth we have here the modern-day version of reparations that are going on. Pigford I allowed for those who had a legitimate claim of discrimination to file that claim. Many who didn't have legitimate claims also filed claims. What I am seeing, information that comes to me, boxes, stacks of data, and people have been deployed to administer the first $1.05 billion, and they say to me they are sick to their stomach, they are heartsick because of all the fraud that they see. And the level, 75 percent, it's a low number. I am hearing numbers into the high nineties, and still we don't see the data. We don't see the applications. We don't see how it matches up with Judge Friedman's opinion here, this decision on the first consent decree, where he says that it's not $50,000, it's $187,500. Mr. Speaker, this has become a modern-day reparations component, and it's wrong. The $50,000 was essentially automatic to whoever applied. They didn't have to approve discrimination, they just needed a friend that would sign an affidavit that said that they knew at one time that they were or wanted to be a farmer and that they may or may not have spoken to anyone at the USDA, but that they had complained either verbally or in writing with someone who was either an employee of the USDA or perhaps they were a Member of Congress or a couple of other categories. This issue needs to be examined far more thoroughly. The Shirley Sherrod case comes into this. Now it's curious that Shirley Sherrod is the number one recipient in the largest civil rights class action case in the history of America, Pigford Farms. Shirley Sherrod is the individual who became so well-known in the media a few months ago when the Secretary of Agriculture summarily fired her for a little clip of a speech that she gave before the NAACP. I don't take issue with the totality of the statement that she made, Mr. Speaker, but it's curious to me that Shirley Sherrod got the notice that she, and whoever her partners might have been, were going to receive $13 million from Pigford Farms, 22nd of July, 2009. The 25th of July, 2009, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack hired her to be the head of USDA Rural Development in the State of Georgia. What does this mean, Mr. Speaker? Well, I don't know the answer to that yet, but I know this. The tremendous amount of data, 94,000 claims, 18,000 black farmers, 4\1/2\ claimants for every black farmer, it's got to be fraud. I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Arizona for yielding and for managing this Special Order here tonight and for bringing this issue, Mr. Speaker, before the American people. This is a critical national security issue. And I'm so grateful that we have individuals here in this Congress, as intended by our Founding Fathers, that focus on a variety of issues that could clearly see and be focused on the intelligence that can bring this before the American people in such a way that they can understand, Mr. Speaker, that you will turn your focus hopefully on this subject matter. There has been a lot of discussion across the country now and in the news media about the WikiLeaks issue. And I look at this, and I think Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, a person who made his living as a hacker, a person who is proud of being able to crack anybody's security code and get in there and pull that information out and then dump it into the public arena, into the public media sphere. For what purpose? What possible constructive purpose could be achieved by an individual who is a product of Western civilization pouring forth state secrets from Western civilization itself? It has to be for either self- aggrandizement, for that or the combination of undermining Western civilization. An enemy, an enemy of the things that we believe in. And I don't stand here with the intent to indict the Aussies. I love the Australians. They are a free spirited, strong free market, free will group of people. They had to also take a continent and settle a continent about the size of the United States itself and make a living down there in an environment that's sometimes beautiful and sometimes harsh. They have a spirit of their own. They remind me that in every conflict that the United States has been in they got there first, and some of them they've been in all of them. It's a pretty good thing to say about the relationship between the United States and Australia. There's not much to say about their citizen--whom I wish today were an American citizen, and at that point I think he might be subject to charges of treason against the United States. So as I listened to the speakers here, I reached into my dog-eared Constitution and took up this definition, the constitutional definition of treason, and it says--and I know that some have called for charges of treason to be brought against Mr. Assange. I know they apply to an American citizen. But this says, Article III, section 3: Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies--which certainly al Qaeda and the Taliban and the enemies of the terrorists who are lining up against us are our enemies--and giving them aid and comfort, giving aid and comfort to the enemies. Well, Mr. Speaker, I think it's a subject that we wouldn't have much debate on here in this Congress that Mr. Assange has given aid and comfort to the enemy. He's empowered the enemy. He's put Americans at risk. He's put the allies of Americans at risk. And in this precarious situation around the globe, in this geopolitical-military-economic chess game that goes on constantly on the entire planet, he's taken away some of our advantage and he's given it to our enemies. And I wish and I hope that there's a way that we can find a way to prosecute a man like that, that we can protect ourselves. And if we fail to do that, or even if we're successful in that and it exposes some other vulnerabilities, I suggest, Mr. Speaker, that this Congress take a look at some new legislation, a new structure of law, that's really not brought about because of the actions of Mr. Assange but brought about because of the actions of our enemies, our terrorist enemies. And I have come to realize, and I think that there will be a significant number of Members of Congress that have come to realize, that we don't have the tools to fight these enemies; that the idea that we could catch terrorists like, for example, Osama bin Ladin's chauffeur, and we can't find a way to try that chauffeur and put him on trial with legitimate expectations of an effective prosecution and a conviction and a penalty. We have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sitting down in Guantanamo Bay yet. Two years into the Obama Presidency, when President Obama said he was going to close Guantanamo Bay and try these terrorists in civilian courts, and now we found out what happens when you try these terrorists in civilian courts--a whole bunch of evidence that's essential to the conviction has been left out of the prosecution, and they were not successful in an effective prosecution and conviction of the last terrorist that was tried in civilian court. So I look at this and I make the charge that I think our military tribunals are a useful way to do this and Guantanamo Bay is the best place on the planet to keep them. But we don't quite have the legislative tools. We don't have the judicial tools. I'm hopeful that this Congress will consider a proposal that's rooted in this thought; that we will set up a special court like a FISA court, or perhaps even the FISA court, and ask them to immediately adjudicate when we catch somebody that's working against the United States, that's perpetrating terrorism against the United States, and be able to process them immediately through a special court, and have that court be able to rule that this was an attack against Americans or whether it was an attack against America's civilization that was designed to spread terror and fear here rather than a crime that was committed against individual Americans, and be able to rule that that individual then fit within the category of an enemy of the United States, an enemy in this war on terror that we have, and then instantly move them off of the shores of the United States and down to Guantanamo Bay or another jurisdiction that's even further removed from these courts, and under Article III, section 2, strip these Federal courts from the jurisdiction of ruling upon these decisions of terrorists that are attacking America. If we do that--and it's a pretty sticky constitutional question on how we would deal with American citizens in that category, but it's not when we deal with someone like Julian Assange. An Australian citizen could be put into that category, moved over to a place offshore of the United States outside of the jurisdiction of the Federal courts, the civilian Federal courts in the United States, and adjudicated under a military tribunal in a fashion that was designed by this Congress and directed by this Congress. That's what I'm hopeful that we'll be able to do.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Arizona. And I reflect upon a trip that I made down to Guantanamo Bay I believe it was a year ago last Easter. And the trip was designed to fill me and a handful of other members on the Judiciary Committee in on the practices and the facilities that they had at Guantanamo Bay. And I think this is something that the American people have not had an opportunity to witness or actually hear about within the news, that there is a facility that's perfectly structured for the job that we have, which is to bring these terrorists to a location and legitimately try them and give some resolution to their circumstances. And I don't remember the exact number of inmates that they had down there at the time, but it was down to the hard core of the hard core. They had already released those that could be released. And the rest of them were a danger to Americans, a danger to free people everywhere, and a danger if they were released to come back, and as Mr. Lamborn said, to attack Americans again, but also NATO troops and other people that represent the free world. And as we are looking at that facility, oh, it's a pretty wonderful facility if you want to be in a jail and be a Muslim, for example. And you walk into these cells, first of all the temperature is set at 75 degrees. Seventy-five. My house is a lot warmer than that in Iowa in the summertime. Because 75 degrees, they argued, was their cultural temperature. And I don't know that that's true. I would think 140 degrees is more likely some of their cultural temperature. But in any case it's set at 75. And you open the door on any of the cells, and they have their own personalized cells, there is an arrow there that points towards Mecca. So they never have to guess which direction that they are praying. Every one of them gets a nice fancy prayer rug that's all embroidered. It takes a lot of hand work. It's a beautiful piece of work. And they get a little skullcap that's also hand-worked and done. And the Korans that they get are carried in a ziplock bag so they are nice and protected and never touched by the hands of an infidel, because that might anger the inmates at Gitmo. And they had their nice television and a little break room that they got together. And here is this flat screen TV. And that went on pretty fine for a while. Oh, by the way, their meals, they get a choice out of nine selections a day of Islamicly approved meals. And they can pick three squares out of the nine every day that fit within their cultural heritage in their way. It isn't like Americans are serving them ham and beans like they would give me or you or anybody else that was in there. They get to select from this special menu, a special menu for special people that get a special rug and a special skullcap and a special ziplock bag- delivered Koran that is never touched by an infidel. And they have as many as 20 attacks on Americans a day at Guantanamo Bay. About half of them are physical attacks, where they try to get one of our guards down, usually Navy personnel, and get their handcuffed chains around their throat and try to strangle them, attack them with the metal that's part of their restraints. And the other half are throwing human feces in the face of our troops. What is the punishment for that? If it happened to be a domestic prisoner in a domestic prison, if you continued with that you would find yourself in solitary confinement. And eventually, the punishment would go to the point where you would be locked up in prison for life. Eventually. But what we do is nothing. There is no penalty. If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed attacks the guards every day, several times a day, the worst thing we can do to him is cut his outdoor exercise down to 2 hours a day. Two hours a day outdoors. The rest of the time you are in 75-degree air conditioning with your own selected meals, three out of the nine that are the choice of the menu there, on your own specialized prayer rug with your own Koran. And there was one inmate that wanted a Bible in Gitmo. He converted to Christianity. But it was verboten to bring a Bible into Guantanamo Bay because it would set the inmates off, the other inmates off who thought that a Bible was an insult and affront to them. And they were watching their flat screen TV in their little break room, and a lady came on to do a commercial, and she had a short- sleeved shirt on and showed her elbow. Showed her elbow. I don't get really all that worked up over an elbow. But they got all worked up over the elbow and trashed the room, tore up the furniture, broke the flat screen TV, scattered it all. It was like a little riot in their little break room. What's their punishment for that? New furniture, new flat screen TV. We coddle these prisoners. We don't even have a punishment for those that attack our American guards. And we set up the trial room so that there are microphones, a sound system, places for witnesses to sit, places for family members to observe, a sound-proof glass that's there. And when it gets down to the critical component of the testimony, we have an officer that is assigned with the job to cut off the testimony until such time as the witnesses that don't have access to classified are marched out of the witness chamber, and they pick up the testimony. This facility is laid out for the purposes of trying people where national security is an issue. And if we had been trying the individual you talked about, Mr. Lamborn, I believe he would have been convicted in Guantanamo Bay. Because the evidence that was necessary to convict him would have been used rather than held back for fear that it becomes a spillage of a national secret that becomes the subject here of the WikiLeaks. So those are things that go across my mind. We have got to do a lot more. We have got to be a lot smarter about this. What would be very helpful is if we had a Commander in Chief who was making the ask of this Congress rather than us trying to push that chain uphill, having a President that would actually be pulling it in that right direction. I yield back.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it's my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to take up the issues that are on my mind and the issues that I hope are on the minds of the American people, the minds of the people who are the elected leaders here in the United States Congress, and hopefully on the minds of those of us who see this American taxpayer dollar as a pretty sacred dollar that should be invested wisely and responsibly. And there are any number of issues that can be brought up under that particular parameter. But I choose to come to the floor tonight, Madam Speaker, to talk to you about the situation of Pigford Farms. Pigford Farms is an issue that emerged here in the United States government around about and exactly on, began I'd say in 1983, in 1983 when the United States Department of Agricultural civil rights office was closed. At that period of time, there wasn't an oversight department within the USDA that might have looked over the shoulders of our USDA employees to see if they were actually treating people equally with equal opportunity under the law, as I think everyone in this Congress will agree every American citizen deserves equal opportunity under the law. That's part of the 14th Amendment. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution that includes the 14th Amendment and equal protection under the law and provide for equal opportunity, not necessarily equality of result, but equality of opportunity. And so I suspect that that focus under the USDA diminished somewhat or at least didn't have a check on it from 1983 on. But with the Pigford Farms issue--and this is the largest civil rights class action lawsuit in the history of America, Pigford Farms. It looms over the heads of the Members of Congress here to be not what it was just a few years ago, $1.05 billion, not what it was when the Farm Bill passed here on the floor of the House under the direction of the chairman of the Ag Committee, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, at an additional $100 million, which was designed to be the sum total that would ever be required to sweep up any of the remnants of Pigford Farms, this civil rights case, and package it all up and make sure that people were compensated and put it behind us. No, it has reared its ugly head again, Madam Speaker. It's reared its ugly head with an issue called Pigford II. It wasn't enough to have Pigford I. Pigford I, which emerged because I believe there was discrimination taking place within some of our USDA offices, particularly around the South, where the culture of segregation had prevailed beyond the end of the legal segregation that we had, and was still, I believe, in some of the offices manifested in the form of discrimination between the Farm Service Administration personnel. But that discrimination that then perhaps, and I think likely, and I believe did carry on through some of those years of the eighties, perhaps as far back as the seventies, but this case deals with the eighties, the eighties and the nineties. So Pigford Farms, the chronology of it goes this way, Madam Speaker. In 1983, the United States Department of Agriculture Civil Rights Office was closed. In 1994, and this would be under Bill Clinton's administration with Dan Glickman as the Secretary of Agriculture, commissioned an accounting firm or an analysis firm to analyze the treatment of minorities and women in the Farm Service agencies throughout the United States. The study examined the conditions from 1990 until 1995 and looked primarily at crop payments and disaster payment programs in Commodity Credit Corporations, that's CCC, loans. A final report found from 1990 until 1995, minority participation in Farm Service Administration programs was very low, and that minorities received less than their fair share of USDA money for crop payments, disaster payments, and loans. Now, Madam Speaker, I am always suspicious of the ``their fair share.'' I know that the word ``fair'' comes up in law over and over again. It comes up in many, many pieces of case law, precedent cases out there. If one would read through that case law, you will see the word ``fair'' over and over again. You will hear the word ``fair'' debated here on the House of Representatives over and over again. And whenever I hear this word ``fair,'' didn't receive their fair share, I always cringe, because you know, we are a body that should be dealing with facts and empirical data. And the judgment should be on the facts, not the judgment of the facts. But the word ``fair'' is always in the mind and the eyes of the person who utters that word ``fair.'' And none of us can agree on what the meaning of the word is of the word ``fair.'' Didn't receive their fair share. Perhaps that's true. I actually believe it is true. But Marilyn and I have raised three sons. And anybody that's raised two or more kids knows there is no such thing as fair unless it's the State Fair or the World Fair or the County Fair or a fair ball or a foul ball versus fair. But this word ``fair'' that's a judgment call is an amorphous word. It could be anything. It could be within the context of what was fair in 1776 doesn't fit with what was fair in 1865, doesn't fit with what was fair in 1942, and not with what's fair in 2010. It's subjective, not objective, the term ``fair.'' And I would like to get away from using the word ``fair.'' But nonetheless, the data didn't support that African American farmers were engaged in the programs to a similar extent as non-African American farmers, what primarily would be white farmers. So that was the report from 1994. Two years later, actually the end of that year, 1996, December of 1996, the Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman ordered a suspension of government foreclosures all the way across the country pending the outcome of an investigation into racial discrimination in the United States Department of Agriculture's agency loan program. And he later announced the appointment of a USDA Civil Rights Task Force. So under the Reagan administration the USDA Civil Rights Office was closed, 1983. Dan Glickman in 1996 reestablished a similar agency called the USDA Civil Rights Task Force. And in February of '97 that task force recommended 92 changes to address the racial bias that existed, I believe, and to the extent is negotiable or debatable as part of the USDA Civil Rights Action Plan. And while the action plan acknowledged past problems and offered solutions for the future improvements, it did not satisfy those seeking redress of past wrongs and compensation for losses suffered. So there was a move that was made to try to alleviate the allegations of racial discrimination within the USDA. Dan Glickman stepped forward in 1996 and announced the formation of the Civil Rights Task Force. That press conference in December of 1996, Madam Speaker, was essentially the confession by the Department of Agriculture that they had engaged in racial discrimination with farm programs, crop payments, disaster payments, and loans. And this started then the litigation that was at least anticipated at the time. And this litigation began in 1997. So in February, February 28 of '97, the Civil Rights Task Force of the USDA recommended 92 changes. And those changes were not implemented. And so in 1997, same year, the litigation against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for discrimination against African American farmers began in August of '97. Two cases. One was brought by Timothy Pigford, Pigford v. Glickman. The other one was Brewington v. Glickman. And it dealt with the farmers from 1983 until 1997, when they applied for Federal financial help, and again by failing to investigate allegations of discrimination, the allegations of discrimination were not aggressively investigated, and those who applied for financial help often didn't get it. But Madam Speaker, I remember those years. I remember what they were like for white farmers in my neighborhood. I remember what they were like for me. And I did business with the Farm Service Administration in some of those years that are included in these that I have noted. And I would remind the body, and yourself included, Madam Speaker, that we had a farm crisis throughout the eighties. I remember what that was like. I can remember a booming economy in 1979, where we had more work than we could do. I was doing custom work on farms, terraces, dams, waterways, cleaning out cattle yards, shaping up, trying to improve upon what Mother Nature gave us. And in 1979, we were already watching the consolidation of farms. We were watching family farms that people were being pushed off their land, they were losing their farms, they were selling their farms. The bid was so high sometimes that they couldn't afford not to sell. Other times they didn't have the equity to be able to stand and refuse an offer. And I lived right on the line between that good land that runs out flat all the way up to Canada versus from where I live it starts running hilly all the way down through Missouri into Arkansas until you get down to the rice country in Louisiana before it flattens out. Right there on that line. Good land, good producers to the north, they had more money and more equity in their land. It appreciated more because it produced more. And they could afford to buy that land from where I lived south in the hills and pay a pretty good price for it and fix it up. While that was going on was the beginning of the downward spiral of the farm crisis. And there was farm family after farm family. And I remember the people, I remember the families, I remember their kids, I remember them walking the long lane to get out and get on the bus. And I remember the days that they moved to town or moved off to a city or to another State and the neighbors bought the farm and hired me or others to come in and burn the buildings and bury them and put it back to farmland. Family after family after family. In 1979, very, very busy. In 1980, we were now down really into the meat of the farm crisis. And that went on, '79, 1980, '81, '82, '83, '84, '85. I, Madam Speaker, lived for 3\1/2\ years with a knot in my gut, not knowing if we were going to be able to make it, not knowing if I was going to be able to feed the kids. And on April 26, on Friday afternoon, at 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon, the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Iowa Highway Patrol pulled into my bank. They locked the doors on the bank and stood a guard in front of that door with a red sticker on the door and it said, Banks closed by order of the FDIC. There I was. I actually had two pennies in my pocket to rub together, two pennies only, a payroll to meet with my crew. My accounts were frozen and so were the accounts of most of my customers. We had a lot of farmers go out of business throughout the whole decade of the 1980s, Madam Speaker. A lot of them were white farmers. A lot of them didn't have a recourse. A lot of them would have liked to have had a loan from the USDA. A lot of them would have had liked to have had some program benefits. A lot of them would have liked to have made what they would have considered to be a more fair shake from the board of the Farm Service Administration. There were very tough decisions made throughout that entire decade. I remember how difficult it was to be holding some assets, equipment, a little bit of land, and watching as my customers couldn't pay me. And when they couldn't pay me, it was awfully hard for me to pay the people that had provided credit for me. The downward spiral of that, as you see land values going down, equipment values going down, the assets even of accounts receivable going down, looking for a way out, you can't get out of a downward spiral. I watched it crush good men. I watched people whose entire identity was wrapped up in the farm that had been homesteaded by their ancestors. Some of them could hold it, but it ruined them. Others couldn't hold it, and they forever carried the guilt of that. And this farm crisis era of the 1980s is part of the Pigford Farms issue. It's not something that can be divorced from it. And so I am convinced that there were many black farmers that lost their farms during the 1980s when the farm crisis was in a downward spiral. There were many black farmers that believed that they should have had a loan program or a commodity program, a disaster payment that they didn't get, that they believed they were discriminated against by the board of the Farm Service Administration, which, by the way, is elected by all the people that are participating in the farm programs in the county. I don't have any doubt they believe they were discriminated against. In fact, I don't doubt some of them were discriminated against. And probably in one way or another all of them that didn't get the program they asked for were discriminated against in one way or another. I don't believe they were all discriminated against on if basis of their race, although some, I believe, were. That's the scenario of the farm crisis in the 1980s. That's the scenario by which the issue was raised and the civil rights class action lawsuit was brought forward against the USDA, that 1997 litigation that brought about the Pigford v. Glickman case and the Brewington v. Glickman case that covered those years of 1983 until 1997. Then in mid-November of 1997 the government agreed to mediation and to explore a settlement in Pigford. In the next month in December the parties agreed to stay the course for 6 months while mediation was pursued and settlement discussions took place. But the USDA had acknowledged past discrimination, and the Justice Department opposed blanket mediation, so they argued that the case had to be investigated separately. I would agree with that from a legal standpoint. But a year later, a little less, October of 1998, the Court issued a ruling that certified as a class black farmers who filed discrimination complaints against the USDA for the period of time between 1983 and February 21 of 1997. And then, in April of 1999, the Court approved this consent decree. This is Pigford I, and they set forth a revised settlement agreement of all claims raised by the class members that reviewed the claims. And that began almost immediately and the initial disbursement of checks to qualifying farmers began on November 9, 1999. Now, this is where some of the rest of the USDA employees came in. To summarize this, Madam Speaker, it works like this. Ronald Reagan's administration shut down their USDA Civil Rights Office and, under Bill Clinton, they started a similar entity back up again. In 1994, 2 years later, Dan Glickman, the Secretary of Agriculture, essentially confessed that the USDA had been discriminating against black farmers. So he appointed a company to do an analysis of it and, over time, it devolved into the courts declaring that the black farmers that had filed the complaints were a class, a class that could be dealt with by the courts to try to get them some compensation. And so Pigford I was born and it resulted in $1.05 billion being distributed--now there was a couple hundred million of administrative costs that I believe are in addition to that and not part of that accounting--but roughly $1.05 billion was distributed to farmers who, well, let me say this, African Americans who filed claims. And, in order to administer all of these claims, this massive number, over 22,000 claims, it was required of the USDA to expedite this to call from across the country their FSA county directors, Farm Service Administration county directors, to come to Washington D.C. to administer these claims, to plow through these piles of paperwork. And so they did. And they came from many of the States and certainly they come from Iowa, we are a farm State after all. And as the FSA directors and other personnel arrived here in Washington, D.C. and began to dig down through this paperwork, working with a lot of it by certifying it as a paperwork application and others face-to-face or over the telephone with the claimants. Here is what came back to me. One of those individuals, and I have had anecdotes from several, but one of those individuals felt the burden of the corruption and the fraudulent claims that were coming forward in front of him, that he copied a box of applications, and a literal box of applications, which I am really sure that would not have been very constructive to him maintaining his job with the USDA. But it bothered his conscience so much, and when he came back to Iowa, he wanted to make it a point to make sure that I knew that these applications that he was dealing with were, he believed were a minimum of 75 percent fraudulent, 75 percent fraudulent. Now if you just apply that to the $1.05 billion in claims that were paid out, if he is right in that number, $750 million were wasted paying people that didn't have it coming, 250 or so million dollars perhaps went to those that did have a claim that had it coming. And these applications are quite interesting to read through them one after another, take the stack and read through them. And you will see that there also were copies of complaints that were filed about fraudulent claims. And the fraudulent claims might be, well, Johnny, yeah, he was raised on a farm but he wouldn't help his daddy. He went off to the city and became a drug addict. And when his daddy needed the help, Johnny wouldn't come and help his daddy. But now his daddy has died and Johnny wants the $50,000 that comes from the USDA under this claim. Pigford I was set up to do this, to pay out claims to people who met--I believe it's four criteria, and I will see, Madam Speaker, if I can remember them--people that were black, people that farmed or people that wanted to farm, those who believed they were discriminated against by the people within the FSA office, Farm Service Administration office within the counties, and those who also issued a complaint, filed a complaint in one of the criteria that's allowed under Pigford I. This would mean that if there is an individual that, if you were back, and you wanted to farm, and you wanted to apply for a farm program, and you believed that they would not treat you fairly because of your skin color, and you complained about it to the proper authorities, that's all that's required. You didn't have to be a farmer. There actually wasn't a verification that you would be black either, but let's just presume that's the case. So if you are an African American, and you didn't have to farm or ever farm or even know what a farm looked like, you just had to want to farm. You didn't have to know where the Farm Service Administration was, you just had to have complained that they weren't going to treat you right and get somebody to sign an affidavit that says that, yep, Joe complained about it to the Farm Service Administration employee at a public meeting somewhere, or a Member of Congress or there are a couple of other criteria there. And if Joe and Tom can agree to sign each other's affidavit, that's all the proof that's required. It's not proof of discrimination. It's an allegation that you believe you were discriminated against. What comes out of the USDA? In Pigford I is this, and I read through form after form of these, if you are black and farmed or wanted to farm and you believed you were discriminated against and you were willing to say so on the application and you allege that you complained, even verbally, to an FSA employee, a Member of Congress, a couple other criteria, and if somebody else will attest in an affidavit that you have actually filed that complaint, that's it. There is no check on whether they have been discriminated against. The consent decree doesn't allow for verification of discrimination. It just simply pays out what they consider to be a legitimate allegation of discrimination this way, an allegation of discrimination that meets those four criteria with someone who signed the affidavit, $50,000 essentially automatic, $50,000 and because of the tax liability that comes with it, there's another $12,500, Madam Speaker, that check gets cut to the IRS so that that there's not a tax liability. And if you actually happen to be a farmer and you had engaged in programs with the USDA Farm Service Administration and you say you had farm loans, program loans, a 100 percent debt forgiveness was automatic that went along with the $50,000 payment, and another 25 percent of that, an additional 25 percent of the debt forgiveness was a check that was also written to the IRS so that the tax liability would be gone. And Judge Paul Friedman, who approved this consent decree, wrote in his opinion that the average settlement would not be $50,000, it would be $187,500 because a $50,000 check for the discrimination, or alleged discrimination, $12,500, or an additional 25 percent to the IRS, plus Judge Friedman concluded in his calculation that the average debt to the USDA was $100,000, that's forgiven along with another $25,000 check for 25 percent of the debt forgiveness to the IRS. So you add those numbers up--50, 1,250, 100,000, $187,000 was supposedly to be the average settlement in Pigford I. This all out of the pockets of the taxpayers, all without a shred of proof, just--well, I guess you could say a shred of proof because the signature on the affidavit from Joe's buddy Tom is the proof, that affidavit, and, yes, the application is filled out by the staff of a lawyer. Well, this door was opened up in a huge yawning way. And the lawyers went to work to begin to promote this across the South, black churches, town hall meetings, fish fries, they promoted it as your 40 acres and a mule. That seems a little bit appalling, and it sounds perhaps like it's a stretch, Madam Speaker, but in reading Judge Paul Friedman's decision, it starts out with these words, and I quote, the very first words in Judge Paul Friedman's decision, and I quote, ``40 acres and a mule.'' Forty acres and a mule. And he goes on to lament that all of the wrongs of slavery and segregation cannot be corrected in the largest civil rights class action suit and settlement in the history of America. But he sets about to try. And that's how he comes with the $50,000 plus the tax component of it and the $100,000 average debt waiver plus the $25,000 in IRS tax liability. He also addresses the issue of some of the groups in the black farmers wanted to have an exemption from the inheritance tax, the estate tax, because they believed that the money that would come from Pigford would be a large enough sum that they wouldn't want to pay estate tax on that when they died and passed it along to the next generation. Judge Friedman, I guess that would be one part of the good judgment, concluded that that was a bridge too far. It was too much to ask for. And so, Pigford I was supposedly settled and resolved. And before the House Judiciary Committee there was a new bill introduced for Pigford II by Bobby Scott of Virginia and others, and this would be the companion, although it may not be exactly verbatim, but essentially at least the de facto companion to the bill that was introduced by then United States Senator Barack Obama. Now figure this out, Madam Speaker. We have a very, very urban Senator, Barack Obama, who has decided he is going to run for President. And what does he do? He introduces legislation to create a whole new Pigford claim. Pigford I should have been settled. That's what the courts decided to do. Why would there be an action of a court? Why would there be a consent decree that essentially was a handshake signed off on by Dan Glickman and, well, true it was Dan Glickman and the black farmers organization, the Clinton administration, why would they sign off on all of that if it didn't end the Pigford issue? Yes, it was designed to end the Pigford claim. It was designed to package it up and put it behind us and move on. But it didn't work that way because Barack Obama introduced--there was a statute of limitations by the way. And the statute of limitations from the opening up of Pigford I until it closed, the consent decree was approved in April 14 of 1999, and they had 6 months to file all of their claims, which would have settled that in October, I've got October 12 of 1999, and there were over 22,000 that claimed they had been discriminated against and that they had complained about it, and they got in line for the $50,000, plus the debt forgiveness, plus the tax liability being paid up front along with the rest, to over 22,000 almost 22,500 claims. And there must have been some paperwork glitches along the way, because over 14,000 of those were paid out, and that's the $1.05 billion, Madam Speaker. To pass this statute of limitations, the effort on the part of Barack Obama and Bobby Scott from Virginia here in this House whom I serve with, and they introduced legislation to open up Pigford again, to disregard the statute of limitations and allow for a new sign-up period because they had accumulated some 74,000, maybe only 72, but 74,000 new names of black farmers who believed they were discriminated against who were shut out of that process on Columbus Day in 1999. So we had hearings. They had a hearing on the bill in the House Judiciary Committee. And the hearing went along about like this, John Boyd, the president of the black farmers organization, which was formed to move forward and collect on Pigford, testified under oath before the House Judiciary Committee that there are 18,000 black farmers. Now, if you are listening, Madam Speaker, you will have already added up that there are 94,000 claims, if you are listening, Madam Speaker, 94,000 claims. That would be 22,000 plus 72,000, 94,000 claims. John Boyd, the head of this, who has driven a tractor around Washington, D.C. and filed his claims and made this a high priority public issue, testified there were 18,000 black farmers. So how is it even if one would concede the point--and I do not for an instant, Madam Speaker, even when we concede the point that every black farmer was discriminated against, that would be 18,000 claims, not 94,000 claims. One could go back through the records and try to find the time we had the highest population of black farmers in modern record history, and we were able to go back into the 1970s and through some convoluted rationale put together some numbers that might justify twice that many, as high as 36,000. But John Boyd's under oath testimony was 18,000 black farmers, 94,000 claims. How does that work? When I asked him the question under oath, he said, we have brothers, we have family who maybe they never saw the farm, maybe they moved off to the city, but they have a share. They have been discriminated against, too. Well, it seems to me to be a great big stretch, Madam Speaker, that we could have 18,000 black farmers and 94,000 claims. And nobody that is advocating for the funding for Pigford can get around this, they can't get their brain around this concept that how would it be that 100 percent of the black farmers were discriminated against? The data that I have seen that shows the percentage of the populations in each of the counties where there were Pigford claims, the percentage of African Americans in those counties, the percentage of claims is directly proportional to the black population in those counties. Now, Madam Speaker, think about that. If the percentage of claims reflected the discrimination, then wouldn't it be that there would be a variance in that relationship between the black population and the black farmers, for one thing? You are not always going to have an equal between the black population and the black farmers. That is not going to be the same county to county. Some counties there is a higher percentage of farmers to black population, and some there would be less, but also, an equal distribution of claims for discrimination. Madam Speaker, I can't seem to reconcile this idea that if you look at the data, the data would show that the discrimination was equal county by county by county in nearly every county all the way across the land in proportion to the black population. How could that possibly be? And I will say it can't possibly be because I know something about the culture within the FSA offices, Farm Service Administration offices. I dealt with them on a regular basis for nearly 30 years. Here is what I know: Each office, a county office, has its own culture. The culture of that office is sometimes shaped by the career employees that work behind the counter. A lot of times they are farmers' wives. They know nearly every farmer in the county. They know their land. They know what kind of crops they raise. They know their personalities, their idiosyncrasies, and they know how to take care of them and how to process them. And the director, the county director, is hired by the county board. The county board is elected by the people who participate in the farm programs in the county. So it is very much a reflection of the county. Now, it could well be, and I wouldn't take issue with a statement that there likely were counties that discriminated against black farmers as a matter of practice. I actually think that happened. But I don't believe that it happened in equal proportion in every county where there were black farmers, which is what the data, what the data would indicate. I believe that there could have been counties that discriminated against every black farmer in that county. And we know there are counties that had all black staff. It is hard to believe that they would have discriminated against every black farmer. And I am convinced there were counties that had county directors and staff people behind the counter where the culture there would not tolerate discrimination in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I believe, of all of these hundreds of counties that were involved, probably there is a full spectrum of culture within each of those counties. But there is no way I can accept the idea that they all discriminated equally county to county across the board. There is no way I can accept that because the cultures of these counties changed. But I will and I can get my mind around the idea that if you get enough lawyers that understand that there is a nice contingency fee for doing a little bit of work, that they can go out and promote the idea of every African American that they can convince that will fill out the forms that may have some form of a complaint or willing to file one without actually having a complaint, that they could gin this thing up, and we have the data that supports the idea that they did. So what we have is Pigford II, a Pigford II set up, Madam Speaker, at least by the words of our Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, by the 2008 farm bill. So when he told me that I had voted for legislation that directed him to sit down with Eric Holder and John Boyd and negotiate a settlement for opening up Pigford a second time in a settlement, it was a pretty shocking thing for me to hear. I wasn't aware that I had been complicit in facilitating what I consider to be a high percentage of billions of dollars worth of fraud here in the United States. So I went back and I read the bill. I remember the discussion we had on the way in here with the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson, when they slipped in at the last minute a hundred million dollar provision in the 2008 farm bill that was designed, it was designed to fund Pigford II. Now, remember, Pigford I was done. It was packaged up. It had a limitation equivalent to a statute of limitation, a closing date, which was October 12, 1999. There were those who said that they missed their chance to sign up. They thought there was 70,000-some out there who would do that. Bobby Scott and others introduced legislation in the House; it didn't go anywhere. Barack Obama, down this hallway, introduced legislation in the United States Senate; it didn't go anywhere. Congress never acted on a willful means to open up Pigford II. It didn't happen. Congress didn't act. Congress didn't appropriate. Congress didn't authorize. Congress accepted the consent decree that closed the filing October 12 of 1999. Even though Congress didn't act, not the House, not the Senate, it still was not enough to say no to some of the people who wanted to see this happen. The chairman of the House Ag Committee, Collin Peterson, said $100 million will close up Pigford. We need to have that provision in the farm bill. I argued that was a placeholder for $1.3 billion. He argued back that I was completely wrong; $100 million would settle the account and be done with it. Now, $100 million is not loose change, Madam Speaker. It is a lot of money, but it is a whole lot less than $1.3 billion, which I alleged would be the cost of him providing this placeholder in the 2008 farm bill. We sharply disagreed on that. And now I will read from the 2008 farm bill, Madam Speaker, what went into that bill, and this is the language that the Secretary of Agriculture says authorizes him to sit down with Eric Holder, the Attorney General, John Boyd, the head of the black farmers, and open up Pigford II for another $1.15 billion. The limitation under Pigford--and this is the 2008 farm bill, H.R. 2419 for those who are paying attention, limitation--in general and subject to paragraph 2, all payments of debt relief shall be made exclusively from funds made available under this subsection. This subsection right here, Madam Speaker, item number 2, maximum amount. The total amount of payments and debt relief pursuant to actions commenced under section B shall not exceed $100 million. That is consistent with what the chairman of the Ag Committee told me: $100 million will cap the United States Government's liability to black farmers for discrimination by adding an additional $100 million to the previous $1.15 billion that had already been distributed, to clean up anything left out there, and here is the language that says so. This is intent language. It says it is the intent of Congress as to remedial nature of section, it is the intent of Congress that this section be liberally construed so as to effectuate its remedial purpose of giving a full determination on the merits of each Pigford claim previously denied that determination. That means if anybody was denied a determination, even by a statute of limitation that closed this on October 12, 1999, that this $100 million was to be the sum total that would be used to settle this issue. The Secretary of Agriculture says this language gives him license to sit down with Eric Holder and John Boyd and put the American people in debt, because this is debt for another $1.15 billion, without having any proof of discrimination. Madam Speaker, I read this language and I point this out because that is why this chart is here. Subject paragraph 2: All payment or debt relief shall be made exclusively from funds made available under subsection (i). Maximum amount, $100 million. That is what was in the farm bill of 2008. That is what was represented to me by the chairman of the Ag Committee, by Chairman Peterson from Minnesota, who argued with me vociferously that I was wrong, that it wouldn't be $1.3 billion; it would be $100 million. Now, Madam Speaker, I point out that we are looking tomorrow or the next day at $1.15 billion coming at us down the pipe through the Rules Committee, no amendments allowed, although I have got one up there in a request, but it is not going to be allowed. They have already told me, You're wasting paper and staff time. $100 million plus $1.15 billion is $1.25 billion. My number was $1.3 billion, a lot closer than this $100 million here--a placeholder that opened the door. We have bureaucrats, Cabinet members, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the Attorney General of the United States that take it upon themselves to read license in this language to put the American people in further debt to a tune of $1.15 billion and open this door up so that people that allege they believe they were discriminated against and allege that they filed a claim and have some friend that will sign an affidavit, will get a $50,000 check, and the IRS gets the tax liability of $12,500 on top of that. And by the way, if they have any USDA FSA debt, that is all forgiven, and the taxes are paid on it, and they are unhappy because they don't get a State tax waiver on these particular assets. This is what's happening. We've got to stand up at some point and say we're not going to pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress. That war has been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood-- it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees especially--and there are no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one is filing that claim. They're just filing claims because they think they can get away with it and because they believe they understand, probably appropriately, that not a lot of Members of Congress want to stand and fight that battle. Well, it's a matter of justice and equity. It's a matter of needing to look into this and of needing to bring the facts out. Madam Speaker, I want to make sure that the Members of this Congress know what they will be voting on tomorrow. I will be voting ``no.'' I will be voting ``no'' because there is no justice in this decision. This is something of which there is no court decision that enables it. There is no legal authorization that provides for it. There is no directive from Congress that directs the Secretary of Agriculture or the Attorney General to enter into any kind of an agreement. There is no court agreement. The court hasn't approved this. They sat around a table, wrote up a document and apparently shook hands. I don't even know if they shook hands. This document said that if Congress authorized or appropriated the money by March 31 of 2010, then they would have an agreement that would bind the black farmers and, if that day went by, then they wouldn't be bound. That's what has happened. If government can sit down and decide to pay reparations with money borrowed from the Chinese, this government is still in free fall. We've got to fix it, and we've got to arrest it. One of the people who is here to arrest the free fall in the United States Congress is my good friend, the gentlelady from Minnesota, who can withstand anything they throw at her, Michele Bachmann, to whom I would yield as much time as she may consume.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentlelady from Minnesota for coming to the floor to add to this discussion, I happened to have clicked on YouTube on the Internet, I did a little search today because I wanted to see what I could find on Timothy Pigford, who is the lead plaintiff in Pigford Farms v. the USDA. It is a video of Timothy Pigford sitting there telling his story, but then he goes on to say that he's hopeful that, first, that they all get paid; second, that it lays the foundation so that the Hispanics, the Native Americans and the women farmers all get paid, too. So when I listen to that I think, what is the motive for this? Do you really believe that there isn't any place in America where people who are listed in his list of minorities get a fair shake? Not one place, not one county, not one FSA director, not one staff that sits behind the counter and says this is the right thing to do, we're going to treat everybody as if they're equal in our eyes just like we're all equal under the eyes of God? Doesn't that happen in one single county in America somewhere? They would deny it, Madam Speaker. They would deny that Americans can be nondiscriminating and understand this equal opportunity and equal justice under the law concept. And to have this kind of pressing that comes on from Timothy Pigford and a number of the other personalities involved here, this system--and there are a good number of African American farmers that filed their complaints, they complain that it has distorted their reputation. They may have a legitimate claim that wasn't settled adequately, and because this has been a full court press at all on, pushed by lawyers in bow ties from the Northeast and sold in the South and marketed as your 40 acres and a mule, this has damaged the legitimate black farmers. I can't think of a more honorable profession than raising food out of this soil. I can't think of a more honorable profession than sometimes bending over and getting dirty and being out in the weather--in all kinds of weather, the summer and winter, rain and storm, out there having your roots go into the soil. Nothing makes you more rooted to America than being rooted in the soil. And I applaud every farmer, black or white or Native American or women or Hispanics, whatever they might be. It's a hard way to make a living, but there is a certain honor and glory to it that can't be replicated anyplace else. It builds character and it builds honor, and they are being besmirched by this broader effort here. We need to say ``no'' tomorrow to the Pigford Farms funding that's coming, ``no'' because it wasn't authorized by the United States Congress. There wasn't even a head fake--to use something that might be the President's language--from Congress that said Secretary of Agriculture and the Attorney General, why don't you see if you can sit down with the head of the black farmers who formed the organization for the purposes of pressing the taxpayers for money--I don't think in the beginning he really thought we were going to borrow it all from the Chinese, but there is no directive on the part of Congress. Congress said, even though I disagreed with it, that $100 million would cap this, it puts an end to it, and anybody that didn't have their case resolved in Pigford I would be resolved here under the 2008 farm bill. But Tom Vilsack took license and sat down with Eric Holder, and they're poised tomorrow to stick the taxpayers for another $1.15 billion, Madam Speaker. And it's time the American people said enough. This election was about debt and deficit and jobs and the economy, and we have to have the will to say ``no'' and draw a bright line. And there isn't guilt on the part of this country that should cause us--it can't be assuaged anyway by borrowing money and paying out people that don't have it coming. We want to make sure we make those people whole who were discriminated against. I want to look into this deeply. I want to follow the money. I want to track and sort the applications, put them all on a big spreadsheet and see what the data indicates. And I think we will find that there is a massive amount of fraud. And we may lose this vote tomorrow, Madam Speaker, we may lose it. And if we lose this vote tomorrow, it still calls upon us to shed sunlight on this issue so the American people know what happened so that we don't do it again, so that we don't queue this up to go down the list of the other minorities--the Hispanics, the women, the Native Americans, and so on. So I come to speak of the Pigford Farms issue, which I am completely convinced has far more fraud in it than it has legitimate claims, and that the American people deserve equal justice under the law, and if they have a legitimate claim it should be able to withstand the scrutiny. I stand in opposition to the funding of Pigford II and the people that perpetrated it, Madam Speaker. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I have long appreciated the honor to serve the people of western Iowa here in the United States Congress. Each one of us carries this duty with us in a heavy way and also sometimes in a jubilant way depending on the cycles of the day and the cycles of the elections. I sat here on the floor tonight, and I listened to the presentation of the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton). He talked about the situation on the border between Texas and Mexico, Arizona and Mexico, and perhaps also New Mexico versus Mexico, California, and Mexico. There are a whole lot of data points that he rolled out here. And I believe that there is a misunderstanding on the part of the American people of the magnitude of the border problem that we have. I make a number of trips down to that border. I think it's my obligation to do that. I have served on the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee now for 8 years. And if all goes well, I will be able to serve on the committee for another cycle. In that period of time, you pick up a significant amount of knowledge about the circumstances that have to do with immigration. And the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) talked about how illegal Mexican drug smuggler gangs are controlling vast areas of the border, some might argue a majority of the border or perhaps even all of the border, with the exception of some ports of entry, and controlling vast parts of the United States itself. I have been down to visit Oregon Pipe Cactus National Monument. It is a national park right on the border. And a large percentage of Oregon Pipe Cactus has been set aside, and Americans have been locked out and kept out because the illegal border-crossers and the drug smugglers command some of that park. A large share of it, mile after mile of it, is under control of the Mexican drug smugglers and people smugglers. And we think that a sovereign nation should have no border incursion. If we have a border incursion, and if it's someone who is lined up next to someone else lined up next to someone else and they are carrying weapons and in uniforms, it is called an invasion. Whether they are wearing uniforms and carrying weapons or whether they are coming across in orderly ranks or whether they are coming across at a rate of perhaps as many as 11,000 a night--and that's some data that came before the House Immigration Subcommittee under sworn testimony--you take the annual illegal border crossings and you divide it by 365, and some of that data under oath calculates out to be 11,000 illegal border crossings in a 24-hour period. A lot of that takes place at night. Think of that: 11,000 a night. And so I ask the question, what was the size of Santa Anna's army? About half that. That, Mr. Speaker, is the magnitude of the illegal border crossings that we are seeing. And the price that we have to pay in the form of social services, law enforcement, education, and health services is in the billions of dollars in costs to the American taxpayer. And the price and loss because of the result of crimes that could otherwise have been prevented is awesome beyond our comprehension. I do have some numbers on that. I'm hopeful that I will be able to produce a fresh report very soon that would better illustrate the numbers of Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of those who came into the United States illegally. That is a real measure to American society. Every life is precious, every life is sacred, and every one that we can save should be saved. And you do so with an orderly society and the rule of law. You don't do so by allowing for vast areas of the 2,000-mile southern border to become lawless. I recall approaching a port of entry, and it was in Sasabe, Arizona. As I approached the port of entry and introduced myself to the agents that were there, and leaving aside much of that narrative, I was informed that, yes, there's a legal crossing at Sasabe at that port of entry in a fairly remote location in Arizona. But on other side of the legal port of entry are the illegal crossing areas that are controlled by the drug-smuggling gangs, the cartels. And that means that there's lawlessness on both sides of the border. If there's an entity that controls an illegal border crossing then that means that our side of that border is not under control. Immediately, if they decide who crosses and who doesn't, they're also deciding to allow illegals to come into the United States and illegal contraband to come into the United States. And I was in fact there on location when there was an illegal drug smuggler that was picked up. He had a white pickup with a false bed in the box. Nice piece of body work. You had to have a practiced eye to see it. But a false floor underneath there that was 7, perhaps 8 inches, and underneath that false floor it was packed full of marijuana. Some would call it bales. They were wrapped up in packages about the size of a cement package, although it's not as heavy, some placed over 200 pounds, some placed 250 pounds of marijuana, underneath the false bed in that pickup. And we took the jaws of life and cut it open and I personally unloaded over 200 pounds of marijuana out from underneath the false bed in that pickup. Now, the circumstances at that time--and I suspect this individual was prosecuted, partly because I was there--but he appeared to be an MS-13 gang member. He had a 13 tattooed on his arm right here. Full of tattoos. Had all of the look that you would have of an MS-13 drug- smuggling gang member. And the practice down there has been--unwritten, but in practice--that if someone is caught with less than 250 pounds of marijuana, that they're not prosecuted by the Federal Government. And when the loads got higher and more frequent, then the number went up to 500 pounds as the threshold for prosecution. Now, where I come from, if you have any illegal drugs in your possession, generally you're going to be prosecuted. There are law enforcement officers that may not, but it's not a practice. We think that the law is the law. Well, if the law is not enforced on the southern border for those that come across the border illegally with illegal drugs in their possession to the tune of hundreds of pounds and in fact thousands of pounds, then what do we have left of the law enforcement fabric on our southern border whatsoever? And how can this be a practice, let alone a policy? I saw it with my own eyes on that day and handled with my own hands. And as I talked to Border Patrol officers and the other law enforcement officers along the border, they confirmed that in some sectors that's the practice. They set the threshold because they didn't have enough prosecutors, they didn't have enough judges, and they didn't have enough prison beds to prosecute all the drug smugglers that they're picking up across the border, let alone 11,000 a night on average, a lot of them some might say just illegal aliens, just people coming into the United States committing the crime of unlawful entry into the United States. But among them are drug smugglers. And among the drug smugglers are violent criminals of other stripes. Part of that goes with the package. But to think that they could come into the United States illegally with a load of 235 pounds of marijuana and weigh it up and put it underneath the bed of the pickup and think, Well, fine, I'm not going to go to prison for this. If they catch me, they will just impound the pickup, which likely is stolen anyway, and impound the marijuana, which I saw warehouses full. And I say ``warehouses.'' More than the size of garages, not the size of something you would see down at Boeing, to put it correct. So, vast amounts. More than a semi load of marijuana that had been confiscated altogether in one particular warehousing location. There are others. But to think that we're not prosecuting with the full vigor of the law with someone who's coming through with a load of marijuana that is 200, 300, 499 pounds of marijuana. That's the America that we have on the southern border. And the people that don't live there and go like I do down to visit and get informed just accept the idea that their America is the same America in, let's say, South Dakota or northern Iowa as it happens to be on the southern border. And it's not true. It is a war zone there. We have seen the numbers of the casualties and the drug wars in Mexico mount. And I remember sitting in Mexico City with some of the members of the cabinet and some of the members of the Mexican Congress who would tell me kind of off on the side that they had 2,000 federal officers, agents, troops that were killed in the drug wars trying to bring order and trying to bring the drug cartels underneath the enforcement of law, to break them up. This would be 3 to 4 years ago. They would say, we have lost 2,000 Federal officers. Now what numbers do we hear? Twenty-eight thousand. Twenty-eight thousand, mostly civilian, but not all civilian casualties, in the drug wars in Mexico. Twenty-eight thousand. Can you imagine the carnage? That's the size of one of the larger cities in my State, the number of like 28,000. So here we are with Border Patrol officers, sending the National Guard down there. Thankfully, there are some Guard troops that are showing up. It does help. Every pair of boots on the ground helps and every bit of equipment we can put down there helps, and every bit of barrier that we build on the border helps. And I do want to build a fence, a wall and a fence. And I don't suggest that we build 2,000 miles right away next week, finish it by the end of next year. We could do that. We're a great Nation. We could do that without breaking a sweat if we had the will. But I do suggest that we build a fence, a wall and a fence where they are crossing it, where they have a path beat down, and just keep extending the fence, the wall and the fence, until such time as they stop going around the end. If it takes 2,000 miles of fence, wall and fence, then so be it. If we can do it with a hundred miles or 200 miles, so be that. But let's have enforcement of our border. Let's take our Nation back. Let's take our national parks and our national monuments back like Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Put that back in the hands of the American people. The America that I envision is the America that I grew up in that said you can walk anywhere in America, pick up a newspaper and read it in English, and you don't have to carry a gun. You can't do that everywhere in America today. The law enforcement is not such--the rule of law is not so established that you can go anywhere in America in that way and safely think that you can travel. You can't go to Organ Pipe Cactus down along the border, you can't take the jet ski on the lake in Texas. The Mexicans are controlling too much of that. And the retribution/restitution is almost nonexistent. And so I would add also that there's another factor that I didn't hear the gentleman from Indiana mention and that's the factor called the spotters' locations on top of the mountains, primarily in Arizona. And as I traveled down there, I began to learn about these spotters' location from some of our law enforcement officers. And that would include the Shadow Wolves down at the Tihono O'odham Reservation. Shadow Wolves are one of the unique aspects of our border enforcement. They are the Native Americans that serve together and train down there and enforce the law on the reservation and on that area that spans the border. Actually, Tihono O'odham is on both sides, in Mexico to some degree. Most of it is in the United States. And as I reviewed the border with them, they began to tell me, There's a spotter up on that mountain. He's watching us now. And I would look up there and of course I couldn't see him. I didn't know where to look, and he was too far away and I didn't have the glasses. And then we'd travel on down another few miles and they'd say, There's a spotter on that mountaintop and he's watching us. And as I began to put this together and traveled along the border and went to the Cabeza Prieta and some of the other locations along the border and talked to our officers, they began to tell me, Well, yes, we know where a lot of these locations are. I had a map there. Well, why don't you just put an X where you know where they are. So he'd put an X here, X there. I had him fill that in. Along the way, we came up with a map that showed the location of at least 100 mountaintops that are controlled by Mexican drug smugglers who sit up on top of the mountain. They will take the stones that are up there and stack them up like sandbags around a gun emplacement. Well, it is a gun emplacement. It's a high-quality optics observatory location where they spot the travel of our law enforcement officers, primarily Border Patrol, all along the highways. If you go down in any area from Phoenix, going south towards the Mexican border, especially where you see an intersection where there is a highway going north and south and another one east and west, look up on one of those corners, and you will see a small mountain there in a perfect location to be able to watch the traffic coming from all four directions. You can presume that that mountaintop is manned--it's a lookout mountaintop. It's a spotter mountaintop, and they're using that so they can tell the people who are moving their illegal loads across from Mexico into the United States when our law enforcement is coming up, when they're approaching. It will cause them to divert, to go the other way, to perhaps take a side road--and there aren't many, but it will give them that sense of warning. Now, for those who might think that I'm catching this secondhand, Mr. Speaker, and for those who might think that this is anecdotal, I can tell you that it's not anecdotal. It's real. I went down and I climbed to the tops of a number of these mountains. I sat in those locations and I observed the traffic. In those locations, with the stones stacked like sandbags on top of one of the smaller mountains, I found a broken piece of some fairly high-quality binoculars, and you could see clothes that had been left there. You can see from those locations that they've been spotting and tipping off as to the law enforcement that's moving along. It's an essential component for them. If they're going to smuggle drugs and if they don't know where law enforcement is, they can't just drive blindly up into Arizona with a truckload of marijuana. They have to know when the coast is clear. Well, these are the ``coast is clear'' spotter locations. They're on top of the mountains in Arizona. I climbed to several of them, observed it from there, took pictures up there, and saw the pieces of litter that were laying around. You can see the patterns and the habits, and you can get a pretty good idea of what their diet is and what they're doing up there. Then we got in a Blackhawk and flew to the top of other locations-- spotter lookout mountains--and we settled down close to that. We brought in law enforcement officers from the ground. With the headphones on and listening to the scanner, you can hear the scrambler of the frequency that they're using when they communicate with each other. It's high-quality optics and high-quality communications equipment with scramblers and descramblers. You could hear, flying from mountaintop to mountaintop, the intensity of the chatter go up and up and up in the earphones when we were tuned in to the frequency that they were using. It's that chipmunk language that has been scrambled into something that's completely unintelligible even though it was coming in, and, you know, it was Spanish that was scrambled, and it got descrambled at the other end. What I could hear was the intensity of that chatter going up and up and up. About a minute from the time we arrived at the next lookout mountaintop, the spotter mountaintop, that frequency and that transmission would immediately stop and be hushed. We would get to the mountaintop in about a minute, and the location that had been manned just moments before, just minutes before, was empty. It was empty every time because they came down off the mountain and went out into the desert and hid. So, when they get out into the desert and get away from that location and hide, they don't have to get very far away, a half a mile or so, and you can't identify them as being the people who were sitting on top of the mountain. Plus, we don't have a law against sitting on top of a mountain in Arizona, so it's hard to prosecute. It's hard to bring them to justice, but they exist. These are paramilitary locations. These are strategic locations. These are people who are armed with high-quality optics and with their high-quality communications devices, and they're set up to smuggle drugs into the United States. So far, we have not been very successful in snapping those spotters off of those mountaintops and taking that tool away from the drug smugglers. That's another piece that, I think, Mr. Burton is well aware of, and I add to the dialogue that he delivered here. What do we see instead? Instead of the administration using the resources that are at its disposal to go down and enforce the law in places like Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and California, it's using resources to sue the State of Arizona. I've read through that complaint, and it's a bit astonishing to me to think that the Department of Justice could contrive such an argument, and even though it didn't mirror the ACLU's lawsuit and MALDEF's lawsuit and--let me see--the American Muslim Society's lawsuit, I thought it would. Instead, they wrote up a whole new legal theory. This is the Holder Justice Department. Eric Holder essentially admitted that the President had ordered him to sue Arizona over their immigration law, and 5 minutes later, under oath, he admitted that he had not read the bill. So here we have the Attorney General bringing a lawsuit against the State of Arizona-- determined to give the lawsuit--who came before the Judiciary Committee. Under oath, he testified that he hadn't read the bill. He conceded under oath that the President had ordered him to sue Arizona. It was clear from listening to the President that the President hadn't read Arizona's law, S.B. 1070. So it's clear, as was concluded under oath and not denied, obviously, by the Attorney General of the United States, that the President ordered Eric Holder to sue Arizona. The President hadn't read the bill. Eric Holder hadn't read the bill, and they were determined to go forward anyway, so we made the commitment. I think that was actually announced by the Secretary of State when she was in South America--perhaps in Ecuador, if I remember right, maybe in Colombia. It's interesting to read the complaint and think, What did they have to sue about? You know, it's like throwing a tantrum, and then somebody asks, What are you mad about? Well, let me see. I'll have to come up with something. I'm sure I'm mad about something. What could it be? Well, let me think. I guess I can't be mad about this whole list--that is obvious--but I'll make up a new reason to be mad. This is a new reason to sue, and here is what it is: They argued in their complaint, the Department of Justice's complaint in their file against Arizona, that Congress had entrusted the various agencies in the executive branch of government with establishing and maintaining a ``careful balance,'' a careful balance between the various immigration laws that this country has. A careful balance. Huh. Well, Congress did no such thing. There is no record of Congress passing legislation and saying, Keep a careful balance, Mr. President, between the various immigration laws so that the Department of Justice thinks this is all right and so that the Department of Homeland Security thinks this is all right, as well as the State Department. Surely, don't enforce an immigration law that might cause the diplomatic arm of the State Department any heartburn with President Calderon. That's their argument, that they may not enforce obvious immigration laws because it might upset our neighbors in one direction or another. This is an astonishing legal position to argue, that they have been entrusted with establishing a ``careful balance,'' then maintaining that careful balance and, therefore, because Arizona is compelled to defend themselves, that somehow that careful balance has been upset by Arizona helping to enforce the laws that have been passed by the United States of America here in this Congress, on this floor, where we gave no direction--no direction--to the executive branch to have the discretion to enforce some laws and not others. There is no discussion. There is no history. There is no Congressional Record in here, let alone in the statutes, themselves, that declares a ``careful balance'' standard. That standard never existed. It was created by the imaginations of the lawyers in the Department of Justice, and now we've got to go all the way to the Supreme Court to fix a problem created and motivated by a political decision to sue Arizona, a decision which came directly out of the White House to order, exactly, Eric Holder to file that lawsuit. That, Mr. Speaker, is what I think of what's going on here with the immigration situation, and it's just a bit of a sequel to the gentleman from Indiana's statements on immigration, Mr. Burton. I want to make sure that I support that initiative that he took here tonight. From my standpoint, we've got to stop the bleeding at the border. We've got to reestablish the rule of law. We've got to raise the expectation that the law will be enforced in all of its aspects. We need to do a careful inventory of all of the resources that we're deploying, especially on the southern border, and make sure, when a Border Patrol officer puts his life on the line and pulls over a stray truck that has got more than a ton of marijuana in it, that that Border Patrol officer never has to get on the phone and plead with a county prosecutor to pick up the open-and-shut case and prosecute it. If not, we don't have the Federal prosecutors enough to prosecute and incarcerate someone who is smuggling a ton or so of marijuana into the United States of America. We must take a look at the deployment of our resources. If our border patrol officers are an adequate number, that means we also have to have an adequate number of prosecutors, judges, and prison beds so that we can enforce the law so that there's an expectation that this Nation has as one of its essential pillars of American exceptionalism the rule of law, and we must stand for it. We cannot and I will not stand for its erosion any longer, Mr. Speaker. But I came here tonight to talk about a number of other things as well, aside from the immigration issue. It was Mr. Burton that got me wound up as I listened to him talk. So I want to go back, and without a very smooth segue, I would like to just take us back, Mr. Speaker, to the election results of a couple of weeks ago and the message that was sent by the American people and reflect a little bit about my experience here and what I've seen happen politically and that works out this way. As I came here, I came here in the majority and we had the votes to pass legislation that was reasonable that the American people could accept, and we did so. As I engaged in the debate here and I watched as the level of intensity of that debate diminished from our side and the level of rebuttal increased from over on this side of the aisle, on the Democrat side of the aisle, I don't know that I realized that at the time--I could feel it here internally but I don't know that I realized it clearly enough at the time but there was a shift going on in the minds of the American people. I thought we were doing the right thing for the most part in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, but we weren't articulating this to the American people in a way that was as useful and accurate as it should have been. The best example of that, and I say this example because of my great respect for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States and put their lives on the line on a regular basis, that selfless and noble commitment. What I saw happening in the State of Iowa in 2003 was when we had Democrat Presidential candidates coming into Iowa on a regular basis, moving through the State stopping over and over again. And as I listened to this dialogue and I remember the date, it was October 5, 2003, and I'm watching the news and listening to the debate of the Presidential candidates, and I opened up The Des Moines Register newspaper. Inside page 3, headline at the top of the page, Candidate Howard Dean Repeatedly calls President Bush a Liar. And I was appalled. I thought, how can anyone call the President of the United States a liar? How can this be in this article? What must the President have said? So I read that article, October 5, 2003, and looking for the statement that would be identified that would make our Commander in Chief a liar, and I read the article and I missed it apparently and I went back and read it a second time for the language that would be in this article that would confirm the truth of the headline that our President, our Commander in Chief, was a liar. It wasn't there, Mr. Speaker. There wasn't an allegation in the article about what the President had said. It was just a story about Howard Dean calling George Bush a liar, repeatedly calling George Bush a liar. Well, it turned out it was about 16 words in the State of the Union address that had taken place just a few months, 6 months or so before that when the President of the United States said, We recently learned from the British that the Iraqis were seeking uranium in the continent of Africa. That's the 16 words, roughly speaking, in general delivery here that was the objection that was delivered by Howard Dean. Well, it turns out the statement was unequivocally true, and I actually have the evidence of that in the brief case that I carry with me wherever I go. But it wasn't so much the point of that because I remember when Charlton Heston ran commercials during the Presidential elections of 1996, when he looked into the camera and he said, Mr. President--and he was speaking of President Clinton--Mr. President, when what you say is wrong and you don't know that it's wrong, that's called a mistake. But when what you say is wrong and you know that it is wrong, that's a lie. Well, I think that's an accurate definition of the difference between a lie and a mistake. I don't think President Bush made a mistake. What he said in that State of the Union address was spot on accurate, absolutely provable. They disagreed with it because of one Ambassador Joe Wilson, who--I will give him a pass tonight, Mr. Speaker, because the clock is ticking. However, I turned to my wife, appalled that a Presidential candidate could declare our Commander in Chief to be a liar, and I said, Marilyn, I'm going to Iraq. So a few days later by the 17th of October, 15th to the 17th, I was in Iraq, and I took a look at what was going on there. I traveled through there, did a lot of stops, met with a lot of our officers that were there and enlisted men and women and came back with a different story on what was going on in that country. But the assault on President Bush and the undermining of his position and our men and women under arms, when I heard people on this side of the aisle say, well, I support the troops but not their mission, Mr. Speaker, that cannot be allowed to stand, to concede a point such as that. My point is, if you support the troops, you support their mission. You cannot ask them to put their lives on the line for Americans if you don't believe in their mission, too. We can't ask them to go on that kind of a mission. So what we saw happen was the assault, the verbal assault on the operations in a time of war in Iraq, being constantly pounded by the Presidential candidates and by many of the people over on this other side of the aisle in an effort to erode public opinion for the war in Iraq because doing so, in my estimation--and I understand that their motives may well have been pure--in my estimation in their desire to win the Presidency and their desire to win back the majority, their zeal to recharacterize our war in Iraq undermined public support for a mission that's turned out to be, on the balance of it, a pretty good ending considering what we were in the middle of during that period of time. My point is the President of the United States and the executive branch of government did not bring out a full-throated defense nor did they articulate a reason for being in Iraq in an adequate way. That left the door open so that the criticism that came against the war in Iraq nearly cost what's now considered by many to be a victory in Iraq. Public opinion's got to hold together. It should hold together on facts, and Republicans need to stand together and stand up for truth in principle when we're right. We cannot allow a debate to go the other way just because we think we have the votes. We must stand and win the debate and hold the votes together. That, Mr. Speaker, is an essential principle. As we go forward and we see these election results, we also need to understand that there will be a time coming into the 112th Congress, gaveled in, sworn in January 5 of 2011, that we'll sit here and we'll think we have the votes, so we just have to wait Democrats out while they have their say. I want Democrats to have their say. I agree with the incoming Speaker of the House, Mr. Boehner, that we need to have sunlight on this place and run this place with the kind of function that allows for--he says open rules. I'd shorten it up a little bit and say a lot more open rules. I don't know that we can do all open rules but more open rules so there's a legitimate debate here. And if Democrats have an idea, bring that amendment, let's debate that amendment, we'll vote them up or down. If Republicans have an idea, also bring your amendment. We'll debate it up or down. Think of how this process is supposed to work. You get busy and you go to work in the subcommittee and you hold hearings and you gather facts and the staff does the research work, crunches it in a way so that the under oath testimony and the information that's submitted is meaningful and that it can be cataloged and rationalized in a way that we can move forward with a good piece of policy. Once that hearing's need is satisfied, then you can go to a subcommittee and mark the bill up, and there of course you have to accept amendments from each side. Whatever the product is of the subcommittee needs to go to the full committee, and when it goes to the full committee, there needs to be a full committee markup. And there we need to allow for an open and legitimate debate because the process is taking an idea, present it to the hearing. If it can sustain itself in open, public dialogue, then it can actually become the bill that moves through the process, subjected to amendments that are designed to perfect the legislation, on through the full committee and to the floor for the same kind of process. That's what's envisioned by our Founding Fathers. It was never envisioned that there would be a Speaker of the House that would run this Congress, the House of Representatives, out of her office with her staff and disallow amendments, disallow debate, disallow an opportunity to even vote with a level of clarity so the American people can see what's going on. So their level of disgust rose up, and 58 Democrats were voted out of office, and there were a number of open seats that increased that number substantially from there. So I think the message should have been clear. It doesn't seem to be clear. It is clear to me. The American people are filled up with a process that does not reach out to draw the wisdom from the American people through this republican form of government, which is guaranteed to us in the Constitution of the United States. They're filled up. They've had it with the nationalization, the takeover of the banks; AIG, the insurance company; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and all the liabilities that go with that. They are fed up with the takeover of General Motors and Chrysler. Now it looks like, though, the White House is going to concede and sell some General Motors shares off into the marketplace. They will take a little loss, maybe even a big loss. I think that's a good step, and I encourage a lot more of it. In fact, I'm hopeful that by the time the 112th Congress gavels out roughly 2 years from now that the Federal Government will have divested itself of all of those private sector entities that have been taken over. And I am hopeful that the first act of the 113th Congress, a little more than 2 years from now, will be to finally pass the final version of the repeal of ObamaCare so that that can then go to the desk of the next President of the United States for his signature to finally repeal ObamaCare. As we sit here in this Congress and we're watching the importance of jobs, the American people said they've had it up to here with debt and deficit. It's about jobs and the economy, and it's about freedom and liberty and being able to order our own lives instead of being ordered within our lives by a nanny state. And ObamaCare is the flagship of socialism that has been delivered to us over the objections of the American people by the tens of thousands who poured into this city multiple times to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances. Tens of thousands of people, for the first time that I know of in history, put a ring around this Capitol Building. They held hands and said, Keep your hands off of my health care. It wasn't just one set of people with long arms holding hands, ringing the entire Capitol. They were six or eight deep all the way around the Capitol and clustered in the corners by the thousands who just didn't bother to get in the line. They said, Keep your hands off of our health care; and Speaker Pelosi marched through the middle of all of that with her oversized gavel to come do what she believed needed to be done for the American people who couldn't apparently think for themselves and said, We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it. Well, ObamaCare that passed could not have passed here in the House even with the strong Democrat majority if it were not for legislative maneuvering in an unparalleled way, including a promise that there would be a reconciliation bill that would circumvent the filibuster in the Senate that would be passed over there and come over here to amend the ObamaCare bill that had yet to be passed. So if you are going to do that, why can't you amend the bill and make it say what you want it to say, and send it back to the Senate? The reason for that is, Mr. Speaker, the Senate wouldn't pass the bill either because they elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts. They were so appalled at socialized medicine coming to America that the people in the Bay State sent Scott Brown to the Senate to put the brakes on ObamaCare. He put the message out pretty strong and pretty loud, and the people of Massachusetts clearly did. But the Senate could not have passed the legislation that passed in the House on that day, or any day since. The House could not have passed it either if it weren't for the promise that reconciliation would come from the Senate. And even then, it couldn't pass the House unless there was a fig leaf that was brought up which was by the President to give the pro-life group of Democrats--the Stupak Dozen, it's called--their fig leaf protection, as if an executive order could amend a statute of the United States of America. So, Mr. Speaker, here is the situation: we have the 2001 and the 2003 tax brackets that need to be extended or we will be seeing a huge tax increase, perhaps the largest tax increase of our lifetimes poised to hit us at midnight December 31 if this lame-duck Congress doesn't act. The negotiations on that are taking place. I do believe that there is more leverage in the Senate on this issue than in the House. If we don't get that resolved, Mr. Speaker, then our job is going to be--the first job, H.R. 1, bill number one--to make those tax brackets permanent so that no one faces anything but a temporary tax increase. And I mean that I would love to see this done in the lame-duck. If it's not done, it must be the first order of business in the new Congress in January. The estate tax, it is a painful thing to think about that kicking in in a diabolical way. The second thing, let's just presume we get it negotiated, and this Congress in lame duck resolves the issue of the '01 and '03 tax brackets, so we are not faced with a tax increase. Then, Mr. Speaker, if that's resolved, my sense of this is--and I think I have a vast amount of support, including 173 signatures on a discharge petition--that we must then use as the first order of business the repeal of ObamaCare. H.R. 1, repeal of ObamaCare. The new Congress will pass that in a heartbeat, to pull ObamaCare out by the roots, lock, stock, and barrel, so there is not one vestige of it left behind. And then we start down the path of shutting off the funding that would be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. We owe it to the American people. We owe it to the constitutional conservatives that rose up all across this land and rallied together to fight ObamaCare. That's the biggest reason why you have this vast change. The biggest change in majorities here in 72 years has taken place because ObamaCare was the crown jewel of the agenda that was driven that the American people have rejected. So I'm encouraging that we move forward with that. I have no appetite for tying together repeal and replace. Those are two separate subjects. We didn't have ObamaCare as a law of the land until late March of this year. We got along fine without it. Having it is worse than having nothing, but we need to win the debate on repeal of ObamaCare, win that debate, and then move down the line with the pieces that we would pass that would improve the health care for the American people that hold together, that hold together the doctor- patient relationship and the free market component and let people have their choices. That's the only way America works. We are not a dependent Nation. We are not a Nation that can submit to a nanny state or an onerous Federal regulation. We are a proud, free, independent people, totally unsuitable for the European style of socialized democracy. We have freedom. We have vigor. We have rights that come from good God. We are a unique race of people. And the vigor of America's history attests to that, and the destiny of America's future attests to that. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas for his presentation here and setting the tone right for Thanksgiving as we are departing this city and going back to spend time with our families again. We are a grateful Nation, and I know that we will have a lot to be thankful for in the King household, as does America have a lot to be thankful for. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention, being recognized, and all of our service here to the American people.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives and be one of the first speakers here on the floor in the aftermath of the election that took place a little over a week ago. I have a number of things that I hope to discuss this evening; however, I would like to start this presentation this evening, Mr. Speaker, with a recognition of valor of an Iowan who tomorrow will be receiving the Medal of Honor that will be hung around his neck and presented to him by our Commander in Chief, President Obama, at a ceremony at the White House. Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor an American hero, Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta. He is of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team from Hiawatha, Iowa. He will be presented with the Medal on November 16, tomorrow, at the White House by the President for distinguishing himself by acts of gallantry at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. In October 2007, while moving along a wooded area with an eight-man squad in Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, the squad was ambushed on three sides by at least a dozen Taliban fighters. Even though Staff Sergeant Giunta received several gunshot wounds, he continued the fight, running straight into the path of gunfire to rescue one wounded soldier and saving his life as he drug him back to safety, then running again directly into the path of oncoming gunfire to overtake and kill two fighters while rescuing his brother in arms, Sergeant Josh Brennan. Even though Sergeant Brennan would later die in surgery, the family still had the comfort of knowing that his brothers were with him and had rescued him from being taken captive by the enemy. That is a small segment of that engagement that day in October of 2007, and, Mr. Speaker, it is our privilege to express our great gratitude and to honor Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta. To commemorate this gallantry and this Medal of Honor, which will be the first Medal of Honor that will be awarded to a surviving American servicemember for either of the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts, probably the greatest supporter and cheerleader and respecter of our military, our veterans, our combat veterans, and especially our combat wounded, works in this Capitol every day reaching out to them--Albert Caswell. Albert has written a number of poems that he has presented to the wounded and to the families. He has provided a tremendous amount of comfort for those who have suffered so much for our liberty and for our freedom. This poem is something that he sat up last night and penned. Mr. Speaker, I read this into the record out of great respect for his contribution, and also great respect for the Medal of Honor winner that tomorrow will receive that medal from the President, Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta. This poem is called ``At Honor's Height.'' It reads, this: At . . . All, At Honor's Height! All in the darkness of war . . . this fight! All in those most sacred moments, that which ignite! When, who lives or dies . . . and but lives to see another sunrise . . . So Sal, so all depended upon you . . . While, against all odds . . . as you stood so tall, almost like a God! As into the face of death you ran . . . As did all your brothers in arms, so too, who on this day began . . . Such Brilliance, Such Light, So True This Sight . . . your hue! All At Honor's Height, as were you! Hooah . . . Airborne! With but your badge of courage worn! As all in that moment, as when your faith so chose to crest! All in your actions, and deeds . . . to answer freedom's quest! As your heart so sailed, up to new heights . . . so now! All in your most selfless light! Its Highest Point, At Honor's Height! Turning The Darkness, Into The Light! To win that day! To win that night! All At Honor's Height! For there can be no greater gift! Nor then there, no more blessed thing as this! Then, but the will to give up one's life! All for, your Brothers in Arms . . . this most sacred sacrifice! While, all in that moment of truth . . . by bringing your light . . . Which, so brings such tears . . . even to the Angels' eyes, this night! Ah yes you, Sal, so stand this day, all at Honor's Height! All in what you so gave . . . so brilliant and bright! For what child shall so be born, all from your gift in future's worn? Who might so save the world, or in harm's way so too . . . climb to such heights! For on this day, you and your Brother In Arms have so shown us all the way . . . To Honor's Height! Mr. Speaker, I don't have the words to embellish the actions of Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, nor do I have the words to embellish the poem that has been so brilliantly written by Albert Caswell, ``At Honor's Height,'' to commemorate the gallantry, the bravery, the nobility of this Iowan who tomorrow will be so profoundly honored at the ceremony in the White House and the presentation of the Medal of Honor. I have had the privilege to get to know one of our top Medal of Honor recipients in the Nation. In fact, the most decorated living American is Colonel Bud Day, also from Iowa. We happen to have three living recipients of the Medal of Honor that I claim as Iowans, and Colonel Day heads up that list as the dean of them. He was the top officer in the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He is a World War II, Korean, and Vietnam veteran. He also has been an honorable and noble leader here in America that has stepped forward and worn the Medal of Honor with courage and dignity, and he has been a noble American in every day of his civilian life as well as his invested life. He has made the advice for Medal of Honor winners that: You wear that medal every day of your life; that when you receive the medal, everyone looks at you and wherever you go they know that you have received the Medal of Honor, so all of your behavior is observed more closely than it might be if you were perhaps significantly more anonymous. So you can cast disgrace on America or you can cast honor on America. The Medal of Honor recipients have by and large, and in all cases that I know of, cast honor on America by their deeds, by their bravery, by their nobility, and by their actions as they proceed through the course of perhaps post-military service and being Americans in a most honorable fashion of seeking to make America a better place to live in. We look forward to the future that Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta has and the message that he will deliver to this country as he proudly wears the Medal of Honor. I ask that this Congress stop and pause and reflect upon the sacrifice that he has made. I think also that there are circumstances where we have lost Americans who have conducted themselves in as noble a fashion who are unrecognized. I pray that Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta does grow old here in America and leaves the legacy of his nobility and bravery wherever he goes as an inspiration to the young, as an inspiration to all of us. He is certainly an inspiration to me, and he should be an inspiration to us here in this Congress. As someone says, I don't really want to have that debate. It is a brutal debate. We have never had such a thing here in this Congress. There are brutal battles in war. Lives are lost, blood is spilled, hearts are broken, destinies are changed. The destiny of America has turned for the better when the destinies of individuals are occasionally sacrificed in that noble cause. And Staff Sergeant Giunta was willing to make that sacrifice. He stepped into the gunfire over and over again. Tomorrow he steps up to receive the Medal of Honor from the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States. I salute Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, and I ask that especially the young people in America look up to him as an example. There are many others. Tomorrow we honor Staff Sergeant Giunta. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence on this subject matter, and I appreciate the privilege to deliver this summary of Staff Sergeant Giunta's sacrifice here on the floor. I ask that as we go forward into the 112th Congress, we keep in mind, we get into our parochial battles here, and I mean that, of course, figuratively, because they really aren't battles by comparison. And we wear the Republican jerseys, the people on the other side wear the Democrat jerseys, and we go at each other day after day here trying to gain some kind of advantage. This Congress, Mr. Speaker, especially over the last 2 years, but I think over the last four, and those on this side of the aisle would say, no, further back than that, has gotten away from the principle of doing the right thing for the American people and instead gotten involved in the one-upmanship that takes place when you have partisan conflict here. I do recall coming to this Congress when I was elected and sworn in here on this floor in 2003. And I recall those 4 years, and subsequent to that, if I had a policy issue, I had constituents that had a problem that needed to be dealt with, if I had something that made a good argument for where we could take America, I took that argument to the committee or I took it to the committee chairs. I took it to members of the committee. I testified before committees to move that policy forward, Mr. Speaker, and there was an ear for a policy discussion. That ear was there on the part of the committee chairs, the members of the committee, to a certain degree with the leadership, that would seek to accommodate those concerns that I would bring forward. I am convinced that most of the Members were in the same condition I was in. There was an ear there and the system was set up so that the wisdom of the American people could be synthesized and poured into each of the 435 Members of Congress. We would sort those issues out and raise the priorities of them, and as we brought those issues here and the priorities came to the top, this Congress acted upon those priorities. At least the process and the system was wired to do that. Sometime in 2007, perhaps, that began to devolve. In 2007, in the beginning of that session, we did have a legitimate appropriations process where we had an open rule and a Member could write an amendment to an appropriations bill, bring it down here to the floor and introduce that amendment, and if it met the rules of the Parliamentarian, it would be deemed in order and one could force a debate and a recorded vote on an issue that had to do with an appropriations bill. Now, that had gone on for 200 years in this Congress. And it went on in the early part of 2007, which I remember is the last time we had a legitimate appropriations process with open rules. And along about 2008, that began to get shut down. And by 2009 and 2010, it was shut down and Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, were shut out of the process. Our constituents can't understand about electing someone to the United States Congress, it a powerful seat, 1/435th of the spending and the initiation of the taxation and the deliberative proceedings that take place as directed by our Constitution, electing someone to establish that franchise, and having that franchise cut out from underneath them because the Speaker of the House had deemed that there wouldn't be any amendments on appropriations bills, there wouldn't be any open rules on appropriations results. I am pretty sensitive to this, Mr. Speaker, because in 2007, my staff analyzed this--I didn't pay attention to it--they analyzed it and concluded that I had introduced and successfully passed more amendments than anybody else in Congress in that appropriations process of 2007. And I look back on that time and I think, where have we gone? We have gone from having an active open rule that was consistent with the first two centuries of American process here in this Congress to a kind of system that not only is there a closed rule on appropriations bills, it has been shut off now for 2 years, but no appropriations bills. No budget. Just a continuing resolution, a CR, that is written in the Speaker's office by the Speaker's staff. And if someone can knock on the door and slip a piece of paper underneath the door, and if somebody inside there decides they want to incorporate it, you might actually be able to have your voice heard. But the voice of the American people has been shut out, and that intransigence is one of the biggest problems we have had in this Congress. If we don't have enough faith in the positions that we take here that we can allow open public debate, and if we can't allow amendments to be offered, debated, and voted upon so that we can perfect legislation in subcommittee, in committee, and here on the floor, then the system is dysfunctional, and it shuts out the wisdom of the American people and it puts it into a monopoly of one office, the Speaker's office, the Speaker's staff, and to the extent that any of the committees can weigh in. That is the piece that I am hopeful will change. That is the pledges that I am hearing, that we are going to see more open rules, the appropriations process comes down with open rules, and that any Member of Congress, whether they be Democrats or Republicans, can offer essentially an unlimited number of amendments in an appropriations process so that the American people can see it is a legitimate process, we can debate those issues, we can vote them up or down, and we can move on. Mr. Speaker, I am looking forward to this reversion back to the fresh air we had, some might say a new breath of fresh air. I would say it is reverting back to the fresh air we had. And it is high time. And all of the issues that have been debated up and down in the media, a lot of them didn't see the light of day here in this Congress, and I am hopeful they will see the light of day. The first issue that I am hopeful that is debated here in this upcoming 112th Congress with this incoming new freshman class, these 80-some arriving new freshmen, actually it might be in the nineties by the time we add those on the other side of the aisle too, I believe as God's gift to America, just in time. I think the cavalry has arrived. I think we have been fighting the battle of the Alamo, and we actually held out before we got overrun. And this massive freshman class full of conviction and vigor and dreams and passion, the lifeblood of the vigor of America, is in this city now, going through orientation, getting prepared, putting their offices together, hiring their staff, finding out where everything is, positioning themselves for committee assignments, et cetera, so that they can hit the ground running here on the 4th of January, when they will swear in to the new 112th Congress in large numbers, 80-some Republican freshmen, who will bring their vigor and their legislative valor here to this floor. And they expect that their voice is going to be heard, and we need to make sure that their voice is heard and that the process is open. It might mean long days, long nights, long debates. It might mean we get a little tired of coming back over here to vote time and time and time again. But the American people expect us to do our work, we should want to do our work, and in fact if we shrink from that, the work product that we have won't be the work product of the reflection of the wisdom of the American people, Mr. Speaker; it will be the work product then of folks that are sitting behind closed doors instead of out here in front of the C-SPAN cameras where we belong. We should be doing our business here. But that first piece of business that I am hopeful comes out in the 112th Congress, and think it will have the full-throated support of that freshman class that is prepared to grab ahold of the levers here in the 112th Congress, I am hopeful, and I will seek to establish that H.R. 1, the first bill coming out of the chute, is the repeal of ObamaCare. If there is any piece of legislation that symbolizes this dramatic change that has taken place here in the seats here in Congress, these 290-plus freshmen that will be seated here, most all of them Republicans, if there is any one single piece of policy that embodies that reason for the transformation, the passing of the gavel, it is the repeal of ObamaCare as the clearest example of what people have risen up against. I remember 4 years ago--it will be 4 years in January--right behind me, Mr. Speaker, as the gavel was passed from Republican to Democrat; from John Boehner to Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Speaker of the House of Representatives. I remember that day. It was a historic day, the first female Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in its history. Nearly 4 years have gone by. Some would say a lot of water under the Golden Gate Bridge since that period of time, Mr. Speaker. And we have seen unpopular policy after unpopular policy come unfolded. For example, the theory that spending billions of dollars extending unemployment benefits is the best bang for the taxpayer's buck when it comes to stimulating the economy. I was not prepared to rebut such an argument. I never conceived of such a thing. But that's one of the principles that the American people know better, and they went to the polls and said, Uh-huh. We're really uneasy with that path it is going down. The idea of pushing ObamaCare down the throats of the American people when it was clear that they had rejected it; when you think of tens of thousands of people who poured into this city I will say a year and a week ago on November 5, a little more than that now, but it was November 5, 2009. Tens of thousands of people were stacked up out here on the West Lawn of the Capitol building, swarmed around the Capitol. They swarmed down through the hallways of the office buildings. They came out here to say, Keep your hands off of our health care. We don't want ObamaCare. This Nation has never seen the kind of resistance that we saw come out of the streets of America in opposition to a policy this was proposed. We have never seen that. And it says in the Constitution freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and the freedom to petition the government--peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances. And they did, all within the confines of the Constitution, a lot of them with the Constitution in their pocket. It was in their head and in their hearts and tears running down their cheeks because they saw what was being done to America. They saw what was being done to the Constitution. And they saw what was being done to their personal liberty and their personal freedom. And they came here to this city and to most of the big cities--in fact, most of the towns and even county seat towns in Iowa, people filled up the meetings to resist the coming of ObamaCare. That was the summer buildup in 2009 to the vote that took place here in the House on November 7, 2009. And then we saw a vote on Christmas Eve in the Senate when Harry Reid decided that he had enough leverage on people that if they wanted to go home for Christmas vacation and see their families, they had to catch a plane on Christmas Eve. If they'd have held out until 9 o'clock that night instead of 9 o'clock that morning, a lot of those Senators would have spent Christmas here in Washington, D.C., which is what they deserved. They deserve coal in their stocking for what they did that day. But they passed through by using the leverage that they had and with no margins to spare a health care bill that didn't match the one here in the House. But they moved the ball down the field a little ways on Christmas Eve. So that would be December 24. And now some of us said, What do we do? How do we stop this ObamaCare juggernaut that had passed the House on November 7, 2009, and a different version of it squeaked--and squeaked through the House, too, but squeaked through the Senate on Christmas Eve morning--How do we stop it now? And I asked one of the senior Senators over on that side, What do we do now? And his answer was, Pray. And pray for a victory in the special election in Massachusetts. I don't think very many people believed that Scott Brown was going to be the next Senator from Massachusetts on Christmas Eve of 2009. And I went up to Massachusetts to participate, to the extent that I could contribute, and for 3 days up there I saw valiant constitutional conservative Americans making phone calls, one after another, lined up to make phone calls for the benefit of Scott Brown's candidacy. Constitutional conservatives, tea party activists, regular Baystaters from Massachusetts. And I met couples that say, Well, I'm a teachers' union member here and my husband is a member of the electrical workers--the United Electrical Workers--and we've always walked the streets and campaigned for Democrats. Not anymore. We're campaigning for Scott Brown. We've had it. We've had enough. We don't like that health care proposal that's coming, and we want to send somebody there that's going to stop it. And Scott Brown pledged that he would vote against ObamaCare and he would block it. And we know what happened. January 19 of this year Scott Brown was elected to the United States Senate to fill--he always said it is the people of Massachusetts' seat. It is their seat, like any seat in the Senate or the House belongs to the people who elect their Representatives to that seat. He was humble enough in that regard. And he was precisely right. We see it as the seat that was occupied by Senator Teddy Kennedy for all of those years. A dramatic shift in the political dynamics of America took place on that day on January 19, and a lot of people thought, myself cautiously included, that that was the end of ObamaCare because they would not have the votes to move ObamaCare by a conference version back through the Senate because it had to sustain itself in a cloture vote. And so we saw President Obama's mojo be diminished dramatically. We elected a Republican Governor in Virginia when they said it couldn't be done. And even more improbably, elected Chris Christie, a Republican Governor in New Jersey when it seemed completely improbable that could happen. And even though he had a lead in the polls going into the last few days, a lot of us thought that something would happen to trip up Chris Christie. Well, he's the Governor. Bob McDonnell is the Governor in Virginia. That message came out loud and clear and strong. And when Scott Brown was elected, it was clear that President Obama's mojo had been diminished dramatically and the prospects of America having to live under ObamaCare had also been diminished and perhaps crushed. But the President came before the Republican conference and had a conversation that lasted about 90 minutes. And subsequent to that he called the meeting on February 25 at Blair House, which was a big square-table discussion about health care, challenging that Republicans didn't want to talk, we just wanted to disagree with the proposals that he had. Well, Republicans wanted to talk and it was the President that didn't seem to want them to talk. So I had a staff person that sat there and put it all into a spreadsheet and timed everybody's speeches. It was limited time. There was a strict rule involved. But of course the President said, I'm the President. I don't have to follow the rules that we have written for the meeting that he's hosting. He interrupted Republicans 72 times that day on February 25 at Blair House. That was the level of respect that he had for our input. But he gained some traction, and they found a way to leverage ObamaCare back at us. From February 25 until March 23, they marched through this Congress. And finally on that day when ObamaCare passed here in the House, it didn't have the majority support of the House in order to be passed. To get enough votes to pass it they had to meet a couple of conditions. One is the President had to make the pledge or the oath that he would sign an executive order that was designed to amend the legislation that was about to pass Congress. Can you think of such a thing? Standing up to take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, so help me God, and thinking that as a President you can write an executive order that eclipses or amends legislation that's passed by the Congress and tell them you're going to do it in advance? That's what the President did. Now if that's not appalling enough, on top of that, another group of House Members here--Democrats--wouldn't vote for ObamaCare here on the House even with the fig leaf executive order that the President promised for the gentleman from Michigan. But they had to also have a locked-down pledge that the Senate would pass a reconciliation package that would also effectively amend the package that was coming to the House. So, for those who didn't live through this, Mr. Speaker, I'd put it this way: ObamaCare was the first big piece of legislation that made it to the President's desk and was signed into law and became the law of the land that on the day of its passage didn't have the majority's support in the House of Representatives and it could not have passed the United States Senate under their current rules, but they had to do this by legislative sleight of hand to package up the three components to ObamaCare--the bill itself that started out at 1,994 pages and ended up 2,500 pages--the bill itself; the fig leaf executive order that the President promised and did sign that was supposed to prohibit the funding of abortion through ObamaCare, which we know it did not; and the third thing was the reconciliation packaged that circumvented the requirement for a cloture vote under the rules of the Senate and send it over here to the House. That's what it took to give America ObamaCare. Americans rose up on that weekend, and for 3 days they would stay on these Capitol grounds. By the thousands, they would stay outside the windows of the Rules Committee and chant, ``Kill the bill. Kill the bill.'' When I'd say to them, ``We're going to have to break this up. We can't keep this up,'' they would say, ``We won't go until they all vote `no.' We won't go.'' These are courageous Americans who stayed here all night. If they slept at all, it was out here on the cement or maybe on the grass. They would not go until they killed the bill. There were enough Americans who poured out here--tens of thousands--and who kept that vigil around the Capitol. They surrounded the Capitol building. They joined hands and surrounded the Capitol building. Mr. Speaker, I'm not talking about one human chain with long arms each. I'm talking about six or eight deep all the way around the Capitol building and clusters in the corners of thousands who were needed to fill the human chain around the Capitol. They came to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances, and still the Speaker marched through the crowd with her huge, oversized gavel in her ``let them eat cake'' moment. So here we are, Mr. Speaker. The American people saw all of that. They saw the takeover of three large investment banks. They saw $700 billion in TARP spending. They saw $180 billion go out to AIG, the insurance company. They watched the formerly private sector, then quasi-government, now completely government-owned, -operated, - functioned, -guaranteed, and -backed up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which has saddled the American taxpayers with a contingent liability of $5.5 trillion. They saw all of that, Mr. Speaker. They saw as the Federal Government took over General Motors and Chrysler to operate those formerly private sector businesses for the benefit of the people affected by them. That's when they handed the secured assets of the investors over to the unions. The American people saw all of that, and their sense of justice was offended: the affront to the free enterprise system, the nationalization of three large banks, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Motors, and Chrysler, and the Federal Government takeover of 100 percent of the student loan program. How? With a debate here on the floor of the House or the Senate? With hearings before committees and markups before subcommittees and committees in a process as envisioned? No. Written into the reconciliation package as a sleight of hand that came out of a circumvention of the cloture vote in the Senate and slipped over here to the House of Representatives to be stuck in as ObamaCare. That is how they took over the student loan program. Then we saw the Federal Government, under the direction of President Obama with the magnum gavel that Nancy Pelosi regally walked through the crowds who simply wanted to maintain their freedom and liberty, nationalize our skin and everything inside it. That's ObamaCare. The second-most sovereign thing we have is our body and our health, and the Federal Government took it over to manage it and to make it the law of the land. They nationalized our skin and everything inside it, and they put a 10 percent tax on the outside if you go to the tanning salon. There was no square inch of skin left not nationalized by this government, and the American people rose up in a peaceful way. I have to give the American people credit, a tremendous amount of credit. In any other country in the world, if they watched their liberty go like that, they would be demonstrating in the streets like they did in Athens not that long ago or as we watched take place in France or in Great Britain, for that matter. I mean the French may have to work until age 62, and they think that's worth burning tires and cars and demonstrating over. What do we do in America when we disagree with our government? We come to Washington, DC. We fill up the parks in America. We do rallies all over. We fly the American flag. We run the yellow Gadsden flag up alongside it, down just an inch or so from height, the yellow Gadsden ``Don't tread on me'' flag, and we petition the government for redress of grievances--peacefully--and they were peaceful. When these rallies were done, when these press conferences were done, I sent staff people out with cameras to look so they could take pictures of the litter. Could they find at least a cigarette butt out there to take a picture of to show me how disrespectful it might have been? These crowds were the most respectful crowds that the park service had ever seen. They cleaned up behind them. They didn't drop anything in the first place. They looked out for each other when they were done. They might have walked the grass down a little bit, but there wasn't any litter to pick up. They love this country. They love this beautiful Capitol. They respect the history of this Nation, of the Constitution, and of the system that we have. They were maybe not successful in rolling back ObamaCare in November of 2009, in December of 2009, or in March of 2010, but they understood what happened. They understood that our freedom and our liberty had been marginalized by an arrogant attitude--that the people up in the Speaker's office knew best and that the American people didn't know. When the statement came that we had to pass the bill so that the American people could find out what was in it, I met a lot of people outside this Capitol, outside the beltway, who read every word of that health care bill. Now, I wouldn't say that I've ever met anybody in or outside of the beltway who could read and understand all of its implications--that's impossible given the depth and the magnitude of it--but they understood that this was an affront to our liberty and to our freedom, that it would forever transform the way health care would be delivered in America and that it was a component of this vast overreach, this taking of our liberty and our freedom that had been initiated, oh, several generations ago. It was brought to a head several times, but never had it seen the configuration of an intense liberal President with a determination to use the majority that a happenstance of history had given him in the House and a supermajority that was filibuster-proof in the Senate. They used it and they abused it, and the American people rose up and went to the polls and said, Enough. Enough. We're going to send people here to this Congress who understand that the Constitution is our default position, that whenever there is a question, we look back to the Constitution for guidance; and if the Constitution constrains us, we don't disregard the Constitution. What we must do is either comply with the original intent of the Constitution or take the trouble to amend it, and it takes a lot of trouble to amend the Constitution. The Constitution needs to be our default mechanism. We have a lot of new freshmen coming in here who understand that. One of them is Bobby Schilling, from Quincy, Illinois, who understands it. The opponent whom he ran against was Phil Hare, who famously said, Oh, the Constitution? We don't care about that. His constituents do. They sent their message, and they sent a new Representative here to Congress who does care about the Constitution. His colleagues in this class are 80-some strong, and all of them, I know, do care about the Constitution. When they take their oath of office, they will take it seriously. It will be something branded on their hearts, as it should be of any Member who comes in here and who has the privilege to serve Americans. We all have to brand down our oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. I am looking forward to this class coming in, Mr. Speaker. I understand the message that has been sent by this country, and it has been sent with those new Representatives who are arriving here in Washington, D.C. They are here now, those who will be sworn in on January 4. That message is: Adhere to the Constitution. Hold on to the Constitution. Believe in it, and defend it as there have been so many who have died in its defense. We can at least stand and defend it and adhere to it. Understand also that debt and deficit, jobs and the economy are the central theme that have been flowed out here. But the takings of our liberty in the form of the nationalization of all of these companies and entities has been an affront to the American free enterprise system. It diminishes the vigor of America to have the government running Fortune 500 companies in America with no plan to divest themselves of it and to think that the Federal Government would make decisions with a ``one size fits all'' formula for our health care and do that to us when we completely have the ability to manage that health care for ourselves. I think there's something also that was missing on the part of the liberals here in Congress, Mr. Speaker. And that's this: That as much as the progressive movement draws its instruction from Western Europe, when the progressive movement was generated by intellectuals that visited Germany in the latter part of the 19th century and came back here and began to inject the progressive thought process with social democracy. Western European social democracy values, to keep it simple, Mr. Speaker, came to us out of Western Europe in the latter part of the 19th century. It's been debated in this country over and over again. These are the people that decided they would undermine our Constitution not by amending it but by trying to redefine its meaning and its intent. And they made the argument that it's a living and breathing document, and therefore, it has to adapt itself to the mores of the day, otherwise we couldn't possibly be burdened with something that was so rigid and structured that we would have to amend it as society evolved. Well, I would make the statement that human nature does not change, and that if we ever get the fundamental structure of our Constitution and law correct--and for the most part, we have the fundamental structure of our Constitution correct--if we ever get it correct, then the only reasons to meet in the legislature is to make appropriations for the upcoming year or two and to make adjustments to new technology, if that's required. But the progressives from a century and a generation ago have polluted the thought process of Americans. And the people who are progressives--and there are some 77 in this Congress, at least today, and they're listed on their Web site, and they're linked with the Democratic socialists of America. Socialists and progressives are one and the same by essentially their own admission. They miss this thing about America: We're not a dependency people. Even if the socialism was right, social democracy is right for Western Europe, it's not right for Americans. And there are a good number of reasons why it's not right. A lot of them are in the Bill of Rights. We have guaranteed freedom, rights that come from God. They don't believe that in--well, some believe it, but it's not in anybody else's Constitution that I know of. It's in our Declaration actually here, and it's in the Iowa Constitution as a matter of clarification. But our rights come from God. They don't come from a sovereign, from a king. They don't come from government. If rights come from government and government takes your rights away, then who are we to complain? Who do we complain to? If the government takes our rights away, they're the ones that are sovereign. But what we have here in America are God-given rights that are vested in the people. The people are sovereign, and the people then entrust the power of their sovereignty through the representative form of government, the republican form of government, and they elect those representatives to represent them here in Washington and around the country. They must guarantee a republican form of government. That is a constitutional requirement. But it's the people who are sovereign. The vigor that Americans have that come from these rights is this vigor--a lot of it's in the Bill of Rights. The freedom of speech in a full- throated way to step out on the courthouse steps and let fly with your deepest convictions without fear of a punishment that might come from the government. I recall standing on the courthouse lawn in Sioux County, Iowa, in Orange City during the Tulip Festival. Myself and another candidate had lined up a couple of big speakers and a microphone. It's always a good crowd during the Tulip Festival. So we just started to holler up a crowd and give speeches. As we did that, more and more people started to gather. And after a little while, a fellow came out of the courthouse, and he came over and approached Representative Dwayne Alons, who represents that area and is from there. And he said, You've got to shut this down. These men can't stand here and give these speeches on the courthouse lawn because this is a polling place. Now this is the first weekend in May. There are no elections going on, no elections near. So the fact that it was a polling place during elections was really irrelevant. But the man said, They can't be speaking here like this. This is a polling place. This is electioneering, and it's a violation of State law. Now we're speaking away in our full-throated positions on the things that we advocated and believed in. And Representative Dwayne Alons looked at that courthouse employee, and he said, Well, if you can't exercise your right to freedom of speech here on the courthouse lawn, could you tell me just where in the world you can exercise your right to freedom of speech? That gentleman turned around and went back in the courthouse, and that's the last we heard of him. But the vigor that comes from this freedom of speech and the confidence that we can write a letter, send out an e-mail, put it on Facebook, put it on Twitter, get on the radio, go out on the street corner and the curb, or stand at the pulpit and express our deepest, most firmly held convictions without fear of retribution or recourse that would come from government--at least in an official fashion--that is one of the essential principles of being an American that adds to our vigor. It allows us to be the people that can use our reason, our ability to rationalize, our ability to continually self-examine our culture and civilization to make these adjustments, like the American people made adjustments when that gavel was passed to Speaker Pelosi in January of 2007. They made more adjustments in 2008, and more Republicans went home, and more Democrats came. And then they watched the results of their decision, and they weren't particularly alarmed when it was Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid until President Obama came in. Their decision, all right? I sat out there on the west portico of the Capitol, and I had a great seat. And I saw the momentous time in history when the first black President of the United States was sworn in. And I felt that uplifting feeling. We had reached a milestone as a nation, and perhaps we had put race behind us. And perhaps, just perhaps, he would find a way to blend the two sides together and get us to a postpartisanship era in America. Well, the American people gave him 2 years, and they could see the pattern over and over again. It wasn't going to be postpartisanship. It was going to be more and more partisanship, and an economic theory that had been discredited since the New Deal in the 1930s by FDR. This Keynesian economist on steroids had decided he was going to spend money hand over fist in a desperate effort to try to stimulate the economy, dug us a hole deeper than the hole the Chilean miners were in, and he was still down there with that shovel digging on Election Day November 2, 2010. The American people looked at that. They were appalled. They thought that good judgment would take over sooner, or at least some time. So they decided the quickest and most effective way that they could take the shovel out of the President's hands was to take the gavel out of Nancy Pelosi's. And that's what happened. Debt and deficit, jobs and the economy became the order of the day. And the American people were appalled that their ability to manage their own health care had also been taken away from them and company after company had been taken over by the Federal Government. And another principle that is a pillar of American exceptionalism, the pillar of free enterprise, also was being diminished on a regular basis by--I don't know that I can say clearly that it's an anti-capitalist administration. But certainly the President surrounded himself with many anti-capitalists. Free enterprise, another foundation of American greatness. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion. And by the way, this freedom of religion has been diminished by the IRS by the intimidation that the churches might lose their 501(c)(3) status. So pastor after pastor steps up to the pulpit. And about the time their convictions and their conscience open up the volume in their throat, they think, ooh, but what if I lose a not-for-profit status? I will be standing on the street corner preaching from the curb? Some let fly, and I am proud of them, all of them. Some pull it back and decide they're going to be more careful. And they're afraid of the tax penalties that might come if they lose their not-for-profit status. But freedom of speech is part of American vigor. Freedom of religion is part of America's core culture. It is the moral foundation that holds our civilization together. You cannot hire enough police officers to do that job for you. It has to be part of our moral character. If you think otherwise, take a look at what happened to the police force in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. More police officers, more problems in that scenario. But the core of our values is tied to our Judeo-Christian faith which is the center core of American civilization. That's part of American vigor. And speech, religion, and the press, the freedom to freely assemble, and the rights to property under the Fifth Amendment, freedom from double jeopardy, the list goes on and on. That's just in the Bill of Rights. That's just in the Bill of Rights. And then we have this other vigor, this American vigor. And it's unique to us. This situation where, I'm going to make this argument, Mr. Speaker, that Americans are a distinct race of people, a race of people. And I don't know anybody else that takes this position; but if they listen, then I think everybody that listens will take this position. We have a distinction that characterizes us. We may look different, we may have different skin tones and different shapes to our facial features. We may come from every--we do come from every continent on the planet. We come from hundreds of countries on the planet. But what we have in common is we either, people that came to America bring with them the distinct vigor of their culture and their civilization. It isn't that somebody that comes from France or Italy or Argentina or Russia, wherever it might be, Sweden, that comes to the United States, it isn't that those nationalities have these unique vigorous characteristics of hardworking industrious entrepreneurs that love freedom and want to build something and put a mark on life and leave this world a better place for the next generation. We got the dreamers from every civilization. We got the can-do spirit from every civilization. The American culture, the American Dream is built because we are the recipients of the cream of the crop of every donor civilization on the planet that sent legal immigrants here to America. And they rose up. They had to sacrifice to get here. They had to plan. They had to sometimes sell out their future to get here. But when they came here, they were determined to build something that had value. And when they saw the Statue of Liberty it meant something to them. It's a dream. It throbbed in their heart when they looked at that and they saw themselves sailing into Ellis Island. Here was this promised land. Yes, some of them thought the streets were paved with gold. But also, many of them believed that they had an opportunity to go out there and mine for that gold and pave their own streets in this country, and nobody could take away their freedom, their liberty, their property rights, and no one could put them in double jeopardy of a crime. That vigor that is from each donor civilization is part and parcel of the character of America. I come from a number of different sources, but some of my ancestors came across the prairie in a covered wagon. They walked beside that wagon or behind the oxen, and on a good day they traveled 10 miles across the prairie where the prairie grass was high in a sea of grass. On a good day they traveled 10 miles. Why they ever decided to drive that stake in the ground where they did and declare a homestead, I don't know how that process goes through one's mind. I've never read nor have I heard how they were thinking. But I know this: they came to the Midwest to live free or die on the prairie. They took the State motto of New Hampshire. They transposed it to the Midwest and on to the points to the West as well, where you had freedom-loving people that wanted spaces and opportunity, and they put their stake in the ground for that homesteaded 160. However they got started and they built, they built a house out of sod, and they started raising kids and putting them to work. And they took the axe and chopped the tree stumps out and turned them into farms, and they ran cattle and they found ways to make a living. They came out to live free or die on the prairie. And those of us who are descended from that kind of stock, we understand why. Why are my neighbors proud, independent? They don't want to be dependent upon government. They just want to have an opportunity to work and succeed and support their church and their family and their neighborhoods and their schools. That's all they ask for. The proudness, the independence, the industriousness, that's what's built America. And we took the cream of the crop off all those donors civilizations, and we gave them an opportunity here under the banner of freedom and liberty. And American vigor rose up. This giant Petri dish of this experiment of freedom and liberty rose up, and here we are. We're not a people that's suitable to be put under the yoke of socialism, or have a Federal Government dictate to us where we can or can't get our health care, or take away our shares in General Motors or Chrysler and hand them over to the Union, or have the Federal Government say that we want a guarantee that people can buy houses whether they can afford it or not, and we're going to guarantee that we're going to charge the taxpayers to pick up the difference when they can't meet those mortgages. These people want to be free. They want to be left alone. We want to allow for the vigor of Americans to shine and to glow and project itself across this continent and across this globe. As I've said, Mr. Speaker, with the opening remarks about Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, the risk that he took running into enemy gunfire over and over again to save his fellow troops, miraculously lived through that, will be receiving the Medal of Honor tomorrow in the ceremony at the White House. He put his life on the line. Some of his people lost theirs. And we owe to him, and we owe to all of those who have put their lives on the line, who have put on the uniform throughout the centuries, we owe them the fight for freedom and liberty here on the floor of the United States Congress. We owe them that fight. We owe them that liberty. We owe them that we're going to shut off this accumulation of debt, we're going to reduce and eventually eliminate the deficit. And in doing so, it will bring the economy back around, and it will produce jobs, and it will enhance our freedom and liberty, and those entrepreneurs that came to this country for that freedom, for a chance to build, and the descendents of those entrepreneurs that came here in earlier generations so that their children would have an opportunity for a better life, to earn, not to receive as if America is some giant ATM, but to earn a better life here. We owe it to Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta and everyone like him our best effort here on this floor to honor his effort, to uphold the Constitution, to uphold the oath to the Constitution that we will again take on January 4, here on the floor of this House of Representatives, to raise America up to the next level of our destiny, do honor to those who've gone before us, and to leave a legacy for those that come behind us. And this is the beginning, Mr. Speaker. This class, this new freshman class, for the 112th Congress is God's gift to America, and the American people will appreciate it. And we need to empower them to the maximum amount because I believe that they will lead us forward to that next level of our destiny.