Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House, and I have only a short privilege to look at some of the data that's been presented by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in the previous hour. I did look at the poster that says here's the economy as we know it in a very short snapshot in billions of chain GDP dollars. I don't know what chain dollars is. I have never discussed an economy within chain dollars. But I have also not discussed it within trends that are compressed down within the very few quarters that are presented in this graph that's been presented here before us on the floor of the House tonight, Mr. Speaker. Here is what I would present. Let's just back up a little bit. Let's back up all the way to October of 1929 and think about what's really happened. This Nation has been challenged over and over again to come forward and determine where we are with our economy. What kind of an economy are we? Are we the managed economy proposed by the Democrats on the other side of the aisle that believe that the President of the United States, the Cabinet, and the Pelosi Congress and the Harry Reid Senate should be the ones to make these economic decisions to manage the nationalized economy? Are we the kind of people that should be nationalizing even more of our economy? And I have gone through this list so many times I can almost recite it by rote in my sleep. This Federal Government, albeit started under President Bush, with the support of Barack Obama all the way through and most of it picked up by him, has nationalized--and when I say ``nationalized,'' I mean owned, managed, or controlled--sectors of the economy that have to do with three large investment banks, and that's Citigroup, Bank of America, and Bear Stearns. Those three have been taken over by the Federal Government. AIG nationalized by the Federal Government, the insurance company. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The entities that the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, said he would never support a Federal bailout of Fannie and Freddie. No, he supported the takeover, the Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We have also watched General Motors and Chrysler be taken over by the Federal Government, and a bankruptcy proposal pitched by the administration to the chapter 11 bankruptcy court that dictated the terms of bankruptcy, and among those terms were: Hand over shares of the automakers to the automakers union. And while that was going on, the only bidder before the chapter 11 bankruptcy court with the case of Chrysler, where I actually have the data and probably have it in my hand here, the only bidder was the Federal Government. The structure of it going into chapter 11 was the Federal Government, set up for a bidder. The only bidder was the Federal Government. It was the Federal Government on both sides of that equation. Unprecedented. A Federal takeover dictating to the bankruptcy court the terms of the resolution of Chrysler and handing over, in the case of General Motors, 17.5 percent of the shares in General Motors over to the automakers union, to the United Auto Workers. That's all taken place, including the takeover of the student loan program in the United States by the Federal Government. Now, if we add this up, three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, and Chrysler, according to Professor Boyle of Arizona State University, that's one-third of the private- sector activity of America swallowed up over the ownership, management, or control of the Federal Government. Then you add to that the student loan program, and then you add to that the financial services that are being regulated right now that are being negotiated in the conference committee that's been named between the House and the Senate, that would put the Federal Government in the position to regulate every single credit transaction in America. Now, I don't just mean one of the large bailed out, federally owned investment banks is doing business with one of the other large federally owned investment banks, that the Federal Government regulates that. I don't just mean that when a small community bank is doing transactions with people that are coming in to borrow money for operating capital or for a mortgage that the Federal Government regulates that. I will take it right on down to this question that was posed by the dentists. Would their transactions that are set up where they set up monthly payments for the parents to pay for the braces on the teeth of their children be regulated by the Federal Government and by the White House? Answer, yes. Under this bill that's coming at us under the language we are dealing with, yes, the Federal Government would regulate the transaction, the credit transaction between the dentist and the parents who would want to finance the braces on their children's teeth. Uncle Sam injects himself into that equation. Do you think that's to the point, Mr. Speaker, where we can't tolerate Federal intrusion any deeper? I think it's gone beyond where we can tolerate Federal intrusion any deeper. But it goes deeper yet. Not just into the cavities into our children's teeth or the braces on them, but right down into a neighborhood, friendly poker game. And I had them analyze the language for this purpose. I just asked the question: Where does this stop? What are the restraints? What are the constraints on the legislation that would give the Federal Government the authority to regulate every credit transaction in America? And I asked specifically: Will you analyze the language in the bill and tell me could the Federal Government, if they chose to do so, regulate the credit transaction that's embodied in an IOU that could be put in the middle of the pot in a poker game in a neighborhood or a friendly or a family poker game? It might even be an IOU for toothpicks. Yes, the language allows the Federal Government to inject themselves into every credit transaction in America. So we have the nationalization of one-third of the private-sector activity in the form of three large investment banks taken over by the Federal Government, AIG, the insurance company taken over by the Federal Government, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and General Motors and Chrysler. That's eight. That's one-third of the private sector activity according to the Arizona State professor, Boyle. One-third. And you add to that student loans, which I don't know what percentage of the overall economy that that is, and I don't want to speculate without some basis of knowledge on that. But we have got 33 percent of the former private sector activity nationalized, taken over by the Federal Government, by the Obama administration now in control and the management or ownership or control of these private sector entities. And now we are at 33 percent. ObamaCare has passed. That's, by a consensus of accounts, right at 17.5 percent of the overall economy that goes into health care under the ownership, management, or control of the Federal Government; 17.5 percent. Where do you round that to, anybody in sixth grade math? Up to 18. Eighteen percent plus 33 percent is 51 percent of the former private sector activity under the ownership, management, or control of the Federal Government; 51 percent. And what did Alexander Tytler tell us out of Scotland back as a contemporary of Adam Smith? And in summary terms, when the public understands that they can vote themselves benefits from the public treasury, on that day democracy ceases to exist. That was Alexander Tytler in about the year 1776, a long time back. Here we are. We are seeing data that shows that only 47 percent of the households don't pay taxes; 47 percent. We don't have a number that shows us the percentage of individuals. But if 47 percent of the households don't pay income tax, and that means Federal income tax, that tells us that we are only 3.0001 percent away from the majority of American households that don't pay income tax. Now, we are within the margin of error. Who could think that the public hasn't figured out, with the tutelage of President Obama, that they should game the system? Because if you are a marginal employee individual, are you better off to game the system and put yourself on the public dole and tap into a myriad of the 72 different Federal welfare programs that are out there or are you better off to go to work every day? If we default back to the statement made by Jimmy Carter back in 1976 in Iowa as he campaigned for President of the United States, impressed me--I didn't support him, Mr. Speaker; I want that to be clear in the Congressional Record--but he did impress me with a statement that he made. He said the people that work should live better than those that don't. I don't think Jimmy Carter lived by that, but he said that. And that impressed me that it was a simple, clear logic, the logic of clarity that should be delivered in this floor more often than it actually is. Of course the people that work should live better than those that don't. But Jimmy Carter had a lot of trouble following through on that. But by today's standards, no, he wasn't. He was a piker by today's standards. Anybody that doesn't live up to an average standard of living can go to the public welfare rolls and expect that they are going to have their rent subsidized, their heat subsidized. They are going to have food stamps. They are going to have 69 other Federal programs that they can have access to. We have become a welfare state. And that works pretty good for the people that want to create a dependency class in America. And that is clearly what's going on with the Obama administration, establishing and expanding the dependency class in America, because they understand that people who are dependent want to make sure that they go vote for the people who require them to be dependent before they will send more benefits their way. Independent people say, I want less government. I want less taxes. I want a smaller role in our Federal Government. I want the States to have their constitutional right to all the powers that are not enumerated to the Federal Government devolve back to the States or the people, respectively. That's what I want. Because I know that when people are responsible for their own activities and they are rewarded for positive behavior and the markets and the conditions of a just society provide disincentives for people who are lazy, who are not industrious, who don't take care of their families, who are dishonest, who might be indulging in substance abuse, those negative indicators for a society are punished in a just society, and positive behavior is rewarded in a just society. You don't have to rule or regulate a just society if you have the financial structures in place, the moral foundation in place and if you're not afraid to stigmatize negative behavior. But this administration has capped off the effort so far of previous, shall I be nice and call them progressives, their effort, their effort to expand the dependency class in America. And whenever that happens, if this Congress expands the dependency class, it is the equivalent of taking a jackhammer and chiseling away at those beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism, chiseling them away, breaking down the very foundation that created American exceptionalism. We're not a Nation that's created for greatness built upon dependency. The dependency class is anathema to the American people and the American spirit. Independence is our spirit. Self-reliance is our spirit. Our vigor, our unique vigor is our spirit. Our liberty, our freedom is our spirit. That's who we are. And how do we get to be in this great Nation? What are these pillars of American exceptionalism that are under assault by the active left in this Congress every single day, jackhammering away at those beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism? What are they? Well, they're easy to find. You look in the Constitution of the United States, take a look into the Bill of Rights. Go right down through the list: freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the freedom of assembly; to petition the government for redress of grievances. Boy, that is beautiful. Are those marble pillars, Mr. Speaker? Of course, they are. Freedom of speech, to speak outward and openly of the things that we believe in without restraint or punishment, knowing that the State can't come in and crush us for our opinions, the freedom with a full- throated objection to our government if they're going down a path that we object to or a full-throated support for a President or a Congress or a judiciary branch of government or any of the agencies within the government that's serving our people in a Constitution and a just fashion. That's freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom of religion, to worship in the church of our choice or not to worship or worship in our home or under a tree or out in the pasture or while we're in the traffic jam and any way we choose. Freedom of religion. Freedom for a pastor or anyone in the congregation whom he might accept to come up and step behind the podium to preach to the Word and preach the law of God and do so without fear, without fear that the IRS might come in and rule that these words were somehow political or partisan and to take away the 501(c)(3) not-for- profit status that exists for our churches within this country. The IRS has intimidated pastor after pastor, congregation after congregation. The core of our faith in this country has been eroded because of IRS intimidation of our preaches and our pastors. Even though that speech is guaranteed in the Constitution, it doesn't guarantee that you get a tax deduction if you speak out too openly. So I tell my pastors, preach the Word, preach the law, preach your convictions and your faith to your congregation in a full-throated way, and if the IRS comes in and threatens to take away your 501(c)(3) status, tell them Steve King stands with you. I stand with you figuratively. If you need me to stand next to you literally, I will do so, and if you still don't have the courage to preach the Word and stand next to me, then I will come and I will preach the Word. And if that doesn't give you enough conviction, remember this: Not in the history of this country has any church lost its 501(c)(3) status because a pastor spoke from his faithful religious heart and preached the Word, the gospel of the Lord to the congregation that has gathered together to hear that message. Not once, not ever, not in the history of America has a church lost its 501(c)(3) not-for-profit status because of preaching the Word from the pulpit. The threat goes out continually, and when a conservative Christian takes a position that has impact, then you hear from the people like, well, let me see--to avoid controversy, let me just say liberal United States Senators who would like to use the IRS to intimidate their opposition. They aren't all alive today, but there's a history of these liberal United States Senators who have done so. None have been successful in removing the 501(c)(3) status. But the truth needs to be preached. That's just the First Amendment. Freedom of speech, religion, and the press; freedom to peaceably assemble; and petition the government for redress of grievances, first amendment. Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to own and control our guns and not have the Federal Government take them away or confiscate our guns. Now, I've been a Second Amendment defender for a long time, and I will be for as long as the Lord grants me breath in this life, but Mr. Speaker, many of the people that defend the Second Amendment seem to think that it's about owning and keeping firearms so we can target shoot, recreational shooting, hunt, or for self-defense. And I will take the position here, Mr. Speaker, that those three things that I've talked about, hunting, self-defense, target shooting, are all residual benefits, kind of like extra benefits that come with the Second Amendment. We would have the Second Amendment whether or not there was target shooting, whether or not there ever was hunting, and whether or not there was self-defense because our Founding Fathers understood that we needed to have an armed populace to defend against tyranny. They understood that a tyrant would come and confiscate our guns and subjugate us to his armed forces, and we would have to knuckle under, and thereby would go our freedom. That was understood by our Founding Fathers, and they put the Second Amendment in so we could defend our freedom and our liberty and be an armed populace to defend against the tyrant. And the good stuff that comes from that is we get to also hunt, target shoot and defend ourselves. Pretty simple concept. But you look around the world, I don't know of a country or a civilization that has registered firearms that has not confiscated them. When a Nation has confiscated firearms, that suppresses our freedom of speech, that suppresses our freedom of religion, that suppresses our ability to assemble and peaceably petition our government for redress of grievances because we would be intimidated by an all-powerful state. We need a state intimidated by the people. That's what this country is about. The power in our government comes from God. Our rights come from God. They're vested in the people, and the people confer that authority into their elected Representatives. That is the very definition of a constitutional republic. And so we have these rights: freedom of speech, religion, and the press; freedom of assembly; and Second Amendment, right to keep and bear arms, because that is a deterrent for tyrants that might want to subjugate us as a people, that might want to take away our God-given rights that we have vested in our elected Representatives. That's just the First and Second Amendment. Those are all pillars of American exceptionalism. No other country has these kind of rights. They have politically correct laws in places like Canada and Great Britain, and those places are freer than many other places in the world, but we provide a full-throated defense of whatever our particular position happens to be. We're American. We aren't people that cower. We don't shrink from conflict. We don't shrink from disagreement. I had a lady approach me on the street a couple of months ago, about the time when ObamaCare passed, and she said to me, you have to find a way to get along. It's kind of a Rodney King statement: Can't we all get along? Can't we compromise? Can't we get away from all of this friction and this tension that's going on here over ObamaCare? And I listened to her. I'd seen the lady on the Hill for several years, actually, and I'd never had a conversation with her. And she impressed me with her deep conviction and commitment to following what was honest, especially in Judiciary Committee. I don't know her name. Only time I ever talked to her. But I said to her, you know, we have these arguments here, we have this tension, we have this disagreement, and I think we do so because we're called to come to Washington to have these debates, to have these arguments, to have the disagreements so we don't have to come to blows in the streets of America, so we don't have to clash with each other. All the way across from sea to sea, we bring our conflict here. We have these debates here. We test each other in this battle of ideas here, and it's even more effective, and I will say significantly more effective, than it was in the era of the Founding Fathers because we have real-time communications. Mr. Speaker, we have C-SPAN. We have live radio. We have Internet. We have podcasts. We can have real-time interactive town hall meetings that interact all the way across America. We can carry this message all across this country. This constitutional republic is more effective today from a communications standpoint than it was in the era of our Founding Fathers, and we should be grateful for that. It's our job to use it and utilize it and to continue to build upon this. So let's have the debate. Let's have a nationwide debate. Let's get after this, and we're doing it, and come November, the American people will decide whether this path of the Federal takeover of first one- third of the former private sector activity of our economy; then adding ObamaCare to this, another 18 percent of our economy going to 51 percent; then, sitting in conference committee right now being deliberated and debated by the conferee, another 15 percent of our economy, the financial sector of our economy, roughly 15 percent by some estimates, you add that onto the 51 percent, and we get up there to 66 percent of our economy; and then we have the cap-and-trade argument, roughly around 8 or 9 percent of our economy. Now, if cap-and-trade is 8 percent of our economy, then that means, in case anybody wonders, cap-and-trade is about this: It's about capping carbon emissions and trading the carbon credits that you get. So if you are an electrical generating plant and you're burning coal like crazy in 2005, that's the measure, capping at 2005 levels of CO2 emission, and you're burning all kinds of coal and you're belching this CO2 out into the atmosphere, which doesn't alarm me, by the way, Mr. Speaker--I still don't think there's a scientific foundation for their hypothesis--but that's going on; the measurement of the emissions of the CO2 will be capped at 2005. Now, let's presume that that same electrical generator takes half of his coal consumption down, replaces it with a nuclear generating plant--actually a new plant that will come online in 2017 in South Carolina. It will be the first one in probably 30 years by then. So you get carbon credits for taking the coal generation, the burning of the coal off line, that CO2 that's not emitted, and replaced it with the nuclear, just the tool that reduced the CO2 emissions. Now that coal-fired generating operation, which might be an entire utility network, will have half their CO2 emissions that have been cut now because of the replacement of nuclear become their carbon credits. Carbon credits that, what do they have now? They have something that has value. They can take their carbon credits, and they can sell them through an exchange on the board in Chicago--there are two exchanges that exist as far as I know right now--and any organization, any entity, any utility that has to burn let's say more coal or more natural gas or more diesel fuel and emit more CO2 than they did before to supply more demand for electricity would have to buy the carbon credits from the entity that had created them by replacing the CO2 emissions with say nuclear or wind or solar or some other source. So these exchanges go on. Carbon credits are expensive when they start, and as they dial this down, the idea is to reduce the CO2 emissions from the standard, the cap, that's the cap at 2005 emission levels, and trade the carbon credits, dial them down by 17 percent by a certain year, which seems to me is 2013, way too soon. And then from two thousand and whatever that year is, a 17 percent reduction, on out to 2050, reduce the CO2 emissions by 83 percent. The vision is, by the time we get to 2050, we'd only be emitting 17 percent of the CO2 that we're doing today. I'm going to expect we're going to use the same amount of energy, and do you expect, Mr. Speaker, that these carbon credits are going to be worth more or less as the cap gets dialed down year by year, until the year 2050, where 83 percent of the CO2 emissions are shut down by the economics of this? Now, it doesn't just shut down the CO2 emissions and give us the same amount of kilowatt hours, or some other type of energy for that matter, or consumption, that could be diesel fuel or gas or anything. No, Mr. Speaker, it doesn't do that. What it does is it shuts down some of the emissions, but the economics of it require that the cost of power goes up. As the cost of power goes up, the consumption of power goes down. That means we use less energy between now and 2013 or 2017 and 2050. If we use less energy, why? Do we turn the air conditioner, set it on 80 degrees--reminds me of Jimmy Carter when he said set your thermostat at 60. Remember? Dial the thermostat down to 60, buy a cardigan sweater, button that sweater up and sit in your living room and put a shawl over yourself and sit there and shiver because, after all, we have an American malaise, and we will never be the Nation that we were before, and we will never be the Nation again that we are today. That was Jimmy Carter's message. It also fits pretty close to Barack Obama's message, who, Mr. Speaker, has said that electricity costs would ``necessarily skyrocket'' under his plan of cap-and-trade. So what are we doing? We have an administration, and the opportunists in the Senate and the House that are looking at the oil slick over the gulf coast, which is an environmental tragedy, and seeking to capitalize on that environmental tragedy by pushing cap-and-trade legislation which will cripple American industry. For example--and I don't think, Mr. Speaker, that I can give the data on this, but I would just suggest that those that are interested should take a look at the American kiln industry and understand that where we have kilns, it might be a really simple thing, it might be like a dryer where you heat up asphalt and you crank it through a barrel that's got heat in it and it brings it through the other side, kind of like a cement truck cylinder, and comes out the other side hot mix asphalt. It takes a lot of heat to do that, takes a lot of energy; there's a lot of CO2 emissions. There are a number of other processes that are far more energy- intensive, including the production of aluminum. We have a lot of aluminum in America, but it takes a lot of energy and emits a lot of CO2. This would about take the aluminum industry out of America to look at the cap-and-trade proposals that are out there. Industry after industry in America would be crippled by cap-and-trade legislation. The cost of our electricity would ``necessarily skyrocket,'' to quote the President. The cost of our gas would go up, our diesel fuel, our kerosene, our jet fuel; I said our electricity. All energy gets more expensive. It just changes the proportionality of the cost per Btu from energy source to energy source. So we would, as a Nation, then make our energy more costly. Now, what the cap-and-trade legislation does is it taxes everything that moves. It takes energy to move anything. Just moving my hand back and forth, you can count that in calories how much energy is consumed by that--not a lot, but it's some. If you would take a 200-pound man and run him up the stairs to the top of the dome in the Capitol and back down again--we have people that could calculate how many calories would be consumed by that effort to go up and down--you could turn that into and calculate it back down through Btus of energy. How could you replace that energy with gasoline or electricity with a motor that would take them up and down? This is energy. Anything that moves takes energy. You can't get something done without energy. So this administration is for taxing everything that moves and a cap- and-trade scheme that would cripple America's economy and put us at a significant disadvantage from the developing countries in the world, in particular India and China--other developing countries, but India and China in particular--it chases our industry over there. And then what would we do? They produce things in countries where they have cheaper energy and cheaper labor. They ship it back to us and we buy it. Well, what do we buy it with? Right now we're buying it with credit, and we are running up the debt against the Chinese. Their holdings of U.S. currency--or U.S. debt, excuse me--are approaching $1 trillion in U.S. debt today. We lament the cost when a young person finishes their college education, receiving their degree--and there's a number out there, this is not a survey number, it's a general ballpark number that has a consensus to it--roughly a $40,000 debt for a young adult that receives a college degree, $40,000 to move into adulthood to pay off that student loan. Now, whatever that real number is, I'm working with 40, which I think is in the ballpark, and we worry about that student loan being paid off by that young person that has a college degree and is entering into the job market. I'm not so worried about that $40,000 student loan, Mr. Speaker, because the baby born in America today owes Uncle Sam, the Federal Government, their share of the national debt, $44,000. You can go into the nursery and be there when they bring a new little baby out and put them in the nursery in the hospital. There might be one or two or six or 10 of these new little miracles laying there wrapped up in blue or pink, with their parents proudly looking through the glass or going in to hold their babies. These little babies, every one of them laying in the nursery today, their share of the national debt--not their student loan, which when they get a degree that helps them earn the money to retire that debt, but these little babies' share of the national debt, $44,000. $44,000, Mr. Speaker, for the privilege of being born in the United States of America. Well, I guess it's probably not the case for an anchor baby that gets citizenship along with it, at least that's an extra bargain that goes along--and I disagree with that. But that same little baby that's born today and owes the Federal Government $44,000, by the time that little baby goes on and learns to tie their shoes and goes off to kindergarten, works their way up through elementary school and walks into their fifth grade class--now, I pick that because that's 10 years, we have 10-year budgets here and we have 10-year budget windows and we calculate our costs over a 10-year period of time. $44,000 in debt, welcome to America. This is the gift of life for being born in America, and you owe $44,000. A lot of them aren't going to pay their share, so if it's half of them, those other babies are going to owe $88,000. But the share for everyone who walks into fifth grade, according to this President's budget, by the time those $44,000 indebted children start fifth grade, they will owe Uncle Sam $88,000. That's the number, Mr. Speaker. We should be very worried about a country that can't pass a budget, that for the first time since there have been budget requirements put into the rules here in the Congress itself, since 1974 when this began, this Congress doesn't have the will or the conviction to pass a budget because it is so abysmal, because the overspending is so atrocious, because the spending that they are conducting cannot be defended and they can't defend and vote against the amendments that would surely be attempted to be brought against a budget. Now, there is a legitimate debate going on in this Congress and there is a legitimate amendment process going on in this Congress, but we don't have a budget and we're not going to have a budget. This Congress doesn't want to take responsibility for a budget. We're going to see them package up a continuing resolution of some kind, a modified continuing resolution that pays off the political favoritism that they will need in order to go on in November, and we're going to get to the other side of the elections in November, kick the can down the road, and we'll be here on the floor of Congress sometime after election day in November; and this Congress will, by order of the Speaker, bring a huge omnibus spending bill to the floor. If it's like the last one, 3,600 pages, several hundred billion dollars issued the night before, dropped on the floor with roughly 60 minutes to debate the issue, no amendments, voted up or down, and the government shuts down if we voted down. I will vote ``no.'' I would love to shut the government down for that kind of irresponsibility. It's unlikely that that will happen, however, because the Speaker has the votes and can do what she will. So here we are, Mr. Speaker. This is a country that is built upon the rights that come from God, our liberty and our freedom. It's built upon this foundation that I declare to be the pillars of American exceptionalism. We are the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world, and we derive our strength from these pillars of exceptionalism, from free enterprise capitalism, from the rights that come from God, from our religious faith and foundation, this core of Judeo-Christianity that is America, and yet we're afraid to say so. We shy away and we shrink away from basic, simple utter truths. I happen to have just heard a speech from, in town, the president of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre. He doesn't know I'm coming here to say this, but I was listening as he delivered his speech, and I wrote this down. He said, If you know the truth is on your side, say it and shout it as long as you can--excuse me. It might be say it and shout it as loud as you can. Stand up, shout them down, and don't you back down. Wayne LaPierre, president of the NRA, a man who has for a lifetime defended our Second Amendment and many of our other rights and freedoms, impressed me with the depth of his conviction and the clarity of his delivery tonight. And now I take us to a subject matter that is on my mind to some degree, Mr. Speaker, and it has to do with what's going on from the White House and the Presidency through the Justice Department. Now, the Attorney General, Eric Holder, came before the Judiciary Committee sometime in late May, right before we broke for the Memorial Day period of time, and he testified under oath that the Justice Department is not a partisan agency, that they don't operate on a partisan basis, that they are driven by the law. Well, I look at the President and the Attorney General and a number of the other representatives of this administration, it's hard for me to accept that statement on face value as being truthful because here's what I see and what I know: the President of the United States spoke out openly and plainly about the Arizona immigration law and made a case that in his view there was a built-in prejudice or bias or profile in the Arizona law because he said that if a mother were taking her daughter out to get some ice cream, they could find themselves having to produce their papers because of, presumably, their race. Arizona law forbids such a thing, but the President alleged such a thing. Now, either the President misinformed the American people knowingly and willfully, or, Mr. Speaker, he hadn't read the bill. I'll opt to the side of he hadn't read the bill. I hope that's the case, and actually I believe that's the case. Then we had Eric Holder, the Attorney General, who also alleged that there could be a profile take place under Arizona's immigration law that would bring about discrimination against people. It turns out that even though I asked Eric Holder before the Judiciary Committee, you have been charged by the President of the United States to use the force of the Justice Department to go against the Arizona law and seek to invalidate Arizona's immigration law, S. 1070, that bill that was drafted and put together by the fine and stellar State Senator, Russell Pearce of Arizona, that legislation--that has been signed into law and was enacted on the last day of July of this year--Eric Holder contends could bring about profiling. Now, when someone says profiling in American Society today, they don't mean profiling according to, oh, let me say, whether you're a member of MENSA or whether you're a member of the Sierra Club. This is racial profiling whenever they say--when I say ``they,'' I mean the administration, people on the left, the self-professed progressives. They mean racial profiling. So the President implies, if not alleges, racial profiling, empowered by Arizona's immigration law, S. 1070. The Attorney General does the same thing. The Attorney General concedes that the President has ordered the Justice Department to seek to invalidate Arizona's immigration law. When I asked the Attorney General, under oath, before the Judiciary Committee, Point to me in the Constitution where you believe Arizona's immigration law has violated the United States Constitution, the Attorney General could not do so. In the alternative, I said, Then point to me to a Federal statute that you believe preempts Arizona's immigration law. The Attorney General could not do so. So, when I said, Point out then for me a case precedent, case law, that you believe is controlling, which would indicate that Arizona's immigration law might be unconstitutional or could be invalidated by a Federal court, the Attorney General could not point to a single case precedent either. So he failed to be able to point to the Constitution, to a Federal statute that could preempt or to case law that controls, the Attorney General of the United States, but he is still using the resources and the authority of the Attorney General's office and the entire Justice Department of the United States to seek to invalidate Arizona's immigration law, which, for the record, Mr. Speaker, mirrors Federal law and is at least as constitutional as Federal immigration law. The Attorney General can't point to any place where that might violate, but he is still willing to pour in the resources and testify that his department is not political, and he admits that the President ordered him to use the department for what I believe to be political purposes. For each of them to essentially imply or to confess that they didn't bother to read the Arizona law--but they wanted to tell the American people what to think about it--is political. It is unjust, and it is not consistent with the Constitution, with Federal statute, or with case law. That, Mr. Speaker, is what is going on. In addition to this, on Arizona's law, we have other people who have weighed in on this. We have other people who have similar levels of, let me say, information to work with. The President doesn't read the bill, and he speaks out against it, and he seeks to drive a wedge based on race. The Attorney General is the one who is on the record saying the American people are cowards when it comes to race. Well, I'm not, but some are, and I understand why--because they turn their PC minyans against people who would speak out openly on these issues. I think we should talk about race. I think we should talk about people who use race for political benefit--people like the President of the United States when he was informed of the incident of Professor Gates and Officer Crowley, in Cambridge, when Officer Crowley conducted himself consistent with, let me say, the rules of engagement for a peace officer in that community. When there was a call for him to come because someone was breaking into a residence in the neighborhood, Officer Crowley came and applied himself to that task as he had, I'm sure, a dozen times before, but Professor Gates objected to having law enforcement there to help protect his property. That message got to the President, and what does the President do? He sides with Professor Gates. Barack Obama was wrong on the Gates issue, and all of the American people know it, and he could not bring himself to apologize to Officer Crowley or to clarify the issue. He was looking for a way out. That's why the President had the beer summit on the South Lawn. That's why Professor Gates and Officer Crowley came and sat down out on the South Lawn. It seemed odd to me that they brought one beer alone, on a single tray. They delivered it and went back and got another one. That seemed a little odd to me. That's what happened. But, in a just world, the person who conducts himself in a just fashion is the one who receives the apology from the people who did not conduct themselves in a just fashion. I will argue, Mr. Speaker, that the President and Professor Gates had an obligation to apologize to Officer Crowley because, first, the President had prejudged that situation. His knee-jerk reaction defaulted in favor of the African American professor and against the Irish cop. That's what happened. I don't think anybody who watched this incident could think otherwise. We have the President of the United States who defaulted in favor of alleging that there would be racial profiling taking place in Arizona because of their immigration law, and he perpetuated a flat-out misinterpretation, and it may well have been willful, of Arizona's immigration law to the rest of America. Now, we should be able to look up to the President of the United States and to trust that he is properly briefed and that he is factual when he presents a position to the American people. That is American executive branch policy. We should be able to trust the President for that. The President should have people around him whom he trusts, who would go back and read the law and would brief the President. Well, it's obvious to all of us who have watched this and who have read the law that the President spoke about Arizona's law and had not read it. If he were briefed, it was off of the MoveOn.org Web site. He is surrounded by people who read those Web sites, who believe them, and I'm not sure that the President has access to the objective truth given the people around him and given the way he has responded. So you have two cases where the President's default reaction falls in the favor of an individual because of skin color as opposed to individuals because of the rule of law--or let me just say truth, justice, and the American way. There is a default mechanism in place. He has an Attorney General who follows that same path, who lectures the American people and who says that the American people are cowards when it comes to race. Well, he has not been a coward when it comes to race. His administration, his agency--the Justice Department--has cancelled the most open-and-shut voter intimidation case in the history of America, which is the case of the New Black Panthers in Philadelphia, who much of America has seen on videotape--let me say YouTube. They are paramilitary uniformed individuals, the members of the New Black Panthers, who were standing there in berets, with big, old billy clubs, smacking them in their hands as white people came to vote, calling those people crackers and telling them, We're taking over this country. We're going to be in power after that. That's a generalization of their statements, but the accuracy of that record is out there on YouTube for all the world to see. That case was open and shut. The case was made by the Justice Department under President Bush. As the handoff took place and went over to the Eric Holder Justice Department under President Obama, what happened, Mr. Speaker? Loretta King, in the Justice Department, cancelled the most open-and-shut voter intimidation case in the history of America because it would have brought about convictions on those New Black Panther party members. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez came before the Judiciary Committee and testified that they got the highest punishment allowed under the law-- negotiated. Mr. Speaker, it was not true. It's not true today. The statement that he made to the Judiciary Committee was false--he knew it the day he said it--and it was to misinform because he was under some pressure and needed to get off the hook. That's a matter of the Congressional Record. He was under oath. It is something that we should pursue. It's unlikely that we can get anywhere with it. That's Tom Perez. So the administration has cancelled the most open-and-shut voter intimidation case in the history of America. It was a done deal. They cancelled it. The administration and Loretta King in the Justice Department cancelled also the will of the people in Kinston, North Carolina. That's K-I-N-S-T-O-N. They dropped the ``G'' because they didn't want to be another Kingston, North Carolina. They voted by referendum the will of the people. The number that I remember--and it's generally memorized but not specifically accurate--is 70-30, a significant landslide majority. They voted to end the partisan local elections in Kinston, North Carolina, and to no longer label the candidates with an ``R'' or a ``D'' for ``Republican'' or ``Democrat'' by their names. That was the will of the people. Though, because Kinston is a covered district, controlled by the Voting Rights Act, if they are going to move a voting booth 10 feet down the hallway, they have to get the permission of the Justice Department under Federal law. So, under the Justice Department, Loretta King, apparently, is the one who speaks for the Justice Department, who speaks for Eric Holder. She issued a letter that cancelled the election results of Kinston, North Carolina, and she declared that they would have partisan elections--and the city council and the mayor of Kinston, North Carolina--because African Americans wouldn't know who to vote for if a candidate didn't have a ``D'' beside his name. Mr. Speaker, that is fact. That is the letter that was written and issued by our Justice Department under the pen and the signature of Loretta King, under the guidance and control of Attorney General Holder. Now, when we talk about things that have a racist flavor to them, when presuming that African Americans can't figure out who to vote for unless they have a ``D'' beside their names, I guess you could make the argument that you would want to profile all the African Americans and declare that they're all Democrats. Therefore, it makes it simple if you just label the people they want to vote for with a ``D.'' I think that has all kinds of racial implications. I don't think those implications have any place in the application of the laws or in the application of the Constitution of the United States. There should be equal justice before the law. This Lady Justice needs to be blindfolded and needs to stay blindfolded. Everybody should be subjected to the same level of law and enforcement without regard to race, creed, color, ethnicity, national origin, and a number of other indicators, but I've listed most of them that are in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act right now. Now, this goes on. This is a Justice Department that can't find a dollar or an individual to commit a minute, let alone a career or a team and a few million dollars, to investigate ACORN--ACORN, the corrupt, criminal enterprise that everybody knows today is a corrupt, criminal enterprise. It has been undermining the very foundation that sits underneath our Constitution, itself, which is, Mr. Speaker, legitimate elections. Legitimate elections, the faith in the legitimacy of our elections, is what keeps this constitutional Republic functioning and alive and gets us back to well. ACORN has damaged all of that. ACORN has threatened all of that. ACORN has diminished our liberty and our freedom, and it has undermined the very foundation for our Constitution. Any Justice Department worth its salt would investigate ACORN, but Eric Holder can't touch that--whether it's an order of the President, who used to work for ACORN, I don't know. We should remember that the President of the United States worked for ACORN. He represented them in court. He represented them pro bono in court. Can you imagine being an attorney and representing somebody in court pro bono and not agreeing to their agenda? He also worked for them in the form of Project Vote, which was when President Barack Obama made his reputation for organizing communities and politics in Chicago. Project Vote is, part and parcel, ACORN. The President of the United States is ACORN. He is identified with ACORN. He made his reputation with ACORN. He has worked for and with ACORN, and he has trained ACORN workers. When he said during the campaign to his supporters to ``get in their face,'' it is pretty consistent with the message that they train ACORN activists, which is to ``get in their face.'' Go intimidate some bankers while you're at it and see if you can get them to make more bad loans in bad neighborhoods. Let ACORN be positioned to judge whether lenders are making enough bad loans in bad neighborhoods. This became a big component of what has undermined our economy and what has caused this downward spiral. The President was involved and complicit in the effort that brought about the undermining of our financial institutions in America by his involvement of working with, for, and in promoting and representing ACORN. Then, when he was elected President of the United States, he sought to move the United States census from the Commerce Department into the White House. He could manage the census, the counting of the people-- real or imagined--from the White House. The public uproar over ACORN caused him to back away from that and to sever the relationship that he had that ACORN was to be working as a contractor with the Census Department. Now, it doesn't mean because they decided not to have a formal contract with ACORN that ACORN wasn't going to be involved in the census. We know that people are policy. We know that there are a lot of ACORN people involved in the census. How could there not be with nearly a half a million people working to count the 306 or so million people who we are? When we follow the money, when we track ACORN, the path leads us to the White House. ACORN should be investigated by any legitimate Justice Department. Kinston, North Carolina, didn't need to take place. The voice of the people said, We don't want partisan elections. We want to vote for the candidate. We don't want to vote for their political party. This was cancelled by Loretta King and the Justice Department. We don't need to have voter intimidation with new Black Panthers out there with billy clubs and a Justice Department that would cancel the prosecution that was open and shut. We need no voter intimidation in America. And where could you better send the message than putting those people that are the new Black Panthers, that are clearly wide open guilty, under the heaviest penalty allowed by law? This is all part of the character and the makeup of this administration; this administration, who plays the race card; this administration, who defaults in favor of whichever minority they think might be the one that would most likely support their political party and their agenda. And I point to the new Black Panthers. I point to the President's remarks on the mother and the daughter going to get ice cream in Arizona. I point to the Justice Department canceling the prosecution, the open-and-shut case, by then almost closed case, of the new Black Panthers in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia; of the city and their municipal referendum on no partisan elections in Kinston, North Carolina; the failure of the Justice Department to investigate ACORN; and the fact that the President spoke out--now this moves into a little bit different subject area, but it also ties, in my view, together--and the President demagoguing Arizona's immigration law, not having read it; the Attorney General doing the same thing, and finally admitting that he'd not read the bill. Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, demagoguing Arizona's immigration law, not having read it, and having admitted that to Senator John McCain. And, let me see, the Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner taking Arizona's immigration law all the way to the Chinese and saying, Well, we brought it up early and often. Apparently, we're a sinful Nation because we believe in the rule of law, Mr. Speaker. And let me see, who's left out of this? Oh, yes. John Morton, the Assistant Secretary, who is the head of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who remarked that he wasn't committed to handling all the people that might be picked up by Arizona immigration or by Arizona's law enforcement officers in enforcement of Federal immigration law. So this whole picture of this administration paints something that makes it really hard for government teachers to get this message down to their students. We have students that are juniors or seniors in high school, and you're teaching them government. They might be younger than that, but juniors and seniors in high school. They might read the paper and watch the news, and they sit in the classroom, and the teacher will say, We have a separation of powers. We have the legislative. We have the executive. And we have the judicial branches of government. These are three separate powers. Some teachers will teach they're separate but equal. That's another hour to talk about it. I don't believe they're equal. But they are separate. To argue that they're separate and having students watch the news and hear that the President doesn't want to enforce immigration law because he doesn't agree with it; that he wants to hold law enforcement hostage until the American people accept his form of amnesty. The President doesn't get that kind of discretion. The President's job is to enforce the law. The Attorney General's job is to enforce the law. John Morton's job as head of ICE is to enforce the law. And the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano's job is to enforce the law. Because you disagree with the law means nothing. You enforce that law whether you agree with it or not because you're not a policy maker. You're a law enforcer. That's how our Constitution is set up. That's the power that's invested in them. If our Founding Fathers had wanted them to be legislators, they would have written it into the Constitution. If the people of this country wanted them to be legislators, I can tell you what they would have done. They would have amended the Constitution and had the power to change Federal law over to John Morton, Janet Napolitano, Eric Holder, for the President of the United States, or maybe even Michael Posner, the Assistant Secretary of State. Who knows. That's not who we are. That's not the way it is. We must defend the rule of law. It is an essential pillar of American exceptionalism. We cannot sustain our greatness as a Nation if we're going to allow the discretionary--discretionary--enforcement of the law to come from executive branch people. And for a President of the United States, who taught constitutional law, albeit as an adjunct professor at the stellar University of Chicago School of Law, to think that that's the case, that he doesn't understand this any better, he thinks he can get away with it. Well, I am here to say, no, the American people know better. We can read the Constitution. We can read our history. And we have access to the information necessary to keep an educated populace, coupled with an armed populace, coupled with the people that have enough self- confidence to be in a full-throated way to stand up and defend our liberty and defend our freedom. That's who we are, Mr. Speaker. That's who we must remain. That's the character that we must maintain. And we cannot allow ourselves to be diminished by a people who happen to find themselves right now sitting in controlling positions within this government that don't understand or willfully defy our values as a Nation or our Constitution. Mr. Speaker, I couldn't have picked a better moment to yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's my privilege and honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House tonight and to pick up on some subject matter. I think my colleagues that spoke on the previous hour covered that subject matter pretty clearly and very well, the matter of global finances and the broader picture that we're working with. For me, I come here tonight with a number of things on my mind and things that are fresh on my mind, Mr. Speaker. They have to do with the immigration situation here in the United States. Having had a long history with this subject matter, when I first came to this Congress, I recall listening to Congressman Tom Tancredo here on the floor. I actually was in my office and watching on C-SPAN and I thought, Well, this is a piece of history in the making. And so I walked over here and into the Capitol Chamber and sat here to listen to him speak. Tom, knowing the rhythm of the place here, saw me in the Chamber and concluded I came over because I had some things to say. He recognized me to speak on the subject matter of immigration. I was not preparing to do so, although I happen to have been prepared because of the issues in mind. From those days on forward, I have been active on this issue in my time here in Congress. I happen to have had the privilege of sharing the stage with Congressman Tancredo Saturday night in Phoenix. It was the same good man with a passion and a great heart; a man that understands America, the need to have a sovereign Nation, a need to control our borders, a need to have a network across this country of all levels of law enforcement working together to enforce the law, the rule of law--I should say, reestablish the rule of law here in the United States--and build a greater country than we are today, Mr. Speaker. It was a refreshing thing for me to hear those words again come out of the mouth of my good friend Congressman Tom Tancredo and to share some time on that microphone with Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Arizona, who has a national reputation for enforcing immigration law, for establishing and building Tent City. And when Sheriff Joe, when he asked me if I had been to visit--and actually I had. He had sent a guide to take me to Tent City last year and presented me with a pair of his autographed underwear. When he found out I have that in my office in safekeeping, I was his good friend, Mr. Speaker. That tent city was built because a judge ordered that the prisons provide more space; and the choice was, apparently, to turn some people loose, spend a lot of millions of dollars to put up a structure, or set up a tent city. They did what they needed to do to enforce the law, especially down in that climate, Mr. Speaker. I also was able to share a microphone with State Senator Russell Pearce, who is the principal author of Arizona immigration law S. 1070, and to spend several hours probing his intellect, his sense of history, and his patriotism that runs so deep for America, and his dedication to the United States of America, the rule of law, the State of Arizona. Put those pieces together, and I looked across at the faces that filled the park grounds there next to the State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona. A lot of red, white, and blue. A lot of the yellow Gadsden flags; the Don't Tread on Me flags, flying in the light breeze that we had there. It was an event to remember, with people just clear out to the outside edges of the park; a good, respectable crowd that was there. People came from many of the States of the Union. This time, I don't know that it's all the States but many of the States. A lot from Florida came all the way to Arizona to express their support for S. 1070, for the law that was principally drafted and pushed through into legislation by State Senator Russell Pearce. And he went out to bounce his legislation off of the best experts he could find in America. And I do give great credit to Governor Jan Brewer for signing and supporting Arizona's immigration law. It is a law that has been misinterpreted, I think willfully, by people on the other side of the aisle. But here's what it is. It is a mirror of Federal legislation. It doesn't go beyond the limits of Federal legislation. It's written within the limits that are there. And it simply says that Arizona law enforcement is going to enforce Federal immigration law. Now, if you remember, Mr. Speaker, there seemed to have been a grudge match or something going on between now Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, former Governor of Arizona, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County. But when Janet Napolitano became the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, shortly after that she announced an initiative to look at how they were going to make some changes in the 287(g) law. The 287(g) law is the Federal law that provides Federal assistance to train local law enforcement officers so that they are well trained and certified to enforce Federal immigration law. And then it makes a commitment for ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to work in cooperation with the local law enforcement that has a memorandum of understanding that is the 287(g)--that's the section in the Federal code--that is an understanding that they now have reached an agreement where they're going to work and cooperate together. There are a lot of jurisdictions in America that had 287(g) agreements. What it is, it's a commitment for the local law enforcement to enforce and support Federal immigration law. It's that simple. Now, you don't have to have a 287(g) agreement in order to have local law enforcement enforce Federal immigration law. In fact, there's an Attorney General's opinion that was written under John Ashcroft that makes it clear that local law enforcement can enforce Federal immigration law. There are a number of pieces of Federal case law out there that address this. One of them would be a 2001 case, the 10th Circuit, and it's U.S. v. Santana-Garcia. In case you want to look that up tonight, Mr. Speaker, if you're having trouble sleeping, I just will tell you simply what that says is that the Federal court, the 10th Circuit, has concluded that it is implicit that local law enforcement has the authority to enforce Federal immigration law, that it wasn't contemplated otherwise. And I would go further and say that if there's something implicit that local law enforcement can't enforce Federal law, does that mean then that if there is a Federal officer that's being assaulted or that is murdered by someone that we can't have local law enforcement pick them up, that it's a Federal crime so, therefore, only Federal officers can enforce Federal crime? If it's a national bank that would be robbed, could the county sheriffs pick up those bank robbers and support the violation of the Federal law against robbing Federal banks or would you have to wait until the FBI showed up to be able to pick up the robbers of the Federal banks? By the same token, if it's a city ordinance that's being violated, can the State highway patrol enforce a city ordinance? I will suggest that yes, they should do that. They should do that when that becomes an obligation of their job. When there's a law being broken in front of them, they should enforce that law. If the speed limits are written by either the State or the city or perhaps county on county roads, if those are the speed limits set, does that mean the county sheriffs and deputies and people can enforce speed limit laws only on county highways but they can't do so on city streets or State highways? I mean, it borders on ludicrous to make the argument that immigration law has been, up until this time, Federal. Therefore, the only people that can enforce it are Federal officials, and they only would be the ones who were trained within ICE and Border Patrol and Customs and border protection to enforce immigration law. It's ludicrous to believe that. There has to be a network of law enforcement working in conjunction, from city police to county sheriffs to highway patrol, departments of criminal investigation, all of our Federal officers working in cooperation with each other with great profound respect for the Constitution of the United States, for the laws that are duly passed here in the United States Congress and those laws that are passed in the State legislatures, the ordinances that come from the cities, and the list goes on. So it is a cooperative effort. It always has been a cooperative effort for law enforcement to work together, and it cannot be such a thing as we are going to separate statutes by the jurisdiction of the entity that passed the law. If we do that, then we will have law enforcement officers who watch crimes before their very eyes but don't enforce the law. Mr. Speaker, that would be the circumstances that take place in sanctuary cities now, sanctuary cities across the country that number by name, places like Houston or Denver or San Francisco. Many other cities have established sanctuary city ordinances that would tell their local law enforcement, Do not work or cooperate in the Federal immigration law. And even though the 1996 Immigration Reform Act that was passed into law, and much of that work was done by now the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Smith), who deserves a lot of credit for language that is there, there is language in that 1996 Immigration Reform Act that prohibits the cities from establishing sanctuary cities. I don't have the language in front of me, Mr. Speaker, but it is language that says to the effect that you cannot prohibit your officers from enforcing Federal immigration law or working in cooperation with. But the problem is that those cities got together that wanted to have a sanctuary policy, and apparently, they found out the same lawyer or lawyers, or sent out a memo to the League of Cities or whatever ties these larger cities together. And they found a way to write an ordinance around the Federal language, and they prohibited their officers from gathering information. And because they were prohibited from gathering, they didn't have any information to pass on and share with ICE and the other law enforcement officers when it came to immigration. It created this thing called sanctuary cities. And so they have said that they are not going to enforce the immigration law within these cities. And what would happen? Of course, you create a magnet for illegals to go to those cities where they are sheltered by the sanctuary city language. And we have, out of the House of Representatives, several times passed amendments on appropriations bills that prohibited any of those dollars coming out of those bills from being distributed to the cities that have jurisdictions where they passed sanctuary language and made sanctuary cities. But it never made it through the Senate, and it never made it into law. So we have city after city that protects illegals within them because there is a political base already there for illegals. And in Arizona, what they have done is, S. 1070, in effect, it invalidates any city that wants to provide a sanctuary city, and simply requires them to enforce immigration law by their local law enforcement. And if they refuse or fail to do so, it allows a citizen to have standing to bring a lawsuit against that entity, against that city or county that is not enforcing the immigration law, not inquiring as to the legal status of the people that they encounter in the course of their normal law enforcement duties. I think that is a good thing. Once 1070 is implemented into law, which I think will be on the last day of July of this year, then you will see the sanctuary cities that happen to exist in Arizona, that will shut down, and they will be compelled to enforce the law, or they are going to be brought into court by the people of Arizona. But the uproar, the objection hasn't been about shutting off sanctuary cities in Arizona; it has been about whether there would be a boycott of Arizona because some claim that the Arizona law will bring about racial discrimination profiling. Well, first, let me say, Mr. Speaker, that profiling has always been an important component of legitimate law enforcement. If you can't profile someone, you can't use those commonsense indicators that are before your very eyes. Now, I think it is wrong to use racial profiling for the reasons of discriminating against people, but it is not wrong to use race or other indicators for the sake of identifying people that are violating the law. Now we all get profiled. I had a moment of irony this morning when I stepped out of the USDA building down here several blocks west of the Capitol. I was wearing a suit, and I had just stepped out to the sidewalk. I hadn't even looked for a cab. I started to walk down the street thinking I would go to the corner. There was a cab going the other direction on the opposite side of the street. He tapped his horn. I looked up, and he swung around the street and picked me up. I asked, How did you identify me as someone who needed a cab ride? I hadn't indicated I wanted one. I was walking down the street. He said, Well, you were wearing a suit and you stepped out the USDA office. There wasn't a car there to pick you up; I knew you needed a cab. He profiled me. He said, I don't stop for people wearing shorts and sneakers because they are not looking for a ride. People in suits coming out of that building are. There I was, profiled because I was a guy in a suit at a time of day when it would be logical I would be looking for a ride somewhere. It is just a commonsense thing. Law enforcement needs to use commonsense indicators. Those commonsense indicators are all kinds of things, from what kind of clothes people wear, the suit in my case, what kind of shoes people wear, what kind of accent they have, the type of grooming that they might have. There are all kinds of indicators there, and sometimes it is just a sixth sense, and they can't put their finger on it. But these law enforcement officers, if they were going to be discriminating against people on the sole basis of race, singling people out, that would be going on already. And we would have already the files of the objections that are taking place. But this is about a political argument. It is not about Arizona's law being unconstitutional or preempted by Federal law or somehow had stretched the bounds that have been set by case law that is out there. It is not about any of that. They would like to say it is; in fact, they have said that it is. But what it is about, Mr. Speaker, is about making a political argument that would like to brand Republicans as being anti-people because of race. Now, could this happen? Could anyone start an agenda here to try to brand people and try to scare the American people on the subject of race or the subject of immigration? My answer to that is, You bet. I have seen it happen. It started here on this floor right over here, in 2006, when in the early summer, if I remember my dates correctly, we passed immigration reform legislation out of here headed up by at that time chairman of the Judiciary Committee Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. Of the things that it did, it was enforcement of immigration law. In the original bill, it made it a felony to cross into the United States illegally. To sneak into the United States, it made it a felony. The gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) sensed that that would be a highly contested issue if it became law, and so he offered an amendment to strike the language that made it a felony to enter the United States illegally. Now, had Mr. Sensenbrenner's amendment passed, then it would have eliminated the language that made it a felony to enter the United States illegally. Jim Sensenbrenner argued vociferously in favor of his amendment. He didn't actually convince me, by the way, but he understood what was going on. And when the vote went up on the board, 194 Democrats voted ``no'' on the Sensenbrenner amendment, which can only be concluded that they wanted it to be a felony to enter the United States illegally. And it is a crime, but it is not a felony. So 194 Democrats voted to make it a felony when they voted ``no'' on the Sensenbrenner amendment. And that Sensenbrenner amendment failed. And when it failed, brought down by Democrats, the streets filled up with protesters protesting that Republicans wanted to make it a felony to enter the United States illegally; 194 Democrats wanted to, and almost all of them demagogued Republicans for the language that was in the bill when they had voted to keep the language in the bill. It was completely cynical. They knew it. You all knew it, and there isn't anybody in this Congress that can challenge this statement. And I would be happy to yield to anybody who has a different perspective on this. I watched it happen. I was in the middle of it. And I watched the streets fill up with people that were storming in the streets, first with Mexican flags and then with white T-shirts and carrying American flags. And as they lined up for the protest, the organizers were taking their Mexican flags out of their hands, handing them an American flag, saying put on this white T-shirt, come out here and protest against these evil Republicans that want to make it a felony to enter the United States illegally. It doesn't bother me that there is a little upset and turmoil in the streets if that's the case. We need tighter immigration laws. We need more tools to work with, not less. But my point, Mr. Speaker, is the very cynicism of voting one way and arguing the other way: 194 Democrats, and they turned and pointed their fingers at Republicans and said, You wanted to make it a felony. They brought down the amendment. It is a fact. It's a fact in the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker. So here we are now in 2010. No legislation of significance on immigration has been passed since then. It didn't happen in 2006 or 2007. The switchboards of the United States Senate were shut down at two different times during those years because the American people reject the idea of amnesty. And I have watched immigration at the Federal level be enforced less with each administration since Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 amnesty act. But he was straight up and honest enough to declare it to be an amnesty act, Mr. Speaker. The 1986 amnesty act was the last amnesty. It was the amnesty to end all amnesties, and President Reagan signed it because he believed that there wouldn't be another amnesty. It was supposed to be amnesty for about a million people. Turned out to be amnesty for about 3 million people by the time the system was gamed and the fraudulent documents and the people came out of the shadows. And 3 million people went through to receive the amnesty in '86, three times the number that they anticipated. And we have had six lesser amnesties since then that aren't published very much. So we have had a continuous series of amnesties. And it's going to continue until such time as either nobody wants to come to the United States, or until such time as we simply give up on the idea that we can control our borders, or until we establish that we are going to enforce immigration law and we are going to stand by the rule of law and we are not going to equivocate and we are not going to compromise. And that, Mr. Speaker, is where I stand. I refuse to equivocate, I refuse to compromise on the rule of law, I refuse to grant amnesty. And we should talk about what amnesty is. To grant amnesty is to pardon immigration law-breakers and reward them with the objective of their crimes. Now, I don't know necessarily what their objectives are. It may be a path to citizenship. It might be a job. They might want to have access to the United States to do philanthropic good things. Or they might want to have access to the United States so they can travel back and forth into the United States hauling illegal drugs into America. And that happens a lot. A couple of nights ago on Sean Hannity's program you could see the video that he ran, and you could see the backpackers coming into the United States with roughly 50 pounds of marijuana bound in a burlap bundle on their back with straps that might be woolen scarves used for straps, makeshift backpacks. And you might see 10 or 15 or 20 or more all in a row each carrying their 50 or more pounds of marijuana on their back. And this goes on night after night after night, Mr. Speaker. It goes on every night. And I have gone down and sat on the border in the dark, sat there quietly, didn't have night vision equipment, and just listened, and just listened as the vehicles came down, they let people off, they would set their pack out on the ground. You could hear the packs thump when they set them on the ground. They would get out of the vehicle. They would talk a little bit. Somebody would hush them up. They would close the doors on the vehicle. You could hear that. They would hoist their packs up, put them on their back, and they would march through the mesquite, come across the border. And when you sit by a barbed wire fence that's got four or five barbs on it and a steel post, you can listen to the posts and you can hear the wire when it stretches. And you can tell each time somebody crosses the fence, and you can count them. And at night I never trust my eyes to be able to actually give an accurate count. I see the shadows, but shadows are not clear enough for me to tell you how many. I can tell you I have heard the noise, I have seen the shadows, I have listened to the same rhythm come over and over again. I have gone up through the stream beds that are in the desert and there seen where they have dropped off many of their clothes that are unnecessary, empty water jugs. When they unload the packs, the burlap bags that they are in will be dropped there. There will be food that's dropped off, some that's been eaten, some that's been left partially eaten, and some of it left. The desert is full of smugglers' litter. And if one would go down to the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument down there where Kris Eggle was killed by an illegal, and he was a National Park Officer ranger, there is a monument to him at the headquarters at Organ Pipe Cactus, but there is a large percentage of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and that's a national park called a monument that's off limits to Americans. And I am guessing at the area. I know it's the southern side of it. And it seems to me that as I looked at the map, about 40 percent of Organ Pipe Cactus is off limits to Americans because it's full of litter, it's full of drug smugglers' litter. It's drug smugglers gulch there. And it is too dangerous for people that are out just enjoying the desert to walk down into. And it's too full of litter. And we don't have the labor to go pick up the mess. And if we did, the mess is accumulating day by day, every day, every night. And the numbers of people that have been crossing the border illegally, we could take the information that comes from Secretary Napolitano, I suppose, and accept it at face value. They would argue that their interdictions on the border have gone down significantly over the last year. And they claim that because they are arresting fewer people on the border that there is fewer border crossings. Now, that may be true. I don't know what's true. But to use the data that shows that there are fewer interdictions of illegal border crossers to conclude that there are fewer crossing attempts isn't necessarily a logical or rational approach. It could also be that they are just simply not enforcing the law as aggressively as they were a couple of years ago when the numbers were higher. I don't know the answer to that question. But when the Bush administration used the same argument, I had the same questions. Just because you arrest fewer people doesn't mean there are fewer people crossing. It might mean you are just not arresting as many people. But here are the numbers that came before the Immigration Subcommittee in testimony from witnesses that had represented our Federal Government. And I am including Border Patrol officers. The number of interdictions they believed turned out to be they were stopping about one out of four. Twenty-five percent of border crossing attempts were being stopped. If you do the math on the stops that they had, that means that there were 11,000 a night on average every night. Not during the day so much. At night 11,000. And that turns out to be four million illegal border crossings a year. And when I go to the border and talk to the people that are enforcing the border and I tell them, so you are stopping about one out of four, you are getting 25 percent of those that attempt. And they look at me and laugh. It's not 25 percent. The most consistent number I get from the people that are hands-on is maybe they stop 10 percent. If you go to some of the other officers there that are not quite as optimistic, they will take that number down to 2 to 3 percent. But I have never heard an officer that works the border regularly tell me that they stopped 25 percent. And I don't believe I have heard a number higher than 10. So I will tell you I think it's 10 percent that get stopped, not 25. That's still a whole lot that get through. If it's 4 million attempts and we stop 25 percent, that means 3 million actually get through into the United States. And, yes, a lot of them go back to Mexico and flow back and forth. A lot of them are drug smugglers. They do that for a living. The people that are working our law enforcement in the desert tell me that they will catch some of these drug smugglers and maybe they will have somebody that only weighs--young men, 15, 16, 18, and they get older--weighing 100 pounds, 105 pounds, not very big people, wiry, tough, with great big calves on them carrying half their body weight or more in marijuana on their back through the desert 70 or 100 miles. Tough people that can cover a lot of territory with a lot of weight on them. And this goes on night after night after night every night. And does America know, Mr. Speaker, that in some of the sectors on our southern border the policy is that if we catch somebody that has less than 500 pounds of marijuana on them we just simply take the marijuana off their hands and turn them loose? That there is not a prosecution for the drug possession in many of the sectors on the southern border because they argue that they don't have the jail space, they don't have the prosecutorial time, and they don't have the judges to deal with this? And I am convinced that this is true, Mr. Speaker. I hear this as not necessarily testimony before the committee, but I hear it come out of the people that have to live underneath it. And I was down there and watched an interdiction take place. And I helped unload the bundles of marijuana from underneath the false bed of a pickup truck, and this was down near Sells, Arizona. It was roughly 240 pounds of marijuana in there. And that would have been under the amount that they would be prosecuted for at the time. They have since raised that threshold. It was 250 at the time I was there. Now the threshold in some of those sectors has been raised to 500 pounds. Now, where I come from, if it's an ounce or a half an ounce or any little particle, that's something to prosecute for. That's the rule of law. But the rule of law has been stretched to the point of ridiculous on our southern border, and the lawlessness from across the border in Mexico is flowing over into the United States. The murders, the intimidation, the deaths are taking it out in the lives of our law enforcement officers, innocent American people who are being murdered, who are being raped, who are being targeted as victims to crime that makes Phoenix, Arizona, the No. 2 capital of kidnapping in the world. Phoenix, Arizona, the No. 2 capital of kidnapping in the world. Does anybody believe that if we could enforce our immigration at the border that Phoenix would be the No. 2 capital of kidnapping in the world? Mr. Speaker, it's important to note that 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico. That means across our southern border, 90 percent of the illegal drugs. I pointed out that we have 4 million--the number is probably down a little bit from that, but I don't have any other data--4 million illegal border crossing attempts a year, and maybe we stop 10 percent. So that means that we still have a number that is about 3.6 million successful border crossings a year, a 10 percent interdiction rate, 3.6 million. Now, just the attempts, I did the math and I said it was 11,000 a night every night. One might take a look, what was the size of Santa Anna's army? Well, 4,000 to 6,000. So we're looking at a number every single night that I will say is probably twice the size of Santa Anna's army, every single night pouring across our southern border, bringing in 90 percent of the illegal drugs in America. We are importing the violence and the death that goes with the illegal drug trade, and still, this President's heart is hardened. So the President scares the American people by telling us that a mother and her daughter could be going out to get some ice cream and be pulled over and stopped and asked to produce their papers based upon a presumption of their skin color. Where is that in the Arizona law? It specifically prohibits such a thing, specifically prohibits. Then, as the President of the United States had his shot or two shots at Arizona, he ordered the Attorney General of the United States to use the resources of the Department of Justice to seek to invalidate Arizona's immigration law. So when Attorney General Eric Holder came before the Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago, just before the Memorial Day break, to testify before the committee, he knew that Arizona's immigration law would come up before the committee, that that would be a subject matter that he would be questioned about. It was his job to be briefed on the subject matter so he could answer in an informed, intelligent way. So as the subject came up, I asked the Attorney General if the President had ordered that he use the Justice Department to seek to invalidate Arizona's immigration law. I can't quote back into this Record his exact quote in the Congressional Record. I can tell you he didn't dispute that. So it was at least by assent that twice the Attorney General acknowledged that the President had directed him. Now, this is supposed to be a Justice Department that's independent from politics, a Justice Department that makes its decisions based upon the law, an objective evaluation of the law, and, by the way, a Justice Department that has an obligation to enforce the law. These are not policy setters. The President of the United States, Mr. Speaker, is not to be a policy setter when it comes to areas where the Congress has legislated. That's what we do here. We set policy. We set policy here in the United States Congress. That's part of the separation of powers. Just at the risk of being redundant, everybody in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker, should know this. I think it's getting harder and harder to teach government class in our schools today because of the conduct of especially our executive branch of government. The separation of powers, the judicial branch of government will take care of things that have to do with the courts. The legislative branch of government, the House, down that hall, the Senate, we pass the legislation. We set the policy. We write the laws. The executive branch of government's job is to see that those laws are faithfully upheld, enforce the law, carry out the policy, the will of the people of the United States of America as expressed to the Republic, the constitutional Republic, the representatives that are elected by the people. Yet, we have Members of the executive branch of government as high as the President, himself, who seem to not understand that simple concept. A President who taught Constitution law at the University of Chicago is still a President that would tell America that a mother taking her daughter to get some ice cream could have a problem and have to produce their papers. This is misinforming the American people. Is it willful? In his case, I don't know. I think when he said that he had not read the bill, and a week or so later he uttered a mitigating statement that indicated to me that either he was briefed or he might have read the bill. But Eric Holder, the Attorney General, to come before the Judiciary Committee, and when I asked him the question, So you have directed the Justice Department to seek to invalidate the Arizona immigration law and to test it constitutionally or statutorily or by case law, could you point to me, General Holder, a place in the Constitution that gives you concern that Arizona's immigration law might be unconstitutional? No, he could not. Could you, General Holder, point to a Federal statute that would preempt Arizona's immigration law? He could not. Could you then, General, point to some case law that would be controlling and limit Arizona's ability to pass immigration enforcement law at the State level? He could not. The Attorney General of the United States could not point to even a potential constitutional violation or a statute that could preempt Arizona's immigration law or any case law that would control, none of it whatsoever. Yet he was still committed and still taking the resources of the taxpayers of the United States of America to seek to invalidate Arizona's immigration law and bring suit against Arizona. And that's what he seems to be doing. There is a draft memo out there--it's not the exact word for it. It's a draft something, Mr. Speaker, that is a product of the Justice Department now that apparently lays out the parameters by which the Justice Department would bring suit against Arizona to invalidate their immigration law, and here's what I believe happened, and I don't think it can be proven otherwise. The ACLU has already brought a lawsuit against Arizona, and the ACLU along with the SEIU, and just name your leftist organization in America. They all joined in common cause. They have made these arguments. This is a lawsuit filed May 17, 2010. Here's what the ACLU and the Muslim group here in America and the SEIU and others have brought suit on, against Arizona's immigration law 1070. It says that it violates the Supremacy Clause. That's the preemption component of this. I don't know where and the suit doesn't say where, not that I have found. It says it also violates the Equal Protection Clause. It argues that plaintiffs who are racially and national origin minorities, including Latinos residing or traveling in Arizona, might be targeted. It does make targets out of them is what it says. I would argue that the bill says that you can't use racial profiling, and so if the targets are breaking the law, you have to enforce the law no matter what their skin color is, Mr. Speaker. That's the ACLU's argument. Another is it violates the First Amendment. I don't know what the logic is on that, and I won't trouble this Congress with that part. But this goes on and says that it violates the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. Well, on what basis? I don't think it goes very deep into that. And then due process, privileges and immunities, right to travel-- people breaking the law don't have a right to travel in the United States, and it violates 42 U.S.C. 1981, which is, prohibits discrimination under color of State law on the basis of alienage, national origin, or race. Well, no, the law prohibits such a thing. But here's what I'll predict to you, Mr. Speaker: When we finally see the litigation that the Department of Justice is seeking to bring against Arizona, we will see that it has been copied and pasted right off of the ACLU's lawsuit. That's the work that I believe is being done. The outside groups, the left-wing groups play the tune--the tune is right here in this lawsuit from the ACLU--and then the Justice Department dances at the direction of the President of the United States, at the direction of the ACLU, the SEIU, and the rest of the left-wing organizations that have filed this lawsuit. But this is not a rational approach. If the President can't articulate a problem, a constitutional violation--even though he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago--the Attorney General, under oath, couldn't articulate a constitutional Federal statute or a case law violation by Arizona's immigration law, S. 1070, but yet, this radical case that I think is irrational and illogical that's brought by the ACLU--and this is just a summary, it's about that thick, and I've read a lot of it, actually--this will make sole theories of specious arguments, and I believe that the Justice Department--if they come forward, and I think they will--will be making those same irrational speeches, arguments. So, Mr. Speaker, I'm concerned about an unbiased Justice Department. It's hard for me to buy the idea that they are unbiased. When I look at this case, this all-out effort to focus on Arizona's immigration law and to invalidate it without a basis or a rationale, when I look at the many faces of the administration that have spoken against it that hadn't read the bill--Attorney General Holder, of course, would be the lead person that had admitted he hadn't read the bill. When Judge Poe asked him that question shortly after my questions of the Attorney General that day, he admitted he hadn't read the bill. Seventeen pages, he hadn't read the bill. He clearly had not been briefed by any objective person that had read the bill. He may have taken the MoveOn.org or the Huffington Post talking points and read them. It sounded to me like he had. It sounded to me like the President had as well. And then Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who is charged with heading up the office that enforces immigration law, the former Governor of Arizona, who should have focused on that bill--well, Governor Jan Brewer should have focused on that bill more; I know she did. Senator Russell Pearce focused on 1070 a lot more; I know he did. But Janet Napolitano, a former Arizona Governor and now Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had not read the bill, but still made public statements that implied, at a minimum, that it would bring about profiling of people in Arizona and disagreed with the law. And when John McCain point-blanked her before the Senate hearing, she had to admit she hadn't read the bill either. The President didn't read the bill when he talked about the mother and her daughter going for ice cream; either that, or he willfully misinformed the American people. We know that Eric Holder didn't read the bill. He admitted to that under oath. We know that Janet Napolitano didn't read the bill. She admitted that under oath. We go further down the line. Michael Posner, the Assistant Secretary of State, he was so outraged by Arizona copying Federal's immigration law that he took the argument to the Chinese. We brought it up early and often, he said, apparently to compare Arizona's immigration law with the brutality that goes on in that brutal regime in China. I don't think I'm done yet, Mr. Speaker. Let's see, who am I forgetting? Assistant Secretary John Morton, who heads up ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who made the public statement that he wouldn't commit to cooperation with Arizona when it came to picking up the illegals that would be arrested by Arizona under S. 1070. Now, John Morton doesn't get to set policy, neither does Janet Napolitano, nor does Eric Holder, nor does Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner, nor the President of the United States; they have to work within the laws that they get. Now, there are other policies that they do get to set within the framework, but they don't get to amend the policy. Congress sets that. The voice of the American people sets it. If John Morton, the head of ICE, doesn't want to enforce the law, if he doesn't want to pick up the illegals that are arrested by Arizona's law enforcement officers, then John Morton should just simply find himself a job that his heart was in. He should go do something that he could do that he believed was right if he disagrees with the policy. You know, a general that thinks we're off on the wrong mission will just resign their commission if they don't think they're getting the support from the political people, and that's happened a number of times throughout our history. When they get an order that they can't carry out, generals have just resigned. At least they maintain their integrity that way. Well, there is an order out there, and it is, Enforce the law. Cooperate, by the way, with Arizona, who has uttered this almost a primal scream of despair and frustration that they've had to take their resources in their State and pass an immigration law that, by the way, I hope and plead goes to every State in the Union. If they can find ways to toughen it up, tighten it up and make it more effective, do that, but start with that foundation of Arizona's law. It's rare when a State takes an initiative that it begins to set the policy for America. I would be very happy to see this happen, Mr. Speaker, when it comes to the case of Arizona. So our Federal officials that got this wrong, that are trying to mirror, by the way, the President of the United States, but the President misinformed the American people. He hadn't read the bill. Janet Napolitano misinformed the American people. She hadn't read the bill. Eric Holder misinformed the American people. He hadn't read the bill. I don't know if John Morton read the bill, but he didn't want to enforce the law, you could tell that. Now I actually think he has made some mitigating statements, and he will be better to get along with. Michael Posner had no business sticking his nose in this whatsoever, and he carried it all the way to negotiations with the Chinese under the State Department. And by the way, I can't stand here in this place on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, without raising an issue of Felipe Calderon, back behind where I'm standing now and before Memorial Day, spoke to a Joint Session of Congress, and he had to lecture us on how he strongly disagrees with Arizona's immigration law. Well, if he does, he also disagrees with the United States Federal Government's immigration law because that's what Arizona's law does; it mirrors it. It mirrors the Federal immigration law. And so we're in an era where the administration, the highest ranking officials within the administration aren't compelled to check the facts before they misinform the American people. They might check a left-wing Web site, but they're not checking the facts. And the American people, who are they going to trust? Shouldn't they be able to trust the voice of the President of the United States? Who's briefing him? Who's telling him what's in the bill? Did they all decline to read the bill? Couldn't anyone have given him an objective analysis? What kind of a shop is being run at the White House in that regard? I think we're getting an indication. And so, furthermore, while I talk about the immigration subject matter, there is another one out here that causes me reason to be concerned. It was reported in the news that President Obama's aunt was granted asylum--and I always have to check her name to make sure that I get it exactly right. Zeituni Onyango is President Obama's aunt, and she has lived in public housing--reported by the news, at least--in Boston for some time. I believe she came to the United States in the year 2000. We don't know necessarily how she got into the United States, whether it was on some type of a visa, whether it was a tourist or what it might have been, but she stayed. And along about the year 2002, she became the focus of the immigration law enforcement personnel. By 2004, his aunt, Zeituni Onyango, had been adjudicated for deportation by an immigration judge. Well, she defied the deportation order. She stayed in the United States, purportedly on public benefits of a series of kinds. I don't know how she actually did that, but that's what the news has reported. Then not that long ago, after her nephew became President, she received asylum. Now, ``asylum,'' in this case, is the equivalent of amnesty for an individual, Mr. Speaker. So Zeituni Onyango, who, if she had honored the deportation order, would have left the United States and would have gone back to Kenya, stuck around here, and couldn't be deported or was not forcibly taken out of the United States. She defied the order, and now she is rewarded with the objective of her crime. Remember when I said that the definition of ``amnesty'' is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and to reward them with the objectives of their crimes? Well, it is a crime to come into the United States illegally. She may have overstayed a visa, in which case it puts her onto the civil side of this, but if her objective were to be able to stay in the United States, the asylum that she has been granted has come from a judge to whom she has argued that it is too dangerous for her to go back to Kenya because, now, the notoriety of being related to the President makes it too dangerous for her to go back and live there. Well, if that's the case, if the President's aunt who lives in Kenya can't go back to Kenya because there is too much focus on her there, then I think there are a lot of the other relations of the President who are in Kenya who would be living under the same kind of fear. Wouldn't they get the same asylum if they came here to the United States? Is that something that the President is for, her getting asylum after the court had said ``no,'' based on the fact that her nephew was elected President? Would that be a reason? As I read that law, I have a lot of questions that come up, but one of them is: If his aunt gets asylum, then wouldn't all of the Obama relations get asylum if they just snuck into the United States? Maybe they can move onto the White House grounds. Then none of them can go back to Kenya anymore. I don't know. I think we should be concerned about whether there was favoritism involved. If a court would grant asylum with no greater basis than what I read here, then I think it is one that should be questioned. Robert Gibbs said, no, there was nothing out of the ordinary, and there was no impropriety. No one from the White House had anything to say about that. They just let the court do what they did. Really? I would wonder if the administration would say the same thing about the bankruptcy court for General Motors and Chrysler. Yes, they have. I happen to have thought about this to the point where I reached in, and I wanted to look at some of the testimony before the Judiciary Committee on hearings that took place some time back. I, actually, don't have this date in my record, but it is a matter of the Congressional Record. This would be testimony of the Indiana State Treasurer, Treasurer Mourdock, who gave some compelling testimony before the Judiciary Committee. I listened to a number of the witnesses testify on this similar theme. The theme was that the White House had dictated the terms of bankruptcy to the automakers. So I asked the question of Treasurer Mourdock: Did any of that testimony that came before the bankruptcy court-- ``did any of that testimony alter the anticipated result of chapter 11?'' Well, this was for both Chrysler and General Motors. Did it alter it? In other words, did the evidence that was presented to the bankruptcy court change the terms that had been offered to it by the White House? Here is what Treasurer Mourdock said: ``No, it did not.'' Now, that's a quote. ``No, it did not.'' I'll just embellish that a little bit and say his answer was this-- and this is how I interpret the answer, is more accurate: the White House dictated the terms of bankruptcy to the bankruptcy court. Now, whenever in the history of America has the President of the United States determined the terms of bankruptcy and told a bankruptcy court this is how it will be? Furthermore, to go on with Treasurer Mourdock's testimony--and being from Indiana, he was in the middle of this, and he was speaking only of the Chrysler industry, I should make it clear. He said this: ``You had the situation where one party was negotiating, setting values, determining which creditors would be in, which ones would be out, what they would be given, what would be liquidated, all to be set up for an auction sale for which there was only one bidder--the United States Government. It was on both sides of the table simultaneously. The impropriety of that in trying to establish value for a sale goes beyond plausible.'' That entire string comes out of his testimony. It says to me, and my conclusion is that he was a witness of this, that the Federal Government set the terms of bankruptcy, and when the testimony went before the chapter 11 bankruptcy court, the court had to make a determination. The determination was already made and offered to them. He said there was only one party negotiating, only one party setting values, determining which creditors got paid, which ones were the winners and the losers. There was one party that was offering shares over to the unions--that didn't have an interest in but they walked out of there with an interest in General Motors at least--of 17.5 percent of the shares. Yet this quote is about Chrysler, determining what they would be given, what would be liquidated, all to be set up for an auction sale for which there was only one bidder. That means the Federal Government, the United States Government, on both sides of the table simultaneously, bidding and receiving and dictating the terms to the bankruptcy court. An administration that could do this we are to believe wouldn't find a way to provide amnesty and asylum for the aunt, Aunt Zeituni Onyango, who lives still in the United States and whom I've invited to testify before the Judiciary Committee? This is not an obscure aunt of President Obama's. I've read his book, ``Dreams from My Father,'' and this is the aunt who was his guide when he visited Kenya. I believe the year was 1988. President Obama writes extensively about his trip to Kenya. It was a transformative or at least it was a very enlightening experience for him, according to his book, which I take at face value. I know that it was fiction, at least in part, but it was based upon fact. So I went through it the other night and searched to take a look as to when this subject matter came up. I thought, well, maybe he made just a light reference to his aunt in the book. So I went through and counted the references to his aunt, who now has received asylum in the United States after defying a deportation order. President Obama mentions Aunt Onyango 66 times in his book ``Dreams from My Father''-- 66 times. She took him to place after place. Almost everywhere he went in Kenya, she was the one who took him there. His impressions of Kenya were delivered to him through her. It is not conceivable to me that an aunt who is that close to him would have come to the United States without his knowledge, nor is it conceivable to me that an aunt who lived in the United States in public housing, presumably under public benefits--and I don't know how those terms were reached and how that could have happened--nor is it conceivable to me that an aunt could have gone to an immigration court and could have been adjudicated for deportation and could have escaped the knowledge or the awareness of Barack Obama. It's not conceivable. It is not conceivable to me that a President can dictate the terms of bankruptcy to General Motors and to Chrysler and can take the shares away from the secured creditors, who are the people who should be first in line to receive the benefits or to receive any liquidation or any purchase or settlement of the automakers General Motors and Chrysler, and can ice them out, box them out, and give them nothing and hand shares of the automakers over to the unions that had no investment in and no collateral hold on those companies. It has mirrored the language exactly out of the Democratic Socialists of America, off the Socialist Web site. If all of that can happen--and it has happened, and some of the evidence I've read into the Record here tonight, Mr. Speaker--it is not conceivable to me that this amnesty/asylum for President Obama's aunt happened independent from the influence of the White House. Perhaps show us the records. Let's open up the case. Let's see. By the way, Attorney General Holder, let's see your draft complaint that you've prepared now to bring the suit against Arizona. When that draft complaint is released--and I formally requested that as a document--I will take it myself and go into the ACLU's lawsuit, and I'll show you where the Attorney General's office copied and pasted right of the ACLU's lawsuit into their own. It will be what comes from that draft complaint. I know it's coming. That's how they're operating. They're not operating independently within that operation. They've been politicized. They have canceled the most open-and-shut voter intimidation case in the history of America, which is the New Black Panthers' case in Philadelphia. It is on videotape. They had a conviction. All they needed to do was to follow through. They canceled the case. Loretta King did so inside the Justice Department. Her name rings back to me because she is the one who canceled the will of the people in Kinston, North Carolina, who voted that they wanted no more partisan elections in local elections. They wanted to take the ``R'' and the ``D'' off the names of the candidates; and with a 70 percent vote, Loretta King invalidated that because she said, Well, black people won't know to vote for another black person unless there is a ``D'' beside his name. That is not equal protection. It is contempt for people's judgment. I think we need to have equal protection under the law. We need to uphold the Constitution, the rule of law and the separation of powers. I am going to stand with the people of Arizona, who have done a great thing for America; and we are eventually going to get to the point where we establish this rule of law and enforce our immigration laws. When that becomes a practice in the United States of America, then we can talk about some of the other solutions when it comes to immigration. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention this evening, your indulgence and the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House. 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, as always it's an honor and privilege to be recognized by you here in the House to address you in the presence of the folks that are here in this Chamber. I appreciate my colleagues in their presentation in the previous hour and their discussion about Jewish American Heritage Month. I want to say also to my friend, Mr. Donnelly, the support for our troops and the grief that we have for those that we have lost goes deep for all of us, and I appreciate that sentiment as well. I look at the democracy in the Middle East and the demonstration there that in 1948, a Nation that stood up and created a Nation, actually a people that stood up and created a Nation. I am very well identified with Israel, in particular because the generation of my life has almost mirrored the generation of the life of the Nation of Israel. And so I would very much encourage the people in this administration to support Israel, support them in their self-defense in the Middle East, and understand that there have been some things that have taken place in this country that undermine the national defense of Israel and to send a message that might encourage their enemies. I would like to send a message here tonight to encourage the nation of Israel, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and all the people that stand up for liberty and freedom in that part of the world. It is one thing to defend your freedom and your liberty throughout the generations as we have through this country; it is another to be completely surrounded by enemies that would like to annihilate you as a people and as a country. We have no neighbors that draw maps of the world that erase the United States from that map--we do have some neighbors that would like to take some chunks out of the great Southwest of the United States and change the map of the United States of America. We don't have any neighbors who seek to, when they educate their children, eradicate all of the United States of America. But that is the case with a number of the neighbors of the nation of Israel. And to be surrounded by those kind of people, people who raise their children and little girls to put suicide vests on at age 3 and walk them around to justify the homicide bombing activities that have taken place all over Israel over the years--and by the way, while I'm on the subject matter, many of those bombings have been reduced dramatically, significantly across Israel, and a lot of that has to do with the barrier they constructed between themselves and the West Bank. I've been there. I've seen that barrier and watched how effective it has been. And I've been a strong proponent of the construction of a barrier that would be that effective on our southern border in particular, where we have millions of illegal border crossers every year coming across our southern border into the United States. And there are those that will say that those that are coming across are just coming here to get a job. They just want to work. They just want to take care of their families. In fact, Mr. Speaker, many do, many do, but there are also many who do not. Ninety percent of the illegal drugs consumed in the United States come from or through Mexico. And out of that huge human haystack of humanity that pours across our southern border every night, while the numbers are down a little bit--at least by the way we keep statistics, we can't be sure because we don't know--but the numbers, when I did have a reasonable measurement, there were 4 million illegal border crossings a year. I think if you take--and this is from memory, Mr. Speaker, so hopefully the accountants in the world won't hold me too accountable, but 4 million illegal border crossings a year divided by 365 days comes down to about 11,000 illegal crossers a night, on average, every night. I have spent some time down there on those crossings at night at places like San Miguel's crossing to sit down there on the border. And some of the places along there, at its best, is three or four barbed wires that are stretched apart where illegals cross through, 11,000 a night, Mr. Speaker. And so you can take your historical measure by Santa Anna's army of someplace between 4,000 and 6,000 that surrounded and attacked the Alamo. It's 11,000 a night. So one might argue, and I think very effectively, that it is two to three times the size of Santa Anna's army that invaded Texas, every night, on average. And no, they don't all come with muskets and they're not in uniforms, but that is the magnitude of it every single night, on average. And now I'm going to say, thankfully, the President of the United States has announced, I believe yesterday, that he was going to ask for $500 million and 1,200 National Guard troops to bolster the security at the border. Now, some of the people on my side of the aisle were immediately critical of it as being not enough, and I won't take issue with them on that part, it is not enough, but it is a good baby step. We have taken so many giant steps in the wrong direction, especially economically, in the effort to do so culturally and socially, that when I see a little baby step in the right direction, like 1,200 Guard troops going down to the southern border, that's a good thing. Little steps in the right direction are a lot better than giant steps in the wrong direction. So 1,200 Guard troops at $500 million works out to be this, Mr. Speaker. That is an increase of border patrol personnel security of 6.5 percent, and it is an increase, from a budgetary perspective--$500 million divided by the roughly $12 billion we're spending on the southern border comes to about a 4.2 percent increase in the budget part of it. Importantly, it sends the right message. And we need to emphasize and reinforce the message that's been sent, that this country, Democrats and Republicans--albeit in significantly different percentages within the parties, but it is a bipartisan position--that we need to stop the bleeding at the border, Mr. Speaker. All the rest of the things we might want to do don't account for much--as a matter of fact, they don't count for anything--if we don't stop the bleeding at the border. I just came from a dinner where I sat down and listened to the narrative of an individual--whose wife actually told the greatest part of the narrative--who was kidnapped by the Mexicans in Mexico. One of the cartels that were the top-of-the-line human kidnappers had asked initially for $8 million in ransom and for 8 months kept this man in a box. He watched his weight go from 165 down to 80 pounds. And finally, finally after those 8 months and down to 80 pounds, he was released. That doesn't happen to all. Some aren't released. Some are killed in captivity. Many of them are brutalized. But when you see a person's weight shrink in half, you know that is brutalization. And this is what's going on in Mexico. There are these kinds of activities that are threatening to throw out the politics of South America in countries like Brazil, for example, and Colombia would be another, and Peru would be another. As I watch this unfold, it isn't a big surprise to us. When we see all the violence in the Southern Hemisphere and in Central America, it shouldn't be a big surprise to us when that violence spills over the border. And when Phoenix becomes the second highest kidnapping city in the world--and it would be first if it were not for Mexico City--I think it should be pretty clear to all of us here in the United States of America, Mr. Speaker, that the violence of the drug trafficking country of Mexico has spilled over into the United States, and the lawlessness that is a part of what goes on south of the border is now in greater numbers becoming the lawlessness that they are living with in Arizona and border States along the way. And when Arizona passed their immigration law, we heard, Mr. Speaker, what I would call a primal scream of desperation come up out of Arizona. And they passed the legislation that they could. They passed the legislation that they needed to protect and defend themselves. Mr. Speaker, that is a long and deep subject which I intend to go into a little more deeply, but I recognize that the astute gentleman from east Texas, the ``Aggie'' himself, the judge, Mr. Gohmert, is here with some actual facts and data that come off of a printed sheet rather than out of that globe of his that has so much knowledge in it. And I would be so happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from east Texas (Mr. Gohmert.)

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas. I wanted to go back through a couple of points the gentleman has made with regard to the Arizona law. One of them would be, my recollection is that ``lawful contact'' was amended to say ``stop, detention, or arrest.'' I happen to have had a copy that has the amendment integrated into the overall bill, and I was able to sit down and read that on Saturday morning.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Didn't they strike ``lawful contact'' and just put in ``stop, detention, or arrest?''

Mr. KING of Iowa. Your copy doesn't reflect that. I recall mine did.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Let me suggest that ``lawful contact'' would mean, among it, ``lawful contact'' would be ``stop, detention, or arrest,'' so specific within those individual subcategories of lawful contact. So I think I make a distinction without a difference in the language as I recall it, and that is carefully crafted language. When we look at the reasonable suspicion component of this, Mr. Speaker, I think about this; that I wrote the reasonable suspicion law in Iowa as a State senator for the Workplace Drug Testing Act that we passed in 1998. It has been in law for all of 12 years, and in that period of time, in fact 12 years and 2 months, I happen to remember it was St. Patrick's day in 1998 that it was signed into law, Mr. Speaker. But we provide for an employer or employer's designee to direct an employee to undergo a drug test, and generally that will be a urinalysis, based upon a representative of the employer declaring that the employee in question has a reasonable suspicion that they are using or abusing drugs. That might be any of the indicators that have to do with bloodshot eyes, or dilated pupils, or erratic work habits, or showing up late, or let me say agitated nature or nervous nature, something of that nature. So the designee of the employer can point to an employee and say, I have a reasonable suspicion that you are using drugs. Go get a drug test right now. That has been an Iowa law for 12 years. It is more draconian than the Arizona reasonable suspicion law with regard to requiring the law enforcement officer to draw their reasonable suspicion and make a determination when he has reasonable suspicion as to the lawful presence of the individual that he has had lawful contact with and had a stop, detention, or arrest. A reasonable suspicion, I would add also to the gentleman from Texas, who went to law school down there, that if I remember correctly, it is a specific, articulable fact, so that it has to be specified as well as articulable. I have trouble practicing that word too. I am doing it here. So I didn't go to law school to learn that. But the reasonable suspicion language that is there is well settled, and it has been completely utilized for decades in the United States, and for at least 12 years in Iowa. Maybe it is the janitor, or it is the nurse or the truck driver, or maybe it is the accountant or the keyboard operator that is the designee of the employer, that has received 2 hours worth of training to start out and one hour worth of training each year to refresh them, and they are the ones that get to point their finger at somebody and not say, let me see your papers; it is, we will send you into the clinic here, and you can fill this jar up, and we will check it out and see if you are using illegal drugs. I would submit that it is a little bit more invasive in a person's privacy to require a urinalysis than it is to require that they show their papers. Yet we have people across this country that are demonstrating against Arizona's immigration law, when all it does is ask the local law enforcement officers to carry out the function of enforcing immigration law, Arizona immigration law, which mirrors Federal immigration law in that practice, and it has been a requirement for a long, long time, perhaps half a century, that those who are in this United States that are not natural born citizens or naturalized citizens have to carry their papers if they are 18 years old or older. That has been a common practice. There appears to be no offense taken about that practice. But here, behind where I stand, Mr. Speaker, we had President Calderon take issue with Arizona's immigration law. He said he strongly disagrees with the Arizona law, that it is a terrible idea that could lead to racial profiling. That is pretty close to the quote, not exact. Mr. Gohmert provided it exactly. So if President Calderon is so offended by the law that Arizona has passed, I would take him back to the simplest lessons in deductive reasoning that were perfected by the Greeks 3,000 years ago, and it would be this: President Calderon, if you are not offended by the United States Federal immigration law that sets a standard that is more stringent than the Arizona immigration law, but you are offended by the Arizona immigration law, the only logical deductive reason that could remain is that he is offended that Arizona law enforcement will be enforcing Arizona immigration law. So that would tell me President Calderon is insulted or offended by Arizona's State and political subdivision law enforcement officers. And I will suggest that the former Member of Congress from Colorado and my friend, Tom Tancredo, got it right when he said you can understand what is going on by the objectors of the Arizona law; the higher the level of hysteria, the greater their fear that the law is going to be effective. They don't want the law to be effective. That's why they're demonstrating. They don't believe, if they've ever read the bill, they don't necessarily believe that it's unconstitutional or it violates a Federal preemption standard or that there's case law out there that prohibits local law enforcement from enforcing Federal immigration law. That isn't all a matter of their issue. They're contriving arguments that help them arrive at a result that they want, which is open borders, full-bore amnesty, paths to citizenship, more voters, more people coming into the United States to cash into this giant ATM called America. And there was a point that was raised this morning in a breakfast that I hosted for the Conservative Opportunity Society. I will put it this way, since it's a confidential discussion that takes place in there. It was raised by one of the members from the upper Midwest, and I'll call it a rust belt State, who said he has watched as generations of Americans have arrived here from foreign lands, different countries other than the United States because they had a dream, because they had a passion. They wanted to build on that dream, and here they could have the freedom to do so. They have all the constitutional rights and protections that man has ever known, the right to property, the rule of law, in a nation that was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, which means we need less law enforcement than anybody else in the world. And people came here to build on that, and that vitality is a great core of the American experience and the American civilization. But he raised the point that, when you start bringing in tens of millions of people who come here for a different reason, a different reason rather than to build, that people coming here believing that they can cash in on the welfare state, that there is somebody else that's going to do the work and there's going to be money that gets kicked out of this government machine--this giant ATM is the shorthand that I use for it--he worries about the future of our Nation because they and their children and their children's children would have a different view about what the work ethic is, for example; the responsibilities we have to stand up and support the rule of law and hold everyone accountable to the American Dream, which embodies a responsibility that we have to utilize this blessing that we have that's passed to us from the previous generations and to leave this world and this country in a better place than it was when we found it. That's an American Dream obligation. And if they come here for a different reason, this is a new phenomenon that hasn't taken place because we've only been a welfare state about a half a century. When my grandmother came here a little over 100 years ago, she came into a society that was a meritocracy. And if people walked across the great hall at Ellis Island and they had a limp or a gimp or a bad eye or both eyes looked a little crazy or a little too pregnant, if something wasn't right, even though they'd been screened before they got on the boat, they put them back on the boat and shipped them back to the country that they came from. About 2 percent of those that arrived at Ellis Island were put back on the boat and sent back to the country they came from because the United States of America was filtering for good physical specimens, good mental specimens, generally, people who could sustain themselves in this growing country, a meritocracy. But today it's anything but. Only 7 to 11 percent of the legal immigration in America is based on merit. The rest of it is completely out of our control, with family reunification and a whole lot of other plans under the sun, but not based on merit. And what kind of a country would not establish an immigration policy designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United States of America? That's one of my, I think, salient points, and I'd be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank my friend from Texas. I am standing here listening, thinking about what it means to be in a country that in the history of the world there has been no country that has more profound respect for the rule of law. And the thought that all this life in the law as a prosecutor, as a judge, as a Supreme Court Justice, all of that activity, to have someone declare that it's all for nothing, that it really didn't have any meaning, that behind it all it was a facade that was simply there to facilitate somebody's political agenda is what it would come down to. And I think back throughout this course of history. And earlier I spoke of the Greeks, but I would take this law, this rule of law back to Rome, Roman law, Roman law that survived the Dark Ages and manifested itself as the foundation of old English common law, that came across to this country and arrived here, let me suggest, with the Mayflower 390 years ago, with the Pilgrims who came over here for religious liberty and religious freedom to get out from underneath the thumb of the King, and also to be able to worship as they pleased, and those traditions of old English common law that came here. But the injustices that still came from English common law were the injustices that were corrected in a large way in the traditions and defined in the Declaration and corrected in the Constitution of the United States. We are here and one of the reasons that we are a great Nation, one of the reasons that we are the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world is because one of the essential pillars of American exceptionalism is the rule of law, Mr. Speaker. When we look at the difference between the country represented by President Calderon and the country represented by President Obama, our traditions are entirely different. As I listened to President Calderon's speech, he said we are founded on the same principles. He said they were founded 200 years ago on the same principles as the United States is my recollection from the speech. I don't have it in front of me. It struck me that I would like to ask that question of him personally to explain that to me, how we are founded on the same principles, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Could that be in a Mexican Constitution somewhere that is 200 years old? I am not aware of that. I hope it is. I hope I just missed it, but I am not aware of that. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Mr. Speaker. This country was founded for religious liberty. It was founded on the rule of law. It was founded on the basic principles that our rights come from God, and that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Mr. Speaker. And America was founded by a Nation who believed in freedom, a Nation of farmers and small shopkeepers, a Nation that rejected the aristocracy, a Nation that wrote in its Constitution that we are not going to confer any title or royalty on anybody in this country. We are going to shed those trappings of royalty, and we are going to be a Nation that is empowered from rights that come from God that come directly to the people, and the people bestow the responsibility on government. That's what America was founded upon. And we believed for a long time that our voices mattered. We have been engaging in these debates well before the Declaration of Independence. Patrick Henry's speech was a manifestation of many decades of Americans seeking to rule themselves before they threw the yoke of King George off in 1776 and culminated with the ratification of the Constitution beginning in 1787 and finishing in 1789. We are a different Nation. When I asked the Historian of Mexico in Mexico City a couple of years ago about the colonial experience of Mexico versus the colonial experience of the United States, his response was, well, about 7 percent of Mexico are the aristocracy, and they have run their country from the beginning. And 93 percent are the people who are being run. And they have no tradition of being able to have a voice that actually changed and shifted the government and directed the government. Not a government of the people, but a government of the aristocracy run for the aristocracy that managed and controls the people. Now, I hope President Calderon is breaking that mold. I hope Vicente Fox started it along the way, and I hope President Calderon is breaking that mold. And I applaud him for the courageous approach that he has had in taking on the drug cartels. They have suffered thousands and thousands of casualties in the middle of this war against the drug cartels, but they have a very heavy lift down there. It isn't that Mexico mirrors that experience of the United States, in my view. I think it's a different history, it's a different experience, it's a different culture, and a different set of traditions. And, yes, we can be friends, and we are trading partners, and we need to enhance those trades. And I want to be supportive of the effort to shut down the drug cartels. And we have, Mr. Speaker, a responsibility in this country to shut down illegal drug consumption so that we can turn down the magnet that draws so many illegal dollars out of the United States into Mexico and the violence that's committed there and points south, and there and points into the United States. All of that is part of the picture. We haven't addressed our side of this problem very well at all. And we point our finger at Mexico. I want them to do their job too. But we can, by golly, shut off the bleeding at the border. That we can do. And there are $60 billion a year that are wired out of the United States into the Western Hemisphere, points south. About $30 billion of it goes into Mexico; about $30 billion goes into Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. And the Drug Enforcement Agency does not even have an estimate on what percentage of that $60 billion is laundered illegal drug money. I would hang that point out there and yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Did he sign that in the year of our Lord?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I reflect back on talking about George Washington and the eloquence that he had and the love for his fellow man and for his country and how great it would have been if Fidel Castro would have stepped down about the time that he finished a term or two in Cuba and how much different this Western Hemisphere would be. What if we didn't have people like Hugo Chavez down there that seek to be President for life and impose their version of Marxism, their version of emperor's law, which is one of the foundations of empire. If you look around and you look at empires, they are run by emperors. They are run by the law of the emperor, not the law that comes from God that sees justice blindly, and the level kind of justice for whomever it might be, rich or poor. I am thinking about this Arizona law again and how it's been misrepresented across this country. I am not very forgiving for what has happened here. When you have the highest official and officials in the United States Government that either shoot from the hip or willfully misinform the American people, and it starts with the President of the United States himself. When the Arizona law was passed he almost immediately said that a mother and her daughter could be going to get some ice cream, and they could be targeted because of how they looked and be required to produce their papers. That was a race card thrown into the middle of this debate based upon no fundamental facts, Mr. Speaker. Then behind that we had Eric Holder the Attorney General, testifying before the Judiciary Committee a week and a half ago, if I recall correctly, about a week and a half ago with Eric Holder. As he was asked these series of questions, he had made the point that he thought that there was a potential for racial profiling that could take place. Then, Mr. Speaker, we found out, and I think Eric Holder may know by now, that he misunderstood the law, but he hadn't read the law. We found out, when Congressman Ted Poe, also a former judge from Texas, asked him the question, have you read the bill? He said, no, he hadn't. He hadn't been briefed on the bill. But he had a few things to say about it, and prior to the Judiciary Committee, about its lack of constitutionality. Well, that's the Attorney General, who also testified that he is a nonpartisan office, that he is simply going to enforce the law. Then we have the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, and she had remarks to make about how the bill could be used for racial profiling. It's obvious that she didn't read the bill. In fact, she confessed to Senator McCain in a hearing that she didn't read the bill. Then we had the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, who heads up ICE, John Morton, who made a statement, I believe it was to The Chicago Tribune newspaper, that he wasn't committed to necessarily picking up the individuals that would be incarcerated by Arizona law enforcement that had violated U.S. and Arizona immigration law. The law enforcement officer, the chief law enforcement officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sent a message, not yet to be retracted, that he wouldn't commit to picking up these individuals that had been picked up by Arizona law enforcement, because he disagreed with the law. Breathtaking. What would George Washington have said to think that the top enforcer of American immigration law, the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security John Morton, would even intimate that he had any options about enforcing the law? I would say, Mr. Speaker, that it isn't his option. It's not the option of the President of the United States to decide whether to enforce the law. It's not the option of the Attorney General to decide whether to enforce a law, or, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Assistant Secretary of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement; none of them have the option. They are executive branch employees. Their oath is to uphold the Constitution to the best of their ability and to faithfully execute the laws. That's their job. This Congress sets the legislation and sets its policy. The executive branch carries it out. They don't get to have discretion. I will submit to John Morton, Janet Napolitano, Eric Holder, or even President Obama. President Obama could do a John Adams. Come back here, run for office, come to Congress. If you like to set policy, get in the legislative business. Don't be in the enforcement business. I am not seeking to enforce a law myself. I am saying here is the law. The Federal Government has immigration law, and you have an obligation, if you are the President of the United States, or an executive branch officer with that duty, to enforce that law. Our job is to set the policy and pass the laws. You know, I will go even further. Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary of State, he said he brought it up early and often to the Chinese that we had a problem with a law in Arizona that could bring about racial profiling. These are the people, we have got 40,000 Chinese in the United States that have been adjudicated for deportation. The Chinese won't take them back. And we are sending them some 550-year-old bones from paleovertebrates, so they can keep their artifacts straight. We need to send them the 40,000 Chinese that they won't take, deport them as well as the bones, Mr. Speaker. And, additionally, Felipe Calderon on top of this. The American people have been misinformed by the President, by the Attorney General, by the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, by the Assistant Secretary of State Posner. Then the President of Mexico takes his talking points from the White House and comes to this floor and lectures and chastises us that we have a law here, that I will say is completely constitutional. I will make this further prediction, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the announcement came out today that the Justice Department under Eric Holder now has a legal brief that recommends that they bring suit against Arizona. Here is my prediction: ACLU has written that legal brief for the Justice Department. That apolitical, nonpolitical Justice Department has a brief that one day we'll get our hands on, a draft brief. Release the draft is what needs to happen from the Attorney General. But in that draft we'll find the ACLU that has already sued Arizona with a 98- page case, there is the document that they're using to put their brief together in the Justice Department. The President gave the order to the Attorney General to look into Arizona's law. And the Justice Department, under Attorney General Holder, looked at the lawsuit that's been brought by the ACLU and MALDEF and other organizations that are hardcore left wing, including SEIU, and they have lifted the language right out of that lawsuit, and that will be the draft, Mr. Speaker. That's my prediction. I put my marker down. When we get our hands on the draft from the Attorney General's office, I will take that draft and I will take the language and I will highlight the language right out of the ACLU's lawsuit. And I'll show you how the Justice Department lifted that language out of the lawsuit of the ACLU and MALDEF--the Mexican American Legal Defense Foundation--and put it right into their draft advisory. And the Federal Government will be conducting and carrying out the order of the President--in a nonpolitical office, supposedly, according to Holder's testimony--at the direction of the ACLU and MALDEF and LARASA and the other organizations, SEIU and many others that are hardcore, leftist organizations in this country. If we're going to have the rule of law, it's got to be impartial. It's got to be objective. It's got to be constitutional. It's got to be statutory, and it's got to be consistent with case law. Arizona's law is all of those things, but this Justice Department's unjustified attack on Arizona is anything but. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and, Mr. Speaker, yielding back the balance, should there be any.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I sat here and listened to perhaps as many as 10 Democrats do their 1-minute. And at least three of them said something that astonishes me. They said we have already created more new jobs than were created in all 8 years of the Bush administration, or some version of that. I have no idea how that could be true. Now, I didn't check the Obama-sycophant-talking-points-dot-gov Web site, but I did everything else, and I couldn't quite find this data. Here is what I know: Last week, unemployment new claims were up to 470,000. The week before it was 478,000. The monthly average was 456,250. We have growing unemployment, not shrinking unemployment. And you don't have a category for jobs created. You have a category for jobs saved or created. That didn't exist until President Obama created that phrase. Now if you get down to 3\1/2\ million jobs left, the President could always claim, well, that's the 3\1/2\ million I saved. Government doesn't create jobs. It gets out of the way so the private sector can, Mr. Speaker. We need a budget, and we need a budget now.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentleman from Texas, we've got an open government. This is the most open, the most honest government in history, and we are drawing conclusions based upon not getting an answer as opposed to the answer that we might get if they would just simply give us the information. I mean, this really saddens my heart to hear this. I'm not that surprised, but it saddens my heart, Mr. Gohmert.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Would we choose some mainline IV drug users off the streets to go in and take IVs in hospitals because they happen to have had the kind of experience that they're good at even though it's illegal? If somebody were proficient in how he operated Turbo Tax and were able to avoid paying his taxes, would that mean he'd be a good person to have as the head of the IRS so that he could probably set up a system to prevent other people from avoiding paying their taxes?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Who best to catch tax cheats.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, in reclaiming my time then, I have to pose the question: If you're in business, if you're an investment banker, for example, if you have a large credit operation going on and if you've watched the Barney Frank bill and the Chris Dodd bill and now your knees are knocking on what might be going on in a future conference committee that's going to produce a bill that likely spills out over here in the House for passage, that's sent over to the Senate and rammed through there and that's put on the President's desk, we know the President will sign the bill. But what is your business model? Let's just say you are providing credit transactions, Mr. Speaker, to a large portion of America, whether it is credit cards or whether it is the toxic assets of mortgage-backed securities, the subprime loans that might be out there. Whatever that might be. Now, if you are sitting there with billions of dollars in those kind of assets and you are making your profit off of those margins of those assets going through, I am going to suggest that if you don't already have a lobbyist, you had better hire a bunch of them. Bring them into this Congress and start to convince people like chairman of the Financial Services Committee Barney Frank, a majority of the members on that committee and others, perhaps through the Ways and Means Committee, start to work your angle. Because your business model, Mr. Speaker, is no longer the business model of providing the most competitive, the most service-oriented, the most customer-focused service that there is. Your business model is do what you have to do out here on the streets in the business world in America, treat customers fine, that is good, come here into Washington and get that playing field not leveled, but tipped in your favor, because you can't do business without, so that you have those kind of chips when the time comes that the regulators would come in and take a look at your balance sheet and determine, well, you weren't quite big enough to be allowed to fail, so we are going to shove you into receivership and we will chop you up and deal you out to our preferred companies. I know the model, I know the pattern, even though it is done in a pretty good fashion with the FDIC when a bank has to go under. We have had too many of them go under. In the farm crisis years in the eighties we had 3,000 banks that went under, and those banks were split up sometimes and dealt out and sold to other investors that had a better track record with managing banks. All right. Well, that looks good and it works well in the micro version. But when you get into the macro version of big business and you have Tim Geithner as the Secretary of the Treasury making the decision on a business that is too big to be allowed to fail, and calling in Sheila Bair and calling in Ben Bernanke and saying, well, don't you agree? They are too big to be allowed to fail, so let's go prop these people up. And, by the way, what would help is if we go in and shove this company into receivership and we deal the assets of that company over into the company that is too big to fail. You pick the winners and you pick the losers out of government. And who wins? The people that pay the lobbyists. The people that have paid for the most political influence. Government cannot make rational decisions on business. They make political decisions on business. Peter Wallison spoke today on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the American Enterprise Institute scholar, one of the brightest minds we have on free enterprise economics in America, a very solid man. Many times I have listened to him illuminate the issue for me in a way that helps me understand it even better. He spoke today about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his sense is that they aren't yet nationalized, that they are still quasi- government. My position is they are nationalized, because the Federal Government calls all their shots, and we have got roughly $50 billion each dumped into either one of them and roughly another $30 billion rolled on top of that $100 billion. So we are around the $130 billion range. Peter thinks that there is not $360 billion, but $400 billion in losses that will have to be swallowed up by the American taxpayers. And we knew and we know now that we were looking at $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities that the Federal taxpayers would have to swallow if Fannie and Freddie were flushed down completely the way the markets might drive them. Concluding my statement and then yielding, that was an example, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are an example of how government can't set values, neither can they evaluate risk, because they are doing political calculations based on political pressure, not economical calculations based upon the risk of success and failure. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, in scouring the financial reform package and the Barney Frank bill or the Chris Dodd bill and setting up the word search and chasing it through there, Mr. Speaker, I don't find anything in either one of those bills that addresses the necessary reform for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are completely insulated. I recall a debate here on the floor of the House on October 26, 2005, that the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank, was very much engaged in. He came to the floor to vigorously oppose an amendment that was offered by Mr. Leach of Iowa that would have established higher levels of collateralization for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, higher standards for underwriting in the secondary market, and higher standards for capitalization for Fannie and Freddie. The vigorous opposition of Mr. Frank flowed out that day. And the gentleman from Texas remembers the exchange that took place on the Thursday before Easter in 2009 here on this floor. The gentleman from Texas was there, the gentleman from Massachusetts was there, and I think me up there somewhere. Because we talked about what had happened with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In that debate on October 26, 2005, the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Frank said, If you are going to invest in shares of Fannie and Freddie, don't do so believing that he would ever vote to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because he would never do that. He would let them go down instead. That is the core and the essence of the statement made by the gentleman from Massachusetts, who now is the chairman of the Financial Services Committee. Well, we know what has happened. Fannie and Freddie have been bailed out. And on that day, the gentleman from Massachusetts said that he wasn't biased in favor of or against Fannie or Freddie because the man whom he had had an intimate relationship with was not a senior executive. It is in the Congressional Record. I don't pull this out of thin air. I suggest, Mr. Speaker, that you check the Record. For me, that is an astonishing confession. To draw a fine line between the reason for bias and not bias is because this individual was not a senior, but more apparently a junior executive for Fannie Mae. So that is a little too intimate for me, Mr. Speaker. I don't choose to go there any further, except to point out that there are a lot of things going on in this United States Government that are not what meets the eye. There are undercurrents here that threaten to swallow up the United States of America. There is a driven philosophy on this side of the aisle that wants to swallow up free enterprise capitalism, that abhors the words of capitalism. There is a driven philosophy that is reflected by 77 members of the Progressive Caucus who come to this floor with their blue charts and say come visit our Web site. Well, not that long ago, a few years ago, the progressives' Web site was hosted by, managed by and taken care of by the socialists in America. But when they took a little bit of heat, they decided they would manage their own Web site so they didn't have to take the criticism. So the socialists ran the progressives' Web site. Now, dsausa.org, that is the socialist Web site, it stands for Democratic Socialists of America, dsausa.org. Mr. Speaker, you should go visit that Web site and understand who your colleagues are. Seventy- seven of them are self-professed progressives. The progressives, according to the socialist Web site, are their legislative arm. They write that they are not Communists; they are socialists. That is a step above a Communist. They don't want to nationalize everything, they just want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies in America. And they have got a big start on it. They don't run candidates on the banner or under the political party called the socialists, because there is a stigma attached to being a socialist in America. So what do they do, Mr. Speaker? They push the candidates that are self-professed progressives. Progressives are not distinct from socialists. They are one and the same. They are just wearing a little bit different-colored jersey. And they are the people here who have driven the idea that we should nationalize the Fortune 500 companies, nationalize the oil refinery industry. Mr. Hinchey in New York, take over the oil industry. Maxine Waters from Los Angeles, operate these Fortune 500 companies, and I quote, ``for the benefit of the people affected by them.'' That is the unions. The Speaker is a member. The Speaker advocated and said that she would not give, in the case of the car companies, a bargaining advantage of the auto makers over that of the unions. Right off of the Web page of the socialists, and she followed through on it. And today, 17\1/2\ percent of General Motors is owned by the unions, without a cash outlay, without a concession of any kind. The President of the United States, who voted to the left of self-professed Senator Bernie Sanders, crammed that down the throats of the investors, the secured investors in General Motors; and now we have the unions owning 17\1/2\ percent, the Federal Government owning 61 percent, and the Canadian Government owning 12\1/2\ percent of General Motors, exactly off of the playbook of the socialist Web site. Mr. Speaker, the American people need to go visit the Web site. They need to understand the playbook is written. It's being carried out by the progressives in this Congress; 77 of them are the core driving force here. When you add to that the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, a whole lot of these people that are self-segregating caucuses, instead of integrated caucuses, you understand who's running America today, Mr. Speaker. I'd yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Just remind me. I'm standing here thinking we're drawing a rational conclusion that the Minerals Management Service would not release the information that showed the results of the testing of the blowout preventer.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If they'd done the testing. There are reports out there that there is testing that had failed some 10 days or so before the well, itself, had failed. Now, I don't know if that's true or not. I don't want to start a rumor.

Mr. KING of Iowa. But are we drawing a rational conclusion here that we could have a government that we could draw conclusions from based upon their response or lack of response and not the answer to the question? I would yield.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, as I watch this regulation that's coming through in the financial services component of this, it's a regulation that sets up Tim Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, to decide which businesses are too big to be allowed to fail, which businesses would be deemed to fail, and all he needs is the agreement of the FDIC and the agreement of the Chairman of the Fed. Those things concern me a great deal. But this conversation could go almost in any direction, Mr. Speaker, because I am prepared to yield to my good friend, the gentleman and the judge from Texas, Louie Gohmert.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. I appreciate the opportunity to listen to the speakers in the previous hour and the opportunity to do a bit of rebuttal even though I've been a little more attentive in previous presentations. Looking at the decline in the economy that they show in their bar graph, it seems as though it could be that when President Bush was no longer President, things got better a lot faster. As I watched that, the graph doesn't go back quite so far enough to really understand what happened during the 8 years of the Bush administration. But I remember what they said. Remember what they said when they stood here on this floor night after night, hour after hour, year after year, the 30-Something Group and others that would stand here and tell America, Mr. Speaker, through this microphone and project it out across the C-SPAN cameras that, if they were just in the majority, they'd fix America. If you would just give them the gavels, they'll solve all of the problems in America. And they made that case over and over again night after night. And lo and behold, what happened? I don't think it was intentional or willful. I think it was a matter of circumstance--race by race, circumstance by circumstance, district by district--that the majority changed from Republicans to Democrats. And the problem that you have when you find yourself in the majority is you're responsible for governing. And even though they claimed the mantle of responsibility in all of those years, those 12 years leading up to the 2006 election when the majority in this House shifted, they claimed the mantle of responsibility. But when it was passed to them by the voters in November of 2006, and when Speaker Pelosi was passed the gavel here--I believe the date was January 3, 2007, Mr. Speaker, and you can correct me if I am wrong on that date--then they'd achieved the goal that they'd called for for all of that time. And I watched what happened. The election returns came in in November in 2006. It was apparent that the Democrats had won the majority in 2006, that there was going to be a new Democrat Speaker. It was most likely going to be Nancy Pelosi. And the incoming most likely chairman of the Ways and Means Committee would be Charlie Rangel, who became the chair of the Ways and Means Committee. And he did the national talk show circuit from November, December, January, and February, all the way across every network. And they asked him over and over again, Tell us about the Bush tax cuts. Which ones of those tax cuts would you want to keep, which ones do you want to let expire? The questions came out over and over and over again. And, Mr. Speaker, I don't want to allege that Charlie Rangel never gave a straight answer. I just don't remember one. But I do know that by February of 2007, the SmartMoney had analyzed the answers and the voids in those answers of Charlie Rangel and concluded there wasn't a single Bush tax cut that he would like to keep. And here we are today in this year of May 2010, and it's obvious the Bush tax cuts will expire at the end of this year. And it will be obvious that the conclusions that SmartMoney drew in November and December of 2006 and January and February of 2007 were accurate. And we saw, in the beginning of 2007, a dramatic drop in industrial investments because SmartMoney in America understood that the cost of capital was going to go up because taxes were going to go up, and that burden was going to come down on those who invested in, yes, their future profits and also creating jobs. Jobs get created by the private sector, not the public sector, unless you punish the private sector and take the money and you drop it into the public sector. That's the only way the public sector creates jobs. So we saw this happen in 2006 and 2007. Lo and behold, the dog that had chased the car for 12 years finally caught it. And what happened? What happened was industrial investment dropped off. The economy began to decline, and they pushed the economy down because they were punishing business every month of all of those years beginning in 2007 with Pelosi. She had the Speakership of the United States House of Representatives, 2007, 2008, 2009, and now into 2010. And furthermore, the argument was, well, they couldn't do enough because we had a President Bush who would veto the crazy anticapitalist ideas. The people who were opposed to free enterprise were in charge of the House of Representatives, but occasionally the President of the United States, President Bush, would veto a bad idea. And it would come back here to the House and we'd uphold his veto, and so they were restrained. And during that period of time, Speaker Pelosi pushed and promoted and supported 44 votes in the House of Representatives that were designed to unfund, underfund, or undermine our troops, 44 votes. And I'm not pulling that out of my head or out of my hat, Mr. Speaker. I have the data. I have the Excel spreadsheet, and I have it all linked to each one of those issues that were pushed. The effort was to attack President Bush and undermine the support for President Bush by challenging his position as Commander in Chief. And in doing so, it undermined our military in a time of war when their lives are on the line. And I asked the question, When someone in this House of Representatives--let alone the Speaker of the House of Representatives--speaks against a military operation, when they argue that we ought to all sack up our bats and go home from Iraq and from Afghanistan, when they make that argument, what happens to some al Qaeda terrorist that's sitting in a mud hut somewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan? He has got the satellite dish on top. I mean, I have flown over those, those mud huts, and added up--I don't remember the exact number now, but it was over 50 percent of those huts had a satellite dish sitting on top of them. They are sitting there watching satellite TV. And these terrorists are making bombs, IEDs, and they are planning to set these bombs up to detonate them against Americans. When Americans are victims of this, we need to ask this question, what happens in the mind of that al Qaeda terrorist that's sitting in that mud hut making his bomb, watching Al Jazeera TV, when he sees the Speaker of the House come out on the floor and speak up and oppose the war in Iraq or Afghanistan? What happens when there is a debate on the floor that goes on over and over and over again, and the left-wing radical liberals in this Congress that call themselves progressives that are identified by the socialists in America as their candidates say that we should pull out of those countries without any hesitation, just do the best we can to keep from getting shot in the back. Do you think, Mr. Speaker--and this is a rhetorical question--but do you think that that terrorist is more likely to build more bombs or less, plant more bombs or less, detonate more bombs or less, are there more Americans lost or fewer Americans lost, because the enemy has been encouraged by 44 votes on the floor of the House of Representatives in 2007 and 2008 in that Congress. That's what's happened here, Mr. Speaker. President Bush was going to retire regardless of what happened and the actions on the part of the Speaker Pelosi, and this country was going to move forward. And even though the President of the United States now, our Commander in Chief, as in the spring of 2008, took the position that he wanted to pull the troops out of Iraq immediately, without any hesitation, just simply try to keep from being shot in the back on the way out of Iraq. That was his position. And I argued that if that was his position, then if he is elected President, the enemy will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11, 2001. Now, we don't know if that turned out to be a true prediction, because now President Obama, then candidate and Senator Obama, changed his position. From the spring of 2008 until election day in November of 2008, he walked a line of changing his position from being for immediate withdrawal to being for a slower withdrawal from Iraq. What we have seen also happen is, now, President Obama has adopted the exact position in Iraq that President Bush negotiated. It's called the Status of Forces Agreement, Mr. Speaker, the SOFA agreement. That agreement was negotiated by the Bush administration and it was with the Iraqis, and it was signed on November 17, 2008, by Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, and just a very impressive public servant who never received his due respect for the job that he did for all of us in that country for the time that he was there, Ryan Crocker. I want to say a few more good things about Ryan Crocker. I met with him very late in the night, I have sat there in those hot and uncomfortable places in Iraq with the top officers, with Admiral Mullen, for example, Ryan Crocker, General Petraeus, a number of other very top leaders in our military and our State Department personnel. Ryan Crocker understands the Middle East. Ryan Crocker served well there. He was instrumental in the negotiations of the Status of Forces Agreement. He was the one who put that hand to that agreement on November 17, 2008. And today, the letter of the Status of Forces Agreement is being followed by President Obama. Good for him. I appreciate that. I support it. It's something I called for. If it were President Bush doing that, I would be for that. I just don't think the American people see it the same way because he is not as proud of that decision as perhaps he would be of a different posture that we have in that part of the country. Mr. Speaker, we have a number of interests in America. Our national security interests are paramount. Those are constitutional. The responsibility of the President of the United States and the Federal Government is to defend us, to defend our shores, to defend the American people. And our military and our troops, and those people that put on uniforms, day after day after day, are the ones that deserve our gratitude and our respect. And we need to do them just duty here on the floor of the House, and not back up from those responsibilities just to provide them with the resources that they need. And that means a consistent message from the Commander in Chief on down and a strategy that we believe that we can win, and it means to say to the leftwing radicals in the United States of America, Don't tell me you are for the troops and tell me you are also against their mission. You have to support the troops and their mission. What's interesting is that when George Bush was the Commander in Chief, you said you supported the troops but not their mission. Now that Barack Obama is the Commander in Chief, you don't really answer to that at all, except for the most part, you left wing radicals, you say support the troops out of a level of pandering to the, let me say, the mission of patriotism, but you don't support their mission. We cannot, Mr. Speaker, ask our military to put their lives on the line on a mission that we don't believe in. No. We have got to ask them to put their lives on the line for the cause of liberty and a mission that we believe in. If we don't believe in the mission, we should not send them, they should not go. But it's up to the call of the Commander in Chief to do so. After all, he is Commander in Chief. He orders our Armed Forces, he sets the foreign policy, and if we don't like what the President of the United States does when it comes to that, we have got about two choices. One is elect a new President and the other is look into the Constitution for another solution. I am not ready to do that because I don't believe there is just cause at this point to look in the Constitution for another solution. In fact, I believe that the President of the United States has eclipsed my anticipation for what he might have been doing in Iraq. In Afghanistan, it's relatively stable; it's not been extraordinarily brilliant. He did send only 75 percent of the minimum number of troops that were requested by General McChrystal, and they have a very difficult task. But the prospects of being successful in that task, I believe, are greater than the prospects of the State Department being successful in setting up institutions that never existed before in parts of the country of Afghanistan that don't have a history of those institutions of centralized government reaching out. We have the foreign policy question that's before us, Mr. Speaker, and we have the question of the United States economy. And we have a bunch of people that are self-professed experts that come here to this floor that never signed the front of a paycheck. They don't have the first idea what it takes for a free market economy to thrive or prosper. They believe that if you raise taxes it's just taking a little more out of the pot of the greedy capitalists. And if you raise regulations, they have got plenty of time to fill out all the paperwork because, after all, what else are they going to do with those resources? It creates jobs when you create more paperwork for the private sector do. Why would you want these people to be in charge of our economy? They demagogue Republicans and say that we are in support of Wall Street. It's Democrats that are cashing checks from Wall Street. And it's big banking and international banks and investment banking, large interests that are sending the biggest checks to Democrats all the while they are hedging their bets. And if you are a big business interest and you have a crony relationship with the United States Congress, you have got a pretty good deal going because you can have the United States Congress raise the regulations and raise the burden of government to keep your competition out. You want to drive out your competition, what's the simple solution to that complex problem? Raise the regulations, raise the taxes, you are only competing against fewer people. I have seen this happen in my lifetime over and over again. I spent my life in the contracting business as a small contractor. I started out as this tiny little old guy that bought a old beaten-up bulldozer. Then I worked it for a while and fixed it a lot. And then I bought another machine and hired another man and after a while we had enough machines we could go out and do a job like grade a road or something. When I was looking at building State highways, I began to look around, and I realized there were only a handful of contractors that were big enough to bid these projects. So I went to the State and said break these projects up, will you? I would like to bid some projects that are under a million dollars. They said, well, we don't like to do that because it takes a lot of administrative hassle to deal with too many contractors. We would rather deal with this half a dozen we have got that we are comfortable working with. So I had to run for the State Senate to get that changed. When we lowered that standard down, we were able to bring more competition in. It's not enough. It's a small part of the solution, but it illustrates a problem, Mr. Speaker. Big business will always try to promote regulation to keep their competition out. It's how it works. Think of it this way. I will take it down to the lowest common denominator, a simple thing that metaphorically can explain this to everyone that's listening, Mr. Speaker. Just imagine that they hadn't yet discovered gold in Colorado. So some miner out there with a pan is panning his way up the stream, and he finds a nugget of gold. He pans his way in, and he goes around and he finds that vein. Then he gets out his pick axe and he starts to chop out this rock, and here is this gold in this rock. Son of a gun, gold in Colorado. There's no settlements around there. So he breaks out his gold and processes it and takes it down and sells it, and pretty soon the rumor goes like wildfire: there's gold in Colorado. The gold rush is on. People come rushing in. Everybody gets their pickaxe, and they start to mine for gold. Now, you may think that this doesn't connect, Mr. Speaker, but it does because the miners then set up their tents and they're there and they are working away. And now that they're making a little bit of money and they're selling their gold, they need some things. Somebody's got to bring them some food, somebody will open up a bar, somebody will start a band so they've got some entertainment to draw the stress down at night. And these miners would be out there, and after a while their hair gets so long that they have to climb up into a tree to get a haircut. And sooner or later one of those miners is going to get out the clippers and cut somebody's hair. When that happens, Mr. Speaker, then somebody else will line up and decide, that's a pretty good haircut for what I need out here. So he'll get in the line and climb into the chair, and there will be a second haircut, then a third haircut. And after a while, this fellow that's pretty good cutting hair will be so busy being a barber he doesn't have time to pick up his pickaxe and mine for gold. And then he decides, I'm going to have to charge you guys; you're taking me out of my cash-flow endeavor. And so he begins to charge the people that he's cutting their hair maybe a dime for a haircut. Now he's making a little bit of money, and pretty soon, eventually, somebody else will see that and decide, I can get into this business. That guy is making a dime for every haircut. He can cut 10 heads a day, that's a buck a day--that's pretty good wages in those days--and he'll set up a barber shop and he'll do it for a nickel. Now that first barber is thinking, I would have been better off to keep out there with a pickaxe mining gold. And so we've got two barbers that are competing, then a third barber, and a fourth, and a fifth. And pretty soon the first barber that got in, he decides that it isn't fair because he has all of this technological equipment. He's got the electric clippers and he's got the nice clean sheet to put around their neck and he's better at taking care of those ingrown hairs and he does a little antiseptic while he's at it. And his equipment is clean and well maintained and the other guy has a pair of scissors and a comb. So he'll go to the State legislature and argue that barbers should be licensed so that there is a standard quality of care for haircuts. It isn't because he believes so much in that standard quality of care. It's because he knows that he can regulate some of his competition out of business. That's what goes on in the barbershops in the gold mining towns in Colorado 150 years ago, but that's also what goes on in big business in the United States of America today. That's what is going on, Mr. Speaker. Big business says, Come and regulate me because it's a cost of doing business at big-business level, the multibillion dollar level. And by the way, those people that can only do business down in the few millions, they're not going to be able to compete. So we should not accept big business as the purest form of free enterprise capitalism. We should look at big business as coming here to this Capitol, ask us to level the playing field, all the while they're looking to turn into a playing field that it's often difficult for a small business to climb into. So, Mr. Speaker, that is the status of big business regulation versus small business regulation, and it sets the tone for I think what we're about to take up next. Although I recognize that in a moment we will be asked to yield for the esteemed chair of the Rules Committee as soon as she gets prepared. But in the meantime, I see that the gentleman from Texas is about to get prepared. I would suggest that, Mr. Speaker, we need to take a look at this regulation that's coming in from the Senate and the regulation of the financial services industry and the credit industry in America. This idea that here in the United States of America we would establish government entities that would look in on every business in America, anybody that's got a credit transaction, whether it would be AIG doing business with a large investment bank or some smaller entity--Mr. Speaker, I will pick that up in a moment, but I would be so happy to yield so that the gentlelady who chairs the Rules Committee can conduct business.