Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Is that the point in history when the first order came down no work, no eat?

Mr. KING of Iowa. But in the United States?

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and the privilege to also have the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) yield to me as he delivers the leadership hour presentation on the economic situation here in the United States and the opportunity to say a few words on that particular subject. And I may revert back to that subject, Mr. Speaker. However, I would shift this subject a little bit over onto a subject matter that seems to be on the minds and lips of Americans all across this country. I have had the privilege to travel to some of the corners of America in the last few weeks and had my conversations in the coffee shops and in the restaurants and in city halls and in meeting places, and I was a little bit surprised that--I had had the perception that in my district immigration becomes an issue that is very much front and center, and I expect that's going to be the case in States like Arizona, California, Texas, those States that are border States, New Mexico, where you have a large number of illegal border crossings. But I didn't expect it would be the case in the Northeast, for example, and other places across the country to the intensity that it was. I found that at every stop someone would bring up immigration. And it reminded me of the times in 2006 and in 2007 when this Nation debated immigration intensively and constantly at every stop, even to the point where, as much as I like to talk about it, and as interested as I am in the subject, and since I am also the ranking member of the Immigration Subcommittee it's my job, Mr. Speaker, but in my town hall meetings in '06 and '07, in many of them I set the rule that we were going to talk about everything except immigration until we had dealt with everybody's concerns and issues. And then we would go to immigration to finish the time that we had left. And invariably, we would get to immigration and it would burn all the time that we had left because the American people are very intense on the immigration issue. And we watched as Frank Luntz did a focus group, or at least one that I could see down in Arizona, he just came back from that recently, and we watched how that group itself was divided between themselves, with very intense emotions, most of them full of frustration and anger about the immigration issue, not in complete agreement on what to do. It seems as though the Hispanics in America are where you find the objections to the enforcement of immigration law, the most vocal ones. And yet we also know there is a large number of Hispanics that many of them have been here for hundreds of years, their families have been. But I will submit that that doesn't get anybody anything. I just shook the hand of an individual down at the Turkish reception tonight who is a naturalized American citizen as of about less than 3 weeks ago. And I would express this, that for any of us to argue that our ancestors have been here since the beginning of the Republic, the Daughters of the American Revolution, for example, and I am glad that they maintain those traditions. And it means a great deal throughout the families. And we understand that we have obligations that are generational that pass along because of the culture and the heritage of the family and the duty to our country. But I recall standing in the Indian Room in the Old Executive Office Building as Emilio Gonzalez, the director of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services, gave a speech at a naturalization ceremony there which I attended for that purpose. And when he said to those gathered that were about to take the oath to become naturalized American citizens, he said, Look out that window. Look out that window. And when you look out the window, you look out at the White House itself and you see the vast south lawn and the south side and the west side of the White House. And he said, I want you to know two things. One of them is from this day forward you are as much an American as the person that lives next door. And he pointed to the White House, where President Bush lived at the time. He said, when people ask you where are you from, don't tell them that you are from Turkey or France or Mexico or Canada or wherever it may be. Tell them you are the first American. That you are an American and you are the first American, and you are as much American as the man that occupies the White House today. That's the right sentiment for this country for legal immigration. That's the way we should think about new Americans, in every bit as good a standing once they take that oath of citizenship and go through their naturalization process, in every bit as good a standing as someone born to the 10th generation of Americans that might be here. But each of us has a different set of history, a different set of family memories that were taught a little bit differently, but we need to tie together under this American banner and this American history. And so the idea that we are going to see students that are sent home from school because they are wearing the red, white, and blue on a day that's supposedly Mexican nationalist day, a day that's Cinco de Mayo, a day that's not celebrated to any significant extent even down in the city in Mexico where the Mexicans won the victory over the French, but celebrated here in the United States. Started up as a promotion. I think it was a beer distributor that actually began the celebration of Cinco de Mayo here in the United States, whatever that is. Mr. Speaker, I don't take issue with the celebration of a holiday that makes people proud of their culture and their heritage. If that were the case, then I couldn't celebrate St. Patrick's Day, which I also recognize isn't celebrated so intensively in Ireland itself, but here it really is. And there are some real parallels here. It's the people that reject the American flag and reject the American culture that I take issue with, not the new Americans that are here that are proud of being and becoming Americans by choice. But we have a big decision to make in this country. And this immigration debate has gone on for a long time. And it centers on this: it centers on the idea that the people that came across the border illegally should somehow be granted citizenship or a path to citizenship, if that's their goal, and somehow it turns into a reward for breaking the law. Now, we need to recognize, Mr. Speaker, that there are hundreds of millions of people across this globe, and perhaps billions, that would love to come to the United States and become Americans. And they are waiting in line in the right way. They are respecting our laws. And I will submit that the people that respect our laws will make better citizens than those who have broken our laws. And our argument here in this country comes down to this: grant amnesty to people that broke our laws, reward them for breaking our laws because there is an argument that we must capitulate because we can't enforce the laws that we have. Mr. Speaker, it is not the case that we can't enforce the laws that we have. And it is not the case that enforcing those laws would be ineffective in resolving this immigration problem that we have in this country. The problem we have is our administration lacks the will to enforce the law. And it isn't just the Obama administration and it isn't just Secretary Napolitano who have demonstrated a lack of will in enforcing immigration law. This goes back through several Presidents. I would take us back to 1986, when President Reagan signed the Amnesty Act of 1986. And it was to provide amnesty for a million people that were in the United States illegally. And by the way, President Reagan was honest enough to call it the amnesty bill when he signed it. It was one of the very few times that President Reagan I will say let me down on something that I thought was philosophically wrong. And I remember disagreeing with President Reagan in '86 when he signed the amnesty bill. And I didn't consider that I would end up in the United States Congress some less than 20 years later to my arrival here and there would be an argument about what was amnesty. It wasn't any question about what amnesty was in 1986. Ronald Reagan admitted the bill was amnesty. But he said he had to sign the bill. In order to get control of the borders, in order to enforce the law, he had to sign the amnesty bill. Now, that was his calculation. And I don't think he liked it philosophically, and he probably came to a conclusion that he didn't have a choice. Whatever the rationale was, he signed the bill. He called it amnesty. No one argued it was amnesty. It was to be a million people. But the fraud and the corruption, the people that gamed the system tripled the number. And those who received amnesty in '86 were closer to the number of 3 million than they were the number of 1 million that was supposed to be the amnesty to end all amnesties that was going to put this away. And the only way we could get control of our borders in 1986 was to give amnesty to the people that were here and enforce the law against the employers and tighten the border and make sure that there wouldn't be a magnet for people to come into the United States. And so, Mr. Speaker, what happened was the enforcement that was stronger, far stronger under Dwight Eisenhower, that diminished from Dwight Eisenhower's time on was stronger under Ronald Reagan than it was under the first Bush administration, and it was stronger under the first Bush administration than it was under President Clinton. And I recall my frustration with each of those Presidents and their lack of will to enforce immigration law. And under Bill Clinton there was an accelerated effort to naturalize a million people into the United States. And I will say legal or illegal, as the anecdotes came to me. And I have talked to some of these people. They told me that they understood that they would be fast-tracked to citizenship, but they were to vote for Bill Clinton for President. That's what I heard from some that came through my district that I have sat down and talked with. And I don't know the specific data on that; I only know the anecdotal data. But if one shows up and tells me that, it's a pretty sure bet that there are quite a few others that had that same idea. So a million were accelerated through naturalization in 1996, and a lot of them voted for Bill Clinton. And a lot of frustration was built among those of us who respect our borders, the sovereignty of the United States, the need and the obligation to defend the borders, and who respect the rule of law and do not want to see it subverted or eroded, especially intentionally and willfully by an administration seeking to produce a political gain. And then, Mr. Speaker, from the Clinton administration, we transitioned into the Bush administration, George W. Bush, a man who I personally like and respect and admire, and found a couple of things to disagree with along the way, and this was one of them. Well, it's odd for me, Mr. Speaker, to stand here on the floor and speak to the issues that I disagreed with with Ronald Reagan or the issues that I disagreed with on George W. Bush, but I saw a lack of enforcement of our immigration laws during that period of time under the George W. Bush administration as well. And there was, in the second term of the Bush administration, there was a concerted effort to try to bring our--to try to bring comprehensive immigration reform to bear. ``Comprehensive immigration reform'' was the fancy term for ``amnesty,'' and the debate about the meaning of amnesty ensued then. And rather than simply admit the meaning of the word ``amnesty'' and admit that comprehensive immigration reform really is comprehensive amnesty, the debate ensued about what amnesty was. So the American people had to submit to a cacophony of different definitions of amnesty, and continuously the argument was made that, well, whatever it was they wanted to do to provide amnesty wasn't amnesty. I recall that discussion about, well, what if they pay a fine for $500 and they promise to learn English and they promise to pay their back taxes, couldn't we give them a path to citizenship? And that's not amnesty, is it, because, after all, you charge them a fine. It's, well, if you're going to sell a path to citizenship for $500, I will have to call that amnesty. And if someone promises to learn English, that's an obligation of the naturalization process. You have to prove proficiency in both the written and spoken word of the English language to be naturalized as an American citizen. Now, I know they get a little sloppy with that, and some of the people that are naturalized just aren't so very good when it comes to the spoken or written word of English. And you'll notice that at a naturalization ceremony when it comes time for people to stand, they may not recognize what that means. And I have heard different directions that have gone out to the crowd, and some sat there without responding, even though it was the most significant and pivotal moment of their life. Well, I'm surely proud of those who step up and want to become an American and who are determined to assimilate themselves in the broader overall American culture, which has a lot of subcultures in it, admittedly, Mr. Speaker. But we saw the enforcement of immigration diminish over these administrations that I've talked about from Dwight Eisenhower all the way to Barack Obama. And with Barack Obama, it's different than it was under the Bush administration. The Bush administration actually accelerated it and began to enforce the law at least more aggressively than they were in the last couple of years. It was, I believe, an effort to convince the American people that they were committed to enforcing immigration law. And I don't know if their heart was ever in it, but I believe it was at least, at a minimum, an effort to establish a record and a standard that they would use enforcement so that the rule of law could be reestablished, and then upon the establishment of the reestablishment of the rule of law, might possibly be able to pass an amnesty bill that the American people would accept. I think it was a political miscalculation. I think it was a mistake for George W. Bush to give his amnesty speech that he gave on that January 5 or 6 of that year, sometime about January 5 or 6 of 2005, I believe it was. I think it was a mistake for the President to do that. I think that he should have first come out with a standard of we're not going to ask the American people to establish a new policy and grant a path to anything, to guest worker, or path to citizenship, or more of a permanent green card status until--unless and until we can establish, as a Federal Government, that the rule of law and the law enforcement personnel whose job it is to enforce immigration law will be enforced, and that those who break the law would do so with the expectation that they would be confronted by the law and punished in proportion to their crime. And I will also submit, Mr. Speaker, that a nation that doesn't have a border can't declare itself a nation. We must have a border. We must define the border, and we can't call it a border unless we defend the border. And on our side of the border, the law must prevail and justice must be blind, and it has got to be enforced by the people who are paid to enforce the law. If they decide not to do that, they are subverting our very civilization. Many of the people who come here come into the United States because they live in a country that doesn't have the rule of law, a country that has corruption, a country that's always spiraled downward into third worldism, a country that probably can't be brought up to a--what I will say is a successful, modern, civilized nation within our generation, this generation of man. Many times it's hopeless to think of it with the level of corruption and the lack of rule of law. Can't have that happen in the United States of America. Justice has been blind in America, and the rule of law has been firm, and it's been evenhanded, and it's been rigid throughout centuries. So Arizona recognized that there were Federal immigration laws that were not being enforced, despite all of the Federal officers that worked the border in Arizona, the lack of will, the lack of will that comes from the top, from the President of the United States to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security right on down the line through the Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel. You can go into the station at the Border Patrol and you can read the mission: We're going to get operational control of the border, to put it in the short version. The mission sounds good. But the mission has got to be in the heads and the hearts of the people who are carrying it out, and that's got to come from the top. I listened last week to a speech that was delivered here at the American Enterprise Institute by General Petraeus who received the Irving Kristol Award there that evening, and it's a very respectable honor that recognizes the contributions of a very respectable man, Irving Kristol. And General Petraeus is a very fitting recipient of that reward. And from memory, he made three points. As he left Iraq, and where I had first met him in 2003 where he commanded the 101st Airborne at Mosul, I think it's important to note that General Petraeus, even then, they swept in and liberated the northwest quadrant of Iraq and the Mosul region and a couple of other provinces there. That was around March 22, in that period of time. By mid to late May, General Petraeus had held an election in Mosul. That's 2003. They elected a governor, a vice governor, and I met with them and also a business representative in Mosul. He promoted very effectively liberty and freedom and a version of democracy there that could be carried out in that country. And I asked him, How did you have an election? How did you know how to do that? He said, We didn't know how. We just knew we needed to have one. We needed to have local representatives that we could deal with. It was interesting that General Petraeus set the governor and the vice governor at the head of the table. He sat on the side of the table to send the signal that the Iraqis were running the show even then, even within months of the time that they had been liberated. Well, General Petraeus' speech last week laid out three steps along the way to success, and they were points that he made as he holed up at Fort Leavenworth there in Kansas, not that far from me, I would add. And he and others that he gave significant credit to wrote the COIN language, the counterinsurgency booklet that was so well published and distributed across the country. Over a million copies have been distributed, and I've read fair parts of it. But he laid out this point that first you've got to get the big things right. You've got to articulate the mission. You've got to plan the mission. The mission's got to be right. It's got to be understood. You have to get the big things right. Then you've got to market it and sell it to the people who have to carry it out. That's step number two. Step number three is see to it that the mission is carried out, right down to the details. But first, you've got to define the mission, and then you have to market the mission to the people who are going to carry it out, and then you have to follow up to make sure that the mission is carried out down to the details. Well, the mission that we have in border security and immigration enforcement in America is not clearly articulated. Congress can pass legislation, which we did in the Secure Fence Act that establishes that we're going to build 854 miles of double fencing, in some cases triple fencing, and that the Secretary of Homeland Security had to certify when they had operational control of the border. Operational control of the border. And there's a good definition in the Secure Fence Act that defines ``operational control of the border.'' But it suffered an amendment to it over in the Senate that weakened the Secure Fence Act that was Duncan Hunter's major effort here in the House of Representatives. The definition of ``operational control of the border'' was reduced and subverted. And the result was that the mission that Congress laid out for the border protection personnel altogether was ill defined because of the squabbles from within. So we weren't able to get the big thing right, the first thing right. We were not able, as a Congress, to define the mission. Even though we tried and we voted on it here in the House and we passed a very clear mission, but it was subverted over in the Senate, and it's been undermined by some of the people on the border. And the effort to require that before you could build a fence you have to negotiate with the local political subdivisions and local people, and that local includes the people on the south side of the border? I don't think there's any merit to going to Mexico and asking them if we can protect our border. That's just an added mission that undermines the mission. So what we have are custom border protection personnel, border patrol agents, ICE agents, others along the border, including our National Parks personnel that are swimming upstream against a high tide of illegal people and drugs pouring through there. Maybe they understand the mission, but they do not believe, nor do they have the confidence, that the higher-ups will support them. And so they are out there every day, punch the clock, do their shift, do what they can do, plug the hole here, plug the hole there. But there isn't anyone in this administration from the White House on down that has defined how we actually accomplish this mission of controlling our borders and shutting off illegal immigration in America. Now, I don't think it happens to be all that complicated, Mr. Speaker. I think you have to have the will. And so the first thing to do is shut off the bleeding at the border. And as Congressman Phil Gingrey from Georgia so articulately said, and I'm confident he's worked--he's a doctor. I'm confident he's worked in the emergency room. He said, when somebody comes in that's a victim of an accident and they wheel him in on the gurney and they're bleeding all over the place and they're bleeding all over the floor and bleeding from several places in their body, he said the first thing that you don't do is grab the mop and the bucket and start to clean up the mess. The first thing you do is stop the bleeding. Get the patient stabilized and get it under control. And once you get it stabilized, then you can worry about cleaning up the mess. Well, we have a lot of discussion about what to do about cleaning up the mess, and we don't have a lot of discussion about what to do to stop the bleeding. So here are the places where the bleeding exists so we can do something to stop it. First on the border is this. We have had--and I don't know that I have confidence in the numbers in the last--during this administration. They're telling me that they have fewer interdictions at the border; therefore, that shows there are fewer border crossings. I suspect that if you just stopped enforcing the law you would have fewer interdictions on the border. They've never given me a real number of how many come across the border and how many are stopped in their attempt to cross the border. But I do a lot of asking, and we do have testimony before the Immigration Subcommittee. We have numbers such as this, that we have as many as 4 million illegal border crossing attempts a year, as many as 4 million. Now, some of those could be people trying more than once. In fact, I know it is. And when I asked the Border Patrol what percentage of those attempts are you able to stop? On the record, they'll say, We think about 25 percent. But when I go down to the border and I ask those who are engaged in this on a daily basis what percentage do you stop, they will look at me. And I'll say, 25 percent? They'll look at each other and laugh and they'll snicker and they will say--the most common number I get is it's more like 10 percent that we stop on their way across the border. And some will tell me it's 3 to 4 percent, but I've never had anyone tell me in private that they think they stop 25 percent or 20 or 15. I can't think of a number above 10 percent, but I can think that the number that I most often hear is 10 percent. So if we have 4 million illegal border crossings a year and we stop 10 percent of that, that's not a very big number, Mr. Speaker. And it's not very good efficiency on what we need to be doing down there on the border. We need to look at this from this standpoint: What would you do to stop the bleeding? Number one thing, shut the border off. It's not that hard to figure out. Why can't we do that? Someone said it's only 2,000 miles, as if that's a vast, undefendable territory, and it's not. Look at the territory that we're defending in places like Iraq and in Afghanistan, for example. A lot of that border is really easy to defend. It's not very difficult terrain. It's wide open desert on both sides where you can see a long ways. And we are spending $12 billion on the southern border every year to protect it. That works out to be, a 2,000-mile border, $6 million a mile. That's when you add up the cost of the Border Patrol, customs and border protection, the Humvees and the pensions and the payroll and all the fuel and the gas and everything that goes into this, and a support network of helicopters, et cetera, it adds up to around $12 billion, and that's $6 million a mile. Now I don't know the most current numbers that we've had on what it takes to build an interstate highway or a four-lane highway, but it's not $6 million a mile. The cost to defend the southern border, and I think it's probably less than half of that price, Mr. Speaker, at least in some of those older numbers that I've looked at, but for the cost of what we're spending to defend the southern border, we could pave a four-lane highway for 2,000 miles a year every year. This is every year. $6 million a mile. Now I ask myself, if Janet Napolitano came to me and said, Congressman King, I want to contract this border control with you, and I'd like to give you a mile to start out. And it's just a mile that looks like the gravel road from my house west that nobody lives on for a mile, or it's a mile of open desert, and I'm going to give you $6 million to see to it that nobody crosses that mile for a year. Now on second thought, since the government does these budgets over a 10-year period of time, give me a 10-year contract to guard a mile of border and give me $60 million to watch that border for 10 years, a mile of it. Mr. Speaker, I will submit, $60 million would be more than adequate to seal that border up so nobody got across my mile. I would guarantee it. I'd bond it. I'd be willing to watch you dock my pay if anybody got across and got away. And if I'm in the private-sector business industry, I'm not going to create this huge enterprise of hiring people and putting Humvees underneath them and all of the trappings that go along with that. Yes, you need some. We need some boots on the ground. We need to protect and defend them and give them good equipment. And we know that their lives are on the line every day. And we've got to respect them and appreciate them and pray for them. But, Mr. Speaker, building empire with boots on the ground isn't the only way to solve this problem. In fact I will submit it's not the most cost effective way. The most cost effective way would be to do what a businessman would do. If Janet Napolitano handed me $60 million and said, Guard that mile for 10 years, you can bet that I would put up, not just a fence; I would build a concrete wall. And I would put some wire on top of that wall, and I would have a road, and I'd have a wire fence behind that road, and I would have cameras and monitors and vibration-sensing devices. I would have all of the electronics necessary to send me signals if anybody came and tried to get over, under, around, or through that wall. And so would anybody else that would do a cash flow calculation on how best to defend the border. Well, anybody except Boeing, for example, who spent a lot of money down there, a lot of money convincing this Congress that they should accept a virtual fence and that virtual fence so far has been a bust. And as much as I appreciate and respect Boeing when it comes to airplanes and tankers, the job down there on the border, they've got some making up to do. We would have been better off if we had spent a couple million dollars a mile to build the concrete wall that I designed and put the wire on top of there and build the sensory devices and build a road behind that and then put a fence in there so that there would be a zone that if you got over the concrete wall, you took some other equipment to get over the fence that's there, and we could defend it. We could patrol it. That's what we needed to do. For a couple of million dollars a mile, we could set that system up. And that leaves $4 million a year left over. Now it doesn't mean that I'm going to be able to do all that without hiring people and paying wages to guard that mile, but let's just say we spent $2 million a mile to put in a wall and a fence and a road and some sensory devices. That still leaves $4 million left over for that year to hire some help, buy a few Humvees, get some radios, some uniforms, some pension plans, all these things that go into it. So I will submit that it's cash flows, Mr. Speaker, to build a wall, build a fence, because it reduces the number of personnel necessary, and it's far more effective. It is far more effective from a cash flow standpoint, from an American taxpayer dollar invested standpoint, to put the infrastructure in place, to maintain the infrastructure. And we had the Corps of Engineers come out with some wild number that it would cost something like $50 billion to maintain the fencing on the southern border. It was a ridiculous number. And there were no numbers to back that up, no numbers to support it. It was a wild number that they pulled out of the sky. I build things. We do Corps of Engineers work. Well, I have in the past. I am now out of that construction business. But I designed a concrete wall that one could put the footing in with the slip form and drop in precast panels and put the wire on top, lay the sensors in there and build that thing, and it wouldn't take us much to put together a crew that could build a mile of that a day. Now that would be not the kind of all-hands-on-deck effort that you see in, oh, a Manhattan Project or a NASA project, or even the kind of effort that they're using to put out the leak in the gulf right now. This is just a little old construction company that would set the system up and toss those panels in, set them in with a crane, one after the other right on down the border. It's not that hard. And it's not that expensive. And it is very effective. And it lets the Border Patrol concentrate on those areas where they would be going through and going under and going around. And it would reduce that traffic dramatically, especially concrete, because you don't cut through that with a torch or a hacksaw; you have to have a concrete saw. And I don't know one that doesn't make noise or vibration, so we would have those kind of sensors that are there. And to those people that will argue that if you show me a 20-foot wall, I'll show you a 21-foot ladder--oh, I think it was perhaps Janet Napolitano that said, if you show me a 12-foot wall, I'll show you a 13-foot ladder, that has got to be the weakest, most specious argument I've ever heard. I've heard people on both sides of the aisle that will make that argument. And so I asked the question of the chief of the Border Patrol at a hearing at Ellis Island a few years ago; that if we can build an impermeable barrier from heaven all the way down to hell that no one could go under, no one could go over, and no one could get through it, how many Border Patrol does it take to man that impermeable barrier for our southern border? The answer that I got back was, It still takes boots on the ground. In fact, it still takes more boots on the ground, because that's the argument. Well, I want enough boots on the ground. I want enough Border Patrol. I'm ready to put the National Guard down there again and guard that border. I'm ready to turn that southern desert into a training ground for Afghanistan and Iraq. We should have done that a long time ago. That all makes sense to me. But if you follow what I've said, an impermeable barrier all the way from heaven to hell--that you couldn't dig under and you couldn't go over the top--the full length of 2,000 miles on our southern border, how many people does it take to watch that? I know. It's hypothetical and it's theoretical, but the answer within those parameters, Mr. Speaker, is zero. It takes nobody to watch the impermeable barrier that they can't go under and they can't go over. That means it takes zero personnel to watch something like that. That's the hypothetical answer that needs to come. Now we know we don't have that kind of a barrier. We know we can't build that kind of a barrier. But my point that I'm making for those who would willfully deny the utter logic of this is that the better the barrier, the fewer the personnel. And I don't argue that we have to build 2,000 miles of border fence and control. We just build it where they are crossing the most and we keep building it, building the length of it, until they stop going around the end. If that's 2,000 miles, then it's 2,000 miles. If it's 854 miles as described by the Secure Fence Act, then it's 854. But that kind of barrier makes the personnel we have more effective; it allows us to get control of our border. It can force all traffic through our ports of entry, and that's what we've got to do. And we've got to beef up our ports of entry, beef up our surveillance and our technology at our ports of entry so that we can catch those drugs and the illegal people and the contraband that's going through those ports of entry. That's part of our job. We can do that. Now under this plan that I've laid out, with the money we have, we could easily build all of the barriers on the border that we deem are appropriate and effective and useful and we should and must do that, and we still have money left over for the personnel that we have, and we'll be more effective in what we do. We can shut off the bleeding at the border. The next thing that needs to happen, Mr. Speaker, is we've got to then shut off the jobs magnet. And some of that can be done at the same time. There's no reason we can't do it simultaneously. This effort on the part of the Obama administration to steer away from enforcing against illegal workers but go against the actual employers without bringing the illegal workers into this--when I say that the raids in Postville were inappropriate, unjust, maybe they'll argue that they're racially motivated. I'm out of patience with people that play the race card the first time. You can deal them out a deck, and out of 52 cards, somehow they will lead with the race card every time as if the race card is trump. Well, the rule of law has got to be trump, and the rule of law is justice is blind. Justice is blind and does not regard race as a factor. The Arizona law prohibits the utilization of race as a sole factor when it comes to evaluating reasonable suspicion. And these officers know what reasonable suspicion is. I happen to have written the reasonable suspicion law in Iowa with regard to workplace drug testing. It's very similar to the Arizona statute and the definition that they are utilizing, which is Federal case law on reasonable suspicion. And in 12 years in Iowa, even though we're not using law enforcement officers to define a reasonable suspicion, what we're doing is asking the employer to designate an employee--the employer himself or herself or an employee--as their specialist in drug abuse in the workplace. And if they see behaviors that are erratic, that are indicators of drug abuse--maybe the look of their eyes, their pupils, the dilation of the pupils, maybe erratic work habits, showing up late, production going down, things of that nature, let alone accidents where people can get hurt or killed--they just simply say to that employee, I have a reasonable suspicion that you're using drugs, and you need to go into the nurse's office or downtown to the clinic right now and provide a urinalysis, and we will test it and find out if you're abusing drugs. In 12 years, we haven't had a constitutional issue, we haven't had any litigation, I haven't heard a complaint about one person being unjustly targeted under reasonable suspicion for race or any other cause. Or even because of personalities. And you have to know, Mr. Speaker, that even in Iowa there are companies where that personnel who manages the ``reasonable suspicion'' definition, whose job it is under Human Resources to do that evaluation and make the call, that individual, yes, they're trained, but surely we would have one that would be a racist like all of these cops in Arizona have been described to be, by the people who oppose this Arizona immigration law. Surely there would be one that would have a personality disagreement with an employee, and they would like to get even with them by making them go take a drug test at will. But none of those objections have been raised. So it's hard for me to accept the idea that trained law enforcement officers--it might be the janitor or the nurse or the truck driver that's pointing his finger at an employee and saying, You go take a drug test. That's what's going on in Iowa without complaints or objections. In Arizona, these are trained law enforcement officers whose training is being focused because of an executive order of Governor Jan Brewer, and they are very sensitive to these issues. They understand this law, and they're going to understand it even more before it goes into effect in August. A lot of them are Hispanic themselves. And to presume that law enforcement officers are racist and racially motivated is a division among the American people that's caused and perpetrated by people who would sow seeds of discontent and distrust and untruth and dishonesty for political gain. That, Mr. Speaker, is what's going on in Arizona. The law that they passed in Arizona is a law that mirrors Federal immigration law. It directs local law enforcement to enforce immigration law, and it also allows the citizens of Arizona--it gives them standing to sue if the local government is not enforcing immigration law to the standards defined. Now, I understand that law enforcement thinks they're in a squeeze, that they might be sued because they will be accused of discriminating; and on the other hand, they might be sued because they didn't discriminate. That might be what we've already heard down there. But it's my experience that when you bring a law like this--and I've had that experience happen to me at least two times in other circumstances. One is the drug testing law that brought out people that were aggressively opposed to it and accused that it would be setting things up for discrimination based on personalities, race or any other reason. And then when we passed the official English law in Iowa that took 6 years to get there--finally it became law--there were a lot of objections from some of the more liberal members of the Latino community. I sat with them, and I listened to their voices over and over again. But of all the fears that they voiced over all of those months and years, there hasn't been a single report that's come back since then that anybody was disparaged or discriminated against because someone said to them, Well, English is the official language of the State of Iowa. And so these fears didn't come to fruition there. The same kinds of arguments that were made in Iowa as are being made in Arizona today on their immigration law, the same kinds of arguments over the official language of English, the same kinds of arguments that were being made in Iowa over the reasonable suspicion language on Iowa's drug testing law, none of those fears came to fruition under official English or under the drug testing reasonable suspicion in Iowa. And I can't stand here tonight, Mr. Speaker, and allege that any of those fears will come to fruition in the State of Arizona, but I can with great confidence predict that there will be far, far less going on that reflects the fears of the objectors of the Arizona immigration law than are predicted by the people that are demonstrating in the streets. I think that my friend and former colleague, Tom Tancredo, got it right when he said, You can judge their fear of the effectiveness of a law by the level of hysteria that they demonstrate. They're not demonstrating against an injustice or something that is really unconstitutional. They're demonstrating because they're afraid the law's going to work, that it will be enforced, and it will actually be effective, and it will clean up a lot of the illegal immigration in Arizona, the 460,000 that they say are there, and I suspect it's significantly more than that. And when you have across this country some of the cities that decide they want to boycott Arizona because Arizona said we want to help the Federal Government enforce immigration law, that's a reason not to buy something from Arizona? That's a reason not to go down there for a convention? I think, Mr. Speaker, it's a reason to go. I think we ought to get together and take a bus and go to Arizona and spend some money. Don't have a boycott--have a buycott. I might go down there and pick up some items from Arizona and bring them home just to express to the Arizonans my solidarity and appreciation to them for stepping up to enforce a law that the American people support, this Congress has passed, it's on the books, that President Obama took an oath of office to uphold and still willfully refuses to do so through his subordinates, such as Janet Napolitano. And I might also point out, Mr. Speaker, that tomorrow Attorney General Eric Holder comes before the House Judiciary Committee. And as he comes before the Judiciary Committee, there will be a whole series of discussions and questions that will be brought out, I am confident. Eric Holder took a look at the Arizona law, and I think was responding to a direction from the President of the United States to see if he could find anything unconstitutional about the Arizona immigration law or something that was unlawful about the Arizona immigration law. So that tells me that they didn't know the Constitution very well, and they probably thought there was something in there that made all immigration law the exclusive jurisdiction of the Federal Government. Well, that's not true. It does say in the Constitution that it's the Federal Government's job to protect us from invasion, and it also says in the Constitution it's the Federal Government's job to set a uniform practice of naturalization. Now, you can tell that I drew a bit of a hesitant blank there. But let me see, article I, section 8 says ``establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.'' So that would be what it says in the Constitution, Mr. Speaker. Those are the two references that we have to immigration in the Constitution, but it doesn't make immigration law exclusive to the United States Constitution and the Federal Government. There's nothing in the Constitution that excludes the States from enforcing Federal immigration law or writing their own. It just can't supersede Federal law. And there's a case that is U.S. v. Santana-Garcia that establishes the precedent that it is implicit that local government law enforcement has the authority to enforce immigration law in the United States. It's implicit in that decision U.S. Government v. Santana-Garcia. Santana- Garcia was that side of the case, up against the United States Government. So anybody that puts on a gun and a badge and a uniform and provides for the safety and the security of the American people and has pledged to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States ought to know that when you take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, that means also the laws that are written within the parameters of that Constitution. It's implicit. When we take an oath here to this job as a Member of the United States Congress, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, as the President does--so help him God--it doesn't mean his interpretation of the Constitution as he sees it. It's not a growing, moving, changing document, as Elena Kagan believes. It's a document that is firm, and it's fixed, and it's rigid. And it's the text of what it says and what it was understood to mean at the time of ratification of either the broader document, the base document of the Constitution, and also the amendments as they were ratified. The local law enforcement still has a responsibility to step up and help enforce immigration law. It isn't a hands-off thing. They don't sit there and look around and think, Well, let me see, the State Bank of Tucson was robbed, and I'm a State highway patrol officer. So I will chase down the bandits who robbed the State Bank of Tucson because that's my job. But, oh, I pulled him over, and I was wrong. It was a mistake. I didn't even have reasonable suspicion. They actually robbed the National Bank of Tucson. No jurisdiction here. I have to let them go. Let the Federal officers go collect those robbers who robbed the National Bank, but the State Bank, of course, might be their jurisdiction. And then the city police officers, what do they do? Do they refuse to enforce speeding laws that are not perhaps the city ordinance? Does the county sheriff only serve papers and refuse to enforce the ordinances of the city when they're blatantly violated in front of them? No and no. Our law enforcement officers in this country have always cooperated with each other throughout the levels of law enforcement to the extent that they can do that in order to produce an effective enforcement of the law. That is how it has been. That is how it shall be. That's how it shall be in Arizona. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County has been enforcing those laws for a long time now, and he's taken the heat from Eric Holder, and that I think implicitly comes from President Obama. And Janet Napolitano, who knows him well, made remarks that would imply that she had come to a conclusion that there were biased violations of people's civil rights under the enforcement of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. There is no basis for it, but they stirred up enough furor that a few of the American people began to believe that there was a basis for it. I went down and took a look at Tent City down in Phoenix. And if I remember my numbers correctly--and this is from memory, not from notes, Mr. Speaker, so it's subject to correction--but about one- third of the inmates in Tent City were there because they were illegal, and about two-thirds of them were there for other reasons. A peaceful group of people. They're there in striped uniforms, and they do get some pink underwear. It's not the nicest place, and it doesn't need to be the nicest place. We don't want to advertise it as a place to come back to. It's a place to leave and not come back to. That's why we have jails. But this situation in Arizona, we've got to stand with them. I stand with Governor Brewer. I stand also with Representative Pearce in Arizona for the work that he has done. And he is very, very articulate in stepping up to defend immigration law. I encourage and look forward to making a new effort to establish a new fence and barrier on the border, one that works out to be a cash flow. And I also look forward to moving legislation in the aftermath of this November election that adopts the New IDEA Act. The New IDEA Act is the legislation that I have introduced in the last couple of cycles, and there aren't very many new ideas under the sun. It takes a little audacity to declare a bill a new idea, but I think it is a new idea. But I think it is a New IDEA. And New IDEA stands for the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act; New IDEA. What it does is it recognizes that there are agencies out there that are pretty aggressive in enforcing their turf. I have noticed that the IRS is pretty aggressive in enforcing their turf, the Internal Revenue Service. So I asked myself, of all of these agencies, which one would be the most aggressive. It comes back to me that the IRS would be useful people. It is like when you go to have a pickup game and you start choosing up sides. I look across here and I think, Who do I want on my team if I want to get something done? If I am going to have to defend the border, give me the military first. They will get the job done. I don't want to get into the argument about the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or Coast Guard. They all get the job done. So if I were to chose, I would say first give me the military. Let us go to the border and let's seal the border with the military. They will get the job done. Then I would look around at who else would I like to pick for my team. Of all the government agencies, if I want somebody to help me enforce immigration law, would I pick somebody from the EPA? No. They would stand in the way. Would I pick somebody from the USDA? No, not likely. But of all of those agencies, maybe somebody from the Department of Homeland Security. Yes, but at the top they are not given a very defined mission. It looks as though their mission is being subverted by the Secretary, Janet Napolitano. So I would pick the IRS for my team because they are effective. They are good at doing what they do. Here is how I would bring the IRS into this effort to help control immigration law. This legislation, the New IDEA Act clarifies and establishes the wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax deductible for income tax purposes. And so let's just say you have an employer that has been paying a million dollars a year out to a good number of employees at a rate of $10 an hour. That million dollars a year is tax deductible because it is a business expense like electricity, heat, fuel, or merchandise that is purchased for resale. All of those things are business expenses. New IDEA clarifies that the wages and benefits paid are not tax deductible. So the IRS would come in, and during the course of their normal audit, they would take the list of employees, punch the Social Security numbers of those employees into the E-Verify database, and if it comes back that they are not lawful to work in the United States, the IRS would take those wages and say, Sorry, employer, this million dollars is not tax deductible for you. So it goes from the expense side, pushed over into the column that makes profit. If you calculate that profit, at the time I did this, it was 34 percent corporate income tax rate, and you add the interest and penalty, the effect of that million dollars denied as a tax deduction becomes an addition of about $6 an hour. So your $10 an hour illegal becomes a $16 an hour illegal because of the audit of the IRS. And, by the way, it is required to grant safe harbor to an employer who uses E- Verify in a legitimate, reliable way. So we give the employer safe harbor if he uses E-Verify. We give the IRS the authority to deny that deductibility if they are not able to work lawfully in the United States. And we put interest and penalty on there as well as the tax liability. Your $10 an hour illegal becomes a $16 an hour illegal. And what will happen all across this country is 8 million illegals will be looking for work, and there will be 8 million jobs that will open up for American workers, lawfully present people who can work in America with a green card or American workers. That solves about half of our unemployment problem right there, and it legitimizes the employers and gives them something they can count on. There are some things that need to be cleaned up with that, in addition, Mr. Speaker. Another one is E-Verify must be changed so employers can use it on legacy employees, that means current employees, and also use E-Verify with a bona fide job offer, rather than the law right now requires the employer to hire the worker and then find out whether they are legal or not. By that time, the employer has invested training in them and they have passed up somebody else to fill that job. So they will have somebody there for perhaps a week, they will have to pay them, and so the employer ultimately has to break the law to find out if they are breaking the law. They need to be able to use E-Verify with a bona fide job offer. They need to be able to use E-Verify to verify those legacy employees that work for them now, their current employees. We can do all this. We can seal the border with a concrete wall and a secondary and a tertiary fence where it matters. We can put sensory devices there. We can build a road to patrol it. We can put cameras up and monitor it. We can man it effectively; in fact, more effectively with fewer personnel than we have if we build the barrier. We need to shut off the jobs magnet in the interior. We can do that by enforcing current law and by passing E-Verify to establish that the IRS is part of a team member that would be required to cooperate with the Social Security Administration and with the Department of Homeland Security. So the right hand, left hand, and middle hand all knew what the other was doing. It is pretty simple to solve this problem. It has been solved in 60 minutes, Mr. Speaker, and if anybody has any questions, they can easily visit my Web site, Steveking.com, where I will be happy to answer any questions that might come up. Meanwhile, I appreciate your attention on this subject matter, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House, and I appreciate my colleague from Texas holding the ground until I come here to hold a little ground with him. I always stand on the same ground as my friend, Judge Gohmert. In fact, all of the way from wading to shore on a free Cuba to climbing a mountain in the Himalayas, and all that free country in between and a bunch of it that is not. I came tonight to talk about a couple of subject matters. One of them that is on the front of my mind is the tax situation here in the United States. We are watching and we watched as the two Bush tax cuts were passed over the last 8 or so years, the 2001 and then the 2003 tax cuts. May 28, 2003, is when the effective ones were passed, the reduction in capital gains, dividend taxes and a series of things. And of course the language that is there on the estate taxes which are suspended for this year, and they go on in full force at the end of this year, and nothing has yet been done. Something does need to be done. I am for a complete abolishment of the estate tax, Mr. Speaker, and I am for the reinstatement or the extension of the Bush tax cuts, if we can get them. But we have watched as the former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, as he was coming in to be the chair, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), traveled around through all of the talk radio circuits and the talk television circuits, and they asked him over and over again, Which of the Bush tax cuts would you like to preserve and which ones would you like to see go away or end? There never was a definitive answer, Mr. Speaker, but the process of elimination brought people to a conclusion over the period of November 2006 until about February of 2007 that there really wasn't a Bush tax cut that soon-to-be Chairman Rangel would support. So we are watching now the eventual sunset of those very effective economic stimulating tax cuts that went in on May 28, 2003. Capital understands when it gets more expensive and less of it gets invested. When less capital is invested, then there are fewer technological advances and the productivity of the American worker goes down and it makes us less competitive as a Nation. It is awfully hard to measure that, but what we can see from that period of time of November 2006 until mid- to late February of 2007, we saw industrial investment go down and the decline in industrial investment was precipitated, the economic decline that came about, about the time that Speaker Pelosi first took the gavel. We can see the data that indicated that there was less capital investment because in part--not entirely but in part--Chairman Rangel signaled to the investment world that taxes were eventually going to go up, and the cost of capital would go up. There would be less capital invested, and that means with less capital invested, it reduces the productivity of the American worker. Reduction in American worker productivity means we are less competitive as a Nation. That means other cultures, other economies, other civilizations would be ascending and the United States would either slow or diminish its ascent economically or decline. And then we saw the economic crisis. The calamity that goes back into the seventies with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act and then on the heels of that came, with the Community Reinvestment Act, the effort to encourage bankers to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods and deal them off on the secondary mortgage market to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who had underwriting requirements that were a little too stringent for some groups in the country, particularly a group know as ACORN. And so ACORN came to this Congress and lobbied for a couple of things in the early and mid- nineties under the presidency of Bill Clinton. They weren't having a lot of success under Ronald Reagan, but under Bill Clinton they were successful enough that they were able to get the Community Reinvestment Act rewritten that put even more requirements for the lenders to make more bad loans in more bad neighborhoods and prop up real estate whose asset value couldn't support the mortgage on it. While that was going on, ACORN was also lobbying here in this Congress, by their view successfully, to lower the underwriting standards for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And they succeeded in doing that. Some in this Congress wanted to tighten the standards and wanted to move them toward complete privatization, which they used to be. And some in this Congress wanted to move Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to complete nationalization. There was a debate here on this floor. There were several debates on this floor. The one that comes to mind for me was October 26, 2005, when at the time Congressman Jim Leach from Iowa had an amendment on the floor to raise the underwriting requirements for Fannie and Freddie, raise the capitalization requirements for Fannie and Freddie so that they would become a more viable economic institution and to move them away from what appeared to be coming, which would be the Federal Government, the taxpayers, eventually having to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Well, that amendment that was offered by Mr. Leach and supported by myself and also Mr. Latham of Iowa and others, did fail here on the floor in the face of a very aggressive rebuttal that came to the floor in the form of the current Financial Services Committee chairman Mr. Frank, who said during that debate, if you are going to invest in Fannie and Freddie, don't count on me bailing them out, I will never vote to do a government bailout of Fannie and Freddie. Well, ``never'' is a word that shouldn't be used by people in this business, Mr. Speaker. And I don't bring it up to be particularly critical of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank. I point it out because ``never'' didn't last very long. It lasted maybe 4 years, moving on 5. But when President Obama signed the executive order that finally swallowed up all of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and we had to go in and bail them out at the end of the Bush administration, that is true. The Executive order before Christmas swallowed up the rest of this, and the Federal Government, the taxpayers of America, took on $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities with Fannie and Freddie. Now they are completely, no longer a quasi GSE, but they are completely owned entities within the Federal Government and the taxpayers are on the hook for all of it. Now, let's presume that Fannie and Freddie could be operated at a profit. Gee, that would be nice. But we know how government works when it comes to profit. They don't have the right incentives, and eventually it can't work. So the Community Reinvestment Act was passed in the seventies, refreshed in the nineties under Clinton which put more pressure on lenders to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. ACORN lobbied for that. ACORN also lobbied to lower the underwriting standards so that Fannie and Freddie could swallow up the secondary market. Fannie and Freddie did that, and today the Federal Government owns more than 50 percent of all of the home mortgages in the United States and the taxpayers are on the hook for the default of those mortgages in the United States. We also had mark-to-market accounting which was put in place during that same period of time. Mark-to-market accounting is a system whereby on your balance sheet you have to write down the marks and what the actual bids are for those commodities. So, Mr. Speaker, I would put it this way. I happen to know a bank in the area, in the Midwest, that had $60 million worth of commercial paper. That commercial paper had always performed, it had always paid and drew a reasonable interest rate. It would be the equivalent of a very effective, well-established company that had an operating loan that they funded through this commercial paper. It had a market and a value to it, and the value was $60 million. And that was on the balance sheet of the lending institution. But when we saw the downward spiral and the threat that could have been a crisis in credit in America, there was not--temporarily there was not a market for that commercial paper. So that lending institution, even though commercial paper had always performed, even though the company was viable and made their loans, the value of that had to be marked from $60 million down to zero, let me just say, figuratively speaking, overnight; $60 million down to zero. Now there is no asset value. We had lenders that were being pressured by FDIC regulators coming in to turn up the capitalization requirements to the banks and require them to, let's say, solidify their balance sheets and to make up for the missing $60 million. It was a temporary situation. And to make sure, Mr. Speaker, that people can understand what mark- to-market accounting is, I would use this example. I think whether you are a city person or whether you are a country person, whether you are a farm or some other type of economics, you can understand this. I come from corn country, and so let's just say that under mark-to-market accounting rules it would work like this: If a farmer had 100,000 bushels of corn in his bin, stored on his farm, dried, 15 percent moisture in good condition, he would look at that, and let's just say the market price for that corn was $4 a bushel. So in those bins on storage in the possession of this farming operation, there would be then $400,000 worth of corn. That is 100,000 bushels at $4 a bushel. That could go on the farmer's balance sheet at that amount, and you may want to mark it down less shrink and less the basis to the marketplace. But for simplicity sake, $400,000 worth of corn on the balance sheet, stored in the bin in good condition. Now, that's all real fine, but along comes a flood, maybe a flood like we've seen in the tragedy in Tennessee, who the folks down there our hearts go out for, Mr. Speaker. But along comes a flood, and it washes out all the bridges all the way around the farm, and it washes out the bridges in the area. So the grain elevator where the bids were coming from at $4 a bushel is shut down. They're operating. They're in good shape. They've got their generators running, and their grain storage is okay. But no trucks can go to haul any grain. Nothing can move. And so magically, there would be no bids for the corn a day after the flood washed out the bridges, and there would be no bids for corn until the bridges were put back in place. That could take months, or it could take days, depending. Well, let's just say a couple of months before the bridges can be put back together. In that period of time, that corn would sit there. It would be in good condition. It would be worth $400,000 someplace else, but not $400,000 sitting there, because he didn't have a bid where he delivered the corn. He can't get it out. So this farmer that had $400,000 worth of asset value would have to write that down to zero on his balance sheet. Meanwhile, the bridge is still open to go to the bank. You need to borrow money to operate from so you can pay your bills. But he couldn't borrow the money because his asset value had gone from $400,000 down to zero, even though that corn would have some value when the bridges were put back together. That's what mark-to-market accounting does. It accelerates the downward spiral with market trends going down and distorts them and takes us down into the economic decline, or it accelerates the upward spiral and distorts the markets that way, because when you get temporary upticks in the market, then the assets go up almost immediately in direct proportion, which increases the borrowing capacity of that balance sheet. We need a better system. The mark-to-market accounting system was abolished in 1938. It came back on us again in the Clinton era, and when it did so, it helped set the foundation for the economic crisis that we have been in. And now here we are with the President having spent a couple of trillion dollars or more, taking over the economy of the private sector in the United States--not all of it, but certainly a majority of the private sector activities have been taken over. It started the end of the Bush administration, accelerated in the Obama administration, and we have three large investment banks--AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. You've got all of the student loans swallowed up in America, and General Motors and Chrysler were taken over by the Federal Government, with 61 percent of the shares of General Motors owned by the Federal Government. That's the taxpayers' investment. And when General Motors is running an ad that says they've paid off their loans, yeah, they did that, all right. They paid off a loan. I don't remember the exact amount of that, but it was in the low few billions of dollars. Meanwhile, the taxpayers are still holding 61 percent of the shares. The Canadian Government's holding 12.5 percent of the shares. The unions were gifted 17.5 percent of the shares of General Motors. And we're watching ads that say that General Motors paid us back? Well, then, why didn't Tim Geithner sell those shares of General Motors into the open market? Why doesn't he divest the Federal Government from their ownership in General Motors? If this administration doesn't believe that they should be in the private sector, why are they running banks, insurance companies? Why have they taken completely over Fannie and Freddie? Why are they running two car companies? Why did they take over the student loans? Why did they nationalize our bodies? Mr. Speaker, that's not a misstatement, and it's one perhaps for those who have not heard of this before, they should pay attention a little to the description. But the most sovereign thing we have, the most valuable thing we have is our health, our physical body. And part of our freedom is to be able to buy a health insurance policy that suits our needs and make the demands of the insurance companies that there's a market for what we want to buy so they produce a policy that meets our demands. Up until a month ago, there were 1,300 health insurance companies in the United States and approximately 100,000 policy varieties that could be chosen from. So if you're a consumer out there on the market, you could look around at those 1,300 companies and decide which one you'd like to do business with, weigh the merits of their policy, settle on the company, look through the variety of policies, and between all those policies, 100,000 policy varieties, choose your policy. That's a lot of choices. You don't have that many choices in the grocery store on how many different kinds of food you want to buy, but it sure looks like choices when you walk into the grocery store. Health insurance in America has a much, much larger selection--or it was--than you find seeing single individual items in the grocery store, because the markets had demanded those kinds of varieties and the companies were seeking to meet the demand. But now under ObamaCare--in effect, by the year 2014, every health insurance policy in America will be effectively canceled by this government. They will all have to be refreshed and requalified, and there isn't a single policy that exists today that the President of the United States can point to and say, Joe, Sally, your policy, the one I told you, Don't worry, you get to keep it, you can't say that you get to keep it. Have you noticed that? Have you noticed, Mr. Speaker, there hasn't been a single policy that's been pointed to by this administration, let alone the President of the United States, that they can say to any consumer out there, This is your policy, and you can keep it. And even if they could find a policy that they could tell you you could keep, they can't tell you that it's going to not cost you any more money. They can't tell you that the premium's not going to go up. And when I make that statement, they will throw up their hands and say, Well, obviously we can't because health care costs are going up. It's a natural thing for them to go up double digits while inflation is going up single digits. But the followup to that is, Yes, you can throw up your hands and say that. But the other thing that cannot be stated by the President's spokesman or by the President or by this administration or by Speaker Pelosi or Harry Reid or anyone else, no one can make the statement that health insurance policies are not going to be increased because of ObamaCare's passage. Yes, they will be. They certainly will be. We see a community rating of seven to one today. That means that the cheapest policy is going to be one-seventh the price of the most expensive policy. This pushes it into three to one. That means that that young person that's paying for a health insurance policy that is-- let's say, if it's $100 a month, the most expensive policy out there would be $700 a month by that comparison. But with this new legislation that's there, for the $100 a month, the highest then can only be $300 a month. So we know what happens. The person down on the lower side with the cheaper premiums that is a lower risk will pay a lot more for their premium because the upside of this thing has got to be ratcheted down some. We saw some numbers, and I can only go to a generalization now because it's far enough back in my memory. These are numbers that had to do with Indiana. We saw a 23-year-old healthy young man's insurance go up almost triple, and we saw the family of four at age 40, two kids and a mom and a dad, we saw their insurance go up a significant amount, and the only people that had a lower premium would be the couple in their early sixties with marginal health that would see their premiums drop off perhaps 11 percent, which is a number I do have confidence is a correct one. So the people with the highest premiums might see an 11 percent reduction. The people with the lowest premiums might see as much as a 300 percent increase in their premiums, and that's why the President can't point to anybody's policy and say, We're not going to increase your costs. And he can't, either, guarantee that you're not going to lose your policy, because a lot of companies are going under in this. There will not be 1,300 health insurance companies doing business in the United States 5 years from now or 10 years from now. And if the President had his way, there wouldn't be anybody doing business in health insurance in America except the United States Federal Government. And if you wonder if that's a stretch of the imagination, Mr. Speaker, I can give you two examples. One of them is the Federal flood insurance program. In the early sixties, all the flood insurance in America was private sector. Property and casualty, if you wanted to insure yourself against a flood, against the river waters coming in and filling up your basement, you went to a private property and casualty insurance company that would write you up a policy and set a premium. But this Congress, ``in its wisdom''--and I say that in quotes that this Congress, ``in its wisdom,'' decided that the premiums were too high and the varieties of policies for flood insurance in the early sixties were not great enough, and so they decided to set up a Federal flood insurance program that would provide one more alternative for the consumers to put some competition into the property and casualty business with regard to flood insurance. Does that sound familiar, Mr. Speaker? I'll submit that it clearly does, because the President said he wanted one more health insurance company to provide competition for the other health insurance companies. He said we didn't have enough competition in health insurance. I don't know why he's forgotten about that. I have not, and I will not. So when the President of the United States says, We just want to add one more competitor, we don't have enough competition, and that competitor will be the Federal Government, as soon as you inject the Federal Government into the private sector--or what was the private sector in this case--then you have an unfair competitor with a comparative advantage. They don't have to be profitable. The Federal Government doesn't have to be. If they run up short, they just tap into the pockets of the taxpayer, and we run up an IOU that might be raiding the Social Security Trust Fund in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where every single dollar has been raided by this Congress. It might be borrowed money from the Saudis or the Chinese, provided they are willing to loan it to us and jack up the interest rates. They will. But the Federal Government does not have to be profitable. And they wouldn't have to be profitable with health insurance, which is an unfair comparative advantage that would drive some of the health insurance companies out, probably lots of them, and take this where the President wants it to go, single payer. The President, as a candidate, consistently argued that there should be one entity that paid for all health care in America. That would be the Federal Government taking over all of those 1,300 health insurance companies and those 100,000 policy varieties and those hundreds of millions of Americans that have legitimate health insurance programs. Eventually, the President wanted to take it all over, but he had to fall back on an argument of just providing some competition because the American people rejected that. So we're supposed to believe that the idea of wanting the Federal Government to sell insurance was just an innocent thing that was designed to provide more competition. Well, we rejected that. And by the way, the United States Senate rejected that. So we didn't end up with an ObamaCare package that has a Federal health insurance component to it other than they're regulating every single policy in America, canceling every policy in America, deciding which ones they want to renew, setting up community ratings that go from seven to one down to three to one and driving up the premiums. But what comes from all of this, Mr. Speaker? I'm taking you then back to property and casualty insurance. The private sector that used to insure all flood insurance in America saw their competitor come in. I think the year was 1963, plus or minus a year. I'm real close. And 1963 is going to hit it, actually. In 1963, the Federal Government came in and provided us one more flood insurance company to provide a little more competition to level the playing field for the people who lived in the floodplain that didn't have enough alternatives. That sounds exactly like the argument that we have today. So the Federal Government got into that business. And over a few years, the property and casualty companies, those private sector insurance companies that reflected the risks and the market in the premiums that they charged--and yes, they're in it for a profit. Thank God for profit. It's done more for the world than all the missionaries that went anywhere. As much as I believe in faith and the Lord's hand in everything that goes on on this planet, free enterprise capitalism has been a wonderful contribution to the well-being of all humanity, and it was a contributor in the flood insurance and property casualty insurance. But the Federal Government got in the business in 1963, and over a period of time--and not a very long period of time--slowly those private sector companies realized they couldn't compete with Uncle Sam because they had to make a profit and they had to charge premiums that reflected the risk. So they dropped out, and for a long time, and certainly today, we cannot--no one in America can go out and buy flood insurance from the private sector. It all is sold by the Federal Government. The Federal Government has taken over the flood insurance program in America lock, stock and barrel, root and branch, all of it. Every single vestige of flood insurance is all controlled by the Federal Government today. They set the premiums not by risk. They set the premiums by whatever bureaucrats think they ought to be, and they don't have to be profitable. So that would explain why they are $19.2 billion in the red in the Federal flood insurance program, and it would explain why in my district, FEMA has come out and has a new ruling that broadens the floodplain dramatically. It's just breathtaking to look at the map of the floodplain that was in blue--and, by the way, national banks that are making loans on mortgages that go into these floodplains require flood insurance to be paid and premiums to be paid. So when they're in the red $19.2 billion and they can't figure out how to charge premiums that reflect the risk and be able to get by with it because people probably can't afford those premiums, but they've expanded and developed their real estate in the floodplain based upon those premiums, having trouble raising the premiums on the people that owe the national banks money that had to buy them, so FEMA puts out a new map, a new map that widens the floodplains dramatically. These tiny little narrow areas become wide areas in the whole river valleys. And in one area, just one area within one of my 32 counties, there are 2,200 individual real estate parcels, most of them rural, that are now in a new floodplain created by FEMA's map and ruling, 1,100 property owners, 2,200 new properties, all of them now in a situation where they're going to have trouble expanding and building. A lot of them are going to have to pay increased premiums for flood insurance that they didn't even have to buy before because they were out of the floodplain, and the Federal Government cashes in. If I take this plan that they're trying to implement in my district and if I multiply it across all the real estate in the United States where it is awfully hard to use, the model that they use goes clear back to the early 1970s. It's nearly 40 years old, this model. The technology that they use is nearly 40 years old, so I can only guess. If I use what they have in one of my counties as a measure, it looks to me like FEMA will be able to collect enough premiums that they can, maybe, recover their $19.2 billion and more. Maybe FEMA will make so much money off of this that they'll be able to help subsidize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Don't hold your breath, Mr. Speaker, but this is 40-year-old technology. We know this: anybody who has ever filled any sandbags and who has fought a flood knows, first, that the adrenalin rushes up in your blood. As the water is coming up, your adrenalin boils up in you, too, and you work harder and more feverishly as the water comes up. Many times, those sandbags along there are just, maybe, high enough, an inch or two, because you're stacking them on there as the water comes up. They're maybe 5, maybe a half an inch or a half a foot, maybe 5 inches or a half a foot--or even a foot. Do you know, Mr. Speaker, that the FEMA model is so imprecise and of such ancient technology that their accuracy is within plus or minus 10 meters? That's 10 meters. Now, I didn't do the precise multiplier on it, but let's just say it's 30 feet, plus or minus. Let's just say they're right on the average. Let's just say I stand on this floor, and they say, Well, the flood might be here or it could be 10 meters up. Well, in looking at the ceiling of this Chamber, they could be that far off. They could be off more than 30 feet on the elevation of the water that they're predicting. Meanwhile, we have the Corps of Engineers, which has hydraulic models that can tell us whether we can build in a floodplain and what the flow is and how we might have to construct our structures so that we don't constrict the flow when we have a flood. They can tell us where the 100-year flood event is and where the 500-year flood event is. Yet who should be surprised that FEMA and the Corps of Engineers can't get together on this and use modern technology? I'm wondering if they have the will or if it happens to be that someone decided that they could just use this 40-year-old model that is plus or minus within 10 meters and impose flood insurance premiums on a whole bunch of Americans, who are unsuspecting and who are probably unable to pay these premiums, to make up for the $19.2 billion in loss that they've got in flood insurance. Now, I tell this long story to describe what is in store for us if ObamaCare is not repealed 100 percent--every single bit of it--and done in the shortest order possible at the will of the American people. Though, before I get to how ObamaCare will transform out, it is really worthwhile for us to look back and see how the Federal Government swallows up other formerly private entities. Back during that period of time when the Federal flood insurance was passed, it was also true that education loans were private sector. If you wanted to go off to college, you went and borrowed the money from the private sector. Then they set up the student loan plan as a means to provide other alternatives so that private lenders weren't handling all of the student loans. The Federal Government came in and did that, by my recollection, at about that same period of time. What is predictable about this? What is predictable is, if the Federal Government gets into a business to compete, they have an unfair advantage, an illegitimate comparative advantage. They don't have to have profit. They don't have to balance their books. They don't have to be good at it. They just have to drive the competition out. They do what a monopolist would do. If somebody is trying to become a monopoly, they try to drive all of their competition out by underpricing, and they distort it to the point where nobody else can stay in the business. Then they're the only one in the business. Then they start to jack the prices up again. Well, it took the Federal Government a long time, but in the dark of the night, in the heat of the ObamaCare battle--in the recision legislation that slipped through this Congress without an opportunity to evaluate it--there was the sneaky piece of legislation that converted what was left of the student loan plans from the private sector into completely the maw of government, itself. So, in this period of time that I have described, we have seen the transformation of a completely private, independent-standing property and casualty flood insurance that faced a Federal Government that wanted to provide just one more competitor into the marketplace so that people had more choices and a Federal Government that swallowed it all up and that drove everybody out of business and a Federal Government that has done so, the same thing, with the student loan program in the United States. They had to hitch it onto ObamaCare to do it. What a bunch of cynics that they couldn't do something like that in broad daylight in front of all of America. No. They had to stick it in when they had the major diversionary tactic of another swallow-up of the private sector--remember, a month ago or 6 weeks ago, whatever that date was--of all of the health insurance in America. Some will say that there are exceptions--Medicare, for example. Medicaid would be another. Then you can argue whether those are insurance policies or government programs to pick people up when they're destitute and to take care of them when they reach retirement age. But for those folks who are under Medicare eligibility or who have incomes outside of Medicaid, we didn't see a Federal health insurance program except for SCHIP, which is the State Children's Health Insurance Program. This was another effort to try to close this gap. There has been effort after effort for the liberals, for the progressives--for the people who just simply deny the liberty of the American people--to take over the health care in America. Bill Clinton stood here, I believe, on September 13 in about 1993, and he gave his health care speech. He wanted to take it all over then. He turned Hillary loose with HillaryCare, and Hillary began meeting in private and in public. She actually had more public meetings, I think, than we had this time around. Although, we were quite critical of the private meetings she had, too. She wrote a bill, and that bill was the government takeover of health care. Well, they couldn't get that done. Bill Clinton came back, and he said, You know, we can't get this done, but we're going to do it incrementally. I believe in that September 13 speech he actually made the proposal-- and I know I can find it in his speeches during that era--when he wanted to lower the Medicare eligibility from 65 to 55. That's when they brought the idea of SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which is set up to buy very, very cheap health insurance for kids. They put that out through the States. In Iowa, it is known as Hawkeye with a little better than a 2 to 1 Federal match. So, when you're sitting in a State legislature, the Federal Government says, You know, help out with some of these cheap health insurance premiums for these kids who can't afford them. Otherwise, here's what we'll do. If you'll put $1 down out of your State tax coffers, we'll put $2 and change down. Let's see. I think it's 70 percent funding by the Federal Government and 30 percent by the States. The States adopted it because it was--do you remember the phrase?-- free money, Mr. Speaker. Well, nothing is free. We know that, but it was viewed as free money by the State legislatures. They adopted SCHIP. In Iowa, it was Hawkeye. Then at the same time that Bill Clinton would have liked to have dialed the Medicare eligibility age down to 55, you can see what's happening. If you reduce the age of eligibility for Medicare and if they're seeking to expand Medicaid--and they've been doing that and have been lowering the standards for eligibility to Medicaid from the lower income side of the scale--and if you make these kids eligible for SCHIP, you're squeezing this from the outside, from the middle. You're lowering the senior age to 55, and you're making sure you're insuring the kids--pick your age--well into their 20s. We had States that had as high a percentage as 66 percent of people who were not kids but adults who were on the SCHIP program. Wisconsin would be one of those States. There was another State that went higher than that. It may have been Minnesota. They had a number that went up into the 80s. I think it was 87 percent. So they were using SCHIP to expand it where they could provide health insurance premiums for people because they wanted to have a single-payer plan eventually. That's what was going on with the strategy of trying to establish this single-payer plan. In the middle of all of this, you know, the Republicans came in, and we fought some of that back. Then Nancy Pelosi was finally elected as Speaker of the House. What did she bring to us here on this floor but an SCHIP program, which had been set at 200 percent of poverty so that a family of four at 200 percent of poverty in my State would be set at about $52,000, in order to turn it up to 400 percent of poverty. It passed the House at the insistence of the Speaker, and I was the only member of the Iowa delegation to oppose it. It would have gone to 400 percent of poverty, which would have meant that a family of four in Iowa who was making $103,000 a year would have had the health insurance for their kids paid for by some taxpayer who would probably not be making that much. While that was going on, there would be people who would have to pay the rich man's tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax. There would be 70,000 families in America who would be paying the rich man's tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax. I have trouble saying ``AMT'' these days. It's the Alternative Minimum Tax. There would be 70,000 families who would be paying the Alternative Minimum Tax who would still be eligible for the SCHIP funding for health insurance for their children. Do you see where this goes? If you have the subsidy at the means testing side of this where lower income people are multiplied from 100 percent of poverty, to 200 percent, to 300 percent, to 400 percent--and by the way, we ratcheted it back down to 300 percent--and allowed $3 billion or more worth of Medicaid funding to go in and fund illegals into the market of all of that, it squeezes it against the middle. Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, someone who would be about 45 years old who would watch the eligibility of the Medicare age drop down to 55, who would watch somebody who is collecting SCHIP who is now 35 years old and who would watch those at 400 percent of poverty--families with $103,000, families of four--having their health insurance premiums paid while they would still be paying the Alternative Minimum Tax? People are looking at this, thinking, Well, the people 10 years older than I get free health care, and the people 10 years younger than I get free health care. I'm the one who's working, who's paying for my own premiums and raising my own family, and everybody else is, too. Why do I try? Do I do that because I'll have higher quality health care? Yes, that would be a good answer. The people who are responsible should live a little better than those who don't in this country. We have got to leave incentives in place. That was the strategy--to squeeze the middle, to put such a load on the people who were still paying for their own or who were earning their own health care, their own health insurance at their workplace or wherever their deal might be, that they would just capitulate, throw up their hands and say, Give me the European model. I've got it anyway. I'm paying for it for everybody else. Why am I buying my own with after-tax dollars? That is the strategy. It is so cynical to crush the spirit of people, to take away their constitutional rights and to impose upon them a national health care act. It was rejected during the Hillary era. They called it HillaryCare. They rejected it in Massachusetts, Mr. Speaker. The people in Massachusetts rejected ObamaCare. Still their hearts were hardened, and still they were determined to come down here and impose the policy on the American people. Well, I'm not letting it go. I will not let it go for a whole series of reasons, but the constitutional reasons are the most important ones. It is unconstitutional to require any American to buy a product that is either produced or approved by the Federal Government under penalty of law. It has never happened in the history of this country. It is a violation of a series of components within our Constitution--and don't think I can't come up with them, Mr. Speaker. Certainly, I know what they are. They are four places. It is a violation of the Commerce Clause because there will be and always have been babies born in States who didn't advantage themselves of any kind of health care whatsoever. They didn't participate in any commerce when it came to health care, and they maybe didn't travel outside of their States at all, so there wasn't even the risk of their going out to be eventually, potentially, picked up by ambulances in other States. The risk didn't exist, so they didn't use health care in the States they lived in. They didn't go outside the States they lived in. They lived lives long or short, healthy or not, and passed away into the next life never having engaged in interstate commerce that had anything to do with ObamaCare, which means it's a violation of the Commerce Clause, swift and certain, without a lot of hard analysis required. If the Commerce Clause doesn't apply to say that the passage of ObamaCare is verboten under the Constitution, if the Commerce Clause doesn't apply on ObamaCare, then it doesn't apply whatsoever for anything imaginable, and it's no restraint whatsoever. You would believe that if you were an activist judge. I reject that. The second part is that it's not in the enumerated powers. There is nothing there in the Constitution that defines any power to impose an obligation by any citizen or any person in the United States to buy a product that is produced by the Federal Government or approved by the Federal Government. That's the second thing. The third thing is that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. We're going to go to four here, Mr. Speaker. The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution says that all citizens whatsoever shall be treated the same regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin or the color of their skin, which is the whole list of the things that are there within title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Well, people are treated differently in the States. The Cornhusker kickback notwithstanding, still the legislation treats people differently in Louisiana than it does in the rest of the country, Florida than it does in the rest of the country, several other jurisdictions or something like eight to 11 different areas in ObamaCare that treat people differently depending upon the geography of where they live. That's forbidden under the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Fourth thing, and this is where we get to, it's a violation of the 10th Amendment. Not only is it not in the enumerated powers to impose this ObamaCare on Americans, but those powers that are not specified in the enumerated powers of the Constitution are reserved for the States or to the people respectively. And this is a violation of the separation of powers doctrine, which is in the 10th Amendment. Four places, Mr. Speaker. It's not in the enumerated powers; it's a violation of the commerce clause; it's a violation of the equal protection clause; and it's a violation of the 10th Amendment. This Supreme Court will see these cases eventually, and when they do, an honest reading of the Constitution compels the Supreme Court to overturn the ObamaCare legislation. And I understand, and I have not read every word in there, that there's not a severability clause in that. And if that's the case, any component most likely that's found unconstitutional throws the whole business out. I wish we had a provision that would put all of that paper back in the tree, Mr. Speaker, and give people back their liberty because that's what this bill does. It violates the Constitution and it takes people's liberty. It takes our freedom to buy a policy that we want. It nationalizes our body. It takes over the most sovereign thing that we have, that's our skin and everything inside it; and the Federal Government manages when we get the tests, what policies we will be able to buy, what the premiums will be. They'll regulate the premiums. They will decide what's offered in the policies, and the Federal Government will impose mandates on those policies that we don't even see in the legislation. There will be mandates there for contraceptives. There will be mandates there for mental health. There will be mandates there for drug treatment. There will be mandates there probably for physical therapy. And we see also an effort to tax your pop if it's not diet pop, tax your soda if it's not diet soda. They want to tell you what you can eat and what you can drink. The next thing they'll be doing in this super- uber nanny state is run us across the scales and tax our fat. That will actually be the simplest way. If they're going to tax our diet, I wish they would just let me alone, run me across the scales and tax me by the pound. But I want the freedom to eat what I want to eat, buy what I want to buy, live the way I want to live. And I want to be able to make my own decisions on whether I am going to exercise or whether I am going to go to a health club. And if my insurance company wants to set up an incentive for that because it's cost effective and they can offer me a lower premium, I'm quite likely to take advantage of that, and I think many Americans would do the same. But this Federal Government cannot be allowed to continue on becoming even more of a nanny state than it already is. We've got to reject that, Mr. Speaker. We've got to abolish ObamaCare. We've got to pull it out root and branch so that there's not one vestige of it left behind, not one particle, not one cell, not one DNA particle of ObamaCare left in this Federal code because if we leave it, it's the equivalent of going in and removing a malignant tumor and leaving part of it there. It still is at great risk of metastasizing; and when that happens, it's the death knell to freedom and liberty in the United States of America. We are not some other people. We are not the mirror of Europe with the stirring in of the later generations of more newly arriving immigrants, legal and illegal. We are a unique people. We have a unique character and a unique quality about us where we stand alone, apart from the rest of the world, for a lot of reasons, Mr. Speaker. Some of those reasons are self-evident, and some of those reasons are in the Declaration, and some of them are in the Bill of Rights. Some of them are actually in the Constitution in a broader sense. But just to enumerate some of those reasons for American exceptionalism, and it's not politically correct to remind people but it's necessary that we do this, that we talk American exceptionalism, a number of them are these: we have the rule of law. The foundation for that is the Constitution. The philosophy for the Constitution is in the Declaration. We have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And life is the paramount right, and it is paramount to liberty, which is more important than the pursuit of happiness. So working from the bottom of the scale up, Mr. Speaker, it works like this: someone in the pursuit of their happiness cannot infringe on someone else's liberty because liberty trumps pursuit of happiness. And, by the way, pursuit of happiness, it was understood by our Founding Fathers to go back to the Greek meaning, which the Greek word for pursuit of happiness is eudaimonia, which in its definition speaks to a search for knowledge, a search for truth, and it implies both the physical and the mental. So to be sound in body and mind and in a search for truth and a search for knowledge, that's the pursuit of happiness because they believed that out on the other end of that scale that ultimate knowledge would provide that ultimate level of happiness. And there's some wisdom in that philosophy. It's Godless, but there's some wisdom in the philosophy of achieving ultimate knowledge. Pursuit of happiness was eudaimonia, that search for knowledge. But someone in their search for knowledge, in their pursuit of happiness/knowledge, cannot travel on someone else's liberty. Liberty is more important than the pursuit of happiness. And someone in the search for their liberty cannot use that liberty to take someone else's life. Individual life is too precious. It cannot be taken by someone because they say they have a liberty. Neither can someone who is in pursuit of their happiness take someone else's liberty because it makes them happy. Our liberties are guaranteed here, and the infringement upon them is that we have to respect life more than liberty. We have to respect liberty more than the pursuit of happiness. Those are prioritized rights that are self-evident that come from God, endowed by our creator. And here we sit in the United States with that philosophical foundation in the Declaration that was basis for our Constitution and the rights that are there that made America a great country--freedom of speech, religion, press, the right to peaceably assemble and petition government for redress of grievances, the right to keep and bear arms. Moving up the line, the right to be free from double jeopardy and to be tried by a jury of your peers. And the right to property in the Fifth Amendment, which has been amended now in the Supreme Court of the United States in the Kelo decision where they struck the words ``for public use'' out of the Fifth Amendment, which says ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' Now the effect of the Kelo decision was that Fifth Amendment has been usurped by the last nine people that should be amending the Constitution, the Supreme Court Justices--it wasn't nine, by the way, and I applaud those that opposed it. But now the Fifth Amendment reads: ``Nor shall private property be taken without just compensation.'' Mr. Speaker, I know mentally you put ``for public use'' in there, but they took it out. Local governments now occasionally, and I hope not routinely, confiscate private property, individual private property, and they give it over to other private property owners because they think they will get more tax dollars out of it. But property rights are a foundation of the success in America. And along the way, free enterprise capitalism is another foundation for the success in America. So you can buy a piece of property and it's yours. As long as you pay for it and pay the property tax on it, you get to keep it. And that can be the basis for your equity that you engage in starting businesses, setting up factories, building homes, expanding farms. Those things that have been the basis of our prosperity are rooted in the rule of law, the right to property, free enterprise capitalism. Also the moral foundation that came over for the freedom of religion rooted in our Judeo-Christian values, which are the thread of our culture today. All of those are reasons why America is a great country. Another reason is because we have skimmed the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization that has sent legal immigrants to the United States. The cream of the crop, the people with the vigor and the vitality and the dream. And they found a way to get onboard a ship or whatever means they could to come here and enter into the United States through a legal port of entry to chase their dreams. And some of them came with a significant amount of capital to give it a go. And a lot of them came with the clothes on their back and the possessions they had in their bag, like my grandmother. And as they arrived here, they began to carve out their American Dream with the kind of vision and the kind of vigor that gave them the idea to come here in the first place. This America, this land of almost unlimited natural resources, a land that has the very foundation of liberty and freedom as the essence and the core of its being, welcomed legal immigrants here who were called by that clarion call of liberty and freedom and property rights and unlimited natural resources and unlimited opportunity in a moral society that was rooted in Judeo- Christian values. And they came here and built a Nation in the blink of a historical eye, settled the North American continent, expanded manifest destiny from sea to shining sea. And all of this has attracted people to come to America. Now, we are either the first generation immigrants that came here, hopefully legally, with that vigor of that dream or the second, third, fourth, fifth, or multiple generations, the descendants of that same dream, imbued with American self-confidence and American can-do spirit and a confidence that we can face any challenge, we can bear any burden. That's the American spirit. And we cannot be capitulating to the European utopian version that's going to have a social program to fix any ill. We can't be trapped into this idea that we can sit down and produce some kind of a policy that will solve every problem. All we need to do is have our default system come back to the Constitution, come back to free enterprise, come back to individual responsibility. If we do all of those things and adhere to the Constitution itself, free enterprise capitalism, maintain our moral foundation, nurture the family unit as the means through which we pour all of our values, if we do all of that, America will be just fine. But Jimmy Carter, when he was running for President and as he was exploring the first-in-the-nation caucus and establishing that as a viable route to the Presidency in Iowa, I read in an interview back in those years in the mid-1970s where Jimmy Carter said the people that work should live better than those that don't. Now, I don't know that Jimmy Carter ever actually acted on that, but that's what he said, and it caught my attention. It was a very simple way of describing this. The people that work should live better than those that don't. Well, that's not the prevailing philosophy in this Congress any longer. It is the people that don't work need to live as well as anybody. So we have 72 different welfare programs, according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. In the mid-1990s when we reformed welfare--I wasn't here--but when this Congress reformed welfare in the mid-1990s, there wasn't the dramatic drop in the cost in welfare. It reduced it a little bit and then it stayed on a plateau and then it climbed again. The welfare has been climbing at a rate that's comparable to or greater than the rate that it was climbing going into the mid-1990s. And we have accepted this. I don't accept it but this society has. This society has also accepted rampant drug abuse so that there's a huge demand for illegal drugs coming out of Mexico, from or through Mexico. That is the core of the problem that we have with the border today and the violence on the border today, and whatever we do to help the Mexicans and seal our border, we need to do that. We need to stop the bleeding, but as long as there is a powerful demand in the United States for tens of billions of dollars in illegal drugs, then there will always be the illegal traffic coming across the border. Mr. Speaker, this is a bit of a rendition on where America is today, a little bit on how we got here, a little bit about the economics of it, a little about the history, a fair amount about what's going on with ObamaCare. This is my statement and my commitment, that I will not rest. I will continue to turn the pressure up to get the passage of the repeal for ObamaCare that I have introduced in this Congress and now should have, if I can add this up, 66 cosponsors on this legislation today. Mr. Speaker, the number of the legislation, should you choose to look it up and sign on is H.R. 4972. That's the legislation that will one day, at least the language of it if not that particular bill number, arrive at the President's desk, where this President would veto it. But with a new majority in 2011, we will have the votes in here to shut off any funding of ObamaCare so that it cannot be enacted. It doesn't become fully enacted until 2014. So 2011 and '12 this Congress, has to start all spending, by the Constitution. We say, no, there won't be any funding for the implementation of ObamaCare, so we will put it on ice for 2011 and 2012. While that's going, we will put the repeal on President Obama's desk and make him veto it. And when he vetoes it, we can take a look and see if we can override it. That will be very hard, but it's not completely impossible. But in 2012 we elect a new President and a new Congress. And that new President and new Congress need to take the pledge that I have taken, which is plank number one, full 100 percent abolishment of ObamaCare, all of it, without any hesitation, without any caveats. And let's put that on the desk of the new President, Mr. Speaker, that will be sworn in January 20 of 2013. And while he stands on the west portico--we will gavel in on January 3, 2013, in here. That's what the Constitution says we do. We will be thy then in a position where we can pass the repeal of ObamaCare, have it sitting there so that when he takes his oath of office January 20, 2013, and puts his hand down as the President of the United States, his first act, Mr. Speaker, can be to put his pen to the bill that repeals ObamaCare and sign that legislation on the spot at the podium on the west portico of this Capitol building and give America back our economic freedom, but more importantly, give us back our human liberty. That's the goal that we have to follow if we are to achieve the greatness that America has ahead of us. If not, we will be trailing in the dust the golden hopes of men and forever diminishing our opportunities, forever diminishing our potential, taking away human potential, discouraging individual entrepreneurs, people that would never realize their dreams because they would be growing up in a nanny state that has taken over the banks, the investment companies, the insurance companies, the car companies, Fannie and Freddie, the student loans, nationalize our body, our skin and everything inside it, and, by the way, put a 10 percent tax on the outside if you go into a tanning salon. All of this taken over and the financial institutions. I want it all back. I want it back for the American people, the American workers, and the American entrepreneurs. I want our spirit back. I am going to work to get it back, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate your attention.

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. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor, and I appreciate the gentleman from Texas' previous hour and his discussion on health care. By the way, the gentleman from Texas, Congressman/Dr. Burgess' contribution on this health care debate that has gone on now for months and months and months, his intensity doesn't let up. He understands the issue. He is here on a cause, and this cause is to do what we can to salvage the system that America has had and improve that system and not capitulate to this system of ObamaCare. Madam Speaker, I will take us to that, and I will cross a number of lines into different subjects here this evening. But with regard to the ObamaCare that we have heard about for the last hour and for the last 9 or so months, we have seen a Congress that has passed legislation that on the day it passed the House, it couldn't have passed the Senate. On the day it passed the House, we don't know what kind of bargains came in that brought about just barely the votes to get it passed, but we knew the President would sign it. He wanted anything that he could put his name on. By the way, the President of the United States is the one who gave the moniker to this legislation, ``ObamaCare.'' He called it ObamaCare February 25 at the Blair House at that conference on health care that seemed to have given the ObamaCare its legs. I am for 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. There isn't any part of that that I want to keep, that I want to hold, that I want to sustain or expand or continue into the next year or generation. Most of it is not enacted until the year 2014. There are some small pieces that are enacted right away, and then slowly over time. The tax increases, by the way, are enacted pretty soon so they can collect this money for the first 4 or more years and then charge only 6 years of expenses against 10 years of revenue and argue that it saves $132 billion. Now we find out that high-ranking people within the administration and possibly the President himself understood that the numbers that came in were not accurate, that ObamaCare is going to cost a lot more than they represented it to cost on the day that the legislation was passed. Now, I don't think that is the reason to repeal ObamaCare. I have always thought it was going to cost a lot more than they said it would. The reasons to repeal ObamaCare are great in number and more varied than that. But we're not going to get down to a financial calculation. In the end, there are enough people in America that think somehow they're going to get a free lunch, that they're not going to support the repeal of ObamaCare for that. But they understand this. They understand when the government runs things, there are lines. There are lines at TSA to get into the airport. There are lines to get your driver's license. There are lines outside of Federal buildings. There are lines outside the Cannon, the Longworth, and the Rayburn Building of just citizens that want to come in and watch their government function. Free people don't stand in line. Free people, Madam Speaker, will go to the next place of business. If the line is too long at McDonald's, they will go to Burger King. But when they're dealing with government, it's a monopoly. That's why the line is there. The government doesn't have any incentive to expedite the passage of people through that service, except to turn down the noise of the squeaky wheel, because government doesn't have to compete for its customers. The government has a monopoly. So free people, they don't stand in line. They go someplace else. But our freedom is diminished every time the government takes up a task that the private sector can do, and health care is certainly one of those. So, Madam Speaker, here's what I'm watching happen. This has taken place over the last year and a half. A little bit of it began under the Bush administration. But I'd start with this: $700 billion in TARP spending, half of that approved under the Bush administration, essentially down the lame duck era of his term. The other half of it-- that was right before the election, if I remember right. The other half of it was approved by a Congress that was elected in November of 2008 and signed in by a President who was elected in November of 2008. That was President Obama. At the direction of Speaker Pelosi and the majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, $700 billion in TARP spending, most of it, in my view, wasted. And while this is going on, we had three large investment banks that were nationalized, taken over by the Federal Government. That means Federal ownership or control, management influence and control, three large investments banks. AIG, to the tune of about $180 billion. Then we watched Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac swallow up billions of taxpayer dollars to recapitalize them for their losses. Then we saw, right before Christmas, the President issue an Executive order that takes on all the contingent liabilities of Fannie and Freddie and completely nationalizes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, all of the markets that are the secondary loan market of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taken over by the Federal Government. Then we saw General Motors and Chrysler taken over by the Federal Government. At General Motors, the Federal Government stepping in with 61 percent of the shares, bought up the share value of 61 percent; the Canadian Government, 12.5 percent; and the unions got handed 17.5 percent, even though the secured bondholders got iced out. They had the secured collateral and they still were iced out in the leveraged negotiations that took place. And so we've seen one-third of the private sector activity taken over by the Federal Government, and along came a $787 billion economic stimulus plan, and then a along came the resurrection of the dead ObamaCare. The dead ObamaCare was brought to life, barely squeezed out of it, on life support, limped out of this Congress, put on the President's desk in a fashion that it could not have passed this Congress on the day because the Senate would not have approved it, Madam Speaker. And so we saw one-third of the private sector profits swallowed up in the banks, the AIG, Fannie, Freddie, General Motors, and Chrysler, and another sixth of the economy swallowed up in ObamaCare, where the most sovereign and private thing that we have, which is our own bodies, our skin and everything inside it, taken over by the Federal Government, called ObamaCare. Our skin and everything inside it, the most sovereign thing that we have. We manage our lives, we manage our bodies, and now the Federal Government tells us what we can and can't have for tests, what we can and can't have for insurance policies, what insurance policies will be approved and what insurance policies are not approved. Every single insurance policy in America under ObamaCare will be cancelled by 2014. Yes, many will be reissued. Some will be similar to the ones they have. But there isn't a single policy that the President of the United States can point to and say, This one will be a live, viable policy in 2015, and it won't have to change. Every one gets cancelled. They've nationalized our bodies. And they've done so, the very people that stood here and--before 1973, but at least 1973--said that, because of Roe v. Wade, they said that government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body. Remember when you said that? Remember that debate? Remember those arguments? You'll make them again. You'll make them again to the end of the Earth because that's the bumper sticker discussion. But it's not rational thought. It doesn't substitute for thinking people. A woman should have an unlimited right to elective abortion because government has no business telling her what she can or can't do with her body, while at the same time, now the very same people, men and women who have argued since 1973 that the government has no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body, now are arguing that the Federal Government has every business and every right to tell everyone in America what we can and can't do with our bodies and have taken over and nationalized the most sovereign thing that we have--our own personhood. Our skin and everything inside it managed now by the Federal Government, by the people who said that government had no business telling a woman what she can or can't do with her body. The men and women, most of you sitting on this side of the aisle, have made the argument, and you don't have a rebuttal for this argument. Not one of you has risen to rebut this argument that I've made. I've put up the contradictions here. I pointed out the hypocrisy. I made it clear on the dichotomy. If you've got an argument to rebut the one that I've made, please stand up. I'll recognize you. I'll yield time to you. But you don't. You will sit there and you won't respond because you know you're wrong. It reminds me of the statement made by Art Laffer on economics when he said, They are rebutting arguments that they know to be wrong in order to curry favor with their political benefactors. Well, Madam Speaker, that's what's going on. You have people here that realize where their power base is in order to curry favor with their political benefactors. They're making arguments that are completely irrational. And when they're caught in those irrational arguments, they slink away out of the Chamber with their hands in their pockets, afraid to face the rationality of it, afraid to face the debate, knowing all the while I'm happy to yield to, but no, you're gone. You won't stick around this Chamber. You won't come to a microphone because you're rebutting arguments that you know to be wrong, because that's what gravitates towards your political power base, and it's disingenuous to make those illegitimate arguments in that fashion. So here we are now. We have come all through this continuum jump of the nationalization of one-third of the private sector activities and you add about 17 or 18 percent of health care on top of that. Now we've gone over 50 percent of our private sector economy taken over by the Federal Government, including 100 percent of the student loans. And where are we next? Well, the financial services industry. Why didn't I see that coming? If someone had given me the job to, in an Orwellian way, write the screenplay to a movie of how America could be taken over by a socialist agenda, I could not have imagined some of the things that have happened so far. I might have gotten half of these things. I don't think I could have gotten the scenario down. I might have been able to envision that the banks could be taken over. That was kind of an obvious one. I'd have been able to envision the takeover of the car companies because that's actually on the socialist Web site. It's actually supported by the Progressives, 77 of whom serve in the United States Congress. They are the arm and the voice of the socialists in America. If you just Google Socialists in America, you will go to the Web site called DSAUSA.org, the Democratic Socialists of America, Madam Speaker. They're proud to be Socialists. They start out and they say, We're not Communists. There's a difference. Well, to start out with your advertisement that you're not a Communist, and there's a difference-- Socialists aren't as bad as Communists is what they're saying. So they'll argue they don't want to nationalize all the real estate, all the real property in America. They don't really even have to nationalize real estate in America. They just want to take over the Fortune 500 companies. That's on the Web site. It's not a manufactured thing. It's there. It's on the Web site. Then they say, We don't have to do this all at once. We can do it incrementally. We can take over the Fortune 500 companies and these other companies that are profitable. We can take them over incrementally. We don't have to do it all at once. Well, look what's happened. Bank of America, Citigroup. All together, three large investments banks--AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler. All of them at one time were all private sector entities, all now swallowed up and managed by the Federal Government. Fannie and Freddie, $5.5 trillion in contingent liability. Swallow all that up. Well, they can control them, a large sector of the economy. And I wondered, why would you want to take over Fortune 500 companies and manage them for the benefit of the people affected by them? What would be the motive to do that? What would this be? Well, it's power for one thing, and it creates a dependency class for another, and it expands the dependency class. The Democrats in this Congress believe that if they expand the dependency class, they will also at the same time be expanding the constituent base that will get them reelected over and over and over again. Never mind that it's a direct assault on our Constitution, a direct assault on our liberty, but it diminishes the vitality of Americans, it saps us as a people and makes us more dependent, European socialism, something worse than that. The argument that comes from the progressives in this Congress that want to nationalize the oil refinery industry in America--Maurice Hinchey--who wants to nationalize the petroleum industry in America-- Maxine Waters--75 other progressives, the socialists and their website say, we don't run people on the socialist ticket; we don't have socialist candidates on the ballot, we have Democrats on the ballot who are progressives. They are our legislative arm, Madam Speaker. So I continue to read through the socialist Web site, the Progressive Web site. And we will see the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison) come to this floor pretty regularly--maybe not every week, at least every other week--and he puts up a blue poster that says ``Progressives''--grijalva.com, or whatever that particular Web site might be--and he's proud of the progressive agenda. But the progressive agenda, if you go read it, you find it on the socialist Web site; they're proud of it, too. And they're proud of the progressives claiming the agenda that the socialists drive. Those are facts. They're not refutable. And I can flip the pages out here and put them on posters on the floor of the House without too much difficulty. Now, Bernie Sanders, who served in this House, a self-evolved socialist, argued many times at these microphones--and I debated with him occasionally, although it was nothing particularly memorable that I can think of--was elected to the United States Senate a few years ago and became the first socialist in the United States Senate. Bernie Sanders, progressive. He's the only progressive in the United States Senate--that's listed at least on the Progressive's Web site. He's proud of that. He's proud of being a socialist. And the argument about where the President stands is not an argument about whether the President is a socialist because the President voted to the left of Bernie Sanders, the self-avowed socialist. The argument, if it was going to be made, should have been made by the President. He should have made the argument that Bernie Sanders isn't a socialist; he's just masquerading as a socialist. Maybe a true socialist does something different. Maybe a true socialist nationalizes even fewer businesses. When I see the President do his glad-handed, double-armed handshake with Hugo Chavez, and I see that that same week Hugo Chavez had nationalized a rice processing plant that belonged to Cargill, a proud Minnesota company that was taken over by Hugo Chavez, while that was going on, General Motors and Chrysler were being taken over by President Obama. And I thought, when I saw those two together with the big grins on their face, that Hugo Chavez is a piker when it comes to the nationalization of business. And the question isn't, is the President a socialist? The question is, he votes to the left of Bernie Sanders, so what's a better description than the one that some are using? What's a better description than the one that Bernie Sanders, the one he uses on himself, the socialist? The President votes to the left of a self-evolved socialist in the United States Senate; I think that's a matter worth note. It's a matter of fact; it's not a matter for debate. It is a matter for consideration, Madam Speaker. And I think it tells us something about America and about where America is being dragged and about where America will go if we don't turn back around and take this country up to the heights that are destined for us, that are based upon individual liberties, rights that come from God--free enterprise capitalism, the religious foundation and our religious faith--not just the freedom to worship freely, but the core of our faith that gives us the moral values that diminish the need for law enforcement to be looking over our shoulder and sapping our energy. I have seen a lot of energy sapped out of this country in the last year and a half of this Obama Presidency, Madam Speaker, and I don't know how much more this country can sustain. But I do believe that we have a chance, and we're going to step forward on that chance to turn this around and take this country back to the heights where she was intended to be. That's going to mean an election result in November that's entirely different than the one we had the last couple of Novembers. And it's going to mean that this Republican party in this Congress, by golly, better get the planks down on where we want to go. We had better be unified behind them. And we better step this Nation forward so that when the election comes people will know what they're voting for, and they will be able to get behind those things that we say we're going to do. I will submit, Madam Speaker, the number one plank in the Republican agenda has got to be 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare, not 99.9 percent or 99.8 or 98 percent; 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. And if there are Republicans that equivocate on that, if they're afraid that they don't want to take on the debate, that they don't want to put a Federal mandate in to provide for and require all insurance to be extended to age 26 for college kids, for example--I want my kids to grow up; I don't want to keep them dependent. I don't want to make their bed when they're 26. I want them on their own well before they're 26. The law has dealt with it this way: That you are responsible for a child until they're 18 years old unless you've been divorced, in which case you might be responsible for that child until they graduate from college. I think that's a bit of an inequity. But to go to age 26 and put a Federal mandate in, I'd turn this question back the other way: Where in the Constitution does it grant the authority for the Federal Government to establish a mandate that would require that insurance companies offer health insurance to age 26 as part of every policy, which certainly raises the premium and means that health insurance is less affordable rather than more affordable? Many of these things will take place and unfold in the upcoming next 2 to 3 years, but here's the timing in the sequence in the repeal of ObamaCare. First, a maximum number of co-signatures on my legislation, on that of Michele Bachmann's, and others. We are somewhere around 63 or 64 cosponsors, Madam Speaker. And there isn't a good reason why anybody that voted ``no'' on ObamaCare can't step up and cosponsor legislation for repeal of ObamaCare. When we net enough signatures on that, we'll put a discharge petition down here at the well. A discharge petition with 218 signatures on it requires a bill to come to the floor for debate and vote without amendments. If we could do that, we could pass out of the House, and if the Senate could do that we could pass out of the Senate a repeal of ObamaCare that could then go to the President's desk. And President Obama would certainly--well, almost certainly--veto the bill. Some will argue it's an exercise in futility, but I put on my Web site--the kingforcongress.com Web site--a polling question that asks this question: Do you believe that 100 percent of ObamaCare is more likely to be repealed, or do you think that the Cubs are more likely to win the World Series? And do you know, we were 2-1, 2-1 of people answering the poll for predicting that it was more likely that ObamaCare would be repealed than the Cubs would win the World Series. Now, I'd be happy to see the Cubs win the World Series. I'm not coming here, Madam Speaker, to stir up any Cubs fans. I'm just pointing out that the Cubs went to spring training this year. They're playing ball. They're throwing, catching, hitting, running; they're practicing, they're in shape, they're getting their pitching up. They're focused. And why? Because they believe that they're positioned to win the World Series this year. They didn't go out with their dobber down. They didn't think it didn't pay to practice. They didn't skip spring training; they went to the field. Even though now they know that most Americans think it's more likely we will repeal ObamaCare than the Cubs will win the World Series, they're still playing ball. And they're not out of this at all. It's early. They're not even out of it when it's late. Until it's mathematically impossible, the Cubs are always in it. But it tells you the degree of difficulty here. If the Cubs are only one out of three likely to win the World Series, we can do this, it's not that hard. It's not as hard as winning the World Series. We can accomplish this. We can repeal ObamaCare. By the way, if the President vetoes a discharge petition or we come back after the elections and Republicans have the majority, we can perhaps then pass a repeal of ObamaCare, and maybe the Senate will get that done too--and Senator DeMint is working on this mission over on the Senate side. And so we set it on the President's desk, and he vetoes it, and we wouldn't likely have the votes to override a presidential veto. Fair enough, that's reality. But here's how the function of this goes: All spending bills start in the House. A Republican majority in the House with a deep conviction to repeal ObamaCare in its entirety can shut off all funding to ObamaCare so that it cannot be implemented. No part of it could be implemented or enforced if we say so in appropriations bills here in the House. And if we do that in 2011 and 2012, we will elect a President in 2012 whose number one plank in the platform needs to be that the first bill he will sign as President is full repeal of ObamaCare. So I just envision this: the inauguration of the President of the United States out here on the west portico of the Capitol building, standing there taking the oath of office. And once he is sworn in as President of the United States by the Chief Justice John Roberts, he can take his hand down. And the first act as President of the United States, he can get out his pen, because we will gavel in January 3 of 2013, we can pass the repeal in the House and the Senate. We can set it up not on the President's desk, let's put it on the podium on the west portico so when he swears in he can have the pen in his hand for all of me, put it down, sign the repeal of ObamaCare, and it's gone from history. Pulled out root and branch, lock, stock and barrel, with no vestige, not one particle of DNA of ObamaCare left behind. Because that toxic stew has now become a malignant tumor, and we need to pull it out by the roots before it metastasizes. That's our duty to the American people and one of the things that I came here to do and one of the things that I will work on. And I will challenge anybody that can make a cogent argument that we have got to repeal ObamaCare before we can move forward because it is an agenda that you can find at dsausa.org. That is Democratic Socialists of America. You can also find that agenda at the progressive Web site that is advertised so many times by those 77 that are the ones that are run on the ticket that the Socialists say they support. That's what's up, Madam Speaker. I wanted to get that out and lay it out and get it off my chest before I asked my friend, the judge from Texas, if he had anything on his mind. And if he does, and he has never been without anything on his mind, he was born with things on his mind, but I am very happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas, Judge Louie Gohmert.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If I could temporarily reclaim my time, I would just appreciate an opportunity to comment on what you said, Mr. Gohmert. This phrase comes to mind: Birds of a feather flock together. That's why it's unusual to see some of those birds that are not of a feather there in the flock of the Tea Party faithful. Why would that be? I think we've seen it here, occasionally, on the floor of the House of Representatives when we generally sit in a segregated fashion-- Democrats on one side and Republicans on the other side. Yes, we walk through and we talk to each other and we do business; but generally speaking, it's Democrats there and Republicans here. Yet on occasion-- and especially on the occasions of the State of the Union addresses and of addresses of the joint sessions of Congress by President Obama--we have Democrats who will come over to this side of the aisle and who will sit in a scattered fashion throughout over here so that, when the standing ovations begin or when they don't happen, they're blended and integrated in a different way. That's by order of the Speaker of the House. It isn't infiltration-- it's public--but it is clearly by order of the Speaker of the House. They didn't just spontaneously decide to come over and sit here and try to start standing ovations and, more or less, change the image of the State of the Union address. Also, we know that the left has infiltrated or has at least announced that they were seeking to infiltrate the Tea Party groups. Some of those subversive tactics come to mind especially in the times that we've had these rallies--they're really press conferences--over on the West Lawn of the Capitol. We went out and took pictures of the lawn. I know on one occasion I asked people to be careful and to pick up their litter, but I don't know of anybody else who has ever made that request. I'm thinking of three occasions when the lawn was spotless. We took pictures. We were trying to find some litter. We were trying to find a cigarette butt--anything out there on the grass. It was all picked up and carried away. The cleanest group of people is the Tea Party group that comes here. They have the Constitution in their shirt pockets or on their hearts. They love this country, and they wouldn't desecrate any of the symbols of our liberty or any of the symbols of our freedom. Though, if you looked at the other folks, at the people on the other side of the aisle, at the people who make common cause with the folks who generally sit over here, on the same day of that major gathering of opponents to ObamaCare, there was a pro-amnesty rally. The differences were they were wearing the same T-shirts; they were carrying signs that came off the printing press one after another, and they left litter all over this city. While the Tea Party groups and the anti-ObamaCare groups were here, they had homegrown signs. They didn't have any commonality of dress. They wore what they had of their own. There was some red, white, and blue out there and plenty of yellow hats and flags, but they were not at all an army that was uniformed, coached, or bussed in. They came in by their own transportation. They made their own signs. They wore a whole variety of different clothes. They made up chants on the way, and they were making signs on the fly. When it was all over, it was as clean as a whistle. It was as if it were a park that they owned because they believed--and they do--that they owned that park. I am proud of the peaceful people who came here. I don't have respect for the folks who tried to infiltrate that and who caused trouble. When I saw the rallies against the Arizona immigration law, when I saw the bottle bouncing off the head of a police officer, when I heard the stories about refried beans being smeared on the State buildings in Arizona, and when I heard about a swastika that was, perhaps, painted there, those are the kinds of activities you would never see happen on the other side with the Tea Party groups. There is no violence there. The violence is perpetrated by people on the other side. The allegation that the ``N'' word, that the ``F'' word, or that spitting took place could not be substantiated, and I am coming close to the conclusion that it was fabricated, not substantiated. As I feel a little better having vented myself on that subject, I would yield back now to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. I was deeply engaged in that presentation, and much of it I reflect upon, having stood there many times at the Lincoln Memorial and read the second inaugural address. It has been too long since I have been back down there. I need to go back. As the gentleman from Texas talked about Voltaire, another statement of his, even though he was a bit of a Utopianist and not necessarily one whose teachings would fit the beliefs that I follow, there is one of his quotes that stands in mind for me, and I think it is appropriate here in the United States. I've watched us turn from a nation of rugged, can-do, highly spirited people to a nation that is slowly, and I shouldn't say slowly, dramatically turning into a nanny state. I grew up in a society where we understood we had freedom, and we exercised that freedom, and the prohibitions were was there a law that prohibited us. The gentleman from Texas and I have exercised that American freedom, that American freedom, pretty interestingly, in the country of Tibet, when it was the idea of Judge Gohmert that we should climb a mountain in the Himalayas. So we set about from Lhasa, Tibet, to go do that. But we had Chinese minders. The Chinese minders' job was to mind us, to make sure we minded them; that we didn't get out of line; we didn't go do things they didn't want us to do; that we didn't see things that they didn't want us to see; and we didn't hear Tibetans or Chinese tell us things that they didn't want us to hear. So they presented themselves often as the interpreters, the protectors. So when we said, we are going to go climb a mountain in the Himalayas here, they said, well, no, you can't. You are not authorized to go up there, and so you can't. Well, China and Tibet is a society where it has to be permissive for you to act. America has been a society where you have got permission to do everything that is not prohibited. We don't ask the question, do we have permission? We ask the question, is there a law against it? So we told the Chinese minders, well, you may say we are not going, but we are Americans. We are going to go climb this mountain in the Himalayas. And that is what we did, because we didn't realize, I don't think, we were in a country where you had to have permission, because we have got the American spirit. We went to the top of that mountain. And it is something that I will never forget, that experience going up, being there, looking at that vista of snow-capped peaks all the way around the horizon, the huge glacial lake down below, that spot on the globe. I am so glad we stepped forward and did that. I don't know if there are any other people on the planet that would have just gone up to the top of the mountain, because that is what we do. We don't wait for permission. If there is not a law against it and we think it fits within our moral standards, we go. Well, this can-do America that we are has been an America that came in, and by the sweat of our brows we built a nation for hundreds of years, that can-do entrepreneurial spirit with free enterprise and freedom and the liberties that are laid out that come from God, that are in the Declaration, most of them, not all of them. Voltaire said back during that period of time, History is the sound of hobnailed boots storming up the stairs, and silver slippers coming down. That describes a lot of what goes on. The ascendency of history are the people that work hard, that are industrious, that produce, that are competitive, and sometimes, Madam Speaker, combative. And when people get a little too soft and they are sitting on the silken pillows and they have the waiters bringing the grapes to them and popping the grape in their mouth while they fan them a little bit, like Ahab the Arab, the sheik of the burning sand, that is kind of the image of what happens when a person lays back on the silk. What has happened with the Voltaire statement was hobnailed boots storming up the stairs, silver slippers coming down. And a lot of the French elite, the aristocracy, were the silver slippers, and they came down the stairs, because they got too lazy and they got too laid back without being competitive. They lost their sense of where they were going or why. I don't want to do that as a nation. I don't want to watch the hobnailed boots come up the stairs. I don't want us to be the silver slippers coming down. I want us to step forward and compete. I want free enterprise. I want freedom, I want liberty, I want a strong national defense. I want to have a tax policy that stops punishing productivity, and it can tax consumption, because that is an incentive for more consumption. I want that strong national defense, as I said. I want school choice, so kids can be raised at the will and the wishes of their parents with real American history and real American values. If we can do all of those things, we can take this Nation to the next level of our destiny. And should we fail, we will trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding and for leading on this issue. Mr. Chairman, I want to just add to this discussion and deliberation that what really happens here is that if this should pass today, and I rise in opposition to H.R. 2499, Mr. Chairman, but it sets up a momentum, it sets up a level of expectations, and the sequence of events being the question that would go before Puerto Ricans and those who were born in Puerto Rico that would live in any of the other 50 States presumably, do you want to stay the same or do you want to change? And once that decision is made, then there is no going back. The momentum then washes over the dam. And the next question that comes back is, now you can't be what you were before. Now you have to decide between being an independent country or a free association, whatever that might be, or statehood. And when we get to this question of statehood and I look at the standards that have been there in the past, I disagree with the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young). I can go up there and English is the language that is used in government and business and everywhere you go. Yes, every language you can imagine is spoken of in every State, but the practice in Puerto Rico is Spanish, not English. Eighty-five percent of Puerto Ricans will self-profess that they are not proficient in English. They have very little understanding of English. In fact, I will introduce into the Record the Latin American Herald Tribune, dated April 26, where the Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico, the Governor's Secretary, said, English is taught in Puerto Rico as if it were a foreign language and 85 percent aren't proficient in it. I will also introduce into the Record a letter from U.S. English, Incorporated. Among it is a statement I think that's very important to consider here in this body, which says: ``No State has ever been allowed to come into the Union when its core organs of government operate in a foreign language, and Puerto Rico must not be an exception.'' And, Mr. Chairman, it points out that Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma had those conditions as conditions coming into statehood. I just would make this point, that I wouldn't rise here today and take this position here today, since 1917 or even the last 50 years. If the practice of education and government in Puerto Rico had been the unifying common language, we would be unified as a people. Let's start that path and have this discussion in a generation. Congressman Doc Hastings, Ranking Member, House Natural Resources Committee, Longworth House Office Building, Washington, DC. Dear Congressman Hastings: On behalf of 1.8 million members of U.S. English, we oppose the current version of H.R. 2499, the Puerto Rico Democracy Act. H.R. 2499 fails to address the serious language questions pertaining to Puerto Rico's status, and compounds this error by pretending to address these issues. This vote will be featured prominently in the legislative scorecard we distribute to our members. As you are aware, Puerto Rico's current policies with respect to language have never been allowed for any incoming state. While English is mandatory in Puerto Rico's public schools, it is taught as a foreign language, and instruction rarely exceeds one hour per day. Unsurprisingly, just 20 percent of Puerto Rico's residents speak English fluently. California has the lowest proficiency rate among the 50 states, and its rate is 80 percent. Puerto Rico's local courts and legislature operate entirely in Spanish, with English translations available only upon request. No state has ever been allowed to come into the Union when its core organs of government operate in a foreign language, and Puerto Rico must not be an exception. Yesterday, the Rules committee defeated amendments offered by Rep. Paul Broun that would have brought Puerto Rico's policies in line with the other 50 states as a condition for statehood. Instead, the committee reported an ``alternative'' English amendment by Rep. Dan Burton. The Burton amendment, while purportedly offering a Puerto Rican state equal treatment, actually offers special treatment by allowing statehood with these historically unprecedented policies intact. Burton's insistence that Puerto Rico will be subject to federal official language policies is meaningless, since the United States has no official language. Further, Burton's ``sense of Congress that English be promoted'' has no legal force. The Burton language is contrary to Congress' uniform historical practice when the language of government of a potential state was in genuine doubt. Congress required--not ``promoted''--English to be the language of instruction for public schools in Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma as a condition for statehood. I urge any member who cares about English's role in our national unity to oppose this version of the legislation. Sincerely, Mauro E. Mujica, Chairman of the Board, U.S. English, Inc.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it's my privilege and honor to be recognized by you to address the floor tonight. I am standing here trying to decide whether I want to support or rebut the statements from the gentleman from Colorado. I support a good number of the statements that he has made, and I may well try to rebut some of the other statements that he has made. But the statement ``replace a broken system with one that works,'' it's an interesting comment. I think it's clear that our immigration system is not working. Well, let me say that the system doesn't work, but I am not certain that the laws are incorrect. And that's the point that I would make is that I roll back to 1986 when Ronald Reagan was straight-up honest and failed me when he signed the amnesty bill of 1986. And the intent was that about a million people would be granted a path to citizenship and that would be it, it would be the end, and there would never be another immigration bill ever as long as any of us lived, and we would preserve the rule of law, and we'd learn to respect the rule of law, but we would allow for the million or so that were here illegally to have their path to citizenship in order to put this away, package it up, and be able to move on. Well, it wasn't 1 million. It was closer to 3 million people, and there was fraud and there was corruption and there were counterfeit documents that were used that was part of that tripling. We might not have counted it right. It might have been more than a million. It might have been 1\1/2\ million. It was unlikely to be 2 million. But it turned out to be 3 million because people were gaming the system. In my particular office, I took applications in and I made sure they filled out their I-9 forms, and I took copies of their documents and made sure my files were complete and considered their applications because I was sure that INS would be into my office to go through my books and make sure that I followed the law because it was going to be enforced by this newly robust Federal Government. That was the commitment. Amnesty now, enforcement forever, never amnesty again. That was 1986. And here we are all these years later, 24 years later, and we have had by each succeeding administration--I'm not particularly happy with the enforcement we saw in the Reagan administration, and I was less happy with the enforcement that I saw in Bush 41 and less happy with what I saw under Bill Clinton and less happy with what I saw under George W. Bush, and I'm less happy with what I've seen under President Obama. Less and less effective enforcement. And they do find a way to put together the data so that they can point to their enforcement and allege that in this particular administration, the enforcement against employers appears to be marginally stronger than it was under George Bush, but the enforcement against illegal workers is significantly less than it was under George Bush, and I wasn't happy with what George Bush did. So is the system broken? I think the enforcement of the system is broken, Madam Speaker. I think that we have had a succession of Presidents who didn't demonstrate the will to enforce our immigration law, and because of that, there has been a growing disrespect for our immigration law. And even people that respect the law have seen that their competition who would hire illegals have a comparative advantage against them if they are going to adhere to the intent of the law. So the competition pushes other employers to violate the intent and the rule of law sometimes and hire the illegals to give them that comparative advantage against their competition. And slowly the respect for the rule of law and their adherence and compliance with the law has been diminished in this country to the point where I have people in my neighborhood that will say, Well, if you don't think I should hire an illegal, then who is going to fix my leaky roof? Who's going to paint my house? Who's going to do these other things? That's not my job, Madam Speaker. My job is to stand up for the rule of law. And, yes, if I think there are laws that are unjust, then I should join with my colleagues and we should find a way to change them. I don't happen to believe that our immigration laws today are unjust. I believe they are unenforced. And I think they are founded on good and just rule of law foundation. Not having the documents in front of me, but I will reach into it a little bit. I've seen some documents that illustrated the laws that Mexico has with regard to their immigration laws, which are if ours are considered Draconian, theirs, in fact, are Draconian. And President Calderon has been arguing against Arizona law while he is enforcing more Draconian laws in the nation of Mexico against people who would come into their southern border. Crossing the border illegally is a felony, punishable up to 2 years in the penitentiary. That's one of the examples that we have. So I would, Madam Speaker, just remind the American people that we have grounded these laws in just and rational cause. And now Arizona has seen that the Federal Government has been unwilling to enforce the laws, and they are watching a crime rate that, if you look at the data over the last 10 years, has increased in almost every category over the last 10 years. In order to be objective, not probably to the extent that has been articulated by many of the pundits, but it has been a gradual and significant increase in the crime rates in Arizona in the areas of murder and rape, violent crime, and certainly about the only thing, except illegal border crossings, which have diminished marginally over the last couple of years. And a year ago last August, there was a report that there were as many as 1\1/2\ million that have been in the United States illegally that reversed their travels and voluntarily deported themselves back to Mexico and points south. Most of that is attributable to the decline in the economy rather than the increase in enforcement. But it doesn't mean that there has been a diminishment of illegal drugs coming across the border or a diminishment in illegal activity along the border. In fact, those numbers are up. The violence numbers are up. The illegal drugs are up. The contraband crossing the borders are up. And the numbers of just individual illegal people by interdiction data that's delivered to us by Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, are marginally down. Now, it may or may not be that there are more illegal border crossings. It might well be that they are just simply interdicting fewer coming across the border and there is less enforcement. Although I do believe that there are marginally fewer illegal border crossings but more illegal drugs, more violence, more kidnappings. The State of Arizona has the highest kidnap rate in the Nation. In fact, some of the cities there have the highest or second highest kidnap rate in the world. That's because of the drugs and it's because of the cartels that are doing business in that area. So Arizona passed a law, and this law does a number of things. It sets up a situation where law enforcement--it requires all of the political subdivisions in Arizona, the counties, the cities, the other political subdivisions, and the State, to enforce Federal immigration law. It sets it up so that an individual has standing to sue the political subdivision, local government, if they fail to enforce immigration law. And it provides for reasonable suspicion for a law enforcement officer to pick up an individual that's out in public if they reasonably suspect that that individual is unlawfully present in the United States. Those are good things, and they are all that I have described within the parameters of existing Federal law today. The argument that has been made and the demonstrations that are queued up for May 1, and that will be this coming Saturday, they are trying to establish demonstrations all over America of people rising up to demonstrate against Arizona's immigration law. Well, look at what has happened. The Federal Government hasn't enforced immigration law. I would say that our immigration laws are true and just and right altogether. And our problem is not because our laws are wrong. Our problem is not because we need to replace broken laws. It's that we need to take this system that--``broken'' is not the right word for it, I would say to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Polis). I think instead it's a system that is not being utilized because we lack the will to enforce immigration law in the United States. And that will has been diminishing over the years. The greater the number of illegals, the more people get to know their neighbors that may be in the United States illegally. They don't see that when you contribute to or allow or tolerate people who are unlawfully present in the United States in your neighborhood, when you hire them, you're contributing to the problem. People don't see that. They just understand that we're all God's children. They like the people that came in. They see that they work hard, and so, therefore, they become their advocates. It's a natural thing to happen. But at the same time, while our laws are being broken and our laws are being disrespected, there's an undermining of the American system. There's a reason that the people want to come to the United States. There isn't a country in the world where there aren't significant numbers of people that don't want to become Americans. And the reasons for that fall into a lot of categories, but one of them is we have respect for the rule of law. Our traditions honor the rule of law. Lady Justice is blind. When you think of the image of Lady Justice standing there blindfolded with the scales of justice balanced, without consideration for race, creed, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, or disability. That's the American creed. We have equal justice for all, and justice is blind with regard to those characteristics. So people want to come here. They want to come to the United States from countries, countries that do not have that tradition of honoring the rule of law. They want to come to the United States from countries that have a corrupt tradition where you have to pay to play and it's who you know and how you pay them off or you curl up and you try to avoid the scrutiny of government and interactivity with the government agencies. Here in this country, we're straight up, open, and honest, and, for the most part, moral and ethical, and we respect the law. But if we grant amnesty to 12 or 20 or more million people because it's described as an insurmountable problem, that the argument that's often made that we can't deport 12 or 20 million people, in fact, we could. We could do that. It's not logistically impossible to do so. I went over to London a little over a year ago to deal with the immigration issue over there. And I listened to them talk about the numbers of illegals that they have, and I have forgotten the exact number, but let's just say that we are in that 12 to 20 million category, and population ratio-wise, they are down in that 1\1/2\ million category, perhaps, of illegals in England. And what is their argument? You can't deport 1\1/2\ million people. It's too many. It's an impossible thing logistically. Well, interestingly we're here with 12 to 20 million. We're making the same argument. Well, then, how many could we deport? If it's not 20 million and it's not 12 million and the British say they can't deport 1\1/2\ million, could we depart 1\1/2\ million if we chose to do that, or is it 1 million or \1/2\ million or 100,000 or 10,000 or one? What is our capability logistically to deport people that are in the United States illegally? And I will suggest that it's in direct proportion to our resources and our will to enforce the law. Our problem is not that we can't do so logistically. Our problem is we lack the will to do so from a moral standard because we're listening to both sides of this argument. The argument that people are here, that they just want to work. They want to earn for their families. And for the most part, that's true. And we disregard the argument that is this point that I need to make, Madam Speaker, and that is that 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in the United States of America come from or through Mexico, 90 percent. It's a consistent number that comes from the Drug Enforcement Agency, and it's been consistent throughout several years. And the illegal drug distribution chains in America, magically, and this is a Drug Enforcement Agency response, magically if every one of the people that are in the United States illegally, magically tomorrow morning woke up in their home country where they were legal to live and reside, if that happened by magic wand overnight, there is at least one link in every illegal drug distribution chain in America that would be severed because at least one link has an illegal alien that's part of that drug distribution chain. And so if it was in our endeavor to shut off the illegal drug distribution in America, we would simply make sure we enforced our immigration laws. And that would be a very temporary fix, and it might only last for hours or days, not much longer than weeks and perhaps not months, but it would sever the distribution of all illegal drugs in America, however temporarily that might be. So when we look at what happens when we have 12 to 20 or more million illegals in America, what are the effects on our society? First, they are delivering 90 percent of the drugs from or through Mexico. And some of them at least touch the delivery of every illegal drug that's delivered in the United States of America while that's going on. What is accompanied by the illegal drug trade? Violence, murder, theft, rape, all of those things that go along with crime are wrapped up and associated with the illegal drug distribution. And the people that are illegally distributing drugs that are in the United States illegally are also, however inadvertently, the channel of their work is enabled by, and not always willfully, and sometimes even unknowingly, it's enabled by the illegal community in the United States. It becomes an underground railroad for illegal people and illegal drugs that are pouring through, from and through Mexico into the United States. And it is something that brings about a high amount of death and destruction and diminishment of human capital, human resources, and human potential. That's why we outlaw those illegal drugs in the first place. It doesn't mean that all the people that are involved in that are willfully evil or willfully trying to undermine our society. It might be inadvertent. But they are part of the problem. And if we are to have the rule of law, we have to enforce the rule of law. And to imagine that when law enforcement comes in contact with people who are here illegally that we would be unwilling to put them back into the condition that they were in at the time they broke the law is unconscionable for a rule-of-law Nation to think such a thing. Think in terms of this: if someone walks into the bank and robs the bank and would walk out of that bank with all of the loot, and we would interdict them with our law enforcement and decide, well, you really only want to provide for your family, so we are going to let you go on here because we don't have the will to stop you at this point. Or our immigration laws, simply deporting people is the equivalent of putting them back in the condition they were in before they broke the law. It's the equivalent of taking a bank robber and saying you don't get to keep the money, but we are going to take you out of the bank and set you outside the door and let you go. That's the equivalent of deportation. It is we put people back in the condition they were in before they broke the law. It's like taking a bank robber out of the bank, not letting them keep the loot, and you set them outside the door and say, okay, go. You are free to go. It's as if you never broke our law. That's what deportation is. It is not Draconian. It is not harsh. It is not cruel and unusual punishment. It is de minimis that we can do if we are going to enforce the law. And if we are not willing to put people back in the condition they were in before they broke our immigration law, then we cannot have enforcement of our immigration law whatsoever. It doesn't work to set a standard of amnesty that's been advocated by President Bush, President Obama, by many of the leaders over here on the left side of the aisle that we should give people a path to citizenship, make them pay a fine, force them to learn English. That seems a little odd to me, how you force somebody to learn a language and require them to pay their back taxes. Those are the minimum standards for somebody who would come into the United States legally in the first place. If you want to become an American citizen, get in line. Get in line in a foreign country. Don't jump the line. Don't jump the border. And when you do that, and you go take your citizenship test--first, you have to pass the test that asks the question what's the economic system of the United States of America? And the answer is free enterprise capitalism. That's a little heads up there, Madam Speaker, on that one. But when people come into the United States legally, they are required to learn English. If they want to become a citizen, if they want to go through the naturalization process, they are required to learn English. They are required to demonstrate proficiency in English in both the written and the spoken word. They have to understand our history and understand those principles that made America great. And we are not going to naturalize somebody that didn't pay their back taxes. And the idea of a fine for being in the United States illegally, and that's the only other condition that we would add, whether that would be pay a fee of $1,500--I remember when it started out to be $500. And then $500 seemed like a pittance, so they raised it to $1,000 and then $1,500. And under the Bush administration we had the discussion and the argument that their position was, well, it's not amnesty if they have to pay a fine. Oh, really? If the fine is cheaper than what you have to pay a coyote to sneak into the United States is it really a fine? And does the fine replace the penalty that exists for violating Federal law? And I say no. If you grant people the objective of their crime, it's amnesty. To grant amnesty is to pardon people for the violation of the law and grant them the objective of their crime. That's what amnesty is. And so if we are going to have amnesty, let's be honest about it, Madam Speaker. Let's ask the people in this Congress, the President of the United States, the executive branch of government, and the people in the United States Senate that are now crafting up legislation are you for or against amnesty. If they want to support amnesty, it's fine with me if they will just admit that. And then we can have a debate as to what degree of amnesty they are going to advocate. But it's offensive to the American people to hear United States Senators or Members of the House of Representatives, Congressmen and - women, or the President of the United States, or his spokesmen or - women, argue that amnesty isn't amnesty when we know very well what amnesty is. Pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crimes. That's amnesty. President Reagan understood it. He admitted amnesty was amnesty. He signed the amnesty bill in 1986. Yes, he let me down, but he was honest about it. And we haven't been honest during the second half of the Bush administration, and we certainly aren't honest during the Obama administration, this first third or so of the Obama administration about amnesty or immigration. And so here are my concerns, that 90 percent of the illegal drugs that are consumed in the United States come from or through Mexico. Of all the violence that pours forth from that, it costs American lives dozens and dozens, in fact by the hundreds, every year Americans that die at the hands of illegals that are here in the United States of America illegally. That's the definition. And if we would be effective in enforcing immigration law, those people who died at the hands who are here illegally would still be alive. When the school bus wrecked in southwest Minnesota and we lost four or five young girls there because it was caused by an accident by an individual who had two or three times been interdicted by law enforcement in the United States but was turned loose again, those girls would be young women today. They would be alive today. And their parents know that. It happens over and over hundreds of times. In fact, it's happened thousands of times since we failed to enforce our immigration laws. So what do we do? We put together the will to enforce our immigration laws. The American people rise up and make the argument that we are going to have the rule of law, that we are going to shut off all illegal traffic at the border. We are going to force all that traffic through the ports of entry. It's been a little while since we have talked about the necessity of building a wall and a fence on the southern border. Someone said to me we can't build 2,000 miles of fence. Yes, we could. We could build 2,000 miles of triple fencing. We could put sensors on it. We could put lights on it. We could build roads in between. We could patrol it. We could enforce it. We can fix it so nobody gets through all that. Yes, we can. And for the people that will argue if you build a 20-foot fence I will show you a 21-foot ladder, that's got to be the silliest and the weakest and the most specious argument I have heard here on the floor of the United States Congress. I have heard the Secretary of Homeland Security say build a 50-foot fence and I will show you a 51- foot ladder. Madam Speaker, what in the world could that mean? All right, if you build a rocket that will fly to the Moon, I will show you a rocket that will fly a mile past the Moon. So what? What does that mean? They are not going to be building a 51-foot ladder. And if they do, we are going to be sitting there with our sensory devices, our roads, our monitoring, and we are going to make sure if they can get over that fence they don't get to the next one. And if they get over that one, we are going to make sure they don't get to the next one. I have designed a concrete wall. And it is not the only barrier; it is not the only tool. And when those of us that talk about the necessity for extending the fence and the wall on the southern border and building double and tertiary fences and walls, the argument against it becomes this silly argument of, well, that's not going to solve the problem. None of us believe it's the total solution. None of us believe that building an effective wall and fence is the only thing we would do. It's among the effective things that we could do. So, Madam Speaker, here are some things that the American people don't know. The President doesn't know. His actuaries don't know. The Speaker of the House doesn't know. Harry Reid, the majority leader in the Senate doesn't know. And the committee Chairs don't know. And I may well be the only one in the United States Congress that knows this. And, Madam Speaker, now the whole world is going to know. Here are the numbers. About 2006 we were spending $8 billion on our southern border. Now we are spending about $12 billion on our southern border. All together. These aren't numbers that come out of the administration except one piece at a time. And you have to add them up and calculate it out and calculate it back to the numbers of miles of border that we have. $12 billion when you add up all of the expenses necessary for ICE that are operating down there near the border in that 20- to 40-mile, maybe 50-mile range of the border. You have to pay the personnel, their health care package, their benefits package, their retirement funds, their equipment, their vehicles that they drive, guns, uniforms, all those things that they do. And you add to that Custom Border Protection, our CBP people, our Customs personnel, our Border Patrol personnel. And all of the forces that are there lined up that are part of that coordinated effort to defend the border are right in the area of $12 billion. $12 billion for 2,000 miles of border. That is $6 million a mile, Madam Speaker. Now, think of this. Most of us can think what a mile is. For me, I live on the corner on a gravel road in Iowa. And a lot of those corners you can stand out there in the middle of that intersection and you can see a mile in each of four directions. It is not the case in mine, but I know how far a mile is. Most of us do. Now, when I stand on my corner and I look to the west that full mile, a mile west, which is the clearest vision that I have, and I think would the Federal Government pay me--if that were the border, would the Federal Government pay me $6 million to guard that border for that mile? Could I do that for $6 million? Would I be willing to take on that contract and control that border for $6 million for that mile? And that's the average for 2,000 miles. Some of it's barren and desolate. Would I be willing to do that, Madam Speaker, for $6 million? You betcha. You betcha, to pick up on a phrase. I would do that for $6 million a mile. And, furthermore, I would be willing to guarantee nobody would get across that mile. I would guard it, I would protect it, I would hire the personnel necessary. And, in fact, rather than paying a lot of people that were boots on the ground, I would have some, and they would be in mobile vehicles, and we would have sensors, and we would have some lights, and we would have radios, and we would have warning devices and ground-based radar. We would do all that stuff. But we would also build a fence and a wall as a barrier to slow that traffic down and make it hard enough that they wouldn't come through my mile at all. In fact, I would shut down all the traffic in that mile for $6 million. And if you award me that contract, I would be willing to let you dock me from that contract. I would guarantee it. I would bond it. I would let you dock me. If they got across my mile, then subtract from my contract every illegal crosser that is there. Then you would put the incentives in place to actually succeed in what we're doing as opposed to just simply doing--it's not catch and release back into America anymore. It's catch and release at the port of entry and turn them back in to Mexico, and then they come back around with a smirk on their face. And I have watched them do that, Madam Speaker. Another tool that we need to have is the New IDEA Act. New IDEA is legislation that I have introduced in the last three Congresses. The New IDEA stands for the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. That's the acronym, New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. It comes from this part. If you look around, across the agencies of the Federal Government and think about those agencies and how aggressively and how effectively they do their jobs, we have the Department of Homeland Security, which has really pledged that they're not going to deport illegal workers in America. In fact, they picked up some illegal workers by accident in Boston some months ago back in December or January. They found out that they were illegal. They processed them. These workers were on their way up to Gillette Stadium in Boston. So ICE, after they processed them, hauled them up to work. They gave them chauffeured transportation up to their job to be groundskeepers at Gillette Stadium in Boston, a complete lack of focus on their job. I mean, you talk about open borders. Jump across the border, come in here and sneak in and get yourself a job and have your documents being invalid, falsification, whatever it might be, misrepresents your status. And if we run across you by accident because our ICE people are out there doing what they do, we will take your fingerprints and your names, and then we'll give you a chauffeured ride on up to work at Gillette Stadium. That is bizarre. It is so far away from an understanding of what it takes to enforce the law. I take us back to a time in the fifties when my father was a manager of the State police radio stations, and he also was the mayor of a small community. The local town cop came across an illegal who happened to be traveling through the community, and I don't know how they interdicted him, whether it was his license plate light that was out or whatever it was, but he was arrested. He was incarcerated. He was held up in the city jail, and they had to process him. And my father, as mayor, was the justice of the peace as well. There never was any consideration about turning him loose because it was too hard to enforce the law. The only thing that could come from that was the person that was illegally in the United States was going to go back to their home country. And by my recollection, that's what happened. But the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act recognizes that the Department of Homeland Security hasn't shown a complete will to enforce immigration law. They have got good officers out in the field. They want to do so. They want to deliver on a mission and accomplish a mission statement. They want to accomplish their mission statement, but the lack of will from the White House down through the Secretary of Homeland Security prevents them from being as effective as they can be. So there's your agency. Department of Homeland Security is not as effective as they can be, enforcing against employers because politically that's more palatable but refusing to enforce against illegal workers because they have decided that those illegal workers can be Democrats. I stand on that statement, Madam Speaker. They've decided those illegal workers can become Democrats, so they want to pander to them. We've got the Social Security Administration that has a database that should be feeding information to the Department of Homeland Security. Whenever you have duplications of those Social Security numbers, you can bet that as soon as the second one shows up, if it's outside the neighborhood in the driving range of the first one, that you have one illegal there at least that's working off of that Social Security number--and maybe both of them are illegal. The Social Security Administration is willing to take the checks that come from the payroll taxes of those millions who are working illegally in America, paying their payroll taxes because it's withheld from their paycheck, but declaring the maximum number of dependents so that they pay Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but not State and Federal income tax. The Social Security Administration's willing to take those checks from those illegal workers and not explore the duplications on those Social Security numbers because the money's going into the account which is being spent by this Congress but is kept in an accounting process in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in a filing cabinet. And bonds that are worth no more than this piece of paper was, a print on top of it. I happen to have one in my filing cabinet as well. $3.54 billion in bonds in the Social Security account. It's an IOU from the government to the government. They put them in a filing cabinet in Parkersburg, West Virginia. But illegals pay into that out of proportion because they're not going to file a tax return. And so the dollars that are contributed on that Social Security number go into that filing cabinet along with those bonds. And we have the Department of Homeland Security who is not willing to enforce the law to the extent that it must be against illegal workers. They may be willing to enforce the law in even an increasing degree over the Bush administration against employers who are hiring illegal workers. The Social Security Administration is cashing the checks of people who have fraudulently misrepresented their identity, and so neither agency has demonstrated the will to enforce the law. So I brought this legislation called the New IDEA Act which clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax deductible for Federal income tax purposes, and it establishes that there will be a cooperative working effort between Social Security, Homeland Security, and the IRS. The IRS, who has demonstrated they do have a desire to enforce the law, they have been vigorous in enforcing the law, and they would be very useful in stepping into the enforcement of illegal immigration law, and they happen to be in just exactly the right position to do so. And so under my bill, should it become law--and in fact, my bill has been advocated by the Democrats in the Senate who are proposing immigration legislation, Senator Schumer and others. They didn't define the title of the bill, but they defined the bill within their talking points, so I can commend them for recognizing the need. New IDEA, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax deductible for income tax purposes, and it directs the IRS to go in under the normal course of their audits, run the Social Security numbers of those employees through, which will show up on the tax forms, run them through the E- Verify program. E-Verify is the Internet-based program that can verify the identity of the employees. It identifies a person who can lawfully work in the United States, and it has a very, very high degree of success and accuracy. So the IRS would come in in an audit, and they would audit corporation A, and say corporation A has 25 employees. Their Social Security numbers will be listed in their tax forms. They will punch those Social Security numbers in to E-Verify. If it comes back that they can lawfully work in the United States, fine. No problem. If it comes back that they can't verify, then the IRS can give the employer an opportunity to cure those records, to straighten them out and to correct them. But failure to correct those records then can be concluded by the IRS, under the New IDEA Act, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, the IRS can then deny the tax deductibility of the wages and benefits paid to the illegals. When the IRS denies that, then those wages--let's just say that it's $1 million worth of wages that are paid, are deducted as a business expense like you would deduct, oh, let's say, fuel or any of your overhead that you might have, input from produced products or whatever it might be. That business expense would be denied. And when it's denied, presumably, it goes over into the income column. So $1 million worth of wages are denied as an expense because it was paid to illegals and denied by the IRS. It would go over here to the other column on the profit side. And I did this calculation at 34 percent corporate income tax, and it might well be 35 percent today, and I think it's more accurate to say so. But at 34 percent, your $10 an hour illegal, by the time you add interest and penalty and the 34 percent tax, becomes a $16 an hour illegal. The IRS steps in then to enforce immigration law by denying the deductibility of wages and benefits paid to illegals, adding the interest and the penalty, and the $10 an hour illegal becomes a $16 an hour illegal. Employers will understand that instantly, and they will set about cleaning up their workforce, using E-Verify. And, by the way, we give that employer safe harbor if he uses E- Verify, using E-Verify to clean up his workforce. And an employer that can't function with the illegal staff that he has may make the decision to incrementally transition over into legal employees over a period of time. Whatever it takes. It's not draconian. It isn't stark. It isn't something that shuts businesses down, but it is something that sets up an incentive for businesses to comply with our immigration law. Should they choose not to do that, then they can pay the Federal Treasury the difference of $10 an hour up to $16 an hour. We need to fix E-Verify, and we do in my bill. We set up E-Verify so that an employer can use E-Verify to verify the employability status of the applicant upon a bona fide job offer rather than having to hire the individual. Under current E-Verify law, you can't use E-Verify to determine if a job applicant can lawfully work in the United States. You can only do that after you actually hire them. So if you hire an individual, and you run their data through E-Verify and it comes back that they can't confirm that they can lawfully work in the United States, then you have to turn around and fire them. And I'll take the position that American employers should not be compelled to hire illegals in order to find out that they're illegal. They should be able to say to the individual, Sam, John, Larry, Sally, whoever you are, I'm offering you this job, and the job that I'm offering you is contingent upon your data being approved through E- Verify. I will do that now if you're willing to accept this job. If they say yes, you run the data through. You've got, at a maximum, a 6- second delay to get this verification done. If they don't meet the test, you don't put them on the payroll. I think that it's immoral to hire people that are illegal, and I don't want to be compelled to do that because we've got a flaw in our E-Verify law. So I appreciate the statement that Mr. Polis from Colorado made that he's for zero illegal immigration. I don't know how you get to that unless you're willing to enforce the law. I think we need to force all traffic--legal and illegal--and all products--human and other products--through the ports of entry on our southern border. I think we need to go ahead and build a fence and a wall. And at the expense of $6 million a mile, that's the maintenance of our border. What will it cost us to build a fence and how much will it cut in the cost to maintain the enforcement of that? If we can, for a couple million dollars a mile, build some very effective barriers, that means that we can cut down on the cost to the boots on the ground to enforce those sections and focus our boots on the ground that we have in the areas where we have trouble with enforcement. That's a logical thing to do. Look around the world. Look at the barrier that they have in Israel, for example, where they had suicide bombers coming through over and over and over again. They built a barrier there, and it's set up to protect the Israelis from the people that would come and do them harm. Is it immoral for them to protect themselves from that kind of damage to their lives and to their limbs and to their treasure? I suggest it is not. And those that would argue that a wall on our border is comparable to the Berlin Wall just completely and intentionally and willfully miss the most important point, and that is that a wall to keep people out is morally and fundamentally different than a wall to keep people in. The Berlin Wall was about keeping people in. You don't hear the same people argue against the Great Wall of China because they know the Great Wall of China was designed to keep people out, not in. We know that the barrier in Israel has worked. We know that our barriers on our southern border where we have them have worked. We have tertiary fencing down there in San Luis, Arizona, that is, as near as I can determine, that section of fence--however short it is-- it's three layers of fencing. As near as I can determine, it has not been defeated by anyone. It's easier to go around the end than it is to go over, around, under, or through. I don't suggest we build 2,000 miles of wall and fencing with sensors and monitoring and patrol roads. Madam Speaker, I suggest that we simply build a fence and build a wall until they quit going around the end. If we do that, it may take 2,000 miles. It may not. We may just be building the 784 miles that are required by the Secure Fence Act. We would need to have a smart immigration policy. And here we are, down into the depths of this downward spiral of our economy, this economy that's been referred to a good number of times as the ``great recession.'' And we're talking about, what, granting amnesty to people, perhaps moving pieces of legislation through this Congress that would legalize 12 million to 20 million people in an economic environment where we have 15.4 million unemployed Americans that fit the category, that fit the definition, another 5 million to 6 million Americans who no longer fit the definition for unemployment because they quit trying. So we have over 20 million Americans that are looking for work or should be looking for work or have given up, and we have at least 8 million illegals that are working in the United States, taking up jobs that Americans could and should be doing. The argument that there is work that Americans won't do, we haven't heard much of that argument in the last year or so, since the economy went into the downward spiral. They haven't said that as often. I have always argued that there isn't work that Americans won't do. We do everything. There is no job in America that is not being done by Americans. No matter how many legal or illegal immigrants might be doing that work, there will always be Americans standing there doing that work as well. When we travel around the world and look at the work that is being done, work that is characterized as work that Americans won't do, I see that work being done by every nationality in every country. There is no work that Americans won't do. When John McCain talked about he would pay $50 an hour for people to come and pick lettuce, I am not sure that he ever wrote that check; but I was quite concerned that I would lose my construction crew, who might all migrate down to Arizona to pick lettuce for $50 an hour. It isn't a matter that there is work that Americans won't do, it is a matter of there has been a flood of underskilled labor that are mobile. They are more reactive. They can beat Americans to that job because they are not as tied to real estate. They don't have those kinds of possessions. They have a cell phone network, and if they need 25 people to pick the lettuce in Arizona, that network brings a lot of illegals in there to do that. It doesn't mean Americans won't do it. There is no work Americans won't do. I mentioned John McCain, and it isn't for the purpose of being critical of the positions he has taken in the past, I say my hats off to the people who have served this country. He is an authentic American hero. He has gone through a tremendous amount of torture and pain and suffering, and he has not lost his resolve to defend this country in a fashion that be believes as a United States Senator. I would just suggest, here are some real facts. I have asked this question, and I come down to a bottom line consensus: What is the toughest, dirtiest, most dangerous job that we ever ask Americans to do? I will suggest that it is not in the United States. It has been and perhaps will not be again in that particular location, but it is rooting terrorists out of places like Fallujah, or places in Afghanistan, where we ask our soldiers and our marines to put their lives on the line to do that, sometimes in 130 degree heat with 70, 80 pounds that they are carrying. They go in and root those terrorists out of Fallujah. They root them out of Afghanistan. They do that, and if you calculate them at 40 hours a week, for about $8.09 an hour. If Americans will do that, if they will take on the toughest, the hottest or the coldest, the dirtiest, and the most dangerous jobs in the world for that kind of money, there is no argument to be made that there are jobs that Americans will not do. We work hard and are willing to take a risk. We stand up for freedom and liberty and the rule of law. The people who put on the uniform to put their lives on the line are very much about defending the pillars of American exceptionalism, the principles that made American great, and they are not about defending someone having a path to citizenship being granted through amnesty. We owe the honor to the people who have defended our liberty and freedom to stand up for the rule of law. The rule of law has been reestablished by the statute in Arizona, the immigration legislation that they have passed and has been signed into law by the governor. These immigration laws in Arizona are laws that reflect the Federal immigration law. They fit within the umbrella of the Federal immigration law. Yes, there is a standard called Federal preemption, and that means if the Federal Government passes a law, provided it is constitutional that supersedes that of the States, that is Federal preemption. But we don't have any statutes that preempt immigration law in Arizona because they have drafted their immigration legislation to fit within the umbrella of the Federal immigration law. And they have set up some clear standards, clear standards that there shall not be racial profiling used as the only criterion when it comes to interdicting or stopping an individual. Now that happens to fit consistently with Federal case law. We have a responsibility and a duty and an obligation and a legal standard that allows our law enforcement officers to use a profile provided their race isn't the only criterion. And reasonable suspicion includes a whole lot of other criteria in addition to race. We don't want to be foolish or stupid about this. I recall an incident that took place in Urbandale, Iowa, 15 or more years ago. It is a community that at the time was not populated by minorities in any significant percentage. There was a Cadillac being driven down the street in a higher income residential area by an African American. The law enforcement officer saw that and wondered, and maybe it was actually Windsor Heights, come to think of it, but it was one of the suburbs of Des Moines, and the officer saw that and thought, That doesn't quite fit what goes on in this community. It could have been the same police officer in an African American community that would have made the call if it were perhaps a white person in that community. But it turned out to be the other way around. He ran the plates on the car and the car was registered to a Caucasian female who lived in the neighborhood. So the officer suspected something was out of order, pulled the car over, and found out that the African American driving the car was the husband of the Caucasian lady whom the car was registered to who lived in the neighborhood. Okay, it wasn't what you would normally see as typical. One could argue it was racial profiling, but I would argue it was police work picking up the things that were inconsistent and trying to pick the populous. In any event, the settlement was $60,000 paid to the driver of the car, the husband of the lady who owned the car and was a very legitimate resident of the community and as far as I know, was a very well-respected Iowan. But sometimes you get caught in the anomaly, and you have to give the police officers their due. They are picking out those things that are out of order and don't fit the normal practice in the neighborhood. And I know the difference. I live in a rural neighborhood. When somebody drives down my road, we generally know who they are and where they are going. If I drive down the road, they know me. It is part of our own built-in security system. Where I reside out here in D.C., I know who stands on the street and what the flow of traffic is, and you see those things that are outside the normal flow. That's what police officers do. It isn't and should not be targeting people because of their race. But race can be a factor in a legitimate police activity as long as it is not the only factor. That is what the Arizona law says. I want to presume that those police officers are operating to enforce the rule of law and protect society and to use the tools that they have to protect the people. That's what they are. They provide security all across this country. Having grown in an law enforcement family, I respect the job that they do and the risk that they take and the judgment and the education that is necessary for them if they are going to enforce the law. In Arizona, the executive order by the governor ensures that they are going to continue to teach and train their officers so that they stay within compliance of Federal law, Arizona law, Arizona Constitution and the United States Constitution. And if there are deviations from that, I am very confident that the people who are driving wedges between us as Americans will find a way to litigate. I regret and it saddens me, and in fact it infuriates me, Madam Speaker, that we would see the people who are race baiters who are seeking to drive wedges between the American people, trying to capitalize on this and scare the American people and make it out to be something that it is not. What it is is, it is a law that sets up and honors the Federal immigration law that uses the Arizona law enforcement people to enforce an immigration law that is now a State law that is the mirror of the Federal law. We need to understand that in the case of U.S. v. Santana Garcia, and several others, that there are Federal precedents that local law enforcement implicitly has the authority to enforce immigration law. Regardless of whether there is a 287(g) agreement, local law enforcement has the authority to enforce immigration law, and there is a Federal law that prohibits sanctuary cities. It has been exploited by many cities in the country, including San Francisco and Houston, a number of cities that want to boycott Arizona, the violation of the Federal law from prohibiting cities from becoming sanctuary cities has been a circumvention, and it says the series of requirements that are in there that prohibit local cities from, let me say, protecting illegals in their communities, and have they found a way to pass memorandums of understanding or city ordinances that direct their police officers to not gather information, because the statute that was written wasn't tight enough and requires that once they have the information, they have to transfer it on to Federal law enforcement officials, so they just prohibit their local law enforcement officers from gathering information on illegals. And so they become sanctuary cities and the streets of the city fill up with people who are here illegally. They are taking jobs from Americans. They are among the 8 millions taking jobs from Americans; and as the streets fill up, they are also turning a blind eye to the illegal drugs and the violence and the abuse that comes out of that community in its entirety. Madam Speaker, I go back to 12 to 20 million illegals living in America, at least 8 million working in America, 15.4 million unemployed, another 5 to 6 million that quit looking for work that fit that category except they are not trying any longer, over 20 million Americans who need a job, 8 million illegals that are occupying jobs that would all go to people who are either Americans or lawfully present in the United States, in an economy that has been declining and shrinking. And by the way, we have 1.5 million green cards that are issued on an annual basis. If you look at the workforce in America, 10 years ago the workforce in American was 142 million, now it is 153 million. It has increased about a little over 1 million a year over the last 10 years. And if you would go back and look, the numbers of green cards has accelerated from about three quarters of a million in that period of time--and that actually is a guess, Madam Speaker--on up to about 1.5 million a year now. Almost the sum total of the expansion of our workforce has been attributable to the legal immigration green cards that are a component of this. And so our economy has to grow and create 1.5 million new jobs a year just to accommodate the legal immigration, let alone the illegal immigration. Those are the facts of what we're faced with today. So, Madam Speaker, I'm going to make this statement, that we have to put a stop to the illegal immigration in America. We've got to direct all traffic through our ports of entry where we can stop the traffic of illegal drugs, contraband, and people coming into the United States. We need to enforce our immigration law. We need to adopt the new ID Act so the IRS can help us enforce immigration law. And then, while all this is going on, we've got to take a look at the legal immigration in America and make a determination as to how many jobs we want this economy to create to accommodate those who are coming in here legally, and we have to have an economy that's going to be robust. Furthermore, according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a household that's headed by a high school dropout costs taxpayers in America an average of $22,449; $22,449 over 50 years of heading the household, a $1.5 million cost to the taxpayers to help sustain this household because we have become a welfare state. When my grandmother came here before the turn of the previous century, she didn't come here to a welfare state. She came here to a meritocracy, and they wanted to ensure that the people that came through Ellis Island were physically and mentally fit and could sustain themselves. And even though they were screened in Europe before they got on the ship, 2 percent of them were sent back from Ellis Island because they didn't meet the standard. And so here we are today, 1.5 million legal immigrants who are granted work permits in the United States consuming all the new jobs in America and expanding the workforce when we have many more Americans that we could tap into to do this work that we haven't tried. That's 15.4 million unemployed, plus 5 to 6 million who no longer meet that category, 20 million altogether. And if I would put them into this category, those Americans of working age are in the area of 80 million Americans of working age who are simply not in the workforce. So if we would just simply hire one out of 10 of those, we could replace all the illegal workers by hiring 10 percent of those who are not in the workforce, but are of working age; and about 20 million of those are looking for work. So, Madam Speaker, we have an economy we need to heal up. We've got a rule of law we've got to reestablish. We have demonstrations that are likely to come across America that are designed to just pit Americans against Americans, race-based, race baiting for political purposes, when what we're really looking for here is the enforcement of the rule of law and a robust economy that's going to employ American workers. We are the most generous country in the world when it comes to allowing legal immigration, roughly 1.5 million a year. No other country comes close to matching that. We need to take a look at our economy, the rule of law, the culture in America, enforce the rule of law, stand with Arizona--who has not done anything except define their Arizona immigration law to reflect that of the Federal law. And the President of the United States, who has directed the Justice Department to examine Arizona law, I think is finding out that it's constitutional, it's statutorily consistent, it cannot be and should not be preempted by Federal law, and it should be honored and respected and supported, not investigated, nor litigated. And I encourage and I thank the people in Arizona for having the courage to step up and pass their legislation. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to an outstanding public servant and proud Greek American, Mr. Dean G. Popps. Dean most recently served our Nation as Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, and on April 16, 2010, he stepped down from his position to return to civilian life. This brings to a close a 7-year tour in the Department of Defense that started with his volunteering for a 179-day rotation in Iraq as part of the Coalition Provisional Authority, where I first had the pleasure of meeting him. Since then, Dean has served our Nation under two Presidents, two Secretaries of Defense and three Deputy Secretaries of Defense in a variety of increasingly senior roles. His visionary approach to his most recent position brought sorely needed business acumen to the Army's bureaucratic acquisition process. By calling on his years of experience as a businessman and entrepreneur, he reinvigorated his staff, reshaped rigid business practices and advanced the Army's acquisition objectives. Through this work, Dean has made invaluable contributions to multiple aspects of Army operations in his years of service. Among Dean's many contributions to the Army and the Nation was his leadership role in the Army's modernization program, in which he successfully defended resources and secured funding for many projects that have strengthened the capabilities of our Armed Forces as they carry out missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. Dean also oversaw the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund for three years, running what became the largest construction effort since the Marshall Plan. This project saw the completion of more than 3,400 reconstruction projects that have had a profound impact on the restoration of key elements of the Iraqi infrastructure as the country rebuilds and establishes a democratic system. A committed leader in every position he has held, Dean effectively ran the U.S. Elimination of Chemical Weapons Program as well, which has become a model for achieving the safe destruction of stockpiled chemical weapons. By the end of his time at the program's helm, the program had successfully completed over 50 percent of our national goal to eliminate stockpiled chemical agents in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention, and it will continue to serve as an outstanding model for similar programs elsewhere in the world. Foremost in Dean's mind has always been a commitment to the welfare of each soldier serving our Nation, a concern that he has upheld throughout his tenure as he helped various projects overcome a myriad of obstacles. He has constantly held himself to exacting performance standards and his visionary leadership and unselfish commitment to duty are truly admirable. The Nation will miss Dean's service but I'm confident his wife Lise, sons Stephen, Jason, and George, and his daughter Christina, will be happy to have him back after his extended loan to the American people. I hope my colleagues will join me in wishing him well in all his future endeavors and hope that those who follow in his footsteps will continue his legacy of selfless dedication to our great Nation. Good luck and godspeed.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I think it might be useful for the gentlelady and I to go through this list of things that have happened about the nationalization. Because if I look at the dialogue in the country, we've carried this dialogue, I think, back and forth together and teamed up on it. The gentlelady has talked about $700 billion in TARP. We haven't brought it up so much, but it is part of this, that three large investment banks were nationalized, either by action of or the support and approval of President Obama; along with AIG, the large insurance company, for some amount around $180 billion. We might have used $185 billion at one time. It's in that area. Then we've seen Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which I did mention earlier. The President by his executive order has swallowed up the balance of the risk, put it on the taxpayers, to the tune of $5.5 trillion in the contingent liability should Fannie and Freddie, either combination of them, collapse. While that's going on, we watched the nationalization, the takeover, of two of our proud American car companies: General Motors and Chrysler. We saw the CEO of General Motors fired and replaced by a CEO that was essentially de facto hired by the President of the United States. We've seen all but two of the board of directors of General Motors put in place by the President of the United States who doesn't even deny it. He takes a little bow and a smile as if that's what we should be doing with government. We have them looking in at CEOs' pay. We look at the student loan program that's been taken over by the Federal Government. We've watched the nationalization of our skin and everything inside it with ObamaCare taken over by the Federal Government. Now we're watching the financial institutions all the way down to the smallest credit transaction will be looked over by the Federal Government. This is a chilling display of the continuum of history of the last 18 months.

Mr. KING of Iowa. And reclaiming my time, I do wish to join in that pledge and putting my marker here. We have joined together in the introduction of legislation to repeal ObamaCare, to pull it out root and branch, lock, stock, and barrel, to eliminate ObamaCare so there is not one vestige of ObamaCare DNA left behind that could reproduce itself and further poison our legislation and our laws in America and further diminish the vitality of the American people. I recall that President Obama as a candidate consistently was critical of President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq. He pounded on President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq. However, that exit strategy actually is being implemented, ironically by the very individual who was so critical. My point is that Barack Obama has been involved in the nationalization of these huge sections of our private sector, as the gentlelady has described, more than 51 percent of our private sector activity. And when we add the financial sector to it, it becomes a number that approaches that three-quarters, as she has said. I sent a letter to Secretary Geithner, a formal letter. The response needed to be under oath because it was within a hearing of Financial Services and Ag hearing that we did jointly. The question was if the President was elected at least in part because he was critical of President Bush for not having an exit strategy in Iraq, what's President Obama's exit strategy to divest the taxpayers of their invested interest in this whole list of private entities that we have talked about from the banks to AIG to Fannie and Freddie to the car companies? I didn't get to the point of the student loan or ObamaCare because that hadn't been nationalized yet at that point. Two months later I did get an answer. And it took a couple of days for the smartest lawyers I had to analyze all the language, which boils down to this: The response from Secretary of the Treasury Geithner, well, we will divest ourselves of these assets when the time is right. And only he would know when that was. But there was no criteria for the Federal Government getting out of this business. It appears that there is a powerful incentive that is driven within the White House and within the progressives, the very liberals in this Congress, of which there are at least 77, to continue the nationalization, the management now that they are seeking to do of managing all of our financial industry, taking over student loans, and now every credit account in America. And additionally to that, I would give a new example that was exposed to me the other day. We have an example of how the Federal Government takes over the insurance industry. They did so in about 1963 or 1964 with the Federal flood insurance program. They argued that the private sector didn't produce enough competition so that you couldn't buy flood insurance in flood plains. Maybe there was a reason for that, because you would be flooded and the risks were too high. So they set up the Federal flood insurance program to provide competition to the private sector that was property and casualty at the time. In a few years, it came to pass that--and it is true today--that the only flood insurance that you can buy in America is under the Federal flood insurance program. It's also true today that that program is $19.2 billion in the red because their premiums don't reflect the risk because they offer this insurance--and by the way, it's compulsory to buy that insurance if you borrow the money through a mortgage loan under a national bank. So it looks to me as though FEMA has been assigned by Congress and is carrying out an action that has now expanded the flood plains dramatically so that the people in these flood plains have to buy more and more flood insurance. And I looked at one area within one county in my district where there are 2,200 more properties and 1,100 more property owners that will be compelled to pay for the national flood insurance premium. Presumably, if you expand the areas that people are compelled to buy insurance and do business with the Federal Government, then you will be able to bring this Federal flood insurance out of their $19.2 billion in the red. Think of what happens when the Federal Government sticks their regulatory nose in every transaction in America, every credit transaction, every private flood insurance transaction, every health insurance transaction, operates and manufactures probably two-thirds of the American cars, probably not quite that many actually, and has already taken over the secondary loan market to where they are in more than 50 percent of the real estate.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, and they decided who would get the credit on home loan mortgages based upon the cash flow of the welfare check. And it didn't work out so well. That's one of the examples. I am standing here thinking about this. Where would they stop? A party whose policy is change, who don't have any timeless values, there is not even a definition of truth over on that side that they can agree on, it is about change. And I have often said that if you would give me the magic wand and I could grant to the progressives, the liberals, the people that fit that definition of folks on that side of the aisle their wish, which would be the entire wish list of all the things that they could compile on that list between now and New Year's, and say to them you get all of this, you get all of this, every policy that you can possibly dream of, and we are going to give it to you when the ball drops at Times Square for New Year's, but the deal is then you have to clam up and not be clamoring for change any more, you have to live under all of the rules and all of the changes that you advocate for, here is what I can guarantee you. They would work night and day to make this list as complete as possible. They would work right up to the last minute. They would have an amendment they were trying to slip in as the ball was dropping at Times Square to bring New Year's about and grant them their wish. And then when they were granted everything they wished, they would stay up the rest of the night trying to figure out how they got cheated and what they forgot. And they would never keep their word about having to live under the rules and the regulations that were part of their wish list. We, on the other hand, believe in timeless values. We believe in the integrity of the human being. We believe that our rights come from God. We believe in free enterprise capitalism. We believe in property rights. We think that people that work should live better than those that don't. We believe the wealth of this Nation is not a zero sum game, but it's something that's built upon the entrepreneurial spirit and the foundations of free enterprise, property rights, individual rights, not group rights. And the destiny of America is going to be determined by the amount of liberty that we can grant to people out of this Congress instead of diminish from them. And my mission is to go forth and to give back out of this Congress the rights that rightfully come from God to the people that have worked so hard to build this country, and not to destroy it incrementally by these huge bites out of our freedom and our liberty. And the question that comes to me is what would a socialist do, what would a progressive do, what would a liberal do that a communist would not? Where do they draw the line? This has been a breathtaking sweep into a takeover of huge chunks of our economy. And they have designs on big chunks of the economy yet. When there is no restraint except the American people and the constitutional conservatives that are filling the streets of America. They come out with their American flags, their yellow Gadsden ``Don't Tread on Me'' flags, their constitutions in their pocket, and patriotism in their hearts, and tears running down their cheeks because of what they see is happening to America under this ruling troika of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. And it's going to turn around, Mr. Speaker. It's going to turn around this November. It's coming back into the hands of the people. And we will have a lot of work to do to clean up the mess. One of the things is on the immigration cards, the flash cards that train people to study their naturalization and pass the test. On one side it will say, ``Who is the father of our country?'' You snap it around and it says, ``George Washington.'' You pick up I think it's card 11, and it says, ``What is the economic system of the United States?'' You flap that card around and it says, ``Free enterprise capitalism.'' It probably isn't the case today given what's happened. I don't want to have to pull that card out of the deck. I want the freedom, the liberty card in the deck. And I want to be able to see my children and grandchildren and every succeeding generation not live the American dream, but live the American dream in addition with a higher standard of living and greater aspirations and more liberty than we had, which is tremendous. This is what is pulling at the heart of America. This is why the constitutional conservatives, which are comprised of the Obamaites with buyers' remorse, the independents that really don't want a label but they understand the Constitution and free enterprise, the 9-12 Project people that have been so activated here on September 12, all of the Tea Party groups that are there, the conservative Republicans, in fact, almost every Republican constitutional conservative, people that understand that our default position needs to be the Constitution itself and not some activist judge's idea of what they would want that Constitution to say, but what it actually says, what it was understood to mean at the time of its ratification.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I am always happy to yield when the Rules Committee is conducting business here on the floor. So I will go back to the beginning, Mr. Speaker, and that is this: that if we would go to 1978--and I want to illustrate the chronology of how we got to where we are today financially. Excuse me, Mr. Speaker, I will take it back even further than that. Let's go back to October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and it launched the Great Depression rather than the Great Recession. We saw a downward spiral in the value of that Dow Jones Stock Exchange and the other shares that were not registered on the Dow at the time, or as part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Americans lost equity. Some jumped out of windows--actually, not nearly as many as history would have us believe--but that crash in the stock market precipitously dropped. Of course it came up and went down, and it's always been a sawtooth. But we went through the thirties. We saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt being elected in 1932. And actually, prior to that, but certainly accelerated from that point, he borrowed money and spent money and created make-work projects, and he put the United States in debt like never before and never envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Even his own people, including John Maynard Keynes, got nervous with the amount of money that was spent. His Treasurer, Morgenthau, expressed his concern that we spent all this money and what do we have to show for it. Unemployment is still high; the economy still hasn't recovered. And they lumbered all the way through the thirties with marginal improvement in the economy. And one has to question if it ever would have recovered if it hadn't been for World War II. In fact, the President of the United States, the current President, has made the remark that World War II was the largest stimulus plan ever. He can make that statement and challenge it or not, I don't take issue with the concept that he is illustrating in that point, Mr. Speaker. But I would continue and make this point, that from October of 1929 we saw all of this spending in the New Deal era of the Great Depression throughout the thirties. We saw all the borrowed money that went into winning World War II, and it's a good thing that we did. I believe Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an outstanding war leader for the better part of the Second World War, not so much of an economic leader, in my view, nor a social and cultural one; but he did hold us together as a Nation and he provided that clear voice and that leadership that was so important during that period of time, and he stood on the ground of unconditional surrender. So I tip my hat to that contribution to history to that man. However, by the end of World War II, we had not recovered economically from where we were in 1929. And by the beginning of the Korean War--let me say by the beginning of the Cold War in 1948, as it was illustrated by Winston Churchill--we had not recovered from the Great Depression. By the beginning of the Korean War, we had not yet recovered from the Great Depression. And by the end of the Korean War, we had still not yet recovered from the Great Depression. If you measure it as the Dow Jones Industrial Average recovering back to the place where it was in October of 1929, that happened, Mr. Speaker, 9 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt had passed away. It was 1954 when the stock market got back to where it was in October of 1929. All of those years. And I will argue, Mr. Speaker, that overspending by government, the interest and the principal overspending by government delays the recovery. It may diminish the depths to which we might have otherwise fallen, but it delays the recovery. It's the same as in a business. Let's say, for example, you're a small business and you're grossing $500,000 a year and meeting a payroll and all the bills that I talked about earlier and you have a flood that wipes out your asset base. Then along comes FEMA, and if you're in business, they're not going to give you a grant; they might help you get an SBA loan. So if there's a disaster loan, it might even be a preferable interest rate, but let's say your debt was $100,000 and you're grossing $500,000 and meeting a payroll of $250,000 a year. Now, it takes another $400,000 to put all the pieces back in your business, and you're able to borrow that money at 4 percent or 5 or 6 percent. Now you have the interest rate on the $400,000, plus the requirement to pay the principal off on that $400,000. All of that money that you're spending now that is the result of the over-leveraging that may be necessary to keep you in business is money that's earned, it's money that you had to earn, you would have earned it anyway, but now that money goes off for interest and principal rather than capital investment, which is what creates jobs. At a certain point, you can't service the debt any longer. At a certain point, a business can't pay the interest; it can't pay the principal, and it becomes insolvent if the debt and the leverage is too high. That is true for a family that runs their credit card bills up too much to where they can't service even the interest or the minimum payments on their credit cards. It's true also for a small business. It's true for a large business--and, Mr. Speaker, it's true for a government. It's true for a small government like Greece. It's true for a large government like the United States of America. At some point, this debt that we have taken on here in this time, in this era, becomes too great for even the most robust economy in the world to overcome--to service, to pay the interest, and to pay the principal on that debt. That's where I think we are headed. We may already be there. That was the fear that they had during the thirties, and that was something that may have restrained Roosevelt in his spending to where we were able to recover from it; although, it took a long, long time-- from 1929 until 1954, until 9 years after the Second World War was over and 9 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away. We carried this burden throughout this whole period of time. Through the fifties, during those idyllic years of Fun with Dick and Jane, which is the life that I grew up in, we were responsible for our budgets. The people who were coming into adulthood at that period of time had now cut their economic teeth on fiscal responsibility because they had pinched pennies and had made it through the Great Depression. Then they fought and won a world war. Then they were engaged in a Cold War. Of course, we had the war in Korea that was a negotiated settlement in the end. These were a frugal, hardened people who were the sons and daughters, in my part of the country, of pioneers who came across the prairie in a covered wagon--generally walking beside the team of oxen, not riding in the wagon--to live free or die on the prairie. These were independent, hardworking, industrious, entrepreneurial spirited, strong faith family people who took advantage of the opportunity to be legally here in America, to build lives for themselves and to lay the foundation for their children and their grandchildren. These were the people in the fifties. Now we watch the next generation, the baby boomer generation, blossom with the component of the generation which was referred to as the ``flower children,'' who didn't take that responsibility, who weren't hardened by those experiences, which were only the secondhand experiences of what had been transferred from their parents to them, and they began to push this irresponsibility. By 1978, the class envy component got high enough, and there were some things that were inappropriate in what was going on, but the lending institutions were redlining neighborhoods. They would look at the inner cities in America that were losing asset value. Now think of this: If you owned an apartment--a ``condominium'' is how we refer to it today--or a house or a piece of industrial or commercial property in an inner city that was being run down, the value of the real estate was diminished sometimes by the crime rates that were there, by the abusive drugs, by the businesses that weren't sustaining their value and their cash flows. So you might have a nice home in a neighborhood that's not as nice as it used to be. Even though you keep your home up, people don't want to buy that home because they don't want to move into that neighborhood, so the value is going down. The bankers and the lenders were doing what they call ``redlining.'' I have a red pen in my hand. They would draw, Mr. Speaker, a line around this neighborhood or this area in the city, and they would make a determination that they were no longer going to lend money on real estate in those neighborhoods or in those commercial industrial property areas that were being run down. It may well have been a prudent business decision. It was defined as a racist decision, and in some cases, I think it probably was. This Congress passed legislation called the Community Reinvestment Act. It compelled lenders to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. That was in 1978. ACORN was formed and shaped around that same period of time. As this moved forward into the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, there was a refreshment of the Community Reinvestment Act that set yet higher standards for making more bad loans into bad neighborhoods. They had found that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had become quasi-government entities for formerly private entities who were not making, according to the opinion of this Democrat majority in this Congress, enough bad loans into bad neighborhoods. So they changed the standards in the Community Reinvestment Act. They were lobbied by ACORN to lower the standards for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They lowered the standards for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the secondary loan market so that more lenders could make more bad loans in more bad neighborhoods and could peddle them off into the secondary loan market of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now we are into the mid-1990s, and still it wasn't such a crisis until such time as the dot-com bubble burst. The dot-com bubble burst, I think, was initiated by the lawsuits against Microsoft that were joined by several State attorneys general, including by my State attorney general, Tom Miller. I think that he and others wielded the lance that pierced the dot-com bubble when they filed the class-action lawsuit against Bill Gates' operation and Microsoft. Even though I believe that that bubble was swelling and that it would have burst at some point, I think the lance that was wielded was by those State attorneys general. That brought about the bursting of the dot-com bubble. In the aftermath of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, we had, I'll say, a mini recession. Alan Greenspan saw that mini recession. Mr. Speaker, this is my interpretation of his actions. Certainly, this is subject to rebuttal by Alan Greenspan or by somebody else who may have some knowledge that I'm not privy to. He set about a policy here in the United States to unnaturally lower the interest rates so that more people could buy homes in order to drive the housing market. This was to partially compensate for the bursting of the dot-com bubble. We had more homes built than before, a higher demand because of the unnaturally low interest rates and favorable terms, and we had the lower underwriting standards that had been provided to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as far as their secondary mortgages were concerned. There was pressure that was put on the lenders. They had been pushed by ACORN, which found itself in the inner-city neighborhoods brokering home loans and approving the conduct of the lenders as to whether they were complying with the Community Reinvestment Act. So we have a political organization that has turned out to be a corrupt criminal enterprise, promoting bad loans in bad neighborhoods at unnaturally low interest rates, driving up a false economy in the housing market to, presumably to some degree, compensate for the bursting of the dot-com bubble that was brought about by the suits of the States' attorneys general, including by my attorney general, Tom Miller. While all of that was going on, we got hit by the September 11 attack on our financial centers. There were the ensuing extra costs involved, and there was a tremendous loss in life and in treasure that took place due to that. Then what do we see happening here? We have seen now an economic crisis that has been, perhaps, averted, but maybe it would have been better if we would have simply allowed some of those businesses that were too big to fail to just simply fail. We'd have reorganized them, and we would have put them through the process to get them back into the system again. We would have recovered more quickly. It may have hurt more, but in the end, we would have reestablished the principle that you simply cannot have ``too big to fail'' unless you are going to have a government guarantee. Now the government guarantee on Fannie and Freddie is $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities. All of this has taken place, and it has moved us away from those standards of free enterprise and accountability. I would be very happy to yield so much time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Minnesota, who is on the Financial Services Committee and who is extremely knowledgeable about this and about any subject that she might choose to change it to.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentlelady yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady. In reclaiming my time, I wanted to explore this ``secured creditor'' so that the Speaker and those who are observing will understand clearly what this means. A ``secured creditor'' would be someone who holds collateral, which is a guaranty that's behind the bond. I'm going to ask you to flesh this out a little bit, but I'm going to say that it includes, perhaps, real property, which could be the actual factory, itself. It could be the equipment inside the factory. It could be cash collateral, security. It could be the cars sitting as ready for shipment to the dealers but not the cars in the dealers' lots, because they own those cars. Is that a reasonable picture of what ``secured collateral'' is when you talk about bondholders and the secured creditors? I would yield to the gentlelady.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I would add onto that that I hadn't thought of that in terms of, and this is a presumption that iPods will stay the price they are, which we know that competition and mass production will probably reduce the cost. But under current value and current dollars, a child born today, for being a natural-born American citizen, their share of the national debt is $44,000. That's like here's your mortgage, sign here with your little ink footprint when you're born, we'll wheel you right out of the delivery room and you've got a $44,000 debt that you have to pay the interest and the principal on. That same child born today, by the time they start fifth grade in school, their share of the national debt will be $88,000. That's the difference between the Obama budget and the budget that we had coming into the Obama administration. That's that kind of a burden that I'm going to presume cross-references to the $300 a month that the gentlelady from Minnesota has talked about.

Mr. KING of Iowa. One of the important studies was done not that long ago by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. He's done a couple of very important studies in the last 2 years. One of them was the level of welfare that's here in the country. I believe he counted 72 different programs that distribute the wealth from taxpayers in America to people who are sometimes taxpayers but more often a greater share of them are tax users. Of those programs, even though we brought down some of the welfare in the mid nineties, it didn't really reduce it so much as it produced a temporary plateau; and then it was built up again with a whole series of programs that we can't track. Well, he has done so. And it's a chilling thing to see what happens to a society that was a meritocracy, that rewarded people for their work, that now has become a welfare state. One of his definitive studies, Mr. Speaker, was this. He went in and looked at households that are headed by high school dropouts, without regard to their immigration status; whether they were legal, illegal, foreign or natural-born Americans, whatever their category might have been with their immigration status, if they headed households, and the average household, a family of four, and they were a high school dropout, they would draw down an average of $32,000 a year in taxes in the whole collection of the benefits that are there and they would pay about $9,000 a year in taxes. They would draw down 32, they would pay about $9,000 a year in taxes. The net cost to the taxpayer was $22,449 a year, and that's an average, and the average sustained life of that household, Mr. Rector calculated, was 50 years. So the math comes out to about $1.5 million to subsidize that household. And we've got people here in this country that are arguing that we need to open up our borders and bring in any number of people because our economy needs this labor and we need someone to pay for the Social Security of the baby boomers. Well, if they can't sustain themselves here, if they're undereducated, even though we have entrepreneurs that fit that category, that are going to make millions of dollars and create millions of jobs, on average it is a net cost to the taxpayer of $22,449 a year, $1.5 million for the duration of that household, that's a burden on the taxpayers that is not a stimulation to the economy, it's a drag and a drain on the economy. And the argument that they are paying Social Security with the payroll tax and, therefore, that's good for those of us that are looking at retirement, members of the baby boom generation, which I am and Mrs. Bachmann is not. That's my little pandering piece here, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the presentations made here in the previous hour, and there were a couple of visuals that I want to look at and commit some of that to memory. I heard from Ms. Kaptur that this is not a partisan issue, it is an economic issue and an American issue, and I agree. I have been troubled for some time not just the influence that comes out of Goldman Sachs, but the influence that comes out of Wall Street. Here is my concern and here how it was internalized. I lived much of my life watching from a distance what was going on on Wall Street, and I believed that as those investors and those bankers sat down there and began to trade on the streets of Wall Street and began to build the edifices that exist there today so very close to Ground Zero, that they were keepers of the free enterprise flame in America. I had great trust that they were the ones that understood from the top down, from the multiple billions of dollars in investments down, how to hold together free enterprise, how to plan for the long term, how to put provisions in place so that each generation could have that opportunity to do free enterprise capitalism and free market capitalism. I got my first wide open eyes when I first went to Wall Street when I was elected to Congress; it would be fairly early in 2003 for me. It's a long story, but the short version of it was after I went around Wall Street and met with a lot of the CEOs and the players that were there, on the way back I turned to my wife and I said, Marilyn, they don't have a vision for the long term. They don't have a plan in place to protect our investments and see to it that this doesn't collapse. They're looking at the short term. They're looking at taking their margins out and they're looking at their quarterly reports, but they're not looking at where we are in 10 years or a generation or 50 years or 100. That was well before we saw anything except a dot-com bubble that was, at the time, being filled by an unnatural housing market that was partially fueled by unnaturally low interest rates. But that was my vision then. As I watch this unfold, I reflect upon an individual we brought in as an expert, and since I'm going to quote him on the floor, I don't want to attribute it to the name, but it's 30 years in investment banking. This was in the beginning of the subprime mortgage crisis as the dialogue was beginning in the country before we actually saw this starting to tail off. He explained it this way: when you're in this investment banking business, what you do is--and these would be the experts--what you do is pretty much what everybody does. That way if they're making money, you're making money, and if things fall apart and they get bailed out, you'll be bailed out with them. That was more than 3 years ago. That's another incident that was branded into my memory because it was a seminal moment in my understanding that the economy that most of us deal with as individuals, balancing our checkbook, paying our credit card bills, looking at the income that comes in weekly or monthly and budgeting our expenses and knowing that there are checks and balances in everything that we do, if we fail to make our house payment, somebody comes and sells our house. If we fail to make our car payment, somebody repossesses our car. They don't come along and say, oh, sorry, you didn't buy a nice enough car, we're going to tax somebody and fund that. We have to be responsible for our finances. If we start a business, we have to guarantee those payments. We have to get a line of credit at the bank so we can make our monthly bills and we can meet the payroll and the utilities and all of the things that come along with the free enterprise side of this. I looked at Wall Street and I found out that they had a different set of rules, a different way of looking at this, that their checks and balances were not built in so that there was an assurance that--the built-in component that is a check and balance that would require that the people who would make the over-investments and take the excessive risks would pay the price for that. So as we get to this point now where we have seen the downward spiral in our economy, this ``Great Recession'' as some will call it and the massive government bailouts that we have had and the tremendous burden on the taxpayers, born and unborn, that we will have this obligation to try to service the interest and the principal on this debt, still the guarantee is there, more than implicit, it's now nearly explicit with this legislation. And we may or may not agree on how we go forward, but I think we can agree that the things that we've done in the past haven't had enough checks and balances internally. As I listened to this dialogue--I didn't come to the floor to speak about this subject, but I wanted to express this right in the aftermath of this previous Special Order, Mr. Speaker, to let you know and everyone know that we do have a common cause to put responsibility and government responsibility in the market system. I just watched the gentlelady pay attention here. I would yield to whatever remarks she might choose to make.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and, Mr. Speaker, I would point out that it is unusual for Democrats and Republicans to share time spontaneously on the floor, but it's because there is a bond of common interest and a bond of a serious legislator that I recognize that's here on the floor for a serious reason. I thank the gentlelady from Ohio for the presentation. I'm going to shift off now into the subject matters that I had on the front of my mind, but I was compelled to address this and I appreciate the response. Mr. Speaker, I come here to the floor tonight to talk about a range of issues. Perhaps if I would pick up on the financial side of this and go through a list of some of the things that have happened that I think contributed to the ``Great Recession'' that some refer to it as. And I would take us back a long ways. I would take us far back to the time that there became implicit guarantees that the Federal Government would do bailouts. I remember those years of the eighties that the gentlelady mentioned. I went through 28 years of business, and I was highly leveraged going into the farm crisis of the eighties. I know the pain of that. I lived for 3\1/2\ years with a knot in my stomach that didn't go away unless there was something incredibly distracting that would cause it to disappear, and then I remember it would form again.