Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. It is my privilege and I'm honored to be recognized to speak here on the floor and to address you tonight. Having listened to my friend and colleague from Ohio talk about the high moral calling that there is for them to pass socialized medicine, I'll just tell you, Madam Speaker, it's hard for me to reconcile those things. It's hard for me to think of a country--a beautiful country with a deep, rich, free tradition that would give up its freedom and its liberty and its sense of responsibility for the sake of the government providing something that 85 percent of people are providing for themselves. The statements that were made by the gentleman from Ohio about what is not freedom--it's not freedom to be able to start your business and have to worry about paying health care premiums or it's not freedom to see those premiums go up by a large percentage every year. That whole spiel, Madam Speaker. And I think it misses the point entirely. I think the freedoms that I'm hearing the gentleman from Ohio talk about are the types of definitions for freedom that I hear talked about by those that live in places like Canada or the United Kingdom or France or one of those countries that has socialized medicine; one of those countries that says freedom is having free health care provide by somebody else paying for it as a taxpayer. It's not the measure of freedom. It's not the measure of liberty. The measure of freedom and liberty is entirely different. You can't ever measure freedom by what is free, because freedom is never free. And it is a huge dichotomy in this Congress that people on this side of the aisle that want to subvert the definition of freedom. And so I will just say freedom is not about what is free. Let's talk about liberty. Liberty is to be able to make the decisions for yourself, but be bridled by morality. That's the difference between liberty and freedom. Other people in the world talk about freedom as in what's free from government, as if that's a measure of liberty. But when you talk about what's free from government, first of all, it's never free. Somebody has to pay the taxes, whether it's the people who are earning and paying taxes now or whether its the children or grandchildren that they would foist this debt upon with this socialized medicine bill. Madam Speaker, we could stand here tonight and we could talk about nuance after nuance of what's in this bill and what isn't. The truth is, the gentleman from Ohio doesn't know. And I suspect that nobody in the entire Democrat caucus knows. I'm confident nobody on the Republican side knows what's in this supposed negotiated change. A night or more ago, there was a bill that was brought to the Budget Committee. It's a shell bill. It doesn't have in it the changes that they're trying to get established here. It's a shell bill. It's designed to start the clock ticking so that when they get the arms twisted and the Speaker uses all the leverage at her disposal and we can hear the bones breaking across Capitol Hill from arms twisted up behind people's back, some of them carrot--some of them stick. When all of that is done, they want to have this machinery in place so that the Speaker, who sits up in her office making these deals behind closed doors, will have a bill come down here to the floor that nobody has seen, at least so far, and a bill that will be a reconciliation package that is unprecedented in its tactic, in its procedure, to propose changes to a bill that is the Senate version of the bill. And this is the unbelievable part, Madam Speaker--the very idea that we have before us this week, and at least threatened to come forward if the votes can be put together this week, a socialized medicine bill, a bill that could not today pass the United States Senate. A Senate version of the bill wouldn't pass in the Senate. Everybody in America knows that. That's why the results of the election in Massachusetts made so much difference. The people in Massachusetts, arguably the least likely in this modern era to save liberty for Americans, voted Scott Brown in as their Senator. He said that he would oppose this Senate version of the health care bill. The bill that passed on Christmas Eve can't pass today on the eve of St. Patrick's Day. Not out of the Senate it can't, Madam Speaker. And so we are in this odd, perverse situation where perhaps for the first time in the history of America--and if this happens, certainly with the largest magnitude of impact, a bill that can't pass the Senate in its current condition--that being the configuration of the Senate as reset by the people in Massachusetts and the American people--a bill that can't pass the Senate comes to the House that's to be passed here on the floor of the House under the Slaughter rule, which deems it has been passed but doesn't require people to vote on it. And so we have a bill that could very well go to the President of the United States where he is salivating to sign it, a bill that couldn't pass the Senate, a bill that couldn't pass the House, but nevertheless could become the law of the land. That is the breathtaking anomaly of what we're facing here, and it's in a bill that cannot be brought here to the floor of the House because, even though Speaker Pelosi can let 37 Democrats off right now, according to the most recent news reports, those 37 happen to represent ``noes'' or hard ``noes,'' and another 55 are undecided. And if the Speaker's to pull the votes together, she's got to run the table on the 55 undecided and hold all of the ``noes'' together. Every undecided would have to decide that they're going to be in favor of socialized medicine for this to work. And the brokered deal would be that they would bring the Senate version of this to the floor under a rule that would be self-enacting, a rule that would be configured right up here on the third floor in that little old Rules Committee that I call the hole in the wall, where the hole in the wall gang usurps the liberty of this deliberative body and usurps the franchise of the Members of Congress and send the bill down here under a limited amount of debate time. Probably it would be a closed rule, so there would be no amendments to the rule; and the rule would be self-enacting which would automatically deem that the bill that has passed the Senate in the past that couldn't pass the Senate today is deemed to be passed by the House of Representatives, even though the Members on this floor don't have the will to vote for it so that it would go to the President of the United States, whom I said is salivating to sign it. He would sign it, and we would have the law of the land, a bill that swallows up one-sixth of the economy of the United States and nationalizes the management of the health care of every American, over 300 million of us, into law enacted, without being able to pass the United States Senate, without being able to be supported and passed for the purposes of becoming law in the House of Representatives. And then behind that, the Speaker is asking people who have gone through a crucible to get here--and I will say, Madam Speaker, I respect the intelligence of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I think it would be hard to believe that there are people in this Congress that would be so stupid to believe that they could be promised that if they just vote for the Senate version of the bill with all of its warts, moles and scars and all of the smelly things that are part of it, the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Florida Gator Aid, the national health clinics to the tune of $11 billion, and about six or seven other special packages and components that are in the Senate version of the bill, none of them passing the smell test. But asking this House to vote for a rule that automatically enacts it so they don't have to vote for the bill on the promise that there would be a reconciliation package that would be passed here in this House that would go over to the Senate that would be designed to fix the flaws in the Senate bill, strip out the Cornhusker Kickback, strip out the Louisiana Purchase, strip out the Florida Gator Aid, and strip out the $11 billion worth of public health clinics that have been leveraged by Bernie Sanders from Vermont and those other six or seven egregious bargains that have been made and convince the Democrats, 216 of them, to vote for a bill that will be followed by a reconciliation package that may or may not have the votes to pass the House of Representatives. Then it would go straight down that Hall to the Senate where the Senate would have to take the changes to the bill that they passed that are dictated by the House and expect that that's going to happen, even though procedural obstructions fall in the way in a breathtaking fashion down to the point where just the parliamentary rules would threaten to strip out half or two-thirds of a reconciliation bill, including the Stupak language which isn't going to go in here anyway. So you end up with the Senate bill becoming law and a futile effort on the part of the House to follow through on a promise to the Members of the House that don't want to vote for this thing that have been leveraged to vote. And what is the configuration of the Democratic Caucus, Madam Speaker? What are they thinking, and what would they like to get accomplished here? Here is where they sit. They sit in three places, just to analyze the political configuration here because this isn't policy anymore. This is politics. Politics are this: hard-core left- wing liberals, every member of the Progressive Caucus which is linked to the socialists in America, they're all for this bill. It nationalizes health care in America. It may not do it in the first stroke of the pen, but it gets us there. And to be fair, there may be one or two of those that will decide that it's not lefty enough for them. But that core of the progressives, the socialists, the lefties, they're going to vote for this bill because they believe in it. It's a deep conviction on their part. The second component will be those Democrats that believe that they will take the risk, and they think that they can somehow figure out how to get reelected to come back to this Congress even though the American people, by the hundreds of thousands, have risen up in every way they know how to say ``no'' to this socialized medicine. And then the next component of this, these are the people that are members of the Democratic Caucus that have decided that they need to vote for this bill for the sake of preserving, let me say, their President's mojo, their President's political capital. To keep the caucus together on the Senate side, they would say, I'm going to have to sacrifice myself because this cause of keeping Speaker Pelosi in power and Barack Obama's mojo flowing is more important than their seat in Congress or the voices of their constituents, which, by the way, reflects to be almost one and the same thing. So there's the configuration. Left-wing liberal progressives that will vote for the bill because it moves us towards socialized medicine--it either is or gets us there eventually; those who will take the chance and decide that they think that they can hold their seat even though they'll vote for something that the American people have rejected, spit out, Madam Speaker, three to one for the most part in this country; and then those that believe that they can somehow either hang onto their seat or they're willing to pay the sacrifice. Three categories. That is what's going on. And then of course you have the Democrats that will vote ``no.'' If 37 of them vote ``no,'' this bill can pass by a vote of 216-215. If 38 of them vote ``no,'' then the bill fails. And I will predict that if it's clear that the bill is going to fail even by one vote, we will see, Madam Speaker, a lineup of Democrat Members of Congress come down here to the well and pull their red cards out of the box that will be sitting on this table and take their felt-tip pen, and they will write in there and change their ``yes'' to a ``no.'' This bill will either pass by one or two votes or it will fail by 40 because they don't want their names on this turkey, but they're determined politically to move this through. Here's what we also have, Madam Speaker, and that is that this all started back a year and a half or more ago, 2 years ago during the Democratic Presidential Caucus, and it started in Iowa. I mean, it is my home territory. I see it. I know it. Hillary Clinton had pushed the National Health Care Act as the first lady in the early nineties, in the beginning years of Bill Clinton's Presidency. Yes, she closed the doors, and she had backroom deals. She did write a bill, though; and it was socialized medicine. It was single-payer. The Federal Government takes it over and creates all these new agencies. It was a scary and threatening thing to what it would have done to our freedom and our liberty. And then the American people rejected that, spit it out, so to speak. And back here we are 15 years later with Hillary Clinton's opponent in the Democratic primaries pushing a socialized medicine program that is in some respects different from that that Hillary pushed. The American people see this, and they rejected it, and they spit it out. What has been created is a toxic stew. They went in and put this all together. President Obama wanted a, and still wants, a single-payer plan. Single-payer is a complete government-run takeover of health care, socialized medicine. He has said so. It's a matter of record. So they went together to try to figure out how to write a bill, and from the beginning, it was this--and I will do the metaphors, Madam Speaker. They went back into old HillaryCare, and they took that old soup bone that was laying on the shelf in HillaryCare in 1993 and '94. It had been sitting there for 15 years. All the meat stuck to the bone was tainted. They took HillaryCare off the shelf, and they put it in the pot, just add some water. They said, Hey, look what we have. Voila, we have socialized medicine--oh, no excuse me--single-payer plan. The American people don't want it to be called socialized medicine. And people looked at that skeptically and said, That's not enough. So they began adding more and more pieces, more and more bells and whistles, other ways to try to blur the taste of that tainted meat that was in that stew. By the time this has been churned through from June of last year, July, August--especially August--and September, October. November, it passed the House. By then, the American people knew that there was a toxic stew that had been cooked up and created by the Democrats in this Congress. A toxic stew. It started with old HillaryCare, dropped that old tainted soup bone into it, and then they began to add other vegetables and bells and whistles to try to blur the taste and mask it. It's still tainted. And the American people have said over and over again in every way that they know how that they don't want a potful of this toxic stew. They don't want a bowlful. They don't want a ladleful. They don't want a spoonful of this toxic stew. American people do not want any measure of the toxic stew of socialized medicine, but that's what we have because the elitists and the arrogance of the liberals have decided that they understand what's right for posterity, and they can manage, Madam Speaker, the people in the country who apparently can't manage themselves. But what I see is 85 percent of the American people who are insured and 85 percent of the people who are happy with their insurance. These are the people who want to be able to make their own choices for themselves, and that's what will be rejected. There is a whole list of things that go out the window if this socialized medicine bill is passed. We are not the kind of people who should be moving towards greater and greater dependency classes. We're the kind of people that believe in freedom in the true sense of the word. We believe in liberty. We have our constitutional principles, our constitutional values, and this bill does not reflect them. I believe if it does become law, there will be court challenges to the constitutionality of it. We will see, as a matter of certainty, health insurance premiums will go up for Americans. The younger you are, the more you will see the premiums go up. There will be a large amount of nonparticipation, people who decide they're going to pay the fine, whether it's $800 or $2,000, because it's cheaper than the higher premiums that will be driven by this bill. And then when they get sick, they'll be going to buy health insurance to cover them after they're sick. And one of the first things that's enacted if this legislation should become the law of the land is--they'll call it the fix. It's the change in preexisting conditions. So it would prohibit an insurance company from considering that an applicant had preexisting health problem conditions, which means that if you prohibit that consideration of preexisting conditions, who would buy insurance until they got sick? Wouldn't you just wait until your house was on fire and buy your property and casualty insurance? Wouldn't you just wait until the hail was pounding the roof to shreds and buy your property and casualty so you can make your claim? That's what will happen with health care. That's about the only thing that happens right away, Madam Speaker, except for the increases in fees, the increases in taxes, the increases in revenue that comes with this in this bill that is, according to Judd Gregg, a $2.5 trillion bill. And that was when they scored it almost a year ago. Now you can add another $400 billion to $500 billion to the cost because the revenue has been shut down, and they would sign a lot of people up over the next 4 years before the benefits kick in. That, Madam Speaker, is what we're dealing with here today. And it's one of the reasons that my good friend Judge Gohmert from Texas has come to the floor. He carries a tremendous amount of knowledge and a tremendous amount of passion about freedom and liberty. He's been here defending this night after night after night here on the floor, in press conferences, at rallies everywhere in America. Louie Gohmert has a place to go. He's stepped up to defend our freedom and our liberty, like all Americans should be doing and like the Americans who filled this Capital City up today. I would be happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas, my friend Louie Gohmert.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I appreciate the gentleman from Texas, as I listened to the gentleman from Ohio talk and to spread this philosophy that somehow, first, there are principles that they've been trying to drag back and establish rights that don't exist for a long time. This goes back to, probably, Woodrow Wilson or earlier, but FDR comes to mind. And if one should go out to FDR's Memorial here in this city, you'll see the memorial that displays the four freedoms. Back in those years, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a speech about the four freedoms, and Norman Rockwell painted the cover of a magazine on that that showed the four freedoms, one at a time. The first freedom was, freedom--let's see--freedom of speech. The second one was freedom of religion. The third one was freedom from want, and the fourth one was freedom from fear. Now, I go back and look at that, and I don't think I was very old when I first realized about that speech of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the four freedoms speech--the freedom of speech, religion, want, and fear--and I knew even then, as a young man, that there is no freedom from want and there is no freedom from fear, that these are things that can be resolved. These aren't rights that come from God. Our liberty comes from God. It says so in the Declaration. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. And we're endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And by the way, the pursuit of happiness, in the left-wing version, means anything hedonistic you might want to do that makes you happy or gives you pleasure for the moment. But pursuit of happiness our Founding Fathers understood was rooted in the Greek word eudaemonia, which means that pursuit of truth, both the physical and the mental versions of truth. So we have these liberties that come from God that are clearly delineated in the Declaration of Independence and the foundation for our laws in the Constitution, and no one in America has a God-given right for freedom from fear or freedom from want. Those are manufactured rights that jerk this country off on to the left towards the socialist side of this. And as I listen to this debate on health care, it comes back to a position that's continually made, that people have not only a right to health care, but they have a right to their own individual health insurance policy that they own. And the folks on this side of the aisle, the Democrat side of the aisle, have continually conflated two terms. Well, many more, but the two that I'm talking about are the terms ``health care'' and ``health insurance.'' Over the last year and a half or 2 years, the subject has been conflated to the point where, when people say ``health care,'' often they mean health insurance. And if you say ``health insurance,'' you generally mean health insurance. But if you say ``health care,'' you might mean health insurance or health care. And many Democrats on that side of the aisle, and I don't know that that's the case with the gentleman from Ohio, have made the statement that everybody in America has a right to health care and that they have a right to their own health insurance policy. And I'll make this point, that everybody in America has access to health care, albeit in some cases it's the emergency room. Everybody has access to health care. We don't let people die in the streets. You'd never see that happen in the United States. We take care of people. We don't have a collapsed system, as the gentleman from Ohio would have us believe. We have the best health care delivery system in the world. We have the best health insurance system in the world. Both of them can use improvements, and we should do that. But we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We shouldn't give up on the great things that we have that give so much quality and so great a life expectancy in this country for the sake of moving towards the socialization or the nationalization of a policy that diminishes us as a people. And so, going through those four freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of religion--which I agree with, those are God-given rights--freedom from want and freedom from fear, takes me back to a hearing we had in the Ag Committee at the beginning of the markup for the last farm bill that we did. And there, Janet Murguia, the president of La Raza--La Raza, I would point out, Madam Speaker, is the organization that is called--the ``La Raza'' is Spanish for ``the race.'' Now, if we had a, let's say, Caucasian organization that was exclusive to that, that had called themselves ``The Race,'' they would be called the racists. But meanwhile, we accept La Raza as the people that are doing the negotiating for our food stamps. And Janet Murguia testified that one of the obesity problems we have in the United States comes because people, they know where their next meal is going to be--they couldn't find somebody that was suffering from malnutrition--but she said that they may have anxiety about where their next meal is going to come from. I think I am going to pick this up in a little moment and yield to my friend from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas from picking up there from where I was forced to leave off. To take this up then, Madam Speaker, the situation of asking Janet Murguia, the president of La Raza, to testify as to why we needed to increase food stamps by 46 percent before the Ag Committee. And not being able to find people that are suffering from malnutrition and not being able to find people that aren't having their meals today, they testified that there were people that were having anxiety because they don't know where all of their future meals were going to come from. And because they had had uncertainty, they tended to overeat, and if they ate out of anxiety--not having full comfort that there would always be plenty of food for them there, they might attend a feast or gorge themselves in those times--she argued if we would just give everybody 46 percent more food stamps, people wouldn't have this food anxiety, and they would eat less, and we would solve this human obesity problem, at least improve it, by providing food stamps for people. Now, here I am sitting in the United States Congress, highest level in the land or the world, for that matter, and I'm listening to a witness begin to tell us why we should expand food stamps. And her argument is if we give people more food, they won't be as fat. People are fat because they eat out of anxiety, and if we make sure there was a mountain of food in front of them, they wouldn't eat out of anxiety anymore and apparently they would lose weight and they would be slender. Now, my response to that takes me back to the statement that I made earlier about the manufactured rights that came out of the presentation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Freedom of speech and religion, that's fine. The other two of the four, freedom from want and freedom from fear, now those are breathtaking principles to lay out in the 1930s. But if you listen to Janet Murguia's testimony, her argument is that people have a right to have freedom from fear of want. And that fear of want causes people to overeat so they get obese, and if we can solve that problem and give them their freedom from fear of want, then they won't eat as much, they'll be thinner, and they will be healthier. This is a bizarre, upside-down, topsy-turvy world that we live in, Madam Speaker. And when we think about what freedom is and what liberty is, Americans that understand it have an entirely different understanding of what liberty is than people in Canada, Great Britain, and around the world. Their argument is that whatever is free expands freedom. So if you have a lot of food stamps and rent subsidies and heat subsidies, you'd have a lot of freedom. I suppose you would because you wouldn't need to go to work. You would have the freedom to go do whatever you want to do, sit around and be a couch potato, or go off to play golf or go fishing every day. But that's not what we're talking about. Not the freedom to be irresponsible or not to take responsibility for yourself. We're talking the liberties that come with this Constitution, that liberties that allow us the right to speak freely, to worship as we please, to peaceably assemble, and redress our grievances, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to keep property. However, the Kelo decision altered the Constitution itself. The right to face your accuser, to have a jury trial. The list goes on and on. Free from cruel and unusual punishment. Those are liberties that we have. They are delineated in Constitution. These are laws that come down from God. But He didn't ever promise us that we wouldn't have fear from want because there is something intrinsic in human nature that says that we have got to get out there and strive and struggle. But this Democrat health care bill is about expanding the dependency class in America. If they can expand the dependency class--they're the representatives of the dependency class; we're the representatives of the liberty class. We're the people that want to work, that want to expand families. We want to provide for and encourage more personal responsibility. We want to see that spark of vitality come out of every human being. And we want that to join together. And we know that our job is to find ways that we can to lay the groundwork and help nurture so that the average annual productivity of the American goes up. If it does, so does our quality of life--at least in terms relative to the rest of the world it does. We have got to have a moral foundation to do that. And it requires individual responsibility, not growing the dependency class. If you take people and they're on a safety net already, a safety net that has been cranked up to where we are a welfare State today--some 71 different welfare programs--and this safety net that was designed to keep people from falling through and freezing to death or starving to death now has been cranked up to the point where the safety net has become a hammock, Madam Speaker, and the more comfortable that former safety net, now a hammock, is, the less incentive there is for people to take care of themselves. They lose their incentive. And so they lose their will to try, they lose their will to be creative. They lose their ingenuity. And they don't think they have to put themselves out to the point their parents did or their grandparents did. I look at the people that settled the part of the country that I live in. Those ancestors in about 1875 came out there and stuck a stake in the ground out in the prairie and claimed a homestead of 160 acres. And a lot of them came out in covered wagons. And if they had a good day traveling, they would walk behind the oxen 10 miles a day on a good day. Some days they didn't move at all because it was muddy, they were bogged down, something went wrong, they broke an axle or wheel or whatever it was. Ten miles a day on a good day to get out on the prairie to drive a stake in the ground and say, This is my 160 acres, and if I build a home on it and I take care of it and I farm it and make it productive--under the Homestead Act they could keep it. That's the American dream. They went out there to live free or die out there on that prairie, and they had to raise their food and they had to protect themselves from the elements and from hostiles. And that independent spirit is the thread of the Americans that we are today. We didn't ever think about capitulating. We didn't think about giving up. We never thought the winters were too tough or the days too long or the work was too hard or too hot or too sweaty or too dusty or snowy or rainy. We did what we had to do because we were driven to succeed, we were driven to achieve the American dream. And by the way, there wasn't a fallback position. That fallback position would have been freeze to death, starve to death, let the hostiles take over you. Any number of things could happen. Well, that American spirit is what has brought about the thriving of the American people and our tenacity globally. If you look at where we are economically, American business has gone around the globe. We set the standard. We set the pace in patents and in trademarks and creativity and in productivity. We set the pace from a military- security standpoint. We set the pace from a cultural standpoint. We set the pace from a religious standpoint. All of these things that I am talking about here are undermined by people on this side of the aisle and undermined by a socialized medicine bill that the Senate could not pass today, the House would not approve of, that diminishes us and expands our dependency so that it can expand the political class that supports and votes for them. This is a cynical political move, and if it was about policy, Madam Speaker, then one of them, just one of them--and I have a question I want to project to the gentleman from Texas here in a moment--but if it was about policy, then the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, Harry Reid of the Senate, or someone out of all of these Democrats over here would have pointed to a country in the world that has a better health care system than the United States and said, Let's emulate that. Well, whom shall we emulate? China? Russia? Cuba? Canada? Great Britain? Germany? I think all of us would reject all of those proposals. If there is a country out there that does it better, I would like to know, and we will take a look at that. I pose that question as more than a rhetorical question, but a real question of substance that has been unanswered. And I would yield to the gentleman from Texas wherever he would like to take that.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Just as I look at the statistics here, and I see the 91 percent of survival rate of prostate cancer in America, that means out of 10 patients, nine will live. I look at the ratio in the United Kingdom, 50 percent. That means out of two patients, one of them will die. One out of 10 will die in America, one out of two will die in England. That is the comparison in the results of this health care.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and so we have seen what the data is on survival rates for cancer in the United States versus Canada and Great Britain and one other country. There is another point that has been made, I say it has been made consistently by the President of the United States, it has been made by the Speaker of the House, and that is this point that there is nothing in any bill that is likely to pass the House or the Senate that could become law that doesn't fund abortion or illegals. This is where the argument came in. Madam Speaker, it is a Joe Wilson argument. Well, I will deal first with the issue of illegals. The House version of the bill is looser than the Senate version of the bill. But when the President says we are not going to fund illegals, he is not right on that. The Senate version is a little tighter. But if you go to the language in the Senate bill, it says essentially that it lowers the standards. We had a standard that existed under the Medicaid standards, which is pretty close to the gold standard as far as the Federal Government is concerned, that if an individual were going to sign up for Medicaid, that they would have to prove their citizenship by providing a birth certificate and a couple of supporting documents or a series of naturalization papers that would allow people to sign up and receive Medicaid benefits. But when this House, under the leadership of Speaker Pelosi, changed the language under SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which I called socialized Clinton-style HillaryCare for illegals and their parents, when they changed that, they lowered the standard, and the standard then for Medicaid and the standard for SCHIP became the same, and that is the standard that exists in the Senate language of the bill. Even though it says we are not going to fund illegals, the proof is simply a requirement that they introduce and offer, let me say, attest to a nine-digit Social Security number. Well, if you have people that are adept at gaming the system, they are not likely to be so intimidated that they would not be able to produce a nine-digit Social Security number. It is unlikely that it will be checked. The standards to require that are a little tighter in the Senate version than they are in the House version, but the Congressional Budget Office, when one examines their calculations, it produces this number: Under the Senate language, 6.1 million illegals could access health care benefits, health insurance benefits under the Senate version of the bill which presumably, if you listen to the Speaker of the House, the House is ready to pass. 6.1 million illegals. And yet, the Speaker and the President say we are not going to fund illegals because they say in the bill they are not going to fund illegals. But you have to look at the standards. This is akin to the no earmarks edict that was delivered to this House at the beginning of the 110th Congress the first year of the Pelosi Speakership when the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, David Obey, brought a big appropriations bill to the floor. And when he was challenged for all the earmarks that were in it, even though they had pledged they were not going to provide earmarks--this is the Pelosi Speakership--David Obey said, There are not earmarks in this bill. But when pointed out to him that there were hundreds of earmarks in the bill, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee then went to the first page of the bill, I believe it was the second paragraph, and he read verbatim from the bill--generally speaking, not verbatim from me-- is this: There are no earmarks in the bill by definition; therefore, this bill doesn't have earmarks. Can you actually write stuff out, the things that we can't believe our lying eyes because someone has said by definition it doesn't exist? That is what is going on here. They will argue by definition they don't want to fund illegals, but the result is 6.1 million illegals taking advantage of the Senate version of the bill by the calculations of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The House version funds illegals. The Senate version funds illegals. And the House version, I know a little better, it funds them in a myriad of ways. Also, the Senate version funds abortion with American people's tax dollars. That is something also that the President says they are not doing. That is something that the Speaker of the House says they are not doing. And I haven't actually heard Majority Leader Harry Reid say one way or the other. But there are a couple of ways that this happens. One of them is in this chart right here. And so, Madam Speaker, it goes like this: When you have Americans that have to fund into these three different systems, pay taxes, or enroll in an exchange plan, or enroll in an exchange plan that covers abortions, some of them will be enrolled in an exchange plan that covers abortions unintentionally because their employer will offer that. And they will sign up and they won't ask the question, and they won't know that their premium is going to fund abortion. But in any case, they will enroll in the red version here that funds abortions.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would yield.

Mr. KING of Iowa. In that case, I take the gentleman's point and I think it has been driven home effectively by this chart and the language that we know. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. And if I called you Madam Speaker, I apologize. I didn't have a rearview mirror. 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. I thank the Judge from Texas for yielding and my friend from Texas for being here to lead on this Special Order tonight, and you especially felt it more than anyone else outside of Texas, the pain of the 14 that were murdered by Major Hasan. And the question arises that we need to face, and it is something we talked around a little bit here, and I don't believe we talked about it directly, and that is the issue of profiling. What is it about people that makes us think we should be a little more suspicious of them than somebody else? I grew up in a law enforcement family, and a couple of things never occurred to the law enforcement extended family that I grew up in. One of them was to ignore the law or the rule of law, and another one would be to ignore the very evidence in front of your eyes. The good thing about police work and investigation is you see things that are out of order, you notice those, turn your focus on that and wonder why it is out of order. And the instincts and the training, which is profiling to one fashion or another, causes the law enforcement resources to be used in a far more effective fashion, and time after time, crimes are solved because there have been police officers that understood the anomalies in the people. I'm opposed to using law enforcement to go out and target people because of race, religion, or ethnicity. But when it's before your very eyes, and when you see people going in and out of the airports and who has been blowing up our planes and who has been hijacking us, that is young Muslim men. And so I would suggest that, instead of spread-eagle searching the 80-year-old Norwegian grandmother with blues eyes and white hair, we ought to turn our focus in a higher percentage on the people that fit the profile of the kind that are likely to bomb us. Now, it's unfortunate that there are a lot of innocent people that would fit that profile, but it's far more unfortunate if we waste our resources searching people that have no history and then their profile doesn't fit anyone that would be bombing an airline. And that is just simple common sense, and it is good police work. But we are so politically correct in this country, we wallow in self-guilt in America. We go back and look at ourselves and figure out, somebody once pointed the finger and said, Well, you're bigoted and racist, so, therefore, we have to bend over backwards to demonstrate we will do all kinds of foolish expenditures of our taxpayer dollars to avoid anybody being able to point statistically to the focus of resources where the resources should be focused. And I don't suggest, Madam Speaker, that we ought to simply profile and put all of our efforts into one particular profile; I just suggest that we score them according to a weight system and turn our focus on those in proportion to the degree of the score. That makes sense. And I would assume that that would have been the thing we would have done after September 11, but in reality, no. We are a nation with self- guilt. Another component of this would be Major Hasan. The question that came out was, whatever happened that he got radicalized? We use the term ``got radicalized'' as if it somehow is not their fault; we allowed an environment or nurtured an environment. Every individual that attacks people and kills them is responsible for their own actions. And if the radicalization does take place, it is by their will and by the will of people like Awlaki. We are also so politically correct that we won't go in and listen to the radicalization taking place. We won't tape the sermons in the mosque. We simply wait for something bad to happen and, therefore, nobody can point their finger to us and accuse us of being politically incorrect. Of course, they point their finger at me every day as politically incorrect, Madam Speaker. I think this Nation needs to utilize their resources, utilize them wisely, and do so in a fashion that is clearly for the purposes of enforcing the law and protecting the safety of the American people. We should look into the psychology of the Army--and I have an Army tie on today, you might notice--that they need to also understand that they have the ability to speak up and keep an eye out for the kind of people that would come and kill us, the people that believe their path to salvation is in killing Jews, Christians, and capitalists, in that order. And if they can get a twofer, they are happy. They believe that is the eternal bliss for them if they can get that done. I say there is a place for them in the next life, and it is not where they think. I yield back to the judge from Texas, and thank him for indulging me.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized here on the floor of the House. I came to the floor tonight, Mr. Speaker, to address you and hopefully the American people listening in. We will give some more thought to what is going on in this country. There are many people across America that are having trouble sleeping tonight and last night and they will tomorrow night and the next night and the next night because they see what is happening to our country. They are watching the deals that are being made. They have got to guess what they are because, yes, they are back behind closed doors, and they are more creative than ever before. Even though the President believed that it was incumbent upon him to at least go through the demonstration of discussions on C-SPAN and having bipartisan discussions which took place here in this city at the Blair House on February 25, it didn't absolve the fact that intensively the weekend before and probably while the discussions were taking place and certainly intensively after, there had been all kinds of backroom bargaining and deals that have been taking place. Not that we have to do all the legislation out in the open. This is just the point the President made, Mr. Speaker. The American people are watching what is happening to our liberty. They are laying awake at night. They are talking with each other at work, at play, and not quite over the backyard fence where I live, but further south, yes, it is warm enough for that. They are wondering how it is that the American people have done everything that they know how to do that is legal and proper to redress their grievances with the United States Congress, and still this Congress' hearts are hardened. Still this Congress doesn't hear the message that has been sent by the American people. Over and over again, it goes clear back to the beginning of August of last year, right after cap-and-tax passed this House, a bill that was not read by anybody and a bill that didn't exist when it was debated on the floor, voted on on the floor. And when the House of Representatives, for the first time that I know, messaged a bill that didn't exist to the United States Senate, right after that--I should pause for a moment, Mr. Speaker, and let that soak in--this House passed a huge bill--cap-and-trade they call it, cap-and-tax I call it-- right before we left for the August break, a bill that didn't exist, that was messaged to the United States Senate; a bill that didn't exist messaged to the United States Senate, and then, Mr. Speaker, the debate over this national health care act began in earnest. Now, the American people are apprehensive about this. They love our liberty, they love our Constitution, and they love our freedoms, as do I. And here is how this unfolded. We had a Democrat Presidential primary that was the challenge between Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton, 15 years earlier, had produced a legislation. A lot of that was done behind closed doors and in backroom bargaining sessions, but at least they had the boldness to introduce a bill, a bill that went up on the flowchart, a flow that I still have somewhere in my archives. It scared the living daylights out of me, growth of government. But it was single-payer, socialized medicine, HillaryCare, rejected in this Congress 15 years ago, reared its ugly head in the Presidential primary on the Democrat side in 2007 and 2008. The challenge between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama brought the focus on reforming health care before the Presidential race. Now, this is how these things happen. First, some experts out there go out and identify a problem, and then they get the media to pick up the problem. And then the political class begins to churn that problem and raise it to the level where, after a while, people hear it every day and they think, We must do something. We must do something. We got here because that contest in the Democrat primary side brought forward the health care issue as one of the top issues. Whether it was that important compared to our other priorities like war or a collapsing economy, I would say this is not the time. But Barack Obama believed he had a mandate as elected President. And as a candidate and early on as a President, Barack Obama, Mr. Speaker, consistently made the statement that he is for a single-payer plan. ``Single-payer plan'' is code language for socialized medicine, for government pays everything, government writes all the rules, government writes all the checks, government decides who works and who doesn't. I have seen some of this language that has emerged that has been filed in this Congress clear back as early as 1981 that said we should establish a national health care service and everybody working in health care will be either a salaried or an hourly employee. That means if you are a brain surgeon, you don't get to charge for your service. The government writes you a check once a month and you go operate on as many brains as you are given to operate on by the government. That is single payer. That is Canadian style. It's German style. It's British style. It's European Union style. We know that Canadian style isn't something all the Canadians want to live with. As a matter of fact, the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, his name is Danny Williams, a little over a month ago needed some heart surgery. And if he had submitted to the heart surgery that would have been available to him under the health care program in Canada, they would have had to have gone in and split his sternum to do the surgery. So there is a long recovery process to stitch that sternum back together, and it is painful. But the specialist in Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami had a procedure where they could go in under the arm, separate the ribs, and do the surgery. The recovery is a lot quicker. So what does the wealthy prime minister of Newfoundland and Labrador do? He walked away from the Canadian system, flew down to Miami, and paid for his surgery out of his pocket. Now, that is Canadian access to American health care. No one who has been proposing this idea of socialized medicine has told us where we are going to go for our health care if we morph into the Canadian, German, European Union, United Kingdom model. No one who is proposing this socialized medicine, government-managed everything, has pointed to a single nation that has produced a model of health care insurance and delivery system that they would point to and say, We want to emulate that. We want to model that. No. Of all the experimenting that has been going on in the world, the experiments haven't worked out for the rest of the world, Mr. Speaker. I happen to have an example of how poorly those experiments have worked out in the world. This would be the survival rate chart comparing the countries by color. If you look at the blue, the mauve, I guess that would be, and then the yellow and the light blue, it goes this way, left to right, generally: United States, then Canada in the reddish, Europe in the yellow, and then England in the lighter blue or the green. Here are the types of cancer and the survival rates: Prostate cancer, United States, 91.90, call that 92 percent, survival rate for prostate cancer, as compared to, going down the list: Canada is not as good, 85 percent; Europe, 57 percent; and England, 50 percent, 51 percent. That is prostate. Clearly better than anybody else. Breast cancer. The United States above everybody else. The slope is the same, although the competition is pretty close between us and Canada. Then you underline all men's cancer lumped in together: Americans, 66 percent survival rate; and then on down to 53 percent for Canada; 47 percent for Europe; and 44 percent for England. A little bit different configuration here for all women's cancer, but still the United States' survival rate is better. These are the outcomes that we get. The innovations that Americans are providing, by the way, are being utilized in these countries. They just aren't utilizing them as effectively as we are here in the United States, and they certainly aren't innovating like we are here in the United States, Mr. Speaker. So President Obama believed that he had a mandate to produce a single-payer plan that emulated one of these systems that clearly, by survival rates, are failures. We have the best health care delivery system in the world. We have the best outcomes in the world. And, yes, we are spending a lot of money. We are a nation that makes a lot of money. We are apparently willing to pay that. So the President made this argument: The economy is collapsing, and we have to fix the economy. President Obama again, Mr. Speaker: We can't fix the economy without first fixing health care, because health care costs too much money. So the President's solution is throw another $2.5 trillion at a government takeover of health care. Spending too much money, you solve the problem by spending a lot more money. Now, that doesn't pass the third-grade logic test, but somehow that argument just drifts off into the distance, and we operate on that premise as if it were a premise that was stable and built on some kind of logic. Well, it is not. The second argument the President made is that we need more competition in health insurance companies. Now, he didn't get it done over there, but the President wants to establish an extra health insurance company that is the Federal Government. So you won't hear this number very often. It's certainly not something that would ever come out of the White House, the number of health insurance companies there are in the United States: 1,300 health insurance companies in the United States. Now, we can't buy from all of them because some of them are health insurance companies within the States that market to the residents within those States because they are prohibited from selling insurance outside of State lines. For example, a young 25-year-old man in reasonably good health in New Jersey would be paying $6,000 a year for a health insurance policy, where if he were in Kentucky he could buy a similar but not identical policy for around $1,000 a year. If you let that young man in New Jersey buy his insurance from Kentucky, I guarantee you he is going to buy the Kentucky insurance, the cheaper insurance. The President, though, his solution is to create another health insurance company so we could have 1,301 health insurance companies. Just one of them would be the Federal Government. And of the 100,000 possible health insurance varieties to choose from, the President's company would produce, pick your number, 10 or 15 policies. So we would add a little bit to the number of choices we have there, but not to the competition. Meanwhile, the most expensive, unnecessary thing we have is the lawsuit abuse in health care and the defensive medicine that necessarily must be part of it. If you look at the numbers on the range, they go down to as low as 5.5 percent of overall health care costs are attributed to lawsuit abuse, much of it going into the pockets of the trial lawyers, and that number goes on up to 35 percent or so. The dollar figure that I would anchor to is health insurance underwriters' number: 8.5 percent of overall health care costs. That is $207 billion a year unnecessarily being wasted, a lot into the pockets of the trial lawyers, a lot being spent on defensive medicine. Some goes to plaintiffs. That is $207 billion a year. The Government Reform Committee produced a report that showed it was at $210 billion a year, but those numbers go on up to $650 billion a year. So there is a range. I will just take us back down to $207 billion. That is a number that I think is entirely defensible and very conservative. And if you calculate that for the duration of the bill, Mr. Speaker, that is $2 trillion over the course of this bill. So the President is going to solve a problem of spending too much money by spending more, and he is going to solve the problem of not having enough competition in health insurance by creating a Federal health insurance company and regulating all the other insurance companies. Now, if they regulate the other insurance companies the way they are regulating Toyota right now, you can see how they can compete in the marketplace. Mr. Speaker, that is the framework of how we got here, and it is based on two flawed premises: One, we spend too much money, and the solution is to spend a lot more; and the other is, we don't have enough competition in the health insurance industry, so the solution is to create a Federal health insurance company. The solution is: Allow people to buy health insurance across State lines; fix the lawsuit abuse, reform the lawsuit abuse; and, provide for full deductibility for everybody's health insurance. I would be so happy to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Thompson.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Pennsylvania, we have talked these different pieces over. I just reiterate this: that the principles you laid out--lower the cost, provide for access to good care, improve the quality, and strengthen the doctor-patient relationship rather than intercede in the doctor- patient relationship, which is what is going on--all of these discussions that we're making, and they claim that there is a bipartisan bill out here. It's pretty interesting. Some language--the shell bill--apparently has gone to the Rules Committee and they have debated and reported a rule out of the Rules Committee that's designed to be the reconciliation language. But the substance of this reconciliation apparently isn't in the bill. Seems to be only a couple of pieces about that bill, a shell bill, and then basically it's pieces of H.R. 3200 that the House has passed that would be inserted supposedly as amendments. Well, it would be passed as reconciliation language that would become amendments to the Senate bill and also an attachment of student loan provisions in there. So it finalizes the complete government takeover of the student loan program. What student loans have to do with health care, what a takeover of our health care by the Federal Government have to do with student loans might just be what qualifies a piece of legislation before the United States Senate down the hallway to meet the standards of reconciliation for the Parliamentarian so that this fantastic bait-and-switch can take place. Here are the circumstances, Mr. Speaker: the House has gone through great pains to pass a bill, and it was very, very close. Well, the Senate wouldn't take up the House bill. The Senate took up the Senate bill. The House bill passed here November 7, 11 o'clock at night, on a Saturday night. Unusual for this House to be in session at a time like that. But even more unusual was the United States Senate passing their version of a health care bill. That was on Christmas Eve morning. They stayed in session on Christmas Eve morning and passed a bill with 60 votes. That 60 votes was required to break the filibuster. And so we're in a circumstance today where the Senate can't pass their own version of the bill today because of the vacancy that was created by the death of Senator Kennedy, and was replaced by an appointment and then by a special election on January 19. They elected Scott Brown. They know Scott Brown is a ``no'' vote on the Senate version of the bill. He has said so. So here's the unique circumstance: the Senate can't even pass their own version of the bill today. They can run that bill back across the Senate, and it would fail. The Senate wouldn't pass the House version of the bill either. And so the House is being asked to pass the Senate version of the bill--the Senate version they can't today, remember, Mr. Speaker. The House is being asked to pass that even though the House rejects it--pass it on faith--so that this reconciliation package, this shell bill that Paul Ryan called a Trojan horse, can be brought here to the floor of the House and be passed, be sent over to the Senate, where the Parliamentarian could rule on whether it would be able to take it up and pass it on a simple majority to circumvent the filibuster in the Senate. This is unprecedented. Others will say this has happened some 21 times in history--not in a government takeover of our health care, not in something as personal and private as this is. This is unprecedented. Then you have the Slaughter rule. The gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Then I think the gentleman does know what happens. If reconciliation doesn't occur, the President will sign the Senate version of the bill that would have been passed by the House by hook or shenanigan, and that would become law. And it would be the law of the land. The law of the land would be the ``Cornhusker Kickback,'' the ``Louisiana Purchase,'' the ``Florida Gatorade,'' which exempts Florida from Medicare Advantage cuts. It would include also billions of dollars for medical health clinics in the State of Vermont to satisfy the Senator from Vermont and six or seven other special deals, along with language that would fund abortion and also language that would fund illegals. That's in the Senate bill, all of that. There's some margins there where it's not as egregious, the House version versus Senate, but Stupak language--Bart Stupak, as has been reported in the news, he has been advised that there will be no negotiations on that piece, that the Senate version of the bill that funds abortion is what they're going to stick with here in the House. And so they'll be forced to put up a vote ``yes'' or ``no.'' That's what happens. This is on the cusp of becoming the law of the land. And the effort to produce this House version of the fix, which, by the way, I reject it all in any combination, it's just the idea of circumventing the rules and trying to pass something through. They're actually trying to amend a bill that is not law and then the promise becomes maybe a signed letter from 51 Senators that says that they will vote for a reconciliation package that will amend the bill after the fact. The Founding Fathers never envisioned that there would be legislation that passed both Houses of this Chamber that neither House would accept. This House won't accept the Senate version on its face. They will only deal with it if there is a reconciliation promise. The Senate can't pass their own version of the bill today. They don't have the votes to do it. They just had the votes while they had another Massachusetts vote. Now there's been a special election. The American people have spoken. A piece of legislation that neither body can pass could very well become law in the next week. This city needs to fill up with people tomorrow. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman will briefly yield, is that out of the House or Senate version, Mr. Gohmert?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and posing a question back to the gentleman from Texas, having read through this language in the Senate version of the bill and done this analysis that you have so well delivered here on the floor, can you imagine that this would just be an innocent mistake created by the drafters?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I'm posing another question to the gentleman from Texas, the judge, and that is, was there an opportunity--would there be an opportunity for any Member of the House of Representatives to offer an amendment to fix those provisions so that abortion is not funded under the Senate language of the bill?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, reclaiming my time, I think we should spend a little time on the Slaughter rule. And before I go to that, I want to make the point that, Mr. Speaker, I anticipate there will be a lot of Americans in Washington, D.C., tomorrow. I believe there are a lot of Americans that have come in tonight to be here to stand up for their liberty and stand up for their freedom, stand up for their Constitution. They've done this on 9/12, and April 15, and November 5, and November 7, and again in December on the Senate side. And then they went to Massachusetts, where we received an intervention in Massachusetts. And now it's up, again, to the American people to defend our freedom and our liberty and protect our health care. But one of the other maneuvers that is not off the table yet, and the majority leader last Friday talked around it every way, every way except taking it off the table, and that is the Slaughter rule, named for the Chair of the Rules Committee, who proposes that, rather than requiring Democrats who don't want to vote for the Senate version of the bill to vote for it, vote it up or down--they're afraid it would fail. I don't think they're worried about making them vote for it. I think they're afraid it would fail. Her proposal is that they would just bring a rule that would deem that the Senate bill had been before the House and been passed. So they wouldn't ever have to vote on the Senate bill. They would just pass a rule that would deem that it had been passed by the House, so there'd never be a recorded vote here in the House on the Senate version of the bill; and that way they could get it off the decks and over to the President's desk where he is salivating to sign anything that says national health care. We have another expert on the floor tonight, another Texan.

Mr. KING of Iowa. And I'm going to go to the first Texan right before I quickly yield to Dr. Burgess, but Mr. Gohmert, Judge Gohmert.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Texas, and yielding to Dr. Burgess from Texas--who has constantly been pounding against this socialized medicine plan, has a meeting in the morning at 8:00, again to put some more light on the subject matter--as much time as he may consume, the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas for coming down and laying this part out and making it clear. To me, it's just breathtaking to think that the Rules Committee, up on the third floor, the hole in the wall committee, the people that rarely have a reporter in the room, and only once in the 7 years that I've been in this Congress has there been a television camera in the room, the people that conduct themselves as if they are operating out of the sight or the scrutiny of the public, would be the ones that would cook up the idea that they could bring a rule to the floor that would deem that the House had passed a Senate bill and dodge the idea of the vote. And I want to make this point over again. We are in this circumstance now where the Speaker, Mr. Speaker, the Speaker of the House, seems to be compelled to bring a Senate version of the bill to the floor of the House, a bill that could not pass the Senate today, a bill that would not pass the House today on its own merits, and in order to get a bill to the President's desk that they could chase with amendments to fix the bill--according to them, fix it. I don't think it actually improves it; it just makes it so that they can get the votes done. It's called reconciliation. And they don't even want to face that first vote of the Senate version of the bill. It is completely ironic that the House has to pass the Senate version of the bill that the Senate couldn't pass because the Senate won't pass the House version of the bill, but the House won't vote on the Senate version of the bill that they have to pass that the Senate can't pass so they'll pass a rule instead that deems that the bill, the Senate bill, has passed the House. That's what's up. Now, I hope that's really clear, Mr. Speaker, because I believe I said it precisely and exactly right. That's what's going on this Congress. No wonder people are revolted by the business that is going on here. And I don't think that we actually addressed the situation on how--I think Mr. Gohmert did a good job of showing us how abortion is funded under this. But I don't think we've addressed this very well at all tonight, on how either version of the bill, the one that, if we get one, we're most likely to end up with, is the Senate version, funds illegals in this process. And the President has said, and many of his mouthpieces at the White House have said, the President won't support a bill that funds illegals. Well, both versions, the House and Senate bill, do that. The Senate bill has tighter language than the House bill. But this language that protected the American taxpayers' assets from going to benefits to illegals was in the Medicaid legislation that existed for years and years. And 2 years ago, when the changes were forced through this House for SCHIP, the socialized, Clinton-style Hillarycare for children and their parents, that piece of legislation lowered the standards for Medicaid so that the proof of citizenship that did require a birth certificate and supporting documents, to keep it simple, was no longer required, and all that was required of an applicant for Medicaid then was to attest to a nine-digit number, presumably a Social Security number. That is essentially the standard that is in the Senate, the standard that is in the House. It lowers the standard to the point where fraud is anticipated to the point where the Congressional Budget Office's calculations produce that it will open up health care benefits to as many as 6.1 million illegals. That is CBO's number. That is a number that is calculated from their estimates, not exactly their number. It is not mine. That is where we stand with this legislation that funds abortion--not so much the House version of the bill, we are not going to get that language--and legislation that funds illegals, legislation that takes away our very freedom and liberty, that nationalizes our bodies, that tells everybody in America the Federal Government can tell you how your health care is going to be managed, that you will buy a health insurance policy, what type of care it will be, what tests will be provided, and what will not be provided. This is a great theft of American liberty. And never before in the history of this country has the Federal Government produced or approved a product that they required every American to own or buy, let alone the transfer of wealth of taxing people and putting refundable tax credits in the hands of some people to buy insurance, while we expand the Medicaid rolls and tax others for their insurance policies so that we can afford to pay others to buy insurance. And the next argument that will be of the next generation if this happens in Congress will be the argument that will come from this side of the aisle, and it will be, gosh, hand-wringers, we are spending so much money on administration writing out checks to people to buy their own health insurance policy, why do they need to have a policy? Why don't we just provide them free health care? And then we can bypass all of this insurance business that is going on and put our money directly into the health care, because they won't have enough money to provide the care because of the costs that are being driven up. That is the next generation of this debate. I am watching the clock; I think we are down to about 3\1/2\ minutes left. But I want to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania for any concluding remarks he might have.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania and yield to the gentleman from Texas for any concluding remarks he might have.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, purely political about expanding the dependency class because the dependency class expands the political power of the left in America at the expense of our freedom and at the expense of our liberty, never to be gotten back again. I thank you, Mr. Speaker, for your indulgence tonight, and my colleagues for joining me. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Would the gentleman yield? I thank the gentleman from Texas. This argument about the commerce clause and the Federal Government being able to regulate interstate commerce, I take this to the other side of the scenario that Mr. Lungren has laid out and take it down to the assumption that is in this bill that everybody in America is engaged in interstate commerce is relevant to health insurance. I would submit that in Texas or California or Georgia or Iowa, there is likely to have been, I will say certain to have been, and likely to still be, individuals born in those particular States that never participated in a health care program of any kind, lived within the State, didn't cross the State line to get an aspirin, and died, and never engaged in health care that could be even described as interstate commerce in any way. Yet this commerce clause would be broadened to the point of being so inclusive that not only would that, by inference, give Congress the authority to require a person to join a health club, but also to show up and exercise, tell us what we can and can't eat, and the commerce clause then would have no limits whatsoever. I am going to say that the individual that is born in one of those States, or any State in America that doesn't participate in a health care program that links the interstate commerce, is completely exempt under the commerce clause, and therefore that is one of the bases for which I believe this is an unconstitutional bill.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. I point out an additional 5\1/2\ million people resulting unemployed over this bill, but it provides access, according to calculations from the Congressional Budget Office, to health insurance policies for as many as 6.1 illegals. So there's your trade-off: 5\1/2\ million unemployed Americans, 6.1 million illegals having access to their own health insurance policy. Additionally, picking up on the point of the gentleman from California, not only does it render an illegal status to someone who wouldn't, could not perhaps or would not, purchase health insurance policies that are mandated by the Federal Government. It levies a fine against them, as we have said, and it takes us into the realm of what I think is a definition of debtor's prison. You levy a fine against someone, and if you don't pay the fine, and when it gets to $250,000, then the original bill adds a prison penalty in there. And it would be for the first time in the history of this country that the Federal Government had either produced a product or certified a product to be produced by the private sector, required every American citizen to purchase that product; and if they didn't do so, levy a fine against them and then have them facing a jail term. That's the kind of debtor's prison that our Founding Fathers rejected. I use stark terms, but that's where it takes us up in our logic. I will say, Mr. Speaker, that we are at this point now where the nuances of these bills, we know what's in them, that anything that is likely to pass this House and go to the President's desk, he will be sitting there with pen in hand to sign. He is salivating to sign something that is called national health care that he can call ObamaCare and does call ObamaCare. He is for single-payer. He is for socialized medicine. He has said that he is for single-payer. So has the Speaker, and so has Harry Reid. So this is about whether we keep our freedom, whether we keep the Federal Government from nationalizing and taking over our bodies like they did at General Motors and Chrysler.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, under the rules of the House on a Special Order, is it appropriate for a Member to yield to someone else when they've been recognized for 60 minutes?