Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I come before this floor to address a topic that has been front and center in this country since 1973: when the Supreme Court came down with the decisions known as Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, then the subsequent case in the early 1990s, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. This is a nation that has traditionally--and from the very beginning of the very first founding document, the Declaration of Independence-- respected and revered life. As our Founding Fathers put that language together, and as John Adams coached Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson put his pen to the Declaration of Independence: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'' Now, Mr. Speaker, it wasn't an accident that the order of these rights that come from God be started out with life, then liberty, then the pursuit of happiness. Of all the scholars that I have talked to and the times that I have sat in the classroom and in my readings, it just never really claim clear. It is not educating our young people about what they were thinking about when they drafted that language in the Declaration: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,'' but the right to life is listed first. It is not second or third. They didn't put together a list of four or five or seven or ten different rights. They laid three out in the Declaration. And those three start with life, because life is the most paramount right. The former Governor of Pennsylvania, Governor Bob Casey, a Democrat, who has since passed away, was denied an opportunity to speak at the Democratic National Convention some years ago because he was a pro-life Democrat Governor and he would speak in favor of life. He said this: ``Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed.'' The measure itself. Now, what does that mean and how do we think about this, Mr. Speaker? It would be this: when the Frenchmen devised the metric system, they set up a distance that was divided out to mean a ratio of the circumference of the Earth in whatever manner of calculation they had. And they came down to--however many times they divided that around, it came down to the length of the meter. Then they produced this meter that was a platinum rule that was set at precisely the length of the meter. And, in controlled temperature and pressure, at standard temperature and pressure, what would the length of this platinum rule be? Exactly a meter. Now, how long is a meter? I guess I could tell you, we can measure it by other measures. We can do some comparisons. But that meter, that original meter made out of platinum that is maintained at standard temperature and pressure, that is the measure itself; and all other measurements of length that are incorporated within the metric system, all of those measures of length are in relation to the meter itself. That meter stick, the original one, is the measure itself against which all other distances are weighed and measured in the metric system. Human life is the measure itself against which we measure every other value that we have because human life is sacred in all of its forms. And then, once we accept that and this Nation accepts that human life is sacred in all of its forms--Democrats and Republicans do agree to that, I believe, generally speaking, maybe even universally--but the disagreement comes in, well, when does life begin? When does life end? We can look at any one of the pro-life groups that are here in this country. You can ask the priests and pastors around America: When does life begin? The most consistent answer to that question is life begins at the moment of conception, the instant of fertilization, the instant of conception. That language is threaded throughout. I have walked into gymnasiums, or maybe a whole school, K-12, or maybe a high school alone, and I will say to them: You will be faced with a couple of questions in your emerging young adult life, and the counsel that you would give to your friends perhaps, or maybe you, yourself, you will have to answer these two questions: Is human life sacred in all of its forms? And I will say to them: Look at the person next to you. Is their life sacred? And they will nod their head. Look at the person on the other side. Is their life sacred? And they will nod their head. And I said: And they are looking at you, and they are nodding their head at you, too, because everybody in here, your life is sacred. It is precious. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed. So once we universally agree that human life is sacred in all of its forms, then we have the next question and ask the question: At what moment does life begin, at what instant? And that is that instant at conception, that instant at fertilization. The rational, moral thought and faithful reasoning comes to that conclusion. Yet the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade and in the accompanying case of Doe v. Bolton, on January 22, 1973, brought down a decision that decided that liberty and pursuit of happiness trumped life. They concluded that a mother could decide whether that child was inconvenient, whether they didn't want the child at the time, and allowed for abortion on demand. Coupling the two cases together, they allowed for abortion on demand. Doe v. Bolton wrote everything in the list that could be exceptions: it could be the mental health; it could be the physical health; it could be even the familial health of the mother, which any of this could be affected by finances themselves. So if you don't think you can afford this baby, Doe v. Bolton lets you say: Well, it affected my mental health. It affected my familial health, so I decided to abort the baby. And any abortion doctor could conduct an abortion at will, staying within this framework that was manufactured by the Supreme Court that turned the principles that are in our Declaration on their head. They no longer recognize that life is the paramount right that is delivered to us from God and that liberty is secondary to life and that pursuit of happiness is tertiary to life. Now, think of this. If any of us, in our pursuit of liberty, would decide that someone's life is in the way of our liberty, we can't go kill them. We would end up in prison or executed in some States. We can't go kill somebody because they infringe upon our liberty. Their life is more important than our liberty. Neither can someone, in their pursuit of happiness, trample on someone else's liberties. Our liberties of freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, the protections that we have on a reasonable search and seizure, a jury of our peers, the States' rights that are enshrined in the Constitution that are subordinate to the enumerated powers in the Constitution, that is all laid out within a beautiful framework that has never been done better anywhere in the world in the history of the world, but it is based on the prioritization of God-given rights. Life is more important than liberty, is more important than this pursuit of happiness. By the way, to define pursuit of happiness a little more thoroughly, some of the young people are growing up and they read that and don't give it very much thought. They say, well, pursuit of happiness is a fun tailgate party before the ball game; it is getting together with my friends; it is sitting down with my Xbox and enjoying the video games that are going on. Maybe it is just listening to music. None of those things fit the categories that our Founding Fathers envisioned when they put pursuit of happiness in the Declaration. Pursuit of happiness was lifted from the Greek term ``eudaimonia,'' which is spilled E-U-D-A-I-M-O-N-I-A--because we are friends, Christina. Eudaimonia, the Greek term, means pursuit of happiness in this concept that our Founding Fathers understood, and that was that development of the whole human being, not a party at all, not a joke at all, not a time necessarily of laughter, but it was a component; to develop one's self intellectually, develop one's brain power with a knowledge base that was as strong as it could be, and for a lifetime, to develop one's mind and develop it thoroughly and contemplate deep thoughts to develop themselves. That is the intellectual component of it. There was a theological component to develop one's self religiously, which they did. Even though they were pagan, in my view, they developed themselves in a belief in a hereafter and in a belief in higher beings. It was plural for the Greeks, the higher beings. But they were developing their intellect. They were developing themselves spiritually and theologically and also physically. They kept their bodies in shape, and they worked out and they exercised, and they competed in the sports that are the foundation of our Olympics today. All of that was wrapped up in the eudaimonia of the time that our Founders read and understood. Thomas Jefferson thoroughly understood. There is no doubt he understood the meaning of the word ``eudaimonia.'' He just didn't think the American people would understand it, so he wrote in there, ``pursuit of happiness.'' We have just kind of given a short and a brief definition of that. We haven't given it the full respect it was intended by the drafter and, in many cases, the author of our Declaration, Thomas Jefferson. So now that I have reset this, life is paramount and it is the most important, and any of us should be willing to sacrifice at least some of our liberty to protect and save the lives of others because those lives are that precious and that important. Any one of us who is in pursuit of our eudaimonia, our pursuit of happiness, should be willing to give up some of that in order to secure and protect the liberties-- not only our liberties, but the liberties of others. So a nation that is built upon those principles would also be a nation that would do most anything to protect the lives of the most innocent among us, our unborn, our unborn that don't have the ability to scream out for their own mercy. They don't have the ability to come to Congress and lobby for themselves. They are silent. They have no chance to make a noise even until the day that they draw their first breath, if they have the opportunity to draw that first breath. But the tally for the decision of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton on January 22, 1973, now has reached or exceeded 60 million babies--60 million babies sacrificed on the altar of choice. Watching the prioritized rights that came from God, we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Our Supreme Court got it wrong, and they set the liberty of the mother over the life of the baby. They set the pursuit of happiness, the eudaimonia, presumably, of the mother, over the life of the baby. We have a hole in our society; not only a hole that comes from the heavy, heavy guilt of tolerating this throughout these years, but it is a hole that is a multigenerational hole: 60 million babies not born that would otherwise be living, loving, laughing, learning, falling in love, having babies of their own, worshipping, and raising their children with the values that have made this America a great nation. But that is all denied this Nation. It is denied the world. The solutions that they would have provided, the happiness and the joy they would have delivered, intellectual firepower that would come from 60 million babies is denied to us. And to go back and look and think, also, a good number of those little girls that were aborted since 1973 would have otherwise been mothers today. And to look at it generationally, and this is a back-of- the-envelope calculation, to take those little girls and predict that maybe each one of them would have had three babies, each one, that calculates out to be, Mr. Speaker, another 60 million babies--another 60 million. So the population of this country would be something like 120 million stronger if the Supreme Court had believed and had conviction on what I have just described about the right to life being the paramount right-- more important than liberty, more important than the pursuit of happiness, eudaimonia, the right to life. When the Supreme Court made that erroneous activist decision, they started this country in a downward spiral, a spiral where there is less respect for life than there was before 1973. Mr. Speaker, if I just take you to the school shooting data and address that, we look back through the history and the records of the school shootings as well as mass killings that have taken place in schools, look back over the last century, the earliest one that we could find was 1924, in Michigan. It was a series of bombs that were planted in the schools there in Michigan, set to go off by alarm clocks, which would be the kind that we would see in the old cartoons today. Those bombs were timed to go off, and the result of that was 40 people were killed in the bombings at the school in Michigan in 1924, mass school killing. That is the largest mass school killing that we could find by sorting through history as deeply as we could research it, 40 killed, bombings, 1924. Then not another mass school killing or shooting, not another killing until 1940, when an individual went into a school in Pasadena and killed five people with a pistol. Then not another school shooting, mass shooting of any kind at least, took place from 1940 on. It took us all the way to 1963, 23 years after that single mass school shooting in Pasadena. Twenty-three years later, the Supreme Court came down with another erroneous decision called Murray v. Curlett. Murray v. Curlett is the case that took prayer out of public schools. Up till that time, we went to school and we went into school and started the day with the pledge and a prayer in the classroom with the teachers, especially in elementary school. I remember that clearly. But by the time the Murray v. Curlett decision came down, I was a freshman in high school, and I remember that order. The Supreme Court commands no more prayer in the public schools. Where did they get the authority to declare that we couldn't exercise our freedom of religion? Now, I have been challenged on this a good number of times in subsequent years, but I remember them saying: Well, what will you do about the separation of church and state? Well, first of all, there isn't a separation of church and state, but it is being exercised by Supreme Court decisions as a separation even not only of church and state, but church and school. Now, the First Amendment of the Constitution writes, and what it specifically does is it prohibits Congress from establishing a law that creates a state religion. And it denies the ability of Congress to pass that legislation that establishes a state religion, so that is all it does. And the freedom of religion shall not be infringed. We have a freedom of religion, but they still, the Supreme Court, made the decision to take prayer out of the public schools, an activist act that then began to scrub faith and morality out of our public schools. I remember that freshman year when I learned this. I remember in that classroom--and these images are in my mind clearly. It was: How are they going to stop us from praying in our schools? What could they possibly do to keep us from praying? They hadn't invented duct tape yet at that time, Mr. Speaker, but, you know, I am thinking the white adhesive tape that doctors use, the medical tape, and I had images in my mind: Well, they could tape our mouths shut with that tape. We could pray silently. They couldn't stop us from praying by taping our mouths shut. The only way to stop prayer in the public schools, if we refuse to accept the order, was to empty the schools out themselves. That image is in my mind. Denison Community Schools, where I went to high school, I can still see the central building in my mind's eye, clearing out all the rooms, emptying the rooms, all the students going outside, outside of that school. And the Army. The Army is in my imagination--Vietnam era--that the Army would come in, and they would have a new chain to roll around those bars that you push inside the doors to open the doors, wrap that chain around there, put a new padlock on it, and post a guard, an Army uniform outside those doors, every entrance into that school. That is the only way they could have stopped prayer in that public school. But they stopped it because we accepted the order of the Supreme Court. We accepted the beginning of the degradation of the moral core of America that was being taught in every public school in America at that time. We revered our faith. We understood our history. We knew that our Founding Fathers, who put this country together, who I believe were moved around like men on a chessboard by the hand of God--I believe the Declaration is written not with divine inspiration, like the Bible, but with divine guidance, just a little bit lower standard of proof. We are gifted in this country with the divine grace that God guided the men and women who built this country in the nearly perfect foundation that they put in place in the Declaration and in also the Constitution. But we let the Supreme Court, that was never designed to be the most powerful of the three branches of government--we let the Supreme Court rule. And then, now, today, we teach in those schools that there is three equal branches of government. They are not equal. They were not designed to be equal. The Founding Fathers put them together that the judicial branch of government was designed to be the weakest of the three branches of government, and they were not even the branch of government that was designed to come down with a rule on what is constitutional and what is unconstitutional. The Constitution requires that Congress establish a Supreme Court. And I had made this case to, God rest his soul, Justice Scalia, an awfully hard man to say goodbye to for all that he has done for our country and all the clarity that he has brought to the understanding of the Constitution. I am grateful that Justice Gorsuch is there to replace him in picking up on the things that are so well perfected by Justice Scalia. But in a meeting with 30 or 40 other members here several years ago, I made the point, Mr. Speaker, to Justice Scalia, and I said to him that Congress is the most powerful branch of government, the legislative branch of government, and the House, in particular, because all spending bills have to start here, and the Constitution doesn't require that we establish all of the Federal circuits that are out there or the Federal district courts below that. The Congress only--and this is how I put it to Justice Scalia-- Congress is only required to establish a Supreme Court. We could abolish all of the other Federal districts if we chose to do so. In fact, Congress did abolish two judicial districts back in about 1802. That is a pattern. It has been established. So if Congress decided to do so, we could weaken the judicial branch of government, and we could reduce the judicial branch of government down to just a Supreme Court, because it requires that we-- constitutionally, we are required to establish a Supreme Court. But there is nothing that requires us to build a building, fund a building, or to fund an administrative staff and team for them. So I said to Justice Scalia: We could eliminate all the Federal courts, except the Supreme Court. We could reduce the Supreme Court down to the Chief Justice at his own card table with his own candle, no staff. And I think it was a bit of surprise for the very glib Justice Scalia to hear that out of a Member of Congress, especially in a setting that was, I will say, quasi-public at least. He thought about it for a little bit. I am not sure if he had ever thought about what I had presented to him, Mr. Speaker, but he thought for a little bit, and he said: Well, I would argue that you could reduce the Supreme Court down to three Justices because, otherwise, if you don't have anything but a Supreme Court Chief Justice, there is nothing to be the chief of. So I would argue for three Justices. And I said: Well, Justice Scalia, there have always been too many chiefs and not enough Indians. And we, more or less, declared a case ready to move on for further discussion. But the point of this exercise, Mr. Speaker, is to make the point that the Court's power exists because Congress empowers it. And if there is a struggle between the legislative branch of government, Article 1; or the executive branch of government, Article 2; or the judicial branch of government, Article 3, I would remind the folks involved in any discussion like that that the branches of government were prioritized in the Constitution in the same fashion that the God- given rights are prioritized in the Declaration--life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. In the Constitution, Articles 1, 2, 3--legislative, executive, judicial branches of government--prioritized because our Founding Fathers envisioned that there would be a struggle between the three branches of the government, and they wanted to set up a static power base so that they expected that each branch of government would jealously protect its constitutional authority, and there would be that tug of war, a struggle, ethically and peacefully, they hoped, between each branch of government. That is why they put the checks and balances in place. They gave the legislative authority to the United States Congress, and the spending authority to Congress, and the initiation of all bills that initiate spending to the House of Representatives. They didn't give it to the Senate because we were to be the hot cup of coffee, and the Senate was to be the saucer that that coffee cooled in. That is why we are 2-year terms here, 6-year terms over in the Senate, but they wanted a legislative body that would be a quick reaction for us, a fast response for if things got out of whack, if they needed to be addressed quickly, then they wanted the House of Representatives to perhaps turn over quickly so that the House could respond to these issues in a fast way. They wanted a judicial body, that legislative body that could sit back, maybe fold their arms a little bit, and wait and be patient and think things through so it wasn't just emotional. It was also kind of a hard-charging reaction force in the House, and seasoned by experience, I might add, Mr. Speaker; and a more careful, slower moving body in the Senate, which I think they clearly achieved a more careful, slower moving body in the Senate. But one of those examples in modern day, when things went against the American people in the elections of 2010, around March 23, 2010--it was March 23--the final passage of ObamaCare passed out from the Senate and the House to President Obama's desk, and he signed that bill as fast as he could get his signature on it. The American people had rejected a Federal Government takeover of our health insurance, at least as a minimum. And I long said that, you know, our soul is the most sovereign thing that we have, and the government hasn't figured out how to nationalize that yet. I don't believe they ever will. The second thing that is the most sovereign thing that we have is our bodies, our skin, and everything inside it. ObamaCare nationalized a Federal takeover of the management of our body, our skin, and everything inside of it, took out of our hands the ability to manage our own health in a free market system, and the public rejected such an idea. They rejected ObamaCare. On March 23, it passed and was signed into law. That election that ensued the following November brought 87 freshmen Republicans to the House of Representatives. Every one of them pledged and every one of them ran on the ticket to 100 percent, rip it out by the roots, repeal ObamaCare. That is the reaction of the public when this body here was not responding to the will of the people. They changed that over in the very next election, which was just months later, from the third month to the eleventh month as--so you are only--and 8 months later, the election had taken place, and we had 87 new freshmen Republicans on the way. We didn't get as far as we needed to get. We didn't get it fully ripped out by the roots, as I wanted to do, but you can see the effects of that election to this day, Mr. Speaker. That is how our Founding Fathers envisioned it would work--the House of Representatives to be a quick reaction force. They reacted quickly in the 2010 election. The American people weighed in. When the executive branch gets out of line, there are provisions there. If there is going to be impeachment, the House has to initiate that impeachment. But over in the Senate, the impeachment doesn't remove a President from office. I believe it constitutionally requires a trial in the Senate, but to remove a President from office takes a two-thirds majority in the United States Senate. I don't think they served us very well in 1998, when the impeachment went before the United States Senate, when William Jefferson Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives, because the trial in the Senate didn't bring us a verdict. It put all the questions together. And instead of asking the question, ``Did he commit the acts that the House had indicted him for,'' and in a separate question, ``Should he be removed from office for that,'' they jammed those questions together, and it gave some of the Democrat Senators a way out. They didn't have to answer the question, whether they believed he was guilty or not, so they never really heard the case and gave us a verdict on the conclusion. It was inconclusive in the Senate. I think that the way they framed those questions that were voted upon by the Senators, I think it was a disservice to the American people, a disservice to our Constitution. But, nonetheless, there is a check and a balance. If an executive--if a President gets out of line, if his executive branch gets out of line, the House of Representatives can initiate impeachment. The House of Representatives can shut off all funding to that branch of government or--well, it wouldn't do that, obviously, but to a division within that branch of government, we could cut the funds to the funding to bring about the result that is necessary if we have the conviction here and if we believe it is prudent policy. The House controls the spending. The House initiates any impeachment that might be required, and we don't want to ever exercise that unless it is judiciously done for good reason and good cause. And the Senate, the prudent group of the Senate, come up for election every 6 years, so they can sit back a little bit. Only a third of them have the level of apprehension that all of those who are up for reelection in the House of Representatives do. But this balance, this check and balance between the three branches of government, was that the branch of government and the division within it--the legislative branch and the U.S. House of Representatives, the division within it was always designed to be able to control the other branches of government and, by the way, able to limit the United States Senate. The reasons for that are why we are up for election every 2 years so the people would be sovereign. We the people are the ones who really do decide who is right in all of this Republican form of government, which is guaranteed to the American people in the Constitution. We are guaranteed, Mr. Speaker, a Republican form of government. But in this form of government, it is we the people; and we the legislators within the United States House of Representatives are the most accountable to the people, and, by that, we need to be the most responsive to the people as well. I think history has proven that out. So it doesn't mean either that the Supreme Court gets to decide necessarily what the Constitution means. I will define what it means here, Mr. Speaker, and that is, the Constitution has to mean what it says. It has to mean literally what it says, but it has to also mean what it was understood to mean at the time of its ratification. Every one of us takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Here, in the House, 435 of us; and over in the Senate, 100 Senators; and a good number of executive branch employees, a long ways down the line, take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Now, I take that oath seriously, and I carry a Constitution in my jacket pocket every day, as close to my heart as it can get, to remember what this means, what it means to me. But I don't take the oath to support and defend the Constitution with the idea in mind that I am going to shift my oath and the meaning of my oath to conform to a Supreme Court decision that does not reflect the original understanding of the Constitution. None of us can take an oath to a living, breathing, moving interpretation of a document. This Constitution, Mr. Speaker, this Constitution constitutes a contractual guarantee, an intergenerational contractual guarantee that this God-given liberty, as defined in our Declaration, and the Bill of Rights and the structure of our government and the function of our government, the enumerated powers that are in here, that this is an intergenerational contractual guarantee passed down to us generation to generation, and it can't change its meaning just because five Justices over there in the Supreme Court decided to change its meaning. Now, I want to respect their jurisprudence and I respect almost all of the decisions that have come down, but there have been times in history when an activist court has decided that they are going to rewrite this society according to their whim. I have always admired Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas, who is a former judge. He came to this Congress and he ran on this ticket. He has been to Iowa a few times, and he is coming back. He says this: I found myself on the bench as a judge, and I was constrained to interpret the literal meaning of the Constitution and to interpret the literal meaning of the laws that were passed, and when I felt the urge to be a legislator, I knew my obligation then was to leave the bench and run for Congress. That is what you need to do when you feel in your heart that you are a legislator, when you reason that you can do more to contribute as a legislator than you can as a judge. So Louie Gohmert came to this Congress. Congressman Louie Gohmert came to this Congress in the right way for the right reasons, to legislate, because that was his heart's desire, and that is where he believed, and I hope today he still believes, that he can do the most good for this country. But the Justices that sit on the bench that decide that they can just ignore the meaning of the Constitution are undermining our God-given liberty. They are undermining the foundation delivered to us by the Founders. They are undermining the Declaration. They are undermining the Constitution itself. I can think of a few of those decisions. The Kelo decision, where the Supreme Court ruled that private property could be confiscated, condemned, through eminent domain by a local jurisdiction of government and then handed over to another private interest. Let's just say that there is a widow lady that lives in a certain section of town, and she wants to live in that house the rest of her life, but there are developers that own the rest of the land around her, and they want to put in a shopping mall. So they would come in and say to the lady: Hey, here is our offer. We want to buy your house. And she says: No. No amount of money can buy my house. I am going to live in this house the rest of my life. Well, in the Kelo decision, they went to government, and government condemned the property, took that property away from her. It was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled that local government could condemn property under the Fifth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, which says ``nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.'' And think of this. They didn't say ``nor shall private property be condemned and handed over to other private interests, without just compensation,'' because the Founding Fathers never imagined that government would have the audacity to condemn private property to hand it over to other private interests. But the function of that decision was, and so now the effect of the Kelo decision is, the Fifth Amendment now reads, in effect, de facto, we say: Nor shall private property be taken without just compensation. They struck out those three words ``for public use.'' That is the effect of a Supreme Court decision, and it is an erroneous decision. It is a wrong decision. It doesn't reflect the language in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. The dissent was written by Justice O'Connor. I didn't know until after I had made my statement on the floor after that decision that her dissent mirrored almost exactly the statement that I made on the floor in rejection of it. I didn't expect the gentleman at that time from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, to agree with me either, but Barney Frank, Justice O'Connor, Steve King, and many others agreed: an erroneous decision. A Supreme Court amended the Constitution, in effect. They de facto amended the Constitution of the United States by coming down with a decision that effectively struck the words ``for public use'' out of the Fifth Amendment, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.'' So now there are extra constitutional takings of private property handed over to private property because local government has concluded they can collect more tax dollars off of that private interest that wants to build a shopping mall or a truck stop or whatever it might be to expand. That is the kind of decision that a Supreme Court can make that are activist decisions that effectively amend our Constitution if we let them do that. So we think of a decision like Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. How did they cook that up? Where does that come from? Well, it comes from out of the emanations and penumbras, Madam Speaker, and it is rooted back in a decision called the Griswold decision from the sixties. I believe it was 1964. Connecticut, at that time, a strong Catholic State, had decided that they would not allow for contraceptives to be sold in Connecticut. The Griswold couple, husband and wife, decided that they had a right to privacy to purchase contraceptives to exercise their liberties. Now, that decision that was made by the State of Connecticut not to sell contraceptives was a part of the laboratory of the States. It is a State's right to pass a decision like that; and as soon as the people in the State of Connecticut decided they rejected that decision, they can elect some new people to their legislature. But this was litigated to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of the United States decided that that couple, the Griswold couple, had a right to privacy, and that right to privacy included the right to purchase contraceptives. So they created a new right, a right to privacy. They created it out of thin air, which we now call out of the emanations and penumbras. That is a little shadow around the edge of the cloud that maybe a Justice in a black robe can see but the rest of us lay people or even the brightest attorneys in the land can't quite see because they aren't seated on the Supreme Court. Well, if you can find rights out of the emanations and penumbras that you can't find in the very language of the Constitution or statute, for that matter, you are an activist judge, and you are trying to alter our society, amend our society into your own fashion. You are legislating from the bench. So they created a right to privacy, and this right to privacy was then used as the foundation of the decision in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton that granted, those two cases together, abortion on demand-- abortion on demand, at least before viability. And viability is a very vague measure of a baby that would be able to survive outside the womb. Now, that length of maturity within the womb and the ability to survive outside the womb has changed substantially, Madam Speaker, since Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Now we have babies who survive clear down as early as into the 20th week. Viability has changed because medicine has gotten ahead of this, and we have saved more babies. But viability wasn't the only measure, because Doe v. Bolton gave all the exceptions that I talked about earlier, made exceptions for the health of the mother, the physical health, the mental health, the familial health, the financial health, anything that might affect her psyche. So it amounts to abortion on demand for the sake of, well, let's wait until it is convenient to take the life of that innocent little baby. But what we see now, Madam Speaker, what we see now is that we are watching these babies grow in the womb and the ultrasound. My iPhone has a number of little babies and the ultrasounds in it, and you can watch as those little babies will squirm and reach their arm out, suck their thumb. They look like they are trying to talk, stretch their legs out. They move around a lot more than we ever thought they did. I have talked to mothers who say as they watch their little baby that is 19, 20 weeks along, squirming around in the ultrasound, that a lot of the time they can't yet feel that movement. We know that as we get later on, even us dads get to feel that movement, and it is a glorious thing. This is the development of a miracle, and you can't be a parent or a grandparent and hold a little baby that is flesh of your flesh and not be amazed at the miracle of a little baby. When I took my firstborn in my hands, little David Steven King, and put him in my hands and looked at him, it was with awe that I saw so many pieces about him: counted the fingers and toes, took a look at his eyes, saw every little feature that is there, that little son. And I began to ask that question shortly after his birth: Could anyone take his life now within minutes after he was born? As squirmy and beautiful and miraculous, created in God's image as he was, could anybody take his life then? I don't know anybody who would be ghastly enough who could do so. So I thought, if he is 20 minutes old and we can't take his life, if he is 5 minutes old and we can't take his life, if he is 1 minute old and we can't take his life, how could we take it a minute before he was born? or 5 minutes? or an hour? or a day? or a week? or a month? Where along this continuum from this moment of conception would there be a time that we could say: Oh, he is only a blob of tissue? He was never a blob of tissue. He was always a unique human being, joining together the DNA of his mother and his father in a unique fashion that would never be matched again. Madam Speaker, think of this. Seven billion people on the planet, every one unique. Even the identical twins, the identical quadruplets that are there, their mother can tell them apart. Their father can tell them apart most of the time. And the older they get, the easier it is. But 7 billion faces on this planet, and God created those faces to be unique. No two faces are the same. Even if their DNA is matched up in identical twins or identical quadruplets or identical triplets, as rare as they are, their mothers can look them in the face and know which child is which. The rest of us can figure out everybody else, and we can, a lot of times, figure out the twins, too. I have twin nieces that I could always tell apart. They would ask me how I could, and I would say: Well, one of you is really intelligent and the other is really beautiful. You two figure out which is which. I am not going to answer the question. But we can tell them apart. Now, what a gift from God, the creation, to have the imagination to create faces, every one unique. No matter how many people on the planet there are, just the facial features are unique, let alone all the rest of us, let alone all the things that go on in our heads and in our minds and the experiences we have, the personalities that develop differently. That combination of nature or nurture that we will never unlock the mystery of that, that is all a gift from God. We have aborted 60 million of the gifts from God--60 million--and another 60 million babies not born because their mothers were aborted. Children who never had the opportunity to live to draw that first breath of free air. When I welcome a new grandchild into the world, I say a prayer over them, Madam Speaker, and I pray that they have a long and a healthy life, a faithful life, and a life that is long and healthy and faithful. And when that day comes that they are called home at the end of that long and healthy and faithful life, I pray that the last breath that they draw is more free than the first breaths that they are drawing on that day. And that is what we need to work for: more freedom, more God-given liberty, more young lives brought into this world. The very source of all joy comes from little babies, from our children, and if we stopped having babies, the joy would finally just die down. The laughter, the giggling would just diminish day by day by day until there was no joy left in the world, because that is the source of it. And yet we are aborting 1 million babies a year. That is why, Madam Speaker, I brought the Heartbeat bill to this House of Representatives, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act. That is why we have worked so hard to get cosponsors on this legislation, we worked so hard to get the cosponsors. People like former majority leader Tom DeLay came here to work pro bono. The leader of Faith2Action, Janet Porter, a driving force, worked to get cosponsors on this legislation, worked to send the messages in the right place. We carefully drafted language that reflects our intent to save the lives of as many babies as we can from the moment of the heartbeat. We require that, if the abortionist is intending to commit an abortion, he must first check for a heartbeat, and that heartbeat would be detected at 7 to 8 weeks. If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected, because we know that is a unique human being, a sacred human life. I would like to go back to the moment of conception, but we can't yet medically identify that moment. But we can identify when a heartbeat can be detected. We all know that if there is a beating heart, there is a baby there. That heart doesn't just sit down there on its own beating away. It is in the chest of a baby, a little baby, a little unique boy or a girl who is a gift from God. That baby has at least a 95 percent chance of successful birth once we can detect that heartbeat in the womb. So how could we allow for the ending of that unique human being's life without that baby ever having a chance to draw a breath of free air or to scream for its own mercy? How could we say no to that? How could we have in our earpieces that ultrasound of that beating heart? That little granddaughter is 20 weeks along and her heart was beating last week, anyway, at 161 beats per minute. That beat is strong, firm, and solid. She has at least a 95 percent chance of successful birth and being welcomed into this world drawing that breath of free air, and I will pray as freer still on her last day many, many years from now. But we need to get there. We need to protect these lives, and we need to get a bill before the Supreme Court. So here in this House, we are 170 cosponsors strong. We are far ahead of any other significant piece of pro-life legislation. I drafted the bill with the strategy in mind, Madam Speaker, to get the Heartbeat bill before the Supreme Court after the next appointment to the Supreme Court. I am very pleased with what I see with Neil Gorsuch. When I hear the rumors of the potential retirements in the Supreme Court, our three oldest members of the Supreme Court are 84, 80, and 78 years old, Madam Speaker. So we can expect a retirement fairly soon. We need to have a bill out of the House of Representatives sitting on Mitch McConnell's desk long enough and hard enough that we can gin up the effort to get it passed out of the United States Senate. There are four windows that need to be open before we can start to save lives in significant numbers, Madam Speaker. One of them is a pro- life majority in the House of Representatives. We have that, 237 votes behind the pain-capable 20-week bill. The next one is a pro-life majority in the United States Senate. Senator Roy Blunt made mention in our values team here a couple of weeks ago that they have a bare majority, a pro-life majority in the Senate. Fifty-one votes voted for the 20-week bill over there. They didn't break the filibuster, but 51. That is a pro-life majority. If they suspend the rules over there and get rid of the filibuster rule, the votes are there to pass Heartbeat bill over and send it to the President's desk. That is the third window. The first window is a pro-life majority in the House. The second window is a pro-life majority in the Senate. The third window is a President who will sign the Heartbeat bill to protect these lives from the seventh or eighth week all the way through. I don't have any doubt President Trump will sign such a bill, and I don't have any doubt that Vice President Pence will be standing right next to him when that day comes. I don't know whether I am going to be standing there, but I am going to do everything I can, Madam Speaker, to get the Heartbeat bill to the President's desk. Yes, it will be litigated. The pro-abortion people will litigate everything that slows down the abortion mills in this country. So it would be litigated. And the timing of getting it out of the Senate to the President's desk and before the Court after the next confirmation means we are called upon to move the Heartbeat bill out of the House within the next few months because as we get closer to the election, it gets harder. Things get crazy around here. So if it gets passed around July, it is going to be really hard to move the Heartbeat bill. There is a little rule that was handed down, I think, from the previous Speaker that says that pro-life legislation doesn't move off the floor of the House unless the top three pro-life organizations support it and will actively support it here in the House of Representatives. Those organizations would be Family Research Council. Tony Perkins supports the bill. The next organization is Susan B. Anthony List. They also have agreed to support the bill. Yes, they have a priority they would like to have move ahead of that, but Marjorie Dannenfelser said: Of course, I would never stand in the way of something so good as the Heartbeat bill. The third organization is the one that is not fully on board. In fact, I don't see that they are supporting it in any way, and back channel says to me that there are some statements made to try to slow it down. That is the National Right to Life, the oldest and the largest pro-life organization in the United States of America. They said that they don't oppose the Heartbeat bill. Madam Speaker, this is right off of their electronic publication, whether it happens to be a tweet or whether it is their website, but here is their statement: National Right to Life, protecting life in America since 1968. National Right to Life says they do not oppose the Heartbeat bill. I struck through there with a red line and said: Well, neither do they support it. They don't oppose the Heartbeat bill. Well, they don't support the Heartbeat bill. They are stuck on this. They are hidebound on this. Their mission statement says that they support and protect life from the beginning of life until natural death. They define the beginning of life at the moment of fertilization. So how can you be National Right to Life and not support the Heartbeat bill? Their reasoning is that they are stuck in this. They refuse to challenge the Supreme Court. They refuse to challenge the viability standards that were written into Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. If the number one pro-life organization refuses to challenge the Supreme Court on those standards, then what they are really doing is accepting--and some would say accepting the idea that we are going to see 1 million abortions a year in this country, as far as the eye can see, because if you are not willing to challenge the Supreme Court, then you are accepting 1 million abortions. That is what we get if we are trimming around the edges with pain- capable at 20 weeks. I support all of this legislation. Let's do it all, Madam Speaker. The pain-capable doesn't get the job done. It shies away from challenging the Supreme Court. We wrote this Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, in order to challenge the viability standard the Supreme Court has. We want to measure life-- unique, precious, sacred human life--from the moment of conception until natural death, protected. By the way, protected in the 14th Amendment. We are all protected in there: life, liberty, and property. So all we need to do is define when life begins, and we are obligated by the Constitution to protect that life. But the Supreme Court has different ideas. I don't believe they will after the next appointment to the Supreme Court. So some of the people who agree with National Right to Life have said that not enough States have passed it. Okay. So we went to work. Here are the States that have passed heartbeat protection language: Ohio, North Dakota, and Arkansas. Now, John Kasich vetoed that legislation. Who lobbied him to do that? The arm of National Right to Life and Planned Parenthood; side by side, by the way. What brings them to do that, Madam Speaker? Because they don't want to challenge the Supreme Court. There is testimony that went before the Ohio Legislature December 13, 2011, that said: We don't want to force Justice Kennedy to vote ``no'' on a Heartbeat bill because then Justice Ginsburg might write the majority opinion. If she does that, she might take away the things we have gained. And we should not go before the Court and risk what we have gained. I would argue instead that every time we have gone before the Court, we have gained. We gain something. We gain ground. The Court is sensitive to the movement of our society. They were sensitive to that when they ran up the Obergefell decision that imposed same-sex marriage on America. They decided American society was ready for same-sex marriage, and they gave us an extraconstitutional decision and forced it on everyone in America. They must have been right because there wasn't a very big fight that was put up. But by their rationale, we are a lot more ready to protect innocent unborn human life than we ever were for gay marriage. Yet we need to get this legislation before the Court. Tonight at 6 o'clock eastern time, 7 o'clock central time, there is a full hearing before the Iowa House of Representatives on their Heartbeat legislation, which has passed the senate 30-20. It went before the house. It has passed out of committee out of the house last Thursday night in the last hour that was available in what they call funnel week. Now this hearing is called for by the pro-abortion people who want to have a full house hearing. The witnesses will be lined up there. They will stand up for life tonight. If the hearing goes the way we expect, I expect the bill will come before the Iowa House of Representatives and it will pass. Watching the expressions on our excellent and wonderful first female Governor in the State of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, I can't imagine she would do anything but sign it. I don't want to put words in her mouth. I am just anticipating a wonderful result. I believe in 1 week or 2 weeks that becomes law in Iowa. Likely the pro-abortion people will litigate like they did in Mississippi on Mississippi's 15-week bill that we have just seen before today, an injunction that is going before the Sixth Circuit. The viability standards in Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and also Planned Parenthood v. Casey will be challenged in the Fifth Circuit on the basis of the Mississippi law. Then that means that the Iowa law that I anticipate also will be litigated. Why wouldn't we send this standard over to the Senate and on to go before the Supreme Court? H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act, litigated at the same time before the United States Supreme Court along with Mississippi's 15-week bill and Iowa's Heartbeat bill. That looks to me like a good result. That brings it from several different angles. I would remind the body that there were three Federal circuits where the partial-birth abortion legislation was heard simultaneously. They arrived packaged up in one case before the United States Supreme Court, and life prevailed in that case, as eventually life will prevail in the United States of America. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank Dr. Harris for leading on this Special Order here this evening and appreciate the opportunity to be recognized. There are a number of things that I would point out. For starters, I chair the Constitution Committee for a reason, and the delivery by Mr. LaMalfa on California's horrible Reproductive FACT Act law--it is not facts, by the way, but it forces pro-life pregnancy centers to provide free advertising for the abortion industry. I don't think there is any question, if you coerce people to advertise for something that, in the first place, is immoral and directly runs against the convictions of the people who are volunteering their time and those who are contributing their resources to bring about a crisis pregnancy center, which is driven by the hearts of the pro-life community in America--I can hardly think of anything more important than having that happen. Now, freedom of speech is one thing. You can't limit speech. But for a State to impose speech, that is another level. That goes beyond. That is beyond the pale of the constitutional First Amendment rights. So as I think about crisis pregnancy centers and what it matters and how it matters to me and the district that I represent: Not long after I was elected to Congress, I went to Gabriel's Corner in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I walked in there, a crisis pregnancy center, a building that was built in what was an empty lot across the street from Planned Parenthood's abortion center. As I walked in there, they had a big picture window they had set up and a kneeler there so that you could be there to look out through that window and pray for those mothers who were going into the Planned Parenthood. And they said to me in that briefing that if a mother was able to have a 4D ultrasound then--this would be about, say, 13, 14 years ago-- that 70 percent of the mothers would decide, once they had seen the ultrasound, to keep the baby. As we walked through there, we finished the tour, and I said: Where is your ultrasound? They said: Well, we don't have one. I said: Why not? They said: We can't afford it. They told me the price on it then was $100,000 for a refurbished ultrasound. I said: Let's raise the money for the ultrasound so that you can save 70 percent of the lives of the babies who come in here because of their mother. So we set about the fundraising effort. I hardly got started and an anonymous benefactor showed up and said: Why are you waiting? Why don't you have the ultrasound? I answered: We're raising the money. He said: Well, go buy the ultrasound, but don't tell anybody who I am. So he wanted to be an anonymous benefactor. We did that; set up the ultrasound. The annual dinner for Gabriel's Corner, the first little baby that was saved by Gabriel's Corner that we knew was brought along to that dinner. And I looked back in that dinner and there was that man sitting in the table clear back at the end, not talking to anybody, but watching. Wow. I have never forgotten what that meant. Another occasion, an individual came to me and he said: I'm in between careers. I need something to do. As we discussed this, it came to the foundational idea to establish Mary's Choice in Sioux City, Iowa. They went ahead with that, a Catholic pregnancy center, a crisis pregnancy center. As they followed through, they built that next to--or they developed it next to Planned Parenthood's abortion clinic. Planned Parenthood couldn't stand the guilt of people praying for them, so they built a big fence, thinking that was going to block the prayers. Well, I think it attracted them instead. The last time I was there, I had my picture taken in front of the Planned Parenthood center in Sioux City. There is a Century 21 real estate sign in front of there, and you can't read ``Planned Parenthood of the Heartland'' any longer on there except in the glue, where they pulled the sign off. It is for sale, or may be sold by now. Progress has been made, lives have been saved. The respect for innocent, unborn human life has grown. And to muzzle them, or force a speech, not just limiting their freedom of speech, but forcing speech-- so I just looked at my iPhone here, and there are a number of ultrasounds that have been texted to me. I am kind of like, I guess I would say, the number one proponent of procreation in Congress, as far as I know. Here is one. It says: ``Baby looked good yesterday. Moving like crazy on the ultrasound.'' I answer: ``This is so beautiful. I'll keep my prayers going. This ultrasound is an answer to them. God's blessings.'' Next ultrasound comes along. This is dated just last Friday. I sent back: ``What is the heartbeat rate for this perfect little miracle?'' She answers: ``161 beats per minute.'' And then I say: ``Purring along like a finely-tuned racing motor, that little miracle.'' ``Yes, and she's moving all around'' is the answer. And here is the conclusion of this. I just think this is so important to implant this in our memory. She answered this way, this mother: ``These ultrasounds are amazing. Watching her stretch and cross her legs, curl up her hand, suck her thumb. At 19 weeks, I can't imagine anyone contemplating abortion would proceed with it after seeing that in their own little baby.'' That little baby is my little granddaughter, and I am going to stand up for life so long as I live.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I would say in defense of the K-9 Corps--and I appreciate the presentation delivered by Dr. Yoho and my great friend from Florida, who gets common sense right in this Congress--that I am a fan of the K- 9 Corps. I am also a fan of the ``benign corps.'' And I want the ``benign corps'' to be thinking about what that means. It is not just a bingo game, but it is bingo for a cancer patient. So when you get the diagnosis of K-9 or benign, I am taking benign over K-9 because that is the thing that we celebrate more than anything else, is that lease on life, that if it goes 5 years, you are cancer-free. Benign cancer-free for 5 years, that gets the job done. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for standing up for the K-9 Corps, and I am now going to stand up for the ``unborn corps.'' Mr. Speaker, I came here to the floor to speak this evening about this Nation and about a nation that has granted to its Supreme Court-- sometimes just because we weren't paying attention or we didn't have the confidence of our convictions--I suppose there was a time when Americans were no better informed on constitutional principles than we are today. Over 216 or so years, we have had this experience of accepting the idea of Marbury v. Madison, a Supreme Court decision that over time, with accumulated decision by decision rooted back in Marbury, that the Supreme Court of the United States was the final word on what the Constitution says. The Constitution doesn't say to the Supreme Court that they have the final word. Instead, it is court precedence, case precedence, that laid the foundation in about 1802 that has been built upon ever since. The longer we accept the tradition of a Supreme Court decision being the final decision on what the Constitution says, the more deeply ingrained is the commitment to that decision and the less our Constitution itself means and the more the traditions of the acceptance of a decision of the Supreme Court means. So here we are today. Mr. Speaker, if people aren't quite understanding what that means, I would describe it a bit of another way. There is a practice in this country called birthright citizenship. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires that a baby born in the United States is an automatic citizen. In fact, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, says: ``All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States . . . . `' Well, in post-Civil War, they knew what they were doing. They didn't think we would confuse it over the years the way we have, but they wanted to make sure that the babies born to the newly freed slaves as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War would be American citizens. They expected that those babies born to the former slaves would be full-fledged citizens with all the rights of citizenship bestowed upon them as those created in the image of God, just like everyone else. But what happened was, even though the amendment was there that said all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are American citizens, over time, in the latter part of the 19th century, they began to bestow citizenship on any baby born in the United States. And it wasn't successfully challenged, neither is any case on point in all of the full history of the litigation that has taken place that has found its way to the Supreme Court. There is no on-point precedent case that determines that the Constitution requires that a baby born in America be automatically an American citizen, but the practice has prevailed. The practice has prevailed along the way that a baby born on U.S. territory, with certain exceptions, is an American citizen, even though the Constitution doesn't require it, because the ``subject of the jurisdiction thereof'' clause that is in there meant a number of things. First, that meant loyalty. Where is your allegiance. There were Native American Tribes--called Indian Tribes at the time and still today--that if the children born on that reservation were American citizens automatically, they were automatically removed from membership in the Tribe. So the folks who drafted the 14th Amendment wanted to exempt them. That is one of the reasons they inserted the clause, ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'' because the allegiance of those born on reservations wasn't viewed to be equivalent to that of those born in the other territorial areas of the United States of America. Then, of course, they wanted to exempt the children born to ambassadors, the children born to diplomats, the children born to their staff. Could you imagine if there was an invading army and babies were born to the folks who followed along on that army, that they would be American citizens? No. They weren't subject to the jurisdiction thereof. They didn't owe their allegiance to the United States. It was clear they owe their allegiance to other foreign princes and potentates, to borrow a phrase from the naturalization oath. So the clause, ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'' exempted those who were not obligated to owe allegiance to the United States, but the practice persisted. It persisted to this day. In fact, some years ago, about a decade ago, we had hearings. In those hearings, the research, at least the testimony, said that somewhere between 340,000 and 750,000 babies were born in the United States where both parents, the mother and the father, were illegal, yet they have been bestowed an automatic citizenship. And it has created this birth tourism where, back during that testimony time--now the price has surely gone up--if there is a pregnant mother in China, she could buy a $30,000 ticket to fly into the United States, be smuggled into the United States, get her OB care, live in an apartment next to the hospital, deliver the baby, and have that little baby's feet stamped on the birth certificate. And that little birth certificate made that baby an American citizen. Then they loaded the baby up and flew the mom and baby back to China, and 18 years later that baby could begin to petition to bring in the family reunification plan. That is how a practice gets started that hasn't been successfully blocked because of litigation that would go to the Supreme Court with a decision made based upon justice. So this situation persists. Three-quarters of a million babies a year, or more--I mean, the entire population of the Dreamers, every single year--born in America to illegal parents, granted automatic citizenship and the ability, once they reach of age, to begin the family reunification process and bring in the whole kit and caboodle of family into America and start them on a path to citizenship. What kind of nation would do that? A nation that is steeped in a precedent of habit--a bad habit--that persists in delivering a policy that is not constitutional but rooted in a murky understanding of what the Constitution actually says; I wouldn't say a dishonest, but a misunderstanding of what the Constitution actually says. So that, Mr. Speaker, I think sets the foundation for the decisions on Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton and Planned Parenthood v. Casey and a number of Supreme Court precedents that built us up to this situation that we have today. And I am speaking of abortion in America, abortion on demand in America, babies who have a chance to live outside the womb being killed because they are inconvenient. They may be, at the time, not wanted by the mother. We are seeing data that shows that a significant percentage of mothers who have abortions are coerced into that by the biological father who doesn't want to carry that responsibility. And what is this based upon? Supreme Court precedents that are--looking back on it, how did they ever build to the position that we are in today? Back in the sixties, there was a case known as Griswold v. Connecticut. That case was one where a family in Connecticut, a husband and a wife--I don't know if they were parents--wanted to be able to buy contraceptives. And because of the Catholic influence in Connecticut, they had outlawed contraceptives in Connecticut. So they went to the Supreme Court, the Griswolds, and said: We have a constitutional right to purchase contraceptives. It is not the business of the State legislature to tell us that we can't purchase contraceptives. We want to take care of our own reproductive rights by managing our contraception. So the Supreme Court stuck their nose in what should have been a States' rights issue and came down with a decision that created, manufactured out of emanations and penumbras--not even whole cloth, but the imagination that there was some cloth there to manufacture it out of--the right to privacy. The Supreme Court concluded that the right to privacy would guarantee the privacy for the Griswolds to be able to purchase contraceptives even though the State of Connecticut said it is against the interests of the people in the State of Connecticut that we control birth through contraceptives. That was their decision in Connecticut. If people wanted to vote with their feet, they could have left Connecticut. But, instead, the United States Supreme Court decided they had the power and the authority to manufacture a whole new right that doesn't exist in the constitution, a right to privacy; and a right to privacy guaranteed the ability for the married couple to purchase contraceptives. Well, that was sometime in about the mid-sixties, and not very long after that the Eisenstadt case came up. It was this: An unmarried couple said: Why are we excluded? We have the same constitutional rights as the married couple has. If they have a right to purchase contraceptives because they have a right to privacy, unmarried people have also a right to privacy. So the Supreme Court decided: We had started down the slippery slope and had granted this right to privacy and a right to purchase contraceptives and keep the government out of the private lives, especially the reproductive lives, of people, consenting adults. How can we deny the unmarried couple the manufactured constitutional right that we have always granted to the Griswolds? So the Griswold case became the Eisenstadt case, and the non-married couples had the same rights as the married couples. Along came 1973. Two cases came before the Supreme Court: Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Roe v. Wade took that concept of a right to privacy that was manufactured, not out of the Constitution, manufactured out of thin air--out of the emanations and penumbras, which means in the shadows of, where the text of the Constitution is--and they decided that a woman had a right to abortion, and it was an inherent right rooted in a right to privacy: You have a right to a contraceptive. You have a right to put an end to the life of that innocent, unborn baby under the same standards of privacy. Who gets to take the life of a baby, or a child, or a young adult, or a mature adult, or a senior adult? Who gets to do that by saying, It is only my business; I control that; it is my right to privacy? But the Supreme Court concluded exactly that. But they did say that it could only happen in the first trimester. But the simultaneous case that came down was Doe v. Bolton. And in the Doe v. Bolton case, they gave exceptions, Mr. Speaker, and said: Well, we are going to restrain this right to an abortion that we have created and manufactured in Roe v. Wade; but we really can't say that if the woman has danger to her life, she shouldn't be able to get an abortion. Sure. We will give her the right to abort her baby if it risks her life. How about if it risks her health? What if it damages her health? What if it affects her psychological health? What if her familial relationships are going to be upset if she doesn't abort the baby? In other words, what if a young lady doesn't have a husband and it would be disturbing to her family for her to have the baby? We want to give her the right to abort the baby because it would upset her familial health, her family life. And, of course, if it affects her economically and it affects her psychologically, it might affect her familial life as well. So if it affects her economics, her psyche, her physical health, risks her life, then abort the baby. She has a right for all that. So when you take them together--Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton--it was abortion on demand, manufactured by the Supreme Court of the United States, Mr. Speaker, not written into the Constitution, but pulled out of the emanations and penumbras, the shadows of, that little shadow around the cloud out there that maybe we can't see it because we are just laypeople with normal perceptive abilities. We might have the best eyesight. We could have 20/20 vision. Well, we could even have 20/20 rear vision to see what is going on, but the Court put on their black robes, they looked up at the sky and they decided: We know what is written in that place around the edges of the clouds in the emanations and penumbras. We know that it is there because we want it to be there. And we can't read it exactly into the language in the Constitution, but we want it, we see it, and we are going to shape society around it. And they did. And they came down with the Roe v. Wade decision and the Doe v. Bolton decision the same day: January 22, 1973. Abortion on demand. And how many of us at that time knew what that would mean, Mr. Speaker? How many of us understood the devastating debacle that was served up to the American people? I remember those times. I remember those years. Marilyn and I were married in 1972. As we looked around at our friends, our contemporaries, there were young couples who were getting started and starting with their families at the time. We knew a decision came down, but we had no idea how bad it would be; and no one in 1973 would have predicted that, 45 years later, we would have experienced 60 million abortions in the United States of America, 60 million babies whose precious lives--perfect little babies, little babies created in God's image. No one would have expected that there would be 60 million on the conscience of America. No one would have expected that we would hear the business community clamoring for labor saying: We don't have enough people to go to work in America; we have to go to foreign countries and bring in millions of people to do this work. Nobody out here is even doing the math to say: What happens when 60 million babies are gone, ripped out of the generations over the last 45 years? What does that do to society? What does it do to our economy? What does it do to our mortality, the conscience, the guilt of America, the sins on the soul of the United States of America? What does it do to all that? But what does it do also to the next generation and the next generation? What about the guilt that is carried by the people who stepped in and took the advice of Planned Parenthood and decided it really isn't a life and there aren't any repercussions--I can be free of the burden of raising a child that I had not planned to raise and walk away and life will be fine again? What has happened to the people who bought into that story? What has happened to the--let's just say--family force, the workforce of America? Sixty million babies ripped out of America, ripped out of the womb, ripped apart out of the womb, ripped out of America. Sixty million babies. Forty-five years. Mr. Speaker, if you do a back-of-the-envelope calculation and you think, of those little girls who were aborted, many of them would be mothers again today, would be mothers by now--and I did a back-of-the- envelope calculation, and I will say that I just figured that, if each little girl that had been aborted since 1973, in those years that they would be of reproductive age--and some of them wouldn't be of that age yet; but if each of those who would be had had three babies, as Marilyn and I have had, that is another 60 million babies. Sixty million. So now the hole in our society is 60 million babies plus another 60 million babies: 120 million Americans. You could dial it down a little bit. You could say, well, they aren't going to average 3. That is probably true. They could average maybe 2\1/2\ or a little better. If you take the 120 million and you dial that down a ways--I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, what the population of America was 100 years ago. Let's pick the 1920 census. Mr. Speaker, 106 million Americans was the total population of the United States of America in the census of 1920, which comes up in a couple of years. It will be a century in a couple of years. 106 million Americans. That is how many we are missing today, all of that many babies, all of that many million developed adults, young people who would have lived, loved, learned, laughed, played, raised families of their own, gone to school and gotten educated, started businesses, created jobs, improved the quality of life of all of us, enriched our lives. The love that would flow from over 100 million babies growing up in America who were denied the right to life, the right to live, and were taken from this world before they ever had a chance to fill their own lungs with air and scream for their own mercy, that is the burden that America is carrying today. Mr. Speaker, when that day comes that abortion is over in America and we respect and we revere life again, as it once was and one day ever shall be, when we reach that point, that doesn't mean that America is absolved from this sin on our Nation. What it really means is we can begin to put our pieces back together and build a history and a legacy of a love and a respect and a reverence for life. All life. Life from the moment of fertilization until natural death. By the way, that life, from moment of fertilization till natural death, is the mission statement of the National Right to Life. The National Right to Life's mission statement--and I am not reading it; I am going from memory, so if I miss a word--says they are dedicated to protecting life from the beginning of life until natural death. I embrace that mission statement. I embrace that ideology and that philosophy that shaped that mission statement for the National Right to Life, the country's oldest and largest pro-life organization. But I did ask the question: How do they define the beginning of life? I looked down through their website, and it is defined from fertilization. Life begins at fertilization. That is the mission of National Right to Life, and we agree. I applaud that position, and I applaud the work that they have done over the last more than 45 years, because they formed themselves before Roe v. Wade, I believe, 1968. So they should be applauded for the work that they have done over the years. But National Right to Life is married to a concept of incrementalism; and when you read through the statements, the testimony that they have supported before various State legislatures, the positions that they have taken, Mr. Speaker, become--and as I have done, sat down and talked with their leadership and tried to convince their leadership to be stronger, more bold, the same answer came back from each one of them that I talked to at National Right to Life, and it is this: they are committed to doing what can be done around the edges. The Supreme Court has built a fence around what they call a right to abortion. There is no right to abortion. There is no constitutional right to abortion. It is manufactured, as I said earlier. But National Right to Life, the Nation's oldest and largest pro-life organization, has built a fence around the Supreme Court decisions, and they are working with incrementalism to try to get as close to that fence around the Supreme Court decisions as they can without being reversed by a decision of the Court. That is their strategic approach, and they have been granted a de facto veto power to any legislation that would come to the floor of the House of Representatives that doesn't have their support. I said ``de facto.'' That is the net result of it. In fact, that is the result of it. So we have 170 cosponsors on the Heartbeat Protection Act, the piece of legislation that says, before a doctor can perform an abortion, commit an abortion, he must first check for a heartbeat, and if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. We know, if there is a beating heart, there is life. And if there is a beating heart and you go in and stop the beating of that heart, you have ended that life. The most innocent lives that there are are those unborn little babies; and if there is a heartbeat that can be detected, the baby must be protected. That is the bill. That is the Heartbeat Protection Act. But National Right to Life doesn't support, and they say it this way, Mr. Speaker. National Right to Life, they say: National Right to Life does not oppose the Heartbeat bill--does not oppose--which is a little bit of semantics, Mr. Speaker. So I struck through the ``does not oppose,'' and I will put it there in exactly the same meaning: they do not support. If you are the National Right to Life and you are committed to protecting life from the moment of fertilization till natural death, how do you not step up to support the Heartbeat bill that protects babies? From the moment a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. The rationale is: our strategy is not here on Heartbeat; their strategy is try not to ever challenge the Supreme Court of the United States. So how can we have the Nation's oldest and largest pro-life organization that is entrenched in a philosophy and a legislative strategy that says that they are never going to challenge the Supreme Court of the United States? If you are not going to challenge the Supreme Court of the United States, then it is on your head and on the conscience of anybody, not just National Right to Life, but anybody who says: I am not willing to challenge the Supreme Court of the United States; I am not willing to challenge Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, or Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Then you are de facto accepting the idea that there will be--no, accepting the actual reality of a million abortions a year, as far as the eye can see. This language here that says the National Right to Life does not oppose the Heartbeat bill, I say they do not support the Heartbeat bill. Both statements are true, but opposing challenging the Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton guarantees a million abortions a year as far as the eye can see over the horizon of history and out of sight, a million a year. We have seen 60 million abortions in the United States of America in the last 45 years. This ratio that we are on today, if the population doesn't grow and if the ratio stays the same, and it sure looks to, unless we do something, we are looking at a million a year and, 45 years from now, another 45 million abortions. In another 15 years, we are back another 60 million, and then it is 120 million babies, and we know how that works. Then those babies not born to the mothers who would have been giving birth to them, you can double the number again. But already we are missing the entire population of the United States of America of 100 years ago as a result of the abortions since 1973. This Nation must step up to the moral principle that every human life is sacred. They are sacred in all of their forms. In fact, Governor Bob Casey, Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, since passed away, God rest his soul, said: ``Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure, itself, against which all other things are weighed.'' Well, I am prepared and at least 170 House Members are prepared to go to the Supreme Court again if challenged. Pass the Heartbeat bill out of the House. Pass it out of the Senate. Send it to the President's desk. The President will sign it. The other side, the pro-abortion people, will litigate it, and it will end up in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court needs to decide are they going to reflect and honor life. The 14th Amendment requires that we protect life, life over liberty; and, in fact, there are prioritized rights of life, liberty, and property in the 14th Amendment. In the Declaration of Independence, it is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but always life is number one, Mr. Speaker. Life is always number one. This country must step up and defend human life. And I want to, from the floor of this Congress tonight, put a shout-out out in congratulations to the Iowa Senate, who moved a very similar Heartbeat bill by a vote of 30-20, passed it off the floor of the Iowa Senate with a 24-minute debate was all the longer it took, 24 minutes, and a 30-20 bipartisan vote came off the floor and got messaged over to the Iowa House of Representatives. There they are in serious deliberations today. I don't know the results of those discussions. I left there last night with optimism that the Heartbeat bill in Iowa would come to the floor there soon, perhaps as early as next week. And should it pass, then it is likely to go to the Governor's desk. I do not have her public statement, but I will just say that I have confidence that Governor Reynolds will sign the Heartbeat bill if it gets to her desk. She is a solid, principled, clear-thinking leader who is also pro-life, Mr. Speaker. So we are doing the things that we can do to protect the lives that we can protect, but it is not good enough to play a perpetual strategy of incrementalism. Incrementalism of a little bit here, a little bit there, try this, try that, what has it done for us? It has saved a few lives, it really has, and every life is precious and worth saving, but it is not good enough. It is not good enough to accept the idea that we are going to see a million babies aborted in America every year as far as the eye can see. So that is why the House of Representatives needs to get the Heartbeat bill to the floor where I believe the votes are there for it to pass. National Right to Life needs to lead, follow, or get out of the way. Right now, the number one entity in the entire United States of America that is holding the Heartbeat bill off the floor of the House of Representatives is right here, the Nation's number one pro-life organization, the National Right to Life. Justice Kennedy has announced--it is announced, at least, and not by Justice Kennedy yet, that he is likely to retire midsummer. We will have a pro-life Court by September, and it is time to move now. That is my message, Mr. Speaker, and I ask all of us to stand up and protect innocent, unborn human life, and let's start to cleanse, again, the soul of America. 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, it is my privilege to have the opportunity to be here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I ask that people who are listening to our conversation weigh heavily on some of the remarks that will be made here this half hour. I come to the floor tonight, Mr. Speaker, to address the situation of innocent, unborn human life in America and to recount the path that we have followed and to lay out a path for the future that gives us a better opportunity to save as many lives as possible. For me, Mr. Speaker, I recall that when 1973 rolled around--January 22, 1973--on that date, we had two major decisions that came down from the United States Supreme Court: Roe v. Wade, which most everybody knows; and the other was Doe v. Bolton. Of those two cases that dropped on us in January of 1973, not very many people, if any, understood the magnitude of the decisions that had been made that day or the impact it would have on the population of the United States of America. They did not believe that we would see 45 years of pro-life marches coming to the city in the middle of the winter and sometimes marching through the snow from down on the Mall, all the way up to the United States Supreme Court building, calling upon the Supreme Court to correct the decision that was made by an activist court in 1973. The bottom line of that decision was that an abortion was essentially declared to be, some would say, a constitutional right for any reason or no reason at all, as much as you might want to parse the phrases in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, Mr. Speaker. Of course, for me, I didn't realize the impact of this in 1973. But by 1976, when my first son was born, I remember holding him in my hands and looking at David Steven King, understanding the miracle of life and the miracle of birth and thinking within that first hour of his life how anyone could take his life now, this little miracle child with that big head and dark hair and blue eyes and gurgling a little bit and crying some and squirming a lot, but a miracle. I thought: How could anyone take his life now, when he is an hour old or a minute old or a minute before he was born or an hour before he was born? Could they take his life a day before, a week before, or a month before, or a trimester before? When could you decide that this child's life could be ended, and do so within a moral framework rather than a framework of maybe self- interest? I concluded that there was only one moment, only one instant. We have to choose that moment when life begins. There is only one, and that is the moment of conception. We all know that. I knew it in 1973. I am sure I knew it before then, but I hadn't thought about it very much. And here we are today and we know. We know by the benefit of ultrasound. We are watching little babies squirm around in the womb. We are watching them yawn and stretch and suck their thumbs and try to talk and stretch themselves and belch and do all the things inside the womb that they do pretty shortly when they get outside the womb. It is life. It is miraculous life. Little hands, little feet, little fingers, a little nose, little eyes. They are little babies that are defenseless. This Congress has allowed a Supreme Court to impose abortion on demand in America, and we have worked to put together very few limitations on that abortion on demand. I don't think we have done enough, either, to send the message to America that life begins at the moment of conception. But ultrasound has shown many of us in this country--millions of us--that life does exist inside the womb. We know that we can, even with a transabdominal ultrasound, verify a heartbeat in 7 to 8 weeks from conception. In 7 to 9 weeks, that little baby is formed by then with a beating heart. We know that of those babies that have a detectable beating heart, 95 percent of those babies will experience a successful birth. It is at least 95 percent. Some say more. So 95 percent of them, or more, are destined to experience a successful birth. Yet the most dangerous place for a baby is in the mother's womb. It is the most dangerous place because our hearts are hardened by a Supreme Court decision that some think will not change, that we have to live with it in perpetuity and accept the consequences of 60 million Americans being aborted. There is a hole in the population of America that is 60 billion babies strong. Some of those little girls who were aborted would be mothers by now. When you do the math on that just on the back of the envelope, that is perhaps as many as another 60 million babies--a missing 120 million Americans that would otherwise have been born in this country and had the opportunity to live, to love, to laugh, to learn, to worship, to be mothers or fathers themselves. That is what we are asking for here in this Congress with 170 cosponsors on the Heartbeat bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa), one of those cosponsors who is a bit of a rare commodity himself, a conservative from California.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman gives me a little too much credit and doesn't take enough credit for himself. That is that measure of humility I was asked about earlier today. Trent Franks always said: The funny thing about humility, about the time you think you have achieved it, you have lost it. Mr. LaMalfa is a solid principled conservative, and I appreciate him coming to the floor to defend life. The effort that we have had is the whip team has gone out and pulled together 170 cosponsors on this bill that has set the stage for a path that I believe soon will be to the floor of the House of Representatives. Let's put the Heartbeat bill over on Mitch McConnell's desk. That is a good place for a lot of good things to have a chance to happen, even though they are a little slower at moving over there than we are over here. One of the nimble folks who has been actively engaged in the pro-life movement in the House of Representatives is Mr. Lamborn from Colorado. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Lamborn).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for coming to the floor to make such a strong message here on the sanctity of human life. When I think about that heartbeat, a heartbeat is a certain indicator of life. If the baby has a beating heart, we know that baby is alive. Statistically speaking, 95 percent or more of those little babies that have a beating heart, that can be detected by an ultrasound in that 6- to 8-week period of time, 95 percent of them will experience a successful birth. I have asked the question to those who weren't supportive of the bill: Did you ever hear the expression, ``Let's error on the side of life?'' Well, let's not error with life at all if we can help it. If we have a 95 percent chance of a successful birth, we can't take a chance on ending that little baby's life. Mr. Speaker, this bill is a bill that has come together over the last year and a half or so. Just to mention some of the points here that I think are important is that we have at least 162 pro-life organizations and leaders that support the Heartbeat bill. I have a little demonstration here. These are some of the organizations and leaders that support the Heartbeat bill. We have to really search pretty hard to find somebody that is not onboard. You can go down through this list. I could read these all off, but I think it would be a little bit tiresome and maybe a little bit redundant. I put this together. This may be one-third of--or maybe even one-fourth--of the overall list of 162 pro-life organizations and leaders that support the Heartbeat bill. It is nearly universal across this country. Of course, we don't have Planned Parenthood on here. We don't have the NARAL here. The National Abortion Rights Action League is what they used to be. They say they aren't anymore, but, yes, they are. We have the pro-life organizations here: the people who care about life, the people who understand that human life is sacred in all of its forms, it begins at the moment of conception, that we have to protect life from that time on, and that we have a constitutional duty to do so. We have an equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution that tells us that. But it seems as though the United States Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, upset that. They decided that a right to privacy, which was a manufactured right--I don't think I have it in my memos--but it is Griswold v. Connecticut back in the 1960s. It is a decision that a couple had a right to privacy in order to buy birth control pills. It was in Connecticut in that period of time. Shortly after that decision, they decided it wasn't just a married couple that had a right to privacy; it was an unmarried couple that had a right to privacy in the form of contraceptives. That was only in the mid- sixties. Then Roe v. Wade came along. I think that this Court can never be defended for the decision that they made, the idea that privacy trumps life, and that the privacy of a mother will allow for an abortion at any stage, is how this all came together between Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. But even some of our professors that you might think have been on the other side of the issue had their skepticism. In fact, there is a bit of it here in Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a statement that she made in 1985. Our Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg said: Roe, I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the court. Heavyhanded judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, the conflict. I would restate the Fourteenth Amendment. It says this: ``No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'' This comes back to personhood. I believe that a conceived baby from that moment is a person. We don't have the technical medical ability to define that moment at this point, Mr. Speaker, but we can define ``heartbeat,'' and we have done so in the Heartbeat Protection Act. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Rothfus), who has been a leader and a fighter for life since back in the 1980s or so, when I was still in the crib.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his eloquent words. I hadn't heard the description delivered by Governor Casey in those years back. But Governor Bob Casey--God rest his soul--captured my attention years ago, 20 or more years ago. I had a quote from Governor Bob Casey, a Democrat, that I had on my bulletin board that I don't have to look up anymore. And it was this: Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed. It rang so clear and true to me that I cut it out of the magazine and stuck it up on the bulletin board. His words echo in this Chamber today. I wish they echoed in his son over in the Senate the same way they echoed out of the mouth of Governor Bob Casey back in those days when he was denied the opportunity to speak before the Democratic National Convention because he is pro-life. And we look today and we see this issue has been more and more polarized. I hope that we can be more broad with this and that we can be more bipartisan than we are. We do have bipartisan cosponsorship on this bill. It is narrow, but it exists. I urge, Mr. Speaker, this body to take this bill to the floor. 170 cosponsors is further ahead than any comparable piece of pro-life legislation. To have that many cosponsors and a good number of other Members who have said, ``I am not ready to sign on the dotted line, but you bring it to the floor, and I will vote `yes,' '' I think we get to ``yes,'' but we need to bring it here. There are concerns that, well, if we pass it off the floor of the House, the Senate won't take it up. Well, we know they won't take it up if we don't pass it off the floor of the House. There is concern about the Supreme Court. Of course there is. We have to challenge the Court. We are going to live with the 1 million abortions a year in this country until we are willing to challenge the Court and do so successfully. I believe, Mr. Speaker, that we are going to see one or two more appointments to this Court in the next 2 or 3 or more years, and we need to get the bill off the floor, onto the desk of Leader McConnell so that it has a chance then to go to the President's desk, where I am very confident that President Trump will sign the bill. And then it has a chance to go--I am happy with it not being litigated, but we expect it will be litigated like every other effective piece of pro-life legislation. I appreciate the attention tonight, Mr. Speaker, and the speakers who have come to the floor to weigh in for innocent, unborn human life and to lay out the path for the future that we have to follow here if we are to answer to God and country for that gift from God, which is life, in the first priority, then liberty, then the pursuit of happiness. Mr. Speaker, 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 so much thank the gentleman from Texas for that, indeed, heartfelt description of what it was like, that miracle little child who also is intelligent and beautiful as well as a world-class artist. Mr. Speaker, I stand here, and I don't understand National Right to Life either. This is exactly what they are formed for. The Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, is an exact fit, as near as I can determine, into their very mission statement. I made it a point to look up that mission statement, and I happen to have it here. The National Right to Life mission statement, Mr. Speaker, goes this way: ``The mission of the National Right to Life is to protect and defend the most fundamental right of humankind, the right to life of every innocent human being from the beginning of life until natural death.'' Now, if that is the National Right to Life's position and mission, ``from the beginning of life until natural death,'' I certainly support that. I don't think we disagree on when life begins. But one might read that statement literally to say ``from the beginning of life until natural death'' may be National Right to Life's position is something other than the moment of fertilization or the moment of conception on when life begins because the mission statement doesn't say ``from the fertilization until natural death'' or ``conception until natural death.'' It says, ``from the beginning of life until natural death.'' But I dig a little deeper. On their website, they have a statement that starts with a question: When does life begin? It answers its question this way: The life of a baby begins long before he or she is born. A new individual human being begins at fertilization when the sperm and ovum meet to form a single cell. Perfect. I agree with that answer. So the mission is to protect and defend the most fundamental right of humankind, the right to life of every innocent human being, from the beginning of life to natural death, the National Right to Life's mission statement, and they define the beginning of life as when, at fertilization, the sperm and ovum meet to form a single cell. There should be no argument any longer on where National Right to Life stands. They should be standing for protecting all innocent life, from fertilization to natural death. It is a fine, honorable position, and the history of National Right to Life has actually spoken to the heartbeat issue in the Heartbeat bill. For example, there was a Heartbeat bill that passed out of the North Dakota State Legislature back in 2009. It went to a Federal circuit court. It was not upheld by that Federal circuit court. Just as I described a little earlier, the lower courts will not overturn a decision made by the Supreme Court. It has to be appealed to the Supreme Court level. This was not. But they were supporting the Heartbeat bill then. So they are on record supporting the Heartbeat bill, and here are a number of other times on their positions on heartbeat. Heartbeat has been showing up pretty often in the information that has come out of the National Right to Life. I would point out again their lead, Carol Tobias or David O'Steen. This is February, 5, 2013, Right to Life's tweet that went out. It is @NRLC, if you want to send them a message. It says: An unborn child's heartbeat is ``the most beautiful music,'' says Beyonce. I looked that up because I wondered what that was. Beyonce was pregnant. She actually had a miscarriage and lost that child. She loved that child before that child was born. I don't have any doubts that her heart was broken. But she said: An unborn child's heartbeat is ``the most beautiful music.'' That is posted on National Right to Life's Twitter page. That is February 2013. Here is a July 2013 Tweet from them: Unborn babies can feel pain, they can dream, they have a heartbeat, they respond to their mother's voice. Abortion ends their life. It looks like National Right to Life understands the importance of a heartbeat. I think they know something that I think I also know: that beating heart is in our ears now. Many of us have heard that beating heart on ultrasound. When we hear that on ultrasound, we know that that is life. We also know that if that heartbeat can be detected and the baby is protected, that baby has at least a 95 percent chance of a successful birth. So that is how viable that baby is at 6 weeks with a heartbeat. Here is another Tweet, September 24, 2014, from Right to Life's Twitter account: Listen to an unborn baby's heartbeat at just 6 weeks. Just the amount of time I gave it. Another heartbeat message, going on down the line, this is 2014, also, a Right to Life tweet: Did you know, babies by 20 weeks can feel pain? They already have a heartbeat and detectable brainwaves by then. That is the Pain-Capable bill that just failed in the Senate. Heartbeat about 6 weeks. So they are telling us this heartbeat matters. A heartbeat is a sure sign of life. If there is a heart beating there, there is a live baby there--a baby with a 95 percent chance, or better, of a successful birth. Moving on in 2014, also. Here is Carol Tobias, the lead in the National Right to Life. She tweets out on this day, 24 March 2014: New smartphone appcessory allows moms to hear unborn child's heartbeat. I am glad that we noticed this. It is important that we know that. That is the place where these heartbeat sounds have been texted to me from young mothers who are at 6, 7, or 8 weeks along. They will send me the sound of that heartbeat. It comes on my phone, and I can open that up and I can hear that heartbeat surging at, say, 158 beats per minute. That is one of the most precious things that came to me about 2\1/2\ weeks ago; 158 beats per minute. Here is the next tweet, February 2015. This is an abortionist. The National Right to Life's tweet is quoting an abortionist who said: ``I know that the fetus is alive during the process''--meaning the process of abortion--``. . . I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.'' I can see the heartbeat on the ultrasound. That abortionist stops that beating heart that ends the life of that baby. But this is why Right to Life put this up. They know that heartbeat beats also in our conscience. It beats in theirs. They want to stop abortions. That is their mission statement. They are the oldest organization in the country, the largest organization in the country. The Heartbeat bill couldn't more perfectly fit their mission statement, their cause for being, or the messages that come out here time after time in what one would presume would be laying down the predicate for the Heartbeat bill itself. Here is another one from Right to Life. Their tweet says: I have a heartbeat. It is a baby. It continues: I have detectable brainwaves. I can feel pain. Don't I deserve human rights? Yes, as soon as we can possibly provide them and stop this carnage of abortion. Don't I deserve the human right to life, is what this quote is, the National Right to Life. Going on to another tweet, this one is in November of 2017. There is a continuum here that brings this through to 2017. The National Right to Life's tweet says: Did you know an unborn child's heartbeat starts around 20 days into a pregnancy? Most mothers don't even know they are pregnant by that time. It is not easily detectable. It is not detectable by the technology we call for in the Heartbeat bill, but that is how early that is. The Knights of Columbus has put up billboards that say: My heart began beating at 18 days. We all start small. Abortion stops a beating heart. Heart, heart, heart. It rings in our conscience. It should ring in the conscience of National Right to Life. Here is National Right to Life in their tweets: Heartbeat; heartbeat; heartbeat; heartbeat; heartbeat. Why not support the Heartbeat bill? You are actually doing so verbally here, but you go back to this canard: the National Right to Life does not want to--they want to say oppose; but, instead, I say it is more appropriate to say do not support the Heartbeat bill. Why? It is beyond my comprehension how an organization that has these kind of convictions cannot be supporting the Heartbeat bill. We have polling that tells us where this stands. It is a majority opinion all the way across the board. In a Barna poll taken in 2017, 69 percent of adults support the Heartbeat bill. Actually, it has slightly more polling support than the Pain-Capable bill that has already passed the House and just failed in the Senate, but with a majority vote. Sixty-nine percent of adults support the Heartbeat bill, 86 percent of Republicans, and 55 percent of Democrats. Even pro-choice/pro- abortion Democrats, the people who vote for them, support them, also support the Heartbeat bill with what we call a landslide level, if it were an election, and 61 percent of Independents. Eighty-six percent of Republicans support Heartbeat, 55 percent of Democrats, and 61 percent of Independents support the Heartbeat bill. We are getting down to the place here where it is making even less and less sense that National Right to Life would not support the Heartbeat bill. There is another big set of reasons here. Mr. Speaker, this isn't the whole set of reasons. This is maybe half, maybe not quite half the set of reasons. Not only 170 Members of Congress have signed onto this bill, and a good number of them that will vote for it on the whip card on top of that, but 130 pro-life organizations and leaders support the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490. You can't read this from very far away because we tried to jam as many names on there as we could. There is another sheet and probably at least another one behind that. It is 130 pro-life organizations. We look down through that, and who are we missing? I couldn't come up with anybody that we were missing, as far as supporting this, other than the National Right to Life. I am looking on top here. Here is Susan B. Anthony List at the top of the list. Here is Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council. These are the top three organizations right here that some have referred to as the Holy Trinity that control pro-life legislation and whether it comes to the United States Congress or not, whether the will of the people can be realized as being stuck right here in red. So we put this in red. I held this back and reserved this spot on the sheet for Carol Tobias of the National Right to Life. Just pick up the phone and call the Speaker is all, Mr. Speaker, that Carol Tobias needs to do and the Heartbeat bill comes to the floor of the House and the will of the people can be reflected. It can go over to the Senate, it can sit on Mitch McConnell's desk, and they can have a vote over there and we will find out where those Senators all are. If it doesn't pass on the floor of the Senate, there might just be some new Senators sent in who will protect innocent, unborn human life. So I can go down the list. Lila Rose, the president of Life Action, a strong supporter, enthusiastic supporter of the Heartbeat bill. Tom McCluskey, March for Life. We have sat down and had a conversation. He is supporting of this. Then we have got Kristan Hawkins, the president of Student for Life. On down the line. Anita Staver, president of the Liberty Council; Ed Martin, president of the Phyllis Schlafly's organization, Eagle Forum. He is the Eagle's president. He solidly supports the Heartbeat Bill. In fact, he was there in that church that day that we put that plan together and has been a driving force. But the real, strongest driving force of all is Janet Porter, the president of Faith2Action. Janet Porter really carried this in the State of Ohio. I went to Ohio to help conclude that. What we found out in the State of Ohio is that not only did the Heartbeat bill pass in Ohio, Mr. Speaker, but it passed over the resistance of the local affiliate of National Right to Life. They will tell me, and David O'Steen told me, they are not in control of their State organizations. You heard Congressman Gohmert address that, also. The State organizations kind of run their own show. But when it was resisted in Ohio, it made no sense. They lobbied John Kasich to veto the bill. Why? Under the grounds that it would be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Ohio. Seriously? Do we go through all that work and then just decide we are going to preempt the court decision, pass a law, sign it into law, and save the babies' lives? Every step we take along the way saves lives. Keith Rothfus made an argument that I want to give him credit for. He said that even just debating the Heartbeat bill saves lives, because the debate causes people to talk about it, to think about it differently, and to make different decisions about the lives that they are in charge of protecting, and that is the innocent unborn lives. So here we are with 130 pro-life organizations and leaders supporting the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490. We look down through this list--and I will put it all public, if it needs be, Mr. Speaker--but I saved a spot up here in red for Carol Tobias and David O'Steen and the National Right to Life. Just give us a call. Send me an email, a text. Pick up the phone. Call the Speaker. We will move this bill, and we will save lives together. Meanwhile, if that doesn't happen, I am going to continue to ask the question: How in the world can you not support this bill? How in the world can the Nation's preeminent pro-life organization, the National Right to Life, who says they do not oppose the Heartbeat bill, and I say they do not support the Heartbeat bill, how can that be? How can you form 50 people on a board of directors, all of them pledged and dedicated to your mission statement to protect life from the beginning of life to natural death, and not find one among those 50 who support the Heartbeat bill, when 170 cosponsors are already on it here in the House of Representatives and multiple others are standing up ready to vote for the bill, and not one among your board supports the Heartbeat bill? There is something wrong. There is something wrong inside an organization. Those statements came both from Carol Tobias and David O'Steen. Maybe there were a couple along the way, there is a little clause in there, but generally this: Who on your board supports the bill? You can't name any. That is essentially it. If that is the case, Mr. Speaker, then there is something seriously wrong in the National Right to Life and something that seriously needs to be corrected because there are babies who must be protected. If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected, and we need the support of the entire pro-life community in order to get this legislation moved out of the House and over to the Senate, to the President's desk. It will eventually get before a Supreme Court. We will eventually have one or two more appointments to that Supreme Court. It has got a shot today. It is clearly more constitutional than the pain-capable legislation because it is precisely drafted with these things all in mind. It is a solid case to go before the Supreme Court. I would say, instead, there is no reason to litigate it, but I kind of think it will be because the enemies to life litigate everything that saves and protects lives. But these little babies are too precious, they are too unique, they are too miraculous for us to waste a minute in protecting their lives. I want every little baby that has got a heartbeat, have every little baby have that chance to be born, that chance to live, to love, to laugh, to learn, to worship, to be a parent of its own, and to be a gift from God to this country, to this planet, and to posterity. That is the miracle of every little child. When Congressman Gohmert spoke of being able to hold his little daughter in one hand, that sacred, protected little girl now has grown into a glorious and beautiful and intelligent woman who is contributing to this society and to this world, and that is true for everyone where all give glory to God. But 60 million babies--60 million babies--cannot continue. We have to put an end to this atrocity of abortion. The Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, does that, and there is only one entity standing in the way, and that is National Right to Life. And I plead with you, and I pray that you will come around to support. Your history says that is who you are and what you do, and it is time, now, to get on the bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, and I appreciate the honor and the privilege to do that. Mr. Speaker, I came to the floor here tonight to talk to you and address the body about the issue that is so important to so many millions of Americans, and that is the issue of life, the issue of protecting innocent, unborn human life that doesn't have the ability to speak out for itself, doesn't have the ability to scream for its own mercy, but it does have the ability to squirm and move and belch and do all the things that we do outside the womb and can feel pain, a beating heart, and a throbbing heart of a heartbeat. I mentioned this on the floor here a couple weeks ago of an ultrasound that was sent to me with a little baby with 158 beats per minute. I would take people through some of the pro-life legislation that has been moved or attempted to be moved here in the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker. I would take you back to 1973 and Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Those two Supreme Court cases, working in conjunction with each other, essentially translated into abortion on demand. We saw abortions go from about 35,000 abortions a year in America, a number that I would say I thought was horrible then, to something like 1.6 million abortions in America, now ratcheted down with the weight of the conscience of our society to some number about 1 million or maybe a little bit less than 1 million. Mr. Speaker, we don't get to count that difference between 1.6 million, roughly the peak, and a little under 1 million as 600,000 babies saved every year. Instead, it goes on our conscience the other way. That is a cumulative total of 60 million babies who have been sacrificed at the alter of this subject called pro-choice, judicial activism. I remind you, Mr. Speaker, that human life is protected in our United States Constitution. It is protected under the 14th Amendment, and we have a constitutional right here in Congress to protect and defend life. In fact, I believe we have a duty to protect and defend life. So I would first take us to that case of Roe v. Wade, and Doe v. Bolton, and the two cases taken together, January 22, 1973, and we have marched every year since then, including just last month on January 19. But essentially this: Roe v. Wade was a case that was built on several Supreme Court precedents, but the one that strikes me the most is the Griswold v. Connecticut case. That was back in the mid 1960s sometime, maybe 1964, where Connecticut had outlawed contraceptives. They were a strong Catholic State at the time, and so they outlawed contraceptives. Griswold went to court and said: No. We are married. We should be able to buy contraceptives, and the State of Connecticut shouldn't interfere in that. So the Supreme Court manufactured this thing called a right to privacy, which was the privacy was protected by contraceptive activities within the marriage. So that case went in as a precedent case that established the right to privacy. And then there was a follow-up case, and that would be the Eisenstadt case, that said: Well, it doesn't matter whether you are married, you have got a right to privacy whether you are married or not, so you should be able to buy contraceptives if you are cohabiting rather than being joined together in holy matrimony. The Supreme Court found in their favor in that case. And then, not that long later, 1973, here comes Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Roe v. Wade says: Well, there is a right to privacy, so I guess if we are not going to interfere with reproductive choices of married couples or nonmarried couples, then we are not going to interfere with whether they want to terminate the life of that innocent, beautiful, miraculous little baby. So they came down with the decision that a right to privacy was more important than the right to life. And on this floor, Mr. Speaker, I brought this issue up numerous times to remind the body that our Declaration of Independence articulated this very clearly. It laid out the parameters for our Constitution. Our Constitution reflects those parameters in the Declaration. So there is a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And those are prioritized rights. The priority is this: life is paramount. It can't be subordinate to anybody's liberty, and somebody's pursuit of happiness can't trample on anyone's liberty or their life. Yet the Court decided this right to privacy, this liberty, this right to privacy that was manufactured in Griswold v. Connecticut in roughly a decade or less earlier, was more important than the right of the life of the innocent unborn. And then they got into the concept of viability. But Doe v. Bolton is the one that gave essentially the broad license. The viability piece says: Well, can a baby survive at the end of the first trimester? No. The end of the second trimester? Probably not. But into the third trimester? That became more likely. Yet even that didn't protect that innocent, unborn baby because Doe v. Bolton put these exceptions in here for the health of the mother, and that was defined and included the physical health, the emotional health, the psychological health, the familial health, and age-related factors. So if you get into the emotional health, that is impacted by mental stability. It is impacted by cash flow. It is impacted by anything. What it amounts to is that this long list carried within it someplace there that anybody could look at it and say: Well, that's a license to abort a baby under any circumstance anytime, provided that the mother just simply wants the abortion. And we, just a little over a year ago, saw a President leave office who stood on the floor of the Illinois State Senate and, multiple times, took the position that if a woman goes to an abortionist and wants an abortion, if the baby survives the abortion, she still has a right to a dead baby. And by the way, all the people speaking over here a little bit ago all voted against the bill that protected a baby who was born alive and survives an abortion. And it is abhorrent to me to think that you would abort a baby. But the second thing is that if that baby survives the abortion, to go forward and kill that baby anyway or put that baby off in a cold room until that baby freezes to death, close the door, shut off the sound, plug your ears, and come back and check in an hour or two or five and see if it is done. It is an appalling place that this country has gone. Sixty million babies. And I have supported every piece of pro-life legislation that has come before this Congress, including the Born-Alive bill. I support the ban on abortions for sex selection. I support the Pain-Capable bill, which passed the House here last October and went over to the Senate where, thankfully, the Senate had a vote on the Pain-Capable bill, and it failed, and we knew it would fail. But it did establish that there is a pro-life majority, at least under those parameters, in the United States Senate. And I believe there will be some Senators who are held accountable for that vote. Mr. Speaker, I want to make it clear that I believe this: I believe that life begins at the moment of conception, begins at fertilization. From that point forward, it is a unique being that is growing and multiplying and shaping; and within about 18 days, we have scientific evidence that the heart starts to beat. We know that there is nerve activity. We know that that baby--by about 20 weeks, it is clear, and I say it is actually irrefutable, that the baby feels pain. We have watched them in ultrasound move around in the womb and squirm. We held a hearing last November 1 where we watched probably the youngest witness to ever testify before the United States Congress, and his name is Lincoln Glen Miller. This little boy was 18 weeks into development, and we watched him on ultrasound as he jerked his arm towards his face, sucked his thumb, moved his lips like he was trying to talk to us, squirmed around. This little guy, Lincoln Glen Miller, showed us the humanity inside the womb here in this United States Congress for the first time. So at the funeral of Phyllis Schlafly, who, prior to her death, was a living, breathing icon, a very principled individual, someone who was the clearest thinker of our time, I read most all of Phyllis' writings and followed her closely and counted her as a friend, and she has had a powerful impact upon this country, but at her funeral, Janet Porter of Faith2Action and I sat down and talked about something that Phyllis had asked: Would I bring a Heartbeat bill to the floor of the House of Representatives and push it through for a vote here on the floor successfully? Phyllis never wanted to do anything unsuccessfully, and I don't either, Mr. Speaker--and send it over to the Senate and work to nurture it over there so it can get to the President's desk for a signature, because we have gone through 45 years of incrementalism. Forty-five years of a little bill here, a little bill there, that saved a few lives here and a few lives there. Henry Hyde, the leader in the pro-life movement, and he was a glorious man who I had the privilege to serve with here in this Congress, and I enjoyed that time with him, Henry Hyde brought the Hyde amendment, and that extrapolated into the Mexico City policy. The Hyde amendment, coupled with the Mexico City policy, has saved 1 million lives, perhaps as many as 2 million lives, during that period of time. I was involved in the ban on partial-birth abortion, and there we first saw the Supreme Court overturn our ban on partial-birth abortion, that ghastly tactic of turning a baby around in the womb and delivering the baby breech, feet first, until that baby's head and face are still inside the mother, and then poking a pair of scissors or a scalpel into the back of that baby's head and sticking a suction in and sucking the brains out to collapse the skull and removing the balance of that baby as that baby squirmed for mercy until the brain tissue was emptied from his skull. Mr. Speaker, that sickening and ghastly and ghoulish tactic was outlawed by this Congress, and it went to circuit courts around the country. And those circuit courts found it unconstitutional because they couldn't overturn Roe v. Wade or Doe v. Bolton, so it came to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in the first round of the ban on partial-birth abortion, found that killing a baby in that ghastly fashion was entirely constitutional because Congress had failed to precisely define to the satisfaction of the Supreme Court the act of partial-birth abortion, and had failed to demonstrate by congressional findings that a partial-birth abortion was never necessary to save the life of the mother. Mr. Speaker, we went back to work. We went back to the Judiciary Committee and we held hearings before the Judiciary Committee, hearing after hearing after hearing. We got out the word processor again--it was a word processor in those days--and we precisely defined the act of partial-birth abortion. When I describe it here, it is more ghastly than I have ever spoken publicly, and I regret the damage that it does to the ears and the psyche of the people who are listening tonight, Mr. Speaker, but it needs to be said. We defined that act absolutely, precisely, from a medical perspective, and we had a lot of sets of eyes and ears on it to weigh in on all approaches that we could do. And with those hearings, medical doctor after medical doctor came through and testified. In the end, we had congressional findings that concluded definitively that a partial-birth abortion was never medically necessary to save the life of the mother. So we defined the act. We proved it was never necessary to save the life of the mother. We passed the legislation, House and Senate, and it went off to be litigated again to three separate Federal circuits, one of them in Lincoln, Nebraska, which I attended in front of Judge Kopf. I will not forget that. But each of those circuits all found that our bill was unconstitutional in partial-birth abortion, not because we didn't define the act precisely enough, and not because our congressional findings weren't that, but because they did prove that it was never necessary for a partial-birth abortion to save the life of the mother. They found our second bill unconstitutional because of the precedent called stare decisis. Stare decisis is the precedent that the court respects a previous decision. So anybody who thinks that there is a piece of pro-life legislation that will save any lives, that is going to be upheld at the lower court level, is, I think, barking up the wrong tree. It is not going to happen that any lower court and lower Federal court in the United States is going to overturn a Supreme Court decision, because they will respect stare decisis, the decision of the Supreme Court. And there are too many Justices who have served in the past on the Supreme Court who would also honor that stare decisis decision. If a similar case comes before them, they would look at the decisions that were made before and say: Well, I guess the court has already resolved this. There is no reason for us to relook at this. There is going to be no de novo review. It is simply going to be whatever the court has decided in the past. We are not going to challenge that going forward. We will build all case law on the case law that is behind us as we go forward. That is an adherence to stare decisis and that is what we must overturn if we are ever to put an end to abortion in this country. That is why we have written legislation in the Heartbeat bill that is designed to challenge Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton and ask a new Supreme Court, after we pass the Heartbeat legislation, H.R. 490, and bring it to this floor, get this vote, and pass it over to the Senate. When the day comes that we have got the votes in the House and Senate and we have a President that will sign the legislation--today, if we could get there--and a Vice President that seems to be enthusiastic about this--and I notice that the political adviser for the President, Kellyanne Conway, had a heartbeat pin on her dress as she spoke just a week or so ago. I appreciate that support that is there. But with the votes that are here now in this House, and the votes that need to be compiled in the Senate, and a Presidential signature, we can ban abortion. If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby shall be protected. That is the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490. But when it is passed--I pray to God it is and soon--it will go to the lower courts because the pro- abortion lobby will litigate everything. Nothing seems to get to their conscience. They will litigate it. And we don't expect to win at the lower court level. It all has to go to the Supreme Court. When we designed this path for this legislation, it was designed for a pro-life majority in the House, which we have; a pro-life majority in the Senate, which was proven just a week ago we have; and a President that will sign that legislation, a pro-life President who said just a few days ago that he is a pro-life President again. I appreciate that reinforcement. We designed it for all of that with the expectations it would go before not the court at the time we wrote the bill and not the court now--perhaps the court now, but more likely a court that would be formed by a subsequent appointment or two made by this President, Donald Trump. All of that needs to be lined up for the Heartbeat bill to have success. And we should remember that. This isn't a function of waiting for the Supreme Court to be where we think it is favorable alone. It is, instead, a function that there has to be four windows that are opened in the right sequence and we have to fly through those windows. So the first window is open right now: the House of Representatives. We just need a Speaker and a majority leader that will schedule the vote here on the floor, with 170 cosponsors on this legislation, and a good long list of folks who want to vote for the bill that just weren't ready to sign on yet. We will get there, Mr. Speaker. That is window number one. We have got to fly the Heartbeat bill through window number one, and then send it over to the Senate. And we have got to fly the Heartbeat bill through window number two. That is harder. It is harder with the filibuster rule, a 60-vote majority. But with 60 million lives at stake, maybe the 60-vote majority is not such a requirement. Perhaps they would be willing to waive that long tradition for the purpose of saving lives. That will be my argument. We have got 60 million lives we have lost in this country and you are requiring 60 votes in the Senate, and that sets the stage for another 60 million lives to be aborted if you can't get rid of that filibuster rule and let a simple majority pass something through the Senate. The window in the House is open now. The window in the Senate can be opened if the Heartbeat bill goes over there. The window at the White House is open right now. And the court is going to take a little time. But if we sit back and we decide we don't want to send something out this window of the House because we don't think that the Senate is ready--the President is ready, by the way--or if we don't think the court is ready, then there will be a window closed and it will be too late. We have got to move this legislation through. It is H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill that says this: that before an abortionist can ply his trade, he must first check for a heartbeat. And if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. It is that simple, that clear. And we have the technology now that shows that definitive heartbeat on ultrasound, where you can watch the baby move and squirm and gurgle and suck its thumb and try to talk, and do all of those loveable things. We have the technology that shows that in ultrasound. We have a take- home kit where you can listen to the heartbeat of your baby. I get them texted to me from young ladies who are moms already and they are already bonding with this unborn baby. That technology says that, at about 6 weeks, we can determine the definitive nature of that heartbeat. And if that heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. Mr. Speaker, here is the problem that we have: 170 Members signed onto this bill and another good bunch of them want this bill to come to the floor and they want to vote on it. The will of the people is reflected through the United States Congress, especially the House of Representatives. Unelected people on the outside of this Congress are the ones who are holding this bill back. When I talk to the leadership up the line and I say, ``I want to vote on the Heartbeat bill and so do 170 Members who signed on and multiple others who want to vote for it,'' the will of this Congress is clear, but the leadership says, ``We don't want to divide the pro-life community. We want to make sure that the pro-life community is unanimous in this before we move legislation.'' I think that is an old rule that was put in place. It wouldn't be my rule. So the top organizations along the way would be National Right to Life, the oldest and largest pro-life organization in the country. Now, I have named them. I can name every other organization from Family Research Council to Susan B. Anthony List, to Faith to Action, on down the line. And I will name a bunch of them a little later this evening, Mr. Speaker. Every other organization that I name supports this bill. The only organization that doesn't support it is National Right to Life. National Right to Life, protecting Americans since 1968. The oldest pro-life organization, the largest pro-life organization. I say: We need you on this bill because it is not going to move until you say you support it or the rest of Congress rises up in a very strong way. So here is their answer. They tweeted this out here a little while back: ``National Right to Life does not oppose the Heartbeat bill.'' That was their message: ``. . . does not oppose. . . .'' But in order for a piece of pro-life legislation to move--according to what I think is an archaic rule--it has to be unanimous. So that means Family Research Council, Susan B. Anthony List, and National Right to Life, if they all say, ``We like this bill; we want to move it,'' then H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill, moves. If they don't say they like the bill, it is a de facto veto that blocks the bill. So the will of 170 Members who signed on, and a good number of folks who are willing to vote for the bill who didn't sign on, the will of the American people reflected in this constitutional Republic that we are, is all being stifled and frustrated by one organization. It happens to be the oldest and the largest pro-life organization in the United States of America: the National Right to Life. Since 1968, they say: ``National Right to Life does not oppose the Heartbeat bill.'' That is H.R. 490. There is no doubt about that. I have had my conversations with Carol Tobias, and I have had my conversations with David O'Steen. By the way, not in person, only by phone. We couldn't get an in-person meeting. But a couple of their lawyers came in and we had that conversation, too. They all say the same thing. They all say: Well, our board doesn't like the Heartbeat bill and doesn't support the Heartbeat bill, so we can't act unless our board tells us to act. I asked: So when was your last board meeting? They said: Oh, several months ago. And there won't be another one until after the March for Life. This conversation took place the first week in December. So call a special board meeting because this is important. The Heartbeat bill grew a lot more momentum than you ever thought it was going to. It wasn't your idea, I know. I will give it to you as an idea if that is what National Right to Life wants. They can't meet with their board. They can't call a board meeting. They can't poll their board. They have to wait until the next scheduled board meeting. Who are these board members? I don't know. Fifty of them. Mr. Speaker, can you imagine 50 dedicated pro-life people in America who are on the board of National Right to Life and all of them sitting there intransigently saying, ``Nope, I don't want to see the Heartbeat bill move. It is not something I want to do. I don't support protecting babies from the moment that a heartbeat can be detected''? How in the world is it that you are the preeminent right to life organization in the country and the best you can say is you do not oppose the Heartbeat bill? The real truth is, if you don't oppose it, neither do you support it. What it really means is the National Right to Life does not support the Heartbeat bill for whatever those reasons are, Mr. Speaker. And I would sure like to know. Because I think if you truly are pro- life, then there wouldn't be a way you could sit there and say: I don't want to protect the babies that have a heartbeat. In fact, if I look through their tweets and their literature, and they are full of references to heartbeat. And I will get to that in a little bit, Mr. Speaker. But I wanted to hear from the gentleman from Texas and set the stage a little bit here. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I would like to address two issues that are of great concern to the security and status of Taiwan, a long- time great friend and ally of the United States. First, I am deeply concerned about reports that Beijing has modified the use of civil aviation flight routes in the Taiwan Strait without consultation with Taiwan authorities. Such unilateral actions are unacceptable to all that desire stability and peace in the region. Issues related to civil aviation and safety in the Taiwan Strait should be decided through dialogue between both sides. I encourage authorities in Beijing to engage those in Taipei in constructive dialogue, on the basis of dignity and respect. Second, I reiterate my support for Taiwan to regain its observer status in the World Health Organization (WHO). As you know, statehood is not a requirement for attendance at the World Health Assembly (WHA)--the decision-making body of the WHO--and so there is no legitimate reason to exclude Taiwan. The People's Republic of China (PRC) is but one nation in the community of many belonging to the WHO and WHA, and should not get to dictate participation to the rest of the body. It is simply not right to treat Taiwan in this way when they contribute so generously to the world, through its role in sectors such as healthcare and international humanitarian aid. Just this month, this House passed H.R. 3320, in support of Taiwan's observer status in the WHO, on suspension by voice vote. This vote is evidence of this body's strong support for Taiwan, which I share and endorse wholeheartedly. Mr. Speaker, I look forward to registering more votes to support and bolster Taiwan's security and status in the world. I am also confident that if we continue to enhance our bilateral relationship, this dynamic partnership that we've built together will continue to thrive in the future, and liberty will increase worldwide.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Gaetz) for yielding to me. I appreciate the gentleman for taking the lead on this issue back some weeks or months ago to bring a resolution to the House Judiciary Committee to call for special counsel to more broadly investigate all of the defugalties that have been taking place in this country, driven by political partisanship on the other side of the aisle. Mr. Speaker, I look back and I think about what the attitude was of President Trump--actually, even before the election and shortly after-- when I listened to him, and he more or less expressed this sentiment, which was that, with Hillary Clinton and her transgressions and the way she had handled the classified material and up to the secret server next to the bathroom up in New York in her place, essentially, the President's position was that we need to move America forward. We should not be dug deeply into going backwards on this or looking back over our shoulder. Let's move forward. The public has litigated this in the election. Now, I think that is where President Trump wanted it to be, but it wasn't to be because the left could not accept the idea that the American people had spoken. They began to manufacture and continue the manufacture this Russian investigation, these allegations that were collusion allegations with the Russians to try to manipulate an American election. I don't think anybody doubts that the Russians made some effort at that, but all of us doubt that they had any impact whatsoever on our election. Those of us, at least on this side of the aisle, have seen zero information and zero evidence that the campaign of President Trump had any kind of relationship that went on with the Russians, that promoted it or colluded in any way. But because there needed to be some explanation for this phenomenal Presidential election of Donald Trump, we had to be drug back into this Russian investigation over and over again. Now, this began within 2 weeks of the President's election, after about November 8 or so. Then as that unfolded, Mr. Speaker, then we saw what was really going on here. We got into about February or March of last year. At that point, I said: They are not going to relent on this Russian investigation business. They are going to continue to belabor this point. The election has already been settled and it is not in question, as far as the results of the polls are concerned. We have a President. Let's honor the President. Let's honor the will of the American people. Let's respect the decision made at the polls. But, instead, the pressure continued on and on, allegations complicit with the mainstream media, the fake news, as we have now finally come to know them, I think, by habit and fact. At that point, I said: If they will not let up, then it is going to be an obligation to dig and drill deeply into all of the things that bring us together, from Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner all the way across the board, from Hillary and the sham investigation, the questioning of her on July 2, 2016, on and on throughout the whole spectrum of things. It became an obligation to drill to the complete bottom of all of the allegations that had been made from the investigation that surely didn't look legitimate to us, as Mr. Gaetz and I and others on the Judiciary Committee began to question people from the FBI and the people from the Justice Department and, at that time, James Comey, the Director of the FBI. We put those pieces together. Each one of those little incidents that were testified to kind of stood up okay on their own, but when you put them together in the string of it had to be an unbelievable string of coincidences that were presented before the Judiciary Committee and the other committees here on the Hill, it became clear to us, initiated by Mr. Gaetz, that we need to go much more deeply into this and much more quickly. A good number of us supported a resolution to call for special counsel. Now, I support the idea of an additional special counsel to broaden this. I would write the language even more broadly than the original resolution. But we should keep in mind what is going on on this Hill today, that is, that there are, by my count, at least, seven different congressional committees that are investigating this broad picture of the subject matter that we are discussing here today. On top of that, we have Robert Mueller's investigation as a special counsel. Additionally, we have an IG investigation going on in the Justice Department under Michael Horowitz. Michael Horowitz has a good reputation. He has about 450 investigators all together, all of whom are probably not working on this. I would be surprised if they were. So there are seven reports from committees that will eventually come out, Mr. Speaker, and one from Robert Mueller that is going to come out and one from the IG that is going to come out. This is pretty confusing to try to understand the subject matter that they are addressing. It is defined a little bit differently from committee to committee and from the assigned investigation groups, but I will envision this: Our Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, sits there in the Justice Department having, in an honorable way, recused himself from the Russian investigation, which keeps his hands off of that. The recommendation, as I understand that, came from Rod Rosenstein, the acting U.S. Attorney General in the event that Jeff Sessions isn't there to be the Attorney General. That was in the recommendation, by the testimony that I believe I remember, that Jeff Sessions should recuse himself from the Russian investigation, and that is the man who made the appointment of Robert Mueller. So when I look at this whole picture, our Attorney General's job is a tough one, but it is one I think he can do better than anyone else in this country or on this planet, and that is make sense of all of these investigations, seven congressional investigations, an IG investigation, and a special counsel's investigation. That adds up to nine, by my estimation. Now, people are human. So that says to me that these assignments of these investigations are either going to overlap or there are going to be gaps. When you have nine of them all together, there will be overlapping and there will be gaps. Where there are overlaps, there is likely to be some contradiction. So the job of the Attorney General is to look at this whole picture and put this back together in a way that you can figure out what the contradictions are, fill in the gaps, investigate the places that haven't been investigated by the assignments of these various committees and the special counsel, and then deliver to the American people the right kind of view on the justice that needs to come. If there are indictments, to make that call for those indictments, clearly and unequivocally, based upon factual evidence. That is why I support this memo being released in the vote of the Select Committee on Intelligence today. It is essential that the American people get to the truth. They can't absorb this truth all in one day. It has to come out a piece at a time because we are human and they are human. So I encourage the Attorney General to keep his hand on this in the steady way that he has. I am very confident that the decisions made on the Select Committee on Intelligence are the correct ones, and I am very confident that the President will make a decision to release the memo so the American people can get at the truth. How far the truth takes us, history will write that book. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for putting this all together here this evening.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be here on the floor of the House of Representatives to carry on some of the discussion that is taking place around this city and around this country today on March for Life day. It would take you back 45 years ago to January 22, 1973, when the case of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton came before the United States Supreme Court. They manufactured a legal opinion out of the emanations and conundrums to quote the decision that resulted in abortion on demand in this country. Some say abortions soared up to as many as 6 million a year in some of those years in the 1970s. America wasn't ready for such a decision. We didn't understand, in 1973, the magnitude of the decision the Supreme Court had made. We knew that it was going to open up abortion. We suspected it would be abortion on demand. We did not expect that, 45 years later, we would be here in this city still marching, marching for life, marching to defend the lives of the innocent unborn, and praying in most, if not every single church in America, to defend innocent, unborn human life. Some of the questions that have come before us in that period of time as two generations of Americans have grown up with the guilt of abortion, with the shadow hanging over our heads, two generations of Americans have grown up having to answer this question: Is human life sacred? Is it the value, is it the measure that we put up when we evaluate all things we do? Our Founding Fathers understood that when they laid out the original founding document of the Declaration of Independence. They wrote that we have the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, it is no coincidence that life is first in that list, Mr. Speaker. Our Founding Fathers understood that they were prioritized rights, that the right to life is paramount and that the right to life is sacred, but that liberty comes from God. He confers his God-given liberty on us, and we have to handle it responsibly. And behind that came pursuit of happiness. Now I will take it from the bottom up, Mr. Speaker. Pursuit of happiness was understood differently by our Founders than I think we understand it today. It seems to me that, if you go into a high school classroom, those who have been studying our founding documents--our Declaration and our Constitution and the Federalist Papers--and ask them what does ``pursuit of happiness'' mean, they might say: ``Well, a good tailgate party,'' or ``a fun time with your friends,'' or any one of a number of other things that they do for recreation. But, truthfully, Mr. Speaker, that is not how our Founding Fathers looked at that pursuit of happiness. They don't even call it the rich things we draw from our families, exclusively. But they understood ``pursuit of happiness'' as the term is understood in Greek, which is the foundation for that term. It is the word ``eudaimonia,'' spelled E- U-D-A-I-M-O-N-I-A. Eudaimonia, the breadth of the pursuit of happiness, if described and understood properly, is this: It is becoming the whole human being, the whole person; developing yourself physically with the God-given bodies that we have with exercise and nutrition; developing our skill sets with the gifts that we have that are physical skills. And it includes, also, the intellectual component, where we develop our minds as far as we can, educate ourselves and fill that God-given brain up with all the information that is relevant and useful. That is the second component. The third component is spiritual. They expected and called upon this pursuit of happiness, this eudaimonia--the effort to become a complete human being, a complete human being spiritually, intellectually, and physically, that was the package of eudaimonia, the pursuit of happiness--but even that couldn't trump another individual's liberty, couldn't take aside the God-given liberty to live free and be free and have free movement and rights to property and a number of those components. So our effort to pursue happiness can't trample on someone else's God-given liberty. We understand that. You can't take away somebody's property because it makes you happy. It is a pretty simple equation. Neither, then, can a pursuit of liberty be allowed to justify the taking of a human life, because life is the highest priority. It is always prioritized, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness; or in Burke's language, life, liberty and property. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is always prioritized with life as the highest priority that stands above all else. I would remind you, Mr. Speaker, that when you want to know how we measure, the meter, invented by a Frenchman, is set to be that 39- point-something inches, and they have a platinum meter stick that is set up so that they could have a finite measure that they keep in a controlled atmosphere so it doesn't expand or contract, and it is the most precise measurement of a meter. That is the basis for distance measuring in the metric world, most of the rest of the world. That is the basis to distance measuring. That meter stick--that platinum meter stick is the measure itself that they measure everything else against in components of or multiples of that meter stick. Well, I would take you to the former Governor of Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, Sr., who has passed away and who was the father of Senator Bob Casey. He made this statement: Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed. Now, here is the comparison that I have drawn. The meter stick is the measure itself of distance, but human life is the measure of all of our values. Human life is sacred, it is finite, and the value of life from the moment of conception until natural death is the same. We don't punish people differently when they commit murder against someone who is 101 years old versus someone who is 1 year old. Somebody who has, perhaps, a century of life ahead of them, we don't say their life is worth more than someone who almost certainly doesn't have a decade of life ahead of them, because human life is sacred and it is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed. So once we understand that human life is sacred in all of its forms, there is only one other question to ask, and that is: At what moment does life begin? At what instant does life begin? We can look through this whole period of human development and we can make arguments about viability and trimesters and ability to breathe or live outside the womb. Those things are always vague, you can never nail that down to anything precise, because even the Pain-Capable legislation that we passed out of this House a couple of months ago that bans abortions after 20 weeks, we say that baby can feel pain at 20 weeks, so that is abhorrent to our conscience and we reject aborting a baby that can feel pain. We don't know whether they can feel pain prior to that or not, but that is not a precise moment. It is a relatively vague moment that is a consensus conclusion of OB/GYN doctors, perhaps, but life itself cannot be measured and neither can we take that life and say: Well, we might not have. I have often stood in a high school or even a middle school gymnasium and talked to the youth in there whose ears and minds are open, and I asked: If someone walked by the door of this gymnasium and looked away from you and poked a gun in the door and pulled the trigger, did he kill somebody? And they looked at each other and said: Well, we don't know. And I said: Neither does he. But if there is somebody laying there in the bleachers that is dead, then what happened? They said: Then we know he killed somebody. I said: Well, can you take a chance with that? Is he guilty of murder if he poked a gun in the door and the crowd was full and he pulled the trigger and somebody died? They said: Yes. Mr. Speaker, so neither can we take a chance with innocent unborn human life and say it really isn't a life prior to 20 weeks, or it really isn't a life prior to viability, or it really isn't a life until the third trimester. So what we have done in this Congress is we have brought in a number of pieces of legislation, incremental pieces of legislation to try to put an end to this killing, because the pro-life community knows and believes--all the pro-life community is convinced that life begins at that moment of conception, that instant of conception, and we have to protect that life from that moment. Anybody who has picked up a little baby, especially if it is your own, in awe at the miracle of this little child created in God's image from the DNA of mom and dad, to be nurtured and shaped, to live, to love, to learn, to laugh, to worship, to have children of his or her own, understands that miracle and how precious it is to us. There are at least 500,000 couples in America that are waiting to adopt because they want a baby to love so badly, yet we have watched as 60 million babies have been aborted since 1973, in the last 45 years; 60 million babies weighing on the conscience of America, a sin committed by the government of our country. There have been people complicit in this that have advocated for it. Just a little bit ago, we had the vote on the Born-Alive bill here on the floor that enhances the penalty. If an abortionist isn't successful on the first try, what they often do is put that baby in a cold room and close the door and let that baby die in that cold room. There are other more ghastly methods that get used as well. So we moved legislation here on the floor to statutorily protect that baby that survives the abortion. In essence, what it really says in the end is this: If you try to end the life of this baby through abortion and fail, we are going to punish you if you need a second try. Mr. Speaker, I don't think it is nearly enough. I think it is a start, but it is not nearly enough. Actually, we need to be accelerating our pace in incrementalism, not taking our foot off the throttle on the incremental approach to ending abortion. So in 45 years, 2 generations, 60 million babies. I am glad we have passed the legislation that protects a born-alive baby from being killed by the abortionist. I am glad we did that today, but we should not see it as a premier piece of legislation that is going to end even one abortion. Instead, it might end some of the killing post-abortion. So it says something about our defense of life, but it doesn't say nearly enough about our defense of life. Through the time that I have been here in this pro-life movement in Iowa and here in this Congress, 2 decades more altogether, I have gone from trying to get legislation passed that required that if a young mother was seeking an abortion--a minor mother was seeking an abortion--that she needed to have parental notification. That was about all we could get back when I started on this in 1996. Notify a parent, even then they defined the parent as, well, she can notify a mom or a dad, a stepmom or a stepdad, a grandmother or a grandfather, an aunt or an uncle, a brother or a sister in the whole or half blood. That is how Planned Parenthood lobbied to define this parent that would be notified that this child mother was going to get an abortion. There is still not parental consent in my State, but, instead, it is parental notification with this long list of what a parent is: a father, a mother, a guardian, a legal guardian--those are okay--then grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters in the whole or half blood. I said: You left out the neighbor, the family cat or the family dog. Couldn't you just name everything as a parent? Maybe you could seal an envelope up and put it in a safety deposit box, and they could open up the archives in 100 years, and that would be the notice, for all the impact they had. They did everything to restrict anything that might protect an innocent unborn baby. That is what it was like in 1996 for me in my State. So through that time, we have marched through this march of incrementalism. Prior to that--God bless Henry Hyde. From where I stand and from the floor of this House, time after time he stood up and he defended life. The Hyde amendment, along with the Mexico City policy, over the effect of these many years along the way, has cumulatively saved somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 million lives. Now, that sounds like a big number, 2 million lives, and it makes me feel good about Henry Hyde. I recall going to his funeral and saying good-bye to Henry. I know that if there is anybody who has stood here and talked at the podium who is in heaven, it is Henry Hyde. The number one pro-life activist, effective worker here as a former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he used the tools of his job and his character and his faith to save roughly 2 million lives. Then I try to figure out: How many others did we save with the incrementalism that we have? I was involved in the effort. I want to tip my hat to Steve Chabot, who was the chairman of the Constitution Committee at that time when I came to this Congress, and we had the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. That was passed out of this Congress and written into law, but they litigated that to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court came down and turned it down in a decision that said you can't ban partial-birth abortion because that procedure is written too vaguely within the law, so the physician--put that in quotes, the ``physician''--can't determine exactly what is lawful and what isn't. On top of that, we hadn't determined that a partial-birth abortion is never necessary to save the life of the mother. So we went back to work and we rewrote that legislation to conform with the Supreme Court's ``no'' decision. We precisely defined the ghastly act of partial-birth abortion in law. We held multiple hearings. Through the course of that, we established congressional findings that a partial-birth abortion was never medically necessary to save the life of the mother. So we answered both of the Supreme Court's objections, and that went back out again, where it was litigated through the three circuits that were converging before the Supreme Court. I was part of that, and I sat through one of those cases in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then came to hear the case here in the United States Supreme Court as well, and there we prevailed. Now, I don't know how many lives we have saved with the ban on partial-birth abortion. They will find another way to abort that baby, but at least we put another principle in place. We are still stuck at about 2 million babies saved over the course of 45 years. I look at some of the other legislation we passed out of the House but not the Senate. Senate Democrats are blocking piece after piece of legislation, but a couple of months ago we passed the legislation over to the Senate that, as we call it, Pain-Capable, or the 20-week abortion ban, and that legislation is the legislation I mentioned a few minutes ago. We have determined that a baby can feel pain. We have evidence of them squirming and struggling to get away from the surgeon's tools, and we have got the testimony of abortionists that tell us how a baby struggles and exhibits pain. Many of you, I believe, Mr. Speaker, have seen the surgery that was being conducted on about a 7-month gestational baby. The incision went into the womb, and that baby reached outside his mother's womb and held the finger of the surgeon. That picture will be in my mind forever. We can't think that a baby that can grasp the finger of a surgeon 2 months before he is born is not a human being and not a human life. Of course they are. So we in this House banned abortion after 20 weeks under the definition that they are capable of feeling pain. That is a step in the right direction and it is a pretty big chunk of incrementalism as well that goes further than maybe anything that has come off the floor of this House so far. We also have legislation waiting here that has pieces of incrementalism, but the Born-Alive legislation that passed this morning here is incrementalism, and it is a small incrementalism that actually doesn't stop a single abortion, but does put a statement down on the value of that baby. Then there is legislation here that prohibits sex-selected abortion, because we are seeing now with ultrasound that you can determine at an early stage whether it is a boy or whether it is a girl. We have people who say: Well, I think I will abort the girl because I want my first child to be a boy. I will take my chances the next time. How do you do that? How do you do that? If you believe that human life is sacred in all of its forms, how can you take the life of a little baby and say, ``I don't want this child to be the sibling to my next child because it is a girl instead of a boy,'' or, and less often, ``a boy instead of a girl''? We know what that has done statistically in China with the one-child policy in China, which they have just lifted to some degree, and you have family after family that will abort any pregnancy that is not a boy because they want a boy to carry on the name. I have a former constituent named Gill Copper, now passed away. Gill Copper was one of Merrill's Marauders who fought down out of the Asian subcontinent in the Second World War. For a while, he was stationed in India, and there, under the Ganges River that goes through New Delhi, or Delhi, India, I believe that is the river--but he would go down and wait under that bridge, especially towards evening, and he would just stand in the water, say, up to here, and he would listen and watch and listen for the splash. When he heard the splash, he knew what brought that about. The splash was, many times, a little girl baby who was being thrown off the bridge into the river because they didn't want a little girl. Gill Copper would swim out there, in that dirty river, get ahold of that little baby, bring that baby and swim back to shore with that baby, dry that baby off, get that baby breathing, and carry that baby down to the orphanage and start that baby's life there. He saved dozens and dozens of little girl babies by posting himself in that river in India, as a warrior defending our freedom in the Second World War, and he became a pro-life activist. He already was. He came back to America a pro-life activist. I want to do all we can to support his sacrifice in his memory, and in Henry Hyde's, and in Joe Pitts', and in Chris Smith's, and in Trent Franks'. Those are the names of the people who have led on this issue since I have been in this Congress and before. All of them deserve a special place in all of our heads and hearts for the work that they have done. We are at a place now where the pieces of legislation that have come through this House of Representatives and have been sent to the Senate, or are poised to come through this House and sent to the Senate, now it comes down in the House to this: we have the bill that prohibits sex- selected abortion. Let's see. We have no sex-selected abortion, and Pain-Capable legislation has already passed. And then Chris Smith has legislation that prohibits abortion on the dismemberment. To describe this, Mr. Speaker, is also ghoulish and ghastly, and that is the process of the dismemberment abortion, where the surgeon reaches in with specially made forceps and grips a part of a baby and pulls--we had a doctor who had committed I don't know how many thousands of abortions describe this before the Judiciary Committee--and pull with very strong force, pull hard and come out with an arm or a leg or a part of a torso, and arrange those pieces in a stainless steel pan to see if he got all the pieces of the baby who he was tearing apart. Chris Smith's legislation stops that ghastly process. It doesn't end abortion, but it ends the ghastly process of dismemberment abortion, and I support that legislation. In fact, I have signed on to every piece of pro-life legislation that has come through this House of Representatives, unless I just missed one somewhere. I believe it is every single one. But as I watched this incrementalism take place, I have always looked for, when do the stars align themselves right? How do we get to this place where we do what we know is true, and right, and just? When will it be aligned right? And the alignment, we have known this for 45 years. We can save these lives, those who will be aborted in the future; we can save them if we have a pro-life majority in the House of Representatives that is willing to take action, if we have a pro-life majority in the United States Senate that can figure out how to get past the 60-vote filibuster rule, if we have a President who will sign the legislation, and if we have a Supreme Court that will uphold that legislation. Four windows, Mr. Speaker, four windows we need to have open. And they almost have to be open, they have to be open in sequence, and they have to be open at the right time. So, today, we have a pro-life majority in the House of Representatives ready to move, if we can get it to the floor, any reasonable piece of pro-life legislation that is consistent with the philosophy that I have articulated here in the last half hour. The House is ready. The Senate has a pro-life majority. They don't have, yet, a way to get past that 60-vote threshold of the filibuster; except, all Mitch McConnell needs to do is go out there and make a motion to amend the rule, by suspending or deleting the filibuster rule, and that can pass by a simple majority in the United States Senate. So all he needs is 51 votes. And I will bet you Mike Pence would fly back from the Middle East to cast that 51st vote if it meant opening up the door to save these lives and put an end to the discretion of aborting babies because they happen to be inconvenient, or for other purposes. So the House is ready. The Senate has a pro-life majority. They have got to get past the filibuster. The President will sign legislation to save lives; and he is giving a speech, maybe about now, talking about the value of innocent, unborn human life. We have never had such a pro-life President. We have never had--and I will say this twice--we have never, never had such a pro-life Vice President, Mike Pence, who sat next to me on my elbow on the Judiciary Committee for, I believe it was, 10 years. I understand his convictions, and I know what he will be saying to the President. I understand the President's convictions. We need to get legislation to the President's desk. What a tragedy if we failed to move when we had the chance to move. What a tragedy if we weren't bold when we had the opportunity to be bold. What a tragedy if we are stuck in the rut of incrementalism and this little, dinky war of attrition that goes on between factions here within the House and within the Senate when we know what is the true, right, and just thing to do. But I have described how we have to be precise in the way we draft legislation that prohibits practices; it prohibits abortion, along with other things. And we have to determine the rationale for our decisions here in the House and in the Senate. So I drafted legislation a year and a half ago, and it is called the Heartbeat Protection Act. The Heartbeat Protection Act is H.R. 490, and it does this: it directs that, if an abortionist is planning to commit an abortion, he must first check for a heartbeat. If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. That is the center of the legislation. It is only a few pages. It is not complex. We stripped it down so it was clean and everybody could understand it. We define the check for the heartbeat to be within the parameters of modern medicine. We can determine a heartbeat, we know the heart will beat as early as 18 days, but it can be determined with confidence at about 6 weeks. So the 20-week bill is the Pain-Capable. This Heartbeat bill can be thought of in, say, roughly 6 weeks from conception. But our definition is the heartbeat, not any time frame. The heartbeat is precise. You can say then to the Supreme Court, we are not going to end the lives of these babies if their heart is beating. We can determine whether the heart is beating or not. One hundred percent of the time that a baby's heart is beating, you have got a live baby; and so we know if we stop that beating heart, we have ended the life of a baby. It is really clear and simple, and it doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to figure that out, even at the Supreme Court level. It is within our hearts, and I look across the countryside, and the miles and miles, thousands and thousands of miles, that I have driven over the last 45 years, and each year, I see more and more of the billboards up, many of them put up by the Knights of Columbus, that say, ``Abortion Stops a Beating Heart,'' or ``We All Start Small.'' They have gotten into our heads and into our conscience and into the culture of America. When we see those billboards, we know what that says. It says, defend these little innocents. They might be the ones who produce the miracles going forward. Every one of them is a miracle; every one of them created in God's image. But we know that abortion stops a beating heart, and we have all heard that rhythm of the ultrasound. We have all heard that sound of a beating heart. If the rules didn't prohibit it, I would take out my iPhone and play this into the microphone because I have got one of those glorious things that is really close to me in my iPhone right now, the beating of that little heart, 158 beats per minute, a healthy, healthy little child. I have had them sent to me by constituents. They want me to listen, and they will show me the ultrasound. I have a district representative who framed the first ultrasound for his firstborn, and that little guy now--that frame has been in his office for all these years. That little guy now, his name is Joseph Dean Anderson, is 9 years old, and he is my godson. His first picture is of his ultrasound. It is still framed, it is still cherished by his parents, and he is cherished by me. These lives are utterly precious. They are the future of our country. Today, we have 102 million Americans who are working, they are of working-age, simply not in the workforce. We are hearing debates here and in the Senate going on this week and next week, and many weeks thereafter, about how we don't have a workforce in America to do the work; so we have to go to foreign countries and bring people here who bring with them a different culture, which, if they embrace ours, is fine. They will assimilate to Americanism. But we have got a large segment of America that is coaching them not to do that, to stick with the old ways, rather than our ways. There is a consequence to that that is for another discussion, another time, Mr. Speaker. But I will submit this: 60 million babies aborted since Roe v. Wade in 1973. Roughly half of them were girls. I went back through this decade by decade and did the math to calculate how many babies would those 30 million girls who would have grown by now, many of them into women, how many babies would they have had? By my measure--and it is back-of-the-envelope only, but it is all we really need to understand the concept--another 60 million. We are not only missing 60 million babies in this country who were aborted since Roe v. Wade, we are missing another 60 million babies who were not born because their mothers were aborted. Now that is 120 million Americans who are missing, and they weigh on our conscience. That is a third of our population, or 320 million Americans. So I can say to a school auditorium, to two girls, two boys, or to a boy and a girl, I can say: You two look at each other. And they look at each other. And then I will say: Do you know what's missing? Your classmate. Your friend would be sitting between you now if it had not been for abortion. For every two we have, there is another one that would be sitting-- every two Americans we have, there is another one that would be sitting in between that would have needed a pair of shoes and a ball glove and maybe a dance contest costume, all the little things that come from little boys and girls, all the joy and all the laughter. Can you imagine shutting down a third of the laughter in a country? Or can you think about what America would be like if we were a country that we just stopped having babies? I mean, it is dialed down even worse in other countries, but that is where the joy and the laughter comes from. Without babies, there is no joy. Without babies, there is no laughter. It slowly silences itself as the years go by, if we had no more babies born in America. That means the 1-year-olds would be where we get the giggles and the laughs from. They laugh and giggle for a few more years, and by the time they got into their twenties, that would diminish down some. They don't have any children, remember. They don't have children to love; so their joy is going to be less. And as they get older, the hope would be gone because what would you be preparing for, except your own death? But we live for the next generation, and I want that next generation, all of them, to be born. I want them to live, to love, to learn, to laugh, to play, to work, to be parents, to have children of their own, to raise those siblings, to broker the disagreements that come along with that, to develop themselves and feel how full you are when you are a person that is completely gifted by the blessings of children and grandchildren. But that has been snuffed out by shortsightedness because of the permissibility of the Supreme Court decision in 1973, Roe v. Wade, and Doe v. Bolton. And we are here in this town today marching, marching from the Mall to the Supreme Court Building for, I guess it would be technically, the 44th time. What did we accomplish? Some things. We supported Henry Hyde, the Hyde amendment. The Mexico City policy has saved about 2 million lives. We banned partial-birth abortion. We have passed a bill out of the House of Representatives that bans abortion after 20 weeks, when we believe that they are--and they are--pain-capable of suffering the grueling pain of abortion. We have done that. But we sit here with the Heartbeat bill. It is the strongest, best supported pro-life bill at this stage of it that is before the United States House of Representatives ever. Even Pain-Capable came in to the announcement that there would be a floor vote on it with about 151 or 153 signatures on it. The Heartbeat bill--which requires the abortionist to check for a beating heart, and if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected--has today 170 cosponsors on it. It has another good, long list of people who say: I am not ready to sign on, but if you put it on the floor, I will vote for it. We can pass that bill off the House of Representatives and send it over to the Senate. And if there are those who think, ``Well, we don't want to let the Heartbeat bill get ahead of the Pain-Capable bill,'' I don't know why we wouldn't do that. I think that is a better policy, actually, and anybody who wants to save lives ought to be for that. But if that is their decision, fine. The Heartbeat bill can push the Pain- Capable bill out onto the floor of the Senate and there can be a debate and a vote on Pain-Capable, the 20-week bill, in the Senate. But there is no debate going on over there today. They don't have pro-life legislation moving through the United States Senate today. It is blocked up and balled up because they have a filibuster rule, and they are a little preoccupied, by the way. But if all this United States Congress can do on March for Life day is to bring a bill that deals with post-abortion, born-alive, saving those babies, I am glad we did it. We should have done another bill. We should have done the Heartbeat bill here today. Mr. Speaker, the circumstances are this. The whip team for the Heartbeat bill deserves a lot of credit. Janet Porter, Faith2Action, deserves a lot of credit. She is a driving force on this, Mr. Speaker. Our former whip and majority leader, Tom DeLay from Texas, has been working pro bono on this case for a long time, for a good year. He has been strategizing on that. He has been pulling votes together on it. His greatest regret as a now-retired majority leader in the United States House of Representatives is that he wasn't able to end abortion while he was the leader here in this Congress. And his word to our leadership here and to all of us is: Don't let this opportunity get away from you. This is the best opportunity. This is the best scenario. The window is open with a pro-life majority in the House and it is open with a pro-life majority in the Senate. The President will sign the bill, and the Vice President will stand next to him, feeling good about it. By the way, the Vice President and his wife, Karen, will probably hold hands and offer a prayer right before an act like that would happen. And the Supreme Court is poised for one or two more appointments to that Supreme Court; and those appointments being, I expect, consistent with President Trump's pledge that he will make those nominations out of the list that was produced by The Federalist Society and confirmed and supported by The Heritage Foundation and by me, by the way, and many other pro-life activists within this Congress and across this country. The selection that President Trump made out of those 21 potential Justices to the Supreme Court was excellent. Neil Gorsuch, there is no better choice, in my view. And one of the things that I think is important that goes into the Congressional Record is some, I will say, very solidly confirmed back-channel information is this: that the White House interviewed all 20 or 21 of those candidates for the Supreme Court. Out of those, they asked the same question of each one of them. And it was this, Mr. Speaker: If it is not going to be you as the nominee to the Supreme Court, who shall it be? Every other candidate, every other Judge under consideration for appointment to become a Supreme Court Justice, said: If it is not to be me, it needs to be Neil Gorsuch. You could not get a higher endorsement on such a high-level position than that, that all of your peers that were in the running said: If it is not to be me, it needs to be Neil Gorsuch. We are going to be very happy with his process and his decisions that he makes for us, and I have a lot of reasons to have great confidence in him. But I offer that for consideration, Mr. Speaker. But our job here needs to be all we can do. When the window is open, we have got to go through that window. The window is open to pass the Heartbeat bill now. 170 cosponsors. We have 129 national organizations and leaders that support the Heartbeat bill. It is about as close to unanimous across the entire movement in this country as it could possibly be. So with 170 cosponsors and another high number of those who say, ``I will vote for it, put it on the floor,'' the vast majority of the Pro- Life Caucus wants it to come to the floor, the vast majority of the Values Action Team wants it to come to the floor. I actually don't know who the dissenters are here in the House that say it is a bad idea to have the Heartbeat bill in law. There are a couple of people who disagree with the strategy, but they don't disagree with the policy, at least on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker. So when the leadership tells the top pro-life organizations in the country, ``You must be unanimous in this and be on the same page,'' and when one organization says, ``I don't want to see this moved,'' then we have a problem. We have a problem because the will of the people needs to be reflected here in the House of Representatives. This is a republican form of government by constitution. The Constitution guarantees a republican form of government, which means a representative form of government. That is, each one of us who have been elected here has a district of about 750,000 people, and it is our job to draw from them their best ideas and couple them with the principles that we have said we stand for, come here and bring those ideas into the House of Representatives, and then let those ideas, out of 435 congressional districts, compete against each other so that the best ideas rise to the top. The ideas that rise to the top need to be the ideas that have the most support, not something that was pulled off the shelf and dropped in down here in a bit of a token for something to do here on March for Life day. What is the most important thing we can be doing? Saving innocent, unborn human life. What is the highest priority we should have--the highest priority for the Members of the House of Representatives? What pro-life bill has the most cosponsors on it by far? That is the Heartbeat bill. So why wasn't it on the floor here today, Mr. Speaker? Why not? The reason is because I believe that there was--shall I call it--an arrangement made by a previous Speaker that pro-life legislation only moves when it is unanimously supported by the top three pro-life organizations in the country. I will name them. I count them all as people who have done a lot of good for this country. Family Research Council, led by Tony Perkins, who is a tremendous pro-life, pro-family warrior. And that is also true, we know, because his office has been targeted in the past and they face violence down there in the entryway to his office. Tony doesn't blink. He is a former marine. We have ridden the road together and been out there in those battles. They are a strong, strong pro-life organization, one of the top three. Susan B. Anthony List, another one of the top three. That is led by Marjorie Dannenfelser, who has a terrific heart, who is very driven and awfully intelligent, and who has a terrific memory about the components of the movement that have gone on. Her sidekick--I will call her that--is an even closer friend, Marilyn Musgrave, who I served here in the House of Representatives with for a good number of years, and she was a mentor to me, and she braced me up sometimes when I was trying to make sense of things that didn't make sense. Mr. Speaker, I count them as friends and pro-life warriors, terrific workers, and people who are go-to people who I count on keeping things on the rails while I am distracted with other things. But we are always on the same page together. Almost always on the same page together, Mr. Speaker. The other organization is National Right to Life. National Right to Life has been granted also a de facto veto power, which the effect of it is to block a bill from coming to the floor of the House of Representatives. Now, I have said there are 129 organizations and leaders that have endorsed and/or support the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490. There is only one that does not, and that is the National Right to Life, and that is led by Carol Tobias and David O'Steen. And I have spoken with both of them at great length, not in person. I have been trying to get those kinds of meetings. But I spoke on the phone with Carol Tobias, the president, a week or so before our Christmas break, about 45 minutes of intense discussion. And throughout all of that, she has insisted that they are not going to endorse the bill, they are not going to promote the bill. I couldn't get her to move one inch, even though every other organization is on board. I couldn't get her to move one inch. She told me that they had had a board meeting, sounded to me like a couple months earlier, and that nobody on the board supported the Heartbeat bill. How big is that board? This is back channel. I am told about 50. Can you imagine 50 pro-life activists sitting on the board of National Right to Life and not one of them thinks that protecting a baby that has a detectible heartbeat is an endeavor that they want to support right now when their mission statement says something entirely different? Well, that didn't seem right to me, and I hoped there was another way to get this resolved, so I told her at the end of the conversation: I guess we have got a couple weeks before the tension starts to build, but I don't have many nice things I can do yet, and I don't think your advice is going to be, to me, to just give up and put the Heartbeat bill in a drawer and say: H.R. 490 was a nice try, but we came up short so I guess it wasn't a good idea. How would I go to those 129 organizations and leaders and say to them, ``Well, I think we will just give up now because National Right to Life is not supporting our bill because Carol Tobias and 50 members of the board, presumably, and also David O'Steen, don't think it is a good idea to move the Heartbeat bill out of the House of Representatives, that they want to wait until the Supreme Court is ready to receive such a bill, apparently without calculating that it takes time to get legislation through the House and the Senate and to the President's desk''? And it may not happen this year if we put the Heartbeat bill on Mitch McConnell's desk in the Senate. It may not happen that the bill would even be taken up. We have got to have time to bring that bill to the floor of the Senate. We are going to have to work on it. I want time to do that. The longer we stall, the closer we get to the next election. If we get to the next election and lose seats in the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, this window in the House could close, and then what do they say? They will say: Well, it was our judgment. We wanted to wait until the Supreme Court was ready. It wasn't our fault that the window closed in the House or the Senate, or perhaps the Presidency. When you have the opportunity to move the agenda, you move the agenda. We have the opportunity to do that. And it is de facto veto power right now that the National Right to Life has because of that arrangement that was put together some years ago that says these top three pro-life organizations have to all be in agreement before we are going to move any legislation off the floor of the House. Why would any Speaker grant de facto authority to an outside organization, none of whom have been elected in this republican form of government? Why would that be allowed to trump the will of the people? Why would that have more value than the considered judgment of the vast majority of the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives? How can we say to any one of those 170: Your opinion doesn't matter at all because you don't yet have the unanimous enthusiasm of the top three pro-life organizations in the country? It comes back to National Right to Life. They put out a statement that says: We do not oppose the Heartbeat bill. We do not oppose the Heartbeat bill. The other side of that coin is, and it is the same coin: We do not support the Heartbeat bill. That is the message. That is the message that Speaker Ryan gets, and that is why this bill wasn't on the floor today. It is the blockage that comes from inactivity. And all that needs to happen is David O'Steen or Carol Tobias needs to pick up the phone, call Speaker Paul Ryan--call my office if you like, and I will patch you through--and say: Do you know what? We want to move it while we have got the chance. The window is open in the House of Representatives. You don't have to do a single thing beyond that. You don't have to whip the bill. You don't have to go visit any Members. You don't have to spend a single dime of those hard-earned dollars that are being raised in the pro-life movement except for the cost of the phone call, and I will pay for it. Call the Speaker. Call Leader McCarthy and say: Do you know what? We do think it is a good idea. Instead of saying: We do not oppose, when really it is you do not support, all you have to do is say: Let that bill go. Just like Charlton Heston as Moses, let our people go. Let those little babies with heartbeats live. Get a bill out of the House to the Senate, and then let's turn the pressure up in the Senate. It isn't going to happen unless we take the first step like a little baby that is wobbling and tottering. They learn to walk. They need a chance to get that chance to walk. We need to be able to move the bill off the floor of the House of Representatives. This isn't a stretch for public opinion. The public opinion is with us. In fact, the polling has been a little higher in support for H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill. It is even a little higher than it is on the 20-week Pain-Capable one, which has been out there. They have been working on it for years, and I respect that and appreciate it. But there isn't some kind of a rule that says you have to struggle for years before your bill can be heard. The strongest and best ideas that have weathered the debate need to come forward and be moved off the floor of the House of Representatives. Here is what it is: 170 Members signed on; 129 organizations or leaders support the bill. I don't know why one group has veto power, de facto veto authority over this bill. We need a vote on the Heartbeat bill, and it is now being blocked because of that inaction. One phone call, or, if they just wanted to post it on their website, instead of ``we do not oppose the Heartbeat bill,'' just post on there ``we now support the Heartbeat bill.'' God bless them if they will do that, because things will move. Now, this Heartbeat bill is the most popular pro-life bill that is pending in the House of Representatives today, and it has been for a long time, for almost this whole Congress. It prevents about 95 percent of the abortions. And this does push the Senate. It pushes Pain-Capable off of Mitch McConnell's desk and perhaps to the floor of the Senate for a vote. It moves the agenda. It helps the other pieces of legislation as well. Here is a polling, though, Mr. Speaker, that I think should give people some confidence; and that is that, all in all, across the spectrum of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, the Heartbeat bill, as written, has 69 percent of adults all the way across the spectrum. This is a Barna poll that took place last year--not that long ago-- and here is how it breaks down by party, in case people are worried about that: 86 percent of Republicans support the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490; 55 percent of Democrats support the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490. A majority of Democrats support the Heartbeat bill, 55 percent, and 61 percent of Independents. When you put that all together and you match it up for the demographics--so the percentages that are Democrats versus Independents and Republicans--and you merge that together, 69 percent support the Heartbeat bill. That is a little better than the 20-week Pain-Capable bill. People understand this. That beating heart is in our hearts, and so are these little babies. And I would say to National Right to Life, whose mission statement almost commands them to support the Heartbeat bill, you ought to amend your mission statement or support the Heartbeat bill. Here is one of their founders, a founder of the pro-life movement and the founder and former president of National Right to Life--now passed away, sadly--and he surely did his part, Dr. John C. Willke. Here is what he had to say: ``When I founded the pro-life movement, it wasn't to regulate how abortions would be done; it was to bring the abortion killing to an end. We have waited too long, and that wait has cost us too much''--Dr. John C. Willke. Take this back to 1973. The missions there were to end abortion. And yet we are stuck in a rut of incrementalism, moving a tiny little bit at a time. We saved 2 million lives in all of this--maybe a few more than 2 million lives, no more--and we watched 60 million babies be aborted. And I am hearing the argument of, well, we really can't move because the Supreme Court is not ready, and we don't know if there are going to be any retirements in the Supreme Court. I know there will be retirements in the Supreme Court. I am certain of it. There will be that. There are three ways out of the Supreme Court, and those folks who were there 100 years ago aren't there now. So we know there is going to be a change in the Court. What we don't know is this Court may well uphold Heartbeat because it is more precisely written and more carefully drafted, and it answers the right kind of questions. I think it has a better chance of being upheld before the Supreme Court than Pain-Capable. But those who pushed Pain-Capable, 20-week didn't have those reservations on their bill, but they seem to wonder about this one and say we shouldn't move Heartbeat until we have another appointment to the Supreme Court. How can you let that happen? Well, perhaps the window closes in the House or the Senate or Presidency. Sitting here twiddling our thumbs and watching babies be aborted at a rate of--oh, by the way, I did get this piece from National Right to Life in a conversation just yesterday that, when they began this effort, there were as many as 6 million abortions a year in America--I hadn't heard that number before, and I didn't go back to verify it, but that is what my ears heard yesterday-- and we have now gotten that number down to under 1 million abortions a year. That is considered progress, and it is progress. Then he gave me the exact number 900-and-some thousand abortions last year. I didn't commit that number to memory, but it means something different to me. That is 1 million abortions a year, every year. That means, in 45 years, we will have another 45 million abortions on our conscience. And that 60 million abortions for today turns into 105 million abortions if we just double the time span from Roe v. Wade another 45 years. And to take pride in getting it down to less than 1 million, as if that is a milestone, troubles me considerably. It might not have if I had just only heard it in that context, but I heard it in a different context 4 or 5 months ago, standing over here on the floor, Mr. Speaker. There is a gentlewoman from the Democratic Party who is one who-- really, there are only a couple of pro-life people over here anymore, so you know that she is not pro-life. She asked me why I have this heart on my lapel, and I told her it was for the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, and I want to protect these babies. From the moment a heartbeat can be detected, the baby must be protected. And she said: I don't know why you want to do that, Steve. We have got abortions down to under 1 million a year. I said: I want to save them all. I want to save every single one of them. That is why I am going to wear this on my lapel until we get this job done. But it was stunning to me that she would say that, being a pro-choice Representative here in the United States House of Representatives. And when I match that up with almost the same thing from a leader in the National Right to Life, I think: We have got to take a fresh look. They are too stuck in their ways. We will never get to the end of abortion if we are married to tiny incrementalism. We have an obligation to take the opportunities that God has given us and the voters have given us and act on them. I would go to personhood, the moment of conception, and do that in an instant if we could get that done, but we can't define medically and precisely that moment of conception. But we have defined medically and precisely the heartbeat. That is our marker, the heartbeat in that ultrasound. We had a little witness come before the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee, which I chair. We held a hearing on the Heartbeat bill. And this little guy was the youngest witness to testify in the history of the United States Congress, I believe. He is an 18-week developed little boy in his mother's womb. And we had the ultrasound sitting next to his mother, but the tape of the ultrasound that they had taken hours before. This little boy's name is Lincoln Glenn Miller. And that little guy, we showed his ultrasound and we showed him there in his mother's womb, and we listened to his heartbeat. His arm was out like this. And I said into the microphone, ``Lincoln, will you move your arm?'' and, in an instant, he jerked his arm toward his mouth. And I said, ``Lincoln, can you suck your thumb?'' and, in a moment, he put his thumb in his mouth and began to suck his thumb. And I said, a little bit later, ``Lincoln, can you talk to us?'' and you can see his mouth moving as if he is trying to talk in this ultrasound on the big screen in the United States Congress in the House Judiciary Committee, the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee. We watched this little guy, Lincoln Glenn Miller, testify to the humanity of an 18-week developed little child. We know this life begins at the moment of conception. We know that we can precisely define that heartbeat. We know that, if you have to check for that heartbeat, it is awfully hard to lie about it when you have to keep the records. We know that it has gotten into our conscience that abortion stops a beating heart, and we all, in our mind's ear, can hear that rhythm of that beating heart. I used 158 beats per minute. That is what is in my iPhone right now. And I can listen to that little baby as that little baby grows and develops. I want to see all of these babies grow and develop. I want to see every one of them come to birth and full term. I pray that they are mentally healthy and that they are physically healthy, and I don't have any more asks after that. Boys or girls, God, bring them to me in whatever order they might come, but let's get them born and let's take care of them and nurture them in mind, in body, and in faith, as our Founding Fathers envisioned when they wrote the language into our Declaration of Independence and prioritized life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. God bless them. Let's do the right thing. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor on this. I want to make sure that people know that I am an original cosponsor of the underlying bill. I support the underlying bill. I have signed on to every piece of pro-life legislation that I can find, and I came here to save as many lives as we can. My question out here is: What do you have to do to break out of the straightjacket of incrementalism and get to actually saving numbers of lives? My hat is off to Jill Stanek. She brought this bill a long way. We are going to honor her today on the vote on the final passage of the bill. But I am putting up a procedural vote, a ``no'' vote on the rule today, because we have 170 cosponsors on the Heartbeat bill. I have gone to every meeting. Nobody brought this bill up as the premier bill, and somehow, one outside organization came in and lobbied to put this ahead. It had 61 cosponsors instead of 170. There has been no hearing. I am for the bill. Attach them both together. Let's save all the lives we can. But if nobody has the courage to step up and say what is wrong with this process, then we're never going to fix the process. So I am going to vote ``no'' on the rule. I won't ask anybody else to do that. I will vote ``yes'' on the underlying bill, and I will go back to work to save as many lives as we possibly can.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I was unable to vote on January 17, 2018 for being off the floor momentarily. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: Yes on Roll Call No. 021.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I was unable to vote on January 10, 2018 for an obligation at the White House. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: YES on Roll Call No. 10.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and I also thank the minority leader for her remarks in support of 702. I rise in support of the 702 reauthorization. It is critical to our national security. You would see the color drain out of the faces of all of our security personnel, the entire national security community, if we lost the ability and went dark on 702. We have got to follow through in this Congress. We have got to provide the flexibility for them to use the tools that we have available to us, and we have set up procedures that will approve of this annually under the FISA courts. We have got a probable cause requirement for any criminal investigation. That protects U.S. persons. And we don't need to be protecting anything but U.S. persons when it comes to this. The gentlewoman spoke of civil liberties, and I stand in defense of those civil liberties as well and in defense of the national security. We have got an IG report that is written into this bill. But I would remind the people who are concerned about this focus on these civil liberties that Google and Facebook and Verizon and AT&T, they hold more data than the U.S. Government has. That is where the real information is, and if they are concerned about that, they should raise that issue. Meanwhile, I am going to oppose the Amash amendment and support the reauthorization of 702. Our people in this America, U.S. persons, deserve that protection for national security reasons. I urge its adoption.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the underlying bill, H.R. 38; or maybe that is the lead bill and there is an underlying bill that has been attached to it. I want to speak a little bit here about this process. First of all, though, we have a concealed carry bill before us that is a good and an excellent bill, that has been hard-worked and well- vetted, and I want to thank Mr. Hudson for his diligent work on this for a number of years. A year and a half or more ago we had this bill about ready to go before the Judiciary Committee. I raised an issue. My concern was that it didn't allow for the proper respect for the States--7 then, 12 now-- who have legitimate constitutional carry, which is: Since you have a Second Amendment right, you have a right to carry a weapon. Under this bill now, having incorporated an amendment that I had prepared a year and a half or so ago that allows then for the residents of the States who have constitutional carry to then travel into other States; if they are legal in their home State, they are legal in another State, under this bill, without having to require the States that respect full constitutional carry to produce permits for their citizens and their residents to travel into neighboring States or anywhere in the country. I think that is a significant improvement, and I thank Mr. Hudson for his cooperation and work on that. Like I say, this is a good and solid bill. I am, however, concerned about this process. When I hear the gentleman, Mr. Hastings, speak about this is the 54th closed rule that we have seen, I am for a lot of open rules. I am for open debate. I want to fight it out in committee and I want to fight it out here on the floor. Our Founding Fathers understood that. They set this system up this way. They said to all of us: Go to your district, pull the best ideas you have there, generate your own good ideas, bring them here, and let them compete in this marketplace of ideas. But if we don't have the window to compete with ideas, if we don't have that opportunity to have the debates, if we don't have the opportunity to force votes on amendments, then the best that America has to offer eventually doesn't show up in the law or to the President's desk. This is one of those circumstances where we learned a bill that didn't have a number the morning that we marked this up in committee is now the Fix NICS bill. It got a number sometime that same day. There was not a full opportunity to vet the Fix NICS bill. I am very apprehensive about what it might do to this country. I would like to have had hearings and learn what kind of American citizens, law-abiding citizens, will be disadvantaged by the Fix NICS bill. Whose names get on that and why? How do you get those names off when you need to be cleaning up the list? I want to have everybody on the list who belongs on the list, but I don't want anybody on the list who doesn't belong on the list. I want to protect American people and I want to protect constitutional rights. We didn't get an opportunity to look into this, and anybody who brought an amendment to the Rules Committee, it came to the floor under a closed rule. So I am concerned and I am apprehensive about this. In fact, as I look through these provisions, I strongly support section 103, Vicky Hartzler's section in the bill. Section 104----

Mr. KING of Iowa. I support also the section of the judges, but offered an amendment in committee--too many Members weren't there; at least 10 Republicans were gone--to protect congressional Members of Congress in the same way as the judges. We didn't have that opportunity to actually have a hearing on it in the committee--a legitimate one-- and we didn't have an opportunity to bring that amendment to the floor, so I have this apprehension. Mr. Speaker, I urge that we get back to regular order.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. The bulk of this article addresses my bill, H.R. 176, the New IDEA Act, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. They go through the calculations here, and I will just touch on some of them. This is data from a Harvard economist, George Borjas. It is his empirical research. He shows that the workers in America, because wages have been suppressed by an oversupply of unskilled and illegal laborers, that American workers are suffering somewhere between a $99 billion and $118 billion loss in annual wages because they haven't gotten a raise in a long time. Nobody gets a raise as long as there is cheaper labor there that keeps that down--no effective raise. So between $99 billion and $118 billion. That is the Harvard economist, George Borjas. That is the annual wages loss because of illegal immigration. If we go to the next page on this, it lays out the conditions, and we are seeing this. This is a number from the Pew Hispanic Center in 2009. It says that there are 8.3 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. labor force. They recently estimated that number is actually ratcheted down to about 8 million. It doesn't say why. But if they estimated the median household income of unauthorized worker families to be approximately $36,000 at 1-\3/4\ average workers per household, that is roughly--let's see. It says, ``implying median per-worker earnings of $20,571,'' they estimated that the earnings-per-worker estimate yields $165 billion a year. This is some of the magnitude of the money that is going out of our economy. Also, added to that, roughly $60 billion is being wired out of America. So those who say, ``Well, we really need these illegal workers because they stimulate our economy, they grow our economy,'' they are siphoning this off. They are holding down the wages for the working people in America to the tune of $100 billion or more a year. They are earning something like $165 billion a year, and they are sending at least $60 billion of that south of the border, about half to Mexico and the other half to Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. So all of these are economic impacts. But the CIS, the Center for Immigration Studies, drew this estimate that, should my bill, the New IDEA Act, H.R. 176, become law--and the perfect place for it is in this tax policy--they estimate that it would score at, the number would be, $25.4 billion a year. If we do a 10-year estimate, that means a $254 billion score, a quarter of $1 trillion poured into our budget at a time that we are cutting taxes and we have a red ink tax policy--which I want to see passed, by the way. We have got some solutions here, and I want to see those solutions become law. H.R. 176 is one of the unique tools that has been here for some time. It is thoroughly vetted. It has had a good number of cosponsors on it over the past years. I knew Barack Obama would never sign it, but Donald Trump will. It was on his website. Early on, when he first launched his Presidency, the support for the New IDEA Act was on his immigration policy that was posted then. I haven't checked it now in quite some time, but I don't have any doubt that, if we send a tax bill to Donald Trump's desk with H.R. 176 in it, it will score better, to the tune of probably a quarter of $1 trillion. It will put an end to the illegal workforce in America, or at least an end to the deductibility of wages and benefits paid to illegals, and it brings together the Social Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS to exchange information so that, if there is a Social Security number that is overused, they need to tell the DHS and they need to tell the IRS. If the IRS comes up with employers that are hiring illegals--and they will--they need to tell the Department of Homeland Security so ICE can come in and enforce the law. So each one of these agencies needs to cooperate with each other. This way, we open up jobs for American workers, and we give the American workers a raise. Now, what could be better than giving the American workers a raise and giving the American workers a tax cut all at the same time, while we nearly guarantee an economic growth cycle for the next decade of an average of over 3 percent per quarter? We can do that. It is all sitting here in front of us. And my hope, my prayer, and my effort is that we can all work together to reach all of those goals. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I have a couple of topics that I intend to take up for the folks here watching and listening. Madam Speaker, I want to talk about the Heartbeat bill and I want to talk about the immigration bill and the tax policy all together. But there is an important issue before this Congress that I want to hear about before I take up these issues. And for that purpose, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. DeSantis) to get this off of his heart.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for his presentation and certainly support and endorse every word that I have heard here. I think about the leadership that George Washington provided, and a couple of things come to mind. One of them is, in my six trips into Egypt, I have met with President el-Sisi each of those times. He finds himself in a position in Egypt very similar to where Washington was in his first term, Madam Speaker, and that is now with a constitution that has a limitation of two 4-year terms for the President of Egypt. He was elected under that constitution, committed to accepting civilian leadership of the military--and that has been taking place--rebuilding the Christian churches in Egypt, establishing a parliament that reflects women as well as men, and religious diversity in allowing for a lot more religious freedom in Egypt. He has followed through on all of that. The real test will be if President el-Sisi is re-elected in Egypt when he is up for that re-election, if that should happen, and I hope it does, then I am also listening very closely to what would be his second inaugural address. In that second inaugural address, I am calling upon him to announce that the second term will be his last term in keeping with the standards that are set by George Washington. That is how you transition into a republican form of government that is a representative form of government, a government of we the people. I would also reflect, as I listened to Mr. DeSantis speak about the greatness of George Washington--and we understand that there has been, I think, an erroneous reading of history and a misinterpretation of history--that there is an effort to purge from and to revise our American history to conform with what contemporary values are. So now if we disparage and expunge from history the statues, the faces, the words, and the leadership of people--some of whom were slaveowners back in that time: Washington, Jefferson, and a list of others all the way up the line--then we fall prey to this weakness of wanting to judge our Founding Fathers and the people who went before us in each generation by the standards of this generation. Yet we admire people like William Wilberforce and John Adams who stood for years to defend the battle against slavery. They made the moral arguments against slavery. We had people who were against slavery who owned slaves. If you were in Virginia, and if you owed taxes, then you couldn't free your slaves. That was true for some of our Founding Fathers who found themselves in that position. They couldn't legally free their slaves. They opposed slavery anyway, but they just couldn't pay their taxes. That is a piece of history that isn't often discussed, Madam Speaker. We need to judge Washington for what he did as the Father of our Country and judge him within the context of the values that they had then. We should remember that they tried to eliminate slavery in the founding documents of this country. They were not able to do so because they had enough representation in the South that prevented it. So we were, then, less than a century later swept into a giant Civil War which was still the bloodiest war that we have been involved in in our 200-plus years of our history, and that was a bloody war of brother fighting brother, North versus South. 600,000 Americans--mostly White, male Christians--went to their graves to put an end to slavery. That is how huge that contest was. That argument needed to be won here. It was debated here in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the United States Senate. It went through the Supreme Court. I listened to the testimony of Star Parker who testified this past Wednesday morning on the Heartbeat Bill, H.R. 490. Star Parker is a magnificent witness. I count her as a real leader in this country and a good friend. She is also an African American who has had several abortions before she came to the conviction that she understood that life begins at the moment of conception and that human life is sacred in all of its forms. So now her voice is being heard--heard in this Congress and heard across the land. As an African American, she compared slavery to the abortion issue today. I look back in the slavery era, the first half of the 19th century building up to the Civil War, and I ask myself, in looking back at my heritage and my predecessors and the things that they believed in and passed on down to me: Where would I have been? Where would I have been, Madam Speaker, if I had been, say, born in 1800? Would I have had enough vision to step forward and oppose slavery in the same fashion that I oppose abortion today? I would hope I would have. I pray I would have. I would think that those same principles would apply as Star Parker drew that comparison and that juxtaposition in her testimony last Wednesday before the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee. Yet here we are today with a similar debate and a similar argument before us. Slavery was morally wrong. Today, I have never in my lifetime met someone who defended slavery, but there were many of them who defended slavery right here where I stand, Madam Speaker, and across the rotunda in the United States Senate where they stand. They defended it because it was the legacy of the culture and the civilization of their times that was included within every civilization throughout the world. Every nation had to figure out how to throw off that yoke of slavery and give all creatures created in God's image an equal opportunity and equal freedom. It cost a lot of blood to put an end to that--600,000 lives. As a matter of fact, not that long ago, I was standing in the Lincoln Memorial. They call it the temple area there around where the huge statue of Lincoln is seated in his chair up in the Lincoln Memorial. Every time I have walked up those steps, I have walked over to Lincoln's left--it is my right as I face him--I read Lincoln's second inaugural address. I don't have the text of it precisely in front of me, but I will get the gist of it, Madam Speaker. There in his second inaugural address--remember, the Civil War is not over yet, so we don't know how it is going to end. He said: Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said, so it is written that the Word of the Lord is true and righteous altogether. Now, I stood there some time back and read that. Sometimes you can read things four, five, six, ten, or twenty times before you see the wisdom in it, but it hit me as I stood there, a drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by a drop of blood drawn by the sword; how many Americans died in the Civil War? 600,000. Lincoln could not have known that. I thought I knew how many Black Africans had been brought to what is now the United States to be slaves and to be enslaved here; I thought I knew that number. I looked it up. It is without much contention, there is a consensus number out there, Madam Speaker--600,000. 600,000 Americans died to put an end to slavery, and 600,000 Africans were brought to what is now America to be slaves. Lincoln could not have known either number. He could not have known those killed in action and those who died in the Civil War. He could not have known that 600,000. He could not have known how many were brought to what is now America to be slaves. A drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, so it is written, the Word of the Lord is true and right and just altogether. It turns out to be 600,000 versus 600,000. Those are prophetic words that came from the mouth of Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address, Madam Speaker. It is chilling to think about how prescient they were. It is impossible for Lincoln to have known, but the instinct that the hand of God that guided him, the guidance of providence that put those words in his mouth that day, turned out to be true this day. I think of all that this Nation went through to put an end to slavery and all that we are going through to put an end to abortion. I look at the cases of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and a Supreme Court that one might say was leaning very strongly to it as an activist court and the string of decisions that brought them to Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. I would take us back through that, Madam Speaker. In about--I have got to guess at the years here again--about 1964 or 1965, there was a case that came before the Supreme Court called Griswold v. Connecticut. There, the State of Connecticut, being a strong Catholic State, had outlawed contraceptives in Connecticut because that was also the position of the Catholic Church. There was a couple that decided to sue to be able to purchase contraceptives. So it made its way all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court looked into it and decided, well, there is a right to privacy, and the State of Connecticut has no business interfering with the constitutional right to privacy that a married couple has in Connecticut to purchase contraceptives. So they created this new right--this right to privacy--that didn't exist in the Constitution. It still doesn't exist in the Constitution. Now there are those who will argue that it exists in precedent and exists in case law, and, according to stare decisis--respect for previous decisions--it cannot be changed. We are stuck with this idea that the Constitution includes a right to privacy, a right to privacy that is applied to married couples who wanted to buy contraceptives in the State of Connecticut. That was when the Supreme Court reached well beyond their bounds, and they needed to stay within the guidelines of the Constitution itself, hence this right to privacy. Then there was the Eisenstadt case where the decision was that unmarried people had the same right to privacy as married people. So they extended that right to privacy to unmarried people as well, and now everybody could buy contraceptives everywhere at any time, and many other things were included underneath that definition. So Roe v. Wade came together, and they decided that, yes, these rights existed, this right to privacy could be extrapolated into a right to abortion because this was all written in the emanations and the penumbras that are up there. To explain that, emanations and penumbras are like this: they are in the shadows of. So if you look up at the clouds during, let's say, a semi-cloudy day, then you will see that little shadow along the edge of the cloud. You can't quite see the other side of the cloud, but you see that fringe along the edge. Someplace in there, those black-robed jurists could see constitutional rights that they couldn't actually find in the text of the Constitution, that they couldn't quite find in Griswold, that they couldn't quite find in Eisenstadt, but they wrote it into Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton and decided: Okay, we are going to guarantee this constitutional right to have an abortion as long as the baby is not viable. The viability, of course, is a pretty mushy definition. The Court has thrown some of our pro-life legislation back at us because they thought our definitions were a little too mushy, but they write some mushy ones themselves. Then you have the Doe v. Bolton case settled at the same time, simultaneous with Roe v. Wade. There they write in the exceptions, which would be anything that might affect the life or health of the mother. The health of the mother can be determined to be the physical health, the mental health, or even the familial health of the mother. So what it means is any reason whatsoever. When you couple those two cases together--and if you respect the Supreme Court decisions, which America did--it said abortion on demand for any reason whatsoever, whether it is a physical reason, whether it is a mental health reason, or whether it is a family issue, anything that is an inconvenience. We ended up with abortion as birth control and abortion on demand for everyone. At that time, the Court could not have seen that we would be having partial-birth abortions conducted across this country in significant numbers to the 24th week and beyond. That is such a ghastly process. This Congress did deal with that through legislation and wrote legislation to ban partial-birth abortion. It was defined. It was outlawed by this Congress. It was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, as we would know. When I arrived here, the Supreme Court had found that it was unconstitutional for Congress to ban this ghastly process of partial- birth abortion, of bringing a baby to birth through breach, feet first, and one inch before that baby could fill its lungs full of American air and scream for its own mercy. They would kill the baby while it struggled and squirmed, and they would collapse the skull by withdrawing from it the contents. That is the ghastly process. It went on over and over again. The Court found it to be unconstitutional for Congress to ban--or any State, for that matter--that ghastly process. So we went back to work here in this Congress in the Judiciary Committee. Under the leadership especially of Steve Chabot of Ohio, we held hearing after hearing after hearing, and we established and first wrote a definition for partial-birth abortion that was precise so that the Court couldn't argue that it was too mushy, too vague, not precise enough. We wrote a precise definition. Then we held hearings that determined that a partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to save the life of the mother. We outlawed partial-birth abortion again. Then it went through the litigation process. Our statute that banned partial-birth abortion, that came from we the people, was shot down in three circuits around the country but appealed to the Supreme Court, and it finally survived on that final analysis of the Supreme Court. Even they couldn't bear the thought of what was going on in this country. It was too stark. It was too ghastly. It was too gruesome. So here we are today, with this House of Representatives having passed legislation that bans abortion if the baby can feel pain at 20 weeks. It was a true and right and just thing for this Congress, this House of Representatives to do altogether, Madam Speaker. We have sent that bill over to the United States Senate. The bill has a little bit of vagueness in it because we are saying 20 weeks. We would like to precisely identify the exact time that the baby can feel pain. But it screams at our conscience that a baby who is struggling for its own survival can be killed in the womb. If it could fill its own lungs, it would scream for its own mercy. It fights to get away from the abortionist's tools. That is the bill that bans that, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which we sent to the United States Senate and now sits on Mitch McConnell's desk and probably doesn't move unless there is a Democrat who also agrees with us over in the House of Representatives. It was bipartisan here in the House of Representatives, and I thank the Democrats who have joined us in the pro-life movement; but it has diminished significantly among Democrats in my time here, Madam Speaker. I won't use the name of the Member. I will just say that a Democratic Member who is a pro-life Member whom I have served with for roughly a decade, but I went to him and said: Can you sign onto my Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490? Are you ready to do that? He said: Not yet. That left the door open for: Well, maybe. I said: How many Democrats do you think we can get to sign onto the Heartbeat bill that bans abortion from the time a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected? He said, without hesitation: Two. We can get two--which meant, I think, him and one other. I said: How many pro-life votes were there in the House of Representatives among Democrats when you came here roughly 10 years ago, how many pro-life votes among Democrats? His answer, without hesitation, was 60. Sixty Democrats would put up a pro-life vote. Ten years later, today, two, maybe three. I hope and pray it is more than that. I will work for all the votes that we can get. But that, I think, tells us something about how polarized the political arena here is in this House of Representatives, in the United States Senate, and explains why Tom Perez, head of the DNC, can say there is no room for pro-life people in the Democratic Party. If you can't be a Republican, then transform the Democratic Party so we can save the lives of these innocent unborn. That is what the Heartbeat bill is, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act, which we held a hearing on last Wednesday. The testimony, I think, was stellar that came out of the panelists who were there. David Forte delivered the constitutional arguments even more so in the Q&A than he did so in his presentation. We heard from Dr. Kathi Aultman, who has been an abortionist and committed an uncounted number of abortions, and she has also had an abortion herself. She has delivered a baby girl vaginally herself. So she is a mother and an abortionist. She said in her testimony: I realize that when I meet the young people whom I delivered--an OB/GYN who had a dual purpose of bringing babies forth in the world, protecting their lives with all the medical technology and skill set that can be developed on this hand, but over on this hand, kill them, and the dichotomy of that hit her after she delivered her own daughter. She went back to work and her hands were still doing what they had been doing, but her conscience screamed at her, and she had to put the tools down and stop this ghastly practice of abortion. Now she has committed a significant portion of her life to putting an end to this. But she said she realized, when she met young people, the joy that she had helped bring them into the world if she delivered them; but at the same time, she understood that there were a lot of young people who are not here because she aborted them. So it always tore at her conscience that way. Another thing that I had not heard from anyone in this movement in the past, in all of our discussions, was this. She said: If I was going to abort the baby, I always referred to it, when I spoke with the mother, as a fetus. But if we were going to deliver the baby and give this baby a chance at life, I always referred to it as a baby. I think that explains to us the difference in the disagreements we have here in the House of Representatives. Almost universally, over on this side, people support abortion in every form they can, with those exceptions whom I tip my hat to and those who will be converted, hopefully, by their conscience over time like Cathy Aultman was. They say ``fetus''; we say ``baby.'' God knows it is a baby. God knows that it is a unique human being from the moment of conception. What we can't yet do, medically, is precisely tell the mother the moment of conception. We don't have a medical way to determine that moment, or I would be focusing our legislation on that moment. But what we do have now, with ultrasound, is the ability to identify that heartbeat in that baby. The legislation in H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act, says this. We require the would-be abortionist to check for a heartbeat before that abortionist would continue with an abortion. They have to maintain records on this: check for a heartbeat, and then if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. We know that is life. If an abortionist stops that beating heart, we know that has ended the life of that innocent baby. As we brought this legislation forward, we found out that there is something about that heartbeat that speaks to the conscience and the hearts of America, Madam Speaker. We know that billboard after billboard--there must be thousands of them around America, many of them put up by the Knights of Columbus--saying: Abortion stops a beating heart. When we see that billboard, maybe it only registers a little bit, but many of us have seen it hundreds and hundreds of times, and we associate the heartbeat with life. If there is a beating heart, we know there is life. If you stop that beating heart, you know that you ended a human life. On the argument that a baby isn't viable, in the Roe v. Wade era back in 1973, the Supreme Court said maybe that is at 28 weeks. But now we have babies that survive at 22 weeks. That is a month and a half less than before. I recall a circumstance in 1992 where I had an individual who was part of the administrative oversight on a construction project that I was on that fall. He was gone for 2 weeks, and I knew why. His wife had gone into labor and delivered a little baby boy prematurely. This little baby boy was in the early part of 20-some weeks. And I am not certain, but I am just guessing earlier than 24 weeks, but certainly not 28. They went to the city and stayed in that hospital with this little boy for 2 weeks and didn't leave. They stayed at his side and prayed for him and they did all they could. He was hooked up to all kinds of tubes. When he came back to me after 2 weeks, he was relatively assured that this little boy would survive. He walked up to me and handed me a cigar that said, ``It's a boy.'' He wasn't handing out those cigars the first 2 weeks because he wasn't confident this little boy was going to live. But he handed me that cigar--and I knew where he stood politically-- and I said to him: We would do anything to save the life of any little baby. Any little boy or girl, we would do anything to save their life. There is no amount of expense we wouldn't go to. There is no amount of medical effort we wouldn't go to to save the life of a baby, no matter how small their chance was to survive. We will do everything. We will spend $100,000, $200,000, $500,000 to save that innocent little life. We do everything we can do with all the medical technology that we have. We spare no effort from doctors or nurses. We will spare no effort on our knees praying to God this little baby can be born and grow into a full human being. He agreed with me 100 percent. He said: I agree with you, and I am so glad that my little boy looks like he is going to be okay. I said: Then are you going to go into the polls of next month--this is October of 1992--and vote for the man for President who will appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who are going to continue to enable abortion in America? He looked at me and called me a name that we can refer to by the first letter of those three words, but he said it in such a way that it wasn't insulting to me. It said instead: You have drilled a point home. After these 30-some years, I ran into him in the grocery store here several Sundays ago after mass. We are both Catholic. I hadn't talked to him in a long time. I asked him how that little boy was doing, and he told me. He said: You straightened me out back then, didn't you? Do you remember that? He asked me if I remembered it. Of course I did. I said: Yes, I remembered it, but I didn't want to bring it up. I did want to know how he is. So that is a composite of the conscience of the Nation, Madam Speaker. I think it tells us that we all haven't come to the realization of the immorality of abortion yet, but America came to the realization of the immorality of slavery. We will get to the realization of the immorality of abortion. We are making progress. Looking at this legislation, H.R. 490, we have a number of 69 percent of Americans supporting protecting any baby with a heartbeat. That is, 55 percent of Democrats support protecting a baby with a heartbeat, and this legislation would save the lives of at least 90 percent of the babies that are otherwise being aborted. So I want to thank all the people who have done so much work on this that brought us to this point. We are at 170 cosponsors. We have had a hearing. Next step, hopefully, is to get the markup before the Judiciary Committee. My goal is to bring the Heartbeat bill to this floor of the House of Representatives January 19 of 2018. That is the date of the March for Life here in this town, and that is the date we need to bring that legislation to this floor. If we can do so and send it over to the Senate, if the Senate can take it up and pass it, I am confident our President will sign it, and we can begin to put an end to this carnage. To speak of the magnitude of the carnage of abortion: 60 million babies aborted since 1973 in Roe v. Wade. I had a lady, who is a Democrat, say to me just over here a couple of months ago: Steve, why are you so worried about this? We have abortions down to where they are almost, or maybe even are below, a million a year? Only a million abortions a year? How can anyone quantify that and say that is anything other than a bloody carnage and a loss of human potential and a denial of the gifts from God? Sixty million babies aborted since Roe v. Wade in 1973. And how many babies would be born to those who were aborted? How many of those little girls that were aborted in the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and even in the early part of this millennia--for a small part, the earliest part of this millennia--how many of those little girls would be having babies today? And how many would they have? Just a back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that there are another 60 million babies that are missing because of the 60 million that have been aborted. And here we are, America. I am listening to people argue, and they will say: Well, you know there is work that Americans won't do, and we have a shortage of labor, so we have to go to some other culture, some other civilization and bring in hundreds of thousands or millions of people to do work that Americans won't do. I wonder, if you would ask those innocent little voices that are in Heaven today, if they wouldn't mind laying a few bricks or maybe cutting some grass or doing a little bit of landscaping around or maybe cutting a little bit of meat. These are all things I do, by the way, even today, if I get the chance. Ask them if they wouldn't have liked to have had a chance at the right to life, if they wouldn't have liked to have an opportunity to live, to love, to breathe air, to laugh, to have their own children, to enjoy the greatest country the world has ever seen, and it is all denied to them. It is denied to 60 million of them, and it is denied to perhaps another 60 million who didn't even have the chance to be aborted because their future parents were killed in the womb. So 60 million plus 60 million is 120 million missing in this country today. No wonder we have a labor shortage. Oh, here is another reason why we have a labor shortage, Madam Speaker. If you look at the numbers of--according to the Department of Labor statistics in their website, there are 94\1/2\ million Americans who are simply not in the workforce. They are old enough to work. They are not in the workforce, 94\1/2\ million. If you add to that the 7-plus million who are on unemployment today, you get up to right at 102 million Americans who potentially could be in the workforce, they are not looking for work or they are on unemployment, and I am listening to employers scream for more labor, more labor, more labor. By the way, they are screaming for more unskilled labor. I look on that same website, and I see--where are the highest levels of unemployment? In the lowest skills we have. We don't have a shortage of low-skilled laborers. We have a shortage of employers who want to pay a competitive wage. So call it 102 million Americans that could be in this workforce. Then we took that number and we started chopping it down. How about those that are too old? We can't ask them to work, so dial that down a little bit. And then how about those that are physically disabled? They can't work, so dial that down. What would it be if we were going to mobilize our workforce on the levels of, say, World War II, where at the end of World War II, we had the lowest unemployment in history? And often this is misquoted and people want to point to some other number. 1.2 percent was our unemployment rating at the end of the Second World War. Women went to work. My mother did. Of course, my father was deployed. But if we mobilized on that level, how many would be available to go into this workforce? We think about 82 million Americans are sitting there today. Some of them on a couch in their front lawn, some of them are riding around in their Mercedes, but a lot of them could be going to work. In fact, everybody I mentioned so far should be at work contributing to our GDP instead of just consuming. Eighty-two million or so out there out of the 102 million that are not in the workforce, and they say: Well, we have to bring in hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions of people to do this work in America. Around our family, Marilyn and I raised three sons. I started a business in 1975. I started a family in 1975. Those three sons got an allowance. They got paid for the work they did. In addition, the allowance was younger, paid for the work they did came a little later. But of those three sons, they all knew what they had to do. Now, if one of those three sons--by the way, I am talking about one- third of our workforce is not in the workforce. They are simply not in the workforce. But one-third of the people who could be are sitting back on the sidelines. So let's just say, around our operation, there is work that has to be done. You got to scoop the tracks out of the dozer. Somebody has got to change their oil. Somebody has got to mow the lawn. Somebody has got to take care of the other chores. Somebody has got to trim the trees, all those things that need to be done. They all got their assignments and they did them. But if one of those sons said, ``Well, I am not working. I am going to sit on the couch and watch the ball game or sit on the porch and watch the rest of you work. I want to eat with the rest of the family. I want to put my feet under the table. I want good food. I want my clothes all clean. I want them ironed. I want them ready to go. Somebody else can clean my room, too, but I still want my allowance,'' you all know, if you grew up in the family, how long that would last. If one of the siblings, a brother or a sister, said, ``I am not doing my work, but give me my allowance, and I still want the keys to the car,'' it wouldn't last one day. In our house, it goes completely the other way. It is: ``Oh, you think that? Now you get all the work, and they get your allowance until you change your mind.'' We fixed that really quick in my household, and I think it would be fixed a number of different ways, but really quickly in every household in America. We don't tolerate a slacker sitting there taking up a room in the house that is demanding all the benefits of the work of the rest of the family. But we have got 102 million Americans sitting there. Many of them are being bribed not to work by welfare checks. We have over 70 different means-tested Federal welfare programs in the United States. Over 70. Some say 87 of them. No one has even memorized the list. So that should tell you that no one understands how they interrelate with each other. No one understands whether there are disincentives or incentives for people to do the right thing and step forward and carry their share of the load. So why wouldn't we dial the welfare down in America until the labor force magically shows up in the workplace? That is what happened with John Smith. His experiment early on in America worked exactly like that. He said that there were--of all the royalty that was there, they thought, because they had blue blood--and that is, of course, the expression of royalty--that they didn't have to work and those commoners needed to work for the rest of time. He said: I am not going to burn up the labor of these common people here so that a bunch of royalty can sit around with their feet up. That is a summarization of the statement. Everybody had to work, and they had the ``no work, no eat'' policy. Well, when you get to that policy, a lot of people decide that working is better than going hungry, but it doesn't mean we don't take care of the people who are needy. It doesn't mean we eliminate these programs. It just means, as I said, maybe we need 10 million more American workers. We can dial this welfare system down, ratchet it down. It is now a hammock. It used to be a safety net, and this Congress with special interests has cranked up the level of the safety net to the level of the hammock, and now 102 million Americans, a good share of them, are in that hammock. We just crank it back down. We could dial it down in proportion to the amount of labor that we need. Everybody that gets off the hammock and goes to work becomes a contributor. They grow our GDP--our gross domestic product--and they pay taxes and they take themselves off the welfare rolls. So why wouldn't you do the twofer, instead of go to some other country and bring people here to do the work who don't speak our language, who don't understand our culture, and who don't embrace the American civilization in many cases, and who run down people in bike paths in New York, and who attack us at Fort Hood--the list goes on and on--Orlando, Florida; San Bernardino, on and on, the people who hate us? As Louie Gohmert often says, ``We don't have to pay people to hate us. They will hate us for free.'' He was talking about foreign policy. We have got people on welfare who hate us. We don't have to pay them either. We need more people working. We need more people back in the rolls. So I want to applaud Kevin Brady, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and I thank him for the very diligent work that he has done in order to bring this tax policy as far as it is today, and to roll it out with the coordination that they have, with the support from the leadership within the House, the Senate, and the White House, and that message has been clear. Also, Kevin McCarthy, our majority leader, stood here today and defended it and explained it, I think, very well. He is an articulate voice for our entire conference and he does an excellent job, along with our Speaker and our whip. By the way, our whip, Steve Scalise, maybe he doesn't have all of his moves back yet, but his heart and his head are back as strong as ever. His voice is as strong as ever. Steve Scalise has his mojo back, Madam Speaker, and I am awfully glad to see that. We need that. It is a gift to us to have him. So what do we do with this need for labor? I asked the question a little earlier in a tax conference downstairs: Of this tax policy, the bill now that was dropped yesterday, does it allow an employer to deduct as a business expense the wages and benefits that are paid to illegals who are in his employment? The answer that I got was: We didn't address that in the bill, so whatever it is today is what it is. What it is today, Madam Speaker, is every employer--let me put it this way: I will say virtually every employer who deducts the wages that are paid of them is often--if they have illegals working for them, they go on the schedule C, like any other employer. So let's just say, if there is an employer there who pays $1 million out to illegals, that shows up in his schedule C as a business expense, wages. And those wages then are deducted as a business expense. Of course, you don't pay taxes on business expenses. I don't pay taxes on fuel. I don't pay taxes on parts. I don't pay taxes on the wages our company pays in 42 years in the construction business or on the benefit packages that we have there. And--but--so employers are deducting wages and benefits paid to illegals, and that is supposed to be against the law. But they don't address that in this tax bill. And the way the IRS has addressed it is that--it says this--according to section 162(e) of the Internal Revenue Code, it denies a deduction for ``illegal payments.'' But even though it denies a deduction, under the statute for illegal payments, the IRS has interpreted this a little bit differently. So it says here in this document: even though it is illegal to employ unauthorized alien workers, the IRS has ruled that section 162(e) does not apply to the wages paid to those aliens--and I would call them aliens--even if the employer knowingly broke the law. Well, there is a problem with IRS interpretation, but I also know they are not very likely to change that interpretation, unless Congress should crack them over the knuckles with some legislation. I have, for a number of Congresses, introduced legislation known as the New IDEA Act. Today, the New IDEA Act is H.R. 176. It does this: it clarifies. It amends 162(e) of the Code, and it clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax deductible for Federal income tax purposes. It gives the employer safe harbor if he uses E-Verify to verify his employees. In other words, if you hire people, you have got people on your payroll, you run them through E-Verify. We know all about this program. The Judiciary Committee passed a mandatory E-Verify bill out of the committee here a couple of weeks ago. But you run them through E- Verify. If you are the employer and they have qualified to be legal to work in the United States through the E-Verify program, then the IRS cannot touch you with regard to hiring illegals. So it is a safe harbor that we build into the bill. So tax, wages, and benefits paid to employers are not tax deductible. The employer gets safe harbor if he uses E-Verify. We also require the IRS to exchange information and build a working committee with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security so that the right hand, the left hand, and the middle hand know what each other is doing. This is the Federal Government, after all. And how can we have departments within this government working at cross purposes with each other? So the IRS' job should be to collect taxes. They should not be allowing the deductions of wages and benefits paid to illegals. They are not legal to work in America. If you are buying illegal drugs, do you get to deduct your illegal drugs? If you pay off somebody to commit an illegal activity, do you get to deduct that? No. In none of those cases, we don't allow deductions for illegal activity. That is partly what the legislation said. But the IRS has their practice. By the way, before I wrote this bill, I was looking around for what department within any branch of government do the people respect fear the most. As one who has been audited thoroughly a number of times, I notice that the IRS is the one that we respect the most--probably fear the most--and the last organization that we want to show up at our door that is going to check to see if we are hiring illegals. So what would happen under this bill is the IRS would show up--we don't accelerate any audits. The IRS would show up to do a normal audit under normal terms of identifying businesses that they would normally audit, and, in the course of that audit, they would run the Social Security numbers and the identifying information of the employees off of the I-9 forms that have been required since 1986 and punch them into E-Verify. If they could verify that all of the employees could work legally in America, then, fine, no problem, and that employer only has his other tax issues to worry about. But if E-Verify kicks any of those employees out--one or more--then the employer has 72 hours' notice to cure, like they would under any other circumstance, to correct any records that might need to be corrected. Otherwise, the IRS could look at that and say: Okay, this million dollars that you wrote off as a business expense is not a business expense. That goes back into the gross receipts and shows up at the bottom as net taxable income. If we do the math on this and break it down, what is the impact? Well, the impact works out to be this: If you have a $10-an-hour illegal and the audit comes in and says you can't deduct that $10 an hour, then the impact of it is that the employer then would be billed for interest and penalty and the tax liability that we calculated, I think, at around 35\1/2\ or 36 percent. That turns your $10-an-hour illegal into about a $16-an-hour illegal. Now, if you are going to have to pay $16 an hour, maybe you could actually hire an American to do that work. You wouldn't have to hire somebody that is sneaking around and that snuck into America. That is one way to look at this is it raises the cost. There is also a 6-year statute of limitations. Nothing goes backwards. There is no ex post facto in this. It would only be from the day of enactment. From that point forward, there could be a 6-year cumulative liability. So the first year that the bill would pass--hopefully, in this tax package that we have in front of us that is coming to us next week-- from the first year the bill would pass, you have 1 year of liability. And say the IRS doesn't audit you the first year. The second year, now you have 2 years of liability. That risk accumulates then for the period of 6 years, that statute of limitations. So, each year, the employer would see that they had a contingent liability: the IRS. If the IRS shows up and audits, they are going to go back at least 4 years, I am going to guess, maybe longer. That means that they are going to work to clean up their workforce. They can do it incrementally or they can do it all at once. But nobody is going to want to sit there with a 6-year statute of limitations hanging over their head. Madam Speaker, I include in the Record an article that is written by the Center for Immigration Studies, dated August 31, 2017, titled: ``Raise More than a Quarter Trillion Dollars of Tax Revenue by Ending Tax Subsidies for Unauthorized Employment of Illegal Aliens.'' [From the Center for Immigration Studies, August 31, 2017] Raise More than a Quarter Trillion Dollars of Tax Revenue by Ending Tax Subsidies for Unauthorized Employment of Illegal Aliens (By CIS) Aliens enter the United States without authorization for many reasons, but for most of them the goal is to secure employment at much higher wages than are available in their native countries. While breaking the law provides very significant economic benefits to these illegal workers and to the businesses that hire them, it comes at a cost to American workers. According to Harvard economist George Borjas, recent empirical research indicates that American workers suffer a reduction of $99 billion to $118 billion in annual wages because of illegal immigration. The economic rewards of unauthorized employment of aliens are not limited to the higher wages of the illegal workers and the lower labor costs of their employers. Unauthorized alien workers and their employers also enjoy multi-billion dollar tax deductions and tax credits that were enacted into law for the benefit of law-abiding workers and businesses. When Congress returns from summer recess on September 5, it is expected to focus attention on a major reform of the federal income tax system, including a combination of lower rates and other tax incentives to families and to businesses. The largest challenge facing tax reformers is finding sufficient additional revenue to pay for the tax cuts and tax incentives they promised to the people who elected them. In fairness to the American families and businesses to whom these tax cuts have been promised, and in particular to the American families whose household incomes have been diminished by illegal immigration, Congress should consider eliminating unwarranted tax breaks to unauthorized alien workers and their employers. Each of the following reforms--one that eliminates a tax subsidy for employers of unauthorized aliens and the other that eliminates a tax subsidy for the unauthorized workers-- comes with an estimate of the additional revenues that would be raised by the reform Together they could raise $296 billion over 10 years--more than a quarter-trillion dollars. 1. No Deduction for Wages Paid to Illegal Aliens. Section 162(e) of the Internal Revenue Code denies a deduction for ``illegal payments''. Even though it is illegal to employ unauthorized alien workers, the IRS has ruled that section 162(e) does not apply to the wages paid to those aliens, even if the employer knowingly broke the law. On January 3, 2017, Rep. Steve King and eight other members of Congress introduced H.R. 176, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, Section 2 of which would amend section 162(e) to clarify that no deduction is allowed for wages paid to unauthorized alien workers. H.R. 176 provides employers a ``safe harbor'', allowing a deduction to employers that used the Department of Homeland Security's free, online E-Verify system to confirm the employee's eligibility to work. The amount of wages paid to unauthorized alien workers cannot be known with certainty. One of the most extensive studies of unauthorized immigrants in the United States was conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center in 2009. According to that study, there were approximately 8.3 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. labor force, a figure that Pew more recently estimated had fallen to 8.0 million. Pew estimated the median household income of unauthorized worker families to be approximately $36,000 and that there were approximately 1.75 workers per household, implying median per-worker earnings of $20,571. Multiplying Pew's estimated number of unauthorized alien workers by the earnings-per-worker estimate yields an estimated total of wages paid to unauthorized alien workers of approximately $165 billion. Many unauthorized workers are employed in the ``underground economy'', i.e., by households and other employers that are not reporting or paying payroll taxes and presumably are not deducting the wages. A 2013 report by the Social Security Administration estimated that, of approximately seven million alien workers in various irregular work statuses in 2010, approximately 3.1 million (44 percent) had Social Security numbers (mostly false or fraudulently secured), while approximately 3.9 million (56 percent) were working in the ``underground economy.'' On the assumption that employers reported payroll taxes and claimed wage expense deductions only for the 44 percent of unauthorized workers who could produce an SSN, and that most employers deducted wages at or near the corporate tax rate of 35 percent, we estimate that disallowing a deduction for wages paid to unauthorized alien workers would increase federal tax revenues by approximately $25.4 billion per year (35 percent x 44 percent x $165 billion), or $254 billion over 10 years. 2. Deny Refundable Tax Credits to Illegal Aliens. Section 24(a) of the Internal Revenue Code allows a $1,000 per-child tax credit for taxpayer's whose earnings fall below a specified threshold. The Child Tax Credit is refundable to the extent it exceeds the taxpayer's tax liability, in which case it is referred to as the Additional Chad Tax Credit or ACTC. A 2011 report by the U S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration explained that aliens authorized to work in the United States are required to obtain a Social Security number (SSN). For aliens who need to file U.S. federal tax returns for other reasons, such as to claim refunds of withholding tax on dividends, the IRS issues Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITINs). Unfortunately, according to the inspector general, the IRS had been permitting aliens to claim ACTCs on returns that reported an ITIN rather than a Social Security number. The payment of ACTCs to illegal aliens is arguably a direct violation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (``PRWOA''), which expressly provides that an illegal alien ``is not eligible for any Federal public benefit.'' The IRS has applied the PRWOA rule to prohibit payments of Earned Income Tax Credits to ITIN filers, but based on a questionable interpretation of the law has allowed ITIN filers refunds of ACTCs. According to the Inspector General, ``[b]ased on claims made in Processing Year 2010, disallowance of the ACTC to filers without a valid SSN would reduce Federal outlays by approximately $8.4 billion over 2 years,'' i.e., $4.2 billion per year. Although the inspector general's figures are based on 2010 fiscal data, Treasury Department tax expenditure estimates indicate that the total child tax credit expenditure was virtually unchanged between 2010 and 2017. Accordingly, based on the inspector general's report, we estimate that limiting the Child Tax Credit to taxpayers with Social Security numbers would increase federal tax revenues by approximately $4.2 billion per year, or $42 billion over 10 years.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for organizing this Special Order and recognizing me to address it. I would like to say at the start of this that the folks that had the Special Order ahead of us had not read the bill that they were expounding upon, and it would be impossible for them to have done so. So I want to remind the body of that, Mr. Speaker, and then address the No Sanctuary Cities Act. It is this: that we saw what happened in San Francisco when the murderer of Kate Steinle had been deported five times. He was a seven- time felon, five-time deportee. He still came back, and he came to San Francisco because he knew that it is a sanctuary city, and if he got crossways with the law for whatever it might be, sleeping on the street or shoplifting or any of the additional felonies that were brought against him, they were not going to notify immigration officials. They were going to turn him back loose on the streets of San Francisco. If he was taken care of as an indigent, they would turn him loose on the streets of San Francisco. So Kate Steinle now lies in her grave, her family grieves for her loss, and America felt that pain. San Francisco is a sanctuary city, and now the entire State of California has declared themselves a sanctuary State. I think, Mr. Speaker, about the hole in the wall. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they had a spot in the canyon there where you had to ride through a notch to get in there, and they posted a guard there. All the bad guys that wanted to get along with the other bad guys in the West went in that place, and if law enforcement came, then they would line up against them and block them from coming in to enforce the law. That is essentially what we have got going on in city after city all over America: sanctuary cities operating under the erroneous idea that because their cities are so full of illegals, that if they would ever allow Federal immigration enforcement officials to work and cooperate with local law enforcement, those folks might not be in America. Well, I met with some people today at the Remembrance Project. These are the families who had their family members killed by illegal aliens who are in America. Many of these illegal aliens who killed Americans and killed other illegal aliens and killed people who are here and lawfully present in America, many of them had criminal records. Many of them had been interdicted by law enforcement, but the local jurisdictions decided it wasn't politically correct to cooperate with Federal law. Well, the Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land, and it is an enumerated power that Congress establish an immigration policy. We do that, and we direct that those laws be enforced. The executive branch's job is to do that. All throughout law enforcement, it has been seamless throughout all of my growing up years. I grew up in a law enforcement family. There was no separation. There was no segregation between city police and county law enforcement officers, the sheriff's department, and highway patrol and DCI and FBI. When there was a crime that was committed, everybody worked together seamlessly. How is it that these cities and now the State of California have carved themselves out an exception to what has been a timeless, time- honored, established cooperation between all levels of law enforcement? So the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act, which was my bill, is now sitting on Mitch McConnell's desk with the scores of other bills that the gentleman from Colorado has addressed, and it is one that says there will be no sanctuary cities any longer and that we will be cutting off funds going to these cities until they get the message. I think it is about time that the Justice Department moved on all of the jurisdiction that they actually have, but we need to help them here in Congress. And it is about time that this bill, along with Sarah's Law and Kate's Law, be moved off of Mitch McConnell's desk to the floor of the United States Senate. That is just a small piece of the broad picture we are addressing here tonight, Mr. Speaker. We need some action over in the Senate. If they would get rid of that filibuster rule, we would see more action than we are seeing today. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me, and I encourage him to continue this effort. I am going to stand with him on this. I thank him for all he is doing.