Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chair, my amendment is an amendment that is adapted from a piece of legislation that has actually passed this Congress in the past and is called the anti-salting legislation. And a salt is when a union often has an employee on their payroll, sends them to accept employment at a non-union operation, where their purpose there is to organize in favor of the union. It is really kind of a spy technique to define it. My amendment is actually pretty plain and pretty simple. And the operative language in it is that: Says nothing shall require an employer to hire an employee if that employee is in furtherance of some other employment or agency status. That is the standard that is in the legislation. And I would point out that this puts the employer in a very, very difficult spot. They will often be able to identify the salts that get lined up, and some of the practices that take place will be there will be companies that will have expansion opportunities, and perhaps they want to hire 100 employees and they have got the demand to do that, but they are afraid that they will be targeted by what I will consider to be labor organization practices that are designed to take grievances before the NLRB for the purposes of organizing within that company, and if they can't get organized within the company, then they are willing to take the company down, as exemplified by CR Electric's $80,000 costs, Construction Electric forced out of business, $32,000 in costs. Titus Electrical Contracting spent over one-half million dollars defending themselves against baseless charges. These things happen. And when an applicant comes forward before a merit shop employer and that applicant is clearly a salt from the union, then it puts the employer between the devil and the deep blue sea. He has two choices: He can either decide not to hire the employee, in which case there will be trumped-up charges bought to the NLRB which will cost them money; or, he can decide to take his medicine and do the hire, in which case if he does the hire, he knows that he has got an organizer there. Now, I support labor organizations' ability to do that. They have a right to collectively bargain. And that should be in place in this country and it is, and I am philosophically in support of it as well. But we can't be allowing these kind of tactics. This amendment is a simple piece of legislation. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. KING of Iowa. May I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chairwoman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chair, first in response to the gentleman from New Jersey, the language that is operative here that addresses the union membership issue that you raise says, ``in furtherance of such person's other employment or agency status,'' so they could hold two union jobs as long as the purpose of the one was not to undermine the organizations of the other. I have lived with union salting. I have seen it happening. I have seen scraper operators with a load of dirt drive into the mud hole, and then when we pushed him, went to push him out, they would put it into neutral and step on the fuel and act like they were trying, but they weren't. They were slowing down the operation before a union vote. I lived through this. I understand what union salting is. I support the organization of a union's ability, but I do not support the devil's choice that is given to the employer that takes down small businesses, breaks companies. We can't have that kind of thing in this country. The devil's choice, the spot between the devil and the deep blue sea, is where they find themselves. This lets an employer make a choice at the hiring as to whether that employee represents themselves for the job for the employment. Of course, they should have the job if they are otherwise qualified. This salting bill passed this House of Representatives in March of 1998 with a significant margin. We will have a vote up today on that. I appreciate that.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chairman, I have an amendment made in order under the rule.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to this modified closed rule today. Although several worthy amendments were offered in the Rules Committee last evening, and I am grateful I will have the privilege to offer one here on this floor later on today, but only three were made in order, and three of those that were not made in order deserve special mention, I believe, here in this rules debate that we are having. The first would be Representative Musgrave's amendment to repeal those provisions that permit employers to require employees to join or pay dues or fees to a union as a condition of employment, that being the right to work amendment. I have long supported that language, going clear back into the seventies as an employer and a small business owner. Secondly, Representative Emerson and I both submitted separate amendments that would exempt businesses employing 50 individuals or less from the legislation. Third, Representative Chabot attempted to exempt small businesses by using the Small Business Administration definition. I have spent my life in small business. I started one in 1975. I met payroll for over 28 years. That is over 1,400 consecutive weeks. I faced the regulations day by day by day, and one of the reasons I stepped into public life was to try to reduce the regulations that are so oppressive to small business. One of the things that you will realize when you are a small business owner and entrepreneur is that you have to be an expert in all things. You can't have a whole floor of lawyers that are there to sort out all the regulations, and you surely cannot have union members that are in there that are there to organize your employees in a fashion that is unfair. If you are a small business, and say you have 12 or 15 employees, and I actually saw this happen on a job where there were 18 heavy equipment operators back in the early '70s asked to vote on whether we would go union or not, and I know exactly how every single member of that crew voted today. I can name them. I can tell you how they voted. You know that in that kind of an environment. We are here without a secret ballot. That is what is taken away from this. I hopefully will be able to offer a motion to recommit based upon that. But that is the Charlie Norwood language that needs to be considered here. There has got to be a secret ballot to protect small employers' employees, especially because the intimidation effect is far greater in a small company than it is in a large company. If I can remember over a period of 34 years how they voted on that vote back on that job in the interstate in Iowa City, then you will know every week how your colleagues are going to vote. We need to respect the initiative of Charlie Norwood, our good friend. We need to protect small business. We need to exempt small businesses from this. We are not going to get that real debate on exempting small businesses here, Madam Speaker, and that is unfortunate. I appreciate the fact that this process has been opened up some, but I do think if there is an idea that is good enough that you can present it and say this should be etched in stone for all of America, which this overall bill does, this card check bill, then we ought to at least have the courage of our convictions and debate those convictions here on the floor of the House of Representatives here in the United States Congress. A rule that doesn't allow that then is a rule that tells me the courage of your convictions really aren't there.

Mr. KING of Iowa. My response would be I have no further speakers and 1 minute remaining.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentlelady from Colorado (Mrs. Musgrave).

Mr. KING of Iowa. If the gentleman would yield.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I bring an, actually, very simple amendment to the floor here. What it does is it just adds to the list of the issues that shall be considered by the President when considering one of the covered transactions. The simple language out of the amendment is that the President shall consider the potential effects of the covered transaction on the efforts of the United States to curtail human smuggling and to curtail drug smuggling. It covers a focus on human smuggling and drug smuggling. I support the underlying bill, and I recognize the important role played by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in protecting the American people and the security interests of the United States. One important piece of this legislation will require the President to consider certain factors relating to national security when deciding whether to prohibit the acquisitions, mergers or takeovers that this legislation is intended to scrutinize. The provisions of the bill provide the President with good criteria to use when deciding what actions should be taken to halt a merger acquisition, but it does not go quite far enough. Mr. Chairman, my amendment of this bill would add a simple and straightforward requirement to the subject matter of things that the President should take into consideration when making these decisions. My amendment would require that the President consider the potential effects of the transaction on our work to stop human smuggling and drug smuggling. This bill rightfully calls for the President to consider important factors relating to our national security, but it doesn't make any mention of the two important national security issues that threaten the United States, and we face it every day, and that is human smuggling and drug smuggling. To give us some background, in the year 2000, the Interagency Commission on Crime and Security in U.S. Seaports, reported that of the 12 major U.S. seaports that it visited, narcotics seized in commercial shipments at the 12 ports constituted 69 percent of the total weight of cocaine, 55 percent of the marijuana and 12 percent of the heroin seized at U.S. borders. Now that is the amount seized, not necessarily the amount that crosses across the border. There has been some effectiveness there, but we know the DEA has some numbers that also are shocking and might have a little different sense of proportionality. But not surprisingly, the commission also stated that smuggling of illegal aliens is a problem, and those same 12 ports in that period of time, 1,187 stowaways and 247 individual fraudulent documents arrived aboard sea vessels. This is something that needs to be focused on by the President, and that is just those that were caught. Of the many threats that face the United States in the global war on terror, we must closely evaluate every merger, every acquisition and every takeover that could put our country at risk, and especially those through drug and human smuggling and especially in this time when we are faced with this global war on terror. This amendment, I think, is an amendment that improves the bill. I support the underlying bill, and I appreciate the work that is done on the part of the Finance Committee and on the part of the chairman and the ranking member.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, for my bill, H.R. 997, inadvertently and by obvious mistake, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price) was listed as a cosponsor of the bill in error instead of the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Price). I would ask unanimous consent that we grant the request of both gentlemen, that the gentleman from North Carolina's name could be removed from H.R. 997. And I would apologize to both the gentlemen from North Carolina and Georgia who are named Mr. Price.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Welcome to the Speaker's chair and the gavel of the United States Congress. It is a big and important thing to serve in this place, and it is always an honor to walk down here on the floor. It is absolutely an honor to be seated there in the Speaker's chair that has seated so many esteemed colleagues on both sides of the aisle. And the kind of leadership that has come from there back through history, the halls and the floor here echo with their influence, and the destiny of America has absolutely been redirected by that seat and by that gavel, and will continue to do so. And I very much look forward to continuing to work in this capacity. I come to the floor this afternoon, Madam Speaker, to raise an issue here and carry on a discussion that is the most intense discussion item across America. And I would challenge anyone to walk into a coffee shop or a place of work or anyplace where Americans gather to talk about the issues of the day, and you don't have to change the subject, just stop and listen, ask a question and see what comes up first. Maybe the weather, maybe a sports team. But when it shakes down to it, Madam Speaker, and we have talked about all of the amenities and the niceties and the general discussion topics that don't have a lot of substance but carry on the day, in the end, in America we get down to one of two subjects, and that is either the global war on terror on which Iraq is a principle battleground, or it is immigration. And sometimes it is both. And having just come back from another trip to the border last week about now a week ago, and having been flush full of the things that I learned down there, I am compelled to come here to the floor, Madam Speaker, and raise the issue and begin to examine this subject and topic a little bit more. We have now, for about 3 years, had an intense debate and discussion on immigration, and there are those of us here in this Chamber, in fact, this House of Representatives last fall voted to build a double fence/wall on the southern border, and laid out the distances, the locations and the distances from those locations. And, when calculated and totaled up, it becomes clear that Congress has mandated, the House and the Senate has mandated that there be 854 miles of at least double- walled fencing, a double fencing or a double fencing and wall constructed upon our southern border in priority areas, Madam Speaker. And last week, I went down to review some of the beginnings of that construction. It also establishes a mandate that the Secretary of Homeland Security, Mr. Chertoff, will establish interlocking cameras and other technology along the border, and he has until May 31 of this year to complete the construction of the interlocking technology according to authorization of the Secure Fence Act, and another year to complete the construction of the double fencing and that 854 miles of that priority area. And then, with the exception of an area at Laredo that is 15 miles, that are 15 miles of either side of Laredo, and that those 15 miles can be constructed in the 2008 construction season on up until December 30 of 2008, that is the congressional mandate, Madam Speaker. That is the mandate that was passed by a significant majority here in the House of Representatives, and a mandate that was passed by a vote that I do remember in the Senate that was 80-19. It was bipartisan, obviously. It had very solid support. And the reason that it had such solid support is this physical barrier that is mandated by Congress and signed by the President, bipartisan mandate, House and Senate, Madam Speaker; these physical barriers or these pairs of physical barriers, double fencing and walls, are something that is not an administrative decision; it is not something that is necessarily prone to human failure or human error or human lack of will to enforce. If you put those barriers in there, they are going to do some good regardless of whether there is anyone there that is maintaining and manning and guarding them or not, which, of course, we need to do. And any kind of a structure that we put in place must be maintained, it must be guarded, it must be manned. It needs to have sensors on it. But these barriers will allow our Border Patrol officers and other backup enforcement officers that we have to be able to respond in a more effective fashion. And if they are going to defeat the barriers, it will take time to do that. And if they trip the sensors, and they should, that will give our Border Patrol officers an opportunity to descend upon that site and make the kind of arrests that are necessary so that the word gets out that there are areas of this border at least that you had better not try to cross. Now, this area in San Luis, Arizona is just south of Yuma. It is a community on the U.S. side that is as far southwest as you can get on the border in Arizona. This is a location that has had some rather permanent steel wall right on the border that has been there for some time, and we have added to that. Now, this permanent steel wall, this is a steel landing mat, interlocking landing mat that is welded together along that border, is being extended in both directions from San Luis. And I reflect also in hearing the remark from the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) that we need some 200,000 welders by the year 2010 or 2012, I forget which exact year that was. I have heard those kinds of cries for help before, and I have lived through those deadlines, and we always seem to come up with the number of people we need to do the job that is necessary. One of the things we do is we just simply pay people what it is worth and they show up to do the job. But if they are short about 6 or 7 welders in 2010, they can get ahold of Secretary Chertoff who picked up a welder down there and welded some of that steel wall together right on the border of San Luis, Arizona. And that also was the case with Senator Johnny Isakson, Senator Ben Nelson, Congressman Mike Pence. And I am not sure, that is the ones that I saw, there were probably others that also lended a hand, as I did, to weld some of that fencing and wall together. It was more symbolic than production, but symbolism does matter in this business, and it helps encourage the people that are down there building those barriers. And particularly, our National Guard that are down on the border, approaching 6,000 strong, they freed up at least 500 on-line slots for Border Patrol agents that can be up-front patrolling. And they are constructing fence and wall with the time that they have down there on the border. Their morale seems to be good. They act like they believe in their mission. I believe in their mission. I am encouraged by the fact that they are there, hands on, building, constructing, putting barriers in place, because this Congress mandated and the President signed, however unenthusiastically, he did sign the authorization of the Secure Fence Act that mandates 854 miles of double fence wall on our border. And then, after the mandate and the authorization, the authorization which is the mandate, then we heard continually from the critics across the country, well, you will never fund it. And if you never fund it, then it will never be built. So it was only, the allegation that it was only the part of Congress to just simply make a promise that we didn't intend to fulfill. And I heard that criticism all the way through the campaign season to November 7 and all the way beyond that well into December, and I have heard smatterings of it since then and questions that come from the media. And at some point last month, Congressman Duncan Hunter, who is the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee and former chairman, and a real leader on this fence on the border, and I and several others, did a press conference. Actually, it was Duncan Hunter and myself on that particular press conference. And we talked about how this fence will be built and needs to be built and must be built, and it is a congressional mandate. And I pointed to the line item in the appropriations bill that funds the Department of Homeland Security, and their overall appropriation is 34 point something billion dollars. And in that 34 point something billion dollars is a line item for double fence and wall and the technology that goes with it, the interlocking cameras and the other devices, and some of them now are ground based radar, funding for all of that to the tune of $1,187,000,000 and change. Now, that is the line item that has been appropriated. That money goes to only one thing, and that is securing our border with either technology or fence, and then the necessary support that it takes to get that done. We followed through, we mandated 854 miles of fence and wall, double, and we have appropriated $1,187,000,000. Now that is probably not enough to complete the whole 854 miles, but, Madam Speaker, it is a great start. And we have given a great start here in Congress and created this inertia and provided the mandate, and now the Department of Homeland Security working with the National Guard has got a beginning. I won't say they have a great start or that they have even a good start, but they have a beginning. And it is great to have a beginning. We are able to do hands-on on the beginning. It is a triple fence there south of Yuma in San Luis. So as I ask the question, Madam Speaker, of how effective are these barriers that we are putting here in place, the answer that I get back down there is: In that area they had interdicted 2 years ago 138,000 illegal border crossers in that area. And, since October, they had interdicted 15,000. Now, that is not quite apples to apples. You have to calculate it out so much per month, but you get the idea that it has been about two-thirds effective at this point. And as I ask the question, has anyone come through the area where we have this triple fence, this 12-foot high steel wall made out of landing mat steel, the 16-foot high steel mesh wall. And that is about 100 feet apart, and then as you come into the United States going north, then there is a 10-foot high chain-link fence like a school playground fence with about three or four bars on top, barbwire. Shorthand in Iowa as barbs. And there, they said that maybe about three people had gotten through that area. And upon further questioning, one or two through the waterway, one or so around the end. Had anybody defeated the area where it is triple fencing? And the answer was, they will defeat anything we build. They will find a way to get over, under, or through it. And, of course, then the follow-up question is: Has anyone defeated it yet, this fence we are looking at? And the answer is no. To date, no one has gone over, under, or through the triple fencing that is constructed there south of Yuma at San Luis. Now, I would like to hold that record intact. I don't know that we will be able to hold it intact, but I think it is important to note that that fencing has not been defeated yet. And, that as long as illegal border crossers have an option to go someplace else to go around, they are not going to try to go over, under, or through. And that will be the case as long as we have a fence that doesn't extend the full length of the border. Now, it is possible for us to supplement those areas where there isn't a lot of concentration of pressure on the border with technology, with ground-based radar, with interlocking cameras, with a quick response force, with teams that can go out and pick people up in the deserts that have 25 miles to walk to get anywhere where they can pick up any transportation mode once they get across the border. So we can use some of those kinds of methods, too, until it becomes inefficient in that approach and we have to go back to extending the fence, extend the wall, give the people on the ground some tools to work with. But continually, Madam Speaker, I get this answer when I ask our Border Patrol about the effectiveness of structures like fences and walls, and that they need more boots on the ground. And the answer is always: Whatever you will do to fencing, there are places where we need to do it in urban areas. We don't need to do it in rural areas. This is their answer. And, we always need more boots on the ground. That is the answer. The answer really isn't to build structure or to build wall. Well, I take issue with that philosophy, and I do so because of looking at it from a bit of a different perspective. That bit of a different perspective comes along like this. If we were to award contracts to companies and pay them according to the level of efficiency of being able to stop all human traffic coming across their sector of the border, stop all contraband from coming across their sector of the border, force all products, all contraband, all people, legal or illegal, through the ports of entry, that is our objective. That is what the laws that are established here in this Congress are about is forcing all that traffic through the ports of entry. In fact, that is what the law presumes that they go through a port of entry. So anything we do to direct traffic through the port of entry is the right thing to do. It has been a piece of wisdom for this country for a long, long time, well over 100 years. Yet we have people that argue well, no, we should just leave the border open, leave it unmarked. I plead sometimes, can't we at least string up a number 9 wire and mark the border, so if you are out in the desert you don't wander across into another country. There are miles and miles and miles of our southern border that are not marked in any way whatsoever, not a wire, not a post, not a fence are not a road, not a wall, certainly, and not a double fence, and not a virtual fence, virtually nothing is there. In fact, literally nothing is there. If you go into some areas of New Mexico, when they laid out the border, the border is marked by a concrete pylon that is about 5 feet high, poured on a base, about this big square, 5 feet high, tapers up, and has a little insignia on it that says this is a border. That concrete pylon will be standing on a ridge line, and then if you look way down the border, you probably cannot see it from the naked eye, miles away. Over on the next ridge line will be another concrete pylon, and that is another mark for the border. I will say that I think many people have crossed through that area and never known that there was a mark for the border because they didn't know where too look. These pylons, these markers were set up back in those old days with an old brass transit, with whatever power they had to set the cross hairs up, dial it in and look down range and then give the motion to the fellow on the other end, who did not have a walkie-talkie, did not have much optical equipment, but simply hand signals. Go ahead, drive your stake in here. We will put the pylon there. That is good enough for this border. But that is all we marked it with, is just concrete pylons from ridge line to ridge line, and there is not a barrier, obviously. So, if I were a contractor, and I were given the job to, say, guard 10 miles of border, and if the benchmark are for the amount of money that I would be paid for that job would be the amount that we are spending on the border today, that being $8 billion to protect our southern border, and that amounts to $4 million a mile, let's just say I were in the business of guaranteeing border security for 10 miles across the desert, and I went in and bid that at the going rate of $4 million a mile. Well, that would mean the Federal Government would pay me $40 million a year to guard that 10 miles of border. Now, what would a rational person do if that were their job to get 100 percent efficiency? If they had a contract, the amount of that contract would be deducted by the number of failures that you have? Let's just say the average crossing of interdictions last year across our southern border, 1,188,000. I mean, that was the number reported by the Border Patrol of border interdictions, that many fingerprinted and returned back to their home countries. Perhaps 155,000 of them were other than Mexicans. Most of the rest were returned back to Mexico. That many fingerprinted, you could divide that out, and I have not done the math. But you could figure out how many came through each mile on average, and then determine that if your mile was successful, we are going to pay you at your $4 million. Or if your 10 miles were successful, we will pay you at your $4 million a mile. If you didn't let anybody through, you are going to get to keep the whole $40 million, this year, next year, every year that you have the contract. We would be getting far more for our money than we are getting today for the $4 million a mile that we are paying and the $8 billion that it costs us to guard that southern border. I can tell you that I would go down, and I would bid my 10 miles or whatever link it was that I thought I could manage and handle. Then I would look at my contract for $40 million, and I would think, you know, for about $1.2 million a mile, I could build a concrete wall on here. I could put double fencing in. Maybe by the time I added interlocking cameras and some sensors and some interlocking ground radar, I may be even up to even $2 million a mile to build my double- wall fence with interlocking cameras and sensors. Now what do I have to do to make sure that no one gets through my 10 miles of border? I would simply have to sit back and watch my monitors, have somebody that is out there ready to respond if anybody does get through, but monitor the situation, and we can monitor into Mexico. We can monitor when they get over, if they should get over the wall, in the United States, and do a quick response and interdiction. I don't think you are going to spend a lot of money out of the remaining $30-some million. I may have to back up here, for 10 miles, if you built 10 miles, and you invest it all together up to $2 million a mile, then you have $20 million invested in that 10 miles. But you have a $40 million contract every year. Then you have got $20 million to work with in order to hire personnel to drive around in Humvees and react, respond, interdict. I would submit that you could hire a helicopter for that 10 miles and do that if you needed to guard it that way. There is plenty of money left over to apply the labor and the patrolling and the maintenance for the fencing that would be necessary. In fact, it would be minimal. It would be minimal. It would take far less labor, far less manpower, far less equipment, to monitor a border that has sealed barriers, barriers. Some of those barriers, to date, have not been breached by anyone. That is far more effective than simply an open desert that will allow people to run through, drive through, ride through on a motorcycle or a horse or a donkey or a Humvee or an ATV or walk or run, daylight or dark, winter, well, not much winter down there, but in rain, when it rains, or in a sandstorm when the wind blows. I will be far more effective to put the barrier in place. Yet when I ask the question of the Border Patrol, be it the union or be it the representatives of the Border Patrol and the administration themselves, their answer always is, we can take some structures like some fences in urban areas, because that gives us more time to react when they jump the fence, but it is going to take more boots on the ground. I have tried and tried in hearings to ask the question in a way that I can get an objective answer, what do we have to do so it takes fewer boots on the ground? I will pose this question this way, and that is, if we created an impermeable curtain that could not be cut, it could not be torn, it could not be penetrated, but a magic kryptonite impermeable curtain that would go from all the way up to the heavens all the way down to hell, and all the way, 2,000 miles from San Diego to Brownsville, if we could hang that there on the border, couldn't be penetrated, couldn't be cut, couldn't be gone over, and it couldn't be dug under, how many Border Patrol would it take then to patrol the border? I would submit that answer then becomes none except for any place where we would have ports of entry. I hope I have illustrated the logic of why we need to build a fence and a wall. This Congress understands it. They voted overwhelmingly to support it here in the House of Representatives just a few months ago, and the Senate, as slow as they are, to be proactive. As much as they like to let the hot coffee cool in the saucer of the Senate, they also moved, and three times they had votes on the floor last year to put a fence on the southern border. My very liberal Iowa Senate counterpart three times voted to put a fence on the border, and that vote in the Senate was 80-19. Yet I am watching the undermining that is taking place on the part of, to some degree, the administration. Also the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee is using his chairmanship to undermine current law. I am watching the undermining that goes on the part of some of the Democrat candidates for the presidency and people who essentially don't appear to believe in American sovereignty. Well, something that we need to simply know in America is that you have to make a decision if you are going to be a nation. If you are going to be a nation, and I will submit that over the last 200 years, the most successful institution of government has been the nation state. Can you imagine going to something other than the nation state? Can you imagine going to the city states that we had at the beginning of the industrial revolution when Machiavelli wrote his books, and when the cities became the center point of government and control, and everything revolved around the cities? What happened was that common languages sprung up, and they began to be formed and shaped by the people that had trade in commerce and travel in a common region. As the languages defined themselves, the borders of the nations also defined themselves along the lines of language. There came from that, the nation states, a common belief, a common history, a common form of communications currency, language, tied people together. They voluntarily moved together and established the nation states. Of course, the nation states have changed and shifted over time. We have tried to create unnatural nation states. Yet here in America, we came together in these 50 States of the Nation State of the United States of America, and we are unique in all of history. We are unique because what we have done is we have welcomed people from all over the world. Let me point out that we continually hear the statement America is a nation of immigrants, and it is stated to us over and over again, as if because we are a nation of immigrants, then therefore we cannot have a rational immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social and the cultural well-being of the United States of America. No, we simply have to open our borders, because immigrants came here and helped build America. If some is good, more is better. If some from anywhere is good, more from anywhere is better. That seems to be the logic and the rationale. I would submit there is a lot more to building an American exceptionalism than simply saying we are a nation of immigrants and that is all we need to know about this subject matter. No, this is a very deep, very complicated subject matter that ties together everything we know about history, everything we know about human nature, everything we know about sociology and biology, and the common sense of geographical origins that come along, and the commonalities of language, common interests, those things all tie us together. But what we have done here in America, founded a nation upon the rule of law, perhaps I will get to that a little bit later. But we are tied together by a common language. That is something that is not unique to the United States, a common language has defined nation states from the beginning. When we get away from the common language that fractures the nation state, and you become squabbling minorities that are bickering against each other, forming and shaping ourselves in ethnic enclaves and pitted against each other because one side of this aisle believes in rights of group rights and victimhood. The other side of the aisle over here believes in individual rights and personal responsibility and the commonalities of equal justice under the law. But the things that tie us together are a common history, common experiences, common goals, a common cause. But we couldn't understand those things if we didn't have a common language. This great experiment of America has been founded upon a common language. This common language ties us together. Then as we look across the vitality that we have within this country, this American exceptionalism that I mentioned a little bit earlier, you would be thinking in terms of where did this American exceptionalism come from? Why do we have it here, and why is that vitality nonexistent in many of the other countries that were donor countries to the United States in the form of the immigrants that they sent to us over the years, over the 200 to 300 years that we have received, accepted and welcomed immigrants into America? I would look back at that and think about my oldest ancestor that we can trace back, at least on my mother's side of the family. One of them would have been a gentleman by the name of Samuel Powell who came here, and he was a Welshman who came over here in 1757 to become an indentured servant. He landed in Baltimore. He had nothing. He pledged to work for 7 years to work off his passage to the United States. So he worked in the stables to work off his passage. This gentleman was kicked by a horse, crippled for life. We know that as there is a little hardbound book about it. Still, through the course of his lifetime, he was the father of 17 children, and those descendents fanned out across the country, and they added to the vitality of America, as many of the children of immigrants and the children of immigrants have. But there was something in the vitality of Samuel Powell, that vitality that is a component that exists within many, many of, and I will say most of, and perhaps almost all of those who come to America. That vitality gives them the courage and the confidence, the fortitude and the adventuresome spirit to get on a ship with everything that they have, mortgage their future for their passage, and come here to reach for their dreams in the United States of America. That vitality that gave them that courage and that confidence, that boldness of spirit was like a filter that skimmed the vitality off of the other civilizations and cultures around the world. As they got out of Ireland and Sweden and out of Germany and out of Italy, and as they came from other places around the globe and came here, and certainly out of Scotland and England as well, and this goes back to our history 100 years ago, as they came over here, they brought that vitality with them. Often we saw that vitality within them, and we identified that as a national characteristic that came from the country that they came from. One of the questions that I ask in my district, I have a wonderful Dutch region in the northwestern part of my district there in Iowa, and it is idyllic communities that are the best combination that anyone could ask for, the absolutely ideal combination of churches to banks to bars in a community. Plenty of churches and a lot of capital in the banks and just a few bars, not hardly any. And their quality of life, and it is strong, and the young children grow up and they expect to build their future in those communities. They are not taking that diploma and going somewhere else in the world to cash it in for the biggest paycheck they can get. Some do. Many come home. Many stay home, rebuild and build their lives there and have their children there, raise their parents' grandchildren right there within the same neighborhood. That is an ideal circumstance that they have. And I ask them, how is it that you have got such ideal communities here in the Dutch areas of Iowa, and I go over to Holland, and there they have abortion on demand, euthanasia, they have prostitution, they have legalized drugs. They have one of the most liberal countries in the world, one of the most permissive, but yet one of the most closed societies in the world where you could never go over there and become a Dutchman. And yet so many things that they do permit in that very liberal society are things that we would reject in our communities, and I have listed some of them. Why is it then that we have such a wholesome, rich community in an area that I have described in western Iowa, and we have the different environment in Holland entirely, and especially in the communities like Amsterdam? And their answer to me, with only a little bit of sense of irony is, well, the good Dutch came here. And, Mr. Speaker, I tell this story because it identifies the source of American exceptionalism. The good Dutch came here. So did the good English, so did the good Spanish, so did the good French, so did the good Norwegians and Swedes and Germans and Irish and all the way down the line. Western Europe were the first big donors to this American society that we have here. And we have also picked up a significant amount of exceptionalism and vitality from our neighbors to the south. And so I want to point this out and emphasize in a very serious way how important it is that we be smart and we be careful with our immigration policy and understand that we are defining an immigration policy that should enhance our economic, our social and our cultural well-being here in the United States of America in a selfish way. Any nation state should have that kind of an immigration policy. It should be promoting them. They should be building their future, whatever country they might be. We need to do it here. We need to set this American destiny on a glide path that soars way beyond the aspirations that I hear here in this place and that I even hear out in the streets of America where there is more optimism than there is here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. We need to set our destiny and control it from here, and we have got to have a vision, we have got to have a dream, and we need to understand the foundations of what has made us great as a Nation. And we need to be looking for new things, new principles, new ideas, new tools that might, just might, supplement the time-honored tradition and principles and tools that were gifted to us from God through our Founding Fathers that are the foundation of this great Nation. But American exceptionalism is one of them. The foundation of the rule of law is another one, Mr. Speaker. And in spite of all of the things that we read about in our history and so much of the glorious past and some of the marginal, shameful events that took place in our history, this Nation has been a Nation that has been grounded on, built upon, rooted in and a pillar of which is the rule of law. The rule of law is sacrosanct in America. And when we set aside the rule of law, it diminishes us all. It erodes everyone's constitutional rights when someone else is given a pass by the law. And so if we are allowed to drive down the highway at 70 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone, and if we pass the Highway Patrol, and even if they happen to pull us over and they say, well, you know, everybody breaks the law, so I am not going to write you up on this 70 in a 55 zone, then pretty soon everybody drives 70, and they will push it up to 75. If they don't get a ticket at 75, then they may go 80. They will drive as fast as they can until they get scared. Then they will slow down a little. That is human nature, and we have known that from the studies on our highways. But too low a speed limit breeds contempt for the rule of law, but enforcement of any speed limit breeds respect for the rule of law. The same is so with our immigration laws, Mr. Speaker, if we have immigration laws that are not enforced, or the foundation of this rule of law is it applies to everyone equally. So if our immigration laws are not enforced equally to all people in this country, then also it breeds contempt for the law. And if we allow the contempt for the law to be bred, then it undermines the rule of law, it undermines this Constitution, and it weakens the rights of individuals. This Constitution I carry in my pocket all days. I have sworn to uphold this Constitution, and I will do so. It is an oath that I take seriously, and, in fact, in spite of some of the news that has come down here, that we don't swear in to the new Congress on the Bible, some of us do bring our Bible down here and do swear in on the Bible, and we take that seriously, as did George Washington. And some of us, in fact, all of us, should add ``so help me God'' when we take that oath. But this Constitution is the foundation for our law. And, in fact, it is the descendant of the Declaration of Independence, the foundation for our law. It is the framework of justice in America writ large. It is the framework of government in America writ large. And we need to adhere to the language that is here and the intent that is here and the original text that is here in this Constitution, Mr. Speaker. And I continue to intend to do that, and I am sworn to uphold this rule of law. And so when I go back to my district, and we have had a finally, at long last, a Department of Homeland Security raid on some of the meat packing around my neighborhood, within the adjoining States and within the State of Iowa, and about 1,282 individuals were picked up and loaded up, and charges were brought against many of them for immigration violations and also for fraudulent documents and document theft. When that happens, and there were truckloads of hogs that were stacked up waiting to go into the packing plant, and there wasn't enough labor there, and actually the plants were temporarily shut down. The hogs had to stay on the trucks. There were a few that were lost. Most were not so badly treated. That is one of the elements we don't talk about so much. But also families were affected, children were affected, and we have debated across that. But when I go before the pork producers and they say, we need to have people in these packing plants to process our livestock, we have got to have a market for the livestock that we raise, we have got to make sure that they can harvest on the days they are supposed to be, and that meat can be processed, packaged and delivered to the meat case so we have got a continuous supply and a continuous flow of our product, however urgent they sense that to be, however focused they are on the problem that is in front of them, and remember, people have a tendency to look at the world through their straw. It is rare for us to step back and look at the big picture and try to add up all the components, or look at the world through somebody else's eyes, let alone look at the world through everybody else's eyes if we would could possibly do that. And that is partly my job is to ask people to look at the world through somebody else's eyes. And so as they say, we need that labor, we can't be shutting down plants because of illegal labor, we have got to find another solution, that is no solution. I ask them, point blank, I understand how important this is to your industry, but are you willing to sacrifice the rule of law in America to be sure that it is convenient, and that you don't have to go out and recruit for labor someplace other than outside the United States for people that will come into the plant? Wouldn't you rather maybe pay a couple bucks more an hour and hire people that are already here, hire some of the 30 percent of America that are high school dropouts; hire some of the 69 million people in America that are simply not in the workforce, but are of working age? We only have about 6.9 million working illegals in America, Mr. Speaker, and we have 69 million nonworking, not in the workforce, Americans. So wouldn't a logical Nation just look around and say, well, let's try and hire? First we would go hire some of those folks that are on unemployment. And we are not at a historically low unemployment level. That was 1.3 during World War II. And I recognize that was all hands on deck. But still we have quite a ways to go, and we can drop more than 3 points before we get down to the levels of unemployment that we had during World War II. But that is not enough to fill the gap. And if we take the people that are on welfare now and that are hirable, and maybe if that is half, and that might be a lot, you put those together with those that are unemployed. If you take the 4.4 percent unemployment and take that down to 1.3 percent, World War II levels, and then reach in and hire half of those that are on welfare and put them to work, you still don't have enough people there to replace the 6.9 million working illegal immigrants in the American workforce. But where you can find them is to go into the 69 million nonworking Americans that are not in the workforce, many of whom are presumably healthy and can be hired. And the answer that I get when I propose that is, well, they aren't in the right place. They don't live where we need them. They are not sitting there next to the job. And so therefore, we should what? Let's go 2,000 or 3,000 miles away and go get some people out of a different country and bring them here, against the law, to replace the need for a workforce that you could replace if you just simply went someplace else in America and put some people in a car, on a bus, on a plane or on Amtrak and send them down there. I mean, I can give you an example, Mr. Speaker. When the raid came in on the Swift and Company at Marshalltown, Iowa, and they picked up about 90 workers there, so presumably there were 90 jobs that were open at that moment, there was a couple, an African American couple, from down in the Dallas area that loaded up and drove from Texas all the way up to Marshalltown, Iowa, went to the H.R. office at Swift and Company and said, we would like to have a job working here processing this meat. We drove a long ways to get here, and now we would like to resettle to Texas, to Marshalltown, middle of the winter, Texas to Marshalltown for those jobs. That kind of answers the questions that there are jobs that Americans won't do. At least there is a personalized example of it, Mr. Speaker. And statistically there are many. But the argument that the people aren't in the right place doesn't hold up. In fact, the Okies weren't in the right place in the '30s, and they loaded up the things that they had, like the Clampetts in a way, and went on off to California and built the economy out there, and they must have been pretty good because the economy blossomed in California after the arrival of the Okies. And so people can be transferred for labor. There was a mass migration from the American South to the industrial areas in the Northern States that took place also about that era. And I recall that as that migration took place, we saw concentrations of African Americans moving into the industrial cities. Detroit would be a good example of that. Cleveland would be another good example of that. They came and they took the jobs and went to work. They were good- paying jobs. They did their jobs, and they raised their families there. And some of those young people went off to college, became professionals and moved off. Others went back and went to work in the same plants that their parents did. But I recall, Mr. Speaker, reading an article in the Des Moines Register some years ago. They had gone into Milwaukee and picked a 36- square-block neighborhood in Milwaukee, and it was a neighborhood that was totally inhabited by people or descendants of that migration from the gulf coast Mississippi area that came up into Milwaukee to take the brewery jobs that were good-paying jobs then. Now, that was back in the '30s, and now, by this time, oh, about the turn of the last millennia, I will say, maybe 1998 or '99, they surveyed those, every house in that 36-square-block area. There wasn't a single working head of household in all homes in that 36-block area. And the article was full of lament as to why government couldn't figure out a way to move some jobs up there to Milwaukee and establish those jobs close enough to the people that lived there that didn't have work that they could then have jobs again. Well, how did government fail the people that are sitting in that 36- square-block area, 6 blocks by 6 blocks in Milwaukee? How did government fail was the focus of the article. And, Mr. Speaker, I will point out that government didn't fail. It never was government's job. It wasn't government that moved them from the gulf coast up to Milwaukee in the '30s, and it wasn't government that moved the Okies from Oklahoma to California in the '30s. It was the promise of jobs that relocated people. They did it on their own. I mean, after all, that is how the illegal immigrants got here, wasn't it? Billboards in Mexico. People migrated up and took the jobs. People move for jobs. I have done it. Many of us have done it. In fact, most of us have done it. And to imagine that Americans can't relocate to take a job is a pretty weak position to take if you are going to set the direction for the destiny of America. But the rule of law, the rule of law is a pillar, it is a foundation, it is essential. And we are embroiled in a central debate here in America on this rule of law. Now, the Senate will be introducing legislation next week that will be comprehensive immigration reform. That is White House language for we are going to take some people that are here, and we are going to give them the path to citizenship. And you are going to hear an argument and a debate about what is the right, the just, the true, the appropriate path for us as a Nation, a compassionate Nation, yes, a Nation that cares about all people, not just within the borders of the sovereign State of the United States of America. We care about the well-being of people all over the globe. No Nation has been generous as the United States of America has been. We have provided more resources for more people. We have sacrificed more lives for liberty and freedom. We have poured more treasure out to the rest of the world than any nation in history by any model or comparison that anyone can create or come up with or convolute, for that matter. And yet we are being accused of being a cold hearted, unkind Nation because we have an obligation to control our borders so we can define ourselves as a Nation. And I will argue that if we give amnesty to the people that have broken our laws and who are in violation of our laws and unlawfully present here on the soil of the United States, if we grant them amnesty, we have kicked aside the rule of law. We have knocked the pillar out, the foundational pillar, from underneath this great citadel of the United States of America. And if the rule of law is gone, what then holds up our values here? What then supports this Constitution that I have put back in my pocket, Mr. Speaker? How do we argue ever again that there is a foundation that exists that we should adhere to the rule of law, that we should respect and protect and defend it, how could we, if this Congress granted amnesty to law breakers in America, gave them a free pass at the encouragement and behest of the White House and the administration, who are focused on this, at the encouragement of the left wing liberals in the United States Senate that are advocating for open borders because they know they can count the masses of illegals whether they are here legally or not, whether they are ever allowed to vote or not, they know that it provides representation here on the floor of the United States Congress. There are Members of this Congress that won't need more than 30,000 votes to be re-elected or elected to this Congress. They are the ones that represent districts that are full of illegal immigrants that are counted in the census for reapportionment purposes. So my 600,000 people, where it takes over 100,000 votes to get re-elected in my district even in a nonpresidential year, has less representation per capita, the citizens in my district have less representation per capita than the citizens in the districts that have high concentrations of illegal immigrant population, because we draw the lines around about 600,000 people. And if there are 400,000 illegals in a single district, that means there are only 200,000 citizens. And if they go to the polls and register and vote, that means there might only be 50,000 of them that will actually vote that are of the age to vote and that will take the trouble to do so. That is a gross distortion of the intent of our Framers, and it is clearly a distortion of the concept of our Constitution and it is a distortion of the understanding of equal representation that the taxpayers and the citizens of America expect from us. We need to address that. But before we do that, we are going to need to address this amnesty issue, this amnesty question, that will be before the Senate shortly and expecting to come over here to the House some weeks or months after that. What is amnesty, Mr. Speaker? Well, it is a simple question for a person from my perspective. If you have a law and the law exists and someone breaks that law, if you reduce or eliminate the penalty for the law that they have broken after the fact, you have provided them amnesty, whether you do it en masse in a group or whether you do it as an individual. I guess as an individual you could call it a pardon. I will say amnesty is a mass pardon for people who have violated an existing law for which there is an existing penalty, and if that penalty is eliminated or reduced, then that is amnesty. Now, that is not a hard concept to understand. Something that I think the vast majority of the American people will understand. I am very confident that Ronald Reagan would have understood. He signed an amnesty bill in 1986. It was one of only about two or three times that that great man let me down. But at least he had the clarity and the conscience to say this is an amnesty bill. He called it an amnesty bill. He signed it, and he also said, and we expected, that there would be enforcement of existing laws. And what happened from 1986 was the enforcement of existing laws diminished gradually over time to the point where in 2005 only three employers were sanctioned for hiring illegal employees. Only three. Now, in this virtual world, I call that virtually no enforcement in the workplace. Virtually none. In fact, when I went down and welded on the fence, I really wanted a virtual welder and a virtual welding rod and a virtual hood so that I could weld some of that virtual fence that I think will only virtually stop people in the end if we don't have the manpower in there to do the job. And I think we have to put up literal barriers to get this done and we can't rely on virtual anything because we will virtually go through a lot of semantics, linguistic semantics, to be able to reach our political goals, but the subject matter and the efficiency is what we need to be after here, the rule of law. Amnesty. There can be no amnesty, and that is where this fight will turn. That is where this debate will turn. That is where it is going to turn in the Senate, and I said last year that those that supported an amnesty bill will be marked with the scarlet letter ``A'' for ``amnesty,'' and they will be held accountable by the voters in the ballot box. And the House and the Senate heard that call and the threat and the danger of those that came close to losing their jobs over there and the ones that are worried about it in 2008. And yet I heard we lost people here because they were for border control, and it is interesting to me that those couple of Members, only two that I can think of, were very strong on border security lost elections last fall. Their opponents, the ones who defeated them, also were advocating for strong border enforcement and employment enforcement in the workplace. So I don't think there is a case that anyone lost an election because they were for border security. I think there were those that were jeopardized because they came late to the subject or they didn't understand the conviction of it. But most, if not all, made some commitment at some level that they are going to support it. Stop the bleeding at the border. Get it under control. Push all traffic through the ports of entry; all human traffic, legal and illegal; all product, both contraband and legal product, through the ports of entry we should support that in this Congress unequivocally. There should be no effort to undermine that and there should be no effort to create a scenario by which we can turn a blind eye to illegal crossings on the border. That is something that is sacrosanct that all of us should agreed to. And I would challenge anyone to stand up now or later, and I would be happy to yield: Do you oppose the idea that we secure our borders and seal them so that all traffic will go through the ports of entry? If anybody wants to oppose that, I will be happy to yield. I don't think that is going to happen. That is number one. Number two means we have got to enforce our employer sanctions, and employers have to understand that if they are going to knowingly and willfully hire illegals, then we are going to have to knowingly and willfully, with our enforcement mechanisms, go in there and punish the employers that have a business plan that is premised upon the hiring of illegal labor. And that happens all over this country. I am watching it happen and it is permeating us more and more, and our resistance is breaking it down more and more. Do we have an amnesty plan for employers that are paying corporate income tax off the profits that they made off the backs of cheap labor at the expense of America's middle class? This middle class is forever shrinking because we are growing an upper class. The elitists believe they have a right to cheap labor, the servant class, as they see it, whether they admit it or not, and the growth of this lower class, this servant class that is coming. No nation ever failed because of a lack of cheap labor. Can anybody look back at history and name a single nation that didn't have enough cheap labor; so their economy collapsed? I would say none. It has never happened in all of history. But many nations have descended into a squabbling cacophony of minorities that couldn't get along, that didn't have a sense of nationhood, didn't have a sense of common history, didn't have a common language, didn't have literacy skills or job skills but simply pulled the whole system down and put pressure on the social services. The wait that is there, we are growing our lower class, that class that the elitists see as a servant class, and we are growing our upper class because of the prosperity that comes really from the Bush tax cuts that we have had for 2001 and 2003. And as this growth continues, the upper class grows, they think it is all to their credit. Now, they earned a lot of it. They got their education. They invested their money wisely. They worked hard and smart and they made money, and I am glad they are building their million dollar mansions. Maybe one day an older used one will be a good place for me to spend my retirement. I am happy for them. And they will move out of a modest home so someone with a more modest income can move in there. It is a natural progression. But they have no right and essentially have no birth right to cheap labor to enrich them. America has been about expanding the middle class, making it broader and making it more prosperous. And this immigration policy, or, I should say, a lack of enforcement on this immigration policy, is shrinking the middle class, compressing them so they can't make the upward mobility, and it is narrowing the middle class because these 30 percent of the high school dropouts that don't have a high school education and a greater percentage that don't have a college education as a cumulative total at least, those people are dropping off into the lower class too. And where are their opportunities, Mr. Speaker? Where do they go to get a job? How does someone with, say, my background, only the age of 17 or 18 or 19 or 20, get started in where my life has been, in the construction business? If I had walked out on the pipeline at age 19 and asked for a job to swamp on the bending crew so I could run 10 miles a day in the dust with a hard hat on my head and get thrown around on the end of a piece of pipe in August going through the cornfields, they wouldn't give a job to a kid today, some blue-eyed white kid that walked up there and wanted a job, because there would already be some people there who had arrived in the United States that were cheap illegal labor that would work cheaper and give them less trouble and those that wouldn't have a workers' comp claim because they would be afraid they would be deported. There wouldn't be an unemployment claim. They wouldn't be any unemployment, any workers' comp. There wouldn't be any lawsuits. They would either show up on time or somebody else would show up to take the job. It is a lot less trouble to work with people that are living in the shadows because they are afraid that the spotlight will come on them. And so you have a meek, docile labor force, and an employer that is making a rational decision with his capital is going to go that route. And we have enabled it here in the United States of America, and now we have become dependent upon a pretty good size supply of illegal labor. And every day that goes by, another person, another company figures out a way to make some profit off of the illegal population that is here in the United States. And I feel a little guilty that I sold my construction business to my oldest son because he has to compete against competitors who will be knowingly and willfully finding that avenue to hire that cheap illegal labor, and he has to find a way to be more efficient so he can compete against them because he is going to follow the law. I know he will follow the law. That is the way he is raised, that is the way he believes, and that is his conviction. Those that follow the law are at a disadvantage today because they are being undermined by people who premise their business on hiring illegal labor. And here we come to the financial institutions that are issuing credit cards to people that don't have a Social Security number. What an outrageous thing, to see large banking companies decide they can find a way to turn a profit and undermine our immigration laws in the United States and essentially provide another avenue that is going to encourage people to continue to break the law, come here, stay here. But amnesty, Mr. Speaker, is a central question that is before us. Will we uphold the rule of law or will we kick the pillar out from underneath the United States of America? Will we stand on the principle of no amnesty no time for people who have come in here illegally that we will uphold the rule of law, we will enforce it? And the people who are going to advocate for amnesty, and it will be coming out of the Senate and it is coming to this floor in here in the House of Representatives sometime within the next few months, that path to amnesty needs to be a trail of tears. And that is a trail of tears that needs to be created by people on the streets of America, in the homes, in the backyards, in the schools, in the churches, in the workplaces. They need to get on their phones. They need to get on their e-mail. They need to call their Members of Congress. They need to write letters to the editor. They need to call the talk radio shows, write articles and get them printed. They need to gin up their neighbors. They need to come to the streets and stand up for the rule of law and oppose amnesty and put that scarlet letter ``A'' for ``amnesty'' and brand those that stand up for amnesty here because if you stand for amnesty, you are opposed to the rule of law, and there is no other way to measure this. And you can't say to someone you are going to go to the back of the line. They are not going to send them to the back of the line. That is not in the heart or the head of the White House. It is not going to happen. Those that are here illegally, the only way they could go to the back of the line would be to have to go back to their home country and get into the line behind the people that are legally in the line from their home country. No one has advocated that, Mr. Speaker. That is not going to happen. They don't want to disturb the lives of the people who came here to live in the shadows. They want to offer that they come out into the sunlight and grant them a path to citizenship. And if that isn't a blatant definition of amnesty, I have no idea what is. But there is actual a serious discussion about we could make them pay a fine. We could penalize them by making them learn English. Penalize them by making them learn English? I think that should be a privilege and a goal because that will give access to the American Dream. But if you are here as a criminal, and there is an objection to that term, but if people have come into the United States illegally, then they have violated a criminal misdemeanor for illegal border crossing, unlawful presence in the United States, and that is punishable by deportation. That is the punishment that needs to be there. There can't be anything less. And to have them pay a fine of $1,500 when a coyote is going to charge $2,000 to $3,000 for a trip into the United States just says, well, the path to citizenship is for sale for $1,500. If you can scratch up the scratch to do that, we can give you a path to citizenship. And the United States Senate and a lot of the liberals here in the United States House would say, Fine. Here is your green card. Here is your path to citizenship. Forget about that part about breaking the law and getting your reward for breaking the law, but be a good citizen otherwise. How can anyone who is given a reward for breaking the law and gets to go to the front of the line, how can they respect the rule of law? How can anyone who is given a reward for breaking the law and gets to go to the front of the line, how can they respect the rule of law? How can it be when you get stopped for speeding, if they give you a ticket to speed, or if you get arrested for robbing a bank and they say, well, okay, but we are going to give you amnesty, take the loot and go, be happy; but just forget that one time we didn't enforce the law on you, and so for now on respect the rule of law? Madam Speaker, it does not work that way. That is not the nature of humanity. Humanity is going to follow this path of least resistance; if they see an opening, they are going to go. And if they have an opportunity that we give them, that we grant them, they are going to take it. And not only they will have contempt for the rule of law, a million back in 1986, that turned into 3 million because of the phony identification and the corruption in the Reagan amnesty, they and their descendants and their friends and their neighbors, almost all of them believe that amnesty is a good idea because they were the beneficiaries of amnesty; just like a bank robber that gets to keep the loot thinks robbing banks is a good idea and will go back and do it again if he runs out of money. Now, think about doing that with 12 million or 20 million or, by the numbers that came out of the Senate the last time, 66.1 million would be legalized by the Senate version. That would be the cumulative total of all who were naturalized in the United States in all of our history. I thank you for your focus, Mr. Speaker.

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 am privileged to be recognized by the gentleman from Eastern Iowa and privileged to have the opportunity and the honor to address you, Mr. Speaker, on the floor of the United States Congress. A lot of things have transpired since we took the week off from this Congress for the Presidents' recess, we call it, which was really a work period back in the district. And our constituents and those in the State of Iowa and in some of the areas north and east of us went through a severe, severe ice storm that tens of thousands of them are without power as we speak. And I know that you and I have an eye on that very closely, and we do though have a great confidence in the resiliency of the human spirit back in the Midwest, and friends and neighbors will step forward to do all they can. And what is within human possibility will be done and things will be taken care of there, Mr. Speaker. So having that off my mind, I take up the subject matter that I came to address this evening. And it has been some time since I stepped here on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, to talk about an issue that is the number one issue as I go around western Iowa and Iowa and other places in the country and have meetings with individuals, town hall-type meetings. Whenever a group of people come together, if you ask questions, stand and listen, eventually the subject of immigration will come up. And it has been the most intensely watched subject and discussed subject perhaps over the last 3 years or a little more, Mr. Speaker. I recall when President Bush gave his speech that laid out his vision on the immigration reform, and I believe the date was January 6 of 2004. I am not off by more than a day, if that. And that speech started us down this path and this Nation of having an open dialogue about what kind of a Nation we are and what kind of a Nation we are to become. And this is something that has embroiled most of the discussion across the country. Everybody has an opinion. It is a good thing, Mr. Speaker, a healthy debate. I recall when Pat Buchanan ran for the Presidency back in 1966, he said: I will call for hearings. I will force a debate on this country. We have got to have a national debate so that we can come to a consensus and put this country down the path towards its future. We have been intensively debating this issue of immigration for the last 3 years, and that would be all of 2004, 2005 and 2006 and we find ourselves now into 2007. So I would say we are about 38 months into this intense discussion, and the results we have from this are hard to measure at this point. One of the reasons is because it is a very convoluted and complicated issue. We have a configuration here in America that doesn't necessarily promote the right kind of policy. I say that, I am cautious about how I address it, because first of all, I will recognize that there are employers who have premised their business plan on hiring illegal labor. I can recall in an agricultural hearing that I attended in Stockton, California last year, there was a lady there, there was a witness, before our Agriculture Committee who ran, I believe it was organic, a truck farming operation where they raised peppers and those kinds of vegetables down south of Yuma near the border. Her complaint was, well, we set up these farms in processing and we need over 900 people a day to operate the harvesting and the sorting and the packaging and the shipments of this crop every day. Now that we have done a better job of enforcing the border, then her lament was that they have a turnover of 9 percent per week, 9 percent of their labor supply per week, it is about 80, and they are having trouble filling their labor supply. So I asked the question, where did you expect your labor supply to come from when you placed your business close to the border? And the answer was, of course, well we expected our labor to come over from Mexico and come work on our farms and then go back to their homes. Well, that would be illegal labor working on farms south of Yuma with the idea that was the plan from the beginning. Now, the request was, come to Congress and ask us to legalize this illegal behavior. It was a planned strategy from the very beginning of the setup of the business operation. I lay this out because this is not a unique circumstance across this country. In fact, it is becoming a standard practice. I am seeing it more and more again as businesses set up to run their operation, whether it is going to be food processing or farming or maybe a dairy operation, and they decide, we are going to need labor to do this. We would like to go forward with our plan and put our infrastructure in place, invest our capital, buy our cows, get our equipment up and get an order in. We will have to hire some illegal labor to milk the cows. I had a dairyman tell me a couple of weeks ago that 51 percent of the milk in this country are milked by people that don't speak English. That doesn't necessarily indicate they are illegal immigrants in America, but that would indicate that a significant percentage of them most likely are. That is some of the scenario. Some of the scenario on the one side is business interests that can capitalize on cheap labor. Believe me, when you pour millions of people into a labor market that are illiterate and unskilled that will work cheaper than anybody else, you are going to drive that labor down. There was a report that was issued here within the last few weeks that shows that the unskilled labor in America has lost 12 percent of its earning capacity because they are flooded. There was a report on Fox News about a month ago that we have a 30 percent high school dropout rate in America, 30 percent dropout rate. So if the students in high schools are dropping out at a 30 percent rate, and we are bringing in illegal labor that will work for the cheapest price, it seemed to me, and we know this to be a fact, that the competition between our high school dropouts and the people that didn't go to school, many of them, from foreign countries that come in, would be clashing in competition for those jobs that require a low education. Maybe they require a strong back and some resilience and persistence. But the opportunity for undereducated, especially young people in America, those dropouts, those that go on to get a college education, those opportunities, are going to people that are living sometimes 22 or 30 to a house. They will work cheaper than anybody else. What has happened is our young people that don't want to go off to college, maybe they are not blessed with the ability to do that, maybe they just decide, I want to punch a clock, I want to wear a blue collar, not a white collar. I am happy enough to go do some labor for my life, but leave me alone. Let me take care of my wife and my family. Let me go fishing once in a while, but I don't really want to go off to college and study. Those opportunities are diminishing significantly in America. What that spells is the narrowing of the middle class in America. We are doing a good job of educating the people in the higher end, those that go off and get their master's and their doctorate. Those will become professional people that often start out at college at six figures and go up from there. That part, that percentage of our population is growing significantly. I am grateful that is the case. We have encouraged a lot of young people to move off into the professions, and they are doing that. That is to the credit of our educational system in this country. So the upper class is expanding, and there is money being made. We have had unprecedented economic growth thanks to the Bush tax cuts, both rounds in 2001 and in 2003. We have had this unprecedented string of growth. That has helped lift investors up, lift entrepreneurs up, and, of course, the professionals have been lifted up also because there is more money in the market. So the upper class of America is growing and expanding and prospering. The lower class in America, that unskilled cheap labor, is also growing in numbers, but not growing in prosperity. As we see the stratification of this society, and think of it in terms of a healthy America that once had a growing ever-more-prosperous middle class is now becoming an America that has a growing, ever-more- prosperous upper class, a growing ever-more-prosperous lower class, and a shrinking more suppressed, more constrained middle class. That is the scenario that is driven by illegal immigration in America, and illegal immigration in America keeps us from having a legitimate debate on the subject matter of how we might go about recruiting the best people we can find to come into the United States, those that will assimilate the most easily, those that bring their already trained skills, those that will be contributors instead of those that are drawing down off of the public system. Those will be contributors in the first day, the first week, the first month, the first year. They are across this world with good educations, and they would love to come to America, and they fit into our economy. All you have to do is teach them their ZIP code and their area code and hand them a cell phone, and in a week you wouldn't know that they were not born here. They would assimilate into this culture and into this civilization. But we can't carry on a reasonable discussion about how to skim the cream of the world off like we used to do, bring them into America so that we can enhance this American exceptionalism. We can't get there because the entire debate has clouded because we are not controlling our borders. We are not stopping the illegal traffic at our borders. We are not doing an adequate job of employer sanctions, although we have had some significant efforts of late, and that means that there is a magnet that draws people across the border. That is the issue that we are dealing with, and the price for Americans is horrendous. I went back down to the border last week. I spent 2 days down there. I flew into Phoenix and then took a ride from Phoenix on down to Yuma. I joined Secretary Chertoff there at the Yuma station along with the chief of the Border Patrol, David Aguilar, and a number of Members of Congress and a couple of Senators. We went down south, just on the south edge of San Luis, which is the most southwesterly town in Arizona on the Mexican border. There, for some time, they have had about a 12-foot high steel landing mat wall placed almost exactly on the border. That has been the only barrier that they have had between the two semiurban areas that are there. Well, here in Congress, last fall, we passed the Secure Fence Act, and the Secure Fence Act mandates that the administration build not 700 miles of fence, but 854 miles of double fence/wall on our southern border in the most priority areas that are defined in the bill. Those priority areas, when you go back and you measure the distances there in the bill, it adds up to 854 miles. One of those priority areas is San Luis where we went to visit. At that priority area, they are beginning to construct fencing there, and at least it is a start. I can't call it a great start or a good start, but at least it is a start. They have a start to building the kinds of structures we need to stop the illegal crossings that are taking place at our border. There with about 12-foot high steel landing mat wall which each of us stopped and took a turn welding on there a little bit, I wish I could have stayed and gotten a little work done, it felt kind of good, but there we lent a hand to continuing construction of the wall on the border. Inside about 100 feet, they had constructed a 16-foot high steel mesh fence, and that has got a metal frame on top of it. The steel mesh is essentially impenetrable unless you take a torch or something to cut it with. So from the steel wall on the border, 100 feet back, 16-foot high steel mesh fence or wall, and then another about 40 feet and there is about a 10-foot high chain link fence with three to four barbs on top, it looks like a playground fence, actually. As we discussed the effectiveness of the structures that they had put in place, and we are continuing to construct at San Luis, Arizona, I asked the question if anyone had made it through that area since they had gotten the triple fencing up. The answer came back, well, we have had several that have made it through here; but 2 years ago, there were 138,000 illegal crossers who were interdicted by the Border Patrol in that area. Since October of last year, until just last week, they were now down to 15,000 that had passed across the border. Now that is not a full year, obviously, so it is not quite apples to apples, but it is significantly fewer illegal crossings there. But then I asked the specific question again, has anyone gone through this area where the triple fencing is? The answer is, well, we think, maybe, yes, three. How did they get through here? A couple of them perhaps went through the waterway and maybe one went around. The next question, of course, was more finely tuned which is, has anyone defeated this triple fencing yet? The answer is, no, they have not defeated the triple fencing, but they said they will; all structures we put in place will be defeated. We have to work, we have to maintain them. I have to agree. I think you have to maintain them. I think you have to patrol them. I think you need to put sensors on them so you can identify if somebody is trying to climb through over the top or under the bottom or cut through, and that, I believe, is in the mix. So we did a driving tour on the border and from there, San Luis, drove along the east, along the border, and the triple fencing reduces down to double fencing. The 10-foot chain link doesn't go all that far yet. It is being extended. Then pretty soon the 16-foot high second layer of fence is under construction, but it is not there either. You are just down to the steel wall, and not very long after that, the steel wall is gone, and you are left with the construction of the steel wall that is being put in place. It extends from San Luis off to the east. If I remember right, they were going to extend it about 19 miles to the east. We are a long ways to go on that yet. But we got up, in a couple of Black Hawks, and flew the border then going east from there, in the southwest corner, all the way almost to Nogales and then turned around and went on up to Tucson. As you fly along the border, you will see there are places the border isn't even marked. There is just sand, not a fence. There is a little trail on our side, and there is a Highway 2 on their side. But there is not a mark of where the border is in many of those locations. It has been an easy prospect for people on the Mexican side of the border to drive along on Highway 2 in Mexico, decide they want to go to the United States, turn the steering wheel off of Highway 2, go out across the desert to the north, and end up on a road 10 or 20 miles to the north, driving through the desert and come out on that road, and, voila, they are home free in the United States of America. That has been going on consistently and continually. It is being done by people smugglers; it is being done by drug smugglers. So along that stretch, they are constructing also a vehicle barrier. And this vehicle barrier exists of, I believe it is 5 inch by 5 inch steel tubing that is driven in on about 5 or 6 foot centers with that tubing welded to it at about bumper high on a vehicle or on a pickup truck, and then concrete poured inside those posts. That does keep most of those vehicles from crashing through, so it makes pedestrians of people who want to come to the United States. It is a little slower way to travel through the desert. We happen to have discovered, I don't know, 25 or 50 miles east of San Luis, a group of about 20 illegals who were perhaps about half a mile into the United States, and they had clustered around the base of a mesquite tree. As we turned the helicopters around and we turned back to take a look, the rotor wash on a Black Hawk is pretty severe in the desert, and it was something that encouraged them to head south rather briskly. So they headed south towards the Mexican border, and we apparently called for backup and then moved on. But there in broad daylight, a half a mile north of the border with traffic going back and forth on the Mexican highway on Highway 2, were a group of about 20 illegals, working their way across the desert. If we run across them with the type of, I will say, helicopter caravan we were in, then that was not an anomaly. That was something I would say would be standard practice that goes on a daily basis. But most of the activity, Mr. Speaker, takes place at night. And I have gone down on the border at night and sat on the fence in the dark and listened, and just listened, not with night vision equipment but just listened. And over time, you hear vehicles come in from the Mexican side and drive with their lights off down through the mesquite brush, stop by a big mesquite tree about 150 yards south of the border, let their cargo out, which were people and packs and you can hear them get out. You can hear them drop their pack on the ground. Presumably they pick them back up again. There will be some hushed whispers and then, Mr. Speaker, they will, single file, come walk through the mesquite brush through the fence, and I am talking about a place further east in Arizona where there is a fence, and climb through the five barbed wire fence. You can hear the fence kind of squeak and you see the shadows. You can't really count shadows, especially when you are sitting there in the dark. It is awfully hard to be certain of what you see, but it is not that hard to be certain of what you hear in an environment like that. So I will say dozens infiltrated around me the night that I sat down there, Mr. Speaker, and perhaps 20 there in broad daylight as we flew by with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Chief of the Border Patrol, and two Blackhawk helicopters that make a lot of noise, and you can hear them coming quite a long ways off, still didn't deter the daylight illegal crossings taking place. And as I look at the numbers of those who are coming across that southern border, and I would direct anyone's attention to the testimony before the Immigration Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee in the 109th Congress, Mr. Speaker, and also in the 108th Congress, where we had a number of witnesses that testified for the Border Patrol or the Border Patrol Union when asked what level of interdiction do you have of those that are crossing the border illegally, what percentage are you able to arrest? And their answer has consistently been 25 to 30 percent is all that would be interdicted. So, Mr. Speaker, their testimony also shows that last year, the Border Patrol on the southern border, the 2000 miles of our Mexican border, intercepted, 1,188,000 illegal immigrants who were seeking to cross our southern border. Intercepted, 1,188,000, and now we are to that point where we fingerprint them all, at least that is what the testimony says, and that their fingerprints go into the record so we can track them if their's are duplicate or triplicate or have been stopped a number of times at the border. And at some point we need to be running out of patience and bringing charges against them, lock them up, make them serve their time and then deport them. Some of that is happening, but our patience level is very high. But of the 1,188,000, I don't have the precise numbers committed to memory, but as close as I can recall, it was about 742,000 that were first time crossers, and the balance of that, the difference between 1,188,000 and 742,000, that 400-some thousand number represents those who crossed the border illegally that year more than once, two times, three times, four times, seven, eight times on up to 17 times, would be one of the numbers that I have heard as they looked at those records, Mr. Speaker. This is something that we are spending $8 billion to protect our southern border. That is $4 million a mile. And we are getting 25 percent to 33 percent efficiency out of that. And we are picking people up over and over again. And if they voluntarily deport, we simply take their fingerprints, identify them, take a digital photograph of them and take them back to the border and let them go back through the turnstile, say, at Nogales or Naco or San Luis or wherever there might be a port of entry. This enforcement at the border has been weak and it hasn't been relentless. The year before it was a 1,159,000. And this stopping one-third, one fourth to a third calculates out to be something like four million illegal border crossers a year. Four million. If you take the 1,188,000 and you say it is a fourth, multiply it times four and then just kind of round it back to four million, that four million illegal crossers turns out to be 11,000 a night, Mr. Speaker. And we are in a discussion across this country today about 7,000 Iraqis that the administration wants to provide refuge in the United States for by doing background checks and clearing them and bringing them here so that they will not be under the gun, so to speak, in Iraq and they can be pulled away if they happen to be targeted by the insurgents and the enemy for helping the United States. That concerns me that we would be bringing people out of Iraq when they need people there to help rebuild their country. And it concerns me that we would have a number that large, and I would seek to reduce that number, if we could, shrink it down as much as possible, do background checks as intensively as we can because I think it is a national security issue and how many al Qaeda could be infiltrated into that 7,000 Iraqis that would want to come in here that would be authorized by the administration, and how many more might there be if we open for 7,000. But by the same token, the relative risk of having 7,000 Iraqis that we would have identified by name, by fingerprint and been able to at least verify some of their activities over the last 5 years or longer in Iraq, the relative danger to the United States pales in comparison to 11,000 illegal immigrants a night trickling, pouring, infiltrating across our southern border. 11,000. I mean, we are approaching twice, some nights it is twice as many as the 7,000 Iraqis. The 7,000 Iraqis are still a significantly sized number. But the southern border takes on a number approaching twice that many every single night, without any background check, without any check whatsoever, people coming into this country; some to come to work, some to pick lettuce, some to get jobs working in food processing and restaurants and hotels and motels and you name it across the country. It is still a violation of American law. It is still a crime, Mr. Speaker. But the worst parts of this aren't rooted in individuals that are seeking a better life, although we must enforce our laws if we are going to be a Nation that has the rule of law. But what is really chilling is the elements that come with that mass of humanity, those elements that come in with that $65 billion worth of illegal drugs that comes across our Mexican border every year. Mr. Speaker, I repeat, $65 billion, with a B, dollars worth of illegal drugs being brought into the United States across our southern border. And the drugs are, the four major drugs, methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and marijuana. And the sources of them work out to be about like this, the methamphetamines, many of them manufactured in Mexico, from Chinese pseudoephedrine products. Now we have taken the Sudafed off the shelves here in the United States, most places in an effective way so that we have taken the local meth cooker pretty much out of business. And the meth that was coming into my part of the country in Iowa and your part, Mr. Speaker, was about 90 percent Mexican meth until we passed the law that took those pseudoephedrines off the shelf in our pharmacies and in our grocery stores, limited those quantities. People can still have access in limited quantities. When we did that the DEA tells me now that the methamphetamines that are being sold in our part of the country, in Iowa, Nebraska and that Midwest area, it was 90 percent Mexican. Now it is 97 percent, and the balance of that trickles in from other places, maybe a California lab, maybe a few local labs, but not much. 97 percent now out of Mexico. We expected that. And we freed up a lot of officers time that are not having to clean up the dangerous meth labs, and put those officers in a better position to interdict the drug dealers. But the meth coming from Mexico, made from Chinese pseudo ephedrine that gets brought into Mexico in numbers way beyond the level of colds that they have down there for the number of people that they have, and that ought to set off some alarm bells. But that is being smuggled in. The meth is being smuggled across the border into the United States in massive supplies, numbers at least over 90 percent of the meth that is used in the United States now coming through, the raw product, the base product out of China to Mexico, manufactured in Mexico, shipped into the United States. That is the facts of methamphetamines. Much of the marijuana comes from any place south, a lot of it raised right in Mexico, and tons and tons of it hauled across the border. I happen to have been down there, it was in the middle part of last May when we interdicted a pickup truck that had about, let's see, it had about 200 pounds of marijuana packaged up in bales and sealed up in tape that was underneath a false floor in a pickup truck, Mr. Speaker. That was just simply a decoy load that was designed to pull the enforcement off so the larger load could go through. I don't know if it actually made it through, but that is the kind of thing that is going on. Tons and tons of marijuana coming into the United States across the border, Mr. Speaker, a lot of it raised right in Mexico. And then we have the heroin that is smuggled in, and that heroin, a lot of it, also comes out of China. And those of us that have visited over in Afghanistan in the poppy fields understand how that works. We have the Taliban that are engaged in the poppy and in the opium trade. They will front the crops in Pakistan, walk out into those farming areas along on the east side of Afghanistan that match up against the border with Pakistan, and pay for half of that crop upfront to the grower, to the farmer. It is a nice little crop agreement, and they pay for half the crop upfront. They come back when the harvest is done. They load up the poppy seeds/opium and pay for the other half of the crop. The farmer comes off fine because he doesn't have to haul any crop. He doesn't have to take anything to town. He gets paid upfront for his input costs and he gets paid for his harvest. And off goes the opium then, hauled away by the Taliban, who sell it out of Pakistan into China and out of China over into Mexico and up into the United States. And, again, we are funding our enemies, Mr. Speaker. And the smuggling routes that go from Afghanistan through Pakistan through China and across into Mexico, up into the United States, are routes that are understood pretty well by our DEA. And let me see. I left off one other drug, Mr. Speaker, and that is cocaine. And if one would notice, a lot of that cocaine was getting into the United States perhaps through our airports before 9/11. We shut that down and provided a significant amount of security at our airports after that. Drug dog sniffers, a lot more sophisticated screening process. When that happened, the Colombians had difficulty delivering their cocaine into the United States, and finally they cut a deal with the Mexicans so that they could use the distribution of the Mexican drug cartel families to flow their cocaine up into the United States. So across our southern Border comes 90 percent of the illegal drugs that are used in the United States of America because those conduits that come out of Colombia, out of China, two different varieties out of China, and then the marijuana that is mostly raised in Mexico, all of that coming across the border, coming through illegal border crossings, coming across places where the border is not marked at all, and the drug cartel families that control those crossings fight for those. And the numbers that we have seen that have been killed in the drug wars in Mexico for 2006 exceed the number 2,000 deaths, the people that were murdered in the struggle for who is going to control the turf, who is going to control the profit. And the cities on the south side, Nuevo Laredo for one of those, that area has become a lawless land that is controlled by the drug cartels. I will say that the new President of Mexico has stepped in to crack down on some of that. The jury is still out on how successful he might be. But these are important components here for us in the United States of America. So here we are with this dynamic growing economy, the strongest economy we have seen in my lifetime. The continual growth quarter by quarter by quarter that is stimulated, of course, by having a competitive low tax environment. And with an economy that has this kind of dynamism, we are able to pay for two things that come from foreign countries that have hurt us greatly: one is the illegal drugs, the $65 billion worth coming across the Mexican border; and another one is paying for Middle Eastern oil and enriching the people over in that part of the world, many of whom are our sworn enemies, not our sworn friends. So we are funding our enemies by purchasing illegal drugs in America, and we are funding many of our enemies just simply because we are involved in purchasing oil to come into the United States. And we are more and more dependent on Middle Eastern oil, not less and less dependent. But I am here to talk about the immigration issue, the illegal border crossing, Mr. Speaker, and the component of illegal drugs that are part of that. And I mentioned the 2,000 murder victims on the Mexican side of the border that were killed in the drug wars. And we will hear the testimony continually about how many people die in the Arizona desert trying to come into the United States. And as the weather warms up and we get into May, June, July, and August, the hotter and hotter it gets, the more victims there are in the desert. And it is sad and it is a tragedy, and we are doing some things to stop that. But I will argue that if we build some more fence, we build some more barrier, we can save some more lives down on that border. Those lives are a concern, Mr. Speaker, and we talk about them regularly and continually here in this Congress. The lives that we don't talk about are the lives of the Americans who die at the hands of the criminal elements that come into the United States. And it has been politically incorrect to discuss such a thing as if we should just sit back and watch our citizens killed on a daily basis. Preventable crimes and we shouldn't utter a peep because somehow or another it might be interpreted as something that is based upon anything other than a love for the rule of law and the enforcement of law and the respect for the value of human life. But I stand firmly in respect for the unique intrinsic value of human life, from conception, fertilization, to natural death. That is my record for more than 10 years in public life, Mr. Speaker, and it is my stand today. It has not changed. It will not change. And I stand for the defense of the American people so that they can be safe in their homes, on the streets in their communities, in their schools, in their workplaces, in their churches, wherever they gather. The American people need to be safe. So I began to ask the question, Mr. Speaker: How many Americans die at the hands of those who do make it across the border and across the desert? I didn't have a concept of what that number would be, Mr. Speaker, until such time as I asked the question in the immigration hearing. I asked it a number of times of different ranks of witnesses that were there. The question again was: How many Americans die at the hands of those who do make it across the desert? And one of the witnesses, his answer was: ``I don't know the answer to that question, but I can tell you it would be in multiples of the victims of September 11.'' Now, that, Mr. Speaker, is a stopper when you think about such a concept. And when he uttered that concept, it started me thinking, and shortly thereafter I commissioned a GAO study, and the study was specifically designed to ask that question, how many Americans die at the hands of those who do make it illegally across the border? The study came back. It took about a year to get the study done. It wasn't quite apples to apples. That is the nature of things in government sometimes. But it did put some facts in place that could be indexed to other existing studies and other existing data that the government has produced. So I shut myself up in the Library of Congress sometimes for several days to be able to concentrate hard enough to pull that data out of that report and use other reports and match them in so I would be able to compare apples to apples. And it comes down to something like this, Mr. Speaker: twenty-eight percent of the inmates in the prisons in the United States, Federal and State, are criminal aliens. Twenty-eight percent. Now, if you presume that those 28 percent are committing crimes in the same proportion of the rest of the inmates, since there are no records out there, you have to presume that 28 percent of the rape; 28 percent of the robberies; 28 percent of the grand theft auto; 28 percent of the first, second, and third degree murder, manslaughter, all of that is committed by criminal aliens. And there is no rationale that it could be anything else unless it would be more rather than less. So I take that 28 percent, and I multiply it, and we have about 16,400 murders in the United States annually. And you take that times .28 and you come up with a number of something like 4,513, perhaps, would be the number of American murder victims representing that 28 percent, which is the population of our prisons that are criminal aliens. Now, that is a huge number and already that is more than the victims of September 11 on one day. But that would be an annual number. And then if you look at some of the other fatalities out there, the highest group of fatalities are those victims of negligent homicide. Most times, negligent homicide, Mr. Speaker, is the case of the victims of drunk drivers; not the drunks themselves, but the victims of the drunk drivers. So as people come into the United States illegally, climb behind a steering wheel, drink and drive, often uninsured, not knowing our traffic laws, not having a sense of responsibility, but running into victims on the streets of America, that number is a number a little higher than the 4,500 or so that are victims of first and second degree murder and manslaughter. But the negligent homicide, mostly victims of drunk drivers, runs a little higher. But it boils down to, when you do the math, shake it down to a day, about 12 Americans every day murdered at the hands of criminal aliens. Statistically, that is a solid number that has been tested across this country. I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, it is a number that the liberals hate to hear, but they have produced no competing data that can challenge this GAO study data that has been multiplied into other government data like crime rates to come up with these numbers: About 12 Americans a day, first and second degree murder victims or manslaughter victims, dead, buried; about 13 Americans a day die at the hands because of negligent homicide, most of them victims of drunk driving. All of these crimes, Mr. Speaker, all of them are preventible if we enforce our immigration laws. If we would deport those people when they run afoul of the law, if we are able to control our borders, get operational control of our borders, force all traffic, all human traffic, all contraband, all cargo, everything that is coming across the border through the ports-of-entry, and then beef up the ports-of- entry, focus our surveillance there, probably have to widen them and put more personnel down so we are not backing traffic up, but if we could force all the traffic through the ports-of-entry and do a good job there, we would theoretically interdict all illegal human traffic, all illegal drug traffic. We would also occasionally interdict a terrorist who is seeking to sneak into the United States. I happen to know of seven individuals who were persons of interest from nations of interest, which is a government euphemism, Mr. Speaker, for someone who is a likely terrorist who hails from a terrorist spawning or terrorist sponsoring country. I know of seven. When they are identified, picked up by the Border Patrol or whatever the arresting officer happens to be, there is a little window there to find out about it. Then they are handed over to the FBI, which then makes that case classified. At that point those officers can't talk to me or anyone about it after that. So if they told me about something that happened today and the FBI picks them up 5 minutes from now and takes them into custody and says this is now a classified case, 10 minutes from now they can no longer even repeat the things they said to me 10 minutes ago, because it is now formally a classified case. So I have a little 24 hour window to hear about this. My network is not that good, but I know of seven. I don't know how many that is altogether. It might be 70. It is probably well more than 70 persons of interest from nations of interest, people who we think are at least likely terrorist suspects coming across our southern border, sneaking into the United States, wishing us ill will, ready to act on that ill will. That threat is there too. The crime element, the drug element, the terrorist element, all of that is added to the depression of the value of our labor force here in the United States, in fact the lower skilled being pushed down by reducing their wages by 12 percent because of the millions who have been injected into that market. We have gotten dependent upon it over the years. Mr. Speaker, this part about the violence perpetrated against Americans is something that I have given the broad statistics of 12 victims a day of murder, 13 of negligent homicide, 25 altogether. Almost every single day the casualties of Americans at the hands of criminal aliens, most of that preventible if we enforce our laws, those casualties are almost every day greater than the numbers of American casualties in Iraq. They absolutely total up to be something that are in multiples of the victims of September 11. These are Americans that need to have their lives protected. We need to have our laws enforced, we need to get operational control of the border, we need to have cooperation at the local law enforcement level, Mr. Speaker. To personalize this a little bit, statistics are one thing. We can talk about statistics. Some people understand the magnitude of that. Some people understand personal pain and evil people. So, I have picked a selection of evil people here, Mr. Speaker. My number one evil person is this individual here. His name is Angel Maturino Resendiz. He is known as, and we will recognize his name, the Railroad Killer. This individual for nearly 2 years, a 39-year-old illegal alien from Mexico, literally followed America's railroad tracks to rape and kill unsuspecting victims. Resendiz struck near the rail lines that he illegally rode and then he stowed away on the next freight train that came his way. He is responsible for as many as 15 serial murders, and the victims' ages range from 16 to 81. He attacked his victims with rocks, sledgehammers, shotguns and tire irons, sometimes in their homes, and sometimes he stole money for alcohol or drugs. Most of these murders took place in central Texas, but it is suspected he killed as far north as Kentucky and Illinois. He has been apprehended by the Border Patrol in Texas and New Mexico eight times within 18 months, and he had been, and I emphasize this, voluntarily returned to Mexico each of those eight times in those 18 months. Eight times he volunteered to return to Mexico when he was stopped by the Border Patrol, and then he would come back into the United States, and sometimes it happened quite quickly, come back to kill again. On June 1, 1999, there were State and Federal warrants outstanding for Resendiz and there were intensive efforts underway to arrest him. Border Patrol agents in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, apprehended Resendiz. He was illegally crossing the border again, and he voluntarily was returned to Mexico, even though there were outstanding warrants on him. The Border Patrol was unaware that there were warrants out, but he was on the FBI's top 10 list. Still, picked up as an illegal border crosser and voluntarily returned, self-deportation, so-to-speak, back to Mexico. How does this happen, that an individual that is in the FBI's top 10 most wanted list, we have him in our hands eight times, and this time, on June 1, 1999, while there were outstanding Federal warrants, we couldn't index his fingerprints to that data there with the system we had in 1999 and put this man behind bars before he killed again? But we couldn't under those circumstances. I am advised that today, everyone that is picked up is printed and their fingerprints are run through the database, Mr. Speaker, and presumably we would catch the next Resendiz perpetrator. It didn't happen in 1999. So they released him, and Resendiz, after he had gone back to Mexico, immediately found his way back into the United States, where within 48 hours he killed four more innocent people. He was finally traced and captured by a determined Texas ranger in July of 1999, and then he was ultimately executed at Huntsville, Texas, June 27, 2006. This man here, Angel Maturino Resendiz, killed at least 15 people. Now he has been executed as of June 27, 2006. But it is something that could have been prevented, Mr. Speaker, if we had had an intense effort to enforce our border. When they come through the second time, if we are not willing to use the fullest extent of the law at that point and provide a deterrent, these kind of things happen. What was he afraid of? He surely wasn't afraid to be picked up again on the border. He knew he would be returned back to Mexico again. Finally a determined Texas ranger hunted him down. Thank God for that kind of effort and that kind of man. Now, that is Resendiz, Mr. Speaker. That is the face of evil. It is not the only face of evil, but that is a face of evil. He is one of those who contributes to those thousands of Americans who have been victimized in the fashion I have described. This is another one, Mr. Speaker, Raul Gomez-Garcia. Many of us know this story, and this will take us into the discussion of the situation that exists in Denver and in many of the cities across America that have established a sanctuary policy. This case has been brought to a conclusion with a conviction and a sentencing, and I can talk straight up about it. Raul Gomez-Garcia, a cop killer. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison for second degree murder, not first degree murder. But as the police officers that were guarding a family celebration which I understand was Raul Gomez- Garcia's family celebration, I believe it was a christening or a baptism of a daughter of his, Raul Gomez-Garcia left the party and went to come back in and they would not let him back in because he didn't have identification or whatever the reason was. At any rate, Gomez- Garcia lost his temper and on May 8, 2005, ambushed two officers, Officer Donnie Young who was shot in the back of the neck, I believe, and killed, and Officer Jack Bishop, whose bulletproof vest saved him when he was shot in the back by Mr. Gomez-Garcia, and who immediately escaped to Mexico. The way I recall this case, we knew he was heading that way. As he got into Mexico, he believed he had sanctuary there. The policy was Mexico wouldn't extradite murderers to the United States if they were faced with a death penalty, which would be the case here for this kind of a crime. And then over time because the Mexican courts had ruled that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment and therefore they were not going to send their citizens to the United States to face a death penalty, no matter what kind of a crime they committed, and the disrespect for the laws here in the United States that come from the courts in Mexico I think cannot be overlooked, either, Mr. Speaker, but that was the position that the Mexican courts took, that the death penalty was cruel and unusual, and so they found some people that they wouldn't encourage to come to the United States. That was those people who were provided sanctuary within Mexico who hid behind the decisions made by the Mexican courts and Mexican laws. Then over time the same court ruled that life in prison was also cruel and unusual punishment. So what would be appropriate punishment for an individual like this, Raul Gomez-Garcia, who shot two cops, killed one, the other one saved by his bulletproof vest, ripped Donnie Young out of his family's life, left a daughter without a father, and put all of that pain and agony on the community and on the family and the neighborhood and put a wound into this Nation, and absconded to Mexico and the Mexican courts say even life in prison is too cruel and unusual for someone who commit such a cruel and unusual act? So the prosecuting attorney had to cut a deal. He had to lower the charge to second degree murder where the maximum sentence was 80 years in prison which Raul Gomez-Garcia received at his sentencing that took place last October 26 in Denver. But the big problem with this is Raul Gomez-Garcia had been stopped a number of times by the Denver Police Department. The sanctuary laws that they have in Denver say that they can't inquire into the lawful presence or the immigration status of anyone that they stop. Therefore, Raul Gomez-Garcia was released each time he was stopped for his traffic violations, car accidents, whatever the incidents of confrontation might have been. Gomez-Garcia was allowed to go back on the streets, back behind the steering wheel, back behind a gun, back behind the backs of two police officers and shoot them in the back, killing Officer Donnie Young. All of this could have been prevented if we sealed our borders, stopped the bleeding at the borders; and failing that, when Gomez- Garcia arrived in Denver with his first encounter with the Denver Police Department, he should have been picked up and deported back to Mexico on the spot. That is what the law says. But Denver says they are a sanctuary city, and that means they want to be a welcoming place for people who come here illegally. The price that is paid is the life of Donnie Young. I think it is a tragedy and it is amazing to me that the citizens of Denver will put up with a policy that will protect murderers within their midst and not enforce our Federal law. And the very idea that because you are local law enforcement and you have a few city ordinances and speed limits and issues like that to enforce, the very idea that because you are a city police officer you don't cooperate or enforce Federal law is anathema to a Nation that is founded upon the rule of law. I grew up in a law enforcement family, and there was no concept in those years that any law enforcement officer was absolved from enforcing any of our laws. Can you imagine a Nation or a world where only Federal agents could enforce Federal laws, and only State agents could enforce State laws, and Highway Patrol officers could only enforce the State speeding laws, not the local speed limits, and your city police officers could only enforce the city ordinances and the local traffic laws? And county officers, what are they going to do? They don't have enough ordinances to enforce anything. All they could do under this kind of rationale would be serve papers and keep the jail and maybe leave us otherwise alone. It is not conducive to a free state to have sanctuary policy or to live under the delusion that you don't have the responsibility to enforce immigration laws because you happen to be wearing a blue uniform of a Denver Police Department. The result is Denver police officers, shot, killed by Gomez-Garcia, who had no business being in the United States and we had many opportunities to send him back to his own country and keep him there or incarcerate him here in the United States until he had paid the price for the others crimes he had committed. Here is what is shocking to me, Mr. Speaker. Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman said the case, Gomez-Garcia, ``sends the message that Denver and its criminal justice system stand behind the police.'' How does that work? How can you stand behind the police when you have Gomez-Garcia standing behind the police and putting bullets into them, and you have picked up and turned the very man loose that you had the opportunity to stop before he took one of your fellow officers? That is what happens with a sanctuary policy. Donnie Young was one of thousands. The face here is another face of evil, Mr. Speaker. And the face of the victims are not here on this floor tonight, but it is a tragedy just the same. And I have another tragedy. This is Jose Luis Rubi-Nava. Now, this individual has been arrested and he has I believe been indicted on other charges, so we are going to say ``allegedly.'' I am going to put allegedly ahead of the things I say about this individual, understanding I don't believe he has been convicted at this point. He is innocent until proven guilty, but these are the news reports that I am referencing. He was arrested in April 2006 for other crimes. He is an illegal immigrant. He could have been deported back to his home country. He could have been incarcerated for the other violations he had, but he was released back into the community, again because of a sanctuary policy, and again this is Denver, the suburbs of Denver. So we have Jose Luis Rubi-Nava of Glendale, Colorado, who is charged with one of the most horrendous crimes that I have heard about in my years in dealing with these things, and that is the dragging death of a female whom we believe was perhaps his common-law wife, a live-in, or a romantic friend whom he allegedly tied a rope around her neck and drug her behind the car for over a mile and left her body about 20 feet outside a driveway in a suburban area, in a suburb of Denver. In reading the report, the gory streaks on the street were more than a mile long and they had to wash the streets to clean things up after the perpetration of this horrible crime allegedly committed by Rubi- Nava. This crime is just among the most horrible things that I have ever heard, and yet the Denver police persist. They buried one of their own, Donnie Young. The mayor's sanctuary policy is what they have to live by I recognize. I am not hearing from the police department that we should stop all of these sanctuary policies. Instead, I am hearing the police chiefs say we take care of our own; we enforce the law. But I hear things like statements made in this case, Denver police have no reason to believe someone is in the country illegally; therefore, they do not contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. If they stop somebody, and any common-sense person, anyone with half a brain, could figure out that they had an illegal immigrant on their hands because of the identification, because of maybe a Mexican driver's license, maybe because of a matricula consular card, which is almost proof positive of unlawful presence in the United States. There is no reason to have a matricula consular card unless you are here illegally, Mr. Speaker. No, the Denver police would argue we have no reason to believe he is here illegally, and therefore, we cannot take action; therefore, we will release an individual back on the streets again and hope he does not drag somebody to death or shoot somebody in the back or run over them as a drunken driver. This kind of tragedy, this kind of evil, Mr. Speaker, has got to be stopped. I have laid out just three cases, and I have discussed perhaps about 17 murder victims in these three cases. That average, I do not know if it is high or low across the perpetrators of capital crime. Mr. Speaker, I can tell you that if you are the family members of any of those victims, you are not thinking in terms of numbers or whether it is a high or a low number of people that were killed. You are thinking in terms of your loved one that you have lost, that devastating, wrenching that a family goes through and a that grief that goes on for a lifetime, that hole that is there for a lifetime, the hole that I talked about in the family of Donnie Young, that hole multiplied by thousands in this country because we do not have the will to enforce our immigration laws, because we do not have the will because we have people that see the massive numbers of low-income, cheap wages as a political power base. On the other side of that, we have people that are making a lot of money off of cheep labor, and they believe they have a right. So, therefore, Mr. Speaker, I will continue this discussion in future evenings, and I appreciate the privilege to address you on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I very much thank the senior and esteemed leader, Mr. King from New York, for yielding to me. I want to start a point here, Mr. Speaker, that I would ask all Members to focus on to understand where we really sit in history, in this course of history. If you would go back to the most successful military known in history for the longest period of time, spanning centuries, it was the Roman legions. And the Romans had a statement called ``nosce hostem,'' which, of course, is Latin for ``know thine enemy.'' We need to do that here in this Congress. We are part of this effort, of course. Know thine enemy. Von Clausewitz wrote the book on war, his treatise on war, that everyone goes to because he boiled it down to understandable principles, certainly ``know thine enemy,'' but his point was the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. Now, if you know your enemy and you are going to destroy their will and ability to conduct war, you wouldn't just go after their ability, you would go after their will as well. So that has been true throughout history. And if you were charged with the task of defeating the preeminent world's Superpower in, say, about the year 1963 under President Kennedy, ``How do you defeat undefeated America?'' was the question that was presented to the Vietnamese. Enter General Vo Nguyen Giap. He was the general that orchestrated the Vietnamese effort throughout the war in Vietnam. He certainly understood history. He understood the Roman legions. He understood nosce hostem. He also understood that you had to defeat the will and the ability of the United States if you were going to defeat them. He knew that he couldn't defeat our ability. He had to attack our will. And that is what happened. And he wrote the book. This is the primer, ``How Do You Defeat the United States of America?'' by General Vo Nguyen Giap. How We Won the War is the title of it. And in the primer he said, ``The beginning was when the United States failed to succeed in a complete victory in Korea, then we knew the will of the United States was weakened. On page 18 he talks about how they went after the will of the United States through public opinion, how they supported it and encouraged the antiwar activists because they knew they couldn't win militarily. So their front on the war that had the greatest chance for success was with the will of the American people. Here is the primer. Our enemies read this primer, Mr. Speaker. They understand this. And one of our enemies over there is Moqtada al-Sadr, who laid it out for us when he said on June 11, 2004, and I saw this on al-Jazeera TV when I was in Kuwait, ``If we continue attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way that they left Vietnam, the same way that they left Lebanon, the same way that they left Mogadishu.'' Mr. Speaker, that is the message that his people heard. That is the message we should hear. I have heard it. I have put it on this floor many times. A couple nights ago I put Moqtada al-Sadr down here on the floor. In the night he went off to Iran to join up with the people who have been supporting him. He understands this. I will tell you this. If this resolution passes and if Mr. Murtha and the people who are working with him are successful in a slow bleed of our resources, then what you will see, Mr. Speaker, is you will see Osama bin Laden say, If we keep attacking America they will leave Afghanistan the same way they left Vietnam, Lebanon, Mogadishu, and Iraq. That is what is coming. That is what is being perpetrated by the rhetoric here on this floor. That is what is being staged in appropriations bills that we will certainly see coming after this resolution. The destiny of America is put at risk, Mr. Speaker, and this says to all of our enemies it is easy to take on the United States if you can just get Congress to lose their will, if you can get them to lose their spine. So I would then simply close with the reiteration of a request made from a major from Kentucky whom I met with in my last trip over there in Iraq. He loves his kids and his cows and he loves God and I know he speaks the truth. He said, ``We have everything we need. So when you pray for us, pray for the American people. Pray they understand the threat and pray they do not lose their resolve. We will not lose ours.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of today, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Idaho, and I appreciate him coming down here and adding to this dialogue. I had a chance to collect my thoughts a little bit during that, too, and a number of points that I did not make here. First, I would like to say the argument is it is a civil war and we should not be involved in a civil war. We have been involved in a number of civil wars, and we will be involved in more civil wars. The same people who say we cannot be involved in a civil war say go into Darfur. Well, that is a civil war. The same people said we should have gone to Rwanda. I am one of them that thought we should have gone to Rwanda. It was horrible. We could have done something about it, but it was a civil war. And that list goes on and on, but let me define a civil war so it is a little more clear, Mr. Speaker, to the people that care, and that is, that you will be able to identify a civil war in Iraq when you see the Iraqi military and the Iraqi police force line up and choose up sides and decide they are going to start shooting at each other. They are not doing that. They are keeping order all that they can. They march forward in uniform. They stay together, and that is one thing that says it is not a civil war. Another one seems to me to be the most obvious and that has not been brought up here, and that is, I know of no entity of the five to eight competing factions within Baghdad that is trying to unseat the elected government of Iraq. It is accepted. The people went to the polls and voted in greater numbers percentage-wise than we do here in the United States, and they elected their leaders. They ratified their Constitution. They elected their leaders, seated their prime minister. So Iraq is a country that is a sovereign country. No one is trying to unseat the government. It is not a civil war. Yes, there is sectarian strife, but it is not so much to do with religion as it is so much the power vacuum that is going on. It is not a civil war. We cannot constitutionally micromanage a war. The precedents for that are utterly weak throughout history, even though there was some struggle with that a number of times. But the precedent that remains was here in 1973, after Richard Nixon finished the Vietnamization process, moved our troops out of Vietnam, then a wounded President during the Watergate era was forced into a situation where this Congress shut off all funds from going to Vietnam, and that was on the land of Vietnam, in the skies over Vietnam and the seas offshore Vietnam. The bill, and I just looked at it again yesterday and I read it a number of times, the bill said none of these funds or any funds heretofore appropriated shall be used on Vietnam, over Vietnam or offshore in Vietnam, which kept all of our military from supporting the South Vietnamese Army which was defending itself after the Treaty of Paris and the resolution of that issue. Now the North Vietnamese broke the treaty. The South Vietnamese did not have support. They did not have munitions, which we promised them. They did not have air cover, which we promised them. We could not even do a naval bombardment to support them from the seas because this Congress jerked the rug out from underneath that. And the disgrace lies yet in our history books. Sam Johnson also went back to Saigon here just not too long ago, within the last number of weeks, and laid a wreath at the U.S. embassy where we lost 10 to 12 Marines as you saw them being air lifted off the top of the U.S. embassy. Ten to 12 marines does not sound like much. That was the cry and the agony of a Nation, but those 10 to 12 Marines, think in terms of the millions of skulls that are piled in southeast Asia that came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the human tragedy. I would say, Mr. Speaker, that none of us could pick up one of those skulls in The Killing Fields, and say this was a Cambodian skull or a Vietnamese skull or an American skull. And I can tell you, God does not draw the distinction, but he understands what goes on in a conscience of humanity and the conscience of a Nation. One would think that this Congress, Mr. Speaker, would have learned from that colossal error and be able to stand and have enough resolve when we are in a situation where Baghdad is surrounded, and by the way, Baghdad is not a stronghold. I asked a commanding general at the time of our ground forces within Baghdad, and I said, What is this about a stronghold? Are there places you cannot go? He said we go everywhere we want to go. We go when we want to go there. Sometimes we do not want to squabble. Sometimes we go in there because we want to pick a fight, but there is no such thing as a stronghold. So that resolves that. I wrote an editorial a while back, Mr. Speaker, and released about December 20 because December 22 was the anniversary of General McAuliff's retort to the Nazis at the battle of Bastone. History will record, and you will remember, Mr. Speaker, the 101st Airborne in World War II was surrounded in Bastone. Bastone, a city that had seven highways coming to it, it was the confluence of the transportation and a critical area that had to be held and controlled for whichever side was going to be successful in the Battle of the Bulge. When the Nazis surrounded the 101st at Bastone and were mercilessly shelling them, they sent a message in that demanded our surrender. General McAuliff's response was, ``Nuts.'' Nuts, Mr. Speaker. Nuts, Nazis. They had to go all kinds of linguists and ask what does this mean? How do you translate this into German? It did not translate very well into German because that was the American spirit that echoed through that word, ``nuts.'' Nuts, we have got you right where we want you. We are going to stay and hold our ground. They did so, and to this day, the 101st will tell you, they did not really need Patton to relieve them, they would have won anyway. But Patton did come, history shows. They held their ground. Bastone was held. The Battle of the Bulge was turned back and the Nazi regime was destroyed forever because of American courage and American guts and an America that said ``nuts'' when they were surrounded in Bastone. Mr. Speaker, today, 2,499 parts of 2,500 parts of Iraq are essentially pacified, and are there under our control. Parts of Baghdad essentially are all that is left. Baghdad surrounded, it is not a stronghold. And if we pull out of there, history will rule us as nuts. Nuts, a weak nation, a weak nation that didn't have the resolve, Mr. Speaker. I will put one more point in here, and hopefully I can get this done within the time that I have, and that is the straddle that is taking place with this resolution, Mr. Speaker. The straddle that gives the majority side of this thing an argument that they are right, no matter what the results are in Iraq. And that is, the way the resolution reads, they support the troops but oppose the mission. Then they go on and say, we are going to do a slow bleed. Jack Murtha says we are going to do a slow bleed and we are going to eliminate the President's ability to conduct these operations in Iraq. Well, all right. So if the President's plan succeeds and Baghdad is pacified and the government of Iraq grows stronger and more stable, you will hear from over this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, over and over again, ``See,'' they are going to say, ``we were right. It took us to encourage the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military to step up to the plate and do the job. If we hadn't done that, the Americans would have held their hand and been their training wheels forever. They never would have learned to defend their country.'' That will come out of that side if history makes it clear that we are successful in Iraq. And if we deploy out of there and Iraq turns into what I believe will be a disastrous chaos and cede the Shi'a region of the Iraq to the Iranians, who essentially have significant influence in there now, that would be 70 to 80 percent of Iraq's oil as well. It would give Iran control of the global export quantity of the oil. Iran would then have control of 42.6 percent of the oil that would go on the market, which is absolutely enough to control the market and enrich them fantastically and let them buy their nuclear capability and intimidate everyone in the Middle East and everyone in Europe and intimidate the United States as well. They would not be limited. That is what happens if we pull out and the catastrophe, not to mention the human catastrophe, not to mention all the skulls that will be stacked up in Iraq like they were stacked up in Southeast Asia to the numbers of 3 million. That is the catastrophe there, Mr. Speaker. But I am going to compare this. There was only one country that was guaranteed to be on the winning side in World War II, and that was France, because they were on both sides, Mr. Speaker. They were on both sides because you had Charles de Gaulle's freedom fighters, and they had gone into exile into Great Britain and continued their ``Free France'' battle going on. That was part of the effort, and we supported and helped them. But you also remember there was the Vichy French. The Vichy French jumped right into bed with the Nazis and they staked their claim there, and that was Marshall Petain. And the French, not much of their country was destroyed really in World War II. Paris certainly held together pretty good, and I am glad it did. But if the Nazis had won and prevailed, the Vichy French would have emerged to the top. And then the French would have said, see, we got on the right side of this war, we avoided a lot of conflict, and Marshall Petain now is our president who is cutting a deal with Hitler. Or, as it turned out, it turned out to be Charles de Gaulle instead. Straddle the issue, go right down the middle, prepare yourself to be on the victorious or at least be right, no matter what the results. That is what this resolution does, Mr. Speaker. It allows the majority party and those that voted for this resolution to make the claim that they are right, no matter what happens. And they brought not one word of strategic plan to resolve this issue in Iraq. Not one. In 4 days of debates, not a single plan came out of that side of the aisle, not one. None came out in the campaigns, either. They never stepped up and said, ``This is what I would do.'' Except some said, ``I would cut and run. I just wouldn't call it that.'' Some of that went on. But, beyond that, there was nothing, except they said we need a strategic plan, we need a better plan. And one of them came here to the floor and said, ``I used to command a carrier task force offshore of Afghanistan,'' which would be by my look of the map the Arabian Sea. And he says, ``My job now is to come here and plan a strategy to resolve the issue in Iraq.'' And I reflected, Judge Louie Gohmert found himself wanting to legislate from the bench in Texas, so he ran for Congress because he knew constitutionally this was the place to legislate. But that Member, Mr. Speaker, if he wanted to micromanage a war, should have kept command of his task force and the Arabian Sea. This is no place, Mr. Speaker, to micromanage a war. Our job constitutionally is to fund it, and the Commander in Chief's job is to run it, and we have endorsed his authority to do that. As these amendments come and these appropriations bills come, one after another in this slow bleed that has been promised, we will know that the constitutional authority doesn't exist to do that. The President has the authority to take the money that has been appropriated and to do intradepartmental transfers and I will say interdepartmental transfers as well to fund the military however he sees fit to protect this Nation. And if this party sees fit to starve our military and put them at risk, then woe are we. But they have also taken responsibility for the results of this war by this. So I will say, Mr. Speaker, this resolution that passed here on the floor today, it assists our enemy. It assists our enemy. It assuages our enemy. It encourages our adversaries. It provides benefit for our enemies. It encourages the bad guys. It provides comfort and charity to the criminals. It encourages and exhilarates our enemy. It provides favor and gifts to the enemy, our foe. It is a handout. It is help to the insurgents. It is relief and reward for the opposition. It is salvation and succor for terrorists. It emboldens and encourages. This day on this floor of the United States Congress will live in infamy, and I pray it may not be a precedent for the future of America and for our national destiny. Mr. Speaker, I would make another point, and that is I have decided I will follow General Petraeus, and you have decided you will follow General Pelosi.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this profound honor to have the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, the People's House. I would reflect that all week long, starting really on Tuesday morning, we have had a series of marathon debates taking place here, Mr. Speaker, marathon debates that ranged in the area of 12 hours a day, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday until after 1 a.m. this morning, taking up again this morning shortly after 8 o'clock, and then moving on until mid-afternoon, when we finally had a vote on the resolution, the resolution that was offered by the majority, the resolution that in one voice said, we honor the troops, and the other voice said, but we are opposed to the reinforcements and opposed to the surge that the President had ordered, the surge that is already in motion, the troops, many of them have already been deployed, and it is not possible to back out of this. So the voice that came, Mr. Speaker, to the people across this world was answered and was heard in a lot of different ways. On one side of it, the antiwar movement within the United States, the activists, liberal left, the protesters that are, at least if not the people that were in the streets during Vietnam, were descendants of the people that were in the streets during Vietnam, philosophically, if not literally, and in many cases it was both. They heard a message, which is, at every cost, the Speaker's leadership is going to drag our military and pull our Commander in Chief back of their commitment to the Iraqi people in the Middle East. And the other voice, a voice was heard by a number of American people, stalwart patriots, people who believe in the destiny of America and understand that there is a price to be paid by each succeeding generation because of the decisions that are made by the preceding generations. We are the recipients of the sacrifice of our Founders and of every generation's sacrifice, starting with the shaping of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, those veterans of the Revolutionary War, those who supported the effort in the Revolutionary War, those who shaped the Constitution, Mr. Speaker, those that built the economy, those that built the churches, those that built the schools, those that built the communities that link together, which is this greater American civilization, we are the beneficiaries. The decisions that they made July 4, 1776, to pick a point we all understand, we benefitted from that decision. And it was a hard decision. And it wasn't a decision that was made without great concern or without great debate. There was. And there was dissension on both sides. Some of the people that were opposed to freedom, a free nation, were identified as the Tories, the people that aligned with the British. They didn't think it was worth the price. They didn't want to risk the blood. They didn't want to risk the treasure. They thought that they could suffer the indignities and the injustices that were being poured upon them from the crown, and that was more tolerable than the price that would have to be paid for freedom. But freedom won out. Freedom was established. And they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, and they did so knowing that they might very well lose their lives and their fortunes, but they would never lose their sacred honor. That was the creed that came from the Founding Fathers, and that was just the Revolutionary War. Of course, it was the biggest and most significant. But, shortly after that, we had another conflict, and one of those conflicts, Mr. Speaker, was one that started out over in the Mediterranean. The hostilities between the United States and the British concluded in 1783. That was when the military victory was won by George Washington, and that was when, also, the protection of the Union Jack that flew over the seas and the oceans was removed from the protection of our Merchant Marine. So 1783, our Merchant Marine, our ship sailing on the high seas, lost the Union Jack protection, the intimidation of the British Royal Navy, 1783. 1784, American ships were attacked and boarded and pirated, and our sailors were forced into slavery, and the cargos were sold, and the ships were put back into the fleets of the Barbary pirates, the Barbary pirates being the predecessors of the enemy that we have today. And it is an interesting study in history, Mr. Speaker, to see what unfolded here in the history of the United States when we sent our best diplomats over to the Mediterranean to negotiate with the Barbary pirates. Those were Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Now, I have here a copy, Mr. Speaker, this is of the papers of Thomas Jefferson, right here, volume nine. This is dated 1785, November 1, 1785 to 1786. This is the report that Thomas Jefferson returned upon his conclusion of his diplomat mission to the Tripoli pirates. In a paragraph that he has written to the American commissioners and John Jay he says, soon after the arrival of Mr. Jay in London, we had a conference with the ambassador of Tripoli at his house. This ambassador of Tripoli was a representative of the Islamic Caliphate. And he says, he writes, ``We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury,'' meaning the United States of America, ``and observed that we consider all mankind as our friends, who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.'' In other words, the statement that came from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams was, to the ambassador from Tripoli, we consider you friends. We have had no hostilities toward you. We have not provoked you in any way. We are simply sailing our ships on the high seas and providing open commerce and trade like any country would do. Why do you attack us? Why do you kill us? Why do you press our sailors into slavery? Jefferson answered, The ambassador from Tripoli answered us that it was founded on the laws of their prophet, that it was written in their Koran that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, the authority of the Koran. I continue quoting, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise. That is from the negotiations that took place in 1786, and that is from Jefferson's report to John Jay. Now, here we are, 2006. We are going through this debate, Mr. Speaker, and I am hearing over and over again there is a reason why they hate us. We should understand why they hate us. If we could figure that out, maybe we could change our ways and we could find a way to accommodate our disagreements, because surely there are two sides to every argument. Well, Mr. Speaker, I am here to submit that Thomas Jefferson understood this thing clearly. He understood a principle that I laid out this afternoon in debate called nosce hostem, which is a Latin term. It comes from the Roman legions, and that is Latin for ``know thine enemy''. The Romans understood, and they were the most successful long-term military legions in history all the time up to that point and maybe in all of history. They had to know their enemy, and they had to persevere, and that is where that term came, nosce hostem, know thine enemy. Thomas Jefferson understood the same thing. And, in fact, his curiosity and his compulsion to understand and know the enemy caused him to go out and buy a Koran, and that Koran was part of his opposition research, if you will. And Jefferson's being one of the most curious individuals as a figure in our history and maybe the most learned man of his time, he studied Greek so that he could read the Greek Bible and do the translation himself. He wasn't quite satisfied with just King James. He wanted to do that comparison because he was that much of an intellectual and he had that level of curiosity. He had the same level of intellectual curiosity in understanding our enemy the Barbary pirates; so his study of the Koran, I am confident, concurred with his report back to John Jay that was handed over to Congress, that report that says they believe their path to salvation is in killing us. So Jefferson persevered in his endeavor to understand our enemy. He studied Koran, understood our enemy, put the report in place, and in that one simple paragraph is an explanation of our enemy today. And there is quote after quote after quote that have been brought forward here by my colleagues on this side of the aisle in the last several days that support that statement. Statements made by Osama bin Laden, statements made by Zawahiri, statements made by other leaders of al Qaeda where they say their religious duty, their responsibility, is to keep attacking infidels; infidels, being defined as unbelievers in their Koran; unbelievers, being those who have not sworn allegiance to Islam. And you saw that in that quote where he said that they continued to attack us wherever we might be found until we either converted to Islam or pay homage or are beheaded. And historically looking back, most of us recognize when we say ``leathernecks,'' that means the Marine Corps today. That nickname came from the Barbary pirate wars when they went to the shores of Tripoli, and our Marine Corps wore heavy thick leather collars, Mr. Speaker. Those collars were worn to reduce the number of marines that would be beheaded by the swinging swords of the Barbary pirates. The beheadings of today are not anything new. These are beheadings that go back throughout time, throughout the Crusades, clear back to a thousand years ago, Mr. Speaker. And our enemy believes they are fighting that same war. They carry that same grudge. But furthermore, it is a religious conviction on their part. It is not something that can be negotiated away. And to believe that we could resolve this conflict by negotiations is a myopic and naive position. We cannot. If that were the case, I am going to trust Jefferson would have found a way, Adams would have found a way, all of our negotiators in the past would have found a way. Some of them would have found a way at least. But we fought the Barbary pirates, and it was a herky-jerky, hit-and- miss, not always successful effort. But we did occupy some land there, and we did force them into submission, and we did get a kind of an agreement to resolve the disputes. But the battles between Western civilization and the Barbary pirates and the radical world of Islam of that era really didn't end until 1830, and I am going to go on record here in the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker, when the French culminated a military operation and occupied Algiers. When they did that in 1830, that was essentially, at least for modern times, the end of the violence. Scattered incidents to be sure, but for the majority the end of the violence between the radical Islamists who were the Barbary pirates of that era up until 1830 and then move us forward to about 1979 when these hostilities started again. They lay dormant. They were essentially in submission. They didn't have many tools to work with. Some of them had been colonized. And during that period of time, they didn't get ahold of governments. They didn't have a place to start. They didn't have an ability transportation-wise to come out here and attack the rest of the world. But things happened and we moved into the modern world. And when the Cold War was over and there was no longer this titanic struggle between the world's two Superpowers and that power vacuum, in came al Qaeda. In came the Taliban. In came the radicals to fill that void. And the philosophical support became there. The funding was there from oil. The real oil wealth began to pour into those Islamic states in the 1970s. And if you remember the oil cartels of that era, the gas lines here, Jimmy Carter's legacy, the 444 days of 52 American hostages paraded in front of the television, and the only way they were going to be released was to elect a President that they were afraid of. So that is why you saw the split screen of Ronald Reagan taking the oath of office and those 52 hostages being released at the same time. But that became the beginning of this constant battle that we have now with the jihadists of today. And they have been empowered by oil wealth, families that are wealthy, by the religious network of radical Islam. Now, to help explain this a little bit, Mr. Speaker, I use an analogy here that is something that I have not heard from anywhere else. I look around and I think how do I compare what is going on? How am I to stand up and say I am opposed to the radical Islam, these jihadists, without directly attacking Islam itself? Many times the President has made the statement that Islam is a ``religion of peace.'' I am looking for more evidence of that before I am going to step up and resoundingly endorse that statement, but I am not willing to indict them at this point, Mr. Speaker. I would rather compare it this way: I am going to say the radical Islam, the jihadists, are a parasite that lives on and within the host called Islam. Now, Mr. Speaker, when you think about what that means, a parasite living on and within a host, a parasite will ride on a host, feed off a host, reproduce off a host, drop off and attack other species, but also attack the host species. This goes on over and over again. And I could take you down through some different species of parasites to make my case, but it remains a biological fact that that is what a parasite does. A parasite doesn't respect its host to the point where it will refrain from killing the host. Sometimes the parasite will kill the host. Think in terms of a tapeworm that will draw all of the nutrients out of the host until the host becomes so scrawny and so disheveled and so weak that the host actually expires. That will happen. There are other parasites that will do the same thing, but there are many parasites that will attack more than one species. This parasite called radical Islam, these jihadists, attack many species. They attack every species of Homo sapien, for that matter. They attack Jews as their preferred target. They attack Christians as a preferred target. They attack capitalists as a preferred target. And when they can do a two-fer, a Jewish capitalist, a Christian capitalist, a Western civilization representative, secular capitalist, they are all for doing that because they know that that destabilizes the civilization that they abhor. This parasite called jihadists also attacks Islam itself. Moderate Muslims are killed in greater numbers than anybody else historically over the last 30 or so years because the destabilization that takes place is where they thrive. This parasite called jihad, the jihadist, lives and it grows and it thrives in an anarchy. So they are seeking to create anarchy. They are attacking the host called Islam, but a host will always provide that food. It will provide the transportation. It provides a home for the parasite. The parasite jihadist, radical Islam, lives within Islam. And so radical Islam goes to the mosques where they preach their hatred and they help sort out those that are truly convicted on the jihad side. The most radical of those are identified by their response, their reaction, and they are connected to and recruited out of the mosques. Many people who go to the mosques are peaceful people. They all aren't. And that is a center where the communication comes through. The language itself is another tool that helps this parasite called jihadists communicate. So the Arabic language itself is a conduit, Mr. Speaker; a common conduit through the language, a common conduit through the mosque system, a common conduit because of common nationalities and identification with each other. You tie that all together and then you pick the radicals out, and that is how you sort out the species of the parasite jihadists. But the host hasn't done much to eradicate the parasite from its midst. I haven't seen Islam step up and decide that they are going to eradicate radical Islam from their midst. No. For a number of reasons. One, they are afraid to confront them. They don't know what the price will be. Another one is they are not quite sure they really want to side with the people that are on our side of this argument. Some of them are also dancing in the streets with their radical jihadists when something goes bad for the people on our side, this Western civilization, which I think encompasses the world that the jihadists are opposed to. Western civilization including Christians, Jews, the Judeo Christian ethic, the free market ethic, the liberal democracies that we have that provide freedom for people and give us this flexibility to define our own future. They hate freedom, as the President has said many times, and they attack freedom. So, Mr. Speaker, this is a difficult nut to crack. And I would like to charge Islam with eradicating that parasite in their midst. I do think it is part their responsibility, but I am not hearing them step up to this task. So I am looking forward to the day that that happens, Mr. Speaker, but until it does, we have a war to fight. We have a task ahead of us, and this task that is ahead of us is a great big, difficult task. And it is far more difficult today, Mr. Speaker, than it was a week ago because of the message that came out of this Chamber all week long, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and this morning up until mid-afternoon, and especially because of the vote; the vote that passed a resolution that said we support our troops and oppose their mission. I mean a third grader can figure out that that logic doesn't fit. You have got to do one or the other, and they are tied together. You don't send your military off and ask them to put their lives on the line for a mission that you don't believe in. And to say to them, ``I am all for you, buddy, but if you get shot over there, if you give your life over there, I can't say that you did it for a good cause because it is a bad cause.'' That is what got said over here. This is a good cause. This is a just cause, Mr. Speaker. And our troops have been undermined today and yesterday and the day before and the day before that. And now they have got to carry out a mission, and it is a lot harder than it has ever been over there. And our enemy has been encouraged, Mr. Speaker. They have got the words that have been said over here, these quotes put up. They have got to be all over al-Jazeera, over the Islamic blogosphere. There have got to be people dancing in the streets all over the land where they recruit our enemies because they know what this means. They know what it means because they study history. And, Mr. Speaker, I have studied history as well. And part of that history is, first of all, the United States of America is a Nation that, up until the conclusion of the Korean War, had never lost a war. We had been successful in every conflict that we had engaged in. And I grew up under that. I grew up with a military father and military uncles on both sides of the family. They sat around a lot and talked. The United States of America, of all the Nations in the world, has never lost a war. And the reason we haven't lost a war is because we believe in freedom. And you are a lucky young man, Steve King, for being born in the United States of America. You could have been born anywhere else, but you were born here. You are a recipient of that freedom that they fought for and each preceding generation had fought for. And I was extraordinarily blessed. I am, Mr. Speaker, but I was raised with a reverence for that freedom and the understanding of the price that was paid for it. And up until that time we had been successful in every conflict. They didn't quite define the Korean War except to say, well, we won that, but nobody talked about that very much. I bring this up, Mr. Speaker, because I picked up a book a little while back. I had to do a little searching to find it. And the title of the book is How We Won the War. By General Vo Nguyen Giap. He was a Vietnamese general who commanded their troops throughout the entire period of time that they were in conflict with the United States of America in Vietnam. And his comment in there that caught my eye first was ``It all began when the United States failed to win a clear victory in Korea,'' Mr. Speaker. If you remember, Korea was resolved in the early 1950s, I think 1952, but when it was resolved, it ended up being on the 38th parallel. We had pushed the Chinese back north of the 38th parallel. We had gone north to the 38th parallel with U.N. troops as well, and pushed back to the 38th. The resolution came, and we shut down the fight on that 38th parallel line, which is pretty much back to the same line before the invasion came from the North Koreans. So it was fought essentially to a draw, and the line was the same line that the war began on. My father and their generation didn't acknowledge that we failed to win that war. They neither acknowledged or said or even implied that we lost it. I think we fought it to a draw. But when General Giap took over in Vietnam, Dien Bien Phu came along in the mid-fifties and the French had lost, and President Kennedy ordered our troops into Vietnam in 1963, by my recollection, and the Vietnamese had to look at what was coming at them. This big industrial Nation, this sleeping giant, formerly sleeping giant, there was only about not even two decades after World War II, a huge, powerful industrial, military and economic force in the world, was coming into South Vietnam to help support the freedom fighting people in South Vietnam. He had to come to a conclusion on how they were going to fight so great a nation. He had seen the French lose their resolve at Dien Bien Phu. They lost their resolve along the way. And he knew something Clausewitz had written about in his book on war years before, when Clausewitz said the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. Will and ability, two factors that are the targets of war. Now, you can destroy the enemy's ability to conduct war. You can wipe out all their tanks and take all their guns. You can take their swords, knives and hatchets. They can be totally devoid of arms. But if they still have the will to fight, they are going to come at with you with sticks and clubs and fists and boots, if they still have the will. That is what Clausewitz understood. It is a two-section effort when you go to fight a war. You are going after the ability to conduct war, the enemy's ability to conduct war, and you are trying to destroy their will to conduct war. So as Giap analyzed that, he realized he could never destroy our ability to conduct war. We could always pour more and more munitions into the fight. We could send our ships and planes over and we could always pour more bombs in there and always could bring more soldiers in. So the strategy was how do you then attack, damage, weaken and destroy the United States' will to conduct war? And the North Vietnamese, General Giap in particular, recognized that their best ally in that war wasn't an AK-47 or a ChiCom grenade. What it was was the anti-war movement in the United States. So they encouraged that movement, and nurtured it and negotiated with it. And they brought Jane Fonda over there and put her in a gun emplacement in Hanoi, and that encouraged the anti-war movement here in the United States. They sent the photo-op back. There were a number of photo-ops like that. You heard from the great Sam Johnson at this very microphone earlier this afternoon, Mr. Speaker, when he talked about how the voices of the anti-war leaders in America were transmitted across loud speakers in the Hanoi Hilton where Sam spent far too many days, 2,500 days in captivity, and how those voices demoralized our POWs in Vietnam. But General Giap understood, we are destroying the United States' will to conduct war. The frontal assault on the will of the American people was going on relentlessly and persistently, and it says in his book, their best ally was the anti-war movement here in the United States. So here we are today, Mr. Speaker, and the enemy has been encouraged. There is nothing that came out of that side of the aisle that discouraged the enemy. I can't think of a single word, maybe one speaker, and that would have been a little bit qualified, that would have discouraged the enemy. Over on this side, just hearing Sam Johnson, if I were the enemy, my feet would tremble in my sandals. We have to understand that there are two parts to this war, the ability to conduct war and the will to do so. And we don't conduct wars here in the United States any longer looking at that as two different things we need to assault. We are trying to fight a nicy-nice war with limited targets and rules of engagement that keep our military from doing the job that they could do. There isn't a strategy to destroy the enemy's will to conduct war. It is just a strategy to destroy the enemy's ability, I should say limit their ability, try to shrink down the arms and funding they have coming in, and try to limit the transportation routes of the insurgents as they infiltrate into Iraq. That is not enough, Mr. Speaker, but at least we are in a position where we can go forward and win this war if the will of the President and the will of our military can overcome the encouraged and supported will of our enemy, which has been encouraged and supported by many, many voices here on the floor of this Congress. Mr. Speaker, I point out also the legacy of Korea and Vietnam. That legacy has already been reflected by one of the leaders of our enemy within Iraq, and this is Muqtada al-Sadr. He is the leader of the Madi militia, and he has been a thorn in the side of the United States for a long time. I identified him as somebody that had to go a long time ago, at least as far back as early 2004. I have to say in memory of Charlie Norwood, this man needs a dentist, and wherever he is going to go, Charlie is going to have no chance at him. But this individual, Muqtada al-Sadr, said over Al-Jazeera TV on the evening of June 11, 2004--I was in Kuwait City waiting to go into Iraq the next day--Sadr came on Al-Jazeera TV and said in Arabic, with the English crawler underneath, he said, ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.'' Muqtada al-Sadr, June 11, 2004, and that was Al-Jazeera TV. That voice out of that man. And when I heard that, I concluded, he has read General Giap's book. He understands maybe not what happened in Korea, but he understands what happened in Vietnam. He understands that he has got to continue to fight, to break the will of the American people here, here in the United States of America, Mr. Speaker, because the last battle in this war, if the United States doesn't ultimately prevail, will be fought right on this blue carpet, right in this place right here. It won't be fought over there in Iraq, it won't be fought in the Middle East anywhere. It is here. Here is where our vulnerability is, Mr. Speaker. Here is where the battle needs to be fought, and here is where the battle needs to be won, for our posterity and for the liberty and freedom we have been passed from our Founding Fathers. Sadr knows it. I will submit this, Mr. Speaker: If we don't prevail in Iraq, and I believe that tactically we have every opportunity to do that, if we don't prevail in Iraq and Jack Murtha gets his way and troops come out of Iraq before there is a clear victory, then this man comes back into power. He is probably done talking about how to get Americans to leave Iraq. But I can tell you Osama bin Laden will surface, or Zawahri will surface, and I will bring their picture down here to the floor, Mr. Speaker, and I will make a statement then. But I make the prediction now, you will see a picture of either Osama bin Laden or Zawahri or whoever the leader of al Qaeda is, and underneath it I will put the quote from them which will go something like this: If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Afghanistan the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu, the same way they left Iraq. And every time we lose our resolve and the legacy becomes the legacy that has been stipulated to us by Muqtada al-Sadr, it gets harder and harder to win the next war, harder and harder to have the will to conduct war, harder and harder to destroy their will, when they know that there is a legacy of us losing our will, us losing our nerve, a legacy of Members of Congress demonstrating a lack of spine, a lack of understanding of history, a lack of commitment to the legacy that has been handed to them and handed to all of us by our founders, Mr. Speaker. So, I would reiterate, nosce hostem, know thy enemy. War, according Clausewitz, the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. No one can destroy our ability, but we don't have the will to match our ability. And that was proven here today, Mr. Speaker. And one of the members of the Democrat party said, and I applaud him for saying so, it does our military no good for the people on our side to sit in the corner and boo when they have been ordered into battle. We need to be on their side. Who would go into the bleachers and boo their home team and think somehow the home team was going to perform better? Who would believe, when you hear the voices that came out of here for the last 4 days, Mr. Speaker, or I go back to the presidential campaign as it went through for 2004, where we heard continually ``wrong war, wrong place, wrong time.'' All we heard from another Senator in Massachusetts, it was all a war cooked up by oil people in Texas. Voice after voice after voice of quasi-leaders of the United States have spoken, and it has undermined our troops and it has weakened their resolve, and it has empowered and emboldened our enemies. And when they are sitting in a hovel in Iraq making an IED and watching their Al- Jazeera TV, Mr. Speaker, and they hear the voices that came out from C- SPAN from the floor of this Congress, do you think that they make more bombs or less? Do you think they have more or less courage to plant them, more or less courage to attack Americans, more or less resolve to continue the fight, more or less perseverance because of the voices that came collectively from this side of the aisle and this Congress, Mr. Speaker? We all know the answer to that. The answer is they have more resolve, more persistence; they will make more bombs, they will attack more Americans, and more Americans will die because the booing from this section has encouraged our enemy, and I got to bury some of those soldiers in my district, as do most of us. And that breaks my heart, because I understand it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be, Mr. Speaker. It didn't have to be and it doesn't have to be. And others will say, but it is. It is the price of a democratic system and a democratic process. And they say it is patriotic to speak about our disagreements. So, if one yells fire in a crowded theater and 50 people are trampled to death on the way out and there was no fire, did they abuse their freedom of speech? And don't we know that there is a Supreme Court decision that says your freedom of speech doesn't extend to the right to yell fire in a crowded theater? Verbatim and specifically the answer to that, Mr. Speaker, is yes. So how can we give a pass to people whose words cost more lives? And beyond the lives, people's whose words alter our national destiny and make us poorer for it and diminish our potential and affect our future and burden our children and put them at risk, Mr. Speaker? I can't tolerate that. As I travel over to the Middle East and settle in and talk to the soldiers there on the ground, and I like to do that more than anything else over there, Mr. Speaker. I will walk into a room, maybe a mess hall, climb aboard a C-130. I will say, anybody over here from Iowa? There have been a couple of times there hasn't been. Most of the time there is somebody there from Iowa. I will sit down, and it is our immediate bond, and I will ask them what is going on here on the ground? What do I need to know? What do you want me to know? And please rest assured I will not identify you or take that information to your officers. This is something for me, because it is my duty to do this kind of oversight. And I hear continually, I am proud to fight for freedom, I am proud to serve my country, Congressman, but why do we have to fight the United States news media too? Why is there a conflicting message coming out of Congress? Why do we have to take on that part of this battle? We are fighting the enemy over here. We need to know that Congress is behind us. One of the lieutenant colonels that I travelled over there with made a statement to me in one of those late evenings as we were talking this over deeply and profoundly. I will not use his name either because I have not asked him that I could do so, but I will use the quote. And he said, Do not save me, pacifists; do not save me. I volunteered for this. I want to be over here fighting for freedom and liberty because I know the world will be a safer place. I want to take this battle on for my children so they do not have to live in fear and they do not have to carry on this fight. They are all volunteers, and they say do not save me. I will take my chances. I volunteered for this war. I want to save my children from this burden. Who are we? Who are we to micromanage a war and try to pull our troops out after all that blood and treasure has been invested in freeing Iraq and giving them an opportunity for freedom? Who are we? I had gold star parents, Mr. Speaker, come into my office a week before I last went to the Middle East. So this would have been the third week in November, and several families had lost a son or a daughter in combat over in Iraq or Afghanistan. We had a lot of profound discussions in there, and I listened to them. They had travelled over to Iraq themselves and taken on the risk to go there. They had met with Iraqis. They had been welcomed into the homes of the Iraqis, and the Iraqi people showered them with gratitude for the measure of freedom they have today, even with the insecurities that are part of that, the gratitude for the sacrifice that Americans have given, their lives for Iraqi freedom and American safety and world safety. And of all the things that were said, one that struck me the most, Mr. Speaker, was a father who had lost his son from California. His name is John. I have forgotten his last name, if I actually ever heard it, and he said, It is different now. You cannot pull out of Iraq. Our sons died there. They gave their lives for the freedom of the Iraqi people, and we are going to have more safety in America because of it? You cannot pull out of there. It is different. That soil is sanctified with the blood of our children. Mr. Speaker, I challenge anyone to look that man or a father in the eye and say I think I know better, I think we ought to concede, I think we ought to admit and pull out and declare defeat like somebody said this war cannot be won, cannot be won, cannot be won. If I put a word search on there, ``cannot be won'' over and over again, hundreds of times it got said here in the last 4 to 5 days. Mr. Speaker, I point out that Iraq, 80 percent of the violence is confined within 30 miles of Baghdad. You just look at the area that is there, Baghdad standing kind of alone in the middle. I checked this all out in the World Factbook just because that is where we go for information. Baghdad represents 1/2500th of the land area of Iraq, and we are saying we cannot prevail because 1/2500th of the land area has some people in there that are battling us? 1/2500th, one day of the life of Sam Johnson when he was in the Hanoi Hilton, one out of his 25 days, 1/2500th of the land area of Iraq, and we want to say we do not have the will. Every ability in the world, but we want to say we do not have the will to persevere, even though that soil is sanctified with the blood of our sons and daughters. It will be a disgrace here on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Sali) who I am sure came down here with his heart full and look forward to whatever he might have to say.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in profound sorrow and gratitude for the life of Charlie Norwood. I believe I had known Charlie long before I came here to meet him in person. I got to know him through C-SPAN and through the media. When I met him personally, he had matched up identically with the person that I saw through the television screen. Charlie had that light within him, as John Shadegg said. I look back at a time when Charlie was not feeling well. He came here whenever it was physically possible for him to do that, and I remember a day when he looked poor, but when he spoke in that microphone right there, that light came back on again and the real Charlie Norwood again blessed this Chamber with his presence. America will always be grateful. Gloria, Marilyn and I want you to know that you and your family are in our prayers. We will always look over to this place on this floor where Charlie always sat and recognize that as Charlie's seat in the people's Chamber.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady for yielding this time, and I appreciate very much the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and the message that is coming, at least from our side of the aisle. Mr. Speaker, I take us back to how do we identify this enemy that we are fighting? So I looked back through some of the history. In 1783, we made peace with Great Britain. The Revolutionary War, for combat purposes, was over. 1784, American merchant marines were being attacked in the Mediterranean by Barbary pirates. In 1786, two diplomats, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, went over there to meet with them, and their idea was, we will be able to talk them into peace. Well, they talked to them all right, and the representative of the Barbary pirates, Mr. Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, responded to them, and this is in the Congressional Record from Thomas Jefferson's report. He asked him, why do you fight us, why do you attack us, why do you kill us? We have done nothing hostile towards you. His answer was, It is founded on the laws of our Prophet. It was written in the Koran. All nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could not take as prisoners, and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise. I take you back to today. We call our marines leathernecks. The reason for that is they wore a heavy leather collar to diminish the odds that they would be beheaded by this enemy who has, to this day, at least fairly recently, is still beheading marines. That is how this started. Now, we are in a war. Von Clauswitz wrote that the object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war. That means take away their munitions, take care of their armies, destroy them if you can. But in the end, whatever you might do doesn't break their will. You have to destroy their will. There is nothing going on on this side of the aisle that is diminishing the will of our enemy. I will tell you, they will interpret it as encouraging the will of the enemy. I would point out this quote from Moqtada al Sadr. I heard this over al Jazeera TV when I was in the Middle East, actually in Kuwait City, waiting to go into Iraq the following morning, June 11, 2004. He said, ``If we keep attacking Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu.'' June 11. Where does he get this from? Well, he gets part of it from General Jeaps' book in Vietnam, the successful general there. They understand, as I heard to my own shock and sorrow, a World War II veteran said to me on one of the days we were honoring him, We haven't really won a war since World War II. Think about what that means. Think about what that means to our enemies who are encouraged by this kind of debate and this kind of behavior. We must have the resolve. I point out also our casualties. We have lost 2,534 brave, patriotic Americans in hostile action. We have lost 591 to accidents within that theater. The loss in American lives as a price to be ready between Desert Storm 1 and the beginnings of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that 10 years, was a little over 5,000, averaging 505 a year. There is a price to be ready, and they pay that price. Those lost lives are every bit as precious to us. I listened to the debate over on this side of the aisle. A brave American, former admiral from Pennsylvania, stated that he believes his job now is to come in and help manage a successful conclusion to the war. Well, I want to compliment Judge Louie Gohmert, who had the urge from the bench, to legislate from the bench, and realized that his constitutional responsibility, if he wants to legislate, is to run for Congress. So now we have Representative Gohmert in Congress actually legislating instead of legislating from the bench. I would submit my question to the gentleman from Pennsylvania: Do you really think your job is to come here and micromanage the war? Do you really think that is constitutional? Regardless of that question, do you think it is wise? How would you like it if Congress made a decision that you really only needed one destroyer in your task force, or you get along without the submarine or maybe you only needed half the supplies on your supply ship? That would be micromanagement that I think he would raise a powerful objection to. And so I would point out that here on the floor of this Congress when we had Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, speaking from that very podium behind me, July 26, 2006, a short half a year ago, he said, ``The fate of our country and yours is tied. Should democracy be allowed to fail in Iraq and terror permitted to triumph, then the war on terror will never be won elsewhere.''

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. I rise in support of the Cantor amendment, and I thank the gentleman from Virginia for bringing this amendment. As we look at the overall atmosphere that is here, and not just the atmosphere in this Congress, Mr. Chairman, but in the atmosphere up above and on this Earth, and we see the effort that is coming, this strong effort, to address global warming. Now, I am not one of those strong proponents of those kinds of efforts; I want to make that clear. I do not think the science is there, but I do look at how this Congress has started, how it was going to be the most open Congress in history, and it has now been opened up today, and I appreciate that. We understand the issue that had to do with minimum wage and the Tunagate issue, and now here we are a judgment issue, a judgment issue of the small plane that Speaker Hastert had was plenty big enough for a very big man and the entourage that he needed to provide his security, and yet now here we have a request for a plane that I see is 42 business class seats, 16 staff people that consumes $300,000 for a round trip. The statistics that I have are $22,000 an hour, $22,000 an hour. Mr. Chairman, that is more money than many of my constituent families make in a year. Well, let us just say that $22,000 an hour is that amount. Then how many people, how many families does it take to earn enough to pay for a year of this plane flying back and forth from Washington to the west coast every single week? So I use 50 weeks, added the math up, its overall costs by those numbers is $15 million annually for this big plane to bounce back and forth and to be able to load all of the family and the supporters, the staff, perhaps other Members, constituents, who knows who might be on that plane, $15 million. Now, how hard is it to pay $15 million out of the Federal Treasury? Well, if we took all of the revenue of the income of those families that I reference, Mr. Chairman, those families at $22,000 a year, it would take 682 families to earn enough revenue just to pay to fly the Speaker back and forth so she could be with her family on the weekends in San Francisco. That lays out what is happening here in my mind, and I take us back to that place near enough to Hollywood that I can reference it. Many of the people in Hollywood that have been flying around on private jets and driving around in big SUVs have been called to task for their positions promoting an effort to stop global warming, but the hypocrisy of riding in those SUVs and flying in private jet planes. Now, the pressure has gotten great enough that I do not know that Hollywood has actually seen the conflict between their public position on policy and their actual practice when they climb in the SUV or get on their private jet. But the public does know that Prince Charles of Great Britain has recognized the conflict, and he has been flying in private jets for years; but this year, he is taking the step that he is flying commercial, not because he is not a very intense individual that is a high-risk target.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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