Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I was unable to vote on December 20, 2020 and December 21, 2020 due to not being in DC. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: ``no'' on rollcall No. 248; ``no'' on rollcall No. 249; ``no'' on rollcall No. 250; and ``no'' on rollcall No. 251. members recorded pursuant to house resolution 965, 116th congress Allred (Wexton) Axne (Davids (KS)) Barragan (Beyer) Bera (Aguilar) Bishop (GA) (Butterfield) Blumenauer (Beyer) Bonamici (Clark (MA)) Boyle, Brendan F. (Jeffries) Brownley (CA) (Clark (MA)) Bustos (Kuster (NH)) Cardenas (Carbajal) Carson (IN) (Butterfield) Case (Cartwright) Castor (FL) (Demings) Cisneros (Carbajal) Cleaver (Davids (KS)) Cohen (Beyer) Costa (Correa) Davis (CA) (Scanlon) Dean (Scanlon) DeFazio (Davids (KS)) DeGette (Blunt Rochester) DelBene (Cicilline) DeSaulnier (Matsui) Deutch (Rice (NY)) Doggett (Raskin) Escobar (Garcia (TX)) Eshoo (Thompson (CA)) Finkenauer (Underwood) Fletcher (Raskin) Frankel (Clark (MA)) Garamendi (Sherman) Gianforte (Suozzi) Gonzalez (TX) (Gomez) Grijalva (Garcia (IL)) Haaland (Davids (KS)) Hastings (Wasserman Schultz) Heck (Kildee) Jayapal (Raskin) Johnson (TX) (Jeffries) Kelly (IL) (Clarke (NY)) Kennedy (McGovern) Khanna (Sherman) Kilmer (Kildee) Kim (Davids (KS)) Kirkpatrick (Stanton) Lamb (Sherrill) Langevin (Lynch) Larson (CT) (Cicilline) Lawrence (Kildee) Lawson (FL) (Demings) Lieu, Ted (Beyer) Lipinski (Schrader) Lofgren (Jeffries) Lowenthal (Beyer) McEachin (Wexton) McNerney (Raskin) Meng (Clark (MA)) Mitchell (Spanberger) Moore (Beyer) Moulton (McGovern) Mucarsel-Powell (Wasserman Schultz) Nadler (Jeffries) Napolitano (Correa) Neal (Lynch) Neguse (Perlmutter) Pascrell (Pallone) Payne (Wasserman Schultz) Peters (Kildee) Peterson (McCollum) Pingree (Cicilline) Pocan (Raskin) Porter (Wexton) Price (NC) (Butterfield) Richmond (Butterfield) Rooney (FL) (Beyer) Rouda (Aguilar) Roybal-Allard (Garcia (TX)) Ruiz (Dingell) Rush (Underwood) Ryan (Kildee) Schakowsky (Underwood) Schneider (Casten (IL)) Schrier (Spanberger) Serrano (Jeffries) Sewell (AL) (Cicilline) Shimkus (Pallone) Sires (Pallone) Smith (WA) (Courtney) Speier (Scanlon) Thompson (MS) (Fudge) Titus (Connolly) Vargas (Correa) Veasey (Beyer) Velazquez (Clarke (NY)) Watson Coleman (Pallone) Welch (McGovern) Wilson (FL) (Hayes)

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on December 17, 2020 and December 18, 2020 due to not being in DC. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: YES on Roll Call No. 245; YES on Roll Call No. 246; and NO on Roll Call No. 247.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, on December 3, 2020, I submitted a personal explanation for having missed votes on December 2 and December 3, 2020 due to being out of town. I wish to correct my explanation for Roll Call No. 229. Although my personal explanation submitted on December 3, 2020 stated that I would have voted ``no'' on Roll Call no. 229, I in fact would have abstained from that vote and I wish to correct the record to reflect that.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on December 16, 2020 due to not being in DC. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: YES on Roll Call No. 242.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on December 7th and 8th due to not being in D.C. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: YES on Roll Call No. 236; YES on Roll Call No. 237; NO on Roll Call No. 238, and YES on Roll Call No. 239.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on December 3, and 4, 2020, due to not being in town. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: ``no'' on rollcall No. 230; ``no'' on rollcall No. 231; ``no'' on rollcall No. 232; ``no'' on rollcall No. 233; ``yes'' on rollcall No. 234; and ``no'' on rollcall No. 235. Personal Explanation

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on December 2, 2020 and December 3, 2020 due to not being in town. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: ``no'' on rollcall no. 228; ``no'' on rollcall no. 229; ``no'' on rollcall no. 230; and ``no''; and ``no'' on rollcall no. 231. members recorded pursuant to house resolution 965, 116th congress Barragan (Beyer) Bera (Aguilar) Bonamici (Clark (MA)) Boyle, Brendan F. (Jeffries) Brownley (CA) (Clark (MA)) Carson (IN) (Cleaver) Castor (FL) (Demings) Cohen (Beyer) Costa (Cooper) DeSaulnier (Matsui) Deutch (Rice (NY)) Doggett (Raskin) Doyle, Michael F. (Cartwright) Escobar (Garcia (TX)) Frankel (Clark (MA)) Garamendi (Sherman) Grijalva (Garcia (IL)) Hastings (Wasserman Schultz) Higgins (NY) (Sanchez) Jayapal (Raskin) Johnson (TX) (Jeffries) Kaptur (Dingell) Kennedy (Kuster (NH)) Kim (Davids (KS)) Kirkpatrick (Stanton) Lamb (Golden) Langevin (Lynch) Lawson (FL) (Demings) Lee (NV) (Kuster (NH)) Lieu, Ted (Beyer) Lipinski (Schrader) Lofgren (Jeffries) Lowenthal (Beyer) Lowey (Tonko) McEachin (Wexton) McNerney (Raskin) Meng (Kuster (NH)) Moore (Beyer) Mucarsel-Powell (Wasserman Schultz) Nadler (Jeffries) Napolitano (Correa) Pascrell (Pallone) Payne (Wasserman Schultz) Peters (Kildee) Pingree (Kuster (NH)) Pocan (Raskin) Porter (Wexton) Pressley (Trahan) Price (NC) (Butterfield) Rooney (FL) (Beyer) Roybal-Allard (Garcia (TX)) Ruiz (Dingell) Rush (Underwood) Schneider (Casten (IL)) Schrier (DelBene) Serrano (Jeffries) Sherrill (Pallone) Sires (Norcross) Speier (Scanlon) Thompson (CA) (Kildee) Titus (Connolly) Watson Coleman (Pallone) Welch (McGovern) Wilson (FL) (Hayes)

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on November 16th and November 17th due to not being present in Washington, D.C. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: YES on Roll Call No. 219; YES on Roll Call No. 220; and NO on Roll Call No. 221.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, and throughout the years I have had the privilege to serve Iowans and Americans here. This is a great deliberative body, although sometimes we miss the facts. And I know that there is a phrase that I heard back in a political era, which is, whenever you lose a vote, you can sometimes use this analysis: Nor is the people's judgment always true: the most can err as grossly as the few. And that has happened a number of times in my 18 years that I have served in this Congress. This is the 116th Congress, and if someone were to ask me, well, what was your favorite session of Congress, I don't have to worry about the 116th being on that list. But I rise to focus on a specific circumstance here, and that is a misquote of me that was driven into just a national feeding frenzy. It was validated by this Congress, this misquote. And when I stood on the floor of this Congress and made a statement to describe what likely happened in an interview with The New York Times that took place in early January of 2019, I made the point on what that statement was, and the statement was regarding white nationalists, white supremacists. There always was a pause between those two odious ideologies and the term ``western civilization.'' I advised Congress that there would be a distinct pause to demonstrate a new thought started rather than jamming those three ideologies together. Who would compare white nationalism and white supremacy, those odious ideologies, who would compare them to western civilization, the very foundation of American civilization, the foundation of the First World, and here, America, the flagship of western civilization today? There is no comparison and should never be equated between the two. Yet, I didn't tie that thought together, but the stenographers did. And I am not here to be a critic, because they have done terrific work for me over the years, and their skill set, and their professionalism are second to none. They are the best in the world, as far as I am concerned, but if they can make a mistake, so can The New York Times, which is my point. So in this narrative, Madam Speaker, I will take you back a little way. And I want the Congress to know what all has transpired here that brought us to the point of the feeding frenzy and the political lynch mob that was here that day on about January 12 or so, or January 13, and it was this: that during my election in the year 2018, November of 2018, there was a national media focus on attacking me. That happens in other races, but I don't know that it ever happened as intensively as it did in my race. In any case, we came through that with a 3.4 percent victory, and I thought that was the end of it. I expected that I would come back. You know, even your political opposition needs a rest from time to time, and so after the election is when they take a deep breath, retool, and get ready for the legislative session. But I sat down with a political operative, who was one of the top political campaign managers at the presidential level in the Nation, and a successful one at that. He came in to give me a little bit of his advice, and as I am listening to that, he said: They are going to try again. They are going to try again to drive you out of office with a national media assault on you, and they are going to attack you with everything. They will throw everything at you. He didn't say but the kitchen sink, but I got the message. And when he first brought that up, Madam Speaker, I passed it off, because I didn't take it seriously. Nothing like that had ever happened before in the history of this country that I knew. And he brought it up a second time, and I passed it off again, because I didn't take it seriously. But the third time, he got my attention. And the third time he brought it up, he said: They are going to make another run at you. This was the day before Thanksgiving of 2018, by the way. He said: They are going to make another run at you, and they believe that they were--this meaning Democrats, yes, but also Republicans, establishment, the swamp creatures, the elitists, those folks, and also the media. They are going to make another run, because they believe that the midterm elections of 2018 were a bit distracting, they had other races to be concerned about, and so, therefore, they couldn't bring all their guns to bear on this Member of Congress from the Fourth District of Iowa. So he did have my attention by then. And as much as it didn't seem plausible, his advice to me was this: They have a messenger that they will send to the President, a messenger whom the President trusts and who has his ear, who is going to be directed to convince the President to send out a negative tweet on Congressman King, and that negative tweet will be the trigger that launches another media assault, all the broadsides that they can get on this Member of Congress. And he used these words: And they believe they can force you to resign. Now, that is a hard concept to get into your head when nothing like that had ever happened before and there was no substance for that to be based upon, but he did convince me. So I set about preempting this, at his advice, and I did, to the extent I could, preempted it at the White House. And I think history proves that that has been successful. President Trump has not taken a shot at me, even though there were many others who couldn't resist the press's temptation to take a cheap shot, but the President did not. So I take it that the effort to preempt it at the White House was at least partially successful. Yet, I couldn't get a meeting with the messenger until January 8, 2019. So on January 8, I had that meeting with the person that was at least named as the potential messenger, and in that conversation, I was assured: I would never do that to you, Steve. Be assured that that won't happen. Well, I was fairly confident that those words were honest, and actually felt pretty happy about it when I walked out of that meeting. But I also suspected that the people that were around that individual might find out about the meeting that I had just finished and might know that I understood the gambit that was going to be run against me. That was January 8. January 9, amazingly, I have a primary opponent that announced on Twitter at 11:23 a.m.--He might have announced earlier than that, except he was busy deleting all of his tweets for the previous 10 years, and then once the tweets were deleted--He announced on Twitter that he was going to challenge me in a primary. He didn't have a website, didn't have a roll-out plan, didn't have a media plan, didn't have an interview set up. He just sent out a tweet. So that seems to me that he hadn't been planning that very long. I think he got a phone call the night before that morning that said: You are going to have to announce now. That was January 9. January 10, The New York Times story came out. And The New York Times story that has been the subject of this turmoil here on the floor of the House that had the whole Nation fixated on a few words, it actually turned out to be about 13 words. It is still pretty stunning to think how you can mobilize the United States Congress over whether or not there is a hyphen or a period where it ought to be. But here is what we have, Madam Speaker. We have to protect the Constitution of the United States, and the First Amendment of the Constitution is freedom of speech, religion, press, and peaceable assembly. And freedom of speech, whatever our speech is--I know that I was sitting in a meeting with some folks in Europe about 2 or 3 years ago, and they are prosecuting people for what they call hate speech and for asking a rhetorical question. I have a couple of friends over there that I happen to know that have been persecuted, prosecuted, and convicted for hate speech that was actually just a rhetorical question. I was making the case to them, I said: You need American-style constitutional protection for freedom of speech. You don't have freedom of speech here in Europe, and you are going to be a lot more robust society, you can address your problems and have open discussion, but you shut down any dialogue by hate speech prosecutions. And they said: We have more freedom of speech than you have in America. Now, that will bring a person up short, Madam Speaker. And so I asked: Why? And his answer was: In America you can start a corporation, you can be a CEO, you can write a check to an unfavored not-for-profit group-- or a profit group, excuse me--and once the public finds out about that, then they put that out all over the internet and they just--they named the people that had lost their companies because of a tweet or because of a donation to an unpreferred entity. And as they made their case, I realized they kind of stumped me a little bit. We have freedom of speech in the Constitution. But they said they don't lock people up for hate speech, they just prosecute them, convict them, turn them loose, and they generally learn their lesson. But here, we have watched since that time, since that time back in--this conversation took place in August 2018, freedom of speech has been diminished in this country incrementally. And it is a tragedy that we are going down that path. But here in this Congress, here is what happened: from the meeting that took place on January 8, the announcement of one primary opponent on January 9, The New York Times story on January 10, and after that, there was nothing I could have said or done that was going to change the inertia that was created. They actually carried out what they had given me the heads-up they were going to do. They actually brought all media broadsides against me. And it didn't matter what was fact and what was fiction. It mattered that they had mobilized all those forces because they thought that they could force me to resign. And for what purpose? I can give you a lot of reasons, Madam Speaker, but I think what is better to do at this point is to examine The New York Times. The New York Times interview took place on January 5 of 2019 on a phone call that I received from the reporter Trip Gabriel right about 8:30 in the morning. I had advised him that he should go through my communications director, but I also had told him that I thought I would be open at about 8:30 until 10:30 that day. So he called me directly. And I had just gotten out of the shower to get ready to come down here and go to work. I didn't get a chance to check the email from my communications director first. That came in at 7:48 a.m., and it said: Don't do the interview. It is a trap. I have been trying to shut this reporter down. I know he is coming at you with a trap. Don't do the interview. I didn't see that until much, much later. Had I seen that, there wouldn't have been an interview. But it was 56 minutes long. And there is no tape. And as far as I can determine, there aren't even any notes that are available to the public. And we have asked him: What was the question that you asked? What was the leading question? What was the context of the answer that I gave? And Kevin McCarthy is critical of me, because he says that he can remember every word that he has used in the last 6 months in an interview, and that includes also the punctuation, because that is the topic we were talking about. I don't think that is even humanly possible. I don't think anybody can do that. And Trip Gabriel says: Don't worry about whether I am accurate or not, because I can type as fast as anybody can talk. Well, I have asked our wonderful stenographers down here how fast they can type, and what I learned was at about 130 words on a conventional keyboard is just about the limit to be certified, but maybe 150 or 160 on the magic keyboard that is going right down there right now. And I say: Can you keep up with me when I am talking at a fast pace? And they say: No. I have to listen to the tape. But I respect the professionalism we have here. Anybody can make a mistake. And then I asked about the precision of punctuation when you are doing a transcript on the keyboards even that we have here, let alone the conventional one that Trip Gabriel was using. And they say: Well, we will get the words right if you talk at a pace that we can keep up, but we can't guarantee the punctuation. So there is a great big difference in whether-- there is a great big difference in whether the meaning of a phrase has got a hyphen in it or whether it has a comma in it. Trip Gabriel put in a comma, and he insists he is right. And I would ask, how could he know? How could he know whether he is right or not, because his memory is not any better than Kevin McCarthy, not as good as Kevin McCarthy says it is. So I want to go through this. So what happened shortly after that, this thing all hit, and on Monday early in the month of January, I had a meeting with our leader here, and it lasted about an hour. And it wasn't a happy meeting for either one of us, but he was determined, he was determined that I am wrong, The New York Times is right. And I don't know how our leader can defend President Trump against The New York Times and attack me for the opposite. If you just Google, lying New York Times, you get hundreds of hits on a Google of lying New York Times. Their credibility has been essentially destroyed. And this little piece, I would say this: 18 years in this Congress, 45 years in the construction business, 6 years in the Iowa Senate, our family goes back three generations on the dirt that we are on right now where we live, and throughout all that time, The New York Times and others have sent reporters into my neighborhood to try to find somebody that has got something derogatory to say about me or some insult to my character, and they have failed every time; The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, you can name all of them. It used to be The Weekly Standard, and they rightfully are defunct now because of their overreach and their political bias that they rolled out. But in all that time, they have never found a single person. And no one has gone on record in this Congress in 18 years, serving on the Judiciary Committee for 16 of those years, the most polarized committee on the Hill and the most racially diverse committee on the Hill, and not one of those folks, and many of them trade in the race issue, has ever made a statement that I had been disrespectful or disparaging in any way whatsoever. And so there is no substance. I have no accusers, no individual accusers that have stood up. But this whole mass of people in this place were accusers on that day in early January of 2019. So I am here to assert that--I am asking this Congress and this Congressional Record to correct the Record and to place a hyphen in the terms from that day where I said I was going to pause--I did pause; I have watched the videotape of it since then several times--that the language be: white nationalist, white supremacist, hyphen. That is a pause, and it is a new thought, and the new thought then became: Western civilization, now how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization just to watch Western civilization become a derogatory term in political discourse today? The very statement itself refutes The New York Times' characterization. It refutes the characterization that was delivered at me by Kevin McCarthy and others. It refutes the characterization that was the presumption of this Congress. But the presumption of this Congress didn't look at the evidence. They didn't look at the facts. They just got swept up in the herd mentality and went ahead and did what they did. And by the way, the resolution that was brought, I believe, by Mr. Clyburn that day, the resolution was actually honest because it said: whereas Congressman King has been quoted as saying. And that was the qualifier, and then they put the quote in out of The New York Times. Well, I was quoted as saying that. That was an honest statement. It was a misquote. They didn't bother saying that. But I was misquoted in The New York Times, but the way it was printed in the resolution was accurate. And all the other whereases that rejected the odious ideologies were all accurate. My own rejection of it in the previous week was stronger than the resolution itself. I wish they had used my language. Mine was stronger, and mine was better, but I agreed with all the words that were in that. And I asked this body, vote ``yes'' on this resolution. I had, I will say, dozens of friends here that were prepared to come to this floor and vote against that resolution in order to guard my back, just on the principle that they knew I am not the person that that resolution implied that I am. But, instead, rather than divide our conference, rather than divide this Congress, rather than ask them to vote against a resolution that happened to be technically true, I asked them all, instead, vote for this resolution because it is technically true, and that is not the argument. Now, only one person voted against it; that was the gentleman from Illinois, Chicago. Bobby Rush, former Black Panther, voted against the resolution because he thought I should have been sanctioned or censured even more. Well, aren't we supposed to look at evidence in this place? Do facts matter? Does reason matter? Or are we just caught up in the political inertia of what goes on, and we try to fit ourselves into the stream so that we don't stand out very much? So I have given you some of that, but none of the context of my quote was included in The New York Times story. We called up Trip Gabriel and said: What question did you ask me? He--first, I asked him: Do you have a tape? He would not even answer the question of whether he had a tape. Then we asked him: What question did you ask Congressman King that brought forth this answer that is only about just a handful of words, 13 words altogether, and what is the context of that? What was the question? What was the answer? Did you feed those words to him, and did he repeat them back to you? And he wouldn't answer that question either. It took two phone calls to squeeze some out. But what we learned was he didn't expect that that would be the quote that would do it. That is almost an exact quote out of him. He didn't think that that would be the quote. He thought it would be something else in the article. So that indicates to me he knew it was a hit job when he did the interview, and that is also what Mark Steyn says. He says that is not a good faith interview request, and this is said just the day after this incident. And Mark Steyn went on to say--he said: He made a mistake, Steve King. He agreed to give an interview on national immigration policy to The New York Times. That is not a good faith interview request. They are only asking you, and he should know this, they are only asking you to stitch you up, to talk to you for 3 hours and get you to use one phrase in there that they can lift out and kill you with. Well, I think Mark Steyn had that figured out, and I think he is really accurate. He went on to say: This guy, Steve King, was trapped. Trapped. The words he said about when did that become controversial, he meant the phrase, Western civilization. How come Mark Steyn knows this the day after and this Congress can't understand this 2 years after? And he went on to say: He is not a white supremacist. He is not a white nationalist. It is all stupid talk. So you have just surrendered the phrase, Western civilization. I don't get that, said Mark Steyn. I don't see what is in it for conservatism in surrendering that phrase and accepting the left's view that the term, Western civilization, is beyond the pale. He also said that conservatives, Republicans, have trouble finding a hill that they believe is worth dying on. But when you sacrifice this issue and that issue and another issue, and you get to Western civilization and you sacrifice the hill of the very foundation of the First World, our country, and the founding of our country, the founding documents, the ideology that I would trace you all the way back to Moses and bring through the Greeks and the Romans in Western Europe and the rule of law and free enterprise capitalism and the industrial revolution and God-given liberty and natural law and the deep reading and understanding that was done by our Founders who shaped this country, who found America to be and shaped America to be a giant petri dish for God-given liberty. Think of what it was like. Here is this land, this huge Western Hemisphere that hadn't seen any aspect of what we consider to be modern life. And on this land, here came, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, the idea--it will be Adam Smith, he wrote ``Wealth of Nations'', published 1776, the same year the Declaration was published. And this petri dish, this giant petri dish of freedom and liberty and rule of law and unlimited natural resources--so we thought at the time--and the concept of manifest destiny and the wars that were fought to secure those things, all of that, all of that that is so rich in America's history and makes us the greatest Nation the world has seen, but we can't defend Western civilization? And I will say, 2 years ago, when this came down, people didn't understand what is happening. But today, Western civilization is under assault, and I have been 100 percent correct on this. I have been more correct on this than I thought I was going to be, Mr. Speaker. But I would just want to add that nobody in America ever sat in the class to learn about the merits of white nationalism or white supremacism, and the content of that quote makes it clear. All the contemporaneous evidence supports what I have been saying. In fact, all of the things that I have said since then, no one has found a hole in any of them. No one has said this is marginally untrue or untrue. No one has ever looked at the language that I have used and said that it isn't accurate. In fact, what I have done is I introduced a fact-check document, and that fact-check document was first published March 6, 2019. Kevin McCarthy gave me 24 hours to prove a negative--24 hours. Well, he didn't actually. I asked for 24 hours. He gave me 1 hour. Now, philosophers have--and everywhere from philosophers to barflies have argued for centuries that it is impossible to prove a negative. Well, no, it is logically possible to prove a negative, and I did that. And I did it in a fact-check document filed in this Congress and published on my website February 3--excuse me--March 6 of 2019. And then some other facts came to bear, and I published a follow-up of that. I deleted nothing from this. I just added some more facts. And that was published February 3 of this year, 2020. So some of the things that I want people to think about is, I had done--we had done the LexisNexis search and asked it: Had Steve King ever said white nationalist anywhere in history? We went back to the year 2000. That is about as far as we can trust the records, I think. And at no time, I had never, ever been quoted as ever even uttering the words that identify that odious ideology. And so when I was asked: What is a white nationalist by Dave Price on a television station in Des Moines, Iowa, it caught me off guard because I hadn't been ever asked to define it before. I had never said the term before. In fact, I didn't use that term when I answered the question. But I did say it is a derogatory term. It might have meant something different 1, 2, or 3 years ago, but today it means racist. That was my definition off the cuff from a question that I didn't anticipate. Maybe it could have been a little more artful, but it is true, and it is true because the term has been weaponized and essentially unused. And so, we looked through the record of LexisNexis and said: Where is the first documented instance of where I ever used the phrase white nationalist? And that turns out to be in an interview that was done right before Christmas of 2018 with the Christian Science Monitor. And there, I was making the case that some of this language has been weaponized. And did I use the terms--I said, I used the terms--if I can find it here, I added a couple of other terms that were part of that, such as, well, racist is weaponized; Nazi is weaponized; fascist is weaponized; white nationalism is weaponized; and white supremacy is weaponized. Now they are trying to weaponize Western civilization. When that happens, our civilization will be on its way out the door. But I was clearly making a statement, defending Western civilization and rejecting the odious ideologies. So we looked it up, and I asked the question--just a minute. This, Mr. Speaker, is a chart of LexisNexis that charts the frequency of the utilization of the term, white nationalist or white nationalism, a derivative of that. So it goes back to the year 2000, and you can see all the way up till 2015, it is virtually unused. It wasn't in our American vernacular. No one could be expected to have the precise and perfect definition for that in their head from a--I will say--a quick response type of a question if we are not using it in our language. It wasn't in our political discourse. It may be in academia. That is probably where--one to 200 times a year is about what that is down on the bottom. And then you see that 2015, it picked up just a little bit. But 2016, it went from virtually unused to 10,000 times a year. And then, in 2017, it went to 30,000 times a year. 2018, it is still up there at 20,000 times a year. This term, white nationalism, was weaponized, and it was used against conservatives. They knew they had worn out the term racism, so they had to come up with some new terms, and that was one of them. Here is another example. This is the year. This is the year 2016. It was, I could say, almost virtually unused up until November of 2016. And what happened in November of 2016? Oh, Donald Trump was elected President wasn't he, on about November 8. And the following Sunday, about the 12th or 13th of November, the top people in the Democratic Party met at the Mandarin Hotel here in Washington, D.C. The articles that I read about it are articles that were written around their star person there, George Soros, who was in that hotel and presumably led some of the discussions that were there and contributed, likely, to the cause. And so from the moment that they went into that hotel, that Sunday, it doesn't really show very much utilization of it. But on the following day, Monday, it shoots off the charts. There is no question that this synchronizes almost exactly with the meeting in the Mandarin Hotel, which, I believe, strategically decided: We are going to launch white nationalism and white supremacy as weaponized terms, and we are going to use them against Republicans. So this is actually, Mr. Speaker, the picture of November itself and broken down day by day. And so you can see, the 11th, the 12th, here is the 13th. That was Monday. They called into the hotel. Thirteen is Sunday, excuse me. And so they were checking in. But on Monday, here we go. Tuesday, that is how they triggered the weaponization of language, and that is what I was describing in that interview, although I thought I was right because my guts were speaking to me. My instincts were speaking to me. I didn't have the data, but it is pretty clear that I was more right than I imagined that I would be. That is the circumstances that we are dealing with here, and the hyperactivity of a planned ambush of a Member of Congress in an effort to try to drive him out of office and force him to resign, based upon false stories and false allegations without substance. So I will take you to this, Mr. Speaker. We went to Congressional Research Services, CRS, and asked them: Who has been removed from all of their committees presumably for disciplinary reasons? And what do you know about as far as you can go back in the search engine or into modern history? We found out that James Traficant was removed from all of his committees. He was subsequently convicted of a Federal felony and went to prison--several Federal felonies, as a matter of fact. Then we have had, I can think of two, three cases since that time, fairly contemporary. I don't want to say their names because I remain a person who--well, I regret what they were convicted of, but, nonetheless, it is this. There have been five Members of Congress who were removed from their committees for disciplinary reasons in all of modern history according to CRS. One of them is fairly recent down in Kansas. The other two, in addition to James Traficant, were subsequently convicted of Federal felonies. So the charges on the Kansas issue are Federal felonies. So here I stand, the sole person in 233 years of the American Republic who has been denied a full-throated representation of his 750,000 constituents by an arbitrary decision of the leader of the Republican Party, who had no evidence except his faith that the dishonest reporter of The New York Times was more honest than a very honest Member of Congress standing before him. No one in this Congress has ever asserted that I misinformed them willfully. Maybe I made a couple of mistakes on data, and if I caught them, I went back and fixed it as quickly as I could. But that assertion has never been made. There has never been made of any personal disparagement, as I said earlier. All of that holds together. No one in this body has ever heard me utter even a swearword under my breath. Yet this is what happens to the freedom of speech and representation. I would add this. I had more votes for me in the previous election in November of 2018 than either the current leader of the Republican Party or the Conference chair, yet they have got a sanctimonious attitude about what is right and what is wrong. So I would assert, Mr. Speaker, that the Congressional Record did err. It is easy to determine that because there is a C-SPAN tape. We have a tape of one thing, and that was there is a distinct difference between the two odious ideologies and Western civilization. I made the point. I did the pause. It is natural for me to talk and think that way. It is not natural for me to advocate for something that I disagree with. Further, this fact-checked document makes it real clear that of all of the time that it has been out here, a year and a half or better, not a soul has found anything false in it, anything mischaracterized, anything biased, or any hole in the logic that says that could not have happened with The New York Times. It is a false and erroneous misquote is the nicest way that I can put that. Mr. Speaker, I have gone through a number of these things that are the factual components of it, but here is another piece: How often was white nationalist used in this Congress? I said it was virtually unused for all those years on up until 2018. We went back through the Congressional Record and did a search, too. I will just read you the text of this fact-checked document, Mr. Speaker, to give you some of the flavor of it. It says: Another indicator of the recent weaponization of the phrase ``white nationalism'' can be found in a study of the Congressional Record. According to the CRS, no Member of Congress has ever said, in their original words, the term ``white nationalist'' on the House floor prior to President Donald Trump being elected. That is out of a CRS report. So how could it be that, oh, that is attributed to me, and there is a thought process that is attributed to me? But it says that Kevin McCarthy's decision to remove King from all three of his committees for a misquote of The New York Times is unprecedented with no analogous case to mine. Apart from party switches/level of party support, King is only the fourth Member of Congress' history--that is this report prior to the Kansas incident I mentioned--according to the CRS to be stripped of all committee assignments, and he is the only one who was removed from committees for a reason that has no basis--no basis in history, in House or Conference rules or Federal law. Or, I will say, no basis in truth either. So one has to come to a conclusion here as to what actually happened. Mr. Speaker, you can believe the version of events that are relied upon by Kevin McCarthy to strip King of committee assignments, but if that is so, one must believe that an unreasonable but sensational interpretation for which no evidence exists is more likely to be accurate than a reasonable, noncontroversial interpretation which is internally supported by context clues and externally supported by data and other contemporaneous published accounts. One must also believe that The New York Times, which is a hostile, liberal paper, which has had other articles about me, Steve King, written by the same author thoroughly debunked as completely bogus, set aside its animus in this particular case and wrote an objective article for the first time on me. This document that I am speaking from contains hyperlinks to source material. Parties interested in reviewing this can go to my website steveking.house.gov and pull one of these documents down. Mr. Speaker, another piece of this was Brit Hume, a legendary journalist and reporter. Brit Hume is publicly no fan of Steve King. He read through an article that was written by Trip Gabriel just about on January 15 of 2019, and Trip Gabriel brought up a whole series of quotes that proves that I am a racist. Brit Hume read down through that and said that it is completely bogus. Most of the articles and most of the quotes don't have anything to do with race whatsoever, and none of the comments were racist. That is Brit Hume. Between Brit Hume, Mark Steyn, and multiple others who are objective, I think we get the idea of what happened here. Going home to spend time with my grandchildren is not what I regret, Mr. Speaker, but what I regret is the precedent that is established here that there is no place to appeal. I recall when I was first elected to the Iowa Senate, I had what turned out to be a future constituent who found himself in an administrative law judge position where the administrative law judges had ruled against him. It was a domestic issue. I knew that he was honest; I knew that he was the target; and I knew he was the victim of stack of lies. So I set about trying to get him an appeal so that his case could be heard. As I checked the fences, so to speak, as we say in Iowa, or perhaps Texas as well, as we checked the fences, it always will go under the next one, the next one, the next one. But once you went around, it was a corral, and there was no way for him. He is back appealing to the very person who ruled against him in the first place. So, Mr. Speaker, what you are really down to is you can go through some motions, but you have to ask the decider to change their mind. That is the only appeal. When you have got the pressure of a nation, the media pressure and the political politics that go on here, then they are not going to change their mind. There is too much narcissism involved for that. By the way, there is a significant amount of mendacity, while we are talking about personal characteristics, because Kevin McCarthy promised me that he would go to the Steering Committee and ask them to restore me to all of my committees. That happened April 19 of this year. I have the transcript of that phone call. Yet, when McCarthy was asked about that in a press conference, he denied it and made me out to be the liar. That is another piece that has got to be changed in the history of all of this. What I regret is, if there is a due process, then there needs to be a place where there can be an appeal. There needs to be a place to roll the facts out and there needs to be a way that you can put people who sit in judgment, who actually have to evaluate the facts and be subjected to criticism for their decision that they would make. None of that exists in this Congress. It may exist over on the other side of the aisle, but it doesn't exist on this side of the aisle. So I have my obligations here, and one of the obligations is to deliver the truth. I am confident everything I have said here today is objectively true. I have dug through this for a good, long period of time. After the primary election, I sat down on my deck out on the east side before the Sun came up in the morning and took my keyboard and began to type. After a few weeks, I had 60,000-some words, and that is a book. That will be in print real soon. The title of that is ``Walking Through the Fire.'' I was able to call Andrew Breitbart, a close, personal friend. When he tragically passed away at age 43 several years ago, I was given the honor to give the eulogy for him at the national memorial here in Washington, D.C., for Andrew Breitbart, whose imprint is on our society to this day. Andrew would say to us: Walk towards the fire. Walk towards the fire. Their bullets aren't real. They just want to scare you. They want to shut you up. They don't like your ideology, so they will attack you personally, and they will call you a whole series of names. He was more eloquent about that than I. I started out the book that way, ``Walk towards the fire,'' but the title of my book is ``Walking Through the Fire'' because, once that fire was lit in front of me, I could have either turned and run or walked through it. I said: If you are going to do this to me, you are going to have to shoot me down in the middle of Main Street at high noon with everybody watching. That is pretty much what happened. They mounted that kind of effort and did everything they could to destroy my reputation. But the facts stand the same. I have no accusers. All of the logic of this fact-checked document supports what I have told you here today, Mr. Speaker, all of it. There is not a hole in it. No one has found a hole in it, even when it would behoove them to find a hole in it or several holes in it. I think that my reputation here among the people who know me is solid. But, also, I will have a shorter list of friends maintenance after this last experience over these 2 years. I don't regret going home. I don't regret spending more time with my grandchildren. I got a phone call from one of our county chairs here a month and a half or so ago. He said: I am calling to tell you that God is showing you how much He loves you because He is guaranteeing you more time. He is sending you home to spend more time with your grandchildren. That is as good a way to put that as you can. I have made good friends here in this place, but the list of them is shorter than I thought it was. So I think it is very important that people coming into this Congress, the freshmen whom I have never gotten a chance to know over a 2-year period of time because, if they are seen talking to Steve King, the leader might not give them the committee assignment that they want, I didn't get to know them. That is too bad. I am sure there are good people there. But that list is shorter than I thought it would be. We need more and deeper character in this Congress, and we need to tie back to facts and policy. What I have seen happen here in the time that I have been in this Congress is, when young Members come in, they come in pretty strong ideologically, for the most part. They want to make a difference, and they want to pass legislation. They are policy people, and they are ideological people. And I meet them and I like them and I like the spark that is in their eyes, but pretty quickly, sometimes there are even one or two or three, even on the first day, who decide: Mine is going to be a political equation. Over time, they give up on the policy. They give up on the ideology. They find out that their job is to either work for this team or work for this team over here. They slowly become a political barometer. And when an issue comes up in front of them and they have to make a decision, the question will be: How does this help me? If it doesn't help them, then that question is: How do I avoid dealing with this issue? I came here to correct the wrongs that I had seen in life and to fix the injustices. I didn't anticipate I would see them so starkly in front of me, but I have. So I wanted to come to the floor here today, Mr. Speaker, and let you know some of these things that I am thinking about. Hopefully, this body will learn from the experiences that we have all been part of here. The freshmen need to be thinking about this and have an independent voice. Mr. Speaker, I have said that one of the ways that you can have an independent voice here in this Congress--and perhaps the only way you can have an independent voice--is you have to have constituents who will support you; you have to have a fundraising network that is independent from the people who can take it away from you; and you have to have a national media voice so that the truth restrains the people who want to undercut you. There is a major component that I left out of my presentation here, Mr. Speaker, and that is I am a Member of Congress from Iowa. I am the dean of the Iowa congressional delegation. I have been engaged in the first-in-the-Nation Iowa caucus for a long time, and I am the only Member that I know of at this elected level who has ever made an endorsement of a Presidential candidate and taken all the heat from the other candidates that comes from that, but I think it is important to do that. I have had, along with just a handful of other people, an extraordinary opportunity to get to know these Presidential candidates one on one, 17 of them the last time. I brought 12 of them into a Freedom Summit down in Des Moines to launch the national Presidential race. I put 1,250 people in the seats and standing room only. They were rock-ribbed, principled, full-spectrum, constitutional Christian conservatives. And when they heard something they liked, they stood, stomped their feet, and applauded and cheered. When they heard something they didn't like, they might look at their watch, boo, hiss, or walk away. They were sorting these candidates and batching up with what they believed in. The conservatives did well that day, but the moderates didn't do so well. And a couple of moderates didn't show up. So when I see that, when the moderates don't show up and the conservatives do show up, and--let's see, Walker got a big bounce out of that that day, Donald Trump got a big bounce, Ted Cruz got a big bounce, Ben Carson got a big bounce that day. They all spoke at the Freedom Summit. And that helped launch them into a very competitive Presidential campaign. I did everything I could to provide access to the candidates so that they could be in Iowa and meeting these caucus-goers and shaking hands and doing the things necessary to have a chance at the nomination. That functions really well. But what we did, we built the platform around that. And the platform for the Presidential candidates was actually built in Iowa. And then we put three or four of those candidates on that platform, once they come out of the Iowa Caucus, and we send them off to New Hampshire. New Hampshire does pretty good, but sometimes they will pull a nail or two out. And then they will take that platform and send those candidates down to South Carolina and, thankfully, they put a lot of those nails back in. So by the time you are done with South Carolina, the platform for the nominees is settled. And that is the platform that makes it to the national convention. That is the platform that arrives in the Oval Office. That is the platform that exists there today. When I walk into the Oval Office, and I look around, I think, My gosh, we really did accomplish this. We accomplished the agenda on immigration, for example, and we accomplished the agenda to repeal ObamaCare. We didn't get it all done, but it is on there. I have in my pocket a picture of all the promises that Donald Trump made, there are a lot of checkmarks behind the ones that have been accomplished. Those promises, many of them were made in Iowa at the launch of this. And that is one of the things that has brought out the opposition, the establishment people in this country don't want conservatives to have a loud voice on who the nominees are going to be. But I say, the heart of the heartland is where the families are. It is where the small businesses are. Where we are the farthest away from the big businesses, we are insulated from that. So our ideology--Democrat and Republican-- is closer to the real people than you might find if you go someplace where there is an expensive media market. In launching Democrat and Republican candidates, we must have that hands-on where they have to meet people and get to know the American people. We want real candidates out there on that stage. And the folks that had the money--for example, Jeb Bush spent $139 million, and he got something like three or five delegates. He is not very happy with how that opportunity didn't exist for him in a way that it might have for a Ted Cruz or a Ben Carson or a Donald Trump or a Scott Walker. So they decided that they don't want to have that voice in northwest Iowa. And that is a big piece of this as well. Mr. Speaker, the forces behind this, the forces of the swamp that have mobilized themselves like never before and pulled off something that had never been accomplished before and done with--I will say a strategy and millions of dollars, and a network of media that was coordinated across this country is all part of this. It is all part of my book. I can't begin to express it all here in the time that I have, but I do appreciate the time that I have been allowed here on the floor of the House of Representatives. Mr. Speaker, I want you to know that I appreciate serving with you, a man of a happy attitude that expresses it across the aisles in a bipartisan way. Mr. Speaker, I urge this Congress to take a look at the C-SPAN tape, correct the Congressional Record, put the hyphen in where it belongs, and recognize that I have been right on this all along. No one has found a hole in anything that I have said. You can look through every word put out the last 2 years. Everything I have said stands up. It doesn't stand up with the New York Times. It doesn't stand up with Kevin McCarthy. It stands up when I say it. I make that point as I step aside here because it is a challenge. Show me where I am wrong. Show me where I have been--I should say-- where I haven't been factual. No one has been able to do that. They won't be able to do that. The fact-checked document stands on its own. It is completely logical, and it proves a negative, even though philosophers have long said that is not possible to do. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized here to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I rise to raise a question of personal privilege.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to call up H.R. 8265 to extend the Paycheck Protection Program to keep millions of employees on the payroll of America's small businesses and keep our businesses open and functioning.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I was unable to vote on August 22, 2020 due to not being in DC. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: ``no'' on rollcall No. 179; ``no'' on rollcall No. 180; ``yes'' on rollcall No. 181; and ``no'' on rollcall No. 182.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on July 27, 2020 due to not being in DC. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: YES on Roll Call No. 167.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I rise in support of my amendment. What it does is, it sees that in the underlying legislation there is language that strikes the President's ability to use the resources within the Department of Defense budget to build a wall or a road along the southern border. It would be a mistake to take that language out and--to have that language in there. We need to take the language out and let the President have the discretion to make these decisions. He has a mandate from the American people. The southern border is such a risk that 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs coming through into the United States come from or through Mexico; 70,000 drug overdose deaths; the violence that comes from it; tens of millions of illegal aliens in America, and we have seen unemployment numbers in this country as high as 40 million throughout this COVID epidemic. So to tie the President's hands and to take away the resources he has in front of him now, because it essentially says, no funds heretofore appropriated may be used either for a wall or a road. I would say also that I came to this floor and from this very podium in 2006 with a model that demonstrated how easy it was to build a wall on the southern border. It is cost effective, and it preserves our security. This amendment gives the President back the authority to continue the construction of the wall. Madam Speaker, I urge its adoption.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on July 22, 2020, due to delayed arrival to the floor. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: ``no'' on rollcall No. 153.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I was unable to vote on July 20, 2020, because I was not in D.C. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: ``No'' on rollcall No. 139; ``No'' on rollcall No. 140; ``No'' on rollcall No. 141; ``No'' on rollcall No. 142; and ``No'' on rollcall No. 143.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on July 1, 2020 due to not being in D.C. Had I been present, I would have voted yes on rollcall No. 134; yes on rollcall No. 135; no on rollcall No. 136; yes on rollcall No. 137; and no on rollcall No. 138.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on June 29, 2020 due to not being in D.C. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: YES on Roll Call No. 123; NO on Roll Call No. 124; YES on Roll Call No. 125; NO on Roll Call No. 126; YES on Roll Call No. 127; NO on Roll Call No. 128; and NO on Roll Call No. 129.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on June 30, 2020, due to not being in D.C. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: NO on Roll Call No. 130; NO on Rll Call No. 131; NO on Roll Call No. 132; and NO on Roll Call No. 133. Cardenas (Gomez) Cleaver (Clay) DeSaulnier (Matsui) Frankel (Clark (MA)) Hastings (Wasserman Schultz) Johnson (TX) (Jeffries) Khanna (Gomez) Kirkpatrick (Gallego) Kuster (NH) (Brownley (CA)) Langevin (Lynch) Lawson (FL) (Evans) Lee (CA) (Huffman) Lewis (Kildee) Lieu, Ted (Beyer) Lofgren (Boyle, Brendan F.) Lowenthal (Beyer) Lowey (Tonko) Meng (Tonko) Moore (Beyer) Nadler (Jeffries) Napolitano (Correa) Payne (Wasserman Schultz) Pingree (Cicilline) Price (NC) (Butterfield) Rush (Underwood) Sanchez (Roybal-Allard) Serrano (Jeffries) Vargas (Levin (CA)) Watson Coleman (Pallone) Welch (McGovern) Wilson (FL) (Hayes)

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on June 25, 2020 due to not being in D.C. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: ``no'' on rollcall No. 116; ``no'' on rollcall No. 117; ``yes'' on rollcall No. 118; and ``no'' on rollcall No. 119.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I was unable to vote on June 26, 2020, due to not being in D.C. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: ``no'' on rollcall No. 120; ``yes'' on rollcall No. 121; and ``no'' on rollcall 122.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. Having listened to the gentleman ahead of me, Mr. Louie Gohmert and some of the discussion that he had, I would pick up with the beginning here, Mr. Speaker, with one of the places where he left off, and that is what happened before the United States Supreme Court yesterday and the statements that were made by the minority leader of the United States Senate. I may have a bit of a different perspective than some in this House or Senate or across this land, but here is the language that was deemed offensive from Senator Schumer. I watched the video, and he was pointing. He pointed at the United States Supreme Court, and he used the names of two Supreme Court Justices. He said this: ``I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.'' That was stunning. It was stunning to hear two Justices called out in that fashion before the Supreme Court. And I know that there was a crowd over there that was happy to hear those words. But as a constitutionalist and former chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, I am troubled by the effort to try to sway judges through what appears to be verbal intimidation before the Supreme Court. I have stood on those same steps and delivered any number of speeches, but I always confine them to the constitutional principles that were involved. I wanted the Justices to hear my speech. I didn't want them to ever hear it as a threat. I wanted them to hear it as a rational approach in a way as if I were actually arguing before that Supreme Court, before that Bench. They are all well-learned and very, very capable people who are deeply steeped in our Constitution and in case law. They have their different philosophies, and that is clear. We often see a 5-4 decision on the Court. Mr. Speaker, I thought when I first arrived in this town a number of years ago, I looked forward to going over to the Supreme Court to hear what I expected to be the profound constitutional arguments before that Bench. So I began going over there for some of the important cases, with that expectation. I recall sitting there, listening to an argument before the Court, and I understood--actually, this would be the Kelo decision before the Supreme Court. The Kelo decision is the decision that I believe amended the Constitution by the Supreme Court decision. It was this. Let's see, New London, Connecticut. There was property there that was owned and utilized by owners who didn't want to sell that property to the developers. The local government wanted that property in the hands of the developers because they would develop that property into, I believe, a shopping mall, and then the taxes would be the revenue going into local governments. So local governments had an incentive in encouraging the development of the property, but the property owners sat there with a constitutional guarantee in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution that says: ``nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.'' That was the guarantee that, first of all, only governments could confiscate property. They needed to maintain that within their own possession, and it has to be for a public use. It can't be for a private use. It was a private business that they handed that property over to in New London, Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, when I listened to the argument, I expected the argument would go back to the very language of the Fifth Amendment, and that would be argued, perhaps, certainly, on both sides. And I come down on the side of: The Constitution means what it says, and it means what it was understood to mean at the time of ratification by the people who voted to ratify it. We can't go back and assign different definitions to words or simply say that it is a living, breathing Constitution that can adapt itself to changing times. If that were the case, there wouldn't be a provision to amend this Constitution provided by our Founding Fathers. The Constitution is an intergenerational, contractual guarantee between one generation of Americans to the next generation of Americans. So, I hoped to hear those--in fact, expected to hear--those arguments before the United States Supreme Court. What I heard instead were arguments that were made to Justice O'Connor, and I think they considered her to be the swing vote. And she came down on, I believe, the constitutional side of it in the end. But there were just little tweaks that had to do with her background. She was raised on a ranch. I think it is a B&B ranch down in southern Arizona, and I think it goes across into New Mexico, as I recall. I read her books years ago. And some of the ranch land that she grew up on was part of the Gadsden Purchase that came in right at the end of the U.S. and Mexican war. But growing up on a ranch, property values matter, and property rights matter, and water rights matter in that part of the country. And her book is replete with those kinds of narratives. It is a really interesting way to get some insight into Justice O'Connor. But she understood this case in a way I didn't know until later. But I came down here to the floor, and we brought a resolution in the House of Representatives, a resolution of disapproval to what was called the Kelo decision. In that Kelo decision, it upheld the decision of local government in New London, Connecticut, to confiscate private property, houses and residences that had a deed, and to take that land and compensate them for what they deemed the value was--condemnation-- and hand them over to the private investors so they can take that land, develop it, and make money with it. That is completely contrary to the reason that we have that guarantee within our Fifth Amendment. As I listened to those oral arguments and saw how they were focused on Justice O'Connor, I understood what was going on. And that is, they weren't profound constitutional arguments; they were personalized arguments that were designed to get to the psyche of the swing Justice who was there. Of course, it wasn't Justice O'Connor, as it turned out. By the way, I have been critical of some of her decisions--not on this one. Mr. Speaker, I want to put this narrative in the Record because I think she is worthy of some significantly positive comments. And one of the decisions that she had made--a different one, obviously, I was railing away on my disagreement with the rationale that Justice O'Connor had come down with. And so someone in the room said: You shouldn't criticize her until you walk a mile in her shoes. And I said: I would be happy to walk a mile in her shoes. I will walk a thousand miles in her shoes. Appoint me to the Supreme Court, and I will walk with her. And I bet you I can convince her. I made some remark like that. And then, as I was talking, I said: You know what? If I can't do that, why don't I just invite her to dinner? So I followed through. I gave my word I would do that, and I went back to my desk in my office and sat down and wrote a letter to Justice O'Connor that invited her to a dinner, just to sit down, have a conversation, get to know each other, be civil with each other, and listen to each other's philosophical discussion. I sent the letter over there, not expecting to get an affirmative response. But what I did get was an invitation to come to her chambers and do a lunch there. I don't remember the year, but I know the date was March 18 of whatever year it was, in the earlier part of the previous decade. So, I went over at that time, and she had a lunch all prepared. She had baked a pie that was, I presume, for me because it was fresh. It was cut and served right there in her chambers. And we had a delightful discussion. She took me from each of the portraits of the Chief Justices and walked me through the history of the Courts, from the beginning all the way up to what was current at the time. When I left that gracious dinner with Justice O'Connor, I decided she has a good judgment on her; she has a good set of character; she has a compassionate heart, a deep understanding of history and law. And disagreeing with her, that is all it is, just disagreeing with the rationale. But I am forever grateful that I took the trouble, and I am really grateful that she accepted the request that I made and then invited me over there to dinner. So, I wanted to put that in, that our Justices are human. And when they get threatened, those threats sometimes cut deep, and the family feels that. These threats that were delivered yesterday in front of the United States Supreme Court were threats that, might I say, intimidate judges. The judicial branch of government, the American Bar Association, everybody involved in that feels that. And they pride themselves in their independence. But I better conclude the Kelo decision before I get too far from it. In any case, the Kelo decision came down, and they allowed for the confiscation of private property handed over to other private interests in order to generate tax revenue for local government. That case still stands. But I was furious that they would do such damage to the Constitution in a 5-4 decision. By the way, Justice Scalia has said that he believes that case will be overturned one day. But we brought a resolution of disapproval to the floor. It is the only time that I know we have done that and spoken out in that fashion on a Supreme Court decision. I noticed that at that time the gentleman from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, came down to give his speech. I was queued up next. Mr. Speaker, I sat right here with my notepad ready to take notes because I expected to get up and rebut most everything that I heard Mr. Frank say. We found ourselves in disagreement on issue after issue, so it was my full expectation that when he was finished talking, I would have a page full of things to stand up and rebut. That has been my style, and we had had many debates like that. But as I listened to Mr. Frank that day, I realized he had exactly the same opinion that I had. He expressed it a little bit differently, but he came down in support of the resolution of disapproval and in support of the Constitution and in support of the property rights that are there in the Fifth Amendment. Mr. Speaker, when I stepped up here to this particular podium, my speech really was to reject the decision made by the Supreme Court. And when I spoke that in the Record, I said effectively what they have done is they have pulled the words out of the Fifth Amendment ``for public use.'' ``Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation,'' and the effect of it was to pull the ``for public use'' out of there. Now, the effect of the Fifth Amendment after the Kelo decision just says ``nor shall private property be taken, without just compensation,'' which means the government can't come in and take your property away from you, unless they write you a check, but they can give it to anybody they want to in the private sector. Whatever their motive might be, it was approved by the Supreme Court with the Kelo decision. And I think that will be abused at some point and a more reasonable Court may be seated at that time and restore the Constitution on the Kelo decision. But my real point here is that we can't be seeking to intimidate the Court. They are human. Justice O'Connor--a gracious heart and a nice lady. And we used to have receptions over there with the Committee on the Judiciary and members of the bench just to take some of the temperature down between the natural disagreements that exist between the legislative branch and the judicial branch of government. Mr. Speaker, when you have the minority leader, the most powerful, highest ranking Democrat in the United States Senate, go stand before the Supreme Court, point his finger at that building that was behind him and say, ``I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.'' Going forward with an awful decision means Chuck Schumer has already decided what he thinks the Court decision is going to be on the requirements that are part of the, I will say, the abortion laws that are coming out of Louisiana. And I have been one of the lead voices on pro-life issues here in this United States House of Representatives. There is on my lapel a heart that represents the heartbeat bill. It is a bill that I introduced in the previous Congress, and that bill protects unborn babies. It essentially says this: If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. And we know that the heartbeat is the first, certain sign of life. When that heart starts to beat, you know that there is a live baby there. You can't call it anything else. It is a live baby. And this little baby has all the components of a growing human being. It just needs to develop them out to full size and to full term. And anybody who has picked up and held--especially a loved one--a newborn baby and gazed with awe at the miracle in their hands has to know that that baby's life didn't begin at the moment of birth or at the moment of first breath and that that baby's life began well before a minute before the baby was born. Mr. Speaker, I know when I held my firstborn son, I looked at him in awe. There was an aura about him. The miracle was in my hands. And I thought: How can anybody take his life now? He is a few minutes old. How can anybody take his life now? How could they take his life a minute before he was born, or an hour before, or a day, or a week, or a month before he was born? Or a trimester or three trimesters before he was born? At what moment did his life begin? Because human life is sacred in all its forms. And we only have to choose when did life begin. It is not that hard a question. Because it is a continuum; it is a gradual growing continuum from the moment of conception on. But that heartbeat says this is a live baby here. And when that heart stops, we call that death. When the heart starts, we know that is life. Even though life began at the moment of conception, medically, we can't pinpoint that precisely enough, but I am willing to go there if we can get there. Right now, we are at heartbeat. And in the last Congress, I was able to get 174 cosponsors, and those 174 cosponsors all signed on with an expectation that we would protect all babies. When a heartbeat could be detected, the baby is protected. We didn't make exceptions for rape or incest or any other provisions. These babies are sacred. If there was a crime committed that resulted in conception, that is on the rapist; that is not on the baby. And those babies are as precious to God as my own grandchildren are to God; and, of course, my grandchildren are extraordinarily precious to me. So I hope one day we get to that and that question. But as we move on, with this superaggressive utilization of freedom of speech and Senator Schumer, I look back at some of this discussion. And Chief Justice Roberts had a response, which is exceptionally rare, to have a statement come out of the Supreme Court. But out of the Chief Justice, he said, and I quote: ``Threatening statements of this sort, from the highest levels of government, are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.'' And Justices, quote, ``will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.''--Chief Justice John Roberts. I appreciate that language that the Justices will ``continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.'' That language will live a long time in the way that that is adeptly put together, and that is how it needs to be. If we want to convince the Supreme Court to take a new look at things, we need to make the constitutional arguments, Mr. Speaker, not the threatening arguments. And where I come from, when somebody threatens you, that means that you are done doing business with that person, and they are very unlikely to get cooperation. But there is another part of this that, even though there would be a measure of justice involved if the decisions made in the Supreme Court went against the interests of Senator Schumer, I would like to reiterate here into this Congressional Record, and I hope it echoes across this land, that, if you think you are going to get even with somebody, the result in this business, whether it is in the legislative, the executive, or the judicial branch of government, if you think you are going to get even with somebody, you invariably hurt the wrong people. And so that is not an avenue that has merit, and I hope that and I expect that that wisdom exists within all of our Justices, all nine of them over there, that payback to Schumer can't be in the cards from any decision that would come down from the Court, it has got to be balanced and objective, as described by Chief Justice Roberts, and that they ``continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.'' I believe the Justices will stick to that, and I am hopeful that Senator Schumer will learn not to utilize those tactics anymore. This is the American Bar Association, the ABA. Their comments came down to this. They said they are ``deeply troubled'' by Schumer's remarks, that ``there is no place for threats--whether real or allegorical.'' And then the ABA, American Bar Association, continued with this: ``Personal attacks on judges by any elected officials, including the President, are simply inappropriate. Such comments challenge the . . . independence of the judiciary and the personal safety of judicial officers. . . . '' Well, Mr. Speaker, I know that is true. I know that when you turn up the dialogue and you hear this radical rhetoric coming out of elected officials in particular, things do happen out in our society. And the Chief Justice is concerned that there could be acts of potential violence that could be stimulated by that kind of dialogue. And I am hopeful that--Senator Schumer seemed to dial it down on the floor of the Senate today. That is good. I didn't notice that he had called upon people to refrain from violence and refrain from threats. He did say that he is from the Bronx and they talk a little more clearly there than other places. I don't doubt that. But this language went to the world, and the world saw it today, Mr. Speaker. And so I am hopeful that Senator Schumer will call upon his supporters to calm down, be logical, make constitutional arguments, and refrain from that kind of rhetoric. And here are the consequences. I had some serious rhetoric applied against me over the last 1\1/2\ years, and each of those situations that were--a good number of them were manufactured firestorms that were fired at me. But also, we saw Members of this House of Representatives that went forward and said, when people go into a restaurant, when they stop to get gas and you see them there, if they happen to be--I am not sure exactly how they defined it, but if they happen to be conservatives, go confront them, make their lives miserable. That kind of discussion was delivered from people who sit over on this side of the aisle, and it had its physical results. It had its physical results, at least in my case, where I sat down in a restaurant last April, and from completely outside my peripheral vision, I was assaulted. That individual has been convicted of assaulting a Federal officer, or a United States Congressman. There is a provision for that. And, by the way, today, he goes before a Federal judge in Sioux City for sentencing. So I won't comment any more on that, because I don't want to be accused of seeking to influence a decision that may or may not have been made, but it is ironic that I am here today having this discussion on Senator Schumer while there is an individual being sentenced for assaulting me back in Iowa, which I believe is a clear result of this kind of radical rhetoric that was poured out. And it wasn't based on truth, in my case, when they attacked me. It was planned. It was orchestrated. It was ginned up. And then you have people out there that take that seriously. And so that is what happened that day, and the sentencing is taking place today. I will trust the judge to make an objective decision. I have written my opinion in longhand and sent that to the court for their consideration. That is where I will leave that recommendation. I have had my chance to weigh in. But let's take this a little further, Mr. Speaker, and that is on this concept of freedom of speech. Now, there are those that want to censure Senator Schumer, and it sounds like Senator Hawley is going to introduce a censuring motion tomorrow in the Senate. I am of the opinion that the most important freedom we have is a robust freedom of speech and that, if we let that be diminished by intimidation tactics, let alone by any kind of laws that would perhaps be found unconstitutional--but watching the Kelo decision, maybe not be found unconstitutional. I want the body to understand this, Mr. Speaker, that freedom of speech is a precious, precious right, and our Founding Fathers understood that if you can't speak, if you can't speak freely, then you can't convey your ideas at all. And then when you can't convey your ideas, they never get tested against anybody else's ideas or embellished or supported by other people's ideas, and that means, then, that human knowledge would diminish, it would atrophy, and it would essentially stop forming around us. Our Founding Fathers envisioned a robust nation that would be regularly and constantly engaged in discussions of public policy, like we are in Iowa as the first-in-the-Nation caucus, like New Hampshire is, and let's just say South Carolina is among those States, too, where there is an intense focus on politics, free discussion. I have spent time in Cuba and learned that they don't have that freedom. They are afraid--even among their families sitting around the table, they are afraid to speak to each other because there might be an informant among them that has been hired by the, at that time, Castro administration. So they don't speak to each other about those things. They don't criticize. They accept what government serves up to them. That is what King George wanted to happen in this country. And if our predecessors here, the revolutionary Founding Fathers, had accepted the edict from King George, we would have never developed this great Nation that we are. We would be stuck back in the mud somewhere back there, because our ideas wouldn't have been brought forward. They wouldn't have been tested against each other, then creating other new ideas. And, you know, we are the Nation that produces more patents, more creativity, than any other nation in the world by far. We are so good at this and we create so much with our intellectual freedoms that we have that are tied into freedom of speech that the Chinese look to us and they steal a half a trillion dollars worth of American intellectual property every year--a half a trillion dollars. And that doesn't include what they steal through cyber. That is called IP piracy. I have been over to China. Years ago, I wrote a bill from Beijing that called upon the U.S. Trade Representative to conduct a study to determine the value of U.S. intellectual property that is stolen by the Chinese, apply a duty on all products coming to the United States from China in an amount equal to that loss, and then collect that and distribute it to the rightful property rights holders. That was a bill then. It is still a good idea today, but they have accelerated their piracy. Mr. Speaker, to give you an example of how this works, we know a little bit about how freedom of speech, thought, and expression works in the United States because we see--actually, in the past, we have seen a more robust freedom of speech on our campuses. Today, they are diminishing freedom of speech on the campuses. They are defining things as hate speech and trigger words and safe places. We don't need that. We have got to be strong enough to face language and let it flow and then accommodate ourselves in a way that we are not influenced if it isn't logical or rational. The Greeks, for example, in their city-states, would banish a demagogue for 7 years from the city-state because they didn't like what he had to say, and that wasn't constructive. But what is constructive is our freedom of speech, our young people sitting in college, sitting up all night long discussing metaphysics till the Sun comes up, new ideas: What is the limitation on what we can do with science? with math? with space travel? All of those things that have made America the leader in the world, they are all tied back to freedom of speech. If you can't speak, you can't express your thoughts. You can't just hold your thoughts in your head and think you are going to do something good with them. If we had taken Albert Einstein and sat him into a phone booth and said, ``We will let you out when you write the theory of relativity,'' first of all, it never would have been created; second of all, nobody could have understood it. You have got to have the interactivity of minds. And people will say: We have the Second Amendment; therefore, we are never going to lose our freedom of speech. I don't see anybody using the Second Amendment to defend their freedom of speech, and I don't recommend that they do. We have to utilize our freedom of speech and push back when it is diminished. So I am not calling for a sanction on Senator Schumer. I am saying this: Senator Schumer, you know what you said. You know whether it is right or wrong. You have to operate in an arena over there and get reelected by the people in your district. Let we, the people, decide. Not a leader here in the Senate, not a leader here in the House, but let we, the people, decide. And, in fact, as a former chairman of the Constitution Committee, the three branches of government, there are tensions between each of those. Our Founding Fathers didn't envision that they would be equal. They believed the judicial branch would be the weakest of the three. But they knew there would be tension as that territory got marked out, and there is always going to be a gray area where there is a little bit of a tug-of-war over who has what territory. But in the end, if you analyze it--I can make your argument for the legislature, even the House and the Senate. I can make it for the executive branch. I can make it for the judicial branch. But in the end, if any branch of government gets out of whack, that means out of sync with the American people, we, the people, solve that problem in the election box. Sometimes it takes time. But that is the best solution is for we, the people, to make that decision, not a decision that sanctions freedom of speech, diminishes freedom of speech, or intimidates people so that they don't utilize their freedom of speech, because we have got to remain the most creative society in the history of the world, and in doing so, we will be the most successful people also in the history of the world. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KING of Iowa

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

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized by you to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Recognizing the centuries of debate that have taken place before our Speakers over the years, every time that anyone has this privilege to address you and be heard by the Members of this House of Representatives and by, today, with our technology, all the people of the United States of America, it is an honor. And it is an honor that goes along with the vote card and with the endorsement of a majority of our constituents back in our various districts. I would say, Madam Speaker, that too often we don't think about how this mix works out; how our Founding Fathers had so much wisdom to put this together when it was 13 original colonies and there were far fewer seats in this House of Representatives than there are today; and yet, to put the mix together here so it is a voice from every corner of America. We started out with 13 original colonies--and I should have probably memorized how many House seats there were in the beginning--but it grew to 435 and then they capped it, because as the country got bigger if we had used that population balance, we would have many more seats here in the House of Representatives. Some would say that 435 is unmanageable; in fact, all of us would have said that on one day or another. But the wisdom of it, the beauty of it, the genius of it is this: That 435 Congressional districts in America, every corner of America is represented here, Madam Speaker, in front of you in the House of Representatives. Whether you go up to Alaska and you hear from the dean of the delegation, in fact, the dean of the House, Don Young, who has been here longer than anybody else, and the wisdom that he brings from way up in the northwest country; or whether you go down into the southern tip of Florida, or up into Maine, or down into, let's say, San Diego, right across the border from Tijuana, or out to Hawaii, or even Guam, for that matter, and the Marianas, you hear the voice of America here. I have listened to the debate here on this floor and in our committees for a long time; and what I hear, when I hear that debate come, you will hear geographical identifications going on. People will stand up for--a lot of times it is ``ag'' products that you can determine. We don't do too many pineapples in Iowa. When I hear about that, I think, well, are we talking Hawaii? Yes, usually. When we are talking about cotton, that is the South. When it is corn, that is the Corn Belt. That is the ``ag'' side of this. But also, we have different weather circumstances. If you want to do a little research, or if you want to find out what is going on in America, you walk down here on the floor, Madam Speaker, and go find somebody that represents the area that is affected. Whether it is weather; whether it is crops; whether it is current events; whether it is a natural disaster or a human-caused disaster, we get straight to it here. The quickest way you can find an expert is here in the House of Representatives. So I congratulate all of my colleagues for doing that job; for bringing the values of their constituents here and putting together that jigsaw puzzle of 435 voices with many, many, many more ideas than those voices. But I came here this afternoon, Madam Speaker, to address a couple of topics; and one of them I want to address is the life and the contribution of Philip Haney. Philip Haney was a friend of mine. He was a friend of Mr. Gohmert and others. Philip Haney was one of the originals to be hired on for the Department of Homeland Security. He became an analyst. He taught himself the Arabic language, and he began tracking the flow of people into the United States out of those countries that, from which came those 19 who bombed us on September 11 of 2001. Philip Haney's expertise built a database. That database tracks something--this is by my memory, Madam Speaker, so that is my disclaimer--about 800 individuals who were at least on the suspect list of those who might be positioning themselves to bring forth another attack on America. If we can remember what that was like in 2001, and think what it was like for Phil Haney, stepping up in a way that he had to educate himself in the Arabic language; he had to understand the culture; he had to understand the history; and then he had to track logistics and other characteristics. He built a database, a database that was an indicator database on whether and if there might be another attack that was rooted in the ideology that took down the Twin Towers, and bombed the Pentagon, and put the plane down in Pennsylvania. Phil Haney was a patriot. When I first met Phil Haney, it was in a quiet, careful room over here just off the Capitol a little ways. I knew a little about his story, but when I first heard his story, he was concerned then that he would be a target by people. And he had a thumb drive with a lot of data on it--I don't know how many gigs it was--hanging on a lanyard around his neck. He kept that with him. I understood that that information was also deposited in a remote location or two or more, so there was a redundancy. If anything happened to Phil Haney, that data would be accessible to the people whom he trusted, I imagine, the most. So that was his insurance policy that he wouldn't be killed. Then, over the years, Phil Haney--and I am going to say 7 or 8 years of this very active--Phil Haney wrote a book called, ``See Something, Say Nothing.'' Those were the orders he got out of the administration at the time, Madam Speaker. Yet, Phil Haney had developed the research and the database that he said, in the last few years of his life, might have, could have--and I will say, those were the words he used--might have and could have prevented the mass killings, the one in San Bernardino and the one in Orlando that were perpetrated by, I will say, Islamic radical hatred. But that information was scrubbed. It was scrubbed from the Department of Homeland Security by order from on high; how high up in the administration, at this point I don't know that we do know. We do know that the former director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, ordered that also to be the case for all of the documents in the FBI, so that there was nothing derogatory about Islam anywhere in all those research documents. That is part of the work that Phil Haney was doing. Phil Haney was then tracking people with his access to the database, but also his ability to track credit card numbers, phone calls, and those things, so that he could see who was talking to whom; where they were traveling; where they were gathering; and that data informed him. But the order came down, scrub all of that out of your database. He never said publicly that he downloaded that information before the scrub came down, but he didn't deny it either. He was a directly honest man, and whatever Phil Haney said, you could always believe. But the administration came in, his bosses, and essentially, took over his computer and scrubbed the hard drive of the records that they said he should not be following, because, I guess, it is under a presumption that if you follow people that are, I will say, associated with criminals, that somehow that reflects a prejudice against their religion. We know that the people that bombed the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon, and put that plane down in Pennsylvania were all of the same religion. But they were a sect of the religion. They were radical Islamists, and Phil Haney was the bulwark against that. Madam Speaker, I say this because a week ago today, Phil Haney died. He was found dead along the road out in a rural area in California, with a gunshot wound in his chest which, I imagine, was very close to where that thumb drive hung from the lanyard around his neck. That was how he kept that data with him at all times. Phil Haney did carry for his own defense. When there were people that would come and talk to him just one-on-one, he often said to them, you are taking a risk talking to me because you could become a target too. He had said to friends as recently as 2 weeks before his death, if there is an announcement, if I am dead and there is a suicide letter, it will be a fake. And he often said, I would never commit suicide. I think the law enforcement people regret that within the first 24 hours the story came out that it was a suicide. That has been retracted since then. And I am talking with people that are in direct contact with the investigators, and that includes the FBI and local sheriff's department. They tell me that the investigation and the death of our friend, Phil Haney, our patriotic friend, that investigation, Madam Speaker, starts with the presumption that it is a homicide and works its way through looking for everything. And it will be a very deep and careful investigation, forensics of all kinds. I wrote a whole series of questions down, and the response I got back was, you will have answers to all of these and many more. Well, I expect those answers. We insist that we get those answers and I do expect that we will get them. But I can't be convinced that Phil Haney committed suicide. I knew him too well. I have talked to at least a dozen of his close friends since that period of time that also said the same thing. The instant the news hit them, they knew that Phil had already--he had already prepared us to know that he would never commit suicide. He was a very deep and devoted Christian man. He had lost his wife a little over a year ago, found a new love, and was scheduled--I call it scheduled--to be married in April of this year, just a little over a month from now. He had everything to live for. He was finishing another book. The information, the data didn't get a complete dump at all in his first book, which I said was ``See Something, Say Nothing.'' And the second book was close to being finished. He was preparing for his wedding. He had joy in his heart. He had energy. He had ambition. And even those that speculated that he might have gotten a health notice that was discouraging, Phil Haney would have used--if he had a terminal notice, if the doctor had said you have got 2 weeks to live, or a month to live, or 6 months to live, or a day to live, Phil Haney would have used every moment he could to complete his work, and finish the book, and make sure that all of that information and data was in the right hands, and that the people that had it in their hands would know what it meant and what to do with it, and who would best put their eyes on it to continue the work that he had dedicated and, I believe, now gave his life for. I want to, while I am standing here on the floor, Madam Speaker, say that I don't believe Phil Haney committed suicide. I expect we are going to get a thorough investigation. The evidence that is coming to me indicates that he was murdered. We don't know that yet. But the next step along the way is, if so, we need to find his killer. So I honor Phil Haney and his life. He was a noble, noble patriot. He knew that he was using the days of his life--he didn't know if it was going to be the last days, but he was concerned it would be, and it turned out to be the last days of his life--stepping up to defend America, to defend the rule of law, to protect our 330 million people here. And that is what cost him his life, in my view, Madam Speaker. So I honor Phil Haney. And to honor his memory, we also need to follow through on a full and thorough investigation, and then if the evidence warrants it, and I expect it will, the investigation that turns up the killer or killers. My prayers are for the family of Phil Haney, for his daughter, for his fiancee, and for all of those who loved a man who was a noble individual, a noble, patriotic American. Speaking of those folks who really do step up and make a difference in the world--Phil Haney is one of them that is on my heart this week. There is another one who stepped up to make a great big difference that is on my mind this week also, and that is Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom. He joined us for a breakfast yesterday morning at the Conservative Opportunity Society. I host that breakfast usually every Wednesday morning at 8 o'clock over in the Capitol Hill Club. It is off the record, Madam Speaker, so I am going to be careful about what I say. I will only repeat the things that I have already heard Nigel Farage say out publicly, but there is nothing that he would be embarrassed about at all. It was a terrific delivery. But the background of Nigel Farage is this: He started out in the trading business--I will say commodities trading business--worked his way through there for a number of years. He got involved in politics, and he was elected to go to the European Parliament. He went there with the belief that the United Kingdom needed to pull out of the European Union. He formed a party called the UKIP. The UKIP party was the most conservative party over in the United Kingdom, and their objective was to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Some of the discussions that we had was what percentage of the GDP of the United Kingdom went to the European Union and how much say they had in the laws that were being passed. What it comes down to is, the European Union will pass a law, impose it back on its member states, the U.K. being one of them, one of the lead member states, and they don't have the ability to ever repeal that. Once they are subjected to the rule of Brussels, they are stuck with the rule of Brussels. The only way out of that is to pull out of the EU altogether, the way I understand this. So I have in front of me here my notes from almost 5 years ago when I invited Nigel Farage to come before the Conservative Opportunity Society. That was July 15, 2015. He gave a tremendous presentation. I was already convinced, which was why I invited him, but I believe everybody around that table was convinced that it is in the best interests of the United Kingdom, the best interests of the United States, for the United Kingdom to pull out of the European Union. Some of the frustrations I have had in trying to negotiate in trade with the European Union come up against the barriers that they have. Most of those barriers do have to do with agriculture, Madam Speaker. For example, we have come a long way with our technology and the genetically modified organisms that we have. We have, for years and years, raised Roundup Ready soybeans. When I grew up, we had walking beans, and we would try to put a little water at each end of the field and go through there and pull the weeds most of the time. Sometimes we cut them with a hook, but most of the time, we pulled them. So we went down, and we would weed our rows to one end, pivot around, weed the rows back to the other end. About every young kid that was there, all the way up to whoever could walk, was in the field pulling weeds out of the beans until a Ph.D. scientist discovered that there was a genetic characteristic that was resistant to Roundup, and Roundup being a better--I will say an environmentally better product to kill weeds with than the 2,4-D that we had been using at the time. So they spliced this gene from another plant into the soybean plant and came up with a plant called Roundup Ready soybeans. That meant that you could plant your beans across the field, your soybeans, and go through and spray a light dusting of Roundup across that. It would kill all the weeds, and the beans would thrive. You would see vast fields without a single weed in them, and nobody had to walk and pull those weeds. They got a little more sophisticated, I might add. After a while, when they got tired of walking, they put a bar across in the front of the tractor with seats on it, and then--my wife has done a lot of this--sat there in the Sun with a spray gun and just spray each weed that comes along in the rows that you are responsible for. That was another way. Well, we know they got a lot of spray on their feet and on their legs. And it seems to be healthy enough in my neighborhood, but it never was really comfortable with that. In any case, that all went away when we came up with a genetically modified organism, Roundup Ready soybeans. Now, that has gone into other crops as well. Well, the folks in the European Union think that somehow that could be a carcinogen. I have argued with them over there, over and over again, show me your evidence on how it could be a carcinogen; show me some science; explain to me, at least your theory, on how it could be a carcinogen. And they say: Well, you have to prove to us it is not. How do you prove a negative? That is one of those age-old questions that philosophers have kicked back and forth for a long time: How to you prove a negative? I put that pressure back on them, and I said: Well, you have to have 60 years of humans, and they have to be controlled specimens so that the only variable is one set of humans are eating Roundup Ready soybeans and the other set are not. And otherwise, their diets, their exercise, their environment are all the same. After 60 years of that, we can evaluate their medical records, see who is dead, who is alive, who has cancer, and who doesn't. Then, we can determine if it is safe-- 60 years. That is an unwinnable argument, with that standard put up, and I said so. This was a 4.5-hour debate with a Dutch scientist, by the way. Then I said: There has to be a better way, another way. You are locking our product out of your countries, the entire European Union, 500 million people locking our agriculture products out and locking them out from the rest of the world, too, with trade protectionism. His answer was: Well, just label it, then, so that everybody knows what is there. I said: I am happy. Let's label it. We have a deal. He said: No, we will label it. We will label it for you. I said: I know your label. It is skull and crossbones. You want to label it as something that nobody should eat. We have been consuming this product for a long, long time, and I don't know that we could feed the world if we didn't use the science. I have long had a couple of ears of corn in my man cave. One of them is an ear of corn that came from an 1848 open-pollinated variety that came over across the prairie in a covered wagon that was planted there. No sophisticated hybrid of any kind; it was the old corn. And that ear is pretty nice. It is about that long, and it has 24 rows of kernels around it. The next ear that is stabbed above it is one from the 2015 crop that has 18 rows of kernels around it. The old one, from 1848, that looks even better than the one from 2015, yielded only between 15 and 25 bushels to the acre. The newer ear of corn, stabbed above it, yielded 232 bushels to the acre, 10 times the production because of the science that we brought to this. It isn't just the genetics. It is the technology, the mechanical technology, too, and it is management. But you put that all together-- and, of course, fertilization as well and weed control--we have gone 10 times--we have multiplied the corn yield by a factor of 10. Science has been a great big part of that, and the European Union is locking out a lot of the science that is feeding a lot of the rest of the world. So, I want into that marketplace. I want to tear down those trade protection barriers and let our American producers market into the European Union. That is one of the biggest reasons that I have been a strong supporter of Brexit. I promoted it wherever I could go, dropped into the U.K. a few times to do so as well. Another one of the barriers is geographic indicators, like parmesan cheese. We are not supposed to label anything parmesan cheese because there is a place in Italy called Parma where they started making cheese that is or is similar to that which we call parmesan cheese. That is one of the geographic indicators. There are many, all put up, in my view, to protect the producers in the European Union from the trade competition outside. Nigel Farage sees that. He has seen that for a long time, not so much for the interest in our agriculture, but the interest of the constraints that come down on the member states of the European Union and how their sovereignty is sacrificed to Brussels and how Brussels then lords it over the members of the European Union. Nigel Farage started that effort, and he has been at it nearly 30 years. When he came to the United States and gave the speech on July 15, 2015, he made some excellent and strong points. He is far more versed on it than I am, and he always will be. But here is just a current piece of it then in 2015. We have a referendum in 18 months. He says that UKIP has completely changed the debate. UKIP will either be--this is just so important, I think, to contemplate, Madam Speaker. He said UKIP--meaning the vote, the Brexit vote--will either be a footnote in history, or we will have done something the schoolchildren will read about. I wrote that down in red ink in that time nearly 5 years ago: We will have done something that will either be a footnote in history, or we will have done something that the schoolchildren will read about. Something happened that the schoolchildren will read about. That is certain. That was the Brexit vote that took place 3.5 years ago on June 23, 2016. I happened to be in London at that time. I didn't go there for that purpose. It was happenstance. I actually had a meeting scheduled on June 24 with Theresa May, who was then Home Secretary. I went into that meeting with her. It lasted probably 30 minutes or a little more. They had just gotten the vote in, actually, at 3 o'clock in the morning, June 24, which is the time that they concluded that the Brexit vote was all in, all done, and the British had voted to pull themselves out of the European Union. I am there maybe 12 hours later, maybe a little less. Theresa May was a very nice lady, but I will say she seemed a little distracted. She didn't know that she was a candidate or was going to be a candidate for Prime Minister. She didn't know in about 3 weeks she would be the Prime Minister. But we talked about trade. We talked about the things of common interest. We went to the agenda that I came there to talk about, and I walked out of there thinking I knew that she had a chance to become the Prime Minister. I was very impressed with her. I know that I said to people at the time: I hope she can become another Margaret Thatcher. I tried to help. I also know, Madam Speaker, that then-President Barack Obama at that time, on, say, June 24, 2016, had said that prior to the Brexit vote--and I believe in an attempt to alter the results that may otherwise come--said if the British vote to pull out of the EU, if they vote Brexit, they will go to the back of the queue in trade negotiations. That day, June 24, 2016, I said to Theresa May: You voted to pull out of EU. I want to see you go to the front of the queue on trade negotiations. She agreed with me. At that point--you know, often you talk to people, and you think maybe they are not listening or something more important replaces that piece in their memory. The following February, then-Prime Minister Theresa May came to the United States, and I believe we met in Philadelphia. She walked across the room over to me and reminded me of what I had said that day, the day after the Brexit vote--actually, technically, the day of the Brexit conclusion. She said: Do you remember what you said to me? I said: Yes. I said that I want to see the United Kingdom go to the front of the queue on trade negotiations, not the back of the queue. She said: Yes, and we want to go to the front of the queue. Well, the 2016 election had taken place by then. Donald Trump had been inaugurated as President just the month before, so we were able to start that discussion but not able to have formal trade negotiations because the U.K. was still in that constellation of European Union nation-states. They didn't formally get themselves out. It was just a vote that said to get out. I don't believe that Theresa May ever believed that it was the right thing to do, for the U.K. to pull out of the EU. Three years went by, more than 3 years went by, 3.5 years went by. Through that period of time, it looked like Nigel Farage had won at the beginning, when the vote came down. They more or less just packaged up the UKIP party, because it had served its function. Wouldn't that be a great thing to see here in the United States? We have these nongovernment organizations that came to work here to get certain things done, and once they accomplished them, if they would just sack up their bats and go home and say we got done what we came here to do? They tend to find another mission in order to keep themselves viable. Nigel Farage didn't do that. He said: Okay, we are going home. We got the job done. We voted; we won the election; and we are coming out of the European Union. But it didn't work that way because Theresa May kept trying to bring a proposal for a conclusion that satisfied all of the parties involved. That meant you had to satisfy Jean-Paul Jonker; you had to satisfy the majority vote in the European Union Parliament; and you had to satisfy a majority of the people in the United Kingdom. They got kicked back and forth, back and forth, several proposals, and they were rejected time and again; but, in the end, the frustration grew, and Nigel Farage concluded that he had to go back to work again. So he went back to work and, this time, formed another party, and that is called the Brexit Party. They elected people again to office in the United Kingdom and brought the votes up to the point where they could be successful, and they swept in and they were successful. Nigel Farage put his support behind Boris Johnson because Boris' commitment was to complete the departure of the U.K. from the EU. So, with all of that, it actually did happen, Madam Speaker, and it happened on the last day of January this year. So it is just about a month ago today that the U.K. was formally severed from the European Union. And I will say that, just observing this, Nigel Farage was the key player in actually removing two British Prime Ministers from office. The second one, of course, was Theresa May, whom I personally like but I just don't believe was committed enough or strong enough to accomplish that which Boris Johnson did accomplish just about a month ago today. So now we are at a place where we can get serious about trade negotiations with the United Kingdom. I am one who favors a strong trade agreement with them that perhaps has benefits that are leaning toward the United Kingdom so that they can get a good jump start in the severing that has taken place in their relationship with Brussels and something that would phase down, perhaps, over 5 years. And whenever there is a trade agreement, like any business transaction, it has to be beneficial to both parties. If we trade dollars, Madam Speaker, I would hope that you would have a reason to do that that pleases and benefits you, and I would have a reason to do that that pleases and benefits me. That is business. And if it is billions of dollars, if it is even trillions of dollars, those exchanges need to be profitable to both parties. But I am happy if we can help the United Kingdom have a smooth glide path out of the European Union and ascend in a successful economy. I just cannot congratulate Nigel Farage enough for the personal accomplishment that he has led. And he has said carefully and, I will say, repetitively: But you are only leading is all you are doing. You have got to have the people. You got to have the workers. You have got to have the volunteers. And they came to the streets of the United Kingdom, and they walked the streets, and they put door hangers on, and they made phone calls, and they mobilized that country. In mobilizing the country, they were able to bring forth the vote that separated the United Kingdom. So when I look at extraordinary figures in history, extraordinary figures like, let's say, Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a terrific wartime President, and then also Dwight Eisenhower, who was also a terrific wartime general--we could go through Patton. We could go on and on about the leaders. But how many people in civilian life start on a mission because they have a conviction, and that conviction drives them through three decades, three decades of being humiliated or being joked about, being snickered about behind his back, but standing up always and delivering the clarity of the facts and the patriotism that is necessary for that success with the departure from the EU by the U.K.? Nigel Farage is an extraordinary individual in history. I have had the privilege of meeting some extraordinary individuals in history, and Margaret Thatcher is among them. I am extraordinarily impressed with her, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul, and, to a lesser degree, Gorbachev. But that network brought about the fall of the wall, and this is the beginning of how a rearrangement across Europe is taking place. I will say, also, it is tough for Poland to be under the yoke of the European Union. It is tough for Hungary to be under the yoke of the European Union. It is tough for Italy. It is tough for Greece to try to match up and be compatible with Germany, for example. When I see these small countries that need a trade agreement and they have to get all the other countries to agree on that trade agreement and the mentality is ``we are going to have protectionism,'' then you are not going to get to a trade agreement if you have protectionism. Also, a couple of days ago, I sat down with just an extraordinary group of conservative leaders within the European Parliament, scattered across eight or nine or so of the countries out of the European Union, and I see the vision that they see, and it is a vision that moves toward they want governments that represent we, the people. They are tired of elitists. They are tired of globalists. They are tired of being constrained by regulators and taxers that are just, I will say, taking care of expanding their empires. They want we, the people to have the say, and they want government to benefit we, the people. And, boy, does that fit with me, Madam Speaker. I am quite pleased that we get to celebrate a tremendous victory for an individual that, for over the course of three decades, kept the ideal in place and, when they got to the vote 3\1/2\ years ago and they more or less moth-balled the part of the UKIP party because they accomplished what they set about doing, then they found out afterwards, a year-and-a-half or so later, came to the conclusion that it wasn't going to happen under Theresa May, started up a new party, the Brexit Party, won the elections necessary there, and threw the support behind Boris Johnson because Boris Johnson said, months ago: I will get the U.K. out by January 31 of 2020. He followed through on his word. Nigel Farage followed through on his word. And I would say that we have brethren now across the Atlantic Ocean that have raised their head up now for freedom and for the voice of we, the people. And I remarked in our private conversation, as we were talking about Winston Churchill, the breadth around the world that the English language has gone. Madam Speaker, years and years ago, when I read Winston Churchill's book, ``A History of the English-Speaking Peoples,'' I read through that book carefully, kind of forward and back and studied it, and I would think about what I had read the night before at my work during the day. You have to understand, I had a job that wasn't intellectually stimulating at the time. So I would digest what Churchill had written and thought about what it meant. But when I finally finished the book, I remember laying it on my chest and looking up at the ceiling and thinking--Churchill didn't write this in ``A History of the English-Speaking Peoples,'' but the conclusion is clearly there if you think about it when you read though the book. The English language traveled all around the world, and wherever the English language went, it was accompanied by freedom. And it was also accompanied by free enterprise and a structure of government and a rule of law; and with all of that came an organization that brought about a work ethic. The British were able to take their language around the world and bring with it the values that came out of that island that has contributed so much to the well-being of this planet. We are the little brothers, so to speak, of that. And so, because America was founded on those values, founded on that language and founded on free enterprise capitalism, Judeo-Christian values, the rule of law, old English common law, it was like a giant petri dish just laid here waiting to spring forth this God-given liberty that we enjoy in this country today. When I go down to Jamestown and walk into that church right on the shore where they landed there in 1607, you walk inside that old church--it is actually built a little bit outside of the original foundation that was put in place then--there is a sign, a plaque on the wall. If you stand and look at that wall, you are looking out--if there had been a window instead of a plaque, you would be looking across the Atlantic Ocean toward England. And it says: Here, on this land, in 1607, English common law came to the New World. That common law exists within our country today. That foundation of common law is not only rooted in our Constitution and our Declaration, it is traceable back to England. It is traceable back to the Magna Carta. It is traceable back to Rome and traced back to Greece, and it is traced back to Moses himself. That is the legacy that was brought to this country: Judeo-Christian values rooted in the rule of law. And, in fact, some of that that came out of Roman law is the right to face your accusers and the principle that you are innocent until proven guilty. And there is another principle, too. If they don't have a law to prosecute you under, then you have made no violation. They must cite the law. And, in some of my Biblical readings, I reflect upon that. When Jesus stood before Caiaphas, the high priest, and he was asked: Did you really say these things--I will paraphrase here a little bit, Madam Speaker. Did you say these things? Did you preach these things? And Jesus said: I taught openly in the synagogue. Everybody was there. All they had to do was listen to me. Ask them. They were there. They can tell you. And he pointed over at the Jews who were accusing him. And when that happened, the guards struck Jesus, and Jesus said--well, first, when he pointed over to the Jews, that was Jesus asserting his right to face his accusers. We all have that right in this country today to face our accusers. There is no anonymous accuser out there that has any validity, unless, of course, you are a hidden whistleblower that is lined up to try to remove the President of the United States. And there are a few other, I will say, unknown accusers. Some of them didn't come forward very well when they were making accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. But, in the end, we have a principle in this country: Bring those people forward. If you can't stand up and, under oath, make an assertion, an allegation that is credible, that is supported by evidence, there is no charge that can be brought against an individual based on an anonymous assertion. Jesus had a right to face his accusers. He asserted that right. And when he did, the guards struck Jesus because they believed his response was insulant, disrespectful. And Jesus said: If I have spoken wrongly, you must prove the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you punish me? Why do you strike me? That was Jesus asserting his right that he is innocent until proven guilty: If I have spoken wrongly, you must prove the wrong. That is America, too. The legacy goes back all the way from, actually, before Jesus into Roman law and all the way up to our times today, through English common law that landed just down the coastline here in 1607 with the pioneers that came in at that time, with the settlers that came in at that time. That is two of the principles. And the third one is the requirement that a violation must be cited in law, and that was St. Paul. He stood before Festus, the governor, and said: If I have offended thee for any reason for which I should be put to death, tell me what that is. Show me your rule. Show me your law. And if you have no law, you have no way to punish me for some law that doesn't exist. Those principles are in our law today. They are not, Madam Speaker, necessarily in the rules of the Republican Conference, I can tell you that, as none of those things were allowed for me. I wasn't presented any right to face my accusers. In fact, I don't have an accuser, not one out of 330 million people. And there is no rule that I have been cited as violating or even thinking about circumventing, let alone violate a law. It turns out that there have been four Members of Congress in all of history since 1789 that have been removed from their committees. Three of them are convicted Federal felons, and then there is me--no rule. Simply, it was an orchestrated media firestorm that got the political lynch mobs' blood up, and they decided the best way to do that was to do what they did. And it has got to be rectified, Madam Speaker. We cannot have a standard in this country that says that one person in leadership, or even if that one person can demagogue the rest of them, can diminish or deny the representation of a duly-elected member of Congress. But that is what has happened, and it must be rectified, and it must be rectified soon. Madam Speaker, I honor the life of Phil Haney. I honor the accomplishments and the continuing life of Nigel Farage. I honor the rule of law, the history, and the legacy that we are as a country, and the values that must be protected, preserved, and maintained. It is so important that we identify, recognize, and refurbish the pillars of American exceptionalism, the legacy that comes from Western civilization rooted clear back to Moses and Mosaic Law through the Greeks and their age of reason and their rationale that laid the foundation for science and ultimately for technology. I thank the Romans, as I said, for their rule of law but also the Republican form of government, which is guaranteed in our Constitution, that representative form of government because we the people can't all get into one gathering like a Greek city-state and argue this out. We have to have people that speak for us. And the wisdom of this construction of our Constitution puts this all together in the best balance that can be contrived. They always knew that there would be tension between the three branches of government, but they wrote that in such a way that that gray area would be struggled over, and if the executive branch got too powerful, then the House of Representatives starts all spending bills, so we constrain the executive branch through the appropriation process. Then if we are too hot-blooded here in the House, which that hot- bloodedness is one of the reasons I am here today, the Senate with 6- year terms cools that in that saucer. So that wisdom is there. And if the judicial branch gets out of hand, then the confirmation process in the United States Senate slowly ratchets that back. They had that balance put together in a beautiful way knowing that we are human beings and we are not always going to honor the intention that is in the Constitution, because we each have our political and our personal desires that distort that gray area in between the three branches of government. By the way, they didn't see the judicial branch of government as the most powerful branch of government; they saw it as the weakest of the three branches of government. And now has asserted itself--and this Congress has allowed them and so has the executive, to a degree, to be stronger than they were designed to be. But in the end, in these difficulties, when there is tension between these three branches of government between the executive and the legislative and the judicial branch of government, our Founding Fathers constructed it in such a way that the election changes things. The election changes we the people, and we the people change the course. For example, if the President gets out of hand, the executive branch gets out of hand, the House of Representatives reacts quickly. When they passed ObamaCare through the House of Representatives and through the Senate, and some of it was admitted, even by those who voted for it, as by hook, crook, and legislative shenanigans, but when that happened, the American people rose up. And in that 2010 election, they removed 62 seats over here and put 62 new seats over here with a new majority and a mandate to repeal ObamaCare. And the first steps that needed to be taken were to cut off all funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare. I led on that. I advocated for that. I fought for that for a decade, and now it is back before the court, the remnants of what is left. I offered, Madam Speaker, the full repeal of ObamaCare almost immediately. I was writing that repeal while Barack Obama was signing the bill, and I brought the discharge petition nearly immediately as well, and we got almost every Republican to sign on it in 2010. Since that time, at least four times, the full 100 percent rip-it-out-by-the- roots repeal of ObamaCare has passed the House of Representatives. And some 80 to 84 times parts of ObamaCare that are part of the bill that I drafted has passed the House of Representatives. Multiple times it has been passed through the Senate and signed by the President that has gotten rid of the individual mandate, for example, and a number of other components of a bad bill. The American people rose up. They changed the majorities here in the House of Representatives. They gave the authority to put the brakes on ObamaCare over here to the House. We didn't put the brakes on it well enough. We should have shut off all funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare and done that in January or February of 2011, and when we didn't, people began to wonder if we were really serious about repealing ObamaCare. Over time there were struggles and, I will say, plenty of them. We had a government shutdown in October of 2013 that was also rooted in trying to shut off the funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare. That failed. Subsequent to that, we had Speaker Ryan write a bill that was a replacement for ObamaCare and a partial repeal, which was advertised as a full repeal of ObamaCare. Repeal and replace. It was a tactical error in my view, Madam Speaker. We should have simply repealed ObamaCare as a standalone piece of legislation and then went to work to put the fixes in, not with a complicated bill that today nobody can explain from memory. I mean, nobody. Not even the author can explain it from memory without having to go back to the paperwork and get boned up on it. But we needed to bring those changes in healthcare and health insurance policy that were logical, that were clear, that were like rifle shots. For example, sell insurance across State lines. Make those amendments to the McCarran-Ferguson Act so that the States would not be able to set up quasi-monopolies with insurance companies at the behest of those companies within their own States. So that in Iowa I could buy a health insurance policy from Arizona, or Kentucky, or Mississippi, or wherever it might be. Insurance across State lines. The reimportation of prescription drugs, Madam Speaker, to cut the cost of drugs by simply bringing them back into the United States at the prices that they are being sold for in our neighboring Canada, for example. That is two things. The third one is full, 100 percent deductibility of everybody's health insurance premium. That is an essential piece. When we had the mandate in place, there were 20.9 million people in this country that were compelled to buy health insurance by law with after-tax dollars, which is roughly double the cost of what you are going to pay with before-tax dollars. And so employers could write off the health insurance policies. If you are a corporation, you can write that off. If you are a sole proprietorship and you hadn't incorporated, you were buying your health insurance with after-tax dollars. So let's say you make $100,000 a year, and you pay your taxes, and now you have got $50,000 left. That adds sales tax, property tax, gas tax, and income tax, State and Federal. Those kind of taxes and more adds up to roughly 50 percent. So you make $100,000 a year, you have got $50,000 left over, and you have got a $24,000 premium that you have to pay on your health insurance mandated in the past by ObamaCare. So there is $24,000 gone. And we know what is left if you are doing the math, Madam Speaker. You have $26,000 left to feed your family, send your kids to college, buy a new car, pay the mortgage, and all of the bills that come in. That took too much money out of people's pocket. They needed to be able to deduct that so that it could be a business expense to them as it is to the competition that the sole proprietorships had. So the family farm, the mom-and-pop operations, the little restaurant run by mom, dad, and the kids, they were punished. And if you look back over the last decade or a little more, we are hard-pressed to go find those little mom-and-pop restaurants anymore, those little gas stations anymore, those family farms. The acres have grown, the numbers of farms have shrunk, and the mom and dad that are on the farm working together as a family and raising their kids with a work ethic and a faith ethic and a family unity ethic don't exist very much either, because one of those two almost has to go to town and get a job where the health insurance for the family is provided. They can't afford to pay it out of the proceeds sitting out on the farm because it is not deductible. The premiums are not deductible under normal business structure unless you incorporate and become a chapter S or a C corporation. So those are some of the things that went wrong here. But the drive to get it right is set up for the balance between the three branches of government. The House of Representatives didn't get as far as we should have gone, but the American people gave us a mandate to do that. We didn't do all that they called upon us to do. And so they called some of us back home again, replaced those seats, and set the majority back over here. Now we are in the second year of that majority. We will find out in November of this year how pleased the American people are with the progress that either has or hasn't been made, depending upon your opinion. It goes back and forth in the House of Representatives. It goes back and forth in the Senate. If the Supreme Court gets out of line, the Senate can shut down and change and refuse to confirm appointments to all the Federal courts, but also to the Supreme Court of the United States. And it is possible, although I believe it has never happened, that if the House has reached a very high level of disagreement with the Supreme Court, the House could shut funding down in the Supreme Court. In fact, I had this discussion, Madam Speaker, with Justice Scalia during the vigorous times of his glorious life, and I said to him, As I read the Constitution, since the Constitution requires there be a Supreme Court, the Congress can reduce the Supreme Court down to the Chief Justice at his own card table with his own candle, no staff. And when I presented that to Justice Scalia in a Conservative Opportunity breakfast of about 40 people, and I did that more or less to tweak him a little bit and see how the glint in his eye would work. And his response back to my constitutional analysis was, I would argue that you could do all of that, but you could only reduce it down to three justices, not one, because otherwise there wouldn't be any reason for a Chief Justice. And my answer was, Well, there has always been too many chiefs and not enough Indians. The man had a tremendous sense of humor, a robust way of living life, and he wrote his opinions in a delightful, entertaining way for the very purpose that law students would read them and remember them. He has impacted our jurisprudence and will, I think, for centuries. I love the man, Justice Scalia. But in the end, Congress does have that authority whether to reduce that Supreme Court down, and so if we did that, it would send a signal, and if you coupled that with appointments to the court, you can see how the judicial branch of government would be turned around, not by the House of Representatives or the United States Senate, but in the end, as our Founding Fathers envisioned it, by we the people. We the people make the final decisions in this. We the people will go to the polls and the primaries coming out. We the people, we will hear very quickly from South Carolina and then on Super Tuesday we the people will send a directive on who is most likely to be the nominee in each of the parties. Then as we get to November after the conventions and the formal nominations of our Presidential candidates and after the primaries in the States so the nominees for each of the seats, all of them up here in the House of Representatives and the one-third of them that are up over there in the United States Senate, Madam Speaker, go to the polls in November and make that selection. And please believe, that selection is the voice of we the people. And when we the people have spoken, we have a right to demand that this Congress follow through on the mandates as we perceive them. They aren't always clear is why I say, ``as we perceive them.'' But it was really clear that our job was to repeal ObamaCare. We didn't get that done. And part of that is a disappointment that brought about the change of majority in the House of Representatives. So I have great reverence for the pillars of American exceptionalism. Most of them are within the Bill of Rights. Think of it this way, Madam Speaker: Ronald Reagan spoke about the shining city on the Hill, and as he spoke about that, I could never quite get that image in my mind. It didn't quite settle. How do you build a shining city on the Hill? It became a mountain, as I looked at it in my mind's eye. It is tough to do the construction of that and build a city out there with all those variables involved. So I have instead constructed in my mind and my imagination a shining city built on the pillars of American exceptionalism. And those pillars of American exceptionalism, most of them are already in the Bill of Rights. Think of a city out there that is built on these pillars, driven down to bedrock, the bedrock of human nature and by the hand of God. Freedom of speech is a pillar. Freedom of religion is a pillar. Freedom of the press is another pillar. Freedom of assembly is another pillar. Those things frame the circle around the outside edge of this shining city built upon the pillars of American exceptionalism. No double jeopardy. Face a jury of your peers. The rule of law. Face a jury of your peers. And then the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, that is there. Property rights that are built within it. The Fifth Amendment, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation, another pillar of American exceptionalism. You can put all of these together, and then you have a series of pillars around the perimeter. But one central pillar needs to be the rule of law. Another central pillar needs to be free enterprise capitalism. I have described the foundation that made America great. That foundation is under attack every day in our universities. For example, our universities are teaching socialism, which is a nice word for communism, Marxism, Maoism. That is being taught in universities across this country every day to our young children, impressionable, going off with the idea that they were going to get this profound education, and they are educated in something that is anathema to the history of the United States or to the success of the United States of America. I want to see the universities teach freedom, free enterprise, the rule of law, the pillars of American exceptionalism, the foundations of Western civilization that have built the First World. Lest there be any mistake about it, there is nothing about anything I said here that has anything to do with race. I have said this over and over again, Madam Speaker. It is not about race; it has never been about race. It is about culture. It is about civilization. And we have to understand that there are things that we share in our history, a common history, a common effort, maybe a common enemy, but a common cause that pulls us together, a common language that ties us together. The most powerful unifying force known to all humanity throughout all history is the ability to speak in the same language and communicate with each other. That pulls us together. It doesn't divide us apart. It pulls us together. It is good when we have more people who can speak multiple languages because we want to communicate with the maximum number of people and understand them, but you can do it quickly with common language, and that is a powerful force. A common defense, a common geography, a common history, a common cause, a common set of likes and dislikes, a common set of even diets and clothing and the things we like about music and play, all the things that have to do with our culture and our movies and our sports, all of those things pull us together. And they are reflective of the American civilization, and they are precious. They are precious to us, and the rest of the world wants to grasp them and retain them and hold them as well. It is not about race. It has never been about race. It is about culture. It is about civilization. It is about enhancing this Western civilization, for which the United States of America is the flagship, is today the flagship for Western civilization. We can welcome all peoples into this belief system that we have, and any baby that could be born and put into a crib in any place in the world can be lifted out of that crib, brought here, raised in America as an American, and they are as American as anybody else. I went over to do a naturalization ceremony with Emilio Gonzalez a number of years ago, who was a naturalized citizen from Cuba, and he was also the director at USCIS at the time. I gave a speech to about 70 to 90 new Americans. He gave one, too. I liked his better than mine because there in the Old Executive Office Building, it was in the summertime and the windows were open, and he said: When this service is over, I want you to walk over to that window and look out that window, which looks out on the White House itself, the South Lawn and the west side of the White House. And he said: Look at that house next door and know that, from this day forward, the person who lives in that house next door is no more American than you are. That is the spirit of the America that we are. Those are the values that we are built upon. There is a greatness ahead of us, but we have to stop bickering and stop dividing each other and pull ourselves together and understand this Constitution is a beautiful document. If properly executed, it will take good people as far as good people could ever go. We are setting the pace for the First World, and we would like to see the rest of the world come together and also become First World. We know the standards. We need to be proud of them, protect them, and refurbish the pillars of American exceptionalism. I will close with this, Madam Speaker. This is by memory, not in my notes. But I remember Nigel Farage saying: We have to have the courage to define and defend our civilization. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.