Dana Rohrabacher

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, let me just remind all of us as we try to decide how much money we are going to be spending on the military, let's remind ourselves that we can arm ourselves to the teeth, we can make sure that we have rockets, aircraft carriers, and new airplanes, but if the people around the world cannot trust us, if people put themselves in an alliance with the United States, if we lose those people who can be intelligence assets, who will fight battles against terrorists like up in Erbil, which is going on right now, we have no chance at peace. We can't carry the load ourselves. I just voted against that added aircraft carrier because what we need to do is to make sure that we are enlisting the people around the world to carry their part of the load. The American people can't do this alone. But I will tell you, if we abandon our friends like this, if we abandon Dr. Afridi, we are putting ourselves at risk for it. It is shameful that we couldn't even get a statement in legislation last year supporting this heroic man who risked his life to finger Osama bin Laden, the murderer, the man who slaughtered 3,000 Americans. Mr. Chairman, I ask my colleagues to join me in this noble endeavor to send a message to Dr. Afridi, and send a message to our adversaries, the brutal terrorists around the world, that we will stand with those free people who are willing to stand with us and not forget them. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, the question we are discussing is simply whether Veterans Affairs physicians can recommend the use of marijuana or not recommend the use of marijuana to their patients. As Republicans, we supposedly believe in the doctor-patient relationship, but apparently, some of my colleagues believe that that relationship is not relevant when it comes to VA doctors and their patients, the patients who happen to be our Nation's great heroes who went off to defend us in war. It is criminal that we send our men and women off to war, where their minds and bodies are broken, and then deny them the ability to obtain a medical recommendation from a legitimate VA doctor upon their return home. Why is it we have faith in the medical qualifications of Congress to determine the best medical practices rather than those people who are doctors in the Department of Veterans Affairs? I would submit that perhaps marijuana is a better option for some patients--and maybe not--but we should stop this heavy-handed, top-down approach and allow the Department of Veterans Affairs physicians and their patients to determine for themselves the best use and the best treatment that they would be able to have. Let's respect these people and their rights. I thought we Republicans believed in the doctor-patient relationship. Either you do or you don't. If you vote this down, you don't believe in the doctor-patient relationship for our veterans, of all people.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise to congratulate a prominent resident and educator in my congressional district, Sister Vianney, on her 54 years of dedication to Catholic religious life and education. Sister Vianney first became a nun on July 7, 1961, with the Sisters of Mercy in Tullamore, Ireland, receiving the religious name ``John Vianney''. She arrived in Costa Mesa at the St. John the Baptist Parish and School and began her career as an educator on August 31, 1962. During her career at the school, she first served as a second grade teacher, then Director of Religious Education, and finally for 40 years was the principal of St. John the Baptist School. Sister Vianney holds a Diploma in Religious Studies from the Pontifical University of Maynooth, Ireland and a Masters in Education from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. During her tenure as principal, she made a special point of assisting special needs students, instituting a full-time Learning Support program for them in 2000, which enabled hundreds of such students maintain their dignity and self-worth in the context of a mainstream educational program. Sister Vianney was nominated for the Distinguished Principal of 1993 Award by the Diocese of Orange and received the Bishop Vann Award for Outstanding Service to Catholic Education just a few months ago. In 2005, she was named one of the ``100 Most Influential People who shaped Orange County in the last 25 years'' by the Orange County Register (ranking 49th on the list), and in 2013 was honored for her long service by the Costa Mesa Mayor and City Council. On June 19, 2015, the Mass of Farewell will be celebrated for her at St. John the Baptist Church. There are few educators anywhere who have had as profound an impact on so many students over so long a time as Sister Vianney, and I know as she leaves St. John the Baptist School that she carries with her the appreciation and fond wishes for a happy retirement of the many whose lives were shaped by her long educational career.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Let me thank my colleagues from California for taking the time and effort to come here and to put these very important expressions of outrage into the Congressional Record. Mr. Speaker, yes, we are outraged that people today would even consider not acknowledging the fact that there was a genocide that took place 100 years ago. I am a friend of Turkey's. I believe that the Turkish people and the people of the United States need to be close. We were in the cold war, and I am grateful to their contributions to our security over the years; but this doesn't mean that we should not be totally honest with each other and with them as friends in that all of us have made mistakes. Certainly, the United States has committed errors in its past that we should agree to acknowledge. In this demonstration today, we are putting ourselves in solidarity with the families of those who were victimized 100 years ago by the Armenian genocide. We also express ourselves to our friends in Turkey that this is the time to just acknowledge that, in the past, mistakes were made and that, indeed, it is time to move on and to make sure that people today in Turkey are treated with greater respect for their rights and in continued cooperation with the United States and with other free people in the world. I thank my friend Mr. Brad Sherman, who has been a leader on this issue, for acknowledging and being here today to make sure that this gets into the Congressional Record on this very important day.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, let us note in this great hall of freedom that this is the culmination of over 200 years of sacrifice and hard work and commitment by generations of Americans who started back in the 1700s to build a country that was based on freedom, liberty, and a democratic ideal of which all people's rights are respected and laws are made by the consent of the governed and that, indeed, we could have established a government at the Federal level which had its areas of authority but where other authority was vested in the States and in the people, themselves. This great, wondrous experiment of democracy is in great danger today from a number of areas. Overseas, of course, we see radical Islam on the rise, and they would like to terrorize the population of Western civilization, especially those of us in America. We also have people who fear forces within our own society. Ironically, one of the things most our people fear is that our own government is out of control and that we have a government today that in no way matches the model that our Founding Fathers had in mind for the United States of America and for the people of this country at this time. They looked forward to a shining city on a hill, and what we have instead is an evermore control-centered government that is not democratically oriented but is, instead, run for special interests, run by crony capitalists, run by bureaucrats in the Nation's Capital themselves, run by rogue elements within our own government, run by a too decentralized system that has emerged over these last several decades. The United States was created by individuals who proclaimed a commitment to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness and life. Even as the Declaration of Independence declared our independence from Great Britain, we declared we were, instead, not just a country that was free of Great Britain but that we were going to be a special country in which people's rights were respected. Even as we did declare our independence in that same document, what did we do? We listed the horror stories that were going on of the great oppression that our Founding Fathers were experiencing by the British, who were trying to suppress their desire for liberty and independence-- many of those items that were declared in our own Declaration of Independence that were reason enough for us to declare independence and to declare ourselves revolutionaries and patriots. Instead, we see many of those same items now being part and parcel of our own government. Our own bureaucracy claims the right to do some of the things that our Founding Fathers felt should have been left to the people and should not be permitted by any government. Today, I would like to mention two significant issues that are at play in Washington, D.C., that will play a prominent role in the degree of freedom that is enjoyed by our people. The second issue that I will mention gets a lot more publicity than the first, but the first issue that I would like to talk about today, which is a dramatic diminishing of the freedom and liberty of our people, is a bill that is designed to dramatically change our patent system. All of a sudden, there are yawns. ``Oh, the patent system. Who can understand that?'' No. It is very easy to understand. Our Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that Americans would have the right to own and control the product of their own creative genius for a period of time, that way we would encourage people to innovate, to come up with new ideas. And, in fact, that patent concept was so revolutionary that it was what catapulted America into a major power in the world. It was a power in which the security and the prosperity of the average person and the rights of the average person were respected. Much of this can be traced back, yes, to the Constitution, to rights, and especially the patent rights because people had a right to own for a period of time the product of their own creative genius. We developed the technology that uplifted America's middle class. We have a working group in this country who have always had a higher standard of living than other countries in the world. Now, why is that? People all over the world and in the United States work very hard. There are hard-working people all over the world, but it was here where hard-working people were able to prosper; people were able to live in dignity, to have families, to look forward to owning things of their own that they could then possess and enrich their own lives. There was nothing wrong with that, and, in fact, it was our technology that permitted that to happen. Well, that technology was based on a legal foundation, as I say, in our own Constitution. Benjamin Franklin saw to it, that wise man, and our other Founding Fathers who listened to him and were captured by the idea. Thomas Jefferson, another man who believed in technology, Benjamin Franklin, these were people who knew that with freedom and technology there is no limit to what America can accomplish, and they set out to build the most creative, the freest, the most prosperous land of all, and they succeeded. But today they are taking elements away from our freedom every day. This attack on the patent system, while it is stealth and not many people are seeing it, is a huge attack on the well-being, the prosperity, the security of the American people. Now, what we have got--and who is trying to bring about these changes in our patent law that will hurt the little guys, hurt the individual inventors, make sure that the American people don't see this as an individual right but look at it as something that corporations do? No, no. What we have are huge multinational corporations that are trying to do their best to undermine the patent rights that we have enjoyed as Americans for over 200 years. Yes, it is a sinister attack on the rights of the American people, and we are talking about crony capitalism at its worst in that these are huge corporations having their say in the Nation's Capital and in Congress because they have influence here. Now, I am not saying that people are being bought off in their votes. I am not saying that at all. But as this system works, every Member of Congress and every person here, just like most Americans, is busy with their lives and busy with specific responsibilities; and what we have are these huge multinational corporations that have basically given campaign donations, not to buy a vote, but to buy someone's attention. So only about 10 percent of the people here know anything about these patent proposals that are now working their way to the floor of the House. These 10 percent, unfortunately, they know. Over the years, they have been given donations by major multinational corporations who explained their point of view. It is just that the other side has never gotten explained, and nobody knows about the other side. So, thus, what we have is coming to the floor a bill, H.R. 9, that will greatly diminish the patent rights of average Americans, of the little guy in a way that it will help these great multinational corporations steal the technology that they did not create. This is the big guys versus the little guys; and I will tell you that the little guys don't always win, and the big guys don't always win. But if the little guys become active and they make sure that their Representative in Washington knows what is going on and knows that they stand for a strong patent protection of the American citizens, of patent rights for the American people, the little guys will win; otherwise, the crony capitalists, these major, huge multinational corporations who don't care about the American people. They care about their profit at the end of the year, which may or may not go into America's warehouse or America's banks. It may go overseas, because these are multinational corporations who know no allegiance to the United States. So what we have got is a bill coming before the House, H.R. 9. Every one of the provisions in this bill has been designed to weaken the ability of American inventors to be able to defend their patent rights in court against major corporations that are trying to steal from them. Now, how did it get this way? How did we get to this point where a bill may come to the floor--and it passed last year. We stopped it in the Senate. But how is that possible? Well, it is possible not because these multinational corporations said: Oh, we want to weaken the patent protection of America's inventors. No. They said: We have got a problem with trolls. Trolls, yes. ``Trolls,'' what a sinister-sounding word. By the way, when I came here 20 years ago, they weren't talking about trolls. They were talking about submarine patents. There is always some sinister-sounding threat that is being used in order to try to diminish the actual patent protection of our average inventor. Today it is ``trolls.'' Now, by the way, what does a troll mean? A troll, according to these corporations, is someone who did not invent something but has purchased the patent rights from the inventor mainly because that inventor maybe doesn't have the money to actually go and to enforce his or her own patent rights upon some huge corporation. So you have some people who come along who have got resources and say, ``I will be your partner;'' or, ``Hey, I will just buy these rights from you.'' This has played an important part in our whole process. You take that away--which is what these big corporations want to say: Unless you invented it, you can't make a profit from it. No, no, no. This is a property right, and if they take that away, individual inventors will never be able to raise the money for their own research, individual inventors won't be able to sell their product. Thus, the number of people who can buy it from them will be so greatly diminished that the value of their patents will be dramatically cut by this bill. But of course these huge corporations don't care. They just want to use other people's ideas and creations for their own profit. They don't care what happens to these little guys; although we know that it is the small inventor that comes up with the genius that changes the lives of people. But of course these huge multinational corporations are only interested in a profit at the end of the fiscal year. Well, this is a huge threat, and people are being told that the trolls--these are people who didn't invent, and thus, again, they are going to benefit anyway by bringing the lawsuit. Well, what they describe and try to claim are that the lawsuits brought on are mainly frivolous lawsuits. Well, let me just note, we have a problem with frivolous lawsuits throughout our system. Throughout our government, we have frivolous lawsuits in every area of our economy. Yes, there are frivolous lawsuits, but this is the equivalent of saying, because some lawyers have frivolous lawsuits, we are going to totally decimate the rights of the American people to sue anyone who has caused them damage. No, no. We don't want to eliminate the rights of the American people because someone has frivolous lawsuits. Let me note that the frivolous lawsuit end of this equation has already been corrected in the courts, but they continue to press for H.R. 9 because their real goal is to diminish the rights of American inventors to sue huge multinational corporations who are stealing their technology. Let's just note the trolls. The trolls, where did this come from? To show how cynical this debate is, the word ``troll'' has actually been created as a PR device to trick the American people into believing that the changes they are bringing about are going to hurt some scurrilous person, a troll, when in fact every provision we are talking about hurts the honest little guy who is struggling to develop new technology or the fact that, if he develops something important but doesn't have the ability to enforce it, he can at least enforce it by selling it to someone who will give him a price for his property. By the way, it is only for about 15 years or so that someone is going to own that, but he has a right to do that. But we are going to eliminate that right for the little guy so that he and nobody else can sue a multinational corporation that is stealing from him. Well, how did that word ``troll'' come about? I talked to a business executive who was in the room with various business executives from major corporations trying to decide: How will we deceive the American people? What we can do is build up a straw man and make it sound like, oh, this is a horrible person, this straw man; thus, we are going to pass laws against that straw man when, in reality, they are trying to get the little inventor over here. So what were the names? They went around: What really scurrilous name can we think of? My friend told me: Well, I actually put into the hopper that we should call them patent pirates. Well, that wasn't scurrilous enough. That wasn't sinister enough because one of them came up with trolls, patent trolls. Well, okay, patent trolls. That is just how cynical this is, that we have businessmen who are sitting in a room trying to decide what word can be used to fool the American people into acquiescence into letting their inventors have their patent rights decimated. One big problem is it is not just the small inventors that are hurt by this change of patent law. Our universities, which now have many patents, our laboratories, which come up with so many new innovations, they are hit dramatically by this. This would probably decrease the value of our patents and people who have whole collections of patents as part of their economic package; it decreases their value perhaps by 50 percent. The major universities stepped forward and stopped it in the Senate, this bill, last time. Well, H.R. 9 is coming up again. We need to stop it here, and we need to stop it in the Senate. Whether you are someone who depends on a job that is a technology-related job, whether you work at a university or a technology laboratory, we need to make sure that the freedom of technology development is maintained in our country. This is necessary for my colleagues and the American people to become active. The little guys can win as long as we are active. We can beat the crony capitalists who try to diminish our freedom. The second bill I would like to mention today is H.R. 1940. H.R. 1940 was submitted by me yesterday. Basically, I would like to call the attention of my colleagues and the American people to the importance of H.R. 1940. What it does is sets a policy concerning the Federal Government that if a State government has legalized the medical use of marijuana last year--now, we are going to include whatever marijuana laws are on the books of various States--that the State law should be what is respected and not the Federal Government coming in to States and local communities where people have decided that they don't believe that the police and Federal action and court action should be used against people who use marijuana. Last year I had a bill that became part of our appropriations process and for DOJ and basically said, for medical marijuana, if a State has a law that legalizes medical marijuana, the Federal Government cannot come in and supersede that State law. In H.R. 1940 I extend that. It will be the same as it was before, only this will also include States that have basically made marijuana for personal use legal. What this bill says is let's respect the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. Let's respect states' rights. Let's respect local communities' rights to control what is going on in their communities. Let us not have an aggressive Federal law enforcement bureaucracy making decisions for us and superseding what local people want to do with criminal justice in their own neighborhoods. H.R. 1940 has been submitted. I would hope my colleagues read this and take this into consideration, perhaps coming on board to support this effort. Last year, we passed a bill just for medical marijuana and put it in as an amendment that said that the Federal Government can't use any of those resources to supersede State law. We got that in last year. And there were 50 Republicans that signed onto the argument that the States have a right to make their determination on these types of things. Our Founding Fathers didn't mean the Federal Government to have criminal justice control over this country. That was supposed to be left at the local level and at the State level. Our Founding Fathers did not want there to be a Federal police force. But yet what we have done is create a militaristic Federal police force that comes into people's neighborhood and now is insisting that even if a State and local community doesn't want something illegal, we are going to enforce a Federal law on them that is a criminal justice law that the local people don't even want. That is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. Our Founding Fathers wanted local people to control their communities and wanted criminal justice to be a State issue. They didn't want to have the Federal Government to have such control over our lives. And to show you how heinous this is, we passed that law here in this Congress--it won by a solid majority--that we would not supersede State law when it came to medical marijuana. Yet we have prosecutors in the United States who are still moving forward, filing charges, bringing people to court, even though the States in which they are in have agreed to legalize the medical use of marijuana. These rogue prosecutors are thumbing their noses at the law. This is what happens when government gets out of line, gets away from the Constitution. The Constitution want us to control our lives at the local level and the State level. They want the Federal Government to handle things that are international and across State borders and are important for trade, et cetera, and our national security. They did not have in mind that we would have Federal prosecutors coming in and stepping on local authority and stepping on local prosecutors and insisting on people being prosecuted, even when the United States Congress is telling them not to do it. To say that this is arrogance and a threat to our freedom is an understatement. We need to pay attention to this because we have built up in the name of protecting people from themselves a law enforcement drug policy that is a dramatic threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people. We don't need a militarized police force. Policemen used to be known as peace officers. When I was a kid, they were peace officers. ``I am a peace officer.'' That means they were there to protect us from each other. Now, we have over the years evolved into the police being called law enforcers. Well, think about what that does. You change the relationship between the law, between the police, and between the citizenry. We have created animosity, we have created fear, we have created violence where there wasn't violence. When someone breaks into a home because they have a baggy of marijuana, that is unconscionable. Breaking into their home with guns drawn--and this happened. And, of course, we have an Attorney General who is insisting not only are we going to supersede states' rights, but we are going to have asset forfeiture. So if someone is providing medical marijuana for one of our veterans or for some people who are suffering, we are not going to give the parents the choice, or someone whose older father or mother is in agony, the chance to try medical marijuana. No, no. What we are going to do if somebody does that is seize their property. We are going to seize the property of the person that sold them the marijuana to alleviate their suffering. This is contrary to everything our Founding Fathers had in mind. This is contrary to the ideal of American freedom and respect for individual rights. I was one of Ronald Reagan's speech writers, as everyone knows, and I have been a Republican all my life, and here I am with my fellow Republicans, and we talk about getting the government off our backs. We talk about states' rights. We talk about individual responsibility all the time. And we talked lately about the doctor-patient relationship as being so important to us. And then we turn around and a majority of my colleagues on the Republican side vote to have the Federal Government come in and step all over state's rights, step all over the rights of the individual to control his life and consume for himself, make his own determinations. Individual freedom, limited government--these are things that we supposedly believe in, but when it comes to the drug issue, no, no; we think the Federal Government has to come in and make that determination for people in their own lives. This is a threat to our freedom. My legislation will take a long step forward to making this a public issue. We should be debating this. I have been sponsoring legislation. My first legislation that was successful was last term in Congress, the one that these arrogant prosecutors are ignoring now that has actually been put into law that they can't use their own resources, meaning their pay, their time, and their office in order to prosecute medical marijuana, but yet several of them are doing exactly that. That shows you how the law and how our constitutional rights are being threatened. I didn't know what reaction my friends who are more conservative would have. I did not know that. I didn't know that maybe some of them would just say: Well, that is a lot of baloney, and just go on using the cliches about the states' rights and individual freedom and not really confront my argument. That is what I thought most of them would do. But I asked a conservative friend of mine just to see what he would say. He is a retired naval officer--a pilot--and he is a typical conservative voter in my district, or in our area in southern California. I asked him: What is your reaction to the fact that the guy you supported these years is now the point person in legalizing medical marijuana? And this officer said to me: You know, you don't know me very well, do you? I said: Well, I know you supported me. You are a retired military officer, and you are now engaged in the aviation business. And he said: Yes, but what you don't know is I have three sons. The day after 9/11, they all enlisted. I said: Yeah. And he said: Let me tell you what happened. Two of my sons came home whole. One son came home having seizure after seizure after seizure every day. Think of that. Your child, your hero marches off to war, and there he is, and you can't control the situation. He is having seizures. They took him to the veterans hospital, and the veterans hospital couldn't do anything to help him. And then one veterans doctor pulled him aside and said: Come and see me off campus. I have got to tell you something. He said: Here is a prescription for medical marijuana. That is what your son needs. I am not permitted to tell you that at the VA hospital. They did it. And this supporter of mine said: My son hasn't had a seizure since. I saw him just a while ago, and he said: It has been 4 years, and my son is still not having seizures. How do I feel about you being the point man on legalizing medical marijuana? I want to give you a big hug. Well, guess what? There are people whose parents are dying or their family, their children, are going through seizures. My child recently had a problem with leukemia. Why would I think that, if she was having a seizure and that would help stop it, that the Federal Government should step in and prevent that? That is what we are doing. The American people need to wake up. My bill will take us a step in the right direction. I am asking my colleagues to support H.R. 1940. Do it because we believe in freedom. Do it because we believe in the well-being of the American people, and we believe in the system that our Founding Fathers decided of ultimate individual responsibility and freedom. That is what we are deciding, as well as the issue of whether or not some poor suffering soul shall be prevented from getting something that might alleviate their suffering. That is not the job of the Federal Government. We need to stand tall on this. My colleagues need to be honest and open with their own constituents, and they will find that they are more supportive than they think. With that said, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to draw the attention of the American people and my colleagues to an issue that is rapidly coming to the floor of the House, and it is an issue that is coming so rapidly that some people might not notice the overwhelming magnitude of this issue. In fact, it is an issue that most people are bored with. They don't like to discuss it. They think it is so complicated that they don't pay any attention. Unfortunately, the fact that little attention is being paid to this issue may result in there being major damage to the well- being of the American people. What I am trying to say is there is legislation that will cause great harm to the American people, to our security, and to our prosperity. It is something that is coming to a vote, and we could well lose unless the American people mobilize and the people in this Hall pay attention to the interests of the American people as a whole and not to major international corporations that have been manipulating this issue. What am I talking about? I am talking about an issue that has over the years been taken for granted, that America would be the preeminent technology power in the world. In fact, it has been our technology superiority that has led to the prosperity of average Americans, to the standard of living that we have, and also to our safety and security as a nation. It isn't that Americans have worked so hard--and we have worked hard--but we have coupled work with technology. In fact, people work hard all over the world, but they have not had the patent protection, the protection for the intellectual rights of ownership in the development of new technology. The people around the world haven't had this; thus, they have had standards of living very low for ordinary people and then, of course, the rich at the top. What we have had in our country is a protection of intellectual property rights by inventors. It is actually written into our Constitution. In fact, the word ``right'' is only used once in the body of the Constitution. There are the Bill of Rights in the latter part, but the word ``right'' is only related to the right that the Constitution declares for those who are writers and inventors who have created something, and they have the right to control it and to own it for a given period of time. This has worked so well for the United States. We have made sure that our people were competitive with the overseas populations, that our people produced the wealth that was necessary for high-paying jobs, produced the wealth that was necessary for standards of living. It comes back to the fact that we have recognized, as a right of ownership, the creativity genius of our own people. Over the last two decades, most people have not understood that there has been a concealed effort to destroy the patent rights of the American people. Let me repeat that. For the last two decades, we have been fighting quietly--people haven't even noticed it--against large international corporations, multinationals, who would destroy the patent rights of the American people. Why did they want to do that? Because they want to steal the creation of our own inventors without having to pay for that right. This is the ultimate little guy versus big guy, David and Goliath fight that I have ever seen in Washington, D.C., but it is also one of the quietest and one that people have tried their best to keep out of the public eye. So how is it that Congress could even conceive of this, where you have big corporations coming to say let's neuter the rights of the little guy or of little Americans? How would this happen? How could anyone imagine that a representative body like the House of Representatives would do anything like that? Well, of course, they are not coming to this body--and they are not going to the committee of jurisdiction, which is the Committee on the Judiciary--claiming that they want to steal from little guys and that they want to take people's ideas and use them without paying compensation for them. No, they don't say that. They have had to create what I call the straw man argument. Now, that is a traditional way of debate. It is in the debate books. If you can't beat your opponent in a debate, create a straw man, create an image that you are actually attacking this guy, the straw man, when in reality you are attacking somebody else. Somebody else is going to suffer the pain. So this man's arguments, the straw man arguments, you can handle them. You can say how horrible that straw man is and his arguments mean nothing, well, because that is not really the guy who is being attacked. It is the other man and woman down there, the small inventors. They are the ones who are going to feel it. But yet you don't hear that from those proponents of the legislation that, as I am warning people, is on the way to the House floor. This straw man argumentation was first used 20 years ago when I got here. They were trying to suggest that we have to make major changes in our patent law because there are these heinous submarine patents. Over and over and over again, the submarine patents were having such a horrible impact on business because they would come up and charge people for patents that the business didn't even know existed. Well, submarine patents, that went away. They no longer talk about submarine patents. Now the boogeyman that is helping them create a straw man argument that will result in the massive theft of intellectual property rights from America's most creative people, the boogeyman now is called the patent troll. That is it: the patent troll. These huge corporations have spent millions--tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions--of dollars over these last few years trying to promote this image that there is a patent troll out there--that sounds sinister, doesn't it?--that has to be defeated. They have proposed legislation in the name of defeating a patent troll, because that sounds very sinister, rather than legislation that permits large corporations to get away with stealing the patent rights from small inventors in the United States. Well, how did this ``troll'' word come about? It is a relatively new word. As I say, when I first got here, they were calling them ``submarine patents,'' that is the evil force. Well, ``troll'' came about--I had a businessman who was an executive of a major company who has actually now changed sides, and he has decided, my gosh, no, he can't go along with this destruction of Americans' rights to own what they have created. He told me about how it was decided. He was in a room with senior executives, mainly from the electronics industry. They went around the room saying, now, what is the most sinister-sounding word that we can come up with in order to divert the attention of the people away from the fact that our real target is these small inventors, because everybody has a soft spot in their heart for small inventors, so they are going to create a false image some way. What can we do? What word can we use to fool the American people into thinking that this is an evil force that we are trying to stop when, in reality, they are trying to beat down small inventors? Well, they went around the room, the guy was telling me, and he said: I actually suggested that they use the word ``patent pirate,'' the ``patent pirate.'' That is how horrible it is. But, no, by the time they got around to the end of the group, to the last part of the group, they had all heard ``patent troll,'' which is even worse than ``patent pirate.'' So they all agreed that this would be the word that we will use to deceive the American people. That is what it was all about. This businessman was very upfront with me about the cynical nature of this type of manipulation. Well, obviously no one could come here and say, ``We want to eliminate the rights of the American people to sue for damages,'' and we can't eliminate the rights of small inventors to actually try to get their money for something that they have invented and spent their whole lifetime trying to create, but what they can do is try to get legislation that will eliminate the ability of patent trolls to function. Well, unfortunately, every single item that is being presented as a means to control patent trolls actually does what? It hurts every single one of them, does damage to little guys trying to protect their patent rights. By the way, everything they are presenting in this legislation would be the equivalent if someone says: Well, we have got this horrible thing about frivolous lawsuits. Because, in fact, what the businessmen often are complaining about and claiming that trolls are being the ones who are doing this, what they are really talking about are frivolous lawsuits. Well, there are frivolous lawsuits throughout our entire justice system and court system. Would we then say that because there are some lawyers who are willing to scam the system or that we know that there are some people who will file frivolous lawsuits that we should eliminate the rights of the American people to sue for damages when they have been damaged by someone or sue to protect their rights when their rights have been violated? No. But that is what is going on here. In the name of stopping the trolls, which they made up the term, we are being asked to support legislation that dramatically eliminates the rights and protections of honest inventors, although that is not what is being said every time there is a debate--``We are for the small inventor; we are for the small inventor,'' when every single one of the provisions hurts the small inventor. What is happening, basically, is we are seeing that the legislation being pushed forward now is under a bill, which is H.R. 9. It is already in the committee. It was a bill that went through last year. What happened is, yes, it went through last year with the same sort of, ``Oh, we are not really trying to hurt the little guy,'' but knowing that is what it was doing because what happened is, yeah, the legislation passed this body. The legislation passed this body. To show you how bad it was, I managed to lead the fight and have one amendment that got one of the bad provisions out. You know what that provision was? The provision was, if a small inventor feels that the Patent Office has not been dealing with him on a legal basis, on a legitimate basis, that he no longer has the right to take his case to court. They were eliminating the right of our inventors to take their case to court when their government isn't operating legally. Now, we managed to push that one back. Unfortunately, the other provisions of the bill moved forward. But guess what. Even though it would hurt small inventors and technology investors and universities, that bill went forward out of this body, but it was stopped in the Senate. It was stopped in the Senate because some of these technology laboratories and some small inventors as well, but mainly the universities, stepped forward and said: Wait a minute. You are trying to supposedly get patent trolls, but what you are doing is going to undercut us. It was analyzed that the result of that legislation, if signed into law and passed through the Senate, would have decreased the value of patents owned by our universities. Now, that is a major source of their income is their patents because they have laboratories and research centers. That would have negated about half the value of the patents that they own. This would have been a disaster. Luckily, the universities spoke up, and they need to speak up in the House this time because it is the same bill they are trying to put through the House, and they are trying to ship it over to the Senate again. We need to make sure that we mobilize and let those people in elected office, whether they are a Congressman or a Senator, know that they have to pay attention to what the effects of this will be on our universities, what it will be on--yes, and on the small inventors. It is unconscionable that we have these huge multinational corporations in a power grab like this. Why is it that they are able to do this, this attack on little guys, on average Americans who have dedicated their life to developing a new technological idea? Why? Why is that? Well, because they are able to give major campaign contributions. I am not talking about anybody's vote being bought. I don't believe that that happens here. I know that a lot of people claim that, but I don't claim that. What I do know is that contributors get the attention of the Member of Congress or the Senator. That is what happens. These big megacorporations--and they are multinational corporations by and large--have bought the attention of these people and have made their argument. So we have 90 percent of the Members of Congress and the Senate who are yawning and nobody is talking to them about the bill, but they have got these other 10 percent with their best friends who have donated to their campaigns actually are able to make the argument. If we are to protect our prosperity, if we are to protect our security, we have got to move forward and interact with those people who are elected to represent us in the Congress and the United States Senate. That is the only thing that will thwart these multinationals and their ability to buy the attention of a certain number of Members of Congress. The Congress will not pay attention unless the universities, unless the average working people, the voters in their district come and see them and talk to them and say: We do not want our rights to be diminished. We don't want any of our rights, but especially our patent rights, which are the rights that protect our jobs because it makes us competitive with overseas. It produces wealth enough for average people to live well in our country. Well, we need to make sure that these huge corporations don't run roughshod over the rest of us because they, themselves, now, as I say, they haven't bought votes; they bought attention. We need to call attention to this issue, and it is up before the Committee on the Judiciary. We are talking about H.R. 9, a piece of legislation that will do a tremendous damage to the American people by cutting off the very constitutional right that our Founding Fathers knew was so important, and that is the right to own, for a given period of time, any type of technology creation and creative genius that you have as a writer or an inventor. This is the little guys versus the big guys. This is David versus Goliath. I will tell you, we little guys need to stick together. If we do, we will win. That is what America is all about. We can and will win. We will not let cynical, powerful forces like those who sit around the room and say: What is the bad word that we can come up with that will scare everybody into supporting our restrictions and our diminishing of patent rights? The cynical people came up with the word ``troll.'' Well, what is wrong with this, by the way? Let me just note that this bill, H.R. 9, will greatly diminish patent protection, but, for example, it destroys the right of discovery. It means that if people actually invest in a small inventor--let's say someone, a small inventor needs an investor. Of course they do. They are not like these huge corporations. They need someone to invest. But later on, the big corporation does what? Steals that invention. In order to what? These big corporations are sued all the time for infringement. What infringement means is they are arrogantly taking something that belongs to somebody else, something that has been patented, and ignoring the patent, putting it into their product, and then say, ``Well, sue me,'' knowing that the little guys have trouble suing because they don't have the money. Well, if anybody has invested in that inventor and the investor sues for infringement--let's say his lawyers aren't as good and he loses that case--well, now, they are changing the rules here. All of a sudden, all of the expenses of that big company, the legal expenses, will have to be picked up by that small inventor. Oh, my gosh, what happens when that happens? You will never get anybody to invest in that small inventor because the law not only says the inventor will pay for the cost of asking for the infringement case, but anybody who has invested in his invention will also have to bear that burden. Who is going to want to become liable if a big company starts stealing and they can't prove it in court? The bill destroys treble damages. Right now, if a big company decides to steal from a little guy--well, if the little guy can prove this guy knew that that was my patent and he is stealing my intellectual property, if he can prove that, he will get treble damages. That is triple damages. Well, that has been what we have had all along. That permits the little guy to have legal counsel because, if it is just simply getting the money back that he has lost, this is damages, because he gets a certain amount because he has been violated. Well, if you eliminate that, how will these little guys get a lawyer? Now, these big guys are trying to eliminate triple damages so the little guys can't get lawyers. By doing these things, H.R. 9 will dramatically decrease the value of patents held by our major universities, held by retirement accounts, held by our laboratories-- the people who own these patents. Now, by the way, let me tell you what they claim a patent troll to be and how they claim that this is bad. A patent troll, according to these huge corporate interests, is someone who didn't invest in something but now has the rights to sue them because that investor--the ``troll''-- has purchased the patent rights to certain technologies. Let me note that a patent sometimes runs around 10 to 20 years that a patent owner can own his patent. An inventor gets granted the patent, and for 17 years, they own that patent. Well, many of them don't have any money, and they can't even develop it, so they have to have investors. Some of them face the theft of their technology, and they don't have the money to put out, and they, themselves, challenge in court that their rights have been violated. It is like a piece of property. If somebody comes and builds a railroad track across your property and refuses to give you any compensation for it, well, you have a right to sue; but some of the little guys don't have enough money to sue. Well, in this case, what we have got is legal entities that are not involved with actually the invention, but they will come in and say, I will invest in your patent so you will have enough money to sue these big guys because they are stealing from you--or they just buy the patent outright, and then they own that property for a given period of time, and then they sue. There is nothing wrong, I believe, with someone stepping forward and buying the property rights of an inventor and then enforcing it through our court system. There is nothing wrong with that, but we have been told that these are all frivolous lawsuits by the trolls. Well, they are not. Some of them are like this, a troll--supposedly, by that name--is nothing more than an investor who has bought the property rights of an inventor, of the person who owned the property in the first place. What we have is these multinational corporations trying to vilify someone who comes in and buys patent rights from small inventors and then using that person to destroy all of the patent rights of the small inventor. Luckily, we have a bill in the Senate, which is S. 632. It is Chris Coons from Delaware who actually has a piece of legislation to try to strengthen people's patent rights, and it eliminates some of the--you might say--bad tactics that were used by people who were involved with frivolous lawsuits in the technology area. He takes care of that without greatly diminishing the patent rights of real inventors. We also have a bill with Representative John Conyers here in the House, and that bill protects the small guy while trying to improve the Patent Office. By the way, what his bill does is ensure that all the patent fees that go into the Patent Office stay there and, thus, improve the quality of the patents that our people have. Over a billion dollars has been taken from the Patent Office in the last 10 years and goes into the general fund when it should be spent trying to protect--and trying to make the system work--intellectual property ownership by inventors. That is the last I have on that piece of legislation, which is H.R. 9, which deserves the attention of the American people. I would like to end my time tonight talking about one other issue very quickly. Today, I introduced legislation, H.R. 1940, which basically says that the Federal Government shall not interfere in those States that have eliminated the penalties on marijuana use and sales or have allowed the operation of medical marijuana dispensaries. This legislation, H.R. 1940, would basically leave it up to the States as to whether or not people should be permitted to use marijuana, especially medical marijuana. I don't see any reason why the people of the United States should face the type of controls and the type of police state activity that impacts their lives by people--whether they are well meaning or not-- who have set up, basically, a bureaucratic law enforcement state that activates and prevents people from living their own lives. If, indeed, someone is using marijuana--for medical purposes especially, but also even for recreational use--if someone is in their backyard, smoking some marijuana, we should not spend limited dollars. We have limited tax dollars here. We are cutting off veterans' benefits, cutting down on people who need help, but then we are spending it on trying to put in jail someone who is smoking marijuana in their backyard or trying to supply someone with the marijuana to smoke in their backyard. That is absolutely absurd. My bill, H.R. 1940, will insist that, if a State has legalized the use of marijuana or the medical use of marijuana, the Federal Government cannot infringe upon that. It is sort of like you see a guy over in the corner of a park, and he is surrounded by policemen, and they throw him to the ground, and they handcuff him and put him in jail, and they go through the court procedures with the judges and all these expenses for smoking marijuana, versus the other end of the park, where some lady is getting raped, but there is no policeman there, and they spend all of their money focusing on the people who are smoking marijuana. That makes no sense. When you have limited dollars, we should especially respect people's right to live their own lives; and, if they make mistakes, which they do, they will have to live with those mistakes. I would ask my colleagues to support H.R. 1940, which is consistent with criminal law should be made at the State and local level and not at the Federal level. We should not have a Federal police force knocking in doors, going into people's homes, and spending huge amounts of money in order to prevent people from personal consumption behavior. I would ask my colleagues, if you believe in liberty, believe what our Founding Fathers believed in, support a strong patent system and oppose H.R. 9 and support my legislation, H.R. 1940, which will restore to the American people and to the States therein the right to control criminal law and their own personal behavior. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I hope everyone paid attention to that wonderful idea that has just been given to us. These Special Orders play a role here in that we permit ourselves the opportunity to hear from people for a little bit more than 1 minute to talk about issues that are significant and who would like to bring them to the attention of the American people and, of course, to their colleagues here in Congress. Today I intend to bring the attention of the American people and my colleagues to a threat to the well-being of the American people, a major threat that has gone unrecognized and could well change our way of life and change the way of life for our children and destroy one of the basic rights that were written into our Constitution in order to protect the prosperity and security of our country. I am talking about the changes that are being proposed in our fundamental technology law, in our patent system. And I know that sounds very boring to most people. But the fact is, without a strong patent system, the American people would be at the mercy of both competitors, in terms of their labor overseas, but also in terms of the vicious and totalitarian elements in other countries that might want to do us harm. It is our ability to produce the technology that America needs in order to make our people competitive and to produce the wealth that is necessary for a decent standard of living that has made America the great country that it is. We are a great country not because we have very powerful and wealthy interests here in the United States, which we do. We are a great country because ordinary people are permitted to live decent lives and because our country has not been challenged throughout its history over and over again and had to waste all of our resources and all of our wealth on vast amounts of armaments and drafting all of our people into the military and having a militarized society in order to have us safe from a foreign threat. No. What we have done is we have been able to produce wealth dramatically in our country and had our workers' being competitive with labor from around the world because we have been technologically superior. Mr. Speaker, there is a threat to that technology superiority, an incredible threat that is being foisted off on the Congress and the American people. I am here to alert my fellow Members of Congress to this threat. One needs only to see how important the technology element of our society has been right here in the United States Congress. There is a statue here in the Capitol to Philo Farnsworth. Now, who the heck knows who Philo Farnsworth was? Well, not many. But there is a statue to him here because he represents a very significant part of the American story. Philo Farnsworth was a farmer in Utah, a man who was educated in engineering, but a man who had very little resources. He set out in between farming to try to find and discover a technological secret that had perplexed some of the most powerful and financial interests in our country. RCA, at that time under a man named David Sarnoff, was America's premier technology company, a company that had vast resources and was deeply involved in trying to find out how to invent a picture tube, how we would have a tube that showed images rather than just radio waves that had voice on them. This was a huge challenge and a historic challenge. RCA pumped millions of dollars of research into this. The one who discovered this secret was Philo Farnsworth, an independent inventor, a man who was a farmer in Utah. He discovered the secret and then wrote to RCA very naively believing that this big corporation would honor his discovery and permit him to have the benefit--or at least a benefit--from this discovery. Yes, then RCA sent Philo Farnsworth a representative from their laboratories. When he described what he had found, the scientist from RCA went away saying, ``We will be in touch,'' and never got in touch. The next thing that Philo knew was that there was an announcement that RCA had made a major breakthrough in discovery--only it was exactly the discovery that Philo Farnsworth had made and had transmitted the information to RCA. This became one of the great jury and great legal battles of the early 20th century. Philo Farnsworth, an individual person, was up against the most powerful American corporation of the day, RCA, and had one of the strongest and toughest leaders of that corporation, David Sarnoff, who vowed not to give him a penny and not to recognize him because it was RCA that actually came up with this. Philo Farnsworth was able to mobilize support behind his claim. He was able to have people invest in his lawsuits, and slowly but surely they made their way through our court system all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. God bless the United States of America. A single man, a poor, individual farmer who had come up with an important technology secret had his rights respected by our Supreme Court over the power and influence of America's most powerful corporation of the day, RCA. Philo Farnsworth was recognized as the inventor, the inventor of the picture tube which has transformed our country and transformed the world. All the picture tubes you see, and now the screens that we see on our computers, can be traced back to the discovery of this one individual, Philo Farnsworth, and the tragedy that his life was because, over the years, he lived a very poor life. He was constantly in struggle. He had very little resources. By the time he won the Supreme Court case, it was late in his life, and he did not benefit, as he should have greatly, from that. We have a statue to this wonderful American, a man who stands for what America stands for, using technology to benefit the people, not just to enrich huge corporate interests. Indeed, Philo Farnsworth has a statue here in the Capitol. But you will never see a statue to David Sarnoff of RCA. That shows you where the heart and soul of America is. The fact that we had a Supreme Court that decided for the little guy rather than the huge, powerful corporation showed what kind of country we have. That is what makes America great. That is what has created the new technologies that have uplifted our people and made sure that our people were competitive and, thus, had high standards of living and that we were secure from foreign threats because we were technologically superior to those foreign threats. This is what has made America great, and today it is in jeopardy. The technological edge of our country will be robbed from us by multinational corporations who are powerful and are shifting issues through the Congress that will greatly diminish the patent protection of the American people. Had these same changes in the law that these multinational corporations would now foist upon us been the law in the days of Philo Farnsworth, we would have no picture tube. We would never have had a Philo Farnsworth. We would never have had the recognition of the creative genius of the American people. Instead, we would have had the powerful, rich, multinational corporations running roughshod over America's creative genius. No. We have that threat today, and I would ask people to pay close attention to what is happening here on the floor of House in the next few months. What has happened is we have to understand that patent protection of the American people is something that was written into our Constitution. It is part of the heart and soul of our country. Benjamin Franklin is well-known as the man who discovered electricity, but he was also one of the great Founders of our Declaration of Independence and, yes, one of the people who authored our Constitution--Benjamin Franklin, the great technology hero, the hero of liberty and just for all. If you go to Monticello and visit Thomas Jefferson's home, it is filled with inventions, small inventions. Thomas Jefferson knew that we were not going to rely on Big Government, we couldn't rely on big corporate interests and rich people, but we would rely on the genius of the American people through technology. Freedom and technology are the two things that would uplift ordinary Americans. Those things are now at stake. They are now in danger. We, in fact, are now facing basic changes to the concept of intellectual property rights, and especially the rights of our inventors, and it is being foisted upon this body in what I would say is a very deceitful manner by powerful interest groups from the outside. But remember, with the protection that we have had, America has had the inventions. We have uplifted the standard of living of the ordinary American. We built the reaper, which permitted us to harvest huge crops of food so that Americans were well-fed, and we became the breadbasket of the world; the cotton gin which made sure that people had clothing. There was a Black American who invented the machine that permitted the mass production of shoes. The mass production of shoes was permitted because a Black American whose other rights were not protected, his rights to own the intellectual property, the inventions, the patent rights to his invention, were respected. Because of that, all Americans ended up with being able to have more than just one pair of shoes. Before this man invented his invention of how to mass produce shoes, ordinary people had one pair of shoes and that was it. That was it. When they wore out, your feet wore out. We had things like the electric light that we know that Thomas Edison was so involved with; telephones, Alexander Graham Bell. All the major inventions that we have were invented by American genius, not of very powerful corporations, but of the American genius of the American people. What we have always had, however, is a situation where big guys did try to steal the creativity of the little guy, but in our country, they couldn't get away with it. In our country, the Philo Farnsworths knew that they would be protected if they created something that uplifted their fellow man. So Americans and American genius was put to work as never before in any country's history to make sure ordinary people, and especially our working people in our factories and our companies, could be competitive with those factories and companies and the workers overseas. Our people don't work harder than the people overseas. That is not what made us a great country. The fact is people work really hard all over the world, especially in Third World countries where people live in utter poverty. They work really hard. But it is the technology that is put into play, the technology put into play with that hard work and the profit motive for investing in that technology and creating that technology, that is what has made the difference in an American people that are well-fed, American people with great opportunities, American people who can be proud that they have a decent standard of living and are able to make decisions for themselves and their families, not just live in the abject poverty that existed for so long in so much of the world. No, it wasn't just our hard work. It wasn't just our natural resources. It was a Constitution that wrote into it the rights of every individual citizen. And paramount to those rights, even before the Bill of Rights in our Constitution, is a provision that guarantees that our inventors and our writers will be given the right to own, to control their invention or their book for a given period of time and profit from it. Traditionally, our inventors have had ownership rights to what they have invented for 17 years of protection. During that 17 years, they would own it, and when they applied for a patent, once that patent was issued, they would have 17 years to control what they had invented. Also, until that patent was issued, it has always been, in the United States, kept totally secret what that invention is until the inventor has been actually granted the rights to own that invention. Well, these things have led directly to a genius, a surge of genius in our borders that reflected the fact that our people had freedom and technology available to them. So these are things that we have taken for granted because this is what America is all about. But today, powerful multinational corporations, especially in the electronics industry, are trying to destroy America's patent system. My colleagues should now understand this, and the American people should understand this and be talking to their Member of Congress and their Senators, because if they succeed in undermining our patent system and destroying the rights of the little guy to own what he has created and give the big guys the power to steal from the little guys, we will see a difference in our country. Within a generation, we will no longer have these advantages that I just spoke about. What we have today is an effort by the big guys to change the rules so they can get away with stealing from the little guys. Now, obviously, people aren't going to come out and just say: ``Please let's vote for a bill that is going to break down the patent system so that big, multinational corporations can steal from American inventors.'' Of course they are not going to say that. So what do they say? Well, let me put it this way. 25 years ago when I first noticed-- this fight has been going on the entire time that I have been in Congress. I noticed that what had happened was that some big corporations were trying to put into the GATT implementation--GATT is a trade treaty. They were trying to put into that trade treaty's implementation language a bill that had to go through Congress, changes in our patent system that weren't even required by the treaty. I will get into what they were doing if you really want to see how heinous and sinister this is. What were those changes 25 years ago that these big corporations wanted to make? Number one was saying that, yes, when you apply for your patent, 20 years after you apply for it, you really have no patent rights after that at all, even if it takes 15 years to get your patent. The American system was the clock starts ticking when you get your patent, 17 years of protection. These big guys were trying to give our American inventors maybe no protection. After 20 years, they had nothing. But everybody would know about it because the second provision they were trying to foist off on us was that after 18 months, if a patent had been applied for, after 18 months, even if the patent had not been granted, they were going to publish the patent application, so that every thief in the world would have heard all of the secrets of every American inventor. They called it the Patent Application Publication Act, they were so blatant about it. After we fingered it and drew America's attention to it, they changed the name, of course. Then it became an issue of not trying to disclose patents or patent applications, not trying to limit the amount of ownership that our patent people had; it became, instead, a battle against the ``submarine patentors.'' That is what they called it. That was the bogeyman that was created that day in order to get people here to vote in a way that would destroy the patent rights of the American people, the patent rights that I just outlined. Both of those were going to be eliminated. You are going to have, instead of no disclosure, you will have full disclosure of your patent application, even before you are granted the patent, and you are not guaranteed any specific time, but your patent was going to run out after 20 years, even if you had never had any time to protect it. That is what they were trying to do, and we managed to stop them. We put a coalition together, a bipartisan coalition. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and myself have been active on this issue for the last 25 years, trying to thwart these huge corporate interests who are trying to neuter the rights of the little guy, of the small inventor, of the independent operator. How did we stop them that very first time? Well, we added an amendment on that said these changes that are being foisted on us today--or being voted on today--only apply to companies that have over 100 employees. All of a sudden, those people who were advocating this saying, Oh, this will be good for everybody, especially the small inventor, all of a sudden, they had to withdraw the bill. Well, if it was so good for the little guy, why would they withdraw the bill? Well, they withdrew the bill because the bill was aimed at helping huge corporate interests to step on the little guy in the United States. We defeated that, but we have been fighting, fighting, fighting for 20 years; and this year, it looks like we have lost the leverage that we had to defeat these powerful special interests. That is why it is important for the American people and people involved in technology development to pay attention to proposals that are being made here in the House and in the Senate concerning intellectual property rights, especially concerning the patent rights that our people have enjoyed, as I say, since the founding of our country. Today, we have a bill that is being presented. Again, it can't be presented on how do we destroy the patent rights of the average American. They have to find something that sounds so sinister that they can set up a straw man. They will say, Look at him, we are going to beat him up. That is what this bill is about. Just like I said, submarine patents were the reason why they had to eliminate the right of the small inventor to a guaranteed term or to have confidentiality in its patent application like before. That was a submarine patent. Well, now, they are not saying that. They have had to come up with a better term that is even more frightening and sickening than submarine patent. The cynical nature of this type of debate on an issue was demonstrated by the fact that a corporate leader, who was on the other side of this issue than I am, has now changed his position and come to me with a description of how the words ``patent troll'' came about because, now, we hear that we have got to change the law, not for submarine patents, but now because patent trolls are preying on the American people, they are draining us of funds and enriching themselves, these patent trolls. Well, where did that word come from? This gentleman that I am talking about was in a meeting with the heads of some very powerful corporations. They sat around in a circle to decide what term they should use. He said to me: Well, I recommended ``patent pirate.'' Well, that wasn't sinister enough, so they came up with patent troll. By the time everyone heard that: Yes, that is the one. Well, why is it the one? Because it sounds so sinister that it is going to be able to blind people as to who the real victim is. Now, we are out to get the patent troll, but it is the little guy, it is the small inventor, it is the independent inventors that are going to be damaged severely by an attack on a patent troll. Now, what is a patent troll, by what they are trying to tell us? Patent troll--we keep hearing the argument that there are people in our society that are using, basically, patents that are not really good patents. They are patents that really are not legitimate patents, and they are using these to create litigation that will enrich the lawyers--the patent trolls--because the patent trolls just reach out with some illegitimate patent claim, and then they have to get paid off or they have to go to jail. Well, how much of this is there? There is some of that, but let us note this: There are frivolous lawsuits throughout our entire system; there are frivolous lawsuits in almost every endeavor in the American economy, but there are also legitimate lawsuits. There are people who are really damaged and deserve to have the right to sue somebody. The law that we are facing now, that is being proposed here in Congress for a patent law, is the equivalent of eliminating the right of people to sue someone who has done damage to them in order to prevent a frivolous lawsuit from happening. Do we really want to neuter the rights of people? Because some people abuse the system, you are going to take the 90 percent of the cases where it is not being abused or 95 percent of the cases where it is a legitimate suit and eliminate that right in order to handle the frivolous suits? That is what is happening. Although we are being told that all of the suits are frivolous and that the inventors are being portrayed as money-grubbers, these guys trying to take advantage of these big corporations--yeah, right. The little guy is trying to take advantage of the big guy, and that is why we have got to pass a law that dramatically restricts the rights of the little guy to deal with an infringement by a big corporation. What this bill is, H.R. 9, and it is waiting to be brought to the floor. It could be brought to the floor in the next week, month, 2 months; we don't know yet. This bill dramatically undercuts the rights of legitimate patentholders to enforce their patents. The patent troll element comes in with this. Today, if you are a small inventor and a large corporate interest has been infringing on your invention, if you own it for 17 years--after that, by the way, everybody can use it for free--but during that 17 years, you have a right to be compensated for the fact that you are the one who discovered this. You invested your time and your effort and your scarce resources in order to come up with this new discovery, yes; and they have a right then to try to bring, if a large corporation is using it without paying them royalties, they have a right to bring suit. But many of them don't have those resources. They don't have any money. They are, indeed, independent small inventors up against corporations that are worth billions of dollars and, I might say, multinational corporations. These aren't just an American David Sarnoff. A lot of these corporations we are talking about are multinational corporations, and they have nothing to do with the American interests. They have everything to do with the interest of making money for their stockholders and their company, which is multinational, which is global in scope and not an American company necessarily. We are going to undercut American inventors' rights to try to enforce their patent from being stolen by multinational corporations. That is what this bill does. This is, to me, in my 25 or 26 years here in Congress, the best example of crony capitalism that I have ever seen. What is crony capitalism? That is when we pass laws and we set up regulations that are aimed at--what--helping the big guy in relationship to the little guy. Crony capitalism is when the little guys pay and end up having their rights trampled upon, but the big guys are protected by different laws and clauses that we put into law here in Washington in the House and in the Senate. Well, the bogeyman this time, as I say, is the patent troll. The patent troll is what? The patent troll is someone--although I wouldn't call him a patent troll. I would say there is a person who is willing to join with a small inventor--or independent inventor--to see that his patent is enforced. We are not talking about phony patents; we are talking about legitimate patents. We are not talking about frivolous claims; we are talking about legitimate claims to patent claims of an inventor, but the inventor does not have the strength to enforce that against a big corporation that has an unlimited budget. This bill would make it dramatically more difficult for anyone to enlist someone who is not the inventor to help them press their case against the infringement, the stuff that they had. By the way, if this law, H.R. 9, was passed and would have been law at the time of Philo Farnsworth, Philo Farnsworth would have been beaten up, kicked around, stepped upon, and he would not have had any benefit from his invention of the picture tube. Do we want a country in which the big guys are able to do that to the small inventors? How long are we going to be on top of things? How long will the standard of living of our people stay high and our businesses competitive and our country safe and secure because of technological advances? How long will that last if we are stepping on the little guy and we fundamentally change the nature of technology law in our country? That is what is happening. This bill passed last year in the House, and it was stopped in the Senate. Let me note that one of the amendments that I personally had to propose that demonstrate how bad this bill is--although I managed to win the one amendment that we were able to win--was they wanted to take away the rights of an inventor to sue the Patent Office if, indeed, the Patent Office was not legally acting in terms of his patent application. In other words, if a government agency was doing something illegally, using illegal criteria--maybe because someone else was influencing the decision from the outside, maybe there was just some sort of personality problem, maybe it was corruption from within--but if an independent inventor sees that he is being treated and is being dealt with in a way that is not consistent with the law, the small inventor has always had a right, just like any other American, to sue and take his case to court. This is how blatant H.R. 9 is. That bill contained a provision that said the small inventor can't take his case to court. They are going to neuter the small inventor of his right to take it to court; and he has to, instead, go to an ombudsman at the Patent Office--oh, my, an ombudsman, how nice. Eliminating the right of an American citizen and inventor in order to--what--in order to send him to a government bureaucrat and the agency that he thinks has done him wrong, rather than having a day in court. That exemplifies everything that is in H.R. 9, and it is so cynical because what we have got is, again, the American people saying, ``Look at this straw man.'' It is called ``straw man argumentation.'' Let's build up a straw man--the trolls--and everybody will think that we are aiming at the trolls when, in fact, the real targets are the little guys--the American independent inventors--the little guys who can't afford without some help from the outside to enforce their patents. There is nothing wrong with someone investing in an inventor who says, ``Look, I have got my whole life's savings in this. I have invented this, but this big corporation refuses to give me any royalties from my patent.'' There is nothing wrong with trying to help that inventor enforce his rights--there is nothing wrong at all--but the straw man is that person who is actually investing in this. Now, he didn't invent it, and he is going to profit by it. Thus, he is a troll. No. That person is fulfilling an important role in not permitting outside people to invest in inventions and with inventors. By doing that, what we have done is diminish the value of every American patent. That understanding defeated this bill in the Senate last year because our American universities understood that, if that went in, the value of all of these patents that the American universities have been developing would dramatically go down. It diminishes the value of all patents when you eliminate that right of the people to invest in patent enforcement. That makes sense. So there was an upheaval at almost every American major university and in many other industries that deal directly with long-term research and development, like the pharmaceutical industry, for example. They knew that we could not allow this to happen. That was stopped in the Senate the last time around. People realized that this type of crony capitalist attempt was to the detriment of the American people. We have some of the most powerful multinational corporations still at play, trying to push this through this session of Congress. People have to know that H.R. 9 is crony capitalism personified. They need to talk to their Congressmen, and my colleagues need to talk to each other about this bill and not just accept what is being handed to them as something that has made its way through the committee process. This bill destroys the rights of discovery for the little guy. This suit basically doesn't do anything to go up against frivolous lawsuits, but it deems all of the legitimate cases and puts them in the same category as frivolous lawsuits. H.R. 9 causes fees, and fees on defending infringement would be leveled not on the guys who have committed the crime. We are actually leveling fees on the people who are trying to enforce their rights. We are asking people to pay more money in order to enforce their rights. It destroys, for example, the treble damage awards. Now, what does that mean? If you are a little guy, to get a lawyer to help you, that lawyer has to know he is going to make a profit when getting involved in a suit against a big corporation. Today, they have what they call triple damages. If the corporation knows that it is infringing on the little guy, there are triple damages. They are trying to get rid of those triple damages and say, ``No, only actual damages.'' What does that mean? The little guy can never afford to hire a lawyer. The lawyers won't get involved. You can see these big corporations, they certainly have all of the legal help they need. Basically, that provision alone neuters the leverage that a small inventor has to get some legal help in his battle to defend his or her own property rights. This bill, by the way, fails to identify--and it even sometimes protects--lawyers who are operating on bad faith with frivolous lawsuits, as compared to trying to help--let's deter frivolous lawsuits, but let's not do it by eliminating the rights of people who have legitimate claims against big corporations. There is another bill now emerging. In the House, it is H.R. 9. It is a disaster. We need to make sure people know that the American people have been tipped off and that we are not going to let this happen by the major, huge corporations like Google, which is one of the main groups behind this trying to rip off these little guys. We are not going to allow that to happen, and they are not going to rip us off either. This has been recognized in the Senate. Like I said, it was stopped the last time, so there is a bill in the Senate, S. 632. Senator Coons has put this bill in. This bill reasserts the condition of willful infringement. Basically, it reinforces the idea that, if a company is willfully infringing, this is something that someone needs to be paid for and compensated for because someone intentionally stepped on his rights. It gives the PTO the discretion to award damages in these cases when you see that a big company has willfully said, We will ignore the fact that we know this group invented it. Ignore that. Just go ahead, and if they try to sue us, we will step on them, or we will get the rules of the game changed in Congress so that they don't have a chance to sue us. S. 632, the Coons bill in the Senate, specifically allows higher education and smaller entities to be identified as legitimate owners. Thus, we are protecting the actual little guys and their educational institutions. What we also have in the Senate bill is something that identifies bad faith in these demand letters. There are frivolous lawsuits. It actually gives strength and power to thwart these frivolous lawsuits without damaging the rights of the small inventor and the traditional rights of the American people. We are up against a major fight, but here we have a good piece of legislation in the Senate, in the Coons bill, S. 632, and in a crony capitalism bill, H.R. 9, here in the House. The American people have to at times get involved or things will go haywire in our country. We don't have the rights and privileges that every American enjoys simply because they are in the Constitution. Over the years, the American people have stepped up when they have seen that their rights were being trampled upon. The big guys were always around, trying to steal from the little guys, but as we saw in the case of Philo Farnsworth, we have a commitment to America's little guys. As for the men and women who maybe are not rich but who have a creative genius that will uplift all of us, we have made a commitment to them. H.R. 9 breaks that commitment and destroys their ability to actually benefit from their own creative genius. I would ask my colleagues to spend time reading H.R. 9 and consider the straw man argument--the trolls. Get beyond the slogan, and see what effect it will have, and ask small inventors--independent inventors-- and educators what impact the changes in H.R. 9 will have. Once the legislators here in the House do, and once they understand the damage that this will do to the American people and how the little guy is going to be stepped upon, they will vote against it, but they have to have their attention drawn to this. People are busy here in Washington. The biggest problem is getting the attention of our colleagues to pay attention to a bill like H.R. 9. That is part of what the citizenry has to do if our process is going to work. They need to be talking to their Congressmen. They need to be talking to their Senators. Whether you are an educator and you deal with patents of your educational institution or whether you are an independent inventor and have an idea that will make Americans more productive and more competitive or make our country safer, you are the treasure house of this country, and they are trying to destroy that treasure right now. I call on my colleagues to join me in opposition to H.R. 9 and to work with the Senate to try to have the Senate bill intertwined and to come to a compromise so we can have a positive bill here in the House and so we can move forward in a positive way to make sure that Americans remain prosperous, that Americans remain secure, and that Americans remain free. That is what our Constitution was all about. That is what Thomas Jefferson was all about, and that is what Benjamin Franklin was all about. That is what we are supposed to be all about. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from New York (Mr. Katko). Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, let me just note that there has been some laudable cooperation in the Science Committee this year, which I deeply appreciate. And the gentlelady and I have actually cosponsored some very needed legislation. I think this particular bill does demonstrate, however, that as much as we can try to work together, that there are some fundamental differences between the two parties here in Congress dealing with scientific issues. It is much to the chagrin of many of us to see--I have been a Member of Congress now since 1989--that the integrity of America's, and especially our Federal Government's, science programs has been brought into question by what appears to be a very cynical manipulation of the sciences by various elements in our government and within the political system who would like to manipulate science for their own benefit. Let me just say that we need to take the steps to ensure to the American people that integrity is being restored to the scientific process, especially those scientific processes in which the Federal Government is involved. This amendment, the reason why I would be opposed to it, it goes in the opposite direction than what this bill was intended to do. The bill was intended to try to create a higher level of trust, that there is an integrity within the science situation here with the EPA Science Advisory Board. This amendment would allow individuals to peer-review their own work, for example, and without any disclosure requirements. That means an individual could be paid by the EPA to write a chapter for a science project and then also serve as a reviewer for that project. The amendment does not require, for example, disclosure of conflict of interest waivers and recusal agreements. So we need to make sure that these types of activities are well documented and that we know exactly what needs to be done so the public can feel confident that when you have an advisory board for the EPA which actually passes regulations and controls over our lives, that the science behind those proclamations and those mandates by the EPA are made on solid science, rather than on people who perhaps have conflicts of interest and other such problems in coming to a scientifically-based decision, rather than a decision and a recommendation that serves special interests or serves someone's own personal interests. So I would ask my colleagues to join me in opposing this amendment. But like the chairman states, this is a work in progress. Maybe we can come up with some language that both sides will appreciate. Thank you very much.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 810, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2015. I would like to compliment Chairman Palazzo and Ranking Member Edwards for a job well done. It has been tough. There have been disagreements. Matters have been handled fairly. And now we are getting behind the product of all of that labor. There was a great deal of work and negotiation on these provisions over the past year, and the outcome of that work is this legislation, which embodies the bipartisan leadership both here at the subcommittee level and at the committee level and the bipartisan support in this House for our Nation's civil space programs. I would like to note that significant differences of opinion remain on many of the provisions in this bill, but I won't go into any of them now. I think I might have worried some of my colleagues on that. But despite those differences, we all share a set of common goals for NASA. The foremost of our mutual objectives is that America must return to international preeminence in human spaceflight. This is true for both access to low-Earth orbit, for which we are trusting our commercial partners, and for far-reaching exploration missions to the Moon and beyond. Our discussions and, yes, our disagreements will continue, but we will continue to work together to achieve America's shared goals. H.R. 810 brings us closer to launching Americans into space on American rockets from American soil. It brings us closer to the next steps in exploration of our outer planets. It brings us closer to technological developments that can turn a seemingly impossible goal into an achievable one. It brings us closer to finding asteroids that may pose a threat to Earth or may provide vast resources that could help humanity in space. It brings us one step closer to moving beyond exploration and into pioneering, leading to settlements in space. It brings us closer to the stars. For these reasons, I ask my colleagues to join me in support of this important legislation.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Let me just note that I have been here 26 years, and I have always tried to vote for increases in the specific level of funding for the National Institutes of Health, which, of course, oversees much of this health research that we are talking about today. I know we have people coming in all the time talking to us. They want us to sign onto a bill to increase this particular disease or that particular disease. But I think the approach that we have to have is basically let's provide as much money as we can to this type of research and programs by people who are the experts, and let them determine where is the best use of our limited research money. So I have been very much supportive of your efforts and the other efforts of many bipartisan people in this Congress. I would like to add that we can't just rely on the government. The next speech I will be giving in a few moments deals with the patent issue. We need to make sure that people in the private sector will be encouraged to invest in new types of technology and new types of approaches to curing these problems, like medical equipment and things that will really help save people. I know Al Mann, for example, has a new inhalant so that 60 percent of the people who now use needles for diabetes won't have to use them. They can just do a little inhale before every meal. It took him 10 years to get that through the FDA--10 years. We need to make sure the FDA is doing its job, and we need to make sure those people who are out in the private sector who are investing in new medical technologies have a way to recoup their money. At the same time, like you are focusing on tonight, we have to make sure the government is doing its part both in patents and in the FDA and, especially, for the National Institutes of Health. So thank you very much for what you are doing.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend my colleague, who has just presented a heartfelt case for scientific and health- related research by the National Institutes of Health. I concur with him that this is a very important part of what we do here. We have budgets that we have to meet, but this should be a significant part of our budget. I would like to also note, as I did when he yielded to me, that, yes, the government needs to play a significant part--the National Institutes of Health--in trying to find cures and in trying to find ways of improving the health of the American people. It is not just up to the National Institutes of Health, and it is not just up to the government employees. My approach, which I will be talking about tonight, is something vital--that the private sector needs to be involved not only in this type of health innovation, but in all sorts of innovation and technological jumps forward that some people think only government can do; but, in fact, it is the private sector and, especially, the small, independent inventors who have played such a significant role in furthering human progress, in uplifting humankind. So while I agree with the government role especially in these health- related issues, I think that we should dedicate ourselves to making sure that private money is going into this. In my area, yes, the University of California at Irvine is doing exemplary work. Yes, but so are many private companies that have invested money in health care technology development. Some of them, I might add, have been taxed to death by a 2.5 percent tax on their gross simply for being the inventors of health-related technologies. This type of medical device tax, which makes the manufacturers of devices the most heavily taxed people in this country, is a deterrent to having people in the private sector investing in exactly what my colleague was trying to suggest--into new approaches to these various diseases. That is also true not only of medical technology but of technologies across the board that really impact on the well-being and on the standard of living of ordinary people throughout our country. I rise today to draw attention, my colleagues, to a legislative threat to the safety and well-being of the American people. We dodged a bullet in the last session of Congress on this very same issue. Alerted by our aggressive yet unsuccessful attempt to stop that effort--that rancorous legislation in the House, which passed by a large majority last time around--we raised such a ruckus that the Senate was inundated with a wide spectrum of opposition to this supposed reform that had passed the House. There was so much opposition, in fact, that the Senate simply refused to bring up the bill for consideration. What is the issue that is being rammed through the House right now and, once we exposed it the last time around, caused the Senate to turn back and to not let it go through? Well, there has been an ongoing fight here in Washington--one most of the public is totally unaware of, and worse than that, most of my colleagues are totally unaware of--that for the last 20 years there has been a classic case of crony capitalism that plagues our country at play here on a specific issue. The big guys--the big crony capitalists--are trying to diminish the rights of the little guy in order to make more money. Surprise, surprise. And in this case, it will basically undermine America's prosperity and security in the long run while hurting the little guys while the big guys get their way. I am certainly not opposed to the profit motive, but first and foremost we need to ensure that powerful forces don't change the economic rules in order to enrich themselves unjustly. Unseen by most Americans has been the attempt by mega-multinational corporations to undermine and yes, destroy a constitutional right of our citizens, this in order to fill their pockets at the expense of American citizens who don't have the means to defeat such a power play. I am referring to an attack on the fundamental constitutional right of Americans to own what they have created. This right, written into our law at the Constitutional Convention itself, which wrote our Constitution, is now under attack. It is a clandestine legal maneuver that would neuter our inventors' protections and permit powerful multinational corporations to steal what now rightfully belongs to American inventors, and thus, ordinary Americans will be hurt, and of course, the big corporations will benefit. It is not just dispossessing individual inventors; this is a power grab that will undermine the prosperity we all have enjoyed as Americans. The less than forthright attack on our patent system will undermine the economic well-being of our working people who depend on the United States for being technologically superior to the working people of other societies. People in all these societies work very hard. It is not hard work--it is hard work coupled with technology--and we have ensured through the patent system that we would be developing the technology that would give Americans the edge. Our Founding Fathers believed that technology, freedom, and yes, the profit motive was the formula that would uplift humankind. As I say, they wrote into our Constitution a guarantee of the property rights of inventors and authors. It is the only place in the body of our Constitution that the word ``right'' is actually used. The Bill of Rights was added after the body of the Constitution, but in article I, section 8, clause 8 of our Constitution, it states: The Congress shall have power to . . . promote the progress and science of useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. This provision has served America well. It has led to a general prosperity where we have technological advances that uplift our own people and give our own people the chance to outcompete those people who work their hearts out overseas but don't have the same technological support system in their economic endeavors. Well, this provision in America has led to prosperity. It has helped our national security. The fact is, we could never dream of trying to defeat the enemies of freedom throughout the world on a man-to-man basis. It is only our ability to be able to bring technology and our genius to play that has given us a leverage over countries that have tens of millions of people and, by the way, don't really value human life. We need to make sure we are technologically superior, and it has been our patent system that has given our inventors the chance to invent things that will protect all of us from aggression and prevent anti- democratic forces throughout the world--fanatic forces--from overwhelming us and overwhelming our defenses. Of course, this having been the country of new ideas, the country where we encouraged people to be innovative, we have uplifted the life of average people. Average people here are now able to live decent lives as compared to the average people in so many countries of the world. Yes, Americans work hard and, as I say, so do other people. It is the technology that makes the difference. Our technology has multiplied the results of the hard work of our people. That is the secret of America's success. Technology and freedom and our strong patent system is right there at the foundation of that principle. It is what has made the difference in this vital area to our security and our well-being. Yet today, we have these multinational corporations--the same ones who run overseas to do business with communist China and with America's enemies and people who treat their populations with total disregard-- yes, these multinational corporations want to diminish the patent protection of the American people because they don't want to pay Americans for their creative new technologies. They don't want to give them their share when they create something that will uplift our people. Over the years, we fought and turned back many efforts to weaken our patent system. I doubt whether half the new Members of this Congress are fully aware of the aggressive and brutal fights that we have been in over patents and the patent system over these last 20 years. A little over 20 years ago, they were saying we need to change the patent system in order to harmonize it with the rest of the world. Our patent system was out of sync with the rest of the world. Well, of course. Our constitutional rights are out of sync with the rest of the world. We are out of sync as we protect people's right to go to church and not be repressed by some other religion. We are out of sync with most of the world when we protect people's right to speak and to criticize their government or to assemble or to try to join unions or other activities in the economic area. No, we actually are out of sync with a lot of areas, but they decided to say we need to harmonize our law on patents with the rest of the world, which has weak patent systems. Their laws have been determined by, basically, what is going to help the big guy and what is going to get new ideas out into the hands of the big industrialists. Well, we have beat back major efforts. The first ones, as I say, were on harmonizing the law. They had two big issues. One was to harmonize our law with the rest of the world. Our system has been that when someone submits their patent, no matter how long it takes for that patent to get issued, it is secret. In fact, it is a felony, I believe, for someone at the Patent and Trademark Office to disclose a patent application. And then, when you get your patent, it is published to the world, but you are granted 17 years of ownership. Well, their goal was what? Their goal was to do it the European and Japanese way, which is--aha--after 18 months of applying for your patent, it is published. If you don't have it, or even if it takes another 5, 10 years to get it, it is published. I called it the Steal American Technologies Act. We managed to turn that one around. The other half of that particular onslaught was that we have now a guaranteed protection, as I said, in the Constitution, as I just read. For a specific period of time, we were granted a 17-year patent protection. That starts at the time when you are issued your patent. Well, overseas that is not what it is all about. We are out of sync with them because what happens is, the minute that you file, the clock starts ticking, and 20 years later you have no patent protection at all, but that is from filing. It may take you 10 or 15 years to get your patent. So they are dramatically reducing the ownership rights of the patent of a person who has applied for a patent, all to the benefit, of course, of these big guys who are saying, We can speed this up maybe with our contacts. And the little guys overseas over and over again get beaten up and their material stolen from them by these powerful forces. We don't want that to happen here. We protect the rights of the little guy here. We won those fights that I was just talking about by standing tall and tough on the issue. And yes, there were some compromises over the years where we beat those first two issues that I talked about, we won that case, but over the years there have been several other hard-fought patent battles where we compromised and were able to come up with something that was acceptable to both sides. Well, now, after a few years of preparing the political battleground in Washington, and now, after Google has provided more campaign contributions than any other corporation in the world on various issues and we have other big corporations providing big campaign contributions--and I am not saying they are buying votes, but what they are buying is attention; and people don't even know about the issue-- but now, Google has been able to explain their case. They don't hear the other side. That is why it is up to us to make sure every Member of Congress knows what the issue is when it comes to the patent fight, instead of walking down to the floor unaware of how significant this is. There is only one group of people that is going to be able to make sure their Congressman is focused on just how significant this issue is. The American people have to notify their Congressmen in order to let them know we should not be weakening our patent system. There is no excuse to undermine the independent inventor when he is trying to protect his rights to a patent. We won't have independent inventors, and we won't be on the cutting edge of change, as we have been. After a few years of preparing, as I say, a new onslaught has been prepared. Now, as I say, they claimed in the beginning that they wanted to harmonize our system, but, of course, we don't want to harmonize and make our system weaker in order to be the same with other countries. So that fight went back over 20 years, but now what they have laid the groundwork for and are bringing up is--in the last 3 years we have seen this fight for the second round. Three-and-a-half years ago, the House passed the America Invents Act, which fundamentally diminished our patent system, weakening its protection for ordinary citizens. It still, even with that weakening, was better than what you had in Europe and in Japan. The negative impacts of that legislation are just now being felt. They are just now moving through the patent system and being implemented by the Patent Office. We are going to find out what happens when you undermine the little guys in order to help the big guys because you don't--after a few more years, where is the innovation coming from? From the big, multinational corporate bureaucracies, from the government bureaucracy? No. When we have undermined the small inventor, the individual inventor, we have taken the profit motive out of this. We have put roadblocks in the way of America moving forward. The next wave began in this patent battle just a little more than a year ago. Last year, as I said, the onslaught aimed at neutering the rights of the small inventor was barely turned back, and that bill came forward, and we got it through. Actually, it passed the House with a substantial margin. When citizens and universities and small businesses across America understood because of the great debate that we had here what was at stake, they inundated their Senators with calls and visits, and their message was: Don't undermine our rights. Don't undermine the rights of the small inventor. Don't undermine this constitutional right. It is just as precious as the rights of speech and press and religion. Let's not undermine that in the name of helping some multinational corporation squash an opposition to a guy who has invented something and wants to get his rightful payment for the work that he has done. Of course, the power brokers don't claim that they must change the measure of legal protection that we offer inventors because they don't claim that it is because the inventors are bad and need to be deprived of longstanding rights or that the Constitution is just outmoded and we don't really want to follow it. They don't argue that. No, these powerful interests, mega-multinational corporations, well heeled here in Washington, these powerful interests have to have a bogeyman to try to draw away attention from what they are really trying to do. The issue won't become diminishing the rights of the small inventor, preventing the small inventor from enforcing his patents on people who are trying to steal it, who are big mega-multinational corporations. No, they don't say that. There is always an excuse, something that has to sound very sinister, a sinister force at play, trying to hurt these innocent businessmen--unfairly at that. We heard it before. About 15 years ago, we heard it was submarine patents. That was the real derogatory term, submarine patents. That was why we need to change the amount of time that someone is able to actually have, as a guarantee for their patent rights. The submarine patent was used to say: Oh, so what if after 20 years and you haven't had your patent for 15 years, so you have only got 5 years of protection, so what? It is the submarine patenters we are really trying to get at--forget the hardship on those little guys, which is the vast majority of people who want to get their patent as soon as possible--but the submarine patenters, meaning we have got to really restrict those little guys. Well, now, the big guys have come up with another sinister label. That was a fraud. The submarine patent issue was a fraud, and we fixed it very easily, with a very small compromise, without having to have all the rights of the little guy eliminated, simply by saying if the little guy is--it can be shown that he prevented the issuance of his patent, trying to elongate that, well then that clock will start ticking during that time period and that time will be taken away from him. If it is not him, if it is the bureaucracy that is holding off the actual issuance of the patent, we shouldn't be doing things that hurt the little guy who is trying to get his patent out. Well, so we got that covered, but now, the big guys have come up with another sinister label because submarine patent doesn't apply anymore. We found a way to solve it without hurting the little guy. Now, the big guys have come up with this other label which is aimed at confusing the public about who gets hurt and who benefits from the so-called reforms that are now being shoved through Congress. They are insisting that the need for patent change, basic changes in our patent system, is because of the so-called patent trolls. Over and over again, you will hear this sinister word. Now, let me tell you how cynical this is. There is a guy who was a top executive at one of the electronic companies who is now on my side, on our side, the side of the little guy on this issue, but he was very high up in a big company. They got together with their people to decide what tactic they should use to get the changes done and passed through Congress. They knew they couldn't just attack the small inventor. They knew they couldn't attack the innovators in our society. What are they going to do to diminish their patent rights? Well, we have got to make it sound like it is somebody else who is going to get hurt, and that person has to be evil. The patent troll is what they came up with. This gentleman who worked in the business said he was in a room when that term was formalized by a number of people in the industry. They went around in a circle and said: What is the worst and nastiest sounding term we can come up with in order to vilify that, to draw people's attention away from this issue? He told me he had suggested patent pirate; and, no, patent troll sound really much more sinister. That is how cynical these people are. It is arrogant, and it is cynical because the patent troll is a creation. Yeah, there are some people who misuse our system. There are frivolous lawsuits that happen in our country. You know what, it is not just in the patent issue. It is all across the board. There are lawyers that have frivolous lawsuits. They are trying to claim that patent trolls are people with patents that are not legal patents, and they are trying to threaten lawsuits so they will get paid off. Well, that is happening throughout our system. They are called frivolous lawsuits. There is no need to hurt our small inventors and to phase back their rights, as inventors, the rights of their ownership and the rights to enforce their patent, in order to get someone a lawyer who is engaged in a frivolous lawsuit. These patent trolls are patent holders. Remember, when you hear the patent troll, just think: someone who owns a patent. Unless it is the inventor himself, they say the patent troll is anyone who owns a patent who is not the inventor. Patent holders or companies who represent patent holders are also people who own patents who get in infringement cases, but these are people who did not invent it themselves, and, thus, they are called trolls. They are engaged in basically defending their rights against the infringement of large companies. Yeah, there are a few cases where small guys, we are told--that, again, is a front, to try to protect the big guys from the little guys, but there has been infringement on the patents that they own, these regular people, people who own--and patents are what? It is your property, intellectual property. Patents should be looked at that the United States Government believes it is your right to own, for a given period of time, as I just read in the Constitution, your invention or your writing, and you own it. If someone is infringing and if you want to buy it from someone, someone who has invented it but can't afford to basically enforce it, well, you have a right to do that. That doesn't make you an evil troll. That means you have bought something that is a piece of property. By the way, after a number of years--10, 13, 14 years--that will no longer be your property because the patent protection lasts only a given period of time. Well, these owners are just as valid as any other patents that are granted by the Patent Office. We are not talking about phony patents. They will try to make it sound like it is, Oh, these worthless pieces of paper. No, these are real patents and real pieces of paper that show you have rights to own this particular technology. Huge corporate infringers would have us believe that these patents that they are talking about, that the people are trying to enforce, that these big companies have used, knowing that there is probably someone who owns that who has developed this new technology and just forgetting about them and leaving them behind, well, these big corporate infringers would have you believe that all these people are that way. They are not. Almost all of the infringement cases happen by people who legitimately own a legitimate patent, and if not, it should be decided in court. There is nothing wrong with bringing this to court if it is a legitimate patent or if it is an illegitimate patent. This happens all the time. Are you violating someone's property rights when they own a piece of property and you have built a road across them without asking whether or not you could use their property? No, that should go to court. In fact, it is not a frivolous lawsuit for someone who owns a piece of property and someone who maybe owns a mine or something over here and just builds a road across and doesn't ask you about it. No, you have a right for compensation. That is basically what we are talking about except, in this case, you have an inventor who has enriched a big company with something new, but the big company doesn't want to give him any of his royalties for building this new technology. By the way, in the past, big corporations would try to do patent searches to make sure they weren't stepping on the little guy, and they would try to cut deals with these patent owners to try to make sure that they didn't face a lawsuit. They would be able to chart out exactly what their expenses were. Then they decided, Don't do it, don't even look, don't check to see if we are stealing this new idea. You know why? They did that because what you have now--and what they have tried to eliminate is that if a big company intentionally knows that it is violating the patent rights of someone who owns that new technology and infringes upon it, that it knowingly does this, there are triple damages that the inventor can get in his lawsuit against that big company. The big companies, they say, Oh, well, so we won't even look, so they can't prove that we knew we were stepping on these little people. They don't even look anymore. That is how arrogant they are. Then they worry when a small guy comes up and sues them for infringement? By the way, why did they want to eliminate the triple damages? Because the little guys, regular people, don't have the money to pay for the lawyers necessary for these lawsuits. The little guy's ability to hire a lawyer on a contingency basis--if you take away the triple damages, you have eliminated the right of almost all of the small inventors to be able to have the protection they need in court, but that was one of their major goals. By the way, we turned that one back, thank God, but it keeps going. They keep going because this is a way to enrich these powerful, multinational corporations in a way that the public isn't seeing it. It is just a change in the rules; and the little guys, the wealth that should be going to them is extracted and put into the pockets of these big corporate entities. They have the power, basically, and they are going to use it. They have the power in the economy, and they have the power in getting their case across to the Members of Congress because they have the ability to hire lobbyists again and to give campaign contributions, but not to buy votes, and I am not suggesting that. When you are here and you have so much time, if you have lobbyists that are working just to get the attention of the Member of Congress on the issue for a short period of time, you have succeeded. These companies can do it, and the little guy can't. The little guy has no way of getting people's attention here. The fact is that these big corporations--and especially Google--have hired the best representatives in town and spent the most money getting people's attention. The only answer here is to make sure we offset that by making sure the American people call their Member of Congress and tell them: Don't diminish the patent protection for regular Americans, don't let this happen. They have won the last couple of fights. Again, like I say, by the time it got over to the Senate, some people just started paying attention, but we lost it here in the House. Well, the patents that we are talking about are patents; they are not frivolous lawsuits. These are patents that were issued by the United States Patent Office, but huge infringers would have us believe: Of course, don't worry, the Congress is just up there trying to protect people who really haven't come up with anything and just have frivolous lawsuits. No, we are talking about tangible, tangible items that these people have used without paying the royalty to the man or woman who invented that particular item, that particular technology. What makes these patents different than the good patents, by the way? These same large corporations own thousands of patents--by the way, most of these corporations are the megaelectronics industry companies, so they own lots of patents. What makes the little guy a patent troll for being willing to try to get some help to fight these big guys? What makes that little guy's patent or the ``troll's'' patent any less real and any less valuable and official as these big companies? They have their patents, too. If the small inventor doesn't have the resources to enforce his or her patent in the limited time--they only have owned this now. Remember, once you own a patent, you own it for 17 years, and then it is done; everybody owns it. In the limited time they are granted for ownership, if they don't have the resources to basically enforce their rights, an individual or company can buy their rights and can create--or they can create a partnership with a small inventor, and they can see to it that way to see that there isn't a theft of this little guy's property, and they call it an infringement. There is nothing wrong with someone coming in and saying: Well, listen. If you can't enforce this, we think it is a good idea, you have 10 more years of patent protection. We will buy that patent right, just like buying a parcel of land. We are going to speculate that that land is going to go up in value or whatever. There is no difference at all. It is a piece of property. It is a property right. It is intellectual property. This effort to change our patent law is an attack on the very nature of intellectual property. Okay. So the small inventor can't do it. What is wrong with somebody coming in and offering to buy that patent right from him for those 10 years or to go into partnership with him? Well, I have consulted with a number of outside individual inventors and groups, and they have reaffirmed that the legislation now being proposed disadvantages the little guy against deep-pocketed multinational corporations. This has been achieved in the guise, as I say, of targeting patent trolls. You are not vilifying this poor little inventor, this guy who works his heart out in his garage, quits his job because he has got an idea, puts all of his money and sells his home in order to build something new, a new technology. No, I am sorry. That guy is a hero. And under the guise of getting patent trolls, whatever that is, they are going to smash this little guy that I just described because they are going to prevent anybody from helping him because that person who is helping him is a patent troll. This person and company who has contracted with the inventor to see that his or her rights are respected, I consider them to be a positive economic and also a moral force within the concept of determining ownership in our society. How horrible, making a business--which some of these companies have done--of helping a business out of helping small inventors see to it that their patent rights are enforced. Oh, how horrible. Or how horrible it is for them to be buying patent rights from them. Oh, my goodness, a guy with money says: You can't afford to enforce your rights; I think it is a great idea; I will pay you for this. The fact that that happens and is able to happen in our society means that that little guy now has something of value. If we take that away and say: Oh, these people buying them are all trolls--sounds sinister--oh, when you do that, the value of our patents for all of our inventors goes down. We are undercutting the wealth that is available to our independent inventors because we are devaluing what they have if they can't enforce it themselves, they can't sell it to somebody who is not going to commercialize it, thus you have got a situation where the patent value, we are taking wealth out of the pockets of the least able people in our society in the technology arena, the least able to weather that, and we are putting that money and that power into the pockets of the big mega-multinational, not just American companies, multinational companies. It is sinful. The proponents of this legislation are covering the fact that someone has stolen someone else's patent rights, someone else's intellectual property, and now they want to change the system so they can get away with this theft. That is what it is all about. The big companies have been stealing. They want to get away with it. They need to change the rules of the game so they can get away with it, and the little guy will just give up because he can't go through all the steps now. They would have us believe that all the lawsuits against these companies are frivolous. As I say, that is not the case. Well, the vast majority of them are not. The vast majority of patent infringement cases have very legitimate areas of concern, and they need to be decided by the court, not to have Congress step in and make it more difficult for someone to take someone to court who has stolen his intellectual property. Yes, there are frivolous lawsuits throughout our system. Why are these guys just focusing on patents? They are doing that because that is what these megacorporations will benefit from. Tonight I draw the attention of the American people to H.R. 9, the Innovation Act, introduced by Chairman Goodlatte with 19 bipartisan cosponsors. The last Congress, the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on this same bill. The same bill that came in last time, this bill that is being proposed now, H.R. 9, is exactly the same bill, except maybe with one provision that is taken out, which is a provision that I was able to get out of the bill on the floor in the debate and in the amendment process. By the way, that provision was going to prevent inventors, if they believed they were treated unfairly by the Patent Office, that provision would deny them the right to take it to court. They would have to settle the issue with an ombudsman from the Patent Office. Get that? The right to use court of a U.S. citizen was going to be denied them, and the proponents of this legislation just let it drip off their back like water off a duck's back. Give me a break. That is a huge violation of rights of Americans, but it is just as huge a violation for us to try to diminish their ability to enforce the rights of their own property. So I draw attention to H.R. 9. Last Congress the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on this almost very same bill. The witnesses at that hearing, including former Patent Office Director Kappos, made it clear that we should move slowly and with great care in making any changes to the patent law, especially in light of the fact that no one yet understands the implication of a similar patent law that was passed 2 years ago, the America Invents Act. The process from that act is just now being implemented. I think it is going to have a very negative impact, and we need to know that that is what is going to happen, and we need to work that into our calculus of whether we should pass even more restrictions like are in that first bill. So everybody says: Take it easy; go slow; make sure you are right before you go ahead. Well, we haven't even digested the last bite Congress has taken out of the patent law. We haven't even digested that at all, and now they want us to gobble down a few more apples. We need to make sure that we know what we have already gotten ourselves into by biting into this apple, but, no, we have got to now commit to having even more and more change before we even know whether that apple is going to turn sour in our stomach and cause us to be sick. In and of itself, this legislation is too broad, H.R. 9, the same thing they tried to pass through here last year, rammed it through, too broad, its implications too unclear, its effects unknowable. That is what witnesses and other experts have indicated. The conclusion, as I say, is move forward with these fundamental changes in our patent system, and if you do so, you might be undermining that system. We need not to move forward quickly on this, see what the impact of the past law changes are. That is what now has been indicated, but that is not what has happened. That is not what we have seen happen here on Capitol Hill. The House was railroaded into passing this new proposal on top of the previous legislation before we have a chance to see whether it is going to have a negative or positive effect, and it is not even being fully implemented yet. But yet we were pushed. This thing was rammed down our throats. It seems like some multinational corporations really wanted action now: Do it now. Well, what is going on here? This congressional ramrodding exemplifies the battle to diminish America's patent system that has been going on for 25 years. This isn't something new. What I am describing to you is just one more hit, one more attempt by people to harmonize American law with the rest of the world. We need to be more like the rest of the world. We have a strong protection of intellectual property rights. Oh, we should be more like the rest of the world--baloney. The fact is America should stand tall. If we want harmony with the rest of the world, they should harmonize with our stronger protection for the individual, for our caring for ordinary people. This law and these changes are going to change the way we do business in America, all right. We are not going to have the creative and the cutting edge as these very same mega-multinational corporations go to countries like China in order to get cheap labor to accomplish their mission rather than using the technology of Americans, giving them the royalty for it, at least, in order to make sure our country and our countrymen are safe, our countrymen are secure and our well-being of our people economically, they have good jobs producing competitive products that they can sell overseas. No. No. These companies, they just want that power for themselves. They want to harmonize with the rest of the world so they can run roughshod over all of us. According to the sponsors of H.R. 9, it is an attempt to combat the problem of patent trolls. That is it. You look at their arguments, it is all patent trolls, patent trolls, patent trolls, even though the study mandated by Congress shows that this much-heralded problem is not a major driver of lawsuits. It has not caused, as they claim, a surge of new lawsuits. In fact, the most recent data shows that patent lawsuits dropped dramatically in 2014 compared to previous years. The provisions of this legislation are designed to make it much more complicated. Now, this is what it is. This legislation, H.R. 9, is designed to make it much more complicated, costly, and challenging to bring a lawsuit for patent infringement, thus hurting the little guy, the infringement that is taking place. That means the victim is the little guy. We are helping the big guy, the guy who is committing the crime. By the way, if these people wanted to impact frivolous lawsuits, if they say, ``Oh, there are too many frivolous lawsuits with patents,'' they should just make it simpler and cheaper to defend against baseless infringement cases. Somebody that is accused of infringement and it is baseless, let's make it easier for these companies to defend themselves against that charge in court. But, no, no, making it more easy to defend themselves, no, no, no. We are being asked to raise the bar for the inventor to bring lawsuits to defend his or her rights rather than lowering the bar to allow small businesses and others to defend themselves against frivolous lawsuits. When we weaken the little guy--that is what we are doing. They want us to weaken the little guy to protect the big guy from frivolous lawsuits. Well, who gets hurt and who is helped? You have a sinister cover-up there, the trolls, and who is getting helped by that? These big megacorporations. And who is getting hurt? The little guys who can't go through all these extra steps; they can't afford to protect themselves. And we are going to side with the big guys, the big guys again who take their work to China without blushing? This legislation, H.R. 9, is consistent with the decades-long war being waged on America's and against America's independent inventors. Here are a few provisions of this Innovation Act we have just submitted: It would create new requirements for a patent holder, when a patent holder must, once filing a claim for infringement, provide information about all the parties who are involved with this; and, thus, you basically have the accused infringer is going to know everybody who is involved and, thus, be able to basically attack all of the people, not just the guy who has lost his intellectual property rights, but somebody who backed him up now will become a target of big corporations. This means the elimination of privacy for major business dealings. The little guy no longer has that right of privacy. The little guy is totally exposed, as his friends and suppliers will be. The patent holder will be forced to provide a list of potential bank accounts to raid, and those bank accounts and all of that information will be made available to the bad guys, the people who are infringing. The big companies who are beating him down will now have all this information to use against him. In addition, once the requirement has been invoked, the patent holder must maintain a current record of the information on file at the Patent Office or forfeit the rights. What that means is the patent holder now has huge new bureaucratic reporting requirements, dramatically increasing his cost and vulnerability. Now, you do that to a small investor or a small inventor, what does that say? You are increasing their costs dramatically. And why are we increasing their requirements for bureaucratic reporting? Because they have actually reported an infringement of their intellectual rights; thus, they have got to pay the price; they have got to have the burden on them. We are going to put the burden on them for saying, Somebody just stole my property. We are increasing the burden on them. If they do that, from then on, they have a whole new obligation, a bureaucratic obligation. In addition, the patent holder gains a new bureaucratic fee--not just a bureaucratic requirement but a fee--and is forced to pay record keeping fees to maintain the current record at the Patent Office. More fees, more bureaucratic requirements. These are minor inconveniences to multinational corporations, these corporations with hundreds, if not thousands of employees. It is not going to cost them anything. In fact, when they go to court, they have a whole stable of attorneys, so it won't cost them much money there either. So for these multinational corporations, this isn't even an inconvenience. But for the little guy, all of these new requirements are killers because they don't have $100,000 that they can just drop into keeping better books over here or getting a hold of all of these people or exposing anybody who has invested in their patent. The Innovation Act also enables large multinational corporations to create nested shell companies which have few assets but can infringe on patents while the inventor is unable to sue their customers, who are free to continue infringing. So they say: Well, we will just do all of our business with this technology, through that company, so if we get sued, they can't get at us--no way. While the first court case moves through the system, we are going to shield these big guys who are stealing. This process could keep an infringing process in place for a decade or more while the inventor is trying to find ways to stop that infringement. The Innovation Act authorizes the Patent Office director to create a patent troll database--how about that--and to create a strategy to teach small business how to defend themselves against patent trolls. We are encouraging the director of the Patent Office to create an enemies list and a strategy guide for people who are infringing on other people's patent rights. That is what we are talking about. They are trying to basically vilify a group of people who are involved in a perfectly legal and moral economic activity, helping out small business guys, buying small patent owners' rights to their patents. If they can't enforce it themselves, they are going into partnership with them. No, no. Now we are going to have a list of these people who are going to be on an enemy's list mandated by the Patent Office, according to this legislation. So we are encouraging this enemies list strategy. Instead of just, okay, if there is a frivolous lawsuit, let's just make it easier for someone to defend themselves in court. The ultimate results of this legislation will be: Increased patent infringement. Have you got that? This legislation, H.R. 9, will increase the amount of theft in our society because now we have made it easier. Reduced legal remedies. We have basically reduced the legal remedies for the victim, for those who have been infringed. We have reduced the investment in small business. Why are people going to invest in a new patent if they think it can be infringed upon, and this guy isn't going to get his money back? So we have dramatically hurt the amount of money that is going to be invested in the new technology, in the brilliant ideas that come from our students from university. You know, they come out and they have great ideas. We want them to go into small business and follow their dream. Oh, no, no. This would make it almost impossible for people like that. Our young people and small businessmen, people with a dream. Irreparable damage will be done to our research universities, to our inventors and entrepreneurs. All of these people are going to be hurt. Let me put it this way: our colleges and universities, they know that if this bill passes--the one that was going through the Senate passed-- there would be a dramatic reduction in the value of all the patents that they own, and that is a major, major asset to our universities. Each part of this so-called reform is detrimental to the patent owners, especially damaging to individual small inventors. Every provision bolsters the patent thieves, the infringers, at the expense of the legal owners. No, no. Let's not talk about that. Let's talk about patent trolls, how evil they are. ``Troll'' is a bad word. You don't want to be on the side of the trolls. No, no. Everything they are proposing in the name of stopping the trolls, using that as cover, hurts the little guy and helps these big guys who are financing this campaign to undermine our patent system. This approach assists thieves because they are powerful corporations versus little guys. The only hope for the little guy has always been that America stands for the God-given rights and that those rights are protected by our government, recognized and protected by it, as it was in the Constitution. To all people, rich and poor, their rights are protected in this country, and we should not be about to let big corporate interests step on the little guy. If a guy owns a piece of property and a big corporation wants to build a road across it, to build a whatever it is on the other side--an oil derrick or whatever it is--they have to pay that man's price because he owns that property. And in this case, we are talking only about an ownership for 17 years, granted to somebody who has actually come up with something that is of great value to our people. No. We need to make sure that we remain the country where we protect everybody's rights and that the big guys can't get away with stepping on the little guys. The rights of ownership are the same as all of our other rights: speech, religion, assembly. And this has been what we are seeing now in H.R. 9--the last couple of years have been a blatant power grab by the big guys to diminish the rights of the little guy. When the bill identical to this one was previously submitted, opposition emerged to it, as people figured out what I am telling you. What I am saying tonight--finally some people, when they heard the debate over here, they mobilized. And when they found out what was about to be foisted upon them, we were speaking with loud voices. Here is a list of some of those people who opposed or expressed major concerns over that act, a bill that was identical to H.R. 9, which is now perched and ready to be shoved through Congress: The Association of American Universities; American Council on Education; Association of American Medical Colleges; Association of Public and Land-grant Universities; Association of University Technology Managers; Council on Governmental Relations; Eagle Forum; Club for Growth; American Bar Association; Patent Office Professional Association; Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure; American Intellectual Property Law Association; Intellectual Property Owners Association; National Association of Patent Practitioners; National Venture Capital Association; the Biotechnology Industry Organization; Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, PhRMA; Innovation Alliance; Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Let's just note, all of these groups were opposed or were very concerned about that act because: It creates more paperwork for everybody, increasing the cost for anybody who wants to defend their rights. It forces patent holders who file claims of infringement to maintain new bureaucratic reporting requirements and to pay new recordkeeping costs. It just complicates their lives and their expenses. It eliminates the independent judicial review of patent applicants by striking section 145 of title 35. This is very important in order to keep the Patent Office honest. There should be an independent judicial review. That is what they tried to foist off on us last time. And it dramatically increases the financial risks for anybody filing an infringement lawsuit. We need to make sure that our country stays true to the American people, to what will give us security for our people. We need to be on the cutting edge of technology. We need to be ahead of our potential enemies. We can't defend our country man for man. We have got to have the best equipment and the high technology that comes from the creative thinking of our people. We need to make sure that our working people are producing more wealth with every hour of work they do; thus, we can afford to provide the services and the standard of living for ordinary people. Every time there is a new idea, if we actually permit that to be stolen by multinational corporations, that is not going to improve the well-being of our people. We have seen this going on in the past. This is not the first time. This is just in the last 25 years of onslaught. And what we have now in H.R. 9 is just the latest salvo in the effort to destroy the patent system that we have got. But this happened a long time ago. We have had to reaffirm the rights of the little guy over and again. There is a statue in our Congress, in our Capitol, of Philo Farnsworth. Do you know who Philo Farnsworth was? Philo Farnsworth was the inventor of the picture tube for the television. Philo was a farmer and an engineer in Utah, a man with not many resources at all. But he figured out something that RCA, one of the biggest corporations in the country at the time, was trying to find out: How do you create a picture tube? Well, he wrote them and said, I found the secret. And what do you know, they sent their top engineer over. Philo actually showed them what he had done. And they said, We are going to get back to you, and we are going to work with you as your partner. You know what they did? He could never get a hold of them again. David Sarnoff, one of the richest, most powerful men in the United States, set out to steal the right to the patent for the picture tube from this lone American, this guy who had a small farm in Utah. And he led--Philo Farnsworth didn't give up. He led a struggle for 20 years to get his rights to own that technology, that intellectual property. And when he was fighting this huge corporate interest that was trying to just squish him like a bug, he stood up there, and he couldn't have stood alone. People invested in his lawsuit. People invested with him so that justice would come and that inventors in the United States would know that when they invent something, they have a right, and the American people will stick by them. In the end, the Supreme Court made the decision, and they decided with the little guy. They decided with Philo. What a great affirmation of our country. And there is a statute today of Farnsworth in the Capitol, the man who advanced communications in our country. You will never find a statue to David Sarnoff or any of these big moguls who tried to squish him, these multinational corporations. Let's remember the heart of America, patriotism. Let's be loyal to our regular people. They will be loyal to us. That is what the American Revolution was all about. I ask my colleagues to join me in opposing H.R. 9. And I invite people to talk about it and to talk to their Congressmen and their Senators and to make sure that they don't come in here for a vote not knowing how important this vote is on H.R. 9. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today, I rise to have a discussion with my fellow colleagues and with those people throughout the United States who are watching this and reading this in the Congressional Record. The issue I wish to discuss is a matter of grave concern to me and I believe to the American people as well. I came here 26 years ago. Prior to my arrival in the United States Congress, I had served 7 years in the Reagan White House. I was a speechwriter to President Reagan, and I was a special assistant to the President, which was a designated rank at the White House. I recall what it was like in the time leading up to Ronald Reagan's election, and I recall specifically how Ronald Reagan dealt with the great challenges he faced. Before Ronald Reagan came to the White House, America was in retreat. There was a sense of pessimism throughout our country. Our economy was topsy-turvy. There were high levels of inflation and high levels of unemployment. Our country was in jeopardy. Our country felt a danger because while we were in retreat, communism--Soviet communism--was on the offensive throughout the world. Well, Ronald Reagan, in 8 short years, turned that situation totally around. He turned the economy around, and he turned around the spirit of the people. We went from being pessimistic to being the most optimistic and forward-looking people in the world. Yes, he helped the economy, but foremost, Ronald Reagan ended the cold war. Mr. Speaker, I am 67 years old. During my life, most of us felt that some day, we would be at war with the Soviet Union--a shooting war--and that it might take the lives of millions of people. We were told to hide under our desk when we were young and cover up our heads in case there was a nuclear attack on our country. Ronald Reagan expanded the United States military. Many times, when people look back and they understand the success that we had in ending the cold war, they believe that it was due to the increase in the size of our military. Let me note that did play a factor because it was a deterrent factor, and it was a factor that awed many people in the developing world, as well as our enemies in the communist world, but that is not what switched and that is not what changed our retreat in the cold war to a great victory and the bringing down of the Berlin Wall. What changed it was a change in strategy that Ronald Reagan initiated during the time that he was President. He was a strong leader. We came into the White House and people asked: What is your strategy for dealing with the Soviet threat to our freedom and the peace of the world? He said: The strategy is very simple. We win, and they lose. That is what he set out. The guidelines that he set out for us who worked for him in the White House and throughout the administration were that our goal was to be that the United States would win the cold war and the Soviet Union would lose. Well, during that time period, Ronald Reagan did not deploy American troops overseas like people think that he did. Yes, he expanded our military power, but he made very few deployments--major deployments--of American troops. In fact, in one deployment which he made to Beirut, where he sent thousands of marines to Beirut, I personally was arguing against it in the White House and went around finding out what it was all about. After a few short weeks, it turned into a fiasco. It turned into a tragedy, as well as a fiasco, I might add. 300 Americans, marines and sailors, lost their lives when their headquarters was blown up--their bunker, you might say. Their barracks in Beirut was blown up. Ronald Reagan's advisers at that time advised him to send in tens of thousands of more American troopers, send in the entire 2nd Marine Division and show these terrorists they can't kill marines and get away with it. Ronald Reagan made his best decision as President at that time not to make such a huge, major deployment of troops into Beirut; otherwise, we would have been in a quagmire for the rest of his administration. They would have been there, stuck in this war zone in Beirut, a no-win situation. Reagan knew that. He also knew when he told us, No, we are going to get out of there as soon as we can rather than get stuck in the quagmire, he initiated another policy, a security policy based on a different doctrine from sending American troops to garrison in the world or sending American troops to fight other people's battles. What it was, was Ronald Reagan initiated the Reagan Doctrine. The Reagan Doctrine was basically to recognize that the enemy of our enemy was our friend and to do everything we could to identify our friends around the world who would help us defeat the Soviet Union. The Reagan Doctrine had us helping people in Nicaragua who were fighting against the Sandinista dictatorship which was allied with the Soviet Union. It was in Africa where you had Cuban troops being confronted by insurgency movements that we supported that were pro- democracy, or at least anti-Soviet, and in Afghanistan where the Soviet Army itself was being confronted. The doctrine supported those who were struggling for freedom against oppression. We helped people in Europe, the Lech Walesas and the various leaders throughout Eastern Europe who organized resistance against the Soviet domination of their countries. Whether it was Poland or Czechoslovakia or Hungary, they received covert support from President Reagan. Reagan wanted, yes, to defeat the Soviet Union, and that is what we did. We did it in a way by helping those who were on the front lines, struggling against what we saw as an evil--that is, a government in Russia that was controlled by an atheistic theory that an atheist dictatorship imposed upon people could reestablish new values among human beings and, thus, create a whole new world. That monstrous philosophy--monstrous because it had monstrous implications in terms of human freedom, but also in the control and slaughter of those people who did not agree with that vision--that had to be defeated because it threatened the entire world. By the time Ronald Reagan was finished with his Presidency and the leadership that he provided to the free world and all those who were struggling against communism, we succeeded. The Berlin Wall came down. This was done because of great leadership and a great strategy on the part of this man. Today, we look at a totally different world from the world that Reagan left us. Unlike the world that he inherited from his predecessor, President Carter, Reagan left us a world where the upward trend toward our civilization was undeniable, that it looked like we could have generations of peace and that our enemies respected us to the point that they would not put us in jeopardy because it would be putting themselves in jeopardy. Reagan gave us chances for peace, prosperity, and freedom throughout the world. Today, we face a totally different world. It is a frightening world. We have, today, an adversary that is every bit as evil, potentially harmful, and destructive to the people of the world as what we faced when Ronald Reagan came to the Presidency at the height of the cold war. Yes, everything was dangerous at that time, and Reagan gave us peace and security. Today, we are facing evil and danger as even before in the cold war, but perhaps we can compare this even to the evil and danger that America and the Western world faced in the early thirties and the late twenties when nazism and fascism raised its ugly head. What happened? During that time period, had we and the Western Allies been able to deal with Adolf Hitler, perhaps there would not have been this huge conflagration of World War II which took the lives of hundreds of millions of people. But they did not deal with that as Ronald Reagan dealt with communism when he became President, and Hitler and the fascist threat eventually, with their aggression, put the free world and those other people who sought a better world in such a spot that war erupted and World War II, that great conflagration, happened. It was avoidable. Well, today, we face a similar threat. We face an evil that, as I say, is every bit as dangerous as the evil that was faced by Reagan and faced before World War II. It is a radical Islamic philosophy that will slaughter people in the West without thinking twice about it or, what is even worse, will slaughter people in great numbers in the West after strategizing of how to do it more effectively--not only slaughtering Christians and other non-Muslims, but this evil force is seeking to dominate that part of the world in which the majority of people are of the Islamic faith. This radical Islamic terrorist evil murders more Muslims than, indeed, they murder Christians, although they have been very aggressive in their murder of Christians in a very demonstrable way, in a way that would try to intimidate the Christian world and the non-Muslim world, but we have brave and courageous people within the Muslim world. We must not let ourselves be brought to the point that the radical Islamic movement wants us to be in, and that is to alienate the rest of the billion of Muslims who occupy this planet and make them our enemy. Like Ronald Reagan, we must seek out our friends throughout the world who are struggling against radical Islamic terrorism and dictatorship and make sure that we back them up, so they will have a chance to defeat this threat and this ongoing murder and chaos that is engulfing their own countries. Today, we have such heroes overseas. Let us note, in the last 6 years, this threat has grown, has gone from miniscule to being a threat that, if we do not deal with it, could erupt into the same type of global conflagration that we saw in World War II and perhaps--or at best--would leave us with a war, with a global split in the world like happened under communism that we defeated under Ronald Reagan. Yes, we could see, if this threat of radical Islam is not confronted with American leadership, 10 years down the road, there could be a massive conflagration that would encompass, for example, what would happen if we do lose total control and things go totally out of control into the gulf areas, in the Persian Gulf and in the Arab world. If that part of the world becomes dominant, if the dominant force in that part of the world becomes this radical Islamic philosophy, it will then move to the ``stans.'' It will then move to the great parts of Africa and of Central Asia, and that will tip the balance of power in this planet and will lead to the type of global conflagration that all of us want to avoid and to prevent. But we must have the type of decisive leadership and the type of actual commitment to winning this battle against the radical Islamic dictatorship that these people are trying to superimpose upon the world. We need the strong commitment that we saw under Ronald Reagan. We need that, and we do not have it. We do not have the leadership we need or the type of chaos that is now erupting in the Arab world would not be happening. What is happening in this chaos that we see is this rise of ISIL, a group of people who are so committed to establishing a Muslim dictatorship throughout their part of the world and throughout Africa and, yes, even throughout the rest of the world where other non-Muslim communities live. These people are dedicated to terrorizing the world into submission to their authority, and they see their authority as coming from their radical version of God, through their radical version of Islam. Again, most Muslims deny and reject that type of Islam. But let us not forget, let us not ignore the fact that this radical philosophy is based on their interpretation of Islam. That it is a religious fanaticism that could, just like communism was a religious fanaticism-- it was an atheism fanaticism. And we have seen Christian fanaticisms in the past, and they did great damage and cost the lives of great numbers of people in their day. This radical fanaticism, unless we defeat it now, will perhaps drag the entire planet into a World War II-like conflagration. How do we stop that? How was Ronald Reagan able to stop the rise of communism, the Soviet expansionism that he faced when he took office and, in 7 or 8 short years, managed to turn that around and defeat that very enemy? First, he had the commitment to defeat it. And I will say today that I don't believe our President has the commitment to defeat and destroy radical Islamic terrorism and the radical Islamic dictatorship that these fanatics would superimpose upon us. Instead, I think our President believes, in good faith, that he can reach an accommodation with these folks, with these fanatics, that an accommodation can be reached and that we should try to prove to them that we are not their enemy. Well, they know they are our enemy because they get their word from God, not from the President of the United States. That is what they believe. They see these overtures, the fanatic radicals like in the Taliban, they see it as a weakness, and it only encourages the radical Islamic movement for our President to try to reach accommodation or to say pleasant things to them without being aggressive, with seeming to be unwilling to actually draw a line in the sand. Our President, as most people know, has trouble even uttering the words ``Islamic terrorism'' in one sentence. We are not going to be successful in defeating this threat that would murder us by the millions of people if they get the chance if our President is not even willing to utter the words ``Islamic terrorism'' in the same sentence. We have a President that, after our Ambassador was murdered in Benghazi, tried to foist off on the American people the false story that our Ambassador was killed because a demonstration against a movie that insulted Islam got out of control and the demonstrators killed our Ambassador. For weeks, this President himself participated in spreading that lie. Now, what message does it give us? First of all, my gosh, our President isn't going to tell us the truth about radical Islam. But what did the Muslim terrorists think? At that moment, the Muslim terrorists were thinking: My goodness, we have a guy that is so weak that he can't even condemn us and condemn the killing of his own Ambassador by our movement. This emboldened them. And that is why, we heard early on support for various ``reform movements,'' and we all hoped that the Arab Spring would be a reform movement. Instead, our President, unlike Ronald Reagan, who sought to help those people who were the most aggressive opponents of Soviet communism, this President has tried to seek out those people in the Muslim Brotherhood and elsewhere and reach an accommodation with them. That is why today we see enormous chaos and the rise of a radical, fanatic Islamic movement, ISIL, that will burn people alive, that will recruit people throughout the West to murder people in a newspaper, like we just saw in Paris, for drawing a cartoon that in some way made fun of their beliefs, as if people aren't free to make fun of other people's beliefs. No, they think it is all right to murder those people, and that is less civil--that is not even a sin, that is a mandate, as compared to murdering unarmed people. An unarmed cartoonist, newspaper cartoonist in France and his colleagues, a policeman who happened to be a Muslim, laying there helpless on the ground, and they murdered him outright. This is fanaticism. This is part of a fanatic, radical Islamic movement that has to be stopped. They will not stop at killing one policeman who happens to be a Muslim on the ground. They will murder millions of others if they get the chance. They are trying to establish themselves throughout the Arab world right now. We need to make sure we stand by our friends. Yet, unlike Ronald Reagan, and there was no doubt he was standing behind our friends who opposed Soviet communism, but what are we projecting to those people who are standing firm against this fanatic, radical Islamic movement that would put an Islamic dictatorship on the people? What are we telling our friends who are standing up against that? Well, how about President el-Sisi of Egypt? El-Sisi was a general who stepped in at a time when Egypt could have gone either way. We had a radical Islamic movement going there. Yes, there was an elected President, and he broke his word to his own people in trying to institute a caliphate in Egypt. They rose up against him in an aggressive shout from the people of Egypt, saying: We will not let our country become an Islamic caliphate. This is Egypt. We believe in a democratic government here, and we believe in an Egyptian government--not some radical, fanatic Arab government that was superimposed on them by members of some Muslim Brotherhood that operates behind the scenes. Well, we almost lost Egypt. And if Egypt would fall today or would have fallen then, there would be no chance of stopping this fanatic movement that threatens the world and threatens especially other Muslim countries. There would have been no chance at all. President el-Sisi is a courageous man who has stepped forward, and our President took a long time and is still taking a long time in getting solidly behind the effort to prevent Egypt from becoming a bastion of fanatic Islamic radicalism that would threaten the world. General el-Sisi, I visited him a year ago, and he expressed: My goodness, we bought all of these helicopters from the United States, and we need them now because there is an insurgency going on with radicals out in the Sinai desert. We need these helicopters. And it took forever for our administration, this government, to provide them the spare parts, the spare parts for that effort. They have jumped through hoops. We were doing them a favor. No, we should look at these people as doing us a favor. They are on the front lines battling this. And President el-Sisi just recently did something that all Americans and peace-loving people throughout the world should applaud, and that is he went directly to Muslim groups in Egypt and spoke to them and spoke on the record saying we have got to cleanse ourselves from this fanaticism in which we are intolerant of other people's religions, these people who would murder other people and commit acts of terrorism. President el-Sisi, that was courageous of him. We need other leaders to follow in his footsteps. Has our administration done anything to congratulate President el- Sisi in making that incredible stand? What type of things have we done to prove that we are behind him in this effort? He also did something else. President el-Sisi was the first President of Egypt ever to visit a Coptic church, a Christian church in Egypt. Yet this administration has been just so-so when it comes to el-Sisi. Yes, we have not undermined him, but we have not given him support, which would have been a signal to all of the other leaders there to stand firm and America will stand behind you. We have people like, for instance, the King of Jordan, who was only here just a few days ago, and what happened? A Jordanian pilot was put into a cage and burned to death as a public spectacle. A Jordanian pilot. Why did they do that? Why did these fanatics do that? Because they meant to terrorize the people of the world, terrorize the people of Africa, terrorize other people who would stand up against them. And what was Abdullah's reaction to that? He left his meetings in the United States and flew back to Jordan. It is now being said that he personally flew a bombing mission against the ISIL people who burned that man alive. Now there is a leader, and we should be backing him up. But what do we hear just in the paper the other day? That Jordan is having difficulty in getting the supplies of weapons and arms that they need to make sure that they can stand firm against ISIL and this horrible, radical fanatic movement that is sweeping through their part of the world. Ronald Reagan knew that we needed to support great leaders who would help us end the cold war. We will bring about war if leaders like King Abdullah in Jordan and President el-Sisi in Egypt--if people think we won't get behind them, how can we count on others to take that stand. How about the Kurds up in northern Iraq? They are the ones bearing the burden, bearing the brunt of all of the fighting that is going on now in Iraq. The other people, when we tried to work things through Baghdad and tried to accommodate leaders who were halfheartedly in this battle and really weren't committed, what happened? We gave them enormous amounts of military equipment that ended up in the hands of radicals, ended up being used as vehicles and guns to destroy and kill people who want the type of world that we want to live in, which is a world of tolerance and freedom and peace and prosperity, not radical, fanatic Muslim dictatorship. Instead, the Kurds have stood firm. The Kurds are the one group in Iraq that have stood firm and are the one group that has received the least support from the United States as compared to the others. Now, Baghdad, which wants to put their thumb down on the Kurds, we are going along with a demand with those people that all our aid that goes to the Kurds goes to Baghdad first. That is recognizing the people who are not really on our side, their power, over the people who are on our side. In fact, there was a meeting in London just in the last few days--I guess it was last week--to determine what would go on in Iraq. The United States was, of course, maybe not sitting at the table, but helped organize this and were part of the process of trying to get this meeting together. We didn't even insist that the Kurds were there. The Kurds weren't even at the table. This is a betrayal of the people who are on the front lines fighting the big fight of today against radical Islamic terrorism. We betrayed them. This is horrible. What kind of message does that send to other people around the world who have to stand up against this onslaught of radical fanatic Islamic terrorist dictatorship that would be superimposed on them? We have got to make sure that these people understand--whether it is Abdullah--or how about the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, for example? Here is a man who is so strong in his conviction and leadership in that part of the world to try to stop this terrible threat. Yes, he is treated well. We should be honoring him. Our administration should be leading the efforts to take the Abdullahs and the Crown Prince there in Abu Dhabi and President el- Sisi. These people deserve demonstrable support, not just sort of halfheartedly getting behind them. What about, for example, even Qatar today? Qatar is trying to make a decision as to what to do in the face of this. For example, they permit us to have airstrikes against ISIL--this radical Islamic group up in Iraq--they are permitting us to use an air base in Qatar to launch those attacks, but we should make sure people understand and are grateful to them for it and be demonstrable about it. Part of it is, yes, stand up with your friends. If somebody does something good, like Qatar has just done and wants to go back--and, by the way, has taken some steps in the right direction after taking some steps in the wrong direction--they lost faith in us, I believe, and now, they are coming back in our direction. We should encourage that. The other half of the equation is we need to be tough on the guys who are our enemies, who are going the wrong way, who are supporting radical Islamic fanatic terrorism, like, for example, Pakistan. We are still giving billions of dollars over a 10-year period to Pakistan. We are giving hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment and foreign aid to a country that is, yes, supporting the Taliban. Almost all of the people that we have lost in Afghanistan can be traced back to terrorists who are using Pakistan as a home base, but not only as a home base, the ISI have been actively involved in helping these fanatic terrorists that our people were up against in Afghanistan. How do we know that? Well, we do know that it is known, but maybe just the fact that they were giving safe haven to Osama Bin Laden--the murderer of 3,000 Americans on 9/11--they gave safe haven to this man. This was, ``Oh, we didn't know.'' No one believes that. They knew. Now, to add insult to injury, they have taken the doctor who gave us the location of Osama Bin Laden and helped us bring Osama Bin Laden to justice, that doctor, Dr. Afridi, is now languishing in a dungeon, in a 10-by-10-foot cell in Pakistan. That act by Pakistan is a hostile act to the United States, and for us to walk away and ignore it is to encourage others to treat us in the same way. We must be tough on our enemies and friends to our friends. Is that a difficult formula? Is that too difficult for people to understand? We are losing today because I believe this President has been treating our enemies better than he has been treating our friends in many cases, in terms of willing to reach out to them. We should be reaching out and trying to do everything we can to help the friendly countries rather than reaching out to seek accommodations with these evil countries. Nowhere is that better demonstrated than the announcement that we had secretly negotiated a deal with Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba--secretly negotiated. Congress didn't know what was going on, and now, he has announced by edict his executive orders. Here is a President--maybe he likes Castro a little bit because Castro, after all, he could rule with edicts, just like our President now likes to rule with edicts, rather than go through what we call your regular order as seeking the legislative branch and seeking compromises and establishing policy in that way. Instead, this President reversed 50 years of American policy towards Cuba on his own rather than coming here to Congress and working out something with us and trying to find what was the best way and opening up Cuba to having the beginning of an economic relationship and having Americans go freely there and then to come to the United States. Well, he did that, and there were no concessions, none, that the Cubans made for this President to give up that 50 years, 50 years of ``this is what our policy is, you are going to have to do this--free elections, opposition parties, et cetera--then we will recognize you.'' This President gave it up and no concessions on the other side. Now, by the way, what message does that send to all these other countries? Again, it is not just Cuba. What message does that send to all these other countries when we complain about human rights or we try to set a standard, some standard, that will, indeed, take that country in the right direction? We end up giving up a 50-year policy with no concessions; thus every little petty dictator in the world or, even worse, every group that is out there who is trying to decide whether or not to go with radical Islamist terrorism or not, they know they can make whatever decision they want and eventually the United States is going to cave in because we are projecting weakness. As I say, the one thing Ronald Reagan did that was terrific was to rebuild our military, and it did--it created a sense of awe, but it was a sense of strength. He used that sense of strength, but it was his strategy in helping those people throughout the world who are our friends and the friends of things we believed in and the enemy of our enemies. That is what worked. We are sending the wrong message to the people who will be the enemy of our enemies. We are undermining by not providing positive and forceful support for those people who are standing up--the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and these others and Abdullah and Jordan and President el-Sisi in Egypt--by not demonstrably standing with them, we send the wrong message throughout the world. That is why things are falling apart. That is why things are not going in the right direction. This isn't we just happen to live in a time when things are chaotic. That is not the case. Just like Ronald Reagan didn't just live in the times when there was a Soviet communist threat that was undermining the peace of the world. That didn't just happen. It was the basis of things that, yes, what they did, but also our response to that threat. Today, this administration, I believe, has led us down a path that has created the chaos that we now see, created a situation where you have a radical fanatic Islamic dictatorship movement that not only tries to take over and dominate the Islamic part of the world, but is threatening terrorist acts and has engaged in terrorist acts. We will have more and more bombings like we saw at the Boston Marathon. We will have more and more terrorist actions taken in Western Europe as we saw in Paris or in Africa, unless we step forward and let the world know that we are strong, we are strong in our commitment, and we stand by those who will help us in this battle. I recently visited New York City, and I had not been there for a long time. I had never gone to the 9/11 Memorial. I visited the 9/11 Memorial, and I would advise anyone who has not been there to go there. This is a memorial to the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11, most of them there at the World Trade Center in those two great towers that were brought down on that day. You should go. Anyone hearing my voice-- my colleagues, others--should go and see this. They have managed to get a picture of almost every one of the victims who died that day. Many, of course, were firemen and policemen who, when the airplane struck that building, instead of running away and rushing away, they ran towards the building, they ran there to see what they could do to help, and they gave their lives, these heroic people. We have to have a government as heroic as our own people if we are going to triumph over the people that slaughtered those people today. They slaughtered them in 9/11, and they will slaughter them today. I looked at those pictures of those 3,000 people--and I was in the government when that happened, and I worked with Reagan before that, but on 9/11, we had been here a long time, and we are all part of this. We owe it to the people of the United States, all of us on both sides of the aisle and in the executive branch and whoever else who is the government of this country, we owe it to our people to make sure we are doing the right thing--and I looked into their faces, and I brought my children with me to see this, and I said: Look, all of those people, do you know what they are telling us? They are telling us, to me and to all of us here in this body, you let us down, you let us down. Don't do it again. Don't let there be another wall in another city with 20,000 pictures on it because they have got some sort of dirty bomb or something. These people that we are facing today are capable of that. I am not arguing for major deployments of military units overseas, occupation, garrison in the world, like we did for too long, and I do not think it was right for us to go into Iraq in the first place. I do argue that when we find people on our side, like Ronald Reagan did, we need to have a strong military, and we need to make sure that the world respects us. Then we need to have stands and activities and actions that win their respect, them knowing that we stand with those people who will stand firm against this threat to the world. Otherwise, some day, there could be another World War II-like thing 10 years down the road when we say: Why didn't you stop that fanatic Hitler when he was just walking around, goose-stepping around in these towns in Germany when he could have been stopped? Why didn't you stop him then? Then there was hundreds of millions of people. This could lead to that type of conflagration. One thing we know, unless we stop this radical movement there now, they will find ways of killing thousands of Americans, and there will be other walls, with other pictures, saying: Why didn't you do something? I call on my colleagues now to seriously look at this challenge that we face. My negative comments about what I believe is the President not dealing with this situation in the right way is something that I am saying from the heart, and I am not doing this for political reasons. Let me just say today that we see examples of where we need to take stands. We need to make sure, for example, that the nouveau regime in Iran is facing a President of the United States and an American Government that are making demands that they do not use this system that they are developing now. They have signed a treaty saying they would not have a nuclear weapon. We should hold them to that treaty, and we should be helping the people in Iran, who are struggling against that nouveau regime. I do not say we should attack Iran with American military might. We should be supportive, and we should have been so all along. There were demonstrators in the streets of Tehran, and there was no message. There was no message at all of support from our government at that time. That was one of the first things this President did--he refrained from helping and supporting those young activists for democracy in Iran. The Baloch people are fighting against the corruption and oppression of the Pakistani Government, which is dominated by these radicals. We should be helping the Baloch, who can also be active in Iran, I might say. There are options that we can have throughout the world today-- actions both in terms of policy and in terms of actually helping people struggle for freedom--that will ensure the peace of the world 10 years down the road, as Ronald Reagan did when he took over. He left us a better world. We need to take the steps now to make sure that, when we leave this body, when we leave Congress--and whoever becomes President the next time around--that we leave this government so that our people have a greater chance for freedom, a greater chance to live in peace. We need to make sure that our people can live in peace and prosperity. Those pictures on the wall at the 9/11 Memorial shout out to us: Do your duty. You didn't do it. You let us down. Don't do it again. Make sure the American people are safe. You have a challenge now. Meet that challenge. Stand firm. Stand strong behind those who are with you. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much. America is about to send a message to the world exactly on whose side are we on, and I am very proud to stand here with my colleagues, standing on the side of liberty, of justice, of treating people decently, of government that serves the people rather than a systematic government that requires the people to serve them, the bureaucracy, the tyrants that hold power. That is what this is all about. Let's get an understanding of who this Castro gang is. Castro murdered the freedom fighters who overthrew the dictatorial government of Batista back in the 1950s. Castro, himself, took people out who had fought against the dictatorship of Batista and shot them in the head. These were people that risked their lives to bring democracy to Cuba, and this man co- opted their revolution. He has allied himself, over the years, with gangsters and tyrants throughout the world. He has had a safe haven for the drug dealers of Latin America, who look to him as the moderator of any disputes between these monstrous gangsters who murder each other and murder anyone who gets in their way. He has allied with these drug dealers. But also, during the cold war he was allied to the hilt to the communist movement throughout the world. He wanted his country to become a nuclear base to attack and drop nuclear bombs on the people of the United States. Let's not forget that. This is the man who wanted to kill Americans by the millions. For us now, oh, well, that is history; let bygones be bygones. Are you kidding me? This is the guy that we need to send a message to. When people have that much hatred of the United States, undermine the freedom of the people in of the world, we are not just going to sit aside and forgive him of these things. Oh, by the way, he is not even asking for forgiveness. The Castro regime is just saying, accept us as we are, a country that has had more political prisoners than almost any other country of this hemisphere, and we are just going to accept them as they are. Well, remember, when people were struggling during the cold war against communism, Castro was on the wrong side. During the cold war, he was the one who wanted to kill Americans by the millions by having Soviet missiles in his country. Finally, what does this agreement that this administration--what will be the effect of it? Oh, yeah, they say, we have been told, well, if you just have free trade people are going to get better. There is going to be liberalism. I call this the ``hug a Nazi, make a liberal'' theory. The fact is that Fidel Castro, just like the Chinese Communists, I might add, no matter how much trade we have, they will manipulate it so that the clique that is in power, the clique that has been able to monstrously oppress their own people, take that wealth, manipulate that wealth that is coming into the country to cement their own power. It is very clear what this man has and his clique have in mind, and that is continuing their oppression of the Cuban people. Let's not be partners to that. Let us again, stand for liberty, stand for justice. The Soviet Union has fallen. It is time for Castro and communism in Cuba to fall as well.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 34, the Tsunami Warning, Education and Research Act of 2015. I would like to thank my fellow partner in this endeavor, Representative Suzanne Bonamici, for her tireless work on this. She has done a great job. She has done her constituents and our committee proud for the hard work that she has put into this. In the end, if indeed we succeed and this bill becomes law and the things we are trying to do are accomplished and hundreds of lives are saved, we can sit back and say: ``It was a job well done. We have saved Americans and some lives overseas. That is what God wanted us to do with our time here in Washington, D.C.'' Thank you for letting me be part of your effort to accomplish this. I would also like to thank Chairman Lamar Smith and Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson. Chairman Lamar Smith has been a wonderful leader who has demonstrated the type of bipartisan effort that can really get things accomplished, and I am proud to be on his team as well. We have seen time and time again what tsunamis can do. That is what this legislation is all about. We need to learn more about them. We need to be more accurate in forecasting and reducing the impacts on our communities. This legislation will help us make sure that all of our coastal communities--especially those in my district in California, which are some of the best coastal beaches in all of the United States of America--are adequately prepared and properly warned about this danger. H.R. 34 will strengthen our tsunami warning system's ability to forecast a tsunami arrival, thus bringing damages down. It will establish a working group to provide advice on tsunami science and technology. This legislation does all of this in a fiscally responsible manner, and I am proud to ask my colleagues to join me in support of it.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I have served in the House of Representatives now for 26 years, and I have met good people and bad people, and I have met people I agree with and whom I like and people I disagree with and I like. We are reflective of the American people. People ask me, ``What do you think about the United States Congress?'' And I always say, ``It reflects what the American people are all about.'' This is the House of Representatives where we represent all of these parts of our country. Well, Ralph Hall was one of those Representatives who represented the goodness in America and the greatness in America. Ralph Hall was first and foremost, I believe, a patriot who put that above every other one of his considerations. I was proud to know Ralph. Ralph is still with us, so we shouldn't think of Ralph as being gone from the Earth. For Pete's sake, Ralph is still here, and I hope he is listening right now because we wish him all the best. Ralph Hall is a great American still, but he has left his legacy here behind. I worked with Ralph on the Science and Space Committee, as they called it, at least they did then--Science, Space, and Technology. Ralph has made enormous contributions to the well-being of our country in two areas in particular. Number one, he did much to help direct America's space program and keep it a viable effort on the part of the United States to utilize space for the benefit of humankind and, of course, for the purpose of the United States to become a dominant power in the next frontier. His leadership was indispensable to creating the potential that we have today of accomplishing great things in space. And to the things that we have already accomplished, Ralph was right in the middle of it, making sure that job got done. He also very involved with energy development. I know that there is a little bit of confusion that just because someone is from Texas that they are going to be backing up the oil companies and things such as that. Ralph was a guy who, yeah, he believed in the oil industry, and he was grateful to the oil industry for the good things that it has provided us, the fact that energy and the production of energy is so important to our national well-being. But he was also a man who understood that science was going to develop new methods of energy and was always pushing our committee and the Science Committee to be on the cutting edge of research and development. When you get people here running for Congress, they run for Congress because they have strong ideas and ideals, often which don't agree with one another. You can imagine trying to get legislation through committees and on the floor of the House, et cetera, when you have people who are having to interact but have different points of view. Well, tensions at that moment can be a blockage to making things better. Ralph, if anything else, was the guy who was able to eliminate the tension in the air that was getting in the way of getting something done because he had the best sense of humor of any other Member I have ever, ever come across. Ralph, by doing that, kept this body a productive body, and we weren't at each other's throats. One last note. My father was a pilot during World War II and he flew in the Pacific. I have a very special place in my heart for Ralph Hall and all those guys because Ralph Hall, too, was a pilot in World War II in the Pacific. He is the godfather to us all. Ralph, we respect you, we honor you, we love you, we are grateful to you for what you meant to our lives and what you have done to help make our country better off. Thank you. God bless.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, let me offer my congratulations to those who have served our country in the Congress who now will be retiring and moving on. All of us will get there sometime. This is a noble job if we make it such, and many people who have served here have done great things for the United States of America. Why? Because they, number one, believe in the principles of the United States, what were set down by our Founding Fathers. Even more than that, what we have had here and what we need more of in America are leaders who care specifically about the American people and what impact they are having on the American people and what impact those policies that they advocate will have on the American people. All too often, people come to Washington, and pretty soon, what they care about is this or that specific special interest. Or they have a special idea, special interest or special ideas. They have a philosophy. They have a vision that goes beyond what the benefit to the American people is, what they are going to establish because of this philosophical commitment to some ideal. Well, both of those are enemies of the well-being of the people of the United States. If people who are elected by the population come here and are loyal to special interests that have to make a profit in a specific area, even though it might be detrimental to the American people as a whole, or people come here and they don't care about the American people--they want to see their dream come true, their intellectual and philosophical ideal put into place--well, the American people get left out with that type of leadership. And what we are doing today, one of the most important issues that we have been facing for almost a decade now, with constant pressure to do something about--what? About immigration policy in the United States. And what we do, what we finally do on this issue will tell us whom we care about and what are our ideals and who we care about more. Do we care about special interests? Do we care about some ideal notion that is not so tangible? Or do we care about what policy will do specifically to the American people? For years--and especially on this election year--we have heard repeatedly about the plight of the people who are here in this country illegally, over and over again about how these poor souls, how we need to give them legal status. We need to reach out and do something for them because they are in a bad situation. And, yes, they came here because there was a desperate situation in that land from which they came. Unfortunately, when you hear people constantly talking about how we are going to help these illegal immigrants who are here in our midst, you don't hear about how what is being recommended to help the illegal immigrants will impact the American people. This is what we should be talking about. This is what needs to be discussed. The people elected by the American people should talk about what is going to happen to the American people if this policy that is being recommended is put into place. Yes. We would like to help people who have come here illegally, and we would like to help people all over the world. There is no reason not to, if we care about the people who have come here illegally, thumbing their nose at our law, but they are human beings, and we care about them. By the way, they are also people whom we can identify with because if we were in their spot, we would do the same. We care about them. But you know what? We have to care more about the American people. We have to care about them if they care about the things that we are doing here. Or maybe they will just write off their government because their government is more concerned about a foreigner who has come here illegally than about the well-being of the American family and the American working people. We hear this word ``comprehensive.'' Over and over again, we have heard, We have to have comprehensive immigration reform. ``Comprehensive immigration reform,'' what does that mean? Why do we hear that over and over again? Because they can't use the word ``amnesty.'' And they know that, really, comprehensive immigration reform means one thing and one thing only because there is really not any type of a real argument about making our system better. But to them, when they say ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' they mean changing the status, legalizing the status of those millions of people who are here illegally. They claim that there are 11 million. That is an old number, and that number has not been updated. And almost everyone I talk to believes that it is more like 20 million illegals who are here, not 11 million. So there is not any real problem on our part with the idea of ``comprehensive reform,'' if we were to say, let's make the system more effective. Yes, we need border control, for example, and we need to restructure the visa system because there are a lot of people who are not only coming across the border illegally but who come here and overstay their visas. In fact, the largest number of illegals now-- people keep thinking that we are talking about just people from Latin America. No. We have got people coming in from all over the world--many of them on visas, many of them sneaking across the border--who have come here illegally and are currently residing here. That number of people have an impact on the well-being of the American people. So, yes, let's make the system better. But let's realize that we are not talking about things that we disagree on. It has all been about whether you legalize the status of people who are here illegally. But let's just note this: We have no apologies to make about the generosity of the American people with our current system of immigration. Yes, it needs to be reformed and made more efficient. But we provide for over a million immigrants to come into our country legally every year. To put that into perspective, that is more than all of the legal immigration into other countries, into every country of the world, combined. So we permit more legal immigration than every other country of the world combined. But yet over and over again, we are made to feel guilty, that we in some way should feel guilty about our immigration system and about the fact that you have people who are here illegally and we won't legalize their status. Well, what would legalizing their status do? What would it do? We know what it would do for them. These people who are here illegally, if they have illegal status, they would then be able to perhaps be eligible for government programs, maybe as part of that. Certainly their relatives would be or their children would be. Right now, even the people who are here illegally are the recipients of government benefits. Of the people who are here receiving--for example, their children have health care, emergency health care. And then, of course, an emergency becomes anything that someone is sick with. And they also, of course, are here, and their children are educated here. And we have government benefits that people have managed, if they end up coming here illegally and have one child--one child then justifies a wide variety of Federal assistance and other welfare assistance programs to these individuals who are basically here illegally. Well, what does that mean? At a time when we are $500 billion more in debt every year, we are borrowing money from overseas in order to take care of these people who have come here illegally? That doesn't make any sense at all. And it especially doesn't make any sense when we know that our own government programs, our own government programs today, we are struggling to make ends meet, to make sure these programs stay vital, to make sure that they have money to function and do their jobs efficiently. The Veterans Administration, we have heard so many problems about how the Veterans Administration had not been doing its job. Well, the money that we spend on people who come here illegally comes right out of the pool of money that should be going to Americans or should at least be going to reduce our debt so that in the future, our American children aren't going to have to pay it off. Now, we have nothing to be ashamed of in terms of the overall number of people coming here legally. But even now, when the people who are here illegally, their impact is incredibly detrimental, as I just said, in terms of how much money is being spent by the government on services to them rather than services to the American people. And we also know that illegals, of course, do take jobs. They are working at jobs, most of them. And they are hardworking, good people. But what impact are they having on the jobs that American people want? They have actually taken jobs that should be--well, let's say Americans wouldn't want to work at that pay level. But the pay level that we are talking about is the pay level that happens when you have tens of millions of illegals in the country willing to work for a pittance. They have come to our country and bent down the wages of America's lower-income people. They have bent them down and taken jobs that should have gone to Americans. For example, I know that the hotel and restaurant industry is very upset with the idea of not legalizing the status of these people. And let me just note that once you legalize the status of these 20 million illegals that are in our country, well, what will happen, of course, is that they aren't going to work for the pittance wages anymore. And they will start making more wages. And then there will be another wave of illegals that will come in and underbid them. So these particular people will earn more money, but the American people will earn less and less. And right now, there are many women in the United States who are single mothers, many urban women who have families and live around big hotels, but the hotels hire people who have come here illegally to clean the rooms when there are many thousands of single mothers who would love to drop their child off at school, clean that room in the middle of the day--which are the hours that they need them at the hotel--and come back by the end of the day to pick up their child. But they are not willing to do it now because those people who work in those hotels, if they are illegals, are paid a pittance. And the American people--no, they won't work for a pittance. And they shouldn't. And it will be a good thing if it increases the price of a hotel room by $10 a night in order to make sure that we have American citizens who are paid well and are able to take care of their families. Yes, that is the policy we should have. We shouldn't have a policy that, instead, brings down the cost of that hotel room by a certain amount, increases the profit of the hotel by a certain amount, and is paid for by the fact that American women no longer can take those jobs because there isn't enough being paid for them to take care of their family. Now, of course, if you live as many illegals live--three or four families to a home--they might be able to succeed or at least survive. That is not the kind of society we need to build here. That is not what America was all about. And what our policy should be is aimed at people who are American citizens who would like those jobs. And if we don't permit this illegal flood into our country, wages will go up, as compared to if we don't. And, yes, we should be happy that American people are making more money. Over the last 20 years, we have actually seen the wages of the American people in real terms go down as we have had illegals pouring into our country. Well, whose side are we on? Who do we care for? And that is what this is all about. We are being told that we are heartless because we don't care enough about the people who are illegally in our country to legalize their status when, in fact, we need to make sure that we are not doing anything that will hurt the American people who are struggling right now. And what will happen if we legalize the status of those people who have come here illegally? What will happen? Let's say there are 20 million here. I know officially it is only 11 million. But every one of those people that we legalize the status for are then going to be eligible for family reunification. There are tens of millions of others who are going to pour in. It is estimated, from just the legal people coming in after the amnesty, that we are talking about 40 million new people, mainly poor foreigners coming to our country. Does anyone think that it is not going to have a huge impact on the economy of our country, on our economic system, on our neighborhoods, on our schools and the well- being of working people? Does anyone think that 40 million foreigners-- And that is what is going to happen. When you hear ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' think legalizing the status, which will then eventually bring into our country 40 million new foreigners, mainly poor people. Well, that is what this debate is all about. I would submit that it is not wrong for people, and it is not hateful, it is not being too concerned about money and material things to think in our hearts about our own people before we think about the well-being of foreigners. What keeps America together? Look, we don't have one race. We don't have one religion. We don't have one ethnic group here. What we have got are people who have come here and are a part of the American family. We have to care about what happens within the American family because we don't have that sharing of one race or one religion or one ethnic group. What is it going to do if we bring in 40 million foreigners now to those people who are now part of our American family? Well, someone says that we should expand the American family. Well, yes, we could just say: Hey, anybody in the world who wants to get here, we are going to make them an American and just forget about what that does to the 300 million Americans who are out there depending on their government to watch out for their interests. What would happen if we have that situation? We will have a very harmful decline in the well-being in their communities, in their jobs, and in the government services that they are able to collect of the American family. Again, that doesn't mean that illegals who are here are bad people-- they aren't--nor are the poor people around the world who will flood into our country--because, if we legalize the status of those who are here, you will see a flood into the country. Just think about this, just the discussion of what they call this act that was being aimed at legalizing the status of people who were brought here when they were younger, just that discussion of that issue brought 50,0000 to 60,000 people swarming in. They sent their children to the border. Whatever happened to those kids, by the way? What happened to those 60,000 kids who were down on the border? Well, they are all over the United States now. And do you know what? In schools in California, we have children coming in illegally from other countries, and some of them are carrying diseases. This is a horror story. Who is watching out for our children? We do care about those 60,000 kids that were there and the millions more kids that will come in if we legalize the status of our own illegal immigrants here. We care about our own kids first, and there is nothing wrong with that. We don't have to apologize about it, and we don't have to apologize also that we have the most generous legal system in the world. By the way, for those people who always talk about, Well, immigration really helps our country and helps our economy, if you look at the statistics that are being presented, often what you are being told about are the effect of legal immigrants, which is true. They do add, and I personally would like to go on the record in saying that I believe in legal immigration. I believe that our million people, we can absorb that, 300 million people, we certainly can absorb 1 million more legal immigrants, we should refine our system, so that those legals that are coming in are people that have a means and a skill or an education level, so they will be contributing to the wealth of the country rather than consuming it. There are a lot of businesses that say they need some specialists. Yes, let's try to structure the legal immigrants in that way so it meets the needs of America, as well as brings in very highly-educated people into our country. When we bring in people who are not that, when we bring in people who are not producing wealth, but instead are consumers, that means there is less wealth in our society, and that means that especially America's lower-income people are worse off. Now, when I was a kid, I mowed the lawns in my neighborhood. It was a good thing. You get a work ethic when you are mowing the lawns. I actually painted houses and dug fence posts. I was an ice-cream scooper at Marineland snack bar, and those are the jobs kids did, but today, one of the factors of illegal immigration--and especially if we legalize the status and draw even more illegals in because now, all over the world, they know, Hey, all we have to do is get here, and we can outweigh them--all these entry-level positions, these positions that are actually giving young people a chance to get some work experience, many of these jobs are being taken by people who are here illegally. They are willing to work at a very low level, and they don't just become entry-level jobs. That is the job they stick with. That means that job is no longer available to an American kid who wants to get some experience in the workplace, a box boy or someone who works at a fast-food restaurant or something like that. We are actually hurting our young people, we are hurting our poor people, the people at the lowest end of the scale, and of course, we are hurting the people who are dependent on government programs. Before I go on to that, there are a group of people in our country that would like to be self-sufficient. They have skills, but they have some sort of physical disability. Those people are struggling to come out and have some self-dignity in earning their own living. Those people are being replaced by people because, Oh, well, we will just hire this illegal, even if we can hire a disabled person, we can get an able-bodied illegal in here for the same amount, so why have someone who has a physical disability? The people at the very lowest level--where is unemployment the highest? In our black community and in the Hispanic American community. These are the people who will be the worst hit if we legalize the status of those who are here illegally. If there are tens of millions more who pour into our country--and as I say, it will be at least 40 million--and then when the word goes out all over the world that we have this surrender of our borders, you can bet there will be even more than that. It will be a massive betrayal of the regular people and lower-income people in the United States, of American citizens--again, the disabled people, lower-income people. What about those people who have worked all of their lives for government, who made sure that they pay their taxes, knowing that the government is going to have certain things to back them up as they got older or whether there are things that they would need in cases of emergency, or how about the education of their family and things such as that? No, these programs will have so many tens of millions of more illegals come in because we have legalized the status of those who are already here, those programs now which are suffering, some of them will break down. So how can, with a straight face, people in this body say they are backing the President's efforts to provide 5 million--this is his first step now--5 million work permits to people who are here illegally? This is at a time of high unemployment. We are defining who we care for. We have already defined who we are as a Nation on how we have set down a rule of law and whether we try to be fair. We are an imperfect society. We know that. We know we have got some real problems we have to solve and work together on. We are a multiracial, multiethnic society, but our society as it is will disintegrate if we have tens of millions of illegals pouring into our country. That is just the way it is. Again, the poorest of the poor will be hurt, and when we give 5 million work permits at a time when we have such high unemployment, when we give 5 million work permits to people who are here illegally, we are actually betraying the American people who are struggling at the lower end of the economic scale. We are betraying them. It is something we all need to think about. We need to say to the American people: we are on your side, and we want to do things that are right for you. I have been dismayed by that element of just sort of, not disdain, but a frivolous overlooking of the well-being of the American people when those people are advocating comprehensive immigration reform. Let us also just note that immigration is something that is on our agenda. We keep hearing about it, but there are special interests at stake here. The reason why it is being pushed is not just this humanitarian special ideal, this humanitarian philosophical thing which I say we have to make sure that those special ideas that they think they become more human, to give our money away to various peoples of the world, that it doesn't hurt Americans, but there are also special interests who are profiting from this. It is not only a bad idea and a bad ideal that is driving this toward these decisions, but we have special interests that want cheap labor. We have people in the business community that want cheap labor. Now, don't tell me that Americans can no longer work as carpenters or as plumbers or as roofers. The construction industry slowly, but surely, now is evolving into where they are hiring illegals. That is wrong. There are people who can do these jobs, but they will take the lower pay alternative--of course they will. There are people that claim that they have to hire illegals because they can't hire Americans at that. No. If people were being paid more money, they could hire Americans at those jobs, but we have special interests that want lower pay, and we have special interests on that side of the aisle who want political pawns to come into this country to serve them when election day comes in the future and you have got 40 million new people here over a 20-year period that they will be voting for their political party. That is just how cynical it is. Low wages and political pawns are being pushed. That is the factor that is pushing this comprehensive program that will be dramatically harmful to the well-being of the American people. I would hope that we postpone any decision on that until next year when we Republicans can debate this issue, go to the American people, and get their guidance on what policy that they want our country to have when it comes to immigration into our country. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this amendment. I support President Obama's authority as Commander in Chief, but his game plan is flawed. It will lead to failure and will put us more in danger. The President's approach of using American air power and local ground troops is wise. It worked in Afghanistan and it worked in Kosovo. However, President Obama is choosing the wrong locals to support. With this vote, Congress approves the arming and training of the Free Syrian Army, which is riddled with radical Muslims. In short, we may again be arming insurgents who will end up our enemy. We are told that the Free Syrian Army has been vetted and that we can trust them. This is wishful thinking, not realistic planning. The President wants to send more equipment and supplies and weapons to the Kurds. That is certainly a good concept, but proposes to send our assistance via the Iraqi Government in Baghdad. Rest assured, Baghdad will pass on whatever it doesn't want to keep for itself. And remember, they wasted most of what we have already given them. Arming radical Islamists is bad enough; depending on Baghdad to distribute our military equipment to the right people makes even less sense. We should arm the Kurds directly; then, instead of relying on an unknown and perhaps radical force, we should instead reach out to the Assad regime and enlist his support in a fight against the common enemy. Perhaps we should consult President Putin in Russia about this issue rather than consult the mullahs in Iran. The President's proposal will not work. I will not support it. Yet another infusion of American troops into this never-ending conflict in the Middle East is a wrong move. It is wrong for the people of the United States and will not succeed. I ask my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this amendment.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Texas outlined for us today the serious challenges that we face in the Middle East. We have a challenge that is of a historic nature where a significant number of Islamic extremists are taking control of territories; and they plan to use that control as a means to terrorize large segments of the world's population, including the people of the United States of America. If we are to defeat this, this evil force that beheads journalists, stones women to death, and persecutes people of other faiths, we must make sure that we reach out to people within the Muslim community as well. We must make sure that moderate Muslims know that we are on their side, and when they side with us that we will stick with them. As we speak today, as I speak on this floor, a man who sided with the United States of America in order to bring justice to those Americans killed by radical Islamists on 9/11, this man, Dr. Afridi, languishes in a prison in Pakistan. If we expect other people to stand with us, we cannot forget Dr. Afridi. We must remember him, and we must save him as he saved us.