[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 171 (Wednesday, November 18, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H13257-H13264]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1930
                      AMERICA'S ROLE IN THE WORLD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Halvorson). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) 
is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I appreciate being 
recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of 
Representatives.
  Listening to the dialogue of the gentlemen in the previous hour, I 
generally have a pattern where I will discuss a bit of different 
viewpoints.
  And returning to that subject matter, I understand their concern for 
military personnel and their families, for the lives and the health of 
all of our brave military personnel. In fact, I sympathize and support 
our military personnel and their families and the entire support 
network that is there. I've been six times to Iraq, twice to 
Afghanistan; and I meet with our military personnel as often as I 
possibly can. And, yes, like every congressional district--and perhaps 
every congressional district--we've lost soldiers and we've lost airmen 
and we've lost marines and we've lost sailors. And that has been the 
case, and it's ever been thus.
  So as I listened to the gentlemen who argue that we should have a 
debate on the floor, it seems as though they come with a common purpose 
of arguing that we should not be in Afghanistan.
  I would make the point, Madam Speaker, that they made the same 
argument when we were in Iraq. And the points that they made then were 
very similar to the points that are being made now and that is the 
position that it's not worth the price. It is a legitimate position to 
discuss, but I believe it is the one to have that debate before we 
engage in a war rather than when we're in the floor of it because the 
dialogue from the floor of this House echoes to our enemies; and they 
begin to wonder whether the Americans have the resolve to persevere and 
bring about the sustained effort that's necessary in order to win a 
war, especially a war that is protracted with an amorphous enemy that 
is scattered throughout the mountains that has sometimes the support of 
the network.
  The Taliban is our enemy and al Qaeda is our enemy, and there are 
another six or seven organizations in that part of the world who are 
defined organizations that are our enemies, Madam Speaker.
  But the position taken by these Members back during the Iraq war was 
to pull out, pull out at all costs, pull out immediately. Simply leave 
a rear guard to try to avoid being shot in the back as our troops 
loaded out of Iraq. Let it collapse, if that's what it would be. But 
they argued it wasn't worth the price--at least some of them, and I 
believe all of them, that were on the floor taking this position 
tonight.
  And yet in spite of the naysayers, in spite of the distraction, in 
spite of the 45 votes that were brought to the floor of this Congress 
and led by the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, those votes were 
designed to undermine, unfund, and to damage the resolve of our troops. 
Those votes that came to this floor--and I have a collected Excel 
spreadsheet that links to each one of those resolutions, each one of 
those votes, 45 votes and debates on the floor of this House--these 
Members can't argue that we didn't have the debate on Iraq. It was 
pushed by the Speaker of the House. And whatever the motives, it 
demoralized our troops and encouraged our enemies.
  And the result of those resolutions and different acts that were 
brought to

[[Page H13258]]

this floor was that this Congress stuck together. This Congress didn't 
crack. We stood with our military; we stood with our troops. We're at a 
time of war. And a decision was made, and this Congress made the 
decision to go into Iraq and to provide for the authority for the 
President of the United States to command the military forces to do 
what was necessary to protect the American people. We were operating 
off the best information we had at the time. That's what any nation 
does at any time in any crisis. And I think at any time in history if 
there has been a question whether it was a right decision, there's 
always the question of what was the information they had to work with 
at the time.
  Regardless, the situation remains this: the people that were here on 
the floor that would like to pull us out of Afghanistan immediately are 
the ones who also predominantly were for pulling out of Iraq 
immediately. We know that the President of the United States, the 
current Commander in Chief, as a candidate for the Presidency, argued 
that Bush had taken his eye off the ball, that the ball was Afghanistan 
and the target was Osama bin Laden and that he would bring Osama bin 
Laden to justice. Even denigrated Senator John McCain for saying he 
would follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell if necessary, but not 
being willing to take on some of the tasks that the President thought 
should be taken on.
  And so our current President, our current Commander in Chief, as a 
candidate and United States Senator, continually made the speech that 
President Bush had taken his eye off the ball, if the ball was Osama 
bin Laden and Afghanistan, and that we should immediately pull all of 
our troops out of Iraq without regard to those consequences, and 
diminished the calamity that almost certainly would have ensued.
  And that calamity, just to paint that picture again, Madam Speaker, 
for the American people's benefit, the calamity that was pending in 
2005, 2006, especially early 2007 and on into 2008, would have likely 
been this scenario: if we'd pulled out, the Kurds would have likely 
declared independence and found themselves in a two-front war: Iran on 
one side that had been throughout those years lobbing artillery rounds 
into Kurdistan, and war with the Turks on the west side who have gone 
in and done several raids against the Kurds there in the last few 
years.
  So there's that open-arm conflict that exists on the east and west 
border of Kurdistan that likely would have swallowed up the Kurds that 
would not have had the help of the United States if we had pulled out 
of Iraq, and neither would they have had the help from Iraq because the 
Iraqis themselves were having significant difficulty in providing 
security for their own people.
  Other problems that we had were militia groups that were warring 
against each other, Sunnis and Shias and the power vacuum that brought 
about this violence. There were neighborhoods that were purged and 
taken back over again. And we had, if not forgotten, the Mahdi militia 
and the other militias that had emerged within Iraq that were in the 
process of enforcement, and some might say ethnic cleansing and 
sectarian violence.
  And al Qaeda was entrenched in the al Anbar province. Al Qaeda ruled 
al Anbar province. Al Anbar province was so bad that I could not go 
there during that period of time throughout all of 2006 and probably 
well before then. The cities of Ramadi and Fallujah had been fought 
over, and they needed to be fought over again before they could be 
liberated for the Iraqi people to take control of.
  That was the scenario. And not only that, the great threat of the 
Iranians and their involvement and engagement in subversive activities 
across their border into Iraq was all part of this competition that 
was almost--almost--a military, political, economic conundrum.

  And you have most of the oil in Iraq is over against the Straits--
very, very close to the oil that's in Iran. And then in the south where 
you had the Shias, the Shias had some affinity to the Iranian Shias.
  So that entire scenario, the worst-case scenario that I can paint for 
this--and it's the one that actually looked like it was the most likely 
it would be if the United States had pulled out of Iraq and an 
instantaneous sectarian violence situation where the Shias and the 
Sunnis would go at each other in an unrestrained way, where al Qaeda 
would have continued to maintain al Anbar province and expand their 
hold and a base camp for the world, the predictions--and they still 
remain true--that there are significant oil reserves in al Anbar 
province that would have been the wealth of that oil that could have 
gone into the pockets and the treasure chest of al Qaeda and funded 
their global operations.
  The only significant refinery--I will say it this way--the most 
significant refinery in all of northern Iraq is in al Anbar province 
where Saddam put it so he could bring the Kurdish oil down and control 
the oil from Kurdistan for political reasons. That could have all been 
an al Qaeda base camp with lots of oil to fund it.
  And it could have been the Shias and the Sunnis and the remaining 
Shias at battle with each other, and the Iranians making common cause 
with the Shias and taking over the oil fields in the south of Iraq 
where about 70 percent of the oil is and having control of both sides 
of the Straits of Hormuz and control of a lot more of the oil in the 
world, and the ability to shut off around 40 percent of the world's oil 
while the Kurds find themselves in a two-front war having declared 
independence.
  That's just part of what would have happened if we had pulled out of 
Iraq, Madam Speaker. That was the advice of the gentlemen on the floor 
that argue against our involvement in Afghanistan.
  And today, today, due to a brave and difficult decision made by our 
then-Commander in Chief, George W. Bush, who ordered the surge, that 
the courageous notion of investing American might and preserving a 
victory that may have been achieved in March and April and May 
primarily in 2003 that needed to be reachieved in a number of the 
cities that were taken over by al Qaeda and other forces that were 
contrary and in opposition to the United States, that order for the 
surge and noble bravery of our military, of all branches of service, 
came together in Iraq and provided the kind of security that has 
allowed the Iraqis to develop their own security forces.
  And those forces now exceed--by the time--if you talk all of their 
security forces, they meet and exceed a number in the area of 600,000 
that are providing for the safety of the Iraqi people.
  The stability in Iraq today? Even though there are flareups of 
violence and flareups of suicide bombs that take place from time to 
time, there is a control of that country that has been taken over by 
the Iraqi people exactly within the design of President Bush--but not 
something that the gentlemen that spoke ahead of me could actually 
admit to, I don't believe, the level of success in Iraq.
  I did introduce a resolution in February of this year that declares 
that we have achieved a definable victory in Iraq, and it defines the 
victory and it lays out the milestones along the way. A definable 
victory and by measure of a civil government that can provide for 
safety and security for its people at a level significantly higher than 
it was. American casualties that went down to the point of where it was 
as likely that we would lose an American in Iraq due to an accident as 
to the enemy.
  The civilian government establishments there, the distribution of the 
oil revenue, the list of accomplishments ratifying a Constitution far 
faster than we were able to do so in the United States when we 
established our first Constitution. The drafting and the writing and 
the passage and the ratification process in its entirety were quicker 
in Iraq than it was in the United States of America.
  So of all of the milestones, of all of the benchmarks that were 
imposed by this Congress on the Iraqi Government and the Iraqi people 
and the responsibility of our President Bush at the time and the 
Commander in Chief of our military and our military personnel, of the 
18 benchmarks, 17 of the 18 benchmarks--even as of last February--had 
been wholly or substantially achieved. And the 18th benchmark was an 
amorphous benchmark that is moving in that direction. What matters is 
how you define it.
  That's what happened. We've achieved a definable victory in Iraq,

[[Page H13259]]

and that accomplishment was done not because of people who wanted to 
pull out, that didn't have the resolve, that didn't understand the 
price that America pays down the line for lack of resolve in this 
moment of history.
  I would use an example, Madam Speaker, and that would be on June 11 
of 2004, I was sitting in a hotel room in Kuwait City waiting to go 
into Iraq the next morning. And I was watching Al-Jazeera TV. And on 
Al-Jazeera TV, June 11, 2004, with the English closed-caption, Moqtada 
al-Sadr came on--the head of the Mahdi militia who gave us so much 
trouble. And he said--judging by the closed caption that I read, and 
presumably it was in Arabic--he said, If we continue attacking 
Americans, they will leave Iraq the same way they left Vietnam, the 
same way they left Lebanon, the same way they left Mogadishu. He was 
predicting that the Americans would not have the resolve to achieve a 
victory in Iraq.
  And had that been the case, if the President of the United States, if 
the balance of the Republicans in this Congress and some of the 
national security Democrats had not had resolve, today we would be 
seeing the calamity in Iraq that I have just laid out as the likely 
scenario. And we would also be listening to Osama bin Laden and perhaps 
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a courtroom in New York say, Well, the 
Americans left Vietnam, and they left Lebanon, they left Mogadishu, and 
they pulled out of Iraq. Americans don't have resolve. All it takes to 
defeat American might is persistence and perseverance and a willingness 
to fight a war of attrition and accept the casualties. And if you do 
that long enough, Americans will lose their patience and will lose 
their will. That was the message that Moqtada al-Sadr got. He said it 
directly into Al-Jazeera TV, June 11, 2004. It was the message that 
Osama bin Laden got when he was inspired to attack the United States 
because he didn't believe that we had the resolve to strike back or the 
resolve to keep the pressure on.

                              {time}  1945

  And because America sent a weak message--Vietnam, Lebanon, 
Mogadishu--it inspired our enemies to take us on and challenge us 
because if they see a sign of weakness, that is where they would 
attack.
  The Japanese didn't think that America had that kind of resolve when 
they attacked us on December 7, 1941. We did show the resolve when we 
were attacked, and we showed the resolve after September 11, 2001, and 
we need to show the resolve in Afghanistan, although it is a much more 
difficult nut to crack. To that extent, I will give my colleagues in 
the previous hour their due.
  My first trip to Afghanistan, it was in the middle of the most 
difficult times in Iraq, when most didn't see a way out that would be 
victorious in Iraq. I came back and said, We will be in Afghanistan a 
lot longer than we will be in Iraq because Afghanistan is a lot closer 
to the Stone Age than Iraq. They don't have the transportation. They 
don't have the infrastructure. They don't have a modern education 
system. They are living closer to the Stone Age. There is only one 
highway that transfers assets across the country, and that is a highway 
that we turned into a paved highway. Other than that, it was a trail.
  The Afghanis, many of them live up in valleys in the mountain, and 
that zone in a particular valley is where the tribe is. So it is much 
more difficult to maintain security in a country that has been at war 
and has been able to reject or eject any of its conquerors.
  The difference is that Americans are not invaders and occupiers. We 
are liberators. Where we have gone, we have liberated people. And 
wherever American soldiers have gone, there has been a tremendous 
blessing that is left in the aftermath, especially if we stay and pass 
along American values.
  Some few years ago, I was at a hotel here in downtown Washington, 
D.C., to hear a speech from President Arroyo of the Philippines, and I 
guess this was about 2004. She said, Thank you, America. Thank you for 
sending the Marine Corps to our islands in 1898, thank you for freeing 
and liberating us. Thank you for sending your priests and pastors who 
taught us your faith. Thank you for sending us 10,000 American 
teachers--and she had a Filipino name for them which I missed--and the 
American teachers and the priests and pastors and the soldiers.
  She forgot to mention actually the Army, she said marines, they 
taught us the American way of life. You taught us the English language. 
You taught us the values, and I will summarize it in my words, not 
hers, the values of Western civilization. She said today, 1.6 million 
Filipinos leave the islands to work wherever in the world they want to 
go, and they send a lot of their money back to the Philippines, 
representing, and she gave the number, but a high percentage of the 
gross domestic product of the Philippines.
  The benefit of having the American civilization arrive in the 
Philippines is evident more than 100 years later, and we are thanked 
for it by the President of the Philippines.
  And now we look around the world and we see, is Japan better off or 
worse off in the aftermath of Imperial Japan, in the aftermath of 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is Japan better off because the Americans went 
into Japan and helped set up a free market capitalistic system, a 
system of representative government that is no longer run by the 
Emperor that our Commander in Chief gave a 90-degree bow before a 
couple of days ago?
  Madam Speaker, I wasn't particularly alarmed when I heard that the 
President had bowed to the Emperor of Japan until I saw the videotape 
of the President of the United States bowing 90 degrees. It was almost 
a genuflection before the Emperor of Japan, so far different than it 
was before the ceremonies of surrender on the USS Missouri. And never 
in the history of the country do we have the record of a President of 
the United States bowing before any foreign leader, and no President of 
the United States should ever bow before another foreign leader. And 
yet we have seen this happen and we have seen this unfold around the 
country, around the world, a global tour of contrition that has 
diminished the power and the influence of the United States.
  Some Nation has to be the superpower in the world. We should have 
adjusted to this fairly easily. It was a struggle that we were involved 
in. At the beginning of the Cold War, and you can pick your date on 
when that starts. Was it the blockade that brought about the Berlin 
Airlift? Was it the 1948 speech at Fulton, Missouri, when Winston 
Churchill laid out the identification of the Cold War when he said an 
Iron Curtain has descended across Europe? But some place between 1945 
and 1948, the Cold War began.
  The Russians and the East Germans began building their Berlin Wall in 
1961, and that wall stood until November 9, 1989. That period of time 
clearly is Cold War time, and you can expand onto that, back it up to 
about 1948 or earlier, and the Cold War wasn't quite over for some 
months after the Berlin Wall started to come down, about the time the 
Soviet Union imploded, and the date I will pick on that, the specific 
date, would be December 31, 1990. That is about as close a date as we 
can get to the end of the Soviet Union.
  At that period of time, we could celebrate that the Cold War was over 
and that the United States of America had emerged as the world's only 
superpower, and that this contest, this struggle, that was between this 
communism, hardcore socialism, militarily imposed economies with a 
regime that believed that the person, the individual, the human being, 
God's unique gift of the now six billion plus of us on this planet, 
that people existed for the State. That was their position. That was 
Karl Marx's position, and that is what has evolved in the thought 
process of the utopianists for 150 or more years.
  And yet we saw the Soviet Union implode after we saw freedom echo 
across Eastern Europe in nation after nation. We just celebrated 
yesterday or the day before the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, 
where thousands and thousands of Czechs stood in the square in Prague 
peacefully and held their keys up, Madam Speaker, and rattled their 
keys for hours on end, rattling their keys for freedom. We can hear 
what that is like. That echoes back 20 years, and we saw Vaclav Havel 
step forward and become the leader of that nation, and they divided it 
into the two separate parts also in a peaceful way.
  A little bit of violence along throughout Eastern Europe, but from 
the

[[Page H13260]]

standpoint of the hundreds of millions of people who became free in the 
aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and part of that was the 
Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the maximum number of people 
breathe free air for the least amount of blood I believe in the history 
of the world, and that freedom echoed, I would argue then, all of the 
way across Eastern Europe, from the wall in Berlin, all of the way 
across Eastern Europe, all of the way across Russia, all of the way to 
the Pacific Ocean, at least for a time.
  And the optimism that I had, and that hope, that faith, that belief 
that the Cold War was really over and that then the free market 
capitalism and the freedom that we have that the rights--our rights 
come from God, and they are enumerated in our Constitution, but they 
are God-given rights, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that the 
image of that, the inspiration of our freedom and the power of the free 
market system had set aside, had pushed away, had defeated every 
competing model for a civilization that had been designed by the world, 
Madam Speaker.

  I have to characterize this another way, more succinctly in the words 
of another, and that was Jeanne Kirkpatrick who in the early part of 
the Reagan administration was the ambassador to the United Nations. 
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, as she stepped down as ambassador to the United 
Nations to pursue other endeavors, she said, What is going on in this 
Cold War is this: That the Soviet Union and the United States of 
America, these two superpowers clashing in this Cold War, are the 
equivalent of, the contest is the equivalent of playing chess and 
monopoly on the same board. With our free market economy and monopoly, 
and with the Soviet Union's massive buildup in military ability, she 
said playing chess and monopoly on the same board, and the only 
question is will the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union 
economically before the Soviet Union checkmates the United States 
militarily. Chess and monopoly on the same board. Do the Russians go 
bankrupt before they checkmate us with their ICBM missiles and their 
other military equipment and hardware, the massive military that they 
were developing?
  We know the answer to that now. That was about 1984 that Jeanne 
Kirkpatrick made that statement. And November 9, 1989, and the ensuing 
months up until the last day in 1990 when the Soviet Union was I think 
officially imploded, we saw that free market capitalism, freedom, the 
inspiration of the rights that come from God that are enumerated in our 
Constitution and that flow, that the government is of, by, and for the 
people, and that the people grant the authority that comes from God to 
their legitimate elected representatives to govern them in an orderly 
fashion, that that system of government, our constitutional Republic 
prevailed, prevailed over the utopian mistake, the colossal error that 
cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people, Karl Marx's approach 
to utopianism. That is what we saw happen, Madam Speaker.
  I believed then, in 1989, in the early winter of 1989 and throughout 
1990, 1991, through the early part of the 1990s until the late 1990s 
some time, I believed that it was clear to the rest of the world that 
freedom had won, that free market capitalism had won. I didn't think it 
was arguable, and I thought somehow that those leaders in the world 
would realize the reality that they couldn't compete with a system that 
tapped into the vitality of the inspiration of every individual who had 
their own franchise and their own opportunity and their own rights to 
engage in making their lives better for themselves and their family, 
and to do so in a moral and ethical fashion within the framework of the 
rule of law. I believed the rest of the world would see that clearly.
  Look at Eastern Europe, the region that so recently had won its 
freedom: How could they begin to think in this myopic, utopian fashion 
of, let's say, of Marx and Hegel and others that are part of the 
utopian philosophers in that part of the world. How could they think 
that? So they went underground for awhile and they drifted away and 
they became this amorphous, loosely and most often disorganized group 
of people who were still Marxists, they were still Communists, they 
were still believers in a managed society, a managed economy, a utopian 
world, the kind of world where liberal-thinking elitists would manage 
the resources of humanity and that every human being was a tool of the 
state and you were there to glorify the state.
  And so they emerged again, Madam Speaker. And as they emerged, they 
began to form alliances against the United States. And those alliances 
that were formed brought about these alliances that we are faced with 
today.
  I mean, it wasn't unpredictable that the Islamic fundamentalists 
would rise up and begin to attack the United States. That wasn't 
unpredictable. In fact, it was predicted, not by me, but by other 
people who had an insight into human nature and history that went 
beyond the things that I could sense at that time at least.
  And so we have seen the philosophy of ``the enemy of my enemy is my 
friend.'' There is a certain factor, and I will just called it national 
jealousy, that envy factor that comes into play. Europe had lost a lot 
of its glory. They had formed in the 1970s, at least, and perhaps 
earlier than that, the European Union. The goal of the European Union 
was to establish the United States of Europe, to establish the United 
States of Europe incrementally by a common currency and opening up 
borders and providing for open and free trade in the European Union.
  It was designed and it was in print as a policy position and 
objective and a goal. And the mission statement was to shape the 
European Union into the United States of Europe and to provide, quote, 
``a counterbalance to the United States of America,'' close quote.
  You can see where Europe didn't like the idea that the United States 
of America--the progeny of Europe is what we have been--could become 
the unchallenged superpower in the world. So that resistance and 
objection emerged from Western Europe, the Western Europe that 
represents, I think, the ancestors to modern day Western civilization. 
But there is a little nation envy that goes on, and there is an 
aspiration of a wannabe in trying to make the world a better place.
  In Eastern Europe they hung onto their freedom a little bit more, and 
I have observed that those people who have most recently achieved their 
freedom are the ones who protect it and guard it the most jealously. 
That has been the case with the Eastern Europeans who remember what it 
was like to live under the yoke of communism who celebrated in this 
month, and will celebrate every November 9 of every year from here on, 
the fall of the Wall, the literal crashing of the Iron Curtain and the 
end of the Cold War and the beginning of freedom that echoed across 
Eastern Europe, and by some estimations all of the way across Asia to 
the Pacific Ocean, until the utopianists, the control people, the 
dictators began to emerge and to take away the freedoms.

                              {time}  2000

  We believed, I think, for some time that in Russia, the remainder of 
the old Soviet Union, that they had that level of freedom that the 
people in Russia wanted. We believed they had free elections and 
freedom of press and a free market economy. At least it was emerging, 
and people were willing to learn how to compete in a free market 
economy. But today we see that Putin has diminished that dramatically, 
that the elections are not the legitimate elections that we had hoped 
we would see in Russia, that free market capitalism is instead 
controlled often by a Russian mob, a Russian mafia, and favoritisms 
that take place and the payoffs that go on within indicate a corrupt 
society that's now run for the glorification and the power and the 
enrichment of the rulers. That's the case in a number of other 
countries in the world.
  But we're unique here in the United States of America. Madam Speaker, 
we're a unique people. And, yes, we are the progeny of Western Europe, 
and we are the progeny that came from primarily Western European stock. 
And at the time that we received the best that Western Europe had to 
offer, we also received a fundamental Christian faith as the core of 
our moral values.
  This is a Judeo-Christian Nation, Madam Speaker. The core of our 
moral values is embodied within the culture. Whatever church people go 
to or

[[Page H13261]]

whether they go to church, wherever they worship or whether they 
worship, we still have the American people who, as a culture, 
understand Christian values and Christian principles, the Judeo-
Christian values that are timeless.
  So I would illustrate that, Madam Speaker, in this way. An example 
would be this: Let's just say if an honorable man from Texas were to 
pull into his driveway and his neighbor's dog had gotten loose and had 
run underneath the tire of his car. If you're in Texas or Iowa or most 
of the places in the country, if you run over your neighbor's dog, what 
do you do? This is how I'm going to illustrate this is a Christian 
Nation. You go over and knock on your neighbor's door and you say, 
Well, Joe, I just killed your dog. I'm sorry.
  Well, there are two things that happened there. One of them is 
confession, I just killed your dog. I'm sorry, his repentance. The 
third thing you say is, Will you forgive me? I didn't mean to. It was 
an accident. So you would have confession, repentance, and you ask for 
forgiveness. And the neighbor, Joe, will say, Well, it wasn't your 
fault. Of course you're forgiven. And that is the path of Christian 
forgiveness that takes place even when we run over our neighbor's dog.
  This is a Christian Nation, and the foundation of Western 
civilization are those kinds of values. And this is rooted going as far 
back as the Age of Reason in Greece where the foundations and the 
principles of logic and reason and science were developed, and it flows 
through Western civilization into the division of the Age of 
Enlightenment that took place, the English speaking half where we got 
our free enterprise and our freedom from and the non-English-speaking 
half of the Age of Enlightenment where we got a lot of these utopian 
ideas that flowed down here. And some of them have polluted the thought 
process, and they clearly pollute the thought process here in the 
United States Congress where many have suspended their ability to 
reason.
  I recall even this week being criticized by a professor of political 
science who assigned me a belief system and then attacked the belief 
system that he assigned to me. You wouldn't have gotten by with that in 
front of Socrates or Milton Friedman, for example, and you shouldn't 
get by with that in this society either. If person after person in this 
Congress takes the posture that we should be legislating in part by 
anecdotes and by feelings and by emoting, by something sympathetic so 
that no one falls through anything, that we create a sieve that there 
are no cracks in, truthfully, Madam Speaker, society doesn't work that 
way. There is good and there is evil in all of us.
  We're predominantly good. We have to punish the evil and reward the 
good. And our job in this Congress is to enhance and increase in public 
policy, to the extent we can, the average annual productivity of our 
people. And if that is brought about in a moral fashion, that improves 
the quality of life, the standard of living of everyone in the United 
States of America, and it strengthens us from a military, economic, 
social, and cultural standpoint. And we are being weakened by people 
who undermine our national security, by people who are constantly 
assaulting free enterprise, capitalism, by people who are constantly 
assaulting the rule of law. And the rule of law does apply and it 
applies in securing our borders.
  I see my friend from Missouri has arrived on the floor, and whatever 
is on his heart at the time, I'd be so happy to yield to the gentleman. 
The gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin).
  Mr. AKIN. I thank my good friend from Iowa for yielding.
  A number of the different words that you're using are so important to 
the foundation of the whole logic of how the American system works. You 
were talking about the idea of a rule of law, and that's one of those 
terms that sounds pretty straightforward. We believe in the rule of 
law.
  What's the alternative to the rule of law? We have been seeing a 
whole lot of it this year. The alternative to the rule of law is 
special deals. If you recall, rule of law is depicted frequently by the 
marble statue of Lady Justice. And she has the blindfold across her 
eyes. She's holding up the scales. And regardless of who you are, man 
or woman or big or little or rich or poor, Lady Justice just simply 
says, Just the facts. So that's what is called the rule of law. People 
are equal before the law. But the alternative to that is, of course, 
rule by whims of mankind. It's special deals.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. It could be anarchy.
  Mr. AKIN. So we have the ``too big to fail'' rule. So we tax 
Americans, not so much Americans that live now but their grandchildren 
we're going to tax, and we pass these things like the porkulus bill, 
which is supposed to be stimulus, and we pass the Wall Street bailout. 
We take all this money and we give it to whom? Every small mom and pop 
shop that might fail? No. We give it to the ``too big to fail.'' So, 
therefore, you've moved from the rule of law to a special deals 
society. And that's the problem. Of course, that's really what 
socialism is. It's special deals administered by guess who, Big Brother 
government.
  That's not what made America great. That's not what allowed our great 
Nation, my good friend Congressman King, that's not what allowed us to 
have a list of the different nations throughout the world that 
Americans freed from horrible dictatorships. That's a long list. I saw 
it actually listed on a cartoon. It had the list of all of these 
countries that American GIs and that American treasure through the ages 
have freed. Places like Germany. Places like Japan where you have some 
dictator, where we went in and we freed them from that. Places like 
Grenada, where our sons and daughters went in and took a risk and left 
a free country. That's not why we were able to do that because we're 
another socialist Big Government-run country. It's because we're a 
country that was based on a different set of principles.
  The thing that strikes me the most, and I don't want to overuse the 
welcome that you've extended to me, is this. There was a country not so 
many years ago, and this is how their thinking worked: They said, look, 
if you've got somebody and they don't have a house to stay in and it 
gets cold in the winter, they're going to freeze to death. And if they 
don't have food to eat, they're going to starve to death. And if they 
don't have medical care, they're going to die of some kind of medical 
condition. So they ought to have a right to housing, a right to food, a 
right to health care. And if they haven't had an education and they 
can't read, they ought to have a right to know how to read and to study 
and be educated. So that government created those rights for its 
citizens, and they marched forward boldly into the future until they 
became bankrupt and were disbanded. And it was called the Union of 
Soviet Socialist Republics. We call it the USSR. And we knew it wasn't 
a very good system because it was based on communism and socialism.

  Yet here in America, we have heard, even as I have stood here on the 
floor with you my friend, Democrats say that you have a right to health 
care. So as a government, we are now saying that we're going to have 
the government get involved in housing. The government's going to get 
involved in food, in food stamps. The government is now going to take 
over health care. The government has now taken over most of the loans 
for colleges and education. And it's like how come we're repeating the 
same things that the Soviet Union did and anticipating that we'll get 
different results?
  Instead, our Founders had a different concept. They said that our 
rights are basic things that come from God. In our Declaration of 
Independence, all are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 
rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If 
you'll note, those rights are not rights to something that somebody 
else has a claim to.
  Those of you from Iowa do some farming. I think you grow some corn in 
Iowa. I know we do some in Missouri, but our next-door neighbor does a 
lot of wheat and corn. And when you have one of your Iowa farmers 
combine the sweat of his brow with the produce from the field, they own 
that corn. It is their corn because it was grown on their land. They 
worked hard and it belongs to them. We call that private property. We 
call that free enterprise. And because I'm hungry doesn't give me a 
right to something that belongs

[[Page H13262]]

to someone else. That's theft. That's stealing. And if the government 
takes someone's corn and gives it to someone else who didn't grow it, 
that's called stealing, except we just call it institutionalized theft. 
That's socialism. You never have a right to something that's the unique 
property of another person.
  The Founders said you have a right to your life because God gives 
that uniquely to an individual. You see, you have a right to liberty 
because God gives you just one life and you can go choose a career of 
your choosing. Nobody else chooses your career. You get to do it 
yourself. But it doesn't say you own somebody else's career and should 
tell them what they should do with their life. That's what the Soviet 
Union thought.
  So our system was based on freedom, was based on limited government; 
limited in the sense that it was the job of government to protect just 
those basic rights that God gives to all men. And we have been setting 
aside that formula that works, instead trying to adopt something that 
the Europeans have never made work, and, of course, it never worked in 
the Soviet Union. We're going in the wrong direction, and we need to go 
back toward freedom.
  I didn't mean to get on too long a dissertation, but those 
distinctions between equal before the law as opposed to special deals, 
that's a very big part of what we're dealing with, Congressman.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Missouri for coming in 
to add that.
  The components of this freedom that seem to be completely disregarded 
over on this side of the aisle and the debate that we've gone through 
on health care and the argument that there are certain freedoms in that 
fashion, I recall Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech. And 
if you go down to the memorial down here at FDR's memorial, you can 
walk along and look at the display. He's the longest serving President 
of the United States. He had some ideas. I think he was very strong in 
leading this country through victory in World War II. I think that his 
economic leadership throughout the Great Depression extended and made 
the Great Depression greater than it might have been if we had allowed 
free market capitalism to prevail.
  But Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave the famous Four Freedoms speech, 
and the four freedoms were painted and drawn by Norman Rockwell on the 
cover of Life Magazine, as I recall it. And the four freedoms were 
freedom of speech, good. Freedom of religion, also good. Both of those 
are constitutional freedoms. They are protected in the Constitution 
specifically. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion. The other two 
were freedom from want and freedom from fear.
  Now, if any people can be free of want, that means that they don't 
have any desire to get up and go do anything. They don't want for 
anything. We know back during the 1970s when the American people were 
worried about the economic juggernaut of Japan swallowing our free 
market up because Japan was growing so fast and they were such intense 
competitors and they had cash left over and they were buying into the 
United States and competing directly, and I remember this from being a 
little boy.
  We first started getting products from Japan that were little New 
Year's toys like the little whistles and those that spring out like 
that when you blow it. I don't know what you call those. I think the 
Japanese made the Chinese handcuffs we had to play with, too, if I'm 
not mistaken. Little paper products that came from Japan. And then 
things got a little better, and I can remember about the time I was in 
junior high school, I had a little Toshiba transistor radio where you 
could listen to a radio with a battery in it and walk around. That was 
a pretty neat deal. And as things went on, we started to see the 
Japanese make optics, and so the optical equipment today is state of 
the art. Very good. Very good recording, a very good electronic device.
  The quality of what they were doing was pretty primitive just after 
World War II, which one would expect, and it got better and better and 
better. And by the 1970s, the Japanese were doing many things better 
than we were here in the United States. And we were worried that Japan 
was going to take us over, defeat us economically and eclipse the 
American economy because our production, our export markets were 
diminishing and theirs were increasing, and that was the first time, I 
think, in my lifetime we were worried about the balance of trade.
  I said then and I will say today that if you wanted to destroy a 
culture, a free enterprise culture, a dynamic culture and civilization, 
the United States has a simple solution. What we would do is we would 
just go in and airdrop money over in Japan, and as long as they didn't 
work, we'd fly them in money. If you drop money down in the streets of 
Tokyo and if people could gather that up every day and spend it and buy 
what they needed, they wouldn't want for anything and they wouldn't 
work for anything. It would destroy the work ethic of a culture and a 
civilization. That's how you would do it. If you want to create a 
socialist state, I can tell you how to do that, too, Madam Speaker.

                              {time}  2015

  And that is, go out into the middle of the Sahara Desert, where there 
isn't a soul, not even a camel, for 100 miles, and hang a pipe there 
from a sky hook--that's our expression for when you don't have anything 
to hang it to, you just hang it to a sky hook--and hang a pipe there 
and drop Federal dollars down out of that pipe, let them billow out 
onto the sand in the desert; and pretty soon somebody would find that 
money and they would go there to grab that money and somebody else 
would come, somebody else would come. It wouldn't be earned income. 
That would just be something free that comes from the sky.
  Federal money comes from the sky. It's been dumped all over America 
by this President: $787 billion in the stimulus plan; $700 billion in 
the TARP fund. And when you give people something for nothing, they 
lose their desire, they lose their want. They have freedom from want as 
long as they're dependent upon the benefactor. We could create a 
socialist state in less than a generation in the middle of the Sahara 
Desert if we just dumped money out there and gave it to people, and 
they would become dependent upon it. That is how you destroy a culture 
or a civilization. We've got to have want. We've got to have desire. I 
think Milton Friedman talked about how greed was a good quality. As 
long as it is a greed that's built upon a moral foundation and 
aspiration. And aspiration is a good thing.
  And why anybody would think that greed doesn't exist in a socialist 
state is amazing to me. The people that are advocating for a socialist 
state, don't tell me you aren't. You are. You've taken all kinds of 
steps to move this Nation into a socialist state. If anybody wants to 
step into that debate, just stand up, I will yield right now; but I 
don't think you believe strongly enough to take me on.
  You're moving us towards a socialist state. The people in this 
Congress on the left side have nationalized eight large entities: three 
large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors 
and Chrysler. $787 billion in the stimulus plan. They have nationalized 
several congressional districts in my State. They don't exist, but they 
must have nationalized them. They've dumped money in there now and 
created these jobs where districts don't exist, where jobs don't exist, 
but it's put out here.
  The freedom of the free market system has been dramatically 
diminished. And the people that advocate for this socialist state, this 
freedom from want, simply create a dependency class in America. FDR's 
inspiration is not a right. You don't have a right to not wanting for 
something. The heart of the American people, the heart of free people, 
has to want for something. We've got to desire for something. We've got 
to desire that the next generation lives better than we do. We've got 
to desire that we live in a moral and virtuous and a faithful society. 
We've got to raise our children that way. If we tie this together, then 
the world is a better place, and more people succeed and more people 
live better. And the harder we work, and the more we produce, it raises 
the average annual productivity. But if we don't want, we don't produce 
and, therefore, our productivity diminishes, and the sun sets on the 
American empire. That's freedom from want's mistake.

[[Page H13263]]

  FDR's other mistake is freedom from fear. Freedom from fear. Now, if 
we don't fear anything, we don't move away from anything or we don't 
face those fears either. How can any government guarantee that you have 
a right to freedom from fear? Yet the belief over here, on the ever-
encroaching socialist side of the aisle, is that we have a right to be 
free from want, free from fear, a right to health care, a right to your 
own personalized health insurance program, a program that will be 
delivered to every American human being, probably to the chimpanzees 
too like they want to do in Austria and have tried, but to every 
American human being a health insurance policy of your very own. That's 
what's in the bill; for illegals as well.
  Here's how it works, Mr. Speaker. It works in this fashion. They have 
now covered every possible scenario of someone who is illegally in the 
United States and made sure everybody's covered if this bill finally 
becomes law. First of all, they undermined the proof of citizenship 
requirements in the Medicaid language and did so in the SCHIP rewrite, 
where they expanded health insurance for children and families of four, 
for example, in my State, making less than $75,000 a year, and 
providing that health insurance at 300 percent of poverty. In that 
bill, which, by the way, provided health insurance premiums for 
families that were also paying the alternative minimum tax; they had to 
pay the rich man's tax, then we had to subsidize the health insurance 
premiums for their children. And in that same bill, they wiped out the 
proof of citizenship requirements, the requirements for a birth 
certificate and other documents that are the foundation of verification 
for Medicaid eligibility so we are not providing Medicaid to illegals. 
That got wiped out.
  Now an illegal person in the United States just simply has to attest 
to a Social Security number. Here's a number. It's mine. Fine. Here are 
your benefits. There are 9.7 million people who, in the United States, 
don't bother to sign up. They're here in this list. I won't go into 
that so far, Mr. Speaker, except to say, now, here, they want to give 
health insurance policies to every illegal in America. I've just talked 
about those that now just have to sign up for Medicaid. But some of 
them have jobs. Those that are working, the employer will be required 
to give them a health insurance policy, legal or not, and prohibited 
from verifying whether they are legal because E-Verify doesn't allow an 
employer to check their current employees; only new hires.
  So under these scenarios that are there, and, by the way, if they 
make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and the employer doesn't 
provide that health insurance, then the alternative is we will just cut 
them a check. We'll give them a refundable tax credit and say, take 
that and buy your health insurance, and they can go to the exchange 
that's created by this bill and they can buy health insurance from 
there. There is no scenario that can be contrived, Mr. Speaker, that an 
illegal in America would be denied, conceivably, a health insurance 
policy, much of it, we might even go so far, I'll say almost all of it, 
funded by the American taxpayer.
  That's how far out of touch with reality the people over on this side 
of the aisle are. It is a lust for political power, and it's a direct 
assault on the rule of law in the United States of America, an assault 
on the producers in America, and it undermines the core of our 
character and who we are, and it dispirits the patriotic Americans. It 
undermines and erodes and corrodes our soul. That is what's at stake 
here.
  I would yield to the gentleman from Missouri.
  Mr. AKIN. I really appreciate your yielding to me.
  One of the things that happens down here, as you're aware of, this 
legislative process gets a little bit complicated. Sometimes people pay 
attention to people like you and I on the floor of the Chamber of the 
House. People may even pay attention to what we're voting on here on 
the floor. But when you talk about this Nancy Pelosi health care/
socialized medicine bill, on the floor, you're not going to have an 
amendment that says, yeah, but the illegal immigrants can't get free 
health care here. They're not going to have that amendment out here 
because people don't want to vote that because that might not be very 
popular back home.

  But the interesting thing is, gentleman, as you know, in various 
committees, they do take those votes. In fact, that very amendment was 
offered in one of the committees where the Pelosi health care bill was 
for some number of months, and they offered an amendment saying that 
there will be no one that's eligible for any of this insurance pool, 
any of these insurance pools that has not passed the eligibility of 
citizenship, and they spelled out what that was. That was an amendment 
that was offered.
  The bill had said originally, we're not going to give this to illegal 
immigrants. But there was no enforcement mechanism. So in order to add 
the enforcement mechanism, that amendment was proposed. That amendment 
then went up for a vote in the committee. Can you guess on you how the 
voting went? It was supported 100 percent by Republicans and rejected 
by the Democrats.
  So, is there a protection in the bill for illegal immigrants to be 
able to get health insurance? The answer is, of course they can get it, 
because that amendment was defeated. Now there were all sorts of 
protest. Oh, it's not our intent that illegal immigrants are going to 
get this free health care. But the fact of the matter is, if that were 
really the intent to protect that, there would have been an amendment 
in the bill to say, we don't mean for people to get this unless they 
pass the citizenship eligibility requirements. But that amendment was 
defeated by the Democrats in committee. They knew that. It came to the 
floor without that protection, and it passed this floor without that 
protection. And that says that the way the Pelosi health care bill 
stands now, that you've got illegal immigrants that come to this 
country and they're going to get health care. And guess who's going to 
pay for it? The U.S. taxpayers are going to pay for it, or their 
children or their grandchildren with the multi-trillion dollar bill 
that has been proposed.
  It's interesting that what you're saying, a lot of people say, Well, 
I don't like this partisan stuff. The Democrats claim this. The 
Republicans claim this. Can't you all just get along? The fact of the 
matter is you put an amendment like that up in committee and you see 
there's just this polar division of opinion as to what should be in 
this health care bill. And what you saw was that all of the Republicans 
said we need to protect against illegal immigrants getting this health 
care. And the Democrats voted--I think there may be one or two that 
voted with the Republicans, but certainly clearly a great majority, so 
that that amendment failed, and that's the way that Pelosi health care 
bill is now.
  And so I just thought it interesting because people don't know about 
what happens in committees.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I just would inject this into our discussion. This 
was what James Russell Lowell had to say, a contemporary of Abraham 
Lincoln's, by the way. This is what he had to say about compromise: 
Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof. It is temporarily 
expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in 
statesmanship. That's James Russell Lowell's statement on compromise. A 
good umbrella but a poor roof.
  I would yield back to the gentleman from Missouri.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, I think that's something we need to be paying some 
attention to, too. So we've got the illegal immigration question that's 
part of these uninsured. There were other kinds of amendments that were 
offered, too, in committees. I don't know if you wanted to talk about 
them.
  I thought another one that seemed to me to be very important and, 
that is, what's the heart of good health care? It seems like to me that 
the heart of it is that when a doctor and a patient come to a decision 
as to what they should be doing medically, that other people shouldn't 
butt in and tell the doctor and the patient what should happen. That 
seems to be fairly fundamental to the way we work. Maybe you want to 
get a second opinion with another doctor to make sure what you're doing 
is right. But that doctor-patient relationship is something that is 
very important. Most of the doctors go into the field assuming that 
they're going to

[[Page H13264]]

have that relationship with their patient, and so we put some emphasis 
on that.
  Now one of the things that we don't like is when some insurance 
company injects themselves into that doctor-patient relationship. I've 
heard the Democrats complain about that. They say, Those greedy 
insurance companies, they get in between the doctor and the patient. As 
a Republican, we don't like that either. And so one of the things we 
did was we put in the bill, as an amendment, that no government 
bureaucrat would insert themselves between the doctor and the patient. 
That was another amendment that was passed, was offered by a Republican 
doctor, I think it was Dr. Gingrey if I remember, from Georgia. Again, 
Republicans voted for it 100 percent. The Democrats, with maybe one 
exception, voted against it.
  And so we have this Pelosi health care bill, and it has no doctor-
patient relationship protection in it at all. Now there is something, 
believe it or not, worse than some insurance person coming between you 
and your doctor, and that's when it's a bureaucrat, a Federal 
Government saying, No, we're sorry, Steve. You're too old. You don't 
get to have this. You can take a bottle of aspirin home with you. But 
we're not going to do it.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I would just reclaim my time. You've inspired a 
recent recollection. I believe it was just yesterday when the Federal 
Government panel came out and said to women, You no longer need to 
start getting mammograms when you're 40 years old. Wait till you're 50. 
You no longer need to get them every year. You can wait 2 years and 
space them out for a 2-year period of time. This is the precursor of 
the panels that we're likely to see if this bill that's before this 
Congress becomes law.
  I will put the diagram of these 111 new agencies up here just so we 
have a little bit of an image of what is coming at us in America if 
we're not able to kill this bill. In any case, the advice that came 
from the panel on breast cancer is the kind of advice you'll get from a 
death panel.
  The freedoms have been dramatically diminished here in the United 
States of America. There's been an assault on them. The vigor and 
vitality of the United States is under assault from the liberal 
socialist left. This is socialized medicine. We've seen the 
nationalization of a third of our economy and we need to get it back. 
The President needs an exit strategy from the nationalization of our 
economy. We need to kill this bill, Mr. Speaker, and we need to reach 
out and grasp American freedom, American liberty and American vitality.

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