[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 2 (Thursday, January 6, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H88-H91]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE DEBATE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I can tell you that I am 
pleased to address you, Mr. Speaker, here on the floor of the United 
States House of Representatives and welcome you to this great 
deliberative body which becomes instantly far more deliberative than it 
has been over the last 4 years. This is part of it.
  As I deliberate and I listened to the gentleman from Tennessee, I 
have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the 
leader, or another Member, there is an opportunity to rise to a point 
of order, there is an opportunity to make a motion to take the 
gentleman's words down. However, many of the Members are off in other 
endeavors. I would make the point that the leader and the Speaker have 
established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this 
Congress, and I don't believe it can be effectively challenged, and 
those who do so actually cast aspersions on themselves for making wild 
accusations.
  I came to this floor, though, Mr. Speaker, to talk about the weather, 
and as I listened to the speeches that have gone on before in this 
previous half-hour or hour, it actually changed the subject for me. I 
think there are many things that need to be brought out and clarified, 
given this, that we have debated this health care bill. We debated this 
health care bill for, oh, close to a year. It was announced in Rules 
Committee earlier today that there were, I believe they said, 100 hours 
of markup in committee. Well, it wasn't the bill that passed. It was 
100 hours of debate and markup on a different bill. They switched bills 
at the end. That's a matter of public record and fact, also.
  But the American public understands what happened. They understand 
that the Speaker of the House said, We have to pass the bill--meaning 
ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker--in order to find out what's in it. When that 
bill was passed, to set the record also straight, I don't think there 
is another time in the history of this Congress that there was a bill 
of this magnitude--in fact I'm certain there is not--that passed the 
House of Representatives without the majority support of the House of 
Representatives for the bill that was before us.
  It is a fact of record, it's a fact of judgment, it's a fact of 
history, that there had to be conditions that were attached in order to 
achieve the votes necessary to squeak that bill by and pass ObamaCare 
here in the House on that day last March. If people forget, Mr. 
Speaker, what I'm talking about, it's this: Remember, there was a 
switch on the bill. The bill that was marked up in committee is not the 
bill that came to the floor, not the bill that had hearings on it and 
had markup. But there were also conditions. We should remember there 
were the Stupak Dozen, the Stupak Dozen who said we insist that there 
be an amendment brought forward that will protect so that the language 
that's in the bill doesn't fund abortion through a Federal mandate. 
They held out on that to get that vote. Little did I know up

[[Page H89]]

until that Saturday afternoon that the gentleman who was doing the 
negotiating had already committed to vote for the bill, and the Stupak 
Dozen were anonymous people. Furthermore, they had negotiated with the 
President of the United States who made a commitment and followed 
through on it to sign an executive order that would pacify or mollify 
the anonymous Stupak Dozen under the presumption, unconstitutionally 
and completely outside the bounds of the separation of powers, that the 
President of the United States could effectively amend legislation by 
executive order and promise he's going to do so before the bill was 
even brought to the floor for a vote. That happened in this Congress.
  Another condition of that was, this is a condition that came after 
the then-chair of the Rules Committee, the gentlewoman from New York 
(Ms. Slaughter), had offered the idea that they should just deem that 
the bill passed so they didn't have to go on record of voting for this 
bill; because they knew how bad it was. They knew how politically 
vulnerable they were. They knew that Speaker Pelosi was making many of 
them walk the plank. A lot of those people are not here in this 112th 
Congress because of that action. But as I talked about why this bill 
didn't have the support of the Congress and in the form that was before 
us, why the majority did not support it, the majority votes that day in 
its form, because there also had to be another deal on top of this. 
This was the deal that the Senate had to pass a reconciliation package 
which was designed to amend the bill that had not yet been brought to 
floor of the House for a vote. I don't know that it's the first time in 
history that there's been a shenanigan like that played, but it's the 
first time in my knowledge that there has been a bill certainly of that 
magnitude that came before this Congress that was not the bill that 
came through committee, that was pledged to be, I put it in quotes, 
amended by a Presidential executive order, and further amended by a 
reconciliation bill that would later pass the United States Senate.
  That's what we have before us with ObamaCare. And it became the law 
of the land on that date of March 30, 2010; passed over here in the 
House, if I remember correctly, on the late evening of March 21 or the 
early morning of March 22, Sunday night. I remember my long walk home 
that night. I remember telling myself, I'm going to sleep until I'm all 
rested up and then I'm going to wake up and figure out what to do.
  I didn't sleep very long. I couldn't sleep with that policy imposed 
upon the American people with the realization that it would become the 
law of the land. And about 2\1/2\ hours later, I got up and went to my 
word processor and typed up a request for a bill to repeal ObamaCare. I 
filed that request at the opening of business that day, the first 
opportunity in the first minutes of that day.

                              {time}  1640

  I want to thank and congratulate Michele Bachmann. I didn't know it, 
she was awake in the middle of the night doing the same thing, and her 
bill draft came down within 3 minutes of mine, exactly the same words. 
That bill draft was turned into a discharge petition with this huge 
Pelosi majority in the 111th Congress, and the discharge petition 
gathered 173 signatures, bipartisan by the Pelosi definition at least, 
Mr. Speaker. And that was part of the foundation that I think actually 
did shake this country.
  There was a statement made in the Rules Committee when they were 
deliberating on the rule for H.R. 2 that we had said that the sky would 
fall if ObamaCare became the law of the land, and they said the sky 
didn't fall. Well, Chairman Upton, now chairman of the Energy and 
Commerce Committee, said, yes, it did. The sky did fall.
  When you look at the 87 freshmen new Republicans that are seated over 
on this side, the nine freshmen Democrats on this side, I think that 
any political pundit would tell you there was a political earthquake in 
America that was brought about in large part by the imposition of this 
liberty-stealing unconstitutional ObamaCare bill that is before this 
Congress now.
  This Congress was elected to come here and repeal ObamaCare, get a 
handle on the debt and the deficit and lay the foundation so that 
private enterprise can start to have faith in the future of this 
country again and they can create the jobs under the framework that we 
are hopeful we will be able to bring through.
  But we are truthfully not in a position yet where the House of 
Representatives can lay all of the economic foundation that is 
necessary for free enterprise to have enough faith and confidence to 
invest our capital in a robust fashion.
  What we are in a position to do now with a new Congress and a new 
Speaker is to be able to play an effective defense against the existing 
majority in the United States Senate and the President of the United 
States, who has frantically been digging holes through his Keynesian 
economics-on-steroids theory and dug such a deep hole that we have 
watched Nancy Pelosi preside over an additional $5.2 trillion in debt, 
and we have watched the Obama administration run that up under their 
term of only a couple of years of about $3 trillion.
  And it has got to stop. The American people did this. They were 
looking at President Gulliver Obama, and they were the Lilliputians 
that came to the polls on November 2 and tied him up with all their 
little electoral ropes and said to the new freshmen class, join those 
incumbent Republicans that are there and any discerning Democrats that 
are willing to join, and there will be some join on this vote tomorrow 
and on Wednesday to repeal ObamaCare, and take the shovel out of the 
hands of the President and certainly take the gavel out of the hand of 
Nancy Pelosi. That is what happened.
  Now, I take you back through this history, because it is being 
rewritten again. How can they go before the Rules Committee, stand here 
on the floor of the House before the American people, Mr. Speaker, and 
take the position that somehow if they just explain it one more time 
and one more way, that the American people will now have some left-wing 
light bulb come on in their head? It is not going to happen.
  The American people have seen clearly. They washed the lenses off and 
they have looked down through the lens of the Constitution and fiscal 
responsibility and common sense and they were appalled at that liberty-
stealing bill of ObamaCare, and they said repeal that monstrosity, 
because the destiny of America will be forever diminished unless we do.
  This is the charge that this new Congress has. It is the voice of the 
American people, and it is the respect that we must have, and my 
gratitude for God's gift to America, the freshman class that was 
elected in 2010 and sworn in here right here on this floor yesterday 
afternoon, and they will affect the agenda of this country for many 
Congresses to come; and it will be a responsible agenda that brings us 
to a balanced budget and begins to reduce the deficit that this country 
has, not just the deficit spending, but reduce the national debt.
  We must get to the point where we can begin to pay down the national 
debt, and we start with this Congress. We start by rolling back the 
spending to 2008 levels. We started here today with a vote that cut our 
own budgets by 5 percent. It is not a lot of money; and, yes, it is 
symbolic, but it is the symbolism that compels us to follow through. If 
it is good enough now for those of us in this Congress that voted on 
that, it is also good enough to bring that policy back through the 
United States of America.
  Well, so what I have heard is the Members on the other side of the 
aisle that still stand here and defend ObamaCare, the ones that are 
left, they have four talking points about the bill that they think are 
compelling, and they must believe that it offsets all of the horrible 
things about ObamaCare.
  First they say that, well, remember, the President had all of these 
promises about what he was going to do with ObamaCare. And he is the 
first one that I know of that attached the word ``ObamaCare'' to it in 
a public way. It was at the Blair House during the health care summit, 
February 25, 2010, when the President of the United States referred to 
his own bill as ObamaCare. So that is the shorthand version for all 
this long thing. They don't want to say ObamaCare. I don't know why. 
That is how everybody knows it, and that is how everybody understands 
it.

[[Page H90]]

  So under ObamaCare, they say there are four--they don't list only 
four, they just give you the four--four redeeming components to 
ObamaCare that apparently offset all the horrible things about it, and 
these four redeeming conditions are these:
  That it requires insurance companies all across America with a 
Federal mandate to provide for policies that must keep your children on 
there up until age 26. They think that is something that America has 
fallen in love with as a really good brainy solution.
  Now, I know there are Republicans that support the idea of insurance 
policies being extended to age 26; but, Mr. Speaker, what a lot of 
people don't know in this country is there are at least two Members in 
this Congress that were elected before age 26, and had ObamaCare been 
implemented before they were elected to office, they would have, could 
have, been on their parents' health insurance plan.

  Now, isn't that a nice thing, when you wean them off of their 
parents' health insurance plan and you transition them over and put a 
pin on their lapel and say, now, run the country. They haven't had a 
single minute of their own health insurance policy until we get here, 
and actually we have a responsibility for it here. We pay our chunk of 
the premiums, like any other Federal employee.
  But I just think it is ironic that there would be such a strong 
argument that people elected to Congress could come here, walk in that 
door, come down here before the Speaker's rostrum, raise their hand and 
take the oath of office, and at that moment still be on their mommy and 
daddy's health insurance policy.
  I wanted my kids to grow up. When they turned 18, I told them my 
responsibilities are now done. I am going to nurture you and give you 
advice and counsel you, and I will help you where I can. But I am not 
obligated, guys. We did our best for the first 18 years. We will do our 
best for every year. We will love you all our lives, but you got to 
start pulling your own load. Now I look at three grown sons in their 
thirties, all married, five grandkids, each an entrepreneur in their 
own right, pulling their own load, and I am glad that they didn't have 
to stay unweaned until age 26.
  But if the insurance companies want to do that, you should be able to 
buy the policy. If States want to mandate, I think it is not a good 
policy, but they can do so constitutionally, and then if a person is 
tired of paying those kind of premiums, you can move to another State 
and vote with your feet. There are some States in the Union here that I 
would move out of because I can't afford the health insurance in them. 
There are other States one could think about moving to because of the 
opposite.
  Here is the second point: preexisting conditions. They always tie 
this preexisting conditions in with the word ``discrimination'' because 
it is like a civil rights code word. So if an insurance company says I 
don't want to provide insurance policies to people who have preexisting 
conditions who wait until they get sick before they buy a policy, the 
health insurance purchasing equivalent of waiting for your house to be 
on fire before you go buy property and casualty insurance, how many 
rational people, Mr. Speaker, in this country, would make the case that 
we ought to have a guaranteed issue for our fire insurance on our 
house? Couldn't we then just, you know, set up our little BlackBerry 
with an automatic send and wait for the fire alarm to go off, and on 
the way down the steps to bail out of the burning house, you just click 
``send,'' and automatically they have to give you a policy so that your 
house could be rebuilt if it is on fire.
  We wouldn't do that. It is ridiculous because it defeats the logic of 
insurance. The logic of insurance is you want to be insured against a 
catastrophe, and you want to share that risk with other people who want 
to be insured against a catastrophe. It is true for fire insurance, it 
was true for flood insurance until the Federal Government took it over, 
and it needs to be true with health insurance.
  But we will address preexisting conditions; and we will have a 
legitimate debate on preexisting conditions here in this Congress, in 
committee hearings, before committees, amendments offered, amendments 
allowed and amendments offered and debated and voted up and down.
  My position is that if the States want to prohibit the consideration 
of preexisting conditions, they may do so. Our State has a high-risk 
pool, and we fund part of those premiums with the high-risk pool out of 
the State treasury.

                              {time}  1650

  I think that's a good idea. I have worked to develop that and expand 
that in my time in the State legislature. I think it's worthy of 
consideration that the Federal Government could take a look at those 
State high-risk pools and find ways to help those States provide those 
kind of backstops because there will always be people that are 
unfortunate. It won't always just be those that are irresponsible. 
There are also those that are unfortunate. And so we need to take that 
into consideration. But to have the whole debate about just those that 
are unfortunate and not take into consideration those that are 
responsible, those that are taxpayers, those that are funding, those 
that are the engine of our economy that are being discouraged by these 
kind of Big Government, socialized medicine, unconstitutional policies 
like ObamaCare.
  Here's the third one. A 26-year-old with insurance, preexisting 
conditions. Oh, yes, the discriminatory preexisting conditions policy. 
It's not discriminatory. It's logical and rational. Would you say that 
it's a discriminatory policy to not allow people to buy property and 
casualty insurance if their house is on fire? It's not discrimination. 
It defies common sense. So I'm not going to let them get by with that 
word.
  Here's a another thing, though. Doughnut hole. They say they fixed 
the doughnut hole and we would unfix the doughnut hole. The truth is 
that low-income people have that fix. There is a backstop for that 
doughnut hole. It's not the hole that they say it is. Furthermore, they 
raise fees elsewhere to fill the doughnut hole. So it's not fixed. It's 
just another transfer. So some people are beneficiaries and other 
people pay the extra money. I am not particularly animated about that, 
although I thought we should not have had that doughnut hole created 
here in 2003.
  In any case, their next argument is against lifetime caps. If States 
want to provide lifetime caps, let them do that. But if individuals 
want to buy policies that have lifetime caps because the premiums are 
lower, let them make that decision as well, Mr. Speaker. But I envision 
the day that we have free markets that are engaged in this. We want to 
preserve the doctor-patient relationship. We want to preserve the free 
market effect of this so that when people make decisions about their 
health and their lives, they have some tools to work with.
  I want to be able to in this Congress, this 112th Congress, advance 
the idea and seek to pass legislation that's pretty consistent with 
Chairman Dreier's. I would expand it a little more. He's advanced the 
medical savings accounts. I would add we need to advance health savings 
accounts, HSAs. In 2003, with the expansion of part D, we put language 
in that established HSAs, health savings accounts. It allowed in the 
first year for a couple to establish a health savings account with a 
maximum amount in it of $5,150, indexed for inflation so it could grow. 
I don't remember what those numbers are today, but that's the calculus, 
from $5,150 on up.
  Well, that's a good deal. ObamaCare slashed that in less than half 
and capped the HSA maximum amount at $2,500. Why? Because they don't 
want people to be independent, and they don't want them to be able to 
make their own decisions. If they do that, then they might undermine 
this effort of expanding the dependency class in America, which is what 
ObamaCare is designed to do, because expanding the dependency class 
expands the Democrat Party, and that increases the political base. And 
it seems illogical to the people. Well, there's the logic I've just 
applied to it, and now, Mr. Speaker, they do understand that this is 
about politics. It's about expanding the dependency class. And it's 
about diminishing the independence and the spirit of Americans.
  And so the lifetime caps piece is the fourth one. Twenty-six year 
olds, preexisting conditions, doughnut hole,

[[Page H91]]

lifetime caps. That's the things they talk about. Four things. That's 
it? Do they redeem those 2,500 pages of disaster? Do they then overrule 
and trump the Constitution of the United States of America? I say no, 
Mr. Speaker. They cannot, they must not, they should not. And I hear 
this debate also about an increase in our deficit of the number, I 
think it was $232 billion, if--not if anymore, it's when--we repeal 
ObamaCare.
  Well, that deficit, and they want to know, Will you offset that 
deficit with spending cuts? Yes, sir. We will be happy to offset a 
deficit with spending cuts. But I would make this argument instead. 
When you have an unconstitutional bill in front of you, and if you're 
weighing $232 billion and you want to debate whether or not that's a 
reason or not to repeal an unconstitutional bill. You can set no price 
on the Constitution of the United States of America. If it's a trillion 
dollars, you repeal the bill anyway because it's unconstitutional. And 
you don't sit back and twiddle your thumbs and wait for the court to 
resolve this for you. I'm glad that there's litigation going on in the 
judicial branch. I'm glad that Judge Hudson found with Virginia on the 
constitutional component of the Interstate Commerce Clause. I'm glad 
there are efforts out there in the States to deny the implementation of 
ObamaCare. All of these things going on.
  But we took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution 
of the United States here yesterday. We took it all in good faith. We 
said so. And when we have an unconstitutional bill before us, Mr. 
Speaker, it is our obligation to repeal that bill. Our judgment of the 
Constitution is not a judgment that defers across and down the line of 
Independence Avenue. We don't go to the Supreme Court and genuflect and 
say, If you change the meaning of the Constitution, my oath applies. 
Our oath applies to our understanding and conviction of the text in the 
original understanding of the Constitution and the various amendments 
as they were adopted. That's what the Constitution has to mean or it is 
no guarantee whatsoever to the people in this country.
  They rose up and they changed this majority in this House, and they 
did so because they're a whole group of millions of constitutional 
conservatives, including the Tea Party groups, and they said, Enough 
unconstitutional activity, enough of this theft of our liberty. We 
are not going to pass the debt and deficit on to the succeeding 
generations. And it was $230 billion was the point, not $232 billion, 
to make it accurate.

  But I noticed today in the Republican Study Committee that chairman 
Jim Jordan read from an article written by Tony Blankley in The 
Washington Times, December 20, 2010. And it caught my ear. And so I 
looked it up. And I'd like to just close with this concept that was 
delivered by Tony Blankley shortly before Christmas this year. He wrote 
about an experience in China and how they were worried that if they 
don't keep the growth going in China that they will create expectations 
and the peasants in China will be unruleable. If you give them 
expectations, then you have to meet those expectations. Well, we in 
America, we trust in our expectations.
  And so he writes this. He said what happened on November 2, was that 
the American people went to the polls and said, I want more liberty and 
less government. I want more liberty and less security about my future. 
And he puts it in these words. And I think they're excellent words. No 
other people in the world would have responded to economic danger by 
seeking more liberty and less government protection. No other people 
would have thought to themselves, if I have to suffer economically in 
order to not steal from my grandchildren, so be it.
  I pray we would have come to that decision a generation ago instead 
of a couple of months ago, Mr. Speaker. But this Congress has come to 
that decision at the direction and the effectiveness of the American 
people. And we will follow through on that pledge, and we'll ask them, 
Keep sending us more people like this freshman class to help get this 
job done so that in our time we can hand the keys of this Chamber and 
this government over to the next generation in sound fiscal fashion, 
sound constitutional fashion, not with diminished liberty, but with 
expanded liberty, and the pillars of American exceptionalism 
refurbished by our generation, thanks to the will of the American 
people.

                          ____________________