[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 30 (Wednesday, March 2, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H1514-H1517]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         A LESSON FROM THE PAST

  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.
  It is an honor and a privilege to address you here on the floor of 
the House. And I would say after listening to the presentation of my 
colleague from Illinois, it's been a little while since I've heard 
that; and I'm glad to hear the delivery you gave tonight. A little more 
time here on the floor would be good for this whole Congress. I 
appreciate the reference to our Founding Fathers and the years in the 
earlier foundation of our country, the principles that we agree on.
  I'm happy to be here. I came here to speak about some subject matter, 
Mr. Speaker, that I think it's important that you turn your ear to and 
that the Members of this Congress turn their ear to and that the people 
in the United States do the same thing.
  We are in very dramatic times in the history of this country. They 
encompass quite a continuum of a ride that we've been on. To go back 
and capture some of that, to frame the present moment that we're in, I 
take us back to a time, let's say back to a time in 1995. In 1995, 
shortly after Republicans won the majority for the first time in 40 
years in this House of Representatives. There was a real test that took 
place. There was a test that took place on the determination on the 
part of the new majority after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, 
so to speak, that had determined that they wanted to bring this budget 
under control. They wanted to cut spending and put us on a path to 
balancing the budget. That was initiated in 1995 with a real 
determination, and also with the benefit of having a majority to work 
in cooperation with in the United States Senate.
  That determination to balance the budget brought about a challenge 
from President Clinton, a number of vetoes on the part of President 
Clinton that brought about the shutdown in the Federal Government. I 
remember those years. I was not in government at the time. I was a 
full-time owner of the construction company that I formed in 1975 that 
continues to this day. As I watched this in the news and I watched the 
debate on C-SPAN, I was inspired by the leaders that we had, the 
statesmen that we had, that stood and laid out the financial 
circumstances that we were in and the necessity to get Federal 
Government spending under control and the plan to bring forth a 
balanced budget.
  While this government was shut down because of the vetoes of 
President Clinton, my recollection is that it was over a $300 billion 
proposed cut in Medicare that was the crux of this matter, where the 
whole issue pivoted on it and a Nation watched as there were threats 
that there were parts of the Federal Government that wouldn't be 
providing services and others were scared that they would lose theirs; 
that Social Security checks wouldn't be coming in on time, et cetera, 
the American public began to roil and boil and rise up and push back. 
And over a period of time, and I don't think at the fault of the 
Members of the House of Representatives but by the circumstances of the 
life and time, the public began to have a higher level of anxiety about 
what would happen if the Federal Government continued with the shutdown 
process that they were in. At a certain point there was a request made 
for a unanimous consent agreement to go ahead and approve the funding 
in the Senate side. When that happened and the Senate passed a 
unanimous consent agreement, it washed over the House here and the 
majority in the House was compelled to accept what had been delivered 
from the Senate on that day.
  It was a sad day for me. As a businessman and a father and a person 
that was working to make my little part of the world as good as I 
could, I was disappointed that this Congress couldn't hold the line on 
spending, couldn't hold the line on this growth in government, and I 
believed that until I understood it from this perspective of standing 
here on the floor, Mr. Speaker, that the House had let us down.
  Today, I think it's a little bit different equation. I think they did 
as much as they could have done and under the circumstances because of 
the UC agreement in the Senate, the House didn't have much choice but 
to concede to the push that came from the Senate. But here is the point 
that I've learned on that day and I stand on at this day, Mr. Speaker, 
and that's this: There's not a time that the Federal Government can 
spend that's not agreed to by the House of Representatives. We start 
the spending, we start the taxes, and if we say no, it won't be spent, 
which means that if we hold our ground here, we can shut off the 
spending to anything that we choose to shut off.

                              {time}  1930

  That's the way it was designed to be by the Founding Fathers, as was 
referenced by the gentleman from Illinois a little earlier. That's what 
the Constitution says.
  By the way, it's our obligation because we're the closest to the 
people. Every 2 years, we're up for election or reelection, and if this 
House is going to change hands, it can change hands within a 2-year 
period of time. It's a 24/24/7 campaign, meaning for 24 months, 24 
hours a day, and 7 days a week, we go on in perpetual campaign mode 
because we are always up for reelection.
  That means that the House here is more responsive and more sensitive 
to

[[Page H1515]]

the people than is the Senate, which has a 6-year election span of 
time. They could put up a contentious vote, one that runs against the 
will of their constituents in the first couple of years or 3 or 4 years 
of their terms and can trust that the people might forget about it by 
the time they're up for reelection. Not so in the House. What we do 
here people are not going to forget about, and they should not. I want 
us to be accountable all the time, and I want a public that has a long 
memory, one that is very astute and very well informed and very well 
engaged.
  We've been watching a populace that has been fitting that mold more 
and more. We've watched, Mr. Speaker, as the tea party groups across 
the country have brought themselves forward and filled up the town 
squares and filled up the town hall meetings and surrounded this 
Capitol, have physically surrounded the United States Capitol, I 
believe, for the first time in the history of America. We couldn't put 
a helicopter up there and take the picture because of air security 
concerns; but I walked around this building, and I saw Americans here 
surrounding the Capitol--yes, holding hands. It wasn't just a human 
chain around the Capitol but a human doughnut around the Capitol. It 
was six- and eight-people deep all the way around the Capitol--no thin 
spots in it--and thousands of people in the corners who weren't part of 
the human doughnut but who were around this Capitol.
  They came here to say, Keep your hands off of my health care. We 
reject ObamaCare. We want no part of it.
  This went on for days and days. There were people who wouldn't leave 
these Capitol grounds. Finally, on that sad day last March, when 
ObamaCare finally passed with all of the legislative shenanigans that 
enabled that to happen--and they were considerable and they were 
unprecedented, Mr. Speaker--the people around here put up a groan, not 
necessarily of despair but of agony, because they'd seen American 
liberty ripped out by its roots and taken over--our bodies nationalized 
by the Federal Government, our health care; the Federal Government 
taking over our bodies, nationalizing our bodies and our skin and 
everything inside it and putting a 10 percent tax on the outside if you 
go to the tanning salon. That's what happened with ObamaCare--a 
nationalization of the second most sovereign thing we have. The first 
most sovereign thing we have is our soul. The second most sovereign 
thing we have is our body, our skin, everything inside it, our health.
  In the United States of America, we must have the right to manage our 
health to the maximum of our ability and not have the Federal 
Government diminish the options or take away the numbers of insurance 
policies we might buy or diminish the health care providers that are 
out there and put this into a one-size-fits-all. That's what ObamaCare 
did, and it's what it does if we let it continue to exist.
  The circumstances of the government shutdown in 1995 were within an 
economic environment that brought us to where we are today, and we 
should understand what that is, Mr. Speaker.
  We should know that, during that period of time, there was a dot-com 
bubble. There was this unnatural growth in the economy that was brought 
about because we had learned how to store and transfer information 
faster and more efficiently and more effectively than ever before. So 
there were millions of Americans who were investing in these dot-com 
companies who were involved in the technological era, in this modern 
dot-com era. They were investing because we could store and transfer 
information more effectively than ever before. They were investing in 
our ability to store and transfer but were not adjusting it to the 
necessity that that information and information transfer and 
manipulation ability helps our economy only to the extent that we can 
use it to provide a good or a service more effectively than before to 
provide efficiencies in our economy.
  We found a lot of ways over those last 15, 16 years to produce more 
efficiencies because of the technology that had developed, but a lot of 
dot-com companies went under because they didn't add that substance to 
add to the value of our overall economy. It isn't enough just to be 
able to store and transfer information better than ever before. You 
have to store and transfer it and help the efficiencies so that 
companies can provide profitability. That was the only thing other than 
if you could market this information for recreational purposes. That 
was the other component. Only two.
  So this dot-com bubble grew out of an overexuberance, an unnatural 
exuberance, that came from an optimism that we were going to take this 
economy someplace it had never been before. That bubble was bound to 
burst. I think it would have burst on its own, but there was a lawsuit 
filed against Microsoft which lanced the bubble, and the dot-com bubble 
burst. As it burst, it was like a blister on your skin, where it 
settles down into the hollow place underneath it.
  There was a dip in the economy, and I believe there was a concerted 
effort at that point to fill this hole created by the bursting of the 
dot-com bubble with unnaturally low interest rates and long-term 
mortgages that would allow people to build or buy houses that they 
otherwise couldn't have afforded, and it created a housing bubble. If 
you think of the dot-com bubble that burst, then when it collapsed, it 
went into a trough, Mr. Speaker, and that trough was sought to be 
filled by an unnatural bubble of the housing boom which was created.
  It was a housing boom that was in the process of unfolding and, I 
should say, of stretching itself to its max while President Bush was 
elected in 2000. Then the 2001 September 11 attacks came on our 
financial centers and this assault on America. That all came with this 
transition of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, with the growth of 
the unnatural housing bubble, with the assault on the United States on 
September 11 of 2001 on our financial centers, and with the attack on 
the American economy. That was coupled with all of the spending we 
needed to do to go to war in Afghanistan and subsequently in Iraq. Then 
in the middle of all of that, we spent billions on standing up the 
Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, and all of the other 
security provisions that we put in place to make sure that America 
could be protected from more and more attacks from al Qaeda.

  All of this was going against our economy.
  Within all of that, there was also the passage of No Child Left 
Behind, which took more money, and there were other components of the 
growth in the compassionate conservatism that was driven by the Bush 
administration--all of this while we were at war. Now, if I add this 
all up, it's not a very good formula for a balanced budget, and we had 
that balanced budget in the late 1990s and rolling into the year 2000.
  When I came here to this Congress, elected in 2002 and sworn in here 
in January 2003, I came down here and said to the chairman of the 
Budget Committee, Where is our balanced budget? He said to me, We can't 
balance the budget. It's not possible to balance the budget, and you'll 
not have a balanced budget to vote on.
  I went back to my office, Mr. Speaker, and I began to put together a 
budget that would balance. My green staff was tasked with the job of 
putting together a budget that we could offer that would be balanced. 
We didn't get it completed. At that time, it was about a $2.7 trillion 
budget. To try to rewrite that in a balanced fashion as a freshman in 
Congress and with a staff that was at that point not yet experienced 
was a very, very difficult task. I got to the point where I wasn't 
confident enough to offer it.
  I wish now, looking back on it, that I would have offered a balanced 
budget, and I wish every year I would have offered a balanced budget. 
The red ink that we had was getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and 
the American people have not been informed as to how difficult it is to 
bring this budget to a balance. One of the important components of 
offering a budget that balances in this year tells us how big the 
problem is, and it has been getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
  I stood here and sat in this Chamber, and listened to the debate 
engaged in, and listened to the 30-Something Group. Night after night 
after night, they would come down here on the floor and make the 
argument that, if we'd just put them in charge, if they'd just have the 
gavels, they would fix this country.

[[Page H1516]]

  So eventually, over time, the Republicans lost the majority. The 
Democrats won the majority in 2006. Nancy Pelosi came in as Speaker. 
Now they had what they wanted. They were going to fix this country--and 
they did all right. They began to take that rather minor deficit and 
turn it into a huge deficit. They began to make energy more expensive 
and to take the prospects of success in America down instead of up. 
They were working on their vision of America, which is the transfer of 
payments, to tax the rich, and to transfer those payments to other 
people who aren't as fortunate--or I'll just say not as productive. 
They may or may not be as fortunate.

                              {time}  1940

  While this was going on, the deficit was growing, the dependency 
class was growing, and that's what was going on.
  There was a concerted effort to borrow money from the Chinese and 
transfer that money over into the pockets of a growing dependency class 
to create a bigger dependency class because that was the political base 
that was supporting the Democrats--and still does in this Congress. And 
we watched this effort to expand the dependency class in America take 
place during the Pelosi Congress that began in 2007 through 2008. In 
2008, Barack Obama was elected President and now this Congress went on 
steroids because they had a President that would sign the legislation 
instead of veto the legislation that was sent out of this Congress. And 
what we saw happen was an accelerated debt, and more and more money 
borrowed from the Chinese and the Saudis, and that $2.7 trillion or 
$2.8 trillion budget raised on up another $1 trillion. We've seen an 
additional $3 trillion beyond our means that has been spent under this 
Obama administration, supported by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
  The American people rose up, Mr. Speaker. They knew that it was 
irresponsible and they filled up the town hall meetings. They saw what 
was happening. The summer of, I guess, two or three summers ago--and 
the year might come to me and I can be confident enough to speak it 
into the Record--but we had an energy crisis. We had gas at $4 a 
gallon. I believe that was the summer of 2008 that gas was at $4 a 
gallon. I went back and did town hall meetings that filled up with 
people. And they saw what was happening.
  And there was an effort in this Congress to shut down access to 
energy, a belief that if energy costs went up, people would use less. 
And I remember the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, saying ``I'm trying to save 
the planet, I'm trying to save the planet.'' Well, I think she believed 
that she was trying to save the planet. And what I saw happening was 
the actions were driving up the cost of energy. That $4 gas issue 
finally broke and it started to spiral back downwards by the time of 
the election in 2008.
  But we had, in August of that year, a monthlong energy debate taking 
place here on the floor. When we were ready to go home for that August 
we had several Special Orders that were cued up for the end of business 
that day. Democrats offered a motion to shut the place down, which 
would have shut off the Special Orders about energy. Some of the 
Members here decided we're going to keep talking, and so we came one 
after another. Eventually the Speaker shut the lights down--not 
completely off--shut the microphones off, shut the television cameras 
off and turned them sideways. And still we stood here for the month of 
August all the way into Labor Day every day making the case that we 
needed all energy all the time. Now that argument diminished when gas 
prices went back down again. It's before us again. And we must do an 
all-energy-all-the-time bill. I want to compliment Congressman Devin 
Nunes from California for all the work that he's done on legislation 
that I believe he'll introduce tomorrow on all energy all the time.
  America needs to have cheap energy. We need to have cheap energy in a 
way that--everything that we do costs energy. If you move anything, it 
takes energy. If you have any product, it takes energy to produce it, 
energy to delivery it, and energy to go pick it up and bring it home. 
And so the cost of energy is tied into the cost of everything that we 
have and do. America cannot be competitive with the rest of the world 
if we have high energy prices. And yet, that 2008 year drove energy 
prices up to $4 a gallon gas. We saw crude oil prices go way over $100 
a barrel, and we're looking at that happening again.
  We've had the President move to shut down drilling offshore by 
Executive order. We've seen Democrats, in large numbers, oppose opening 
up ANWR for drilling, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I've been 
for drilling up there for a long time. I've gone up there. We drilled 
the North Slope in the early 1970s, and if it did anything with the 
environment it enhanced it, it didn't diminish it. And the strictest 
environmentalist we had couldn't fly over that country and point to a 
well and tell you how it had even defaced the landscape or broken up 
the scenery. The wells are submersible, they don't show up. There are 
not roads to each of them. They go out on ice roads in the winter time 
to service them. It's a good place to go and develop oil in the North 
Slope, and we need to go get it.
  We need to drill offshore. We need to drill in the Bakken region in 
North Dakota and Montana, and it spills over into Canada. And we need 
to continue to bring Canadian oil down into the United States and 
refine it here and be the best trading partner for the Canadians that 
they could possibly ask for. If we fail to do so, they will build a 
pipeline to the west, and they will pump that oil and the oil stands 
out to tankers that will take that oil over to China, Japan, and places 
in Asia. They will do the logical thing. We need to make sure the 
logical thing is here in the United States. Mr. Speaker, that's just 
the energy issue.

  And as this rolls forward, another summer we had the issue of health 
care. And as the effort came to pass ObamaCare here in the House of 
Representatives, the American people began to realize what was 
happening to their liberty, and they filled up the town hall meetings. 
We had town hall meetings in Iowa that got so big that they had to be 
moved outside because there wasn't room inside the biggest rooms we 
could find for all the people that came to, in a constitutional 
fashion, petition the government peacefully for redress and grievances. 
And they came, and they were well informed. Some of them had read the 
whole bill. And with great passion--and sometimes with little tact and 
sometimes with great deference--they made the case to me over and over 
again, they didn't want ObamaCare. They still don't want ObamaCare. And 
when it was passed here in the House they rejected it. And so I spent 
not quite a year of my life fighting the passage of ObamaCare. And 
since that period of time I introduced legislation to repeal ObamaCare 
immediately after its passage on that late night last March. We're 
coming up on a little past 11 months since it's been passed into law. 
The American people still reject it. They want their liberty, they want 
their freedom. They want to manage their own bodies, manage their own 
health care. They want a free market system. They want a doctor-patient 
relationship. And they sent 87 new freshmen here to the House of 
Representatives to ensure that ObamaCare would be repealed, that the 
funding to ObamaCare would be shut off, and that we would see no more 
implementation or enforcement of ObamaCare.
  And what has it brought us, these 87 new freshmen that stand together 
on that one square? Here's what it brought us, Mr. Speaker: H.R. 2, 
presumably the second-highest priority of the new Speaker of the 
House--it brought us a new Speaker of the House, Speaker John Boehner. 
And he sets the priorities, at least by tradition, for the first 10 
bills that come out of the House, H.R. 1 through 10. And H.R. 2, the 
second-highest priority, was the bill that repealed ObamaCare.
  The legislation that I introduced almost 1 year ago and teamed up 
with Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and others, including Connie Mack of 
Florida and Parker Griffith of Alabama--no longer in this Congress--and 
a number of others that were part of this original effort to introduce 
legislation to repeal ObamaCare, and many others that signed on as 
cosponsors, and 178 that signed the discharge petition to repeal 
ObamaCare--the message was very clear. H.R. 2 was debated and passed 
the House of Representatives in the early stages here in the 112th 
Congress

[[Page H1517]]

in January, when it sent it over to the United States Senate. That's an 
important step.
  Another important step is to do as I've said since at least the 
middle of last summer: At every appropriations bill introduce language 
in that bill that cuts off all funding that would be used to implement 
or enforce ObamaCare. That's an essential part of this. I had gone back 
and read through the history of how this Congress shut down the funding 
for the Vietnam War and shut off a war that had gone on for over a 
decade. They did so by putting language in a continuing resolution that 
shut off the Vietnam War. And it was language that said, in 1974--and 
they started some of this in 1973, but in 1974 they said, 
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds in this 
continuing resolution for appropriations during the Vietnam War, 
notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds in this 
act and no funds heretofore appropriated shall be used to carry out 
offensive or defensive operations in the air over the seas adjacent to 
or the land of Vietnam or its adjacent countries. It's a bit of a 
paraphrase, but it makes the point succinctly, I believe, Mr. Speaker.

                              {time}  1950

  When I read the debate on that appropriations bill and when I read 
the language, that ``notwithstanding'' language that was put into the 
continuing resolution that shut off the funds going to Vietnam to the 
point where bullets that were being unloaded on the dock at Da Nang 
presumably were loaded back up again. None of the funds could be used 
to carry out offensive or defensive operations.
  It cut off the supply support for South Vietnam's military. And we 
wondered why was it that they ran in the face of the North Vietnamese 
that spring in 1975? They had nothing left to fight with, Mr. Speaker. 
Their munitions were gone. They were played out. They didn't have heavy 
weapons; they didn't have light weapons that were well supplied. And it 
brought about the collapse of the South Vietnamese self-defense. And 
millions died in the aftermath--not just in Vietnam. In Cambodia and 
other places in Southeast Asia.
  I disagreed with the decision that this Congress made, but I do agree 
that the language in the continuing resolution was effective in 
shutting off the funding to the Vietnam war; and similar language to 
the language that I've crafted to go into the appropriation bills from 
this point forward that says, essentially, notwithstanding any other 
provision of law, none of the funds in this act and no funds previously 
appropriated shall be used to carry out the provisions of ObamaCare.
  That's the language that I sought to introduce and asked the Rules 
Committee to grant a waiver for--unsuccessfully, I might add. That's 
the language that I asked be written into H.R. 1, the continuing 
resolution. It's the language that I tried to get offered here on the 
floor during H.R. 1 that was ruled out of order. And the amendments 
that I was able to get passed worked in compatibility with Denny 
Rehberg of Montana and others--Denny Rehberg, who did very, very good 
work on this appropriations bill, on H.R. 1. Without his work, we might 
not have had anything that was in order. Because of his work, we had 
eight amendments that were in order that were voted on. Each of them 
cut off funding to ObamaCare in some version or another. I compliment 
all of my colleagues who worked on that.
  But now we've reached this point where we've got to draw a line. H.R. 
1 took the hill. It said none of the funds in this bill are going to be 
used to implement ObamaCare. No funds are going to go to fund Planned 
Parenthood. No funds are going to be used to fund abortion anywhere in 
the world out of this continuing resolution.
  But that language was not included in the continuing resolution that 
was passed night before last here in the House--or maybe it perhaps was 
last night. My nights blur together. That language was not included. We 
need better language that I'm suggesting here included in the next CR.
  This government shuts down March 18 if we don't now extend its 
funding again. I'd like to get a solution that takes us to the end of 
the fiscal year.
  But standing on the hill and defending the hill to shut off all 
funding to ObamaCare since every Republican in the House and the Senate 
has voted to repeal ObamaCare, everybody in the House has voted to cut 
off all funding to ObamaCare at every opportunity--and that's eight of 
them--we have this opportunity now to write a new CR and to write the 
language into it that does unfund ObamaCare. Not just what's in the CR, 
but what is automatically appropriated.
  There are automatic appropriations, Mr. Speaker, that are in the 
ObamaCare legislation--I will say deceptively written--that appropriate 
funds that go forward whether or not this House acts, goes forward in 
perpetuity. Perpetuity. That means forever, if anybody out there is 
wondering what it is.
  And for a 10-year period of time, there are automatic appropriations 
of $105.5 billion over 10 years that automatically fund the 
implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare. If this House doesn't act 
to shut it off, ObamaCare is implemented if we do nothing. Even if we 
pass the repeal, even if we don't authorize any new funding, $105.5 
billion gets spent to implement it, which means that the roots of 
ObamaCare go deep. The deeper they go, the harder they are to rip out.
  And I've said it must be ripped out by the roots. Let's rip it out, 
Mr. Speaker, in this next CR. Let's retake the hill that we took with 
H.R. 1. Let's hold the hill. Let's stare the President down. Let's 
stare Harry Reid down. If we're not willing to do that, they will get 
everything that they're willing to fight for.
  This is the time for this new House with these new 87 Republican 
freshmen. Every Republican that's voted to repeal and unfund ObamaCare 
now needs to help us take the hill and hold the hill and stare the 
President down.
  Let's fund the government so it functions legitimately, but let's not 
cave in to a President who may well shut down the entire United States 
Government in order to preserve his pet project, ObamaCare, which has 
been rejected by the American people and this Congress resoundingly.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your attention and yield back 
the balance of my time.

                          ____________________