[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 35 (Wednesday, March 9, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H1657-H1660]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  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. Mr. Speaker, it is again a privilege to be 
recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of 
Representatives. And it's a privilege to sit here in this Chamber and 
listen to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) talk about these 
critical issues for the United States of America.
  Each of us that come down here on so many days come here for the 
purpose of bringing up these critical issues and informing you, Mr. 
Speaker. And while that's going on, there are people all across America 
that are listening in and deciding for themselves the priorities and 
deciding for themselves what kind of job we're doing here in Congress.
  I'd love to step in on the immigration debate and burn up about 30 
minutes talking about that, but Mr. Speaker, I need to have this 
discussion with you about ObamaCare. There are a fair number of 
different strategies that are working here in the House of 
Representatives--and perhaps a number of different strategies, to some 
degree, going on in the United States Senate--but the circumstances are 
this:
  Almost 1 year ago, ObamaCare passed the United States Congress and 
was messaged to the President, where he eagerly signed the bill. It was 
a combination of legislative shenanigans that took place. The bill 
itself that came to the floor was not a product of committee; it was a 
bill that was written by Speaker Pelosi's staff and her office with who 
knows what input and it was dropped on us in a fashion that didn't 
allow us an opportunity to evaluate it there, then, or on the spot. It 
was a combination of two bills. One of them was ObamaCare as it went 
out of the House over to the Senate. The Senate then promised, on the 
condition that ObamaCare be passed--and the votes that were necessary 
to pass the basis of ObamaCare were generated because the Senate 
decided that they would, under a reconciliation plan, avoid the 
filibuster rules of 60 votes in the Senate. They sent us a 
reconciliation plan that altered and amended ObamaCare itself. And in 
that package was a promise from the President of the United States that 
he would issue an Executive order that would take care of the concerns 
of the pro-life Members--pro-life Democrats who wouldn't vote for 
ObamaCare as long as it funded abortion.
  And so the audacity of the President of the United States to take the 
position that he could amend legislation that passed this Congress by 
Executive order--which is not a constitutional position, Mr. Speaker--
but that audacity was swallowed by enough people that they voted 
ObamaCare out of the House marginally. The reconciliation package that 
came from the Senate squeaked out of there because of the promises that 
were made and came over here and was passed because of the promises 
that were made. And the final cap on it was the President's Executive 
order that was supposed to amend ObamaCare.
  And what do we have in all of this mess? We have 2,500 or so pages 
that are so convoluted--and if anybody in this Congress, any lawyers 
out there that propose to be experts, anybody that's staff on Energy 
and Commerce, or former Speaker Pelosi, or anybody else out here, I 
don't think there's a single person on the planet, no matter how good 
their background, no matter how intelligent, no matter how well read, 
no matter how many research books they might have to work with, if you 
would shut them in an office and cut the wires and the wireless to the 
outside world, not a single person out of these 6-plus billion people 
on this planet could read ObamaCare and be able to analyze all that it 
does or its implications on the lives of 300-plus million Americans. 
It's not possible to do so. We did, I think, a very good job of 
analyzing what it was in broad terms.

  Some of us knew going in that there was deceptive language written 
into ObamaCare that automatically appropriated funds that would set up 
the implementation of ObamaCare--even if Congress appropriated no money 
to it, that would put the implementation in place and churn it on in 
perpetuity, Mr. Speaker. Some of that information I believe came out of 
some of the members of the Energy and Commerce Committee that had been 
analyzing this bill last fall. I believe that we had some verbal 
discussions on it--not here on the floor necessarily, but on-the-side 
conversations that I had with some of the better-informed Members of 
this Congress, and they aren't all here any longer in this 112th 
Congress.
  But as we came into January, I'm thinking about how we unfund 
ObamaCare. And it has been my argument all along, Mr. Speaker, that the 
strategy is this: That first, a lot of us used all of our energy to do 
the best we could to kill ObamaCare. In spite of all of that, in spite 
of the tens of thousands of people that came from every single State in 
the Union to come in here and surround this Capitol and tell them keep 
your hands off of my health care, still the former Speaker of the House 
marched through the crowds with her over-sized gavel in her let-them-
eat-cake moment and imposed ObamaCare on America.
  Shortly after the moment that that vote went up on the board I went 
down to the people that had--and I say surrounded this Capitol; it 
wasn't just a human chain around the Capitol, it was a human doughnut 
around the Capitol. It was six and eight people deep all the way around 
the United States Capitol, unbroken, human doughnut around the Capitol, 
still with thousands of people left over in the corner, so to speak. If 
you envision a circle--there isn't one, I understand, but they were 
standing in clusters by the thousands. Still, not part of that human 
doughnut, they came here and said keep your hands off of our health 
care.
  That bill finally passed here on the floor and was messaged to the 
Senate. And I went down with that group, as did Michele Bachmann and 
several

[[Page H1658]]

others--Pete Hoekstra of Michigan comes to mind as another individual 
that was back and forth communicating with the people that came here to 
peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances, exactly 
in line with the First Amendment to the Constitution. And I promised 
them, as did Michele Bachmann, that I would introduce legislation to 
repeal ObamaCare. That happened the very next day, and it happened for 
us within 3 minutes of each other.
  So I laid out, though, the strategy over the next few days and weeks 
to repeal ObamaCare. And I'm going to refresh this now, Mr. Speaker, 
for the minds of those who are paying attention, and it's this: First, 
all energy was focused on killing ObamaCare. I didn't burn up 1 minute 
of media time that I can think of talking about what to do if it 
passed. I remember people asking me out here in the crowd, what will 
you do if it passes? And my answer was, ``I'm focused on killing it. 
We'll worry about that, that's another subject for another time, I'm 
focused on killing it.'' Well, it did pass. And we turned the focus, 
then, on repealing it. And the beginning of that was that opening of 
business--actually same day because this passed after midnight on a 
Sunday night, so it was Monday morning. This Congress opened for 
business at 9 o'clock. At that minute, there were two requests waiting 
in place to bring the legislation to repeal ObamaCare.

                              {time}  1710

  Then I began to lay out this strategy which was, get as many 
cosponsors on the repeal as possible. And as that number grew, sometime 
in June, or towards the summer, I introduced a discharge petition. That 
discharge petition was designed to gain 218 signatures. With that, the 
Speaker of the House and no one can block it. It must come to the 
floor, no amendments, for an up-or-down vote. Well, we got to 178 
signatures on the discharge petition, which is pretty good. I believe 
that number was 178. I question that, because there were six 
Republicans that did not sign it, but all but six signed it. We had one 
Democrat that signed it. So I guess that takes it down there to maybe 
173, looks more like the number. I would just correct that for the 
record, Mr. Speaker. Let that be 173 signatures on the discharge 
petition. We were working for 218, is the point. Yet the discharge 
petition that, if it had been brought to the floor, would have been 
voted on and could have passed, and if it had been forced to the floor 
under a discharge petition, it would have passed and we would have 
repealed ObamaCare from the House then.
  But it always was a way to get people on record so we knew who was 
for repeal of ObamaCare and who was unwilling to go on record for 
repeal of ObamaCare. And it always was something that candidates for 
Congress could look at that and challenge the individual that they were 
running against: ``Why didn't you sign the discharge petition. Are you 
really against ObamaCare? Your name's not on there.''
  It was useful for a good number of candidates, and some of them have 
said they wouldn't be here in this Congress today if they didn't have 
the discharge petition to measure their opponent with. So it always had 
a utility in two ways: seeking to repeal ObamaCare, and putting a 
marker down so that the American public could discern, who's for 
ObamaCare and who's against it and who's afraid to take a position.
  All that was taking place last summer, all the way on up through 
August, September, October and into the election on the 2nd day of 
November, where, through the summer, continuing the strategy. It was 
not just the discharge petition. It was use it and other things, and 
win the majority here in the House. When we have the majority in the 
House, then we can bring the repeal of ObamaCare.
  And I said for a long time: Repeal of ObamaCare needs to be H.R. 1. 
That's the highest priority for the Speaker of the House. The Speaker 
traditionally gets the first 10 bills to name, H.R. 1 through H.R. 10. 
You can look at the priority by their number. So number 1, I believe, 
needed to be the repeal of ObamaCare as the highest priority, Mr. 
Speaker.
  Well, it turned out that H.R. 2 was the repeal of ObamaCare. All 
right. There's no complaint on my part. That's a very high priority, in 
any case, and we did pass the repeal of ObamaCare, consistent with the 
strategy that I laid out way last summer.
  And then, way last summer, I was making the case that no money can be 
spent by the Federal Government unless the House of Representatives 
agrees to it. We can shut off all funding to ObamaCare here in the 
House of Representatives, and if the Senate disagrees and the House 
says no, then no money gets spent by the Federal Government, until we 
reach an agreement. That's what's going on right now, Mr. Speaker.
  So, I argued then and I argue now that part of this strategy to undo 
ObamaCare has to be to unfund ObamaCare. To defund ObamaCare, to phrase 
it a little bit differently. It was always part of the strategy going 
back almost a year. And as we move forward to defund ObamaCare, we need 
to understand that there were automatic appropriations that were 
written into ObamaCare, and that's part of the dialogue that was going 
on last fall in a very quiet little way but no one had drilled into it 
that I know of and looked at all of the pieces, on our side. On the 
other side, they wrote it in.
  So I'd like to hear from someone who was involved in that on the 
Democrat side, I'd like to hear from former Speaker Pelosi, or maybe 
I'd like to hear from the whip, Steny Hoyer: Did they know it was in 
there? Of course they did. Did they direct their staff to write it in 
there? Probably. Who on that staff devised this strategy to put in all 
of these threads that add up to $105.5 billion? I would like to know 
the answer to that question. That will emerge over time, as history has 
a way of uncovering these things.
  But, in any case, the automatic funding was there. Another way to 
phrase it would be self-enacting funding was there. And I drafted 
language to cut off the funding to ObamaCare patterned off of the 
funding that was shut off to put an end to the Vietnam War. That's in 
the Congressional Record and in the media record some time back. But 
about 5 or so years ago, I got curious as to how I remembered the 
Vietnam War being ended versus what actually happened. I went back and 
read the Congressional Record and the debate on that, Mr. Speaker. The 
Congressional Record reveals this: There were about three different 
places and perhaps more, but we uncovered three different places in 
appropriations bills where Congress shut off the funding to carry out 
the war in Vietnam. It began in 1973. The most significant was on a 
continuing resolution in the spring of 1974. As I read through that 
language, maybe 5 years ago, it gave me an inspiration on how to bring 
language to shut off the funding to ObamaCare.

  I'm going to go from memory here. It's in the Congressional Record. 
So it won't be precisely accurate but it thematically will be right. 
The language that was written into a continuing resolution in the 
spring of 1974 that shut off the American support in the war in Vietnam 
reads close to this: Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no 
funds in this act and no funds in any act heretofore appropriated shall 
be used for offensive or defensive operations in the land of Vietnam, 
in the skies over it, the seas adjacent to it or in the adjacent 
countries, and it names at least Laos and Cambodia along the side. I 
believe they also said Thailand. But it named the countries next to it 
and it said, no funds shall be used for offensive or defensive 
operations, Vietnam, the skies over it, the seas adjacent to it or the 
countries adjacent to it, and no funds in any act heretofore 
appropriated shall be used for such purpose.
  In other words, whatever money was in the pipeline got shut off. They 
shut off all involvement. And you can imagine, and I don't know it to 
be factually true, Mr. Speaker, that there were bullets and grenades 
and munitions that were being unloaded on the dock at Da Nang that were 
loaded back up again on the ship and hauled away. I don't know that to 
be fact, but figuratively that's what happened. They shut off 
everything. With language written into a continuing resolution, they 
shut off a war here in the United States Congress.
  Now if we can shut off a war here in the United States Congress and 
stop all the money that's in the pipeline and

[[Page H1659]]

any money that might be coming at the same time and all the funds that 
are in the act, none of them can be used to conduct the operations in 
Vietnam, we can sure as the world in a continuing resolution write 
legislation that will shut off all of this automatic funding that was 
written into ObamaCare. How could anyone imagine that somehow because 
the Congressional Research Services defined the spending that is 
automatic spending here in the ObamaCare act, they called it mandated 
appropriations and fund transfers. Mandated appropriations and fund 
transfers have been defined by some folks as mandatory spending. And 
then they go on to argue that mandatory spending cannot be addressed in 
an appropriations bill. I would remind them, this is the United States 
Congress, and the former majority in this Congress wrote all this into 
a bill. And it's automatic funding. It's self-enacting funding. It's 
not completely unprecedented as a tactic, but it is completely 
unprecedented in its magnitude. Therefore, this Congress can't be 
hiding behind a rule or defining a piece of legislation as mandatory 
spending. We're not mandated by any previous Congress. No Congress can 
bind a subsequent Congress. If this House of Representatives says no, 
then ``no'' means ``no.'' We sometimes have to remind the Senate over 
and over again, and we would have to do that under the proposal that 
I'm making.
  But I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that this is an unconstitutional 
bill. It's been pushed through this Congress in an unprecedented 
fashion, with a series of shenanigans that this country has never seen 
before. Two Federal courts have found it unconstitutional, Judge 
Vincent found it completely unconstitutional, and it's on its way 
through the circuit and to the Supreme Court and it should be expedited 
directly to the Supreme Court, except the White House is holding the 
ball. The White House is holding the ball because their tactic is to 
try to get ObamaCare implemented to the maximum amount before such 
time, so that it becomes too late to pull it out by the roots. That's 
part of the tactic.
  So from the litigation standpoint, the unconstitutional components 
are the unconstitutional mandates, compelling States in violation of 
the 10th Amendment that they have to comply with an act to provide 
these services, and compelling individuals that they have to buy 
insurance even though they're not participating in the system 
whatsoever.

                              {time}  1720

  That's never been done before. It's completely unprecedented, Mr. 
Speaker. So we see the Obama administration now offering a little 
carrot out there to the States, to the Governors, saying we will waive 
the mandate for the States. Now, the caveat is you have to provide an 
equal or better policy yourself in order to be able to qualify for the 
waiver, and you've got until 2014 to do that.
  But that act, which likely won't come to any kind of fruition, is a 
means, I believe, to take away the argument that it's an 
unconstitutional mandate on the States. The White House has also had 
language that came out a couple of weeks ago that they would consider 
or entertain the alteration or perhaps the elimination of the 
individual mandate.
  Now, that's the second component that might come out of the White 
House that would, if those two provisions were altered in practice, 
they can go before the Supreme Court and argue that it's not a 
constitutional violation because it's not really a mandate. And that's 
how they hope to walk through this thicket of constitutional 
prohibitions and hopefully they can find a decision at the Supreme 
Court level that will allow them to impose ObamaCare on the rest of 
America. That's their litigation tactic, Mr. Speaker.
  Their legislation tactic is this: The pressure that grows, they're 
trying to take the pressure off. So when the House played into their 
hands a week or so ago by bringing legislation on the 1099 component of 
this, this outrageous requirement that people report to the IRS any 
cumulative transactions with any entity that meet or exceed $600 in a 
year, which means if you pay somebody to mow your lawn you have to turn 
in a squeal form to the IRS. And this is something that was put into 
ObamaCare, these extra requirements, because they were able to score it 
as, my memory is that it was then $17 billion it was supposed to 
generate in taxes because the IRS was going to go in and audit these 
squeal forms, the 1099 forms.
  Well, in any case, that was the most objectionable component in the 
short term that came with ObamaCare. Therefore, this House picked this 
up and sent it to the Senate. And what happens? The Democrats in the 
Senate are going to take it and send it to the President. Why? Because 
they think that people shouldn't be required to file the 1099 forms and 
they can find another place to come up with $17 billion? No, Mr. 
Speaker, that's not it. It's this: They understand that the objections 
to the 1099 squeal forms that were written into ObamaCare are the most 
egregious of all in the short term, and they want to take the lid off 
the pressure cooker, let some steam out, put the lid back on, and they 
want to continue to frantically implement ObamaCare with the $105.5 
billion that is written into it and the self-enacting automatic 
spending that is there.
  So as the pressure builds against ObamaCare, they're willing to take 
a little piece off here, lift the lid off the pressure cooker there, 
and drain that heat down so that they can hang on to the major 
components of ObamaCare and get it implemented. And while we have a 
whole series of different initiatives that are going on around here 
driven now by the new Republican majority, five different proposals 
within Energy and Commerce to change the language from mandatory 
spending to, I suppose, optional spending or something, all of those 
are authorization pieces of language. There is no leverage to get them 
passed. If Energy and Commerce passes that legislation, it goes over to 
Harry Reid's desk where it probably goes directly into the trash, not 
into the desk drawer.
  So we can't produce leverage to change the definition. We have to 
look at the leverage that we have, the leverage that we're gifted with. 
And it's this: This government comes to, runs out of money at midnight, 
March 18. We are all staring at that deadline. And the House of 
Representatives has demonstrated clearly that we want to avoid having 
the President or Harry Reid shut this government down. We want to keep 
this government functioning in a responsible fashion.

  But I will say, Mr. Speaker, that functioning in a responsible 
fashion is not turning a blind eye to $105.5 billion. It is not 
wondering where this number came from. This number is in this CRS 
report. This is a Congressional Research Services report titled, 
``Appropriations and Fund Transfers in the Patient Protection and 
Affordable Care Act.'' It's written by C. Stephen Redhead, specialist 
in health policy, and it's dated February 10, 2011.
  In this, now that the numbers are in here, when you go through and 
highlight the numbers, we put it into a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet, 
Mr. Speaker, this spreadsheet shows the total of all these automatic 
appropriations. They come to $105.464 billion, and that's over a decade 
period of time. This is the minimum. This is the threshold number. It's 
not the maximum amount that can be spent.
  Just to give an example, here is one of the items in here of 
automatic appropriations, self-enacting appropriations that shows this. 
Let's see, it totals $10 billion through FY19. But this is for Medicare 
innovation. Medicare innovation. This is funds that goes to 
Congressional Medicare or Medicaid Services, CMS, FY11 it's $1 billion. 
And it's written in such a way that it's $1 billion every year, and 
here's the language, in perpetuity, Mr. Speaker.
  This is one example of Medicare innovation that gets appropriated 
automatically, written and hidden into the bill, a billion dollars 
every year for Medicare innovation that goes on in perpetuity. And it 
doesn't require an act of Congress. It's not an act of an 
Appropriations Committee in the 112th Congress that funds the FY12 or 
11 or any subsequent year. This is the perpetual motion machine that 
keeps spitting out money. It will spit out money forever. It will spit 
out money until Congress conducts an affirmative act to shut off this 
funding.
  That's what I sought to do with the amendment that I offered in H.R. 
1, which said, patterned off of the Vietnam War amendment, it said--and 
I'm

[[Page H1660]]

going to do this in summary, too--notwithstanding any other provision 
of law, no funds in this act, and no funds in any act previously 
enacted, shall be used to carry out the provisions of, in summary, 
ObamaCare. That language pulls out by the roots everything that's here 
in this CRS report and shuts off the automatic appropriations.
  There is an issue, also written into ObamaCare, another sleight of 
hand that took place. There are many others, but this one is 
particularly egregious that grants the authority to the Secretary of 
Health and Human Services to do transfers to fund the implementation of 
ObamaCare essentially at her discretion, and probably out of the U.S. 
Treasury, just to do the automatic appropriations; to grant that kind 
of authority to a bureaucrat, to circumvent Congress, to set up that 
authority, a transfer authority, which is the equivalent of an 
appropriations authority that goes on in perpetuity to the Secretary of 
Health and Human Services. While there are automatic appropriations to 
the tune of $105.5 billion for a decade that also go on in perpetuity 
without--so binding the future Congress in a way that requires an 
affirmative action on this Congress's part to shut it off.
  So, Mr. Speaker, where I am is this: I am done dancing around with 
all of this. I've looked at it. I've analyzed it. I've joined with some 
of my colleagues. I thank my colleague Michele Bachmann for raising 
this up in the media and doing as much media as she has done over this 
last week or so. I drove this with all that I had back when we were 
working on and building up to and passing H.R. 1. I will continue to do 
so.
  We must shut off this funding. We must do it affirmatively. We need 
to do it where we have leverage. There are only two places where there 
is leverage: that is in the continuing resolution in one place, and the 
other one is the debt ceiling. But what I have said is I will vote for 
no appropriations bill that funds Planned Parenthood. I will vote for 
no appropriations bill that should be shutting off the funding, the 
automatic funding especially to ObamaCare. That's where I stand. That's 
where I will stand.
  If enough Members of this Congress stand with me, we will put an end 
to ObamaCare. And we need do so early. We've got a lot of good work to 
do in this Congress. We can either look forward to a long, protracted 
battle, a war of attrition over this that goes on over the entire 112th 
Congress and on through the elections of 2012, including the 
Presidential election of 2012, or we can pull this tumor out by the 
roots, this malignant tumor called ObamaCare that is metastasizing as 
we speak while this automatic funding is being poured in and likely 
being transferred. We can put the brakes on it.

                              {time}  1730

  We can pull it out by the roots, every bit of it, get rid of it lock, 
stock, and barrel. That's what we must do. It's our obligation, our 
pledge, and this House has voted to repeal it. This House has voted to 
unfund it, and every Republican in the House and every Republican in 
the Senate has voted to repeal ObamaCare. Two Federal courts have found 
it unconstitutional. It is irresponsible to tolerate the funding to 
ObamaCare while it goes on on our watch, while we have the power to 
shut it off, and while we understand that it is unconstitutional into 
the bargain.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I came to this floor tonight to urge this House to 
stand together, to write the language into the CR that I asked be 
written into H.R. 1 so we can go forward and join with the American 
people, the supermajority of the American people that have rejected 
ObamaCare, that want their liberty back, that want constitutional 
legislation coming out of this place. The very reason that there are 87 
new freshman Republicans in this House of Representatives: Every one of 
them ran on repeal of ObamaCare. Every one of them voted to repeal it. 
They brought a new mandate here. Many of us have been standing here 
fighting it.
  I welcome them, God's gift to America, and I ask all, Mr. Speaker, to 
join with me. Let's shut off all of this funding to ObamaCare; that 
that is in the existing appropriations and that that is automatically 
appropriated, whether some might want to call it mandatory spending--I 
call it self-enacting automatic appropriations--written in a deceptive 
fashion, must be shut off, and I will continue to work on this cause 
with every effort that I have, Mr. Speaker.
  I appreciate your attention and your indulgence.

                          ____________________