[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 43 (Tuesday, March 29, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H2029-H2033]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Noem). 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. I thank the gentlelady for recognizing me here on 
the floor of the House, Madam Speaker, and appreciate the privilege to 
address you. I came to this floor, one, to hear from Judge Carter and 
to listen to the presentation that he made. And the other component of 
it is I came here to talk about one or perhaps two subject matters. One 
of them is ObamaCare, as one might imagine.
  I would make this point that--first, Madam Speaker, if it's possible 
that there's anybody that doesn't know why ObamaCare is so bad, if they 
maybe haven't heard the argument in some time and they're forgetting 
about how bad ObamaCare is, and if they're starting to hear the 
language about what is redeemable about ObamaCare, I want to make it 
real clear: nothing. There is not one single component of ObamaCare 
that is worthy of us making any effort to do anything except to repeal 
it all, eradicate it all, pull it all out by the roots.
  I listen to some Members of this Congress that will say, Well, don't 
you want your children to be on your insurance when they're 26? No. I 
raised them to grow up. I want them to take their own responsibility. 
If they can be elected to the United States Congress when they're 25, 
then I think that's a pretty good age to at least say you are free, on 
your on--well, first, you got your car keys when you were 16--your 
license, anyway.

                              {time}  2050

  Then you get to vote when you're 18 and choose the next leader of the 
Free World. Then you get to go out and, let me say, go into the tavern 
legally when you're 21 and get elected to the United States Congress 
when you're 25. Then they kick you off of Mommy and Daddy's insurance 
when you're 26? Somehow I think that delays the growing-up process.
  I think that we need to have people growing up and taking personal 
responsibility at an early age rather than delaying it to a later age. 
If the States want to have it at 26, let them have it at 26. If 
insurance companies want to provide for that market, let them write the 
policies to provide for that market; but the Federal Government should 
not stick a mandate on this that requires all health insurance policies 
to keep the kids on until they're 26.

[[Page H2030]]

  Let's just say there's a young person who gets elected to Congress, 
like--well, yes, I would think that there are some Members of the new 
class that would fit very close to that category. Would one really 
think that they would come in here at age 25 and transition from their 
parents' health insurance on over to the Federal opportunity of health 
insurance that they can access and pay their share of the premiums that 
come with this job of working in this Congress and maybe never have a 
window where they were responsible to go out in the marketplace and buy 
their own health insurance?
  I think that's actually a bad idea, but if people want it, let them 
drive that through their States.
  Some will say that we want to cover preexisting conditions so that 
children cannot be denied insurance on policies that their parents 
have. Well, that's a good idea, and it's one that can be sustained by 
demand in the marketplace. If that doesn't do it, it can certainly be 
sustained by mandates within the States, but it does not require, Madam 
Speaker, that the Federal Government get involved in mandating to the 
States, actually mandating to everybody in America, what shall be done 
with insurance.
  So now I've used up, I think, the two things that had some popularity 
in ObamaCare. That's it--insurance for 26-year-olds and no denial 
because of preexisting conditions to children whose parents have 
policies.
  If I want to go out and buy a policy that ensures that my children 
could stay on it, that policy is available in the marketplace. I will 
say this, that before ObamaCare wrecked the markets and drove out a 
number of health insurance companies, we had 1,300 health insurance 
companies in this country which were viable in the marketplace, 
competing, providing all kinds of policy varieties for customers to 
choose from--in fact, over 100,000 health insurance policy varieties 
and 1,300 companies. There were 100,000 policy varieties. We had plenty 
of competition. ObamaCare has driven out competition. It has not added 
to it. It has driven out competition. It has made it harder. It has 
driven up the cost of health care.
  The indecision and the fear of what's happening has caused the entire 
health care industry to be frozen in place. Now they come along and 
say, Well, if you're not going to repeal it, can you accommodate me in 
some way?--perhaps in some way like granting them a waiver. I'm hearing 
individuals say, I want my waiver. They know that there have been 1,040 
waivers to ObamaCare.
  Madam Speaker, I know that there are people out there who are 
listening who maybe don't understand what that means. It is this: 
ObamaCare is the law of the land. It is imposed upon everyone in 
America. A law is to be applied to every individual in an equal 
fashion. We might sit in different categories. We might have Medicare 
that applies differently to somebody who's 65 than it does to somebody 
who's 60 years old; but these are waivers to statutes and to 
individuals and to entities.
  From my standpoint, it's unheard of, and where that authority came 
from I did not see coming; but this administration has found out that 
they pushed a law that's so bad--so bad--that they are granting waivers 
to companies, to entities, and to entire States, like the State of 
Maine.
  Now we find out that one of the people who has taken credit for 
helping to write ObamaCare, the gentleman from New York, who, I 
believe, is a candidate for the mayor of New York City, is now calling 
for a waiver for the City of New York to ObamaCare. So maybe, if he 
gets his way, it won't be 1,040; it will be 1,041 waivers.
  That's appalling to think that you would sit in a strategy meeting/
session and try to drive a policy that, I believe, is flat out 
socialized medicine and argue that it's good for everybody in America 
because they're too ignorant to take care of their own health care and 
now find out that the policy is so ignorant you want a waiver from it 
for the largest city in America. That's appalling to think that that 
would happen.
  1,040--1,040 waivers. Let me see. The IRS will enforce this. It will 
punish people with an extra penalty if they don't comply. Let me see. 
The E-Z formula. The E-Z form for the IRS is the 1040EZ. We've had 1040 
waivers, 1,040 waivers. It's E-Z for them, Madam Speaker, but it's not 
going to be easy for anyone who doesn't get a waiver.

  We have this thing called the equal protection clause. It's in the 
Constitution, the 14th Amendment. Everybody is going to be protected 
with equal protection. ObamaCare, itself, violates the equal protection 
clause because it gives some American citizens a different standard 
than others. I'm thinking of Florida and their Medicare Advantage, 
which they have an exemption from under ObamaCare. Even though the 
cornhusker kickback was removed because, actually, Nebraskans rejected 
it--to their great credit--Floridians didn't reject their exemptions so 
that they kept their Advantage. That was an existing policy that 
exempted them from the wipe-out of Medicare Advantage, which happened 
to people like Iowans, for example. The equal protection clause? Not 
hardly. It's a violation of the equal protection clause. It's an 
unconstitutional bill, ObamaCare.
  But I forgot to tell you, Madam Speaker, all of the reasons why it's 
bad. It cannot be afforded. It's a $2.6 trillion total outlay for the 
first full 10 years once it would be implemented, and it increases 
taxes almost to that much over that period of time. It cuts Medicare, 
which is going to have a huge increase from 40 million to 70 million 
recipients of Medicare over the next few years. That huge increase cuts 
Medicare by $532 billion. It purports to reform Medicare. While this 
cut we know has got to actually happen, it just simply calculates it 
into the CBO score.
  We can't afford ObamaCare. It's unsustainable therefore. It will 
reduce the research and development. It will increase lines and delays. 
It will ration care, and it will take that care out of the cost of many 
people and put it on a mandate that will force more people into 
Medicaid, and there will be companies that will be forced off the 
coverage they now provide for their employees and force those people 
onto a program that's federally subsidized, where there is a fund that 
will fund their health insurance premiums, which is also unaffordable.
  All these things are bad. There are so many bad things about 
ObamaCare that I don't think there is any one person in the country who 
could stand up in 30 minutes and list all of the bad things about 
ObamaCare. It boils down, though, to this: it's unaffordable. It's 
unsustainable. It reduces research and development. It reduces the 
quality and lengthens the lines. It delays the service. It rations the 
care.
  It takes away one more thing. The most important thing about 
ObamaCare is this: I believe it is the unconstitutional takings of 
American liberty. It is unconstitutional in numbers of ways, three or 
four ways at least. American liberty is something that is precious; and 
to think that the Federal Government would step in and commandeer, 
usurp, the God-given liberty and right that we have to manage our own 
health care and turn it into a rationed service, according to formula, 
in which only government would decide who would get what service and 
when and who would be on the waiting list for surgery and who would be 
on the waiting list to die without surgery, is a result of ObamaCare. 
It cannot be argued or refuted.
  They put you on a waiting list for a hip replacement, or they put you 
on a waiting list to die without. That's one of the things that 
happens. They don't seem to think that's what they're doing willfully, 
and I don't accuse them of willfully wanting to do that. It's a 
consequence of the thick-skulled action of people who believe that 
there is a Socialist model to produce their version of Utopia rather 
than the individual dynamics that come from people who have free 
choices.
  But we are a vigorous people, Madam Speaker. We're a unique people. 
We're the kind of people who recognize from the beginning that our 
rights come from God. We are endowed by our Creator with certain 
unalienable rights. Among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness. That pursuit of happiness wasn't the pursuit of hedonism; it 
was the pursuit of perfection, just the pursuit of perfection--both 
intellectual and physical improvements. That's the pursuit of happiness 
in the Greek form, and that's what our Founding Fathers understood.

[[Page H2031]]

                              {time}  2100

  They're unique, vigorous people with rights that come from God, and 
of all the things that flow through with this, these rights, many of 
them laid out in our Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, religion, and 
the press; freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government 
for redress of grievances; the right to keep and bear arms--the right 
to keep and bear arms; the property rights that are the Fifth 
Amendment; the right to protection of trial by jury, to be tried by a 
jury of your peers, and the right to protection against double 
jeopardy; the rights that are endowed to the States and then the 
people, respectively, in the Ninth and mostly the Tenth Amendment.
  All of those are unique things to Americans. They don't apply to 
Western European democratic socialist states or, should I say, social 
democratic states. They don't apply to people in Canada. They don't 
have that same level of rights. They don't apply to people in Mexico or 
anyplace in this hemisphere or anyplace else on this planet. These 
rights, as understood and envisioned by our Founding Fathers, apply 
only to Americans. And they are the foundation of why Americans are a 
unique and vigorous people, and they're the foundation of why we are 
the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. And we have a unique 
vigor, and that vigor comes from the foundation of these rights.
  But, Madam Speaker, I would take the position this, that you could 
take all of these rights that we have, that we identify as coming from 
our Creator, from God, and you can bestow them upon any other people on 
the planet and ask them to go out and build a vigorous society that 
would match and mirror that of America, and I will submit that that 
effort would fail. It would fail no matter if they had unlimited 
natural resources, if they had free enterprise to no end, if they had a 
reverence for the Constitution the way we do.
  You could take this package, this vision of American rights and 
Constitution, you could put it in the richest land in the world or the 
poorest and offer it to any people on the planet, and I will submit 
that they could not succeed in producing another country that has the 
vigor and the success that this country has. And I'm not standing here, 
Madam Speaker, taking credit for this. I'm standing here giving 
reverence to this gift that we have that is America.
  And I will continue, that of all of the rights that are foundations 
of those beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism and the 
free enterprise component that goes along with it--property rights, 
freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and the list goes on--
there's one other component that no other nation can have, and that is 
the unique vigor of the American people.
  And we are a people that have been blessed by the vigor of every 
contributing, every donor civilization on the planet, no matter the 
country. The people that came here, the legal immigrants that came to 
the United States, came here with the vision of the American Dream. 
They were attracted to the vision of the American Dream. And so we were 
able to, by good sense of circumstance and forethought and vision, skim 
the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization on the planet: 
the people that had a vision, that had a dream, that had a vision, that 
wanted to test themselves, that wanted to build something that went 
beyond their generation; people that wanted to leave the world a better 
place than it was when they found it; people that wanted to prepare the 
ground for the next generation to farm, so to speak, and in some cases 
literally, these are the people that we got that came to America from 
every country, whether it would be England or Scotland or Wales or 
Poland or Germany or Italy or any of the countries on the planet, all 
across Asia, all across Central and South America; people that had a 
vision that they wanted to live free and breathe free and build 
something and have children and grandchildren that could benefit from 
their labors.
  And their vision and their intuitiveness and their creativity and the 
entrepreneurial nature, they came to America, and that set up a natural 
filter, natural filter for people to save up enough money and to get 
passage to come to the United States. Some of them sold themselves for 
as long as 7 years of labor just to pay the passage to get here. That's 
a dream. You don't get any calls that come like that. You get people 
that are vigorous, and we attracted them, and that's the American 
spirit.
  This vigorous American spirit is totally unsuitable for a social 
democracy or socialism or hardcore leftist communist Marxism or any of 
those other utopian philosophies that many of them emerged out of the 
non-English speaking portion of Western Europe, and their philosophies 
permeated a lot of the components of the globe because they're built 
upon class envy, but they're not built upon the truths of human nature 
nor are they built upon our rights coming from God.
  And so here we are in this country, fantastic that we are the 
recipients of such gifts, and the gifts that we have and the vigor that 
we have, we need to understand what it's rooted in. And it's rooted in 
these freedoms and it's rooted in the filter, the filter that filtered 
out people that wanted to come here but didn't have quite the ambition 
to make it happen. It was hard to get here, and you had to have a dream 
to want to come here; and when you came here, we respected hard work 
and smart work and people that planned and invested and they were 
rewarded, and we admired them and raised our children to emulate them.
  How many people like Donald Trump today, even though--like I said, I 
don't have anything bad to say about Donald Trump, not here into the 
Record. It's because he's been successful, people admire him. Bill 
Gates, because he's been successful. Steve Jobs, they admire him 
because he's been successful. They've been successful because they've 
been entrepreneurs. They've been creative. They've worked within the 
free market system. They have made our lives better and improved the 
quality of our lives and lowered the cost of the services that we need 
for our quality of life to be upheld and made those contributions and 
gotten rich in the process. That's the free enterprise system.
  So here we are, these vigorous people, and some of the nanny state 
advocates here in this Congress--actually, it was a majority of them 
last year--decided they want to impose ObamaCare on us and take away 
our personal vigor. They wanted to take over the responsibility of 
managing our health care. What they finally did was, because ObamaCare 
is right now the law of the land, they nationalized our skin and 
everything inside it, a government takeover of my body. The government 
took my body over and the body of 308 million Americans, and now 
they're going to tell us when we get health care, under what conditions 
we get health care, that we must have their health insurance policy 
that they prescribe for us. They've taken away our individual 
responsibility. They've nationalized our skin and everything inside it.
  And they had the audacity--and the President's fond of that word 
``audacity.'' It was in the title of one of his books, ``The Audacity 
of Hope.'' The President of the United States had the audacity to 
impose a 10 percent tax on the outside of the skin that he nationalized 
inside of if you go into a tanning salon to turn yourself a little 
browner. That is a reach of the nanny state to impose a tax. They 
wanted to tax your non-Diet Coke. They want to manage our lifestyles in 
such a way that they will tax us if we eat fat foods and then presume 
we should get a discount if we eat healthy foods.
  This is a nanny state personified. ObamaCare is so bad. It's bad 
because of all the things that I've listed about the cost and the 
quality and the lines and the rationing and the net result of all of 
that, Madam Speaker, but the worst part is it is an unconstitutional 
taking of American liberty. It takes from us the ability, the right to 
manage our own health care, and it must go.
  And when that legislation was passed and signed into law--I believe 
the anniversary date was March 23 of this year--I laid awake most of 
the night and slept a little bit and got up in the middle of the night 
and drafted a piece of legislation to repeal ObamaCare. It was waiting 
at the door of the service team to be formally put into the form

[[Page H2032]]

of a bill when they opened up that morning.
  Very interestingly, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota had 
done the same thing, and her legislation came down within 3 minutes of 
mine, exactly the same 40 words that said we're going to repeal 
ObamaCare and, ``as if it had never been enacted'' were the last words 
in the bill. Forty words, repeal ObamaCare, gives the names of the 
bill, the numbers of the bill, et cetera, the last line, ``as if it had 
never been enacted.''

                              {time}  2110

  Rip it out by the roots, Madam Speaker.
  Now, that was not necessarily unheard of, but there aren't many 
precedents in the history of Congress for repeal legislation to be 
filed actually the next day after a huge piece of legislation has been 
passed. But that is what we did, and we started down that path 
immediately, working to get signatures on the bill and building up the 
support to repeal ObamaCare.
  By mid-summer we had a discharge petition. By the end of the 111th 
Congress, going into the election as the only part that counted, we had 
173 signatures on my discharge petition, people that wanted to see 
ObamaCare repealed come to the floor, bypass the committee process, 
bypass the Speaker's ability to kill the bill before it got here, and 
bring it to the floor for a vote. We had 173; we needed 218.
  And the message that went out across America was useful in that some 
Members of Congress that are here today will say straight up they 
wouldn't be here if it were not for the discharge petition and they 
could challenge their opponent to sign it. And almost every Democrat 
refused to do so. And now there are 87 new freshmen Republicans. Every 
single one has run on the repeal of ObamaCare. As far as I know, 
everyone has run on the defunding of ObamaCare. And I know that every 
single Republican in the House of Representatives voted for H.R. 2, 
which is the repeal of ObamaCare. And I know that every single 
Republican in the United States Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare. The 
language that we generated then is the language that emerged into H.R. 
2. And today every Republican and some Democrats are on record voting 
to repeal ObamaCare.
  Now, that didn't stop there. The strategy that I put together almost 
a year ago was this: that we needed to win the majority, which we did; 
bring the repeal of ObamaCare, which we did. It didn't succeed in the 
United States Senate, but behind that always was this majority here in 
the House of Representatives has an obligation to cut off all funding 
that would be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare.
  And I have been consistent with that language all the way through 
last summer into last fall and past the election and beyond. Repealing 
ObamaCare, then cut off the funding to ObamaCare. Stop the 
implementation of ObamaCare and stop the enforcement of it by shutting 
off the budget dollars and hold this waste of money to this 
unconstitutional bill of ObamaCare until such a time as we can elect a 
President who will sign the repeal.
  The date for that to happen in my strategy is January 20, 2013, Madam 
Speaker. And that's the date that the next President of the United 
States will be inaugurated out here on the west portico of the Capitol 
Building.
  And when that President stands there and takes that oath of office, 
it's my vision and my dream and my commitment to work towards it, I am 
going to ask him take your oath of office with pen in hand, Mr. 
President-elect, and I'm going to ask you to solemnly swear to 
preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States to 
the best of your ability so help you God. And once that statement is 
made and it's completed and the oath of office is finished and he's 
formally the President of the United States, and before that new 
President on January 20 of 2013 shakes the hand of Chief Justice John 
Roberts, I want that pen in his hand to come right down to the 
parchment, and I want him to sign the repeal of the ObamaCare right 
there on the podium of the west portico of the Capitol, right out there 
as the first act of the next President of the United States. That's my 
vision. That's my commitment.
  But until then shutting off funding to ObamaCare is a must-do. And 
most of America knows by now that there is $105.5 billion automatically 
appropriated in a deceptive way by the way the bill was drafted up in 
Nancy Pelosi's office, not going through committee, not having the work 
of the will of this Congress, but drafted up in her office and dropped 
on us with hardly any notice and certainly no time to inform the 
American people of what was in it, automatic, unprecedented in their 
scope, appropriations to the tune of $105.5 billion, Madam Speaker.
  And already it automatically appropriated in the 2010 budget. So 
that's $18.6 billion and $4.95 billion in the 2011 budget. It totals up 
to $23.6 billion, already appropriated, almost all of it set aside for 
the purposes of implementing ObamaCare.
  We must have a showdown. We must face the President down. If the 
President demands that ObamaCare be funded, what are we going to do? 
Say, no, Mr. President, that he vetoes legislation that would otherwise 
fund all of government?
  And if President Obama does that or if Harry Reid continues to 
perform as his proxy and shuts off anything that we send over that way 
even though we've demonstrated our desire to keep the legitimate 
functions of government, all of them, functioning, if the President 
shuts it down or Harry Reid shuts it down and this government comes to 
a halt, here's the irony.

  The irony is this: lights would go out in Federal offices around this 
land. Not all of them because essential services will keep going. But 
lights will go out. And as the lights go out in the nonessential 
service Federal offices, what will be going in the other offices? 
ObamaCare will continue even in a government shutdown to be implemented 
because there's $23.6 billion sitting in their pot to spend out of to 
implement ObamaCare, and we could have shutdown after shutdown, and 
ObamaCare is implemented and implemented.
  We must hold the line. We must stand on this principle. It is our 
obligation. It is unconstitutional. We take an oath to uphold the 
Constitution too. And that includes defending the Constitution and 
opposing unconstitutional legislation with every tool at our disposal.
  The President and the Democrats, I believe, Madam Speaker, plan to 
shut this government down. That's why they agreed to a continuing 
resolution in December that funds the government until March 4. It was 
to bring this to a head. They wanted to box us into a corner and then 
blame Republicans for shutting the government down.
  Well, it's real clear: Republican leadership wants to avoid a 
shutdown. It's clear to me that Democrats are determined to provide a 
shutdown and try to blame it on Republicans. And it's clear to me that 
if we fund all the functions of government except ObamaCare and if the 
President brings about a shutdown, it won't be the House Republicans; 
it will be Harry Reid as proxy for the President.
  If that happens, what we're going to see happen here is the President 
of the United States could veto an appropriations bill that funds 
everything except ObamaCare. It would be a Presidential executive 
tantrum that he would be throwing. That tantrum that he would be 
throwing would be saying this: that his signature piece of legislation, 
ObamaCare, means more to him than all of the other legitimate functions 
of government combined.
  That's the scenario that we are in. The American people will render a 
verdict when that day comes that there is that kind of a showdown. And 
it must come. The American people will render a verdict. They will side 
with us. They are not going to side with the President who has imposed 
ObamaCare when 62 percent of Americans want it repealed, 51 percent 
intensely want to do so, and only 24 percent want to keep it in any 
kind of a vigorous way.
  So, Madam Speaker, I will say this: we have an obligation to stand 
and hold our ground. This showdown will come. It must come. If it 
doesn't, we will be capitulating to the President in every way that 
he's willing to fight. I say let's stand our ground now. Let's have our 
fight now. Let's get it over with, and let's get on with the business 
of the 112th Congress.

[[Page H2033]]

  With that, Madam Speaker, I would yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________