[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 46 (Friday, April 1, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H2255-H2258]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   KEEPING THE GOVERNMENT FUNCTIONING

  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 a privilege to address you here 
on the floor of the House of Representatives and to once again bring a 
case before you that I believe will be overheard in an effective way by 
the American people and responded to you by, of course, your good 
judicial and prudential judgment.
  I came here to the floor to talk about a number of things. I should 
always bring up the number one thing that is on my mind first. And I 
know that it's impossible for me to exhaust the subject, but I have 
given it a significant endeavor over the last year and a half. And now, 
as things move towards a head, with the continuing resolution 
negotiations and debate that is taking place and the major decisions 
that will be formed over the weekend by the leadership in the House and 
in the Senate in consultation, presumably, with the White House, we 
expect to see some kind of a proposal come before one or both Chambers 
next week before the clock ticks down on the continuing resolution that 
is temporarily funding this government in a piece of shell 
appropriations that should have never have happened. But that's a 
subject matter perhaps outside of what I should bring up today, and we 
should focus on the issues at hand, and they are this:
  There was a strong pledge that was made that if Republicans win the 
majority, Mr. Speaker, that we would cut $100 billion out of this 
fiscal year's budget. I will submit that, recognizing that we were 5 
months into this fiscal year before we had an opportunity to begin that 
process, that calculates out to be about $61.5 billion if you 
annualized $100 billion. Even though the initially proposed continuing 
resolution did not include those kinds of cuts, there was an intense 
debate here in this Congress driven by the 87 freshmen Republicans to 
get that number up to a number that was either $100 billion or $100 
billion if you calculated it on an annualized basis.
  We did come together on that number, and this House did pass H.R. 1, 
which included in it $61.5 billion worth of cuts out of fiscal year 
2011, even though, let me say, the function of the House was not 
functional during the last 2 or 3 years at least of Speaker Pelosi's 
time, and there was no appropriations process that one could bring 
forward, and there was no budget that was brought forward and, 
therefore, government was being run on stopgap measures of continuing 
resolutions.
  During the lame duck session--the lame duck session being the period 
of time when Congress comes together to meet after an election. I have 
said that lame duck sessions should only be to take care of the urgent 
issues that need to be handled before the new Members of Congress can 
be sworn in. The old Congress, at least in theory, is delegitimized by 
the elections that take place. Last year, it was on November 2. They no 
longer represent the will of the American people. That has been 
reflected in the election results all across the land. And this House 
was designed to be a quick reaction strike force to be responsive to 
the American people.
  So our Founding Fathers put it within the Constitution, never amended 
out, that House Members are up for election every 2 years. And every 10 
years there will be a census, and that census is designed then to be 
used to redistrict the districts. And we have now agreed that 435 is 
the maximum number of House Members. And as the population moves and as 
the population grows, every 10 years, we reset the congressional 
districts to as accurately as possible reflect the new population 
distribution in America. That goes on, along with every 2 years, there 
is an election.
  So the elections have two purposes. Every 10 years, it is to reflect 
the population change; and every 2 years, including that 10-year census 
year election, which comes up in 2012, it's the quick reaction response 
to the will of the American people. Because our Founding Fathers 
understood that, if you put people in this office and let them have 
tenure for life like we are hearing about in States like Wisconsin or 
Ohio what tenure does to a person's due diligence, then there would be 
people that would sit here forever and never be responsible to the 
American people.

                              {time}  1540

  They recognize if they would set the Senate up in 6-year election 
cycles that the Senate wouldn't be accountable within a short period of 
time, not within 2 years or 4 years, but in 6 years. That was 
intentionally so the Senators would be more inclined to make long-term 
visionary decisions, and House Members could come in as the shock 
troops, so to speak, to bring the quick reaction if the Congress got 
out of sync with the people.
  Well, it's pretty clear, Mr. Speaker, that the Congress got out of 
sync with the people last year. Actually, they began to get out of sync 
with the people well before that, more than 4 years ago.
  But when President Obama came in he had huge majorities to work with 
in the House under Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and in the Senate with Harry 
Reid as leader, even to the extent that they had a massive majority in 
the House of Representatives, and they had a filibuster-proof majority 
in the United States Senate. And so they felt their oats, so to speak.
  And their ideology, drove them, I think, to--maybe they didn't know 
it. I think some of them knew it, and I believe the Blue Dogs that were 
in this House of Representatives that lost their elections last 
November knew it. They knew they were walking the plank. They knew they 
were going down into political Davy Jones' locker if they voted for 
ObamaCare. But they did, because of leverage, because of legislative 
shenanigans, because--and I'll say it, Mr. Speaker, that to understand 
this, that ObamaCare, for a long time here in the House of 
Representatives, was H.R. 3200, a bill that came through the Energy and 
Commerce Committee in a fashion that was, at least envisioned, to be a 
functional fashion through our Constitution and by our Founding 
Fathers. But it came through, and there were long, long debates in 
committee, but H.R. 3200, which was the product of the House, didn't 
make it to the floor for a vote.

[[Page H2256]]

What came to the floor for a vote under ObamaCare was a bill that was 
written in Speaker Pelosi's office of 2,600 or so pages, plus or minus 
100. It depends on the font type. But 2,600 or so pages of a bill that 
no, not one person had an opportunity to read it all before it came to 
the floor for a vote. And as much as it was studied by many, there are 
quite a few Americans now that have read it all.
  But, Mr. Speaker, I'll submit this, that it has so many convoluted 
contraptions within it, that there isn't a single person on the planet, 
no matter how intellectual they might be, no matter how much experience 
they might have, there's not one person that has the capability of 
reading the ObamaCare bill and understanding all of the activities of 
that bill where it references other sections of the code and you have 
to read it and switch back and forth, zigzag in and out of existing 
code and look at the ObamaCare piece of legislation and, at the same 
time, understand the implications to Americans. It's one thing to 
understand what a bill does technically, and it's another to understand 
how people have to live underneath that legislation. So H.R. 3200 
kicked off to the side. The product of the actual committee didn't come 
to the floor. The product of the Speaker's office, her staff, many of 
them young, junior people writing up a bill that they thought was right 
for America, dumped down on us here to be on a short period of debate 
and a vote be passed by the House, and could not and would not have 
passed the House the day it was brought to the floor for a vote except 
for a couple of little promises. One of those promises was that the 
Senate would pass a reconciliation package, which put other pieces into 
it in order to avoid the filibuster rule in the Senate. So in order to 
get that done, they had to bring some things that couldn't get passed 
under the filibuster rule in the Senate, write them up in a separate 
bill. Well, somehow that bill couldn't have been amended to the one 
here on the floor because that wouldn't have passed. And furthermore, 
the ObamaCare bill that was written in Nancy Pelosi's office couldn't 
have passed here on the floor because Bart Stupak had a dozen Democrats 
that locked up with the Republicans and said, we aren't going to vote 
for a bill that funds abortion. Nancy Pelosi wrote a bill that funds 
abortion. Harry Reid wrote a reconciliation package that they promised 
to send over to the House that did the things that his Senators needed 
to have happen and that House Members needed to have happen, and the 
piece of ObamaCare that was written by Nancy Pelosi that funds abortion 
was going to satisfy the Stupak dozen if the President signed an 
Executive order that amended the legislation that was before the House.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, I wouldn't expect every American to be completely 
understanding this convoluted process. In fact, I'd expect most of them 
to be very confused about this. This was designed to be a confusing 
process. And the idea, the very idea that the President of the United 
States would take an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend 
the Constitution of the United States, that everybody in this Chamber 
would do the same thing, and everybody in the Senate would do the same 
thing, and then believe somehow, all you have to do is read article I 
of the Constitution, and one can easily conclude that the President 
cannot amend a piece of legislation by signing an Executive order. He 
does not have the authority to do so. That is a constitutional 
violation.
  And I have, in the very similar, if not exactly identical language 
that is in the Iowa Constitution, gone to court to prove exactly that 
when former Governor Vilsack thought that he could rewrite the code of 
Iowa by executive order. And the case of King v. Vilsack is in the 
books, Mr. Speaker, and the Court vacated the executive order of the 
Governor of the State of Iowa because he thought he could legislate by 
executive order. I said he couldn't. We went to court. The judge said 
he couldn't, and it's resolved in that issue, and the point is conceded 
by former Governor, now Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack.
  That same tactic was used by the President of the United States, 
Barack Obama, when he signed an Executive order that was designed to 
amend the bill that was about to pass, actually he signed it after the 
bill passed. And the bill that passed on the condition that the 
President would sign an Executive order to take care of the funding for 
abortion and that the Senate would pass a reconciliation package that 
fit the other needs.

  Why couldn't we do this under what we call here regular order? Why 
couldn't we have a committee process that would work a bill through?
  Well, they did, but Nancy Pelosi dropped that one in the trash, wrote 
her own. Why couldn't they allow the reconciliation package, if it had 
any merit, to be amended on to the ObamaCare legislation, even if it's 
the legislation that was written in Speaker Pelosi's office, and 
rejected that out of committee? Why couldn't that have been an 
amendment that could have been voted on up or down here in the House of 
Representatives attached to the same piece of legislation?
  Why couldn't they have put the language of Barack Obama's Executive 
order that supposedly says the Federal Government's not going to fund 
abortion. Why couldn't they have put that into the bill too and had an 
honest debate on an honest piece of legislation? Why not?
  Well, because it wasn't. Because they could not pass it under an 
honest process. It had to be a legislative shenanigans process. That's 
what we got.
  And as that bill went to final passage that night, I got a little bit 
of sleep that night, not much. I drafted legislation to repeal 
ObamaCare. Probably at the same time, me not knowing it, Congresswoman 
Michele Bachmann of Minnesota drafted legislation to repeal ObamaCare. 
We each got our legislation drafts down and they came to us shortly 
after 9 o'clock that morning, exactly the same 40 words, within 3 
minutes of each other, that said we're going to--now, I'm going to do 
this a little bit in summary, but only 40 words--that this Congress 
would repeal the act of ObamaCare. And it references the two sections 
that are the components by number, by bill number, and the last words 
of that repeal bill is as if it had never been enacted.
  So we introduced that legislation, actually separately. I joined on 
hers and she on mine, and we went to work to get signatures to move the 
repeal bill. That turned into a discharge petition with 173 signatures 
on it, and that would be throughout the summer and into the fall of 
last year that we were getting signatures on the discharge petition.
  And Mr. Speaker, you will know that if there's 218 signatures, a 
majority of the House of Representatives on a discharge petition that 
represents a bill, that bill bypasses committee, and the Speaker can't 
block it, and it comes to the floor to be voted up or down without 
amendment. That's what a discharge petition does.
  Well, it took us a long ways down the line of a commitment to repeal 
ObamaCare, and it was a tool that was used by several, and I'll say 
many candidates for Congress who now, some of them elected to this 
Congress, part of the 87 freshmen Republicans, all of whom ran on the 
repeal of ObamaCare. And I believe, and don't know this, and I've heard 
no exceptions, but I believe it's also likely that all of them ran on 
defunding ObamaCare, cutting the funding off, because we knew that a 
Republican majority here in the House could pass the repeal of 
ObamaCare, which we did in the second week here, under H.R. 2.

                              {time}  1550

  The second highest priority for Speaker Boehner was the repeal of 
ObamaCare. H.R. 1 was funding the government; H.R. 2 was repealing 
ObamaCare.
  That legislation passed the House with a resounding solid bipartisan 
vote and went over to the Senate, where every Republican in the Senate 
voted to repeal ObamaCare.
  We committed to cutting off the funding to ObamaCare, and that's the 
next step. And I said, since last July at least, to cut off all the 
funding to ObamaCare in every appropriations bill that comes out of the 
House of Representatives.
  Well, H.R. 1 was the single piece of legislation where we had the 
maximum amount of leverage. That is the funding for the duration of the 
year for all of the functions of government.
  We learned sometime last year that there were automatic 
appropriations

[[Page H2257]]

deceptively, I believe, written into ObamaCare that are designed to 
create this perpetual money machine that funds the implementation of 
ObamaCare. Some call it mandatory spending. I do not. I call it 
automatic spending. There is automatic spending in ObamaCare written 
into it. And the number is still on my hand in Sarah Palin fashion, 
$105.5 billion automatically appropriated, spent in an authorization 
bill completely outside of regular order of this Congress, with a 
handful of exceptions, in short term and few dollars. But in scope and 
in magnitude, no one has ever tried, no one has ever had the audacity 
to try to impose an automatic appropriation on this Congress that would 
be $105 billion.
  Some of that money goes beyond that. That is just 10 years. Some of 
it is appropriated, Mr. Speaker, in perpetuity; $1 billion a year here 
and $1 billion there that goes on every year that can't be stopped 
unless Congress goes in and shuts it off. And that is what we need to 
do, Mr. Speaker. We need to do this in every bill.
  This continuing resolution that is before us now must include within 
it the language that cuts off the funding to ObamaCare, the current and 
the previous, the language that cuts off the automatic spending in 
ObamaCare.
  There is $18.6 billion for fiscal year 2010, most of it not spent 
yet, that implements ObamaCare, $18.6 billion of the $105.5 billion, 
and there is another $4.95 billion in 2011 that automatically 
appropriates to ObamaCare. That is $23.6 billion, Mr. Speaker, that 
goes in to kick ObamaCare in. It has been found unconstitutional by two 
Federal courts, and it has been rejected by the American people who 
sent 87 freshmen Republicans here to repeal ObamaCare, and we are 
sitting here looking at $23.6 billion in automatic spending. We are 
struggling to cut the budget by $61.5 billion. Well, let's do that. But 
over here is $23.6 billion in automatic spending that goes on.
  And if, as I believe, Harry Reid is committed to shutting our 
government down--and by the way, the majority leader in the United 
States Senate speaks, I think, as a proxy for the President. What does 
the President want here? Well, he wants to delay, or he would be 
telling Harry Reid to pass something. And I believe Harry Reid wants to 
delay and then shut down.
  They have convinced me that their intention all along was to shut 
down this government. That is why they agreed to a short-term 
continuing resolution until March 4, so they could posture themselves 
to be in a position to force a shutdown of the government. They think 
that they can blame it on Republicans, and then the public will punish 
Republicans at the polls.
  Well, Mr. Speaker, I will submit that is not the way it is and not 
the way it will be now, because John Boehner and Eric Cantor's 
leadership have demonstrated clearly that this majority in this 
Congress, the Speaker's office, the majority leader's office down the 
line have three times--H.R. 1, 2-week CR, 3-week CR--demonstrated there 
are the dollars for the legitimate functions of government. There are 
the dollars for it. We have provided it three times here, and three 
times the Senate hasn't moved on anything of their own initiative.
  So they have convinced me that their goal all along was to shut down 
the government. And if I didn't believe that, all I had to do was 
listen to Senator Schumer or Howard Dean or some of the language coming 
out of Majority Leader Reid. I am convinced that they are committed to 
shutting this government down.
  If they do that, we need to say to them: Here are all the resources, 
again, and no money to implement ObamaCare.
  If there is no money to implement ObamaCare but all the money that is 
necessary for other fiscally responsible, legitimate functions of 
government and they go in and shut this government down and point their 
fingers at us, the American people will know differently. They will 
understand that it always was the strategy to shut the government down 
by the Democrats in the Senate, and the White House, and that we are 
committed to keeping it open. But we cannot be allowing the funding to 
go forward to an unconstitutional taking of American liberty, which is 
ObamaCare on its face.

  It is unconstitutional in four different ways: It is irresponsible; 
it is unsustainable; it can't be funded; and we can't find the funds to 
fund it all. It is $2.6 trillion in outlays in the first 10 years.
  We must, Mr. Speaker, cut off the automatic funding to ObamaCare, and 
any funding going forward to ObamaCare let the courts decide. And we 
decide here in the House of Representatives to draw a line, draw a 
bright line and stand firm. That all needs to happen in that way.
  And history tells us this, Mr. Speaker: That when there was a 
government shutdown, the argument last time was over spending, most of 
it within either Medicare or Medicaid. If my memory serves me 
correctly, it was over $300 billion in cuts. Whether it would be a 
plus-up or a plus-down from that, you can't take a stand on a money 
figure. You can't say, I'm going to stand and fight on $300 billion. 
But if they lower my cuts down to $299 billion, I'm going to be a 
``no.'' Or, if they take it up to $301 billion, I will be happier yet. 
You cannot stand on a principle that is a dollar figure, because 
whatever you pick it is always going to be on a sliding scale. It is 
not a principle.
  We are standing on $61.25 billion right now. Well, if they lower 
those cuts down to $61 billion, do we say ``no''? I think that the 
Democrats on the other side understand that. That is why they have 
floated this number of $33 billion in cuts. They haven't said whether 
they were willing to accept it yet.
  They got to $33 billion in cuts this way: They took $61.5 billion, 
divided it by two, and rounded it up to $33 billion. That is how they 
arrived at the number. There isn't any question in my mind about that. 
And they want to be able to say, well, we met you halfway and a little 
more, so you should be happy that we are willing to compromise. To 
them, compromise is: Take the number, cut it in half, and then, if you 
can't get agreement, cut it in half again. And they call it compromise.
  Well, I have said money itself is not a principle. You can't stand on 
something strongly unless you are standing on a principle. Well, a 
principle is an unconstitutional 2,600-page taking of American liberty, 
the nationalization of our skin and everything inside it called 
ObamaCare. That is a principle.
  It is completely unsuitable for an American people that live with the 
liberty and freedom that God gave us, that our Founding Fathers so well 
articulated in the Declaration and in the Constitution, that is part of 
our tradition, part of our history, and part of the inspiration for the 
entire globe to be knocking on the door wanting to come to the United 
States of America. Because of what? Liberty, Mr. Speaker, listed out in 
the Bill of Rights: Freedom of speech, religion, and the press. Freedom 
to peaceably assemble, and petition the government for redress of 
grievances. The Second Amendment, to keep and bear arms. The right to 
own property. Protection from double jeopardy. To be tried by a jury of 
your peers. The philosophy of Federalism that devolves the powers down 
to the States or the people respectively. All of this and going on. 
Equal protection under the law and the 14th Amendment. On and on and 
on.
  These are the inspirations for a vigorous people, a people that have 
a belief and a common cause and a common culture, a cultural continuity 
of belief in our liberty.
  And they would impose us, what? Socialized medicine? A Federal taking 
of our right to manage our own health care? And part of that management 
would be to buy a health insurance policy that is driven by the 
marketplace that people demand and want? That would have any of the 
bells and whistles that the market demands and have every bell and 
whistle that the market demands, and should not have mandates imposed 
on it by the Federal Government that are imposed within the States.
  People should be able to buy their own health insurance policy across 
State lines. The protection for the monopolies of State health 
insurance companies is anti-market, it is anti-free market, it is anti-
freedom. And John Shadegg's bill that he pushed so hard while he was 
here needs to be something that goes to the President's desk, that 
allows people to buy insurance across State lines; so that a

[[Page H2258]]

young man 23 years old paying $6,000 a year for a typical policy in New 
Jersey, laden with mandates, could instead go buy that typical policy 
in Kentucky for not $6,000 but $1,000. Doesn't that help our costs? 
Doesn't that get more people insured? Doesn't that do the right thing 
and protect people?
  That is just one. I could take you down through a list of seven or 
eight or nine good solid Republican ideas, most, if not all, of which 
can come to this floor as standalone pieces of legislation and be sent 
over to the Senate, where Harry Reid would push them off his desk into 
the trash can. They wouldn't have the respect of going in his desk 
drawer.

                              {time}  1600

  Why? Because they are liberty oriented; they are free market 
oriented; they are constitutional; they are principled, and it gives 
people back their liberty.
  But this country, the United States of America, this vigorous people 
that we are, we have a vitality that is unique. We have all of the 
vitality that comes from the rights that I have talked about. We have 
the vitality of the free enterprise system, which is the foundation of 
our economic system.
  I would point out that there are flashcards that newly arriving 
immigrants, or those, I should say, that are studying for their 
citizenship test, mostly that is 5 years in, studying for their 
citizenship test, flashcards. On one side it will say, Who is the 
father of our country? You snap it over, it says, George Washington. 
Next card, Who emancipated the slaves? Snap that card over, Abraham 
Lincoln. Next card, What is the economic system of the United States of 
America? Free enterprise capitalism. That is an axiom of faith of the 
American people, that we are free to spend our money as we choose.
  ObamaCare commandeers our paycheck, Mr. Speaker. It takes it over. 
And they say you must buy this health insurance policy that is approved 
or produced by the Federal Government, and if you don't do that, we are 
going to send the IRS in to punish you, to fine you. It is a punishment 
if you don't buy it.
  If they can pass a law that requires you to buy a product that is 
produced or approved by the Federal Government, if they can commandeer 
5 percent or 10 percent, or in many cases 25 or 40 or even 50 percent 
of your payroll to pay for a health insurance premium, if they can 
commandeer any part of your earnings and force you to buy something, 
the next step is they can commandeer your money to buy a General Motors 
car because their investment may not be doing so well, or a Chrysler. 
Or maybe you could buy some shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They 
took that over, too, didn't they? Maybe they can force you to invest in 
the student loan program. They took that over, too, didn't they? They 
could force you to buy a certain kind of washing machine, a certain 
kind of shoes. And they can also force you, at that point, you have to 
buy so much diet pop instead of non-diet pop, so many ratios of carrots 
versus candy bars.
  If they can commandeer 1 percent of your paycheck and force you to 
buy a product, they can commandeer 100 percent of your paycheck and 
force you to buy all products, to the point where you are enslaved by 
the Federal Government. How can that be constitutional for a free 
people?
  Mr. Speaker, I will submit it is not and it cannot be, and that is 
why this House voted resoundingly to repeal ObamaCare. That is why 
every Republican here and in the Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare. That 
is why we must cut off all funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare in 
every appropriations bill, and that is why they deceptively plugged 
into ObamaCare the automatic appropriations of $105.5 billion, and that 
is why they front-loaded it with $18.6 billion in the FY 2010 budget to 
intensively implement ObamaCare, and that is why there is another $4.59 
billion in this fiscal year. There is $23.6 billion sitting there in 
the pot.
  And think of this, Mr. Speaker. If they are successful in forcing a 
shutdown of this government, and while they are busily trying to point 
their fingers at those of us who provide the resources to keep it open, 
we would still see $23.6 billion hard at work implementing ObamaCare. 
The lights could go off in Federal offices all over America because of 
a shutdown, but you could drive down and look at where the lights are 
on. Guess what? That is the $23.6 billion still there, still 
implementing ObamaCare, like Santa's little elves, making sure we have 
socialized medicine before the lights come back on.
  That is what we are faced with, Mr. Speaker. That is where we must 
draw a line. We must stand and do this fight. The fight is inevitable. 
So choose the ground when the army is the strongest and on the ground 
that we can stand and fight on, and that is this: Provide the resources 
for the legitimate functions of this government, not for the 
illegitimate functions of this government. And if the President of the 
United States working through his mouthpiece, Harry Reid, or directly 
brings about a shutdown, it will be about a bright line between all of 
the legitimate functions of government versus perhaps a legislative 
tantrum, an act of audacity and narcissism that his signature piece of 
legislation called ObamaCare means more to the President of the United 
States than all of the functions of government put together, Mr. 
Speaker.
  For all those reasons, I say, this is the week to draw the line. This 
is the week to do the fight. This is the week to do the battle. We have 
to have it. We can't avoid it. Let's get it over with so we can get on 
with the legitimate functions of the United States Government.

                          ____________________