[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 175 (Wednesday, November 16, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H7703-H7706]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
INTEGRITY IN GOVERNMENT
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 always my privilege to be
recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of
Representatives. And I find it a bit ironic that I'm watching the
Representatives from Florida, New York and Texas speak to the Speaker
pro tem just previous to you about the election situation. I'm thinking
about the 2000 election when it was reported--not substantiated to my
satisfaction--but reported that as many as 25,000 people from New York
voted both in New York and in Florida either for a President from Texas
or one from Tennessee where the Speaker pro tem momentarily ago was
from. That's a bit of an irony as I listen to this discussion that's
going on about the election process here in the United States.
And I think there's too little concern on the part of my colleagues
whom I do respect and appreciate and count as friends in many respects.
I think there's too much focus on how you get more warm bodies to the
polls as many times as possible and not enough on the legitimate vote.
Now as I listened, the gentleman from Texas said there's no
demonstrable evidence that fraud is occurring. I would disagree. I
think convictions are demonstrable evidence, and the convictions
particularly in Troy, New York, of election fraud. I have seen it in
the State of Iowa in a fashion that didn't result in convictions, but I
have conviction that it happened. We have paid too little attention to
election fraud in the case that I mentioned of people voting in the
State of New York and in the State of Florida. If they do both, they
surely can't be lawfully voting in each of the States. They may not be
lawfully able to vote in either State, but voting in both States.
And how does that happen, Mr. Speaker? This is an unexamined subject
matter on the part of my colleagues from the other side of the aisle.
How does it happen that people can vote someplace where they don't
reside? How does it happen that people can vote when they're not
citizens? How does it happen that they can vote when they're not
qualified to vote? How does it happen that they can vote in more than
one jurisdiction for the same election, not necessarily simultaneously,
but possibly simultaneously?
And I can answer those questions to some degree how that is, Mr.
Speaker. It works this way: the voter registration lists within the
States are not integrated among the States. And so if an individual is
registered to vote in New York, they can also be registered to vote in
Florida, or any adjoining State for that matter, New Jersey,
Connecticut, you name it. All we have to do is go in and register in
one State and go register in the other State.
In fact, in my own State, it was the case--and probably is not still
the case--that the voter registration list does not integrate itself
county to county in a definitive way. If John Doe registers to vote in
Washington County and goes over to register to vote as John M. Doe in
Jefferson County, there's two registrations there, and John Doe can
vote in both counties, both by absentee.
In fact, in my State where there's 99 counties, it's possible to vote
in 99 counties simultaneously by absentee. If you just simply register
yourself to vote, put up an address that is perhaps a false address,
but an address of someone else, and if the voter registration is unique
in any way--the initial could change, it could be ``John,'' it could be
``Jonathan,'' the middle name can change, and that's all it would take.
The same person could vote multiple times in a State. Now think how
many times that can happen when they're crossing the State lines.
No one has yet calculated how many times an individual could vote in
the United States if they really wanted to game the system. And we do
hear credible stories of buses taking people across the State lines and
buses taking people from precinct to precinct to vote multiple times.
And who have been the advocates for same-day registration? Who have
been the advocates for lowering the integrity of the vote itself? It's
been the people on the other side of the aisle. It's been the
Democrats.
The things that Republicans bring to establish credibility and
integrity in the vote are undermined by the Democrats on the other side
of the aisle, Mr. Speaker. And why? Because they say that people are
disenfranchised from their vote. And I would argue that legitimate
voters, American citizens who respect the law and vote one time, one
place in their legal residence, are watching their vote be canceled out
by illegitimate votes. That happens in this country. Because we don't
have convictions for people voting in multiple locations for the same
election isn't an indication that it doesn't happen. We do have some
convictions.
We don't have large numbers of convictions as the gentleman from
Texas may have implied but not specifically said. And the reason for
that is because our voting laws are so open, so lax, and so insecure
that it's nearly impossible to get a conviction.
For example, in the State of New Mexico, if I were working the voting
booths as an election worker in New Mexico, and I opened the polls up
at, say, 8 o'clock in the morning, and I'm sitting there for the list
of people that come in, and they say, I'm John Doe, I'm Jane Doe, I'm
Jim Smith, if one of them walks in and says, I'm Steve King and I live
at the address where I live, and I have not yet voted, I am compelled,
even as an election worker, to let that false and fraudulent individual
vote under my name. It's against the law in New Mexico and other States
to challenge an illegitimate voter even when you know that they are
illegitimate, even to the extent that they allege they are the person
who is checking them off the list. They still have to let them vote,
and they can't challenge them.
{time} 2000
That's how open these laws are. That's the kind of thing that you
have promoted, the kind of thing that you won't defend, the kind of
thing that I will yield to if you've got a defense for opening up and
eroding the integrity of the vote in the United States.
And many of these are State laws, I recognize that, but we give
direction and leadership. We have the HAVA Act, the Help America Vote
Act, that opened it up even more. And I think the gentleman from New
York, who
[[Page H7704]]
spoke within the last half hour--and I do agree on this. There should
be a paper trail so we can audit the votes that are cast. Now, we've
agreed on that. We've worked together on that cause. We have not
arrived at that as far as a conclusion for this Congress is concerned
that can be passed into law, but I think there should be a paper trail.
And the gentleman from New York and I are in conceptual agreement on
that, Mr. Holt. I appreciate that push. I do think it's out of the
right spirit of his head and his heart, but it might also be from
suspicion that the people that produce the electronic voting machines--
they may be Republicans, they may be Democrats, and that seems to color
our judgment. Mine is. Don't give anybody a chance to cheat. And don't
let the electronic voting machines be offered in such a way that some
programmer can jigger the machine to give an advantage to either party.
I think of the election situation that took place in Florida in the
year 2000. I spent 37 days focusing on that. I was the chairman of the
Iowa State Senate State Government Committee. It was my job to see to
it that Iowa didn't become a Florida, the fiasco in Florida. So,
therefore, I chased all the way through the Internet, everything that I
could find, all the research that I could come up with on the election
processes State by State, 37 days of focus. And then after that, not
quite as focused, but I followed through on legislation which passed
the Iowa Senate, and I discovered a significant amount of election
fraud in this country. This is in the year 2000, well before the
American public had heard of ACORN. I found, I believed, a significant
amount of election fraud.
There were a pair of brothers in Florida that had done research on
election fraud in Florida, the Collier brothers, both of them now
passed away. They've written a book on this and did a video on it, as I
recall. And part of that video was walking into the maintenance shop
where they took care of the machines that counted the punch-card
ballots, the notorious punch-card ballots that were prevalent in
Florida in the year 2000. And they have the video of the former
election commissioner, who had retired from that and handed it over of
course to his successor and gone to work maintaining the vote-counting
machines, the machines that you would feed in a stack of punch-card
ballots and it would run through, and the machine would read it and it
would spit the number out the other side. And on that video--and it was
available at the time. I don't know if it's available now. The man
walked through his shop and pulled out of the drawer a gear. And he
said, here's how we do this, we just grind one tooth off of this gear,
and then every time 10 ballots go through it kicks an extra one in on
our side. On videotape, there it was. And of course they got nervous
afterwards and tried to do what they could to suppress it.
Those kinds of things have gone on in America. They have gone on in
Florida. They've gone on in other States. And the people that advocate
for or defend more open election laws and process are, whether they
realize it or not, enabling election fraud in this country. I want it
to be as clean as possible, as legitimate as possible. I don't want a
single qualified vote to be canceled out by an unqualified vote, let
alone one that's designed to be fraudulent. I don't want buses going
across State lines loaded with people that are in there to do same-day
registration to vote and disappear.
We had voters in Iowa that registered from a hotel room where the
campaign had out-of-State workers. People don't live in hotels in these
kinds of neighborhoods. It may happen in the inner city. It doesn't
happen in a hotel in the neighborhoods I'm talking about in Iowa. These
are people that come and stay a couple days, or 4 or 5 days, maybe a
week, and they're gone again. These are folks that have a home of their
own. It isn't a residence. When you register to vote from a hotel,
where they didn't have a single guest that stayed longer than 2 weeks
in the last year, we're pretty sure that if that's the hotel where they
put their campaign workers that came from out of State, it's a pretty
good bet that those votes that were registered in that hotel are votes
from people that are not legitimate to vote within that precinct,
within that district, or probably, in almost each of those cases,
within the State.
Here's another one, the statement made by the gentleman from Texas:
If you have no Texas driver's license, you have to get someone to take
you to the polls. Well, is that person a recluse? Don't they have an
opportunity for an absentee ballot? Do they ever go to town, for
example? And if they do, can't they time their trip to the grocery
store to go on election day and vote?
And the concern about the primary part of this, yes, I think there
are some fraudulent primaries that take place, and there are some that
are stacked up that I'd like them revisited. I'd like to see the
Granite State revisit their primary process that lets people go to the
polls and vote and--say the Democrats go to the polls and vote in the
Republican primary. We in Iowa have a caucus system for our President,
and there we require that they be registered either as Democrats or
Republicans. They have to pick one or the other. And they don't get to
switch sides that easily, although it is possible in the State of Iowa.
But here's what needs to happen in this country. We need to have
voter registration lists that are free of duplicates, free of the
deceased, and free of felons where the law applies. And they need to be
certified to be citizens, not a motor-voter law that people go in that
don't speak English, that get their driver's license and then they ask
them a question, check this box, check that box. If they don't
understand English, they don't know what they're saying yes to. They
don't realize that they are under penalty of perjury if they claim to
be a citizen and they are not. And so they will say yes; they get the
nod; now they're registered to vote. Now a noncitizen--quite often
illegal--is in a position to cast a ballot.
And we saw 537 votes be the difference in the State of Florida in the
year 2000 on who would be the President of the United States; the
Commander in Chief and the leader of the free world decided by 537
votes in the State of Florida. Now, every time they recounted those
votes in Florida, I think that Republicans on this side and Democrats
on this side will agree that it came back to that same number. And if
you've got some other narrative, again, I'll yield to you, you can tell
me what your narrative is. But the consensus now, after all this
analysis, is we've got a legitimate vote there. George Bush was not the
appointed President; he was the elected President. But it was very,
very close in the year 2000 and it did pivot on Florida. But how far
apart would that election have been if one could actually know which of
the votes were fraudulent and which were not?
The last time I came to the floor I heard the minority whip come to
the floor and make the statement that we didn't have evidence--again,
as we've heard from the gentleman from Texas--no demonstrable evidence
that fraud is occurring. And the gentleman from Maryland's statement
was close to that, although not exact. I'd argue the opposite. We have
ACORN--ACORN that admitted to more than 400,000 fraudulent voter
registrations, more than 400,000 confessed-to fraudulent registrations.
This is the acorn that I carry in my pocket, Mr. Speaker. I carry it
in my pocket every day to remind me what happens to this country if we
let organizations like ACORN or advocates that seek to diminish the
integrity of the vote take over. If they do that, then they erode the
faith of the American people in the election. You can have fraudulent
elections, but as long as we believe that they're legitimate, the
American people are going to accept the results because we do have
great faith in this constitutional Republic, which is guaranteed to us
from Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, by the way, shall
guarantee a republican form of government.
But this country respects the election process, and that's why we
accept the results of the election process. And if we lose faith in the
election process, legitimate or not, then the very bedrock that the
foundation of our country--the Constitution--sets on crumbles and the
Constitution itself crumbles, and we crumble into some form of anarchy
because we will have lost our integrity in our election process.
Now, is it too much to ask that if someone goes to the polls that
they
[[Page H7705]]
would bring with them a picture ID? I wonder if any of those folks have
ever gotten on an airplane or if they've ever gone to rent a movie and
they're asked for an identification to support their credit card when
they rent a movie. That's not too much to ask. I've never heard anyone
come to this Congress and say: I demand my civil liberties. I demand
that I be able to rent a movie without any identification, without any
credit card. Why can't we just do that on my word? I'll walk in and
sign this paper that says, I'm Joe Blow and I live at 100 Exotic Avenue
and I want to rent an exotic movie, and I don't want to have to have
identification to do that. We've never had anybody ask for that this
Congress. They know they don't have a civil right to do business in
this country without identification.
{time} 2010
If the merchant requires that identification, they willingly supply
it. And yet to choose the next leader in the free world, the Commander-
in-Chief, the President of the United States, the advocates that have
stood on the floor have said to the effect of, anybody that walks up
there and attests that they are a living, breathing human being and
that they live somewhere, they can vote and they can register on the
spot, and they can vote and they can walk away not showing any
identification whatsoever. And in some cases it just takes someone to
attest to that they are the individual that they say they are.
So they don't really even need to misrepresent themselves. They can
walk up and say, I'm Joe Blow, I want to vote here, and I live in this
precinct. They sometimes will lie about where they live, but they can
actually say who they are. And then they can walk to the next precinct
and say, I'm Joe M. Blow, and then I'm Joe N. Blow at the next precinct
and O. Blow and P, Q, R, right on down the line. They could put a
number in for their middle name and vote in 99 counties in the State of
Iowa, and they can do it in many of the other States as well.
We do not have the integrity in our election process that we need. I
know that it's being gamed. I also know that we're not getting the
convictions and the prosecutions because we don't have the structure in
place even to get those convictions because we've eroded the integrity
to the point where there's not a basis there to bring that kind of a
prosecution.
But then we watch George Soros invest in the campaigns of multiple
secretaries of state across the country. And where was it? Swing
States. And what happened in those close elections where George Soros
was a campaign contributor?
We know what happened. Those real close elections, in the last minute
votes showed up that were surprises, and the election turned. We have
at least one Senator down the aisle in my neighborhood that arrived in
that fashion, Mr. Speaker.
And so I am disturbed about the results of these elections if they do
not reflect the actual will of the American people, the actual will of
the people within the jurisdiction that should be voting for those
candidates; and I believe we need to enhance the integrity of the
ballot.
I would shorten the terms that a person could be asking for an
absentee ballot, and I would tighten the conditions and so that if it's
reasonable for you to vote in person on election day, do so. These
elections should not be a drawn out, 45- or 90-day absentee ballot
affair. The more we do the absentee ballots, the more we cast our
ballots from afar, the more likely it is we're voting for a candidate
who's passed away during the campaign, and the less likely it is we
will know all the things we need to know to make a reasoned judgment
about that candidate.
In fact, at spots we have elected a United States Senator who was,
who had passed away in a tragic plane accident. And I regret that that
happened, but the people went to the polls and voted to elect that
person who was passed away.
I'm for a voter registration system that's free of duplicates,
deceased and, where the law applies, felons. I'm for a picture ID, a
government-issued picture ID that has legitimacy, and I'm opposed to
motor voter. I'm opposed to satellite voting, and I'm opposed to same-
day registration.
And all of these components of the election process, I add to that
again, there needs to be a paper trail for the ballots. Let's have
integrity. Let's have a certification that they be citizens from the
secretaries of state of each of the States. And then, if we don't have
enough integrity in our ballots, something's got to happen where we
crunch the databases of the voter registration against those of the
other States to find out how many duplicates there really are. And
there would be many.
So I have less faith in this than most of the American public does;
and if they had the exposure to what I've had the exposure to, I would
submit, Mr. Speaker, that there wouldn't be the confidence in this
election process that the American public has; and that lack of
confidence might result in a different kind of a result here within
this Congress and within the States. I think that they would impose
more integrity in the ballot process.
And so I didn't come here to speak about that. I listened to the
gentlelady and the gentleman that spoke in the previous period and felt
that I had to express the other viewpoint. I actually came here, Mr.
Speaker, to talk about how we transform this economy here in the United
States.
And being from Iowa, I've listened to the economic proposals of each
of the Presidential candidates. I listened to them make their pitch for
their vision for America. And I said last January, February, March and
on throughout the summer, clear into August, at least, that we don't
have a Presidential candidate on the Republican side of the aisle
that's put together an economic recovery plan. Yes, they have pieces.
Yes, they have components, and they do tweak it around the edges, and
they'll argue that one piece or another is what it takes to bring our
economy back around to where it belongs.
Well, I've watched this economy devolve downward, and it has. It's a
deep trough. But worse than the deep trough is the length of this
trough that we're in. And it is an economic fact that if you look at
the patterns of economic growth and decline throughout the history of
the free market world, one will see that whenever there has been a
Keynesian economic theory applied, the more vigor with which it is
applied, the longer is the trough for a recovery.
If one will look at the grandest experiment of Keynesian economics we
had seen up till this point it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's new deal
that he unleashed on the American people, starting at the beginning of
his term. The Stock Market crashed in October of 1929, and we saw
Herbert Hoover caught up in the throes of that climactic shift
economically that was a global trend.
Herbert Hoover had--everything he'd touched had turned to gold up to
that point. He believed that he could steer government to solve the
problem. Well, he went to work to try to steer government, and it went
the other way on him.
Cool Cal Coolidge had a pretty good handle on it earlier, in the
previous century, and that was: Don't just stand there, do nothing,
because the free market system will recover itself.
Well, instead we had Smoot-Hawley; we had trade protectionism. We had
then the New Deal that flowed out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We had
billions of dollars that ultimately were spent throughout that period
of time, at least in today's dollars. And the CCC camps, the WPA
programs, the TVA, the list went on and on and on that came out of
Roosevelt. Throw another plan at it, throw some more money at it,
borrow some money, grow the Federal Government and put money into the
hands of people. And if you do that, the theory was, according to John
Maynard Keynes, who was the most influential economist of his time, and
his curse lingers on us in this Congress today, that if you would get
money into the hands of people, they would spend it and that would
stimulate the economy and the economy would recover. In other words, we
could spend ourselves into prosperity, according to John Maynard
Keynes.
Now, Franklin Delano Roosevelt bought into the Keynesian economic
theory with more vigor than George W. Bush bought into the Henry
Paulson stimulus plan, or should I say the TARP plan. $700 billion
tossed in there to pick up toxic debt was the plan. But back in the
thirties it was FDR's plan
[[Page H7706]]
to follow Keynes' directive, which was put money into the hands of
people and get them to spend and you'll stimulate the economy, because
they believed that our economy was consumer-driven.
Well, Mr. Speaker, every Keynesian experiment that I know of in
history, and that includes Roosevelt's New Deal, it includes the
Japanese, and it absolutely includes Barack Obama's economic stimulus
plan, plans his approach to this.
And by the way, the President, President Obama has told us directly,
face-to-face, that he believes that Roosevelt lost his nerve; that he
should have spent a lot more money in the thirties; that because he
lost his nerve and didn't spend more it brought about a recession
within a depression, and unemployment went up because Roosevelt didn't
borrow and spend enough government money.
Well, I know what it's like to compete with a government that has
more money than the private sector has. I know what it's like to try to
hire somebody off of unemployment. I know what it's like to train
employees, put them on a benefits plan, and have them finally in a
place where they can be a full-time employee that can yield a return on
the work that they're doing and you can count on them being to work
every day, and look at how their career is laid out working for your
company, and have the Federal Government or the State government, or
the county government, or even the city government come in and outbid
you for those services.
And how do they do that?
Well, they do that by looking around and thinking, here's this
trained employee. What's it take to get them? And they will up the ante
until they can hire this trained employee, and inevitably that employee
will take the offer of the higher paycheck and a benefits package that
competes or exceeds the one that you can offer from the private sector
and go to work for the government where they don't have the
responsibility, where they don't have to work as hard, where the hours
are more predictable, where the risk of employment is less and it's
more stable.
I recognize that. But better wages and better benefits and all of
those comforts that come with a government job work against the private
sector.
{time} 2020
And so private sector employers then find themselves faced with
having to go out and hire more help and train more help and see that
those employees roll over into the government employment.
The real downside, though, is this. Where does the government come up
with the money to pay more wages and pay better benefits, which they
have been increasingly doing over the last generation? By raising
taxes. The government raises taxes. It raises taxes to get the revenue
to bid against the private sector. And then the government comes out
and makes an offer that says we're going to extend unemployment
benefits out to 99 weeks.
Now, it makes it harder yet for the private sector to recover because
they're competing with the government's offer, the government's offer
to hire employees away or the government's offer to pay people not to
work. And where does that money come from? This Federal Government
borrows it.
This Federal Government borrows it. It borrows it from the Chinese,
borrows it from the Saudis, borrows it from multiple countries around
the world. And about 50 percent of it, to be fair, comes from investors
within the United States domestic funds that are invested into U.S.
Treasury bills, for example.
So a government that believes that it can stimulate an economy by
stimulating consumption and completely ignores the part of the equation
that requires that there be production for the economy to function. And
I would point out that if no one is producing any food, clothing, or
shelter, if no one is producing any transportation links out there in
the private sector, if no one is making available any of the
recreational facilities that will attract those dollars, there's not
production. If there's not production, there's no place for anyone to
spend their money.
This economy is production-driven, not consumption-driven. And we
must, to grow out of this economic situation that we're in, we must
produce goods and services that have a marketable valuable, both
domestically and abroad. When we do that, and we will eventually do
that, this country will grow out of this problem that we are in.
But we must get government off of our back. We must keep a
competitive tax rate for the rest of the world. We must reduce our
regulations. We must stimulate our entrepreneurs.
And this Republican side of the aisle has now for about 3 years been
saying, Where are the jobs? Mr. President, where are the jobs?
Well, I've heard that echo many times in this Chamber and across
through the media outlets in the country.
But I would submit that there is something else out there that's
required before there will be any jobs, and that's the prospect of
profit. Investors, employers, entrepreneurs must have a prospect for
profit before they will invest their money or put their time in or take
the risk of hiring employees, especially with ever more regulations,
especially with ObamaCare pouring down over everything that we do. We
are not going to get to a recovery until investors, entrepreneurs, and
employers can see an opportunity for profit and begin to realize that
profit because you can't write paychecks for employees from deficit
spending very long. You must have profit in order to pay employees.
So if there's going to be jobs, and we want Americans to go to work,
you must have profit in order to fund the wages. And I don't know why I
don't hear that from anybody else. It's as if this word ``profit'' is a
dirty word. No, it is a very good thing. America is a country that has
to build itself on profit, on free enterprise, capitalism.
I just took a look in my desk drawer today. There are flash cards in
there that were published in 2008. These are the flash cards that
enable one to be trained for naturalization here in the United States.
So if you want to become an American citizen, and you come to America
legally, get yourself a green card, and what you do is you have to take
the test. And part of that test is, what's the economic system? Free
enterprise capitalism. That's on the test. It's a little head's up, Mr.
President. I hope you could pass that test.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention, and I yield back the
balance of my time.
____________________