[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.

                          ____________________