Congressional Record, Volume 159 Issue 89 (Thursday, June 20, 2013)

[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 89 (Thursday, June 20, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H3975-H3982]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

IMMIGRATION REFORM

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Rothfus). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being
recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House
of Representatives. I won't, at this time, take up all the issues that
were raised in the previous 45 minutes or so, Mr. Speaker. Instead, I'd
like to talk about two topics, though, and one of those topics is the
topic of the farm bill which historically, in a sad way, failed here on
the floor of the House of Representatives within the last hour or so,
hour and a half.
The first thing I want to say about that is that the chairman of the
Ag Committee, Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, has conducted himself in a
fashion that is deserving of and he receives my admiration and should
receive that of his constituents and the people of this country.
One of the most difficult balances to achieve in any bill that we
produce here in Congress is that 5-year--we call it the ``farm bill''--
the 5-year farm bill that has roughly 80 percent nutrition in it and
about 20 percent agriculture in it. And each 5 years, we try to write
the best formula and look into the crystal ball for the next 5 years as
well as we can, and it takes the chairman of the Ag Committee, which is
the least partisan of the committees here on the Hill, to direct the
committee staff--which are very experienced and some of the best staff
people we have here on the Hill--to work with the ag staff of the
Democrat side, or the opposite party, and work with the ranking member
to try to bring together such a variety of issues that have to do with
sugar, dairy, crop insurance, nutrition and the qualifications for
nutrition, piece after piece of this.

[[Page H3976]]

It's like a huge accordion, and the chairman of that committee has
got to make decisions on each component of that huge accordion to try
to get it lined up in a way that if you go a little too far into the
necessary reduction in the food stamp side, you lose votes over here on
the Democrat side. If you don't take enough out of there, you lose
votes on the Republican side. If you don't take enough money out of
agriculture, you lose it over here on some of the conservative side.
And on the other hand, if you don't have enough subsidy, you lose votes
on the Democrat side.
This is a very difficult balance, Mr. Speaker, and the marriage
between the farm bill and the nutrition component of this, or the
agriculture component and the nutrition component that we erroneously
call the ``farm bill'' here because of history, that marriage was
created out of necessity because the farm program could not be passed
on its own. There were too many opponents to that, and the nutrition
program had too much opposition on its own. And they married the two
together, and each 5 years or so--and it hasn't always happened in 5
years. I don't know when it's ever happened perfectly--it's been dialed
together as closely as possible and cooperation was asked from
Democrats and Republicans to finally come together and pass a bill.
Frank Lucas put that together as perfectly as I think it could be
done. I think, Mr. Speaker, that he was a maestro in the way he
orchestrated all of this. And I watched as we went through the
committee markup. We did one last year and couldn't get floor time to
debate a bill. And so the work of the committee wasn't necessarily
wasted because we started again this year. We began to put the pieces
together again. We had a long markup of the bill, an extended markup of
the bill, not as long as it was the previous year, and the pieces came
together.
Here's what it needed: it needed to have a strong, bipartisan support
coming out of committee before it was going to get floor time, and it
needed to have a prospect, a reasonable prospect, of 218 votes here on
the floor of the House before that floor time would be granted. And as
we have seen from the Speaker, he has consistently said that he wants
to see the House work its will.
Now, he let that happen on a continuing resolution in January, or
I'll say February of 2011, and we did 92 hours of debate here on the
floor under an open rule. And every aspect of the budget was the House
working its will, and that was the longest and most expressive way that
I have seen this House work its will.
But the Rules Committee here on the farm bill that came out of the Ag
Committee allowed a full series of amendments here on the floor. The
chairman spoke to that number. I think he said there were over 100
amendments here on the floor. And, yes, there was an agreement made
under unanimous consent to pass a group of them that were not
contentious, ``en bloc'' as we say. I think there was a real sincere
effort to work a bill out here on the floor that would come to a
conclusion that received 218 votes.
Today, Mr. Speaker, we saw an example of when that didn't work, when
an amendment or two or three went on that were more of an objection to
that careful and delicate balance that had been put together by Frank
Lucas. In the end, when the votes could not come together--in a very
rare thing--a 5-year bill--that actually has been 6 years since we
passed one--failed here on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Mr. Speaker, I won't forget this day. I hope that this Congress, I
hope the American people, and I hope, especially, the constituents of
Frank Lucas remember the job that he has done. I don't ever remember
seeing anybody in this Congress work so wisely, so honestly, so justly
and so carefully to put together something that had to be so carefully
balanced to have a glass of cold water thrown in his face is what
happened here, I think, on the floor today.

{time} 1520

So I wanted to express my regret that the farm bill failed here
today, and my appreciation for Frank Lucas, for the subcommittee chairs
and the ranking members that worked with us on this. Those that gave
their word and kept it, I thank all of them. And Mr. Speaker, I'm
hopeful that the day will come that that work that has been earned is
exonerated by a vote here on the floor of the House. In either case, I
want the Record to reflect my opinion and my appreciation for Frank
Lucas.
We've had a big week here, Mr. Speaker. In this big week and this big
day that I'll just call yesterday, I look back on it after a full day
and I've wondered how one could actually do all of the things that were
accomplished yesterday. I just want to run through that narrative
because it's fresh in my mind. And that is that yesterday we did the
longest press conference in the history of Congress. I don't know what
competition there might have been for that--now, who would want to have
a long press conference? Well, somebody that wanted to have a long time
to air out a huge issue, and the issue was immigration.
I have believed for some weeks now--in fact, 2 or 3 months--that the
machinery of this Congress was set up to push immigration--and I'll
call it ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' which is of course the
euphemism for amnesty--through this Congress faster than the Congress
could adjust to it, learn about the policy within the issues, and
faster than the American people could learn about it and weigh in. We
always need to move at the pace of the American people so that they
have a chance to let us know what they think and we have a chance to
digest that policy and make those decisions.
This immigration issue was moving too fast. I believed, and I believe
that it was accelerated too quickly in the United States Senate. I
believe that today. It's moving too quickly without enough debate. It's
too big a decision to be made. I believed, and I believe that it's
still moving too quickly through the House of Representatives.
I would point out that there was a Gang of Eight in the Senate--there
remains a Gang of Eight in the Senate--that had been meeting in private
and holding some press conferences, talking about the things that they
were attempting to do, that finally rolled out a bill. I believe it was
rolled out at 844 pages long.
The debate and the markup that took place in the Judiciary Committee
in the United States Senate was relatively long. There were a good
number of amendments that were offered. But most of those votes--some
might even say all of those votes--just came down the lines of whether
they were part of the deal or whether they weren't part of the deal. So
it looked like the Gang of Eight had a deal going into the Judiciary
Committee markup. They certainly came out of that with their deal
intact, and it's to the floor of the United States Senate today. That's
fast and fast track.
While that's going on, the attention of the American people on this
issue has been split between the United States Senate and the House.
There has been a working group, a bipartisan working group, in the
House also. In the Senate, it's four Democrats and four Republicans in
the Gang of Eight. In the House, I learned not that long ago that the
working group was four Democrats and four Republicans. I also learned
that the Speaker encouraged their work, and I learned that they were
working in secret for perhaps the last 4 years.
Well, it was in secret. I have, I believe, served more time in the
seat, listening and hearing immigration information and reading through
reports, probably than anybody else on my side of the aisle over the
last decade--although there are two or three that I think have a high
level of expertise on immigration policy.
My antennae aren't that weak here, Mr. Speaker, that I'm not picking
up the signals of what's going on behind closed doors. We talk, we flow
through here to vote, we meet with each other, but I didn't know that
there was a secret committee working here out of the House of
Representatives that had the blessing of the Speaker. I didn't know
that until it was announced by the press some weeks ago. And the secret
committee that didn't admit to its existence, some of them facetiously
spoke about it as ``that secret committee'' even though they finally
admitted--and the press, I think, ferreted

[[Page H3977]]

this out--that they were on that committee. This committee of four
Republicans and four Democrats in the House of Representatives that was
secret--now it's not a committee of eight any longer, it's a committee
of eight minus one, at least as far as I know--their ability to produce
a bill seems to have been stalled here in this Congress. I'm not sorry
about that.
About the same time that conclusion may have been drawn, I heard our
Speaker, I believe it was 2 weeks ago on Friday at his press
conference, say he hoped to see immigration legislation pass out of the
Judiciary Committee in the month of June. Well, that was a surprise to
me. And when the announcement came shortly thereafter that we should
clear our schedules for this week and next week as members of the
Judiciary Committee to prepare for a markup on immigration, I saw that
as a green flag that was dropped that moves the immigration policy more
quickly here in the House of Representatives than I'm comfortable with.

But I do not criticize the conduct of our chairman of the Judiciary
Committee. Bob Goodlatte is one of the more astute people on policy
that we have in this Congress. He is a seasoned and knowledgeable and
smart legislator, and he sees the pieces that are moving and
understands what he needs to do to move the right pieces. And I have
served with him on two committees now for more than 10 years.
And yet the pace that's going through this Congress may be a wise
one. It may be a wise one if enforcement first is what emerges here
from the House of Representatives, and if the bill in the Senate can be
slowed down or stopped in the Senate.
The consensus that I hear among the Republican Conference in the
House of Representatives is this, Mr. Speaker: Stop the bleeding at the
border. Shut off the bleeding at the border. Close the border. Get that
done. And when you get that done, then come back and talk about the
other things.
I'd make the point that when I came here a little more than 10 years
ago, I said then let's stop the bleeding at the border. We've got to
close the border. I came to this floor, and when people said, well, we
can't--I've advocated long that we should build a fence, a wall and a
fence on our southern border. And that fence, wall and fence that we
can build on the border would be what will help to secure our border. I
agree that we would add to that sensory devices, vibration sensors,
motion detectors, you name it, add all that to it. But you simply
cannot have enough border patrol agents to control 2,000 miles of
border with the conditions that we have. They have to rotate shifts,
they get their vacations, there's time off. It takes a lot of people on
payroll to have enough people on the ground. And we know that there's
bleeding through that border, a lot that's crossing through the border.
Mr. Speaker, I went down and did a surprise visit to a point of entry
at Sasabe, Arizona. When I walked in there--they didn't know a Member
of Congress was showing up there--I spoke with the shift supervisor,
and his name was Mike Kring. He has since passed away, sadly. I think
that he was a strong enforcement officer. He was well respected by his
men that I saw around him. But I asked him about the frequency of the
crossing there, at the legal crossing at the point of entry which is
pretty much a rural port of entry in Sasabe, Arizona. And he said,
well, this crossing isn't the busiest crossing near here. There is an
illegal crossing east of me that's far busier and an illegal crossing
west of me that's far busier. This is just our formal crossing. That
tells you something about what's going on on the border.
We can close the border. We can do it with the resources that we
have. I have long said that. I have not changed my position--I think
it's stronger rather than weaker.
I may be the only one that's actually gone back and done the work to
calculate what we're spending to defend our southern border. These
numbers are old, Mr. Speaker, that I'm about to quote here this
afternoon. They come to this: there's a 50-mile area north of our
southwest border. Within that 50 miles, you will see Border Patrol
agents, Custom and Border Protection agents, you will see ICE agents in
there also. The effort that's done to control our border also is the
cost of their vehicles, their communications, their benefits package,
all of the things that we invest in that area. When you add that all up
and you divide it out by the 2,000 miles--which is pretty close to it,
it's the best number to use for the length of the border, the southern
border--you end up with this number--and this number would be adjusted
upward, not downward, to get it more current than the roughly 3 years
ago that I'm talking about: $6 million a mile. We're spending $6
million a mile, at a minimum, every year to control our southern
border. And we're getting, according to Border Patrol testimony before
the Immigration Subcommittee, about 25 percent enforcement.

{time} 1530

They think that of the 100 people that would try to cross the border
they might be stopping about 25 percent. Now, it's probably gotten a
little better in the last couple of years. But when I go down to the
border, Mr. Speaker, and I ask the agents there candidly, without
identifying themselves and without going on public record, what
percentage of the illegal border crossers are we interdicting, the most
consistent number I get is 10 percent, not 25. Some will smirk and
say--or not really smirk, but they will just kind of snort and say,
well, 3 or 4 percent. The real answer is we don't know. They know more
than we do.
The 10 percent number seems to me to be more likely to be an accurate
number than the 25 percent number. But think of this. At the peak of
the illegal border crossings, we would have about 11,000 a night. That
comes to 4 million illegal crossing attempts a year. Eleven thousand a
night. Twice the size of Santa Anna's army coming across our border
every night, on average. And maybe those illegal crossings have been
reduced by half--maybe. That's still the size of Santa Anna's army
every night.
We are talking about whether we should legalize the people that came
across that border. And we're assuming by the argument of, say, Mr.
Gutierrez of Illinois and many others that they're all innocent people
that were brought in by their parents--maybe against their will,
certainly without their knowledge that there was anything wrong with it
or illegal with it, that that's the universe of all the people that are
unlawfully present in the United States are just simply those that
wanted to come to America for a better life.
Mr. Speaker, I go down to the border. I sit alongside that fence at
night. I don't have night vision, but I have ears. I can sit in the
dark and I can hear the vehicles come down through the mesquite. In
fact, when you hear the one with the bad muffler come back a second
time and a third time, you know they're shuttling people to come across
the border at night. Within, say, an hour after dark to the next 2 or 3
or 4 hours after dark is when the highest traffic is, because they know
they've got to walk across the desert a long ways and they want to make
as much time as they can before it turns daylight where they might hole
up or where they might be picked up if they can get to the highway
north of there.
So I listen and I hear the vehicles come through across the desert. I
hear the mesquite scratch alongside the vehicle, and you hear the doors
open. Maybe 70, 80, 90, 100 yards south of the border you can hear the
doors open. You can hear people get out. First, they open the door. You
can hear them drop their pack on the ground. Then they get out and then
they close the door, kind of quietly, but it is still a quiet slam of
the door. You can hear them pick up their packs, whisper. You hear them
walk through the brush, and you can hear them cross the fence.
When you're down there at night without night vision, you sometimes
think you see some things you don't see. Have you ever sat around at
night in the pitch-black dark and watched? Your mind will play tricks
on you.
I can't say into the record, Mr. Speaker, that I saw good numbers of
people walk across the border. I know I heard them. That's the only
place they could have been going. I heard them go through the fence. I
believe I saw the shadows, but I'm not certain of that particular
component.
I'm very confident that there are hundreds and hundreds of people
that pour across that border at night. That number that I said is
roughly half of

[[Page H3978]]

11,000, the size of Santa Anna's army, which was 5,000 to 6,000, is
roughly the number that we will see every night.
Now, this border is wide open from that perspective. All of the
people that came into America aren't those that are coming through that
path. All of those people that are coming into America across that
border, sometimes you will see a pack train of 75. Every one of them
will have a pack of marijuana on their back and they're carrying it
into the United States, smuggling it into the United States. Those
people fit under the DREAM Act definition, too, if they came into the
United States before they were 16 and had been here whatever the length
of time might be. If they came here before December 31, 2011, it would
be the Senate version of the bill.
I've been on the border, Mr. Speaker, and seen the shadow wolves
interdict a smuggler, a marijuana smuggler, coming through with a false
bed in the box of a pick-up truck that was extended downward about 7 to
9 inches. Underneath that were the bales of marijuana. I unloaded them
myself and took them up to the scales where they were weighed. They
weighed approximately 240 pounds.
The reason for that, Mr. Speaker--240 pounds--is because in some
sectors of the border they don't have the ability to prosecute drug
smugglers and so they set a limit, the prosecutors will set a limit.
Sometimes it's you have to have more than 500 pounds of marijuana to be
prosecuted; sometimes you have to have more than 250 pounds of
marijuana to be prosecuted. The smugglers know that.
I'm going to guess that the sector that I was in that day, the limit
was, at least anticipated by the smugglers, to be 250 pounds. So they
dialed it under 250 to about 240 pounds and sent their guy through, and
he was caught. What we don't know is, was that a decoy so that when all
converged on that smuggler, that there wasn't a straight truck through
with a couple of tons of marijuana in it. I don't know that. Those are
tactics that we see. That's tactics of using sometimes illegal
crossings, sometimes going through the legal crossings that we have.
A lot of the border isn't marked. Across New Mexico, there's a
concrete pylon from horizon to the next horizon that's just set there,
and you would have to know what you were looking for to know where the
border is. It's just open desert. I've flown most of that, a lot of
that at night. I've also traveled--I'll say that I've traveled probably
every mile of our southern border, with the exception of some of the
miles along the Texas border, which zigzags quite a lot, and I haven't
covered all of that.

Mr. Speaker, we can build a fence, a wall, and a fence, and we can do
it with less money than we're spending today on the southern border,
over $6 million a mile on the southern border.
To put this in perspective, to build an interstate across Iowa
cornfield--expensive now, today, expensive Iowa cornfield--we can buy
the right-of-way, we can pay for the engineering, we can do the grading
and the drainage work and the paving and the shouldering and the
painting and the signage and the seeding and the fencing, all of that,
and open up a four-lane interstate highway for about $4 million a mile.
We're spending $6 million on every single mile of our southern border,
and we're getting something like 25 percent or less efficiency with
what we have there.
Part of it is because the President has declared, by executive edict,
amnesty. Even though I think the Border Patrol is doing their job as
well as they can within those limits, it's clear that ICE has been
handcuffed. We have had the President of the ICE union, Chris Crane,
testify before this Congress--I think he's been nine times into this
city within the last year and a half or so--doing a stellar job of
pointing out that the law requires the Federal immigration officers to
place into removal proceedings those people that they encounter that
are unlawfully present in the United States. It's their judgment on
that that dictates.
Well, the President has prohibited them from doing so through the
Morton Memos, the Morton Memos that have been rejected by this Congress
in two ways within the last 3 weeks or so. One is a full vote in the
House on the King amendment, and the other is a vote in the Judiciary
Committee on the King amendment. So we have, every way that we've had
the opportunity, rejected the idea that the President can simply make
up immigration law out of thin air, decide that he can issue work
permits, that he can legalize people that are here illegally, that he
can, by executive edict, destroy the rule of law--destroy the rule of
law.
I often talk about the pillars of American exceptionalism. We are a
great country, Mr. Speaker. This great country that we are relies upon
this America that Ronald Reagan described as the ``shining city on a
hill.'' This city is built on the beautiful marble pillars of American
exceptionalism. Many of them are within the Bill of Rights:
Freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly, all wrapped up
in the First Amendment to our Constitution;
There are property rights in the Fifth Amendment;
There is a prohibition on double jeopardy. You get to be faced by an
accuser and a jury of your peers;
The States' and personal rights that are reserved in the Ninth and
Tenth Amendments.
All of those are pillars of American exceptionalism. So is free
enterprise capitalism.
If we had none of that, we wouldn't have the Nation we are. If you
build--and I want to add to that, the core of our culture is Judeo-
Christianity. We welcome people of all religions. The foundation of the
American civilization is Judeo-Christianity. Without it, we can't be
the America we are either.

{time} 1540

So think of this beautiful shining city on the hill--which Reagan so
eloquently described for us--sitting on the beautiful marble pillars of
American exceptionalism, but I can't think of that city sitting there
without also thinking of an essential pillar of exceptionalism called
the rule of law.
Now, if you would take a jackhammer and chisel away that marble
pillar of American exceptionalism, which is freedom of speech, and
destroy freedom of speech, the beautiful edifice of our shining city on
the hill would crumble and fall. If you did the same thing to freedom
of the press, our shining city on the hill would crumble and fall. If
you took away our Second Amendment rights, which I didn't mention but
which are a pillar of American exceptionalism, eventually our other
freedoms would crumble and fall, and tyrants would take over. If you
put people subject to double jeopardy, we wouldn't be the civilization
we are, and the rule of law wouldn't mean what it does. It would
crumble and fall just as it would if you destroyed the rule of law, if
you have contempt for the rule of law, if the Supreme Court disregarded
the rule of law, and if they ruled on interpreting their law to be
their whim, their wish--not the very definition of the supreme law of
the land, being our Constitution.
It is as the President so well described on March 28, 2011, before a
high school here in Washington, D.C., when he was asked: Why don't you
just implement the DREAM Act by executive order?
His answer was to the students who were listening: I don't have the
constitutional authority to do that. You've been studying the
Constitution. You students know that it's the job of the legislature to
pass the laws, the job of the executive branch to enforce the laws and
the job of the judicial branch to interpret the laws.
Now, that is an accurate description as should aptly come from a
former adjunct professor of constitutional law at the University of
Chicago. That is our President. He knew what he was talking about, and
that description was consistent with his oath of office, Mr. Speaker.
The oath of office is defined within our Constitution. It's specific.
It has been concluded with ``so help me God'' for a long time, but
within that oath is also the oath to preserve and protect and defend
the Constitution of the United States. In the Constitution, it requires
the President of the United States--our chief executive law enforcement
officer and Commander in Chief--``to take care that the laws be
faithfully executed.'' That doesn't mean, Mr. Speaker, execute the law.
That doesn't mean execute the rule of

[[Page H3979]]

law. That doesn't mean execute the Constitution itself. It means you
take an oath, and your job is to uphold the law, to take care that the
law is being faithfully executed.
The President has defied his own oath of office. He has defied the
rule of law. He has defied the Constitution, and he said, I'm not going
to enforce the law. I'm not going to enforce the laws that I don't
like. I disagree with some of the immigration policy that has been
passed by Congress and signed by one of his predecessors--in fact,
signed by Bill Clinton. He is refusing to enforce those kinds of laws.
That does great damage to the Constitution, and it throws the balance
of the three branches of government out of whack. Our Founding Fathers
imagined that there would be competition for power and influence
between the three branches of government. They envisioned it always
with three branches of government--the legislative branch, the
executive branch and the judicial branch.
This Congress is in article I. That means we are more the voice of
the people than any other branch of government. It was the first and
most important branch. They also knew that they had to have a strong
chief executive--a strong President, a strong Commander in Chief. The
experiences they went through in fighting a Revolutionary War with the
Continental Congress told them you can't have a strong national defense
without a strong Commander in Chief, so they established that. They
established the balance between the legislative branch in article I and
the executive branch in article II and also the balance--and, I think,
to a slightly lesser degree--between the judicial branch. Think of it
as a triangle.
They envisioned that each branch of government would seek to expand
its power. That's human nature. You always want more power than you
actually have, whether you take this thing from the Pope to the
President, right on down the line to the Senators, who have a one one-
hundredth of the power of the Senate Chamber, and to the House Members,
who have a one four-hundred-thirty-fifth of the House Chamber. We
always want to have a little more leverage, a little more influence--
get your hands on a gavel or maybe become the majority leader, the
minority leader, the Speaker of the House. Actually, the former Speaker
of the House, Speaker Pelosi, just walked across this floor, Mr.
Speaker, and she would understand that as we all do. In a family, you
always want to have more influence. If the patriarch of the family is
the one who writes the rules, you always grate a little bit underneath
that. That's a natural thing to always try to grab a little bit more
power.
They knew it was human nature, so they set up this balance between
the three branches of government, but they envisioned that each branch
of government would jealously protect its constitutional authority and
not concede it to the usurpation of some other branch of government.
They envisioned that Congress would try to grow in its influence and
authority, and they gave the President veto power so that he could veto
the overreach, potentially, of the House and the Senate together.
They balanced the House and the Senate so that this hot cup of
coffee--or hot cup of tea, they were thinking here in the House of
Representatives--could be a quick reaction force when things go wrong
in America. A new crop of House Members comes in with the freshest of
vigor that comes from the American people, and they set about changing
things. That's a 2-year election cycle. We saw that in 2010 when 87 new
freshmen Republicans came into the House of Representatives--every
single one of them having run for office on the promise to
repeal ObamaCare, every single one. Meanwhile, while the House was
being heated up, the Senate itself--which, if all of the Senators
rather than roughly a third of them were up for election each cycle, I
think we would have seen the majority turn over in the United States
Senate, but it didn't quite do that.

So the Senate has been the cooling saucer to the hot cup of tea or
coffee that is the House. Our Founding Fathers saw that, and they
wanted to balance that. They wanted to have the longer view in the
Senate. They wanted the quick reaction forces in the House. They wanted
to blend them together, and they did. I think they did a very good job
of that.
They also wanted to then check an overreach of article I, the
legislative branch, the Congress, by giving the President of the United
States veto power. At the same time, they put constraints on the
President because we can control the activities of the executive branch
through the appropriations if we can actually control the
appropriations here in the House of Representatives. So they granted
that authority, but they expected that there would be like a tug of war
for that power. They did not think that the President of the United
States would take an oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States and be required to take care that the
laws be faithfully executed and then go out and execute the law rather
than enforce the law, but that's what has happened.
The President has with impunity defied the rule of law, and has
simply canceled immigration law that existed on the books that requires
ICE and Federal immigration law enforcement officers to place those
individuals unlawfully here in removal proceedings. That's the law. The
President suspended it.
And what has happened here in Congress?
There was an election after he did that. On March 28, 2011, he said,
I don't have the power to by executive order implement the DREAM Act.
On June 15, 2012, he assumed that authority, and he simply suspended
the rule of law and imposed his will, his wish, on America.
And what happened?
The people who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule
of law decided that they were going to honor the lawlessness. They
decided that they were going to comply with the President's order
because, well, their jobs were on the line, for one thing, but I say
also they have an oath of office for another.
When that happens, when there is a dispute between the legislative
branch and the executive branch of government, the judicial branch
needs to step in to sort out that dispute. I know they don't like to do
that, Mr. Speaker. In any case, I asked for a meeting and invited
people to come to the table, which they did, and we discussed how we
move forward to put a block on the President's unconstitutional
assumption of legislative authority--a violation of the separation of
powers.

{time} 1550

I had been through that litigation in the past on an issue that I'll
not take up here, but it had to do with a State issue and the State
chief executive officer. I knew the arguments. Out of that meeting came
the lawsuit of Crane v. Napolitano. That's Chris Crane, the president
of the ICE union as the lead plaintiff. Of course, now Napolitano is
the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.
That case went before the Northern District of Texas, the Federal
court, where Judge Reed O'Connor ruled in favor of the plaintiffs--
that's the ICE union and the list of plaintiffs that are there--ruled
in favor of it in nine of 10 arguments and sent the other argument back
to the executive branch to reword it in such a way--I'll just use my
terms, Mr. Speaker--it's more intelligible so he can answer and respond
on that particular point.
Generally, the decision was this: Judge Reed O'Connor essentially
wrote: shall means shall, not may. If it requires that the agents put
people that are unlawfully present in the United States in removal
proceedings, if it says they ``shall do so,'' then they shall do so.
Shall means shall. It doesn't mean may. And there is no word in our
language that is more definitive that can replace the word shall, at
least as far as legal parlance is concerned. That's essentially the
decision.
So it seems to be--and I'm optimistic that it's moving in the
direction--that we will get a final decision in a Federal court and
perhaps the administration will appeal this all the way up the line to
the Supreme Court.
But in the end, I can't imagine how a judicial branch of government,
how a Supreme Court could come down on the side of the President and
decide that the President of the United States has

[[Page H3980]]

the authority to make up law as he goes along or disregard law as he
goes along.
The President has argued--at least the President and his spokesmen
and spokeswomen have argued--that they have prosecutorial discretion.
Prosecutorial discretion means that they can't enforce the law against
every person who might violate the law because they don't have the
resources, so the resources need to be targeted where they do the most
good. That's prosecutorial discretion.
I agree that that exists and that it's necessary that the discretion
of prosecution exists. But I don't agree that the President can define
broad classes of people that include hundreds of thousands in a single
class and then decide that he's not going to enforce the law against
any of them. That is what he has done. He's manufactured four classes
of people and decided he's going to waive the law on all of these
classes of people, suspend its enforcement. That turns out to be an
invitation to more and more people to violate the law, even ``to the
extent of.''
We have had illegal aliens in the halls of the congressional offices
that have lobbied Members of Congress with impunity. And they will come
in boldly and say, I'm exempted from the law by the President of the
United States, so I can be here. And I demand that you agree with me
and get me my college education. They have been inside the Judiciary
Committee room. They have been introduced by the ranking member of the
Judiciary Committee. That's how far this has gotten, Mr. Speaker. The
contempt for the law, the contempt for the rule of law and the sense of
entitlement have gone beyond the pale.
So this rule of law, which must be reconstructed now, because the
verbal and keyboard jackhammers of the left have chiseled away at that
beautiful marble pillar of American exceptionalism called the rule of
law. And because they have done that, we must reconstruct it. And if we
can't hold the rule of law together, if we can't restore it, if we
can't reconstruct it, then it crumbles. If the rule of law, according
to the Gang of Eight's bill in the Senate, according to some of what
seems to be moving here in the House, destroys the rule of law at least
with regard to immigration, it destroys it.
There would be no enforcement of the rule of law with regard to
immigration unless you committed a felony. You're here unlawfully, you
commit a felony or you commit a combination of three mysterious
misdemeanors, that happens to qualify you for removal proceedings.
Those are exemptions that are part of it. They claim that they will
enforce the law on that.
The balance of it is if you cross the border illegally and come into
the United States, that is a crime, Mr. Speaker. If you overstay your
visa, which is about, let's say, a number that approaches 40 percent of
those who are unlawfully present in the United States, that's a civil
misdemeanor, not a crime, at least today. If you do either one of those
things only, they're not going to put you in removal proceedings. And
if you come across into the United States and you defraud your employer
and you come up with fraudulent documents and you use that in order to
get a job, this administration isn't going to enforce document fraud,
which is a felony against you.
Essentially it said if you can get into the United States legally or
illegally, if you can stay in the United States, you can cheat to get a
job, you can lie to your employer, you can use document fraud and there
won't be a penalty to any of these things. Essentially, nonviolent,
peaceful crimes are not going to be a problem. But if you get engaged
in some of the serious things like maybe drug smuggling or the crimes
of violence that we all know about or the threat of violence even, then
it makes the administration uncomfortable, and they might decide to
send you back and put you in the condition that you were in before you
broke the law.
But peaceful people have been granted amnesty by the President of the
United States. And this Congress has sat here almost placidly and
accepted it as if he has that constitutional authority, and he does
not. That's why the lawsuit of Crane v. Napolitano was filed, and it's
a clear understanding from my standpoint. But the confusion seems to be
that too many Members that take an oath of office to preserve, protect,
and defend this Constitution, as well, don't have a clear enough
understanding of the brighter line between article I and article II.

Our job is to legislate, write the laws. The President's job is to
enforce them. It's that simple. Yet there was an interpretation that
came out to us on the morning of November 7. Wednesday morning,
November 7, Mr. Speaker--and a lot of people will understand and
remember what that date was. That was the day after the election.
I was engaged in this election as much as I've been engaged in any
election. And as a Member of Congress from Iowa, I was also engaged in
the Presidential nomination and election process. I was engaged in the
debate. And I've done events that have to do with Presidential
candidates on a relatively regular basis. I think I understood what the
debate was about for the election for President of the United States.
As I listened to that, it was about jobs and the economy. If you
would put jobs and the economy in quotes and then put Barack Obama's
name in the search engine of Google, or if you would put jobs and the
economy in quotes and then put Romney or Mitt there in the search
engine of Google and send that off, you're going to get hundreds of
thousands of hits altogether because that was the topic of the election
last November 6, jobs and the economy. I told the Romney people I've
heard ``jobs and the economy'' so many times it puts me to sleep. Don't
you think you're putting the American people to sleep by beating the
same drum over and over again?
But remembering the mantra jobs and the economy until we were just
drubbed into numbness with it also reminds us that the election was
not, Mr. Speaker, about the immigration issue. I don't remember a
debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney that went into any depth or
substance on the immigration issue. Yet before the sun came up on
November 7, some of the leading pundits and experts concluded that Mitt
Romney would be President-elect by now before the sun came up on
November 7 if he just hadn't said the two words ``self-deport,'' or if
he had not been such a defender of the rule of law on immigration.
That was a surprise to me. I wish he'd have talked about it more.
Well, he didn't. The election wasn't about immigration, but talking
heads and, let me say, erroneously pragmatic individuals in my party
who decided that they would contribute to this argument that came from
both parties. And they drove the argument to the point where some
people were convinced the election really was about immigration when it
was not. And they argued that Mitt Romney would be President-elect if
he had just gotten a larger percentage of the Hispanic vote.
He would not, Mr. Speaker. If he had won the majority of the Hispanic
vote in the swing States, he still would not have won the Presidency.
If he had won 70 percent, he might have; but that didn't happen. And no
one really thinks that's going to happen in the near future. So they
came to a conclusion and thought they could support it with facts.
They've learned now that they can't support their conclusion with
facts, but they're determined to go forward with granting amnesty to
initially--they think--11 million people that are here in this country
unlawfully while providing the emptiest and most vacuous of promises
that one day they're going to get around to putting a plan together,
and if the plan happens to be implemented they might secure the border.

{time} 1600

That's what's going on. And I don't know how in the world they can
say this to the American people with a straight face and believe that
there's going to be border security in exchange for law enforcement.
It's not going to happen, Mr. Speaker. It didn't happen in 1986, one of
only two times that Ronald Reagan let me down.
But in 1986, the promise was this:
We had about a million people in the country illegally. Actually, it
started at 700,000 to 800,000. That sounds like a minuscule number
today. So roughly a million people, and debate raged in the House and
the Senate. I believed all

[[Page H3981]]

along that good sense would prevail. I believed that people who gave
their oath to uphold the Constitution in the House and in the Senate
would understand that they were undermining the rule of law if they
granted amnesty to people who came into America illegally. I believed
all along that they would understand that if they grant amnesty, they
would get more lawbreakers, more illegal border crossers, a less
manageable situation than the one that they had in 1986.
But the argument for clemency, for amnesty prevailed in the House and
the Senate. But I believe that Ronald Reagan would understand the
principles of rule of law clearly enough and the long-term implications
of such an act of amnesty in 1986 clearly enough that he would take the
authority that was vested in him and the United States Congress to veto
that legislation and require the Congress to pass amnesty by a two-
thirds majority in the House and Senate and overturn his veto. I don't
believe they could have done that in 1986.
I believed Ronald Reagan would veto the Amnesty Act in 1986. Instead,
to my great disappointment, he signed it. The calculation at the time
was, if we just grant amnesty to these million people, we're going to
get full cooperation to enforce the border and never again will there
be another Amnesty Act--never again. This was the Amnesty Act to end
all Amnesty Acts. It was going to be law enforcement from that point
forward. The border was going to be secured. There would be a clear
prohibition on hiring illegal employees. They were going to shut off
the jobs magnet, and they created the I-9 form, the I-9 form which
requires an employer to fill out the form, make sure that you have the
documentation, the identification, and make sure that you have all of
the ``I's'' dotted and the ``T's'' crossed on the I-9 form because a
Federal agent is going to come inspect your paperwork. An INS agent
would come and inspect your paperwork.
I did all of those things as carefully as I could. I had a fear that
I would slip up and not meet the standard, Mr. Speaker. And so we very
carefully documented our job applicants in my construction company to
make sure that we were in compliance with the law, all the while
expecting that that INS agent was just around the corner taking a look
at the paperwork of our competition or our neighboring business. Of
course, they never showed up to check my paperwork. I'm not
disappointed by that. I'm disappointed that they didn't show up to
check the paperwork of thousands of employers with millions of
employees.
The enforcement didn't really happen. It didn't happen in shutting
off the jobs magnet. The litigation began. The ACLU began litigating,
as did other organizations. They began to argue, You're requiring an
employer to make a judgment call when he looks at the documents and the
picture and the face of the person that's applying. And you cannot
require an employer to make a judgment call because it makes them
liable for the lawsuit that we're going to sue them with.
So the litigation of immigration turned it into a mess,
intentionally, I believe, so that they could provide for open borders,
which was the intention of the Teddy Kennedys and others at the time.
They undermined the enforcement effort politically. And they undermined
it in the courts, and they undermined it culturally, and they began to
convert the people who came here illegally into a victims' group.
If you understand the politics of victimology, you understand that
there is a certain amount of sainthood that gets attached to these
victims, for people that are in victims' groups. That conversion has
been taking place since probably before 1986, but I remember it from
that point forward.
What Ronald Reagan learned and what today his Attorney General at the
time, Attorney General Ed Meese knows and has three times written
about, and what another member of the Reagan administration, Gary
Bauer, knows and has spoken openly of is that if you grant amnesty, if
you suspend the rule of law and you tell people, We're not going to
enforce the law against you, continue to break it, you'll get more law
breakers.
More law breakers means more lawlessness, and more lawlessness erodes
the rule of law. And when they bring a bill to the Senate that
legalizes, aside from the felons, the three mysterious misdemeanor
committers, aside from that, it legalizes everybody here in the United
States that's here illegally. Not only that, they send an invitation by
the bill out to anybody that has been deported in the past that says:
Reapply. Come back into the United States. We really didn't mean it.
They say if you came here after December 31, 2011, you're not going
to be exempted by this Amnesty Act that is coming through the Senate,
so presumably they are going to enforce the law against those who came
here after December 31, 2011.
Mr. Speaker, they're not going to do that. If they were going to do
that, you would see a news story about somebody who was put back and
the condition they were in before they broke the law that came here
after December 31, 2011. No, ICE is prohibited from enforcing the law
against people who fit these definitions, and I asked that specific
question of the president of the ICE union before the Judiciary
Committee under oath. And he said, If they're in jail, I can't put them
in removal proceedings.
Even if they're in jail, he can't go into jail and say, Listen, I'm
required to put you in removal proceedings. I'm going to take you back
to the port of entry. He can't do that.
Who's in handcuffs now? ICE, the Border Patrol, in handcuffs today.
They can't enforce the law the way it's written in even the 1986
Amnesty Act, let alone the 1996 Immigration Reform Act of which Lamar
Smith of Texas had such a huge role in. Good legislation; glad they did
it. 1986 was flawed; it should have never been passed.
But if ICE can't enforce the law today, even if someone is in jail,
and they are essentially handcuffed from doing their job, and there is
a legalization of the people that came into the United States before
December 31, 2011, and an invitation to those who have since been
removed to come back again, and no prospect that they're going to
enforce the law against those who come in after December 31, 2011, that
makes it, Mr. Speaker, the always is, always was, and always will be
Amnesty Act.
I use a little bit of, let me say, license here to speak of it this
way: always is, always was, and always will be. If you is in America,
you gets to stay. If you was in America, you gets to come back. And if
you will be in America, you also get to stay.
This is the perpetual and retroactive Amnesty Act. It's perpetual; it
goes on forever. You could never enforce immigration law again. You
could never say to people, Well, you came here after our deadline; now
we're going to enforce the law.
Not after you flow 11 million or 22 million or 33 million people into
this country, or a number that results from this that may perhaps be
over 50 million people over time. Numbers USA's number is 33 million
people that get legalized as an effect of the legislation in the
Senate.
Robert Rector's study at the Heritage Foundation--and both of them,
by the way, did stellar work yesterday. His study only contemplates
11.5 million, which is the lowest number, the reduced number, the
boiled-down number of those we know are here that essentially reflects
off the United States census. That's the people that admit they're here
when you ask them, Are you here illegally? A number approaching 11
million said, Yes, I am. I confess.
We know that in the '86 Amnesty Act that was roughly a million people
anticipated. It became over 3 million people. So use the three-to-one
multiplier. That does reflect pretty close. It's not the formula used
by Numbers USA. That formula is a careful formula that calculates
family unification and the record we have of human activity on how they
react to the legislative changes that take place.
But if the formula was 1 million in '86, it became 3 million because
of document fraud and other reasons. Those who gamed the system, those
who came in before the Amnesty Act was signed, or even after the
Amnesty Act was signed, to take part in that and lied about when they
came here, the 1 million became 3 million. It doesn't stretch my
imagination to see the 11 million become 33 million. That seems to me
to match up in two different types of formulas.

[[Page H3982]]

{time} 1610

So do we really want to legalize 33 million people, or even 11
million people?
Do we want to give them access to all of the government benefits that
we have?
Do we want to let them have access immediately to, I'd say, at least
to and their children to the systems that we have, the health care
system, the education system we have, the public security systems we
have?
Do we want to put them in a place where their tax return makes them
eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, so that all of their
children that may not live in the United States even at the time, they
get a check from the Federal Treasury for that?
Do we want to see this pour out to where the number that came from
Robert Rector's study is that, on average, the people that would be
included in this amnesty act in the Senate, over the course of the time
they would live in the United States, the average comes in at 34 years
old, and a 34-year old, by the time they reach that age, will live to
the age of about 84. That's 50 years in the United States. That's a net
cost to the taxpayer of $580,000 per person.
Do we want to really write a check or borrow the money from the
Chinese to fund that?
Do we need that many more people in the United States doing the work
they say Americans won't do, for a price of $580,000 per person?
Do we want to rent cheap labor for the price of $12,000 a year?
That's what the math works out to. I think it's $11,600 a year.
Do we really want to--do the taxpayers care that much about having
somebody to cut the grass and somebody to weed the garden and somebody
to do all this work that they claim Americans won't do?
By the way, I don't think anybody in this Congress can find work that
I haven't been willing to do, and I think my sons would certainly
reinforce that statement. They remind me that they've been out in 126-
degree heat index and poured concrete on these days, and they've been
driving sheet piling across the swamp at 60 below wind chill. They tell
me that's a 186 degrees temperature change, and no species on the
planet could survive what they went through growing up in our family.
And I say, well, no species other than my sons. And I remind them that,
and me too, guys.
We did work like that in the heat, in the cold, in the rain and the
snow. We did work underground. We do the sanitary sewer work. We do
earth work. We do all kinds of things. We do demolition. All of the
work that they say Americans won't do, we've done a whole lot of that
and will do more.
No one's too proud to do work in this country. We're just sometimes
not willing to do work for the price that's offered. And we know that
free enterprise capitalism takes us to this. The value of anything,
including labor, is determined by the supply and demand in the
marketplace.
Corn prices go up and down, depending on how much there is, how much
corn there is, the supply, and how many customers there are to buy it,
the demand. That's true for gold and oil and platinum and soybeans and
labor.
And because we have an oversupply of unskilled labor, and
underskilled labor is why we have such low wages and benefits at low-
and unskilled labor. The highest unemployment's in the lowest of
skills.
And yet people in this Congress think you have to expand the low-
skilled labor numbers, bring people in, low- and unskilled, Senate
version of the bill, seven unskilled people and undereducated people,
for every one that's going to be able to pay their going rate on what
it costs to sustain them in society.
For every person that would come in under the Senate bill, that would
pay as much or more in taxes as they draw down in government benefits,
there are seven who will not be able to do that.
The universe of those in the 11 million people cannot sustain
themselves in this society that we have, not in a single year of their
projected existence in this culture, in this society, in this economy.
So why would we do that?
Why, if we need more people to pull on the oars, would we allow 100
million Americans, that are of working age and simply not in the work
force, to sit up there in steerage, while we bring people on board to
pull the oars and wait on the people sitting in steerage?
That defies any kind of rational logic, Mr. Speaker.
So to destroy the rule of law, to, I'll say, subsidize a non-work
ethic, and now it turns into three generations of Americans that are
drawing down some of the 80 different means-tested welfare programs, it
is foolish for us to consider such a proposal. And I'm hopeful that the
good sense of the American people can do something about the spell that
has been cast over too many Republicans in the House and the Senate.
And so, Mr. Speaker, I urge the American people to save this Congress
from themselves and restore the rule of law.
I yield back the balance of my time.

____________________