[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 108 (Thursday, July 25, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H5083-H5086]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       THE SHINING CITY ON A HILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege to be recognized by 
you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and it's my 
privilege to follow the gentleman from Texas as we close out this 
legislative week and a lot of the Members are on their way to the 
airport, or at the airport now, going back to serve their constituents. 
I'll be there myself, and I trust Mr. Gohmert will be too.
  I wanted to come to the floor and talk about this country that we 
have, this civilization that we have, the foundations of our 
civilization, and what's required to retain them and enhance them and 
move this country beyond the shining city on the hill and to a place 
beyond there onward and upward. Ronald Reagan often described the 
shining city on the hill. He described it as an America that is. An

[[Page H5084]]

America that was and an America that is. We were always challenged by 
the dream, but he didn't actually articulate, that I recall, something 
beyond this shining city. But societies must progress, and those that 
progress the most effectively and those that can be sustained the 
longest need to be built upon solid pillars.
  The shining city on the hill standing true and strong on a granite 
ridge was built on a solid foundation, and I argue that the foundation 
of it are the pillars of American exceptionalism, and those pillars are 
listed in the Bill of Rights. You add to that free enterprise 
capitalism, Judeo-Christian values, the foundation of our culture, 
which welcomes all religions, and on top of that the dream that 
inspired legal immigrants to come to America, and that dream embodied 
within the vision of the image of the Statue of Liberty. That's the 
American Dream. That's the American country that we are. And that's the 
foundation upon which we've got to build our American future.
  How did we get here? What was the reason that these pieces came 
together? How was it that our Founding Fathers came to a conclusion 
that we would have freedom of speech, religion, assembly, the right to 
keep and bear arms, freedom of the press, that we would have property 
rights, that we would have Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable 
search and seizure, that we would not have to face any kind of jury but 
a jury of our peers, and that we would not suffer double jeopardy and 
that justice would be blind and every person would stand before the law 
to be treated equally? The statue that we see of Lady Justice holding 
the scales of justice perfectly balanced is almost always shown to us 
blindfolded because justice is blind. But justice is not a feeling. 
Justice is something that has to be delivered by the law.
  These are pillars of American exceptionalism, as are those rights 
that are not enumerated in the Constitution that devolve respectively 
to the States or the people, those enumerated powers that we have for 
Congress or those delegated to the Presidency, the executive branch, 
and the judicial branch of government. All of this is laid out as 
foundations that have been--although they've been altered to some 
degree over the years, we have adapted to those principles more often 
than we've altered our constitutional principles because our Founding 
Fathers got it right.
  Where did that come from? How could it happen that these Founding 
Fathers could come together on what was an obscure place on the planet 
and get these ideas so well articulated that they could be the 
foundation of the greatest Nation the world has seen, the strongest 
economy the world has seen, the most dominant culture and civilization 
that the world has seen, the furthest reach in our economy, the 
furthest reach in our influence strategically?

                              {time}  1345

  How did this all happen?
  And I would take you back, Mr. Speaker, to think a little bit about 
the formation of, I'll say, modern history. I take you back to Mosaic 
law before the time of Christ when Moses, who looks down upon us right 
now, the only face that is looking directly at us from all of these 
faces of law providers in history, Moses looks down over this Chamber 
in full-face form, and he's looking back here and he sees, as we should 
see, ``In God We Trust,'' our national motto.
  How did that come together, Mr. Speaker?
  It was when Moses came down from the Mount with the law, God's law, 
and the foundation of that law, the way it was separated out through 
the tribes and the way the law and the way justice was delivered, 
emerged out of Mosaic law and appeared also in Greek law. And as the 
Greeks, masterful people as they were, they were shaping the Age of 
Reason. So we had Mosaic law that informed the Greek Age of Reason, and 
the Age of Reason, where I imagine that Socrates and Plato and 
Aristotle and other philosophers sat around and challenged each other 
intellectually like gunslingers did in the West with guns, they did it 
with their brains. And young philosophers would go up to Socrates and 
challenge him with their philosophy, and Socrates would take it apart 
because he was the top guy and he informed others. But as they were 
proud and prideful of their ability to reason and the culture of Greece 
at the time, they had to infuse Mosaic law to uphold their rationale. 
And some of them, as they voiced Mosaic law, were teased by other 
Greeks that said, Well, you got that from Moses.
  But my point in this is that as civilization was progressing, Mosaic 
law came down from the Mount, was handed to civilization. It emerged 
through the Greek civilization as the Greeks were developing their Age 
of Reason, and we're talking about the foundation of Western 
civilization. And almost concurrently with that, Roman law was emerging 
as well.
  Now, I'll take you then to the time of Christ. Christ taught us our 
values, the very values of repentance and redemption that didn't exist 
in any form before then, and that's his gift to us. But I make this 
point in talking about the law, and it is this:
  Think of Mosaic law coming down, being infused within the Greeks, 
transferred also to the Romans. Roman law ruled over that part of the 
world where Christ stood before the high priest Caiaphas. And if you 
remember, Mr. Speaker, the high priest said to Jesus: Did you really 
say those things? Did you really preach those things?
  And Jesus responded to the high priest, as the Jews were watching, he 
said: Ask them. They were there. They can tell you.
  That was, Mr. Speaker, the assertion by Jesus that he had a right to 
face his accusers. That principle remains today in our law, that we 
have a right to face our accusers. And when he said: Ask them. They 
were there. They can tell you, he's facing his accusers and demanding 
that they testify against him rather than make allegations behind his 
back.
  And what happened when Jesus said that? They believed and the high 
priest believed that Jesus' answer was insolent and the guard struck 
Jesus.
  Jesus said: If I speak wrongly, you must prove the wrong. If I speak 
rightly, why do you punish me?
  He asserted his right to be innocent until proven guilty before a 
Roman court. Those two principles remain today in our law: a right to 
face your accuser; innocent until proven guilty. You face that jury of 
your peers, as I said. You need a quick and speedy trial. They didn't 
have to wonder about that in those days; it happened quickly. And the 
punishment came quickly as well, right or wrong.
  This foundation of law was wrapped up in Roman law, and it was spread 
across Western Europe as the Romans occupied areas like Germany, 
England, as we know it today, on into Ireland. And when the Dark Ages 
came, when the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 A.D., then we saw 
civilization itself tumble and crumble, and we saw the heathens break 
down anything that represented the old culture, anything that 
represented real civilization.
  While that was going on--they were tearing buildings into rubble, 
they were burning anything that was written documents--while that was 
going on, the priests, and let me say the descendants of the disciples 
of Christ, began to gather up any papers and documents they could get 
their hands on. Some went to Rome to be secured and replicated by the 
monks and the scribes there. A lot went to an island off of Ireland 
where the monks and the scribes replicated those documents there. That 
was the foundation of the relearning of a civilization, a civilization 
that had been lived for centuries, having lost the ability to reason.
  That Age of Reason that they were so proud of in the time of 
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was lost to civilization for centuries 
as people just lived by instinct and didn't leave much of a record of 
their rationale and didn't develop science, technology, or thought. And 
at a certain time, this information that was preserved in the documents 
of the classics, both Biblical and religious information, and any 
document that the monks and scribes could get their hands on, they 
preserved. And they analyzed it and they studied it, and they took a 
continent and taught that continent how to think.
  As the church emerged from Rome and from the St. Patrick side of this 
thing out of Ireland, they built monasteries across the continent, and 
they were the centers of knowledge. They began to educate the classical 
information that they had preserved primarily

[[Page H5085]]

from the Roman but also from the Greek era, and they reeducated an 
entire civilization and re-created civilization based on what, Judeo-
Christian values, the Age of Reason, and that reason that tied the 
values of faith together with the values that will allow for science to 
be developed.
  And that brings us to that year, let's say the years emerging from 
the Middle Ages, and Martin Luther stepped on to the scene in the 16th 
century and brought us, on top of that, the Reformation Period where he 
made the point that cast across the globe that you can honor God in a 
lot of ways. A mother changing a baby's diaper honors God more than a 
thousand rote prayers that you don't give meaning from your heart into.

  And so the Protestant work ethic got added to all these values that 
have been added together. And the competition between the Protestant 
and Catholic Church within Christianity ended up, it was rough and it 
was brutal, but the effect of it on our civilization and on our society 
has been good because the competition that drove from that made us all 
better, and each religion drew from the other.
  And, by the way, the Eastern Church was separated when the Turks 
sacked Constantinople. So the Eastern Orthodox and Russian Orthodox 
were separated, and they evolved in a little bit different way, but 
we're tied together. We're tied together culturally. We're tied 
together historically. We're tied together by our common humanity and 
our belief in, and this is the unique component, their belief in 
redemption.
  These attributes that I've discussed now, they're embodied within 
Western Europe as we emerge into, as we had emerged into the Age of 
Discovery, meaning Christopher Columbus and the explorers who came over 
here to the Western Hemisphere, that component, as well as a little bit 
later, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
  Think about where we are here in America. We are the recipients of 
some of the wisest, most analytical people that the world has ever 
produced, our Founding Fathers. They are a product of a culture and a 
civilization that believed in Adam Smith's free enterprise and the 
rights to property, and they believed they were free men, that they 
were free. In fact, they said so in the Declaration Independence when 
Jefferson wrote in the Declaration: A prince who exhibits the 
characteristics of a tyrant is unfit to be a ruler of a free people.
  A free people. They saw themselves as a free people before the 
Declaration. They didn't become necessarily free people as a product 
of, although they certainly had to earn it. They declared their freedom 
from England, but they saw themselves as free people before they issued 
the Declaration of Independence.
  But that brings us now to July 4, 1776. I brought this history around 
from a couple thousand years, or a little bit more, more than 2,000 
years.
  On this continent now we have the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. I 
believe they are inspired by God, and it was by Divine Guidance that 
the Declaration was written, but it arrives here this, with what, these 
rights that we have--freedom of speech, religion, the press, and 
assembly, the right to keep and bear arms. The balance of these rights 
from the judicial side of it, the property rights from the Fifth 
Amendment, the devolution of power down to the people or the States, 
all of this landed on a continent with unlimited natural resources, so 
we believed at the time. All of these rights, free enterprise, strong 
Judeo-Christian faith and values, the reason many came here, unlimited 
natural resources, and a concept of manifest destiny.
  Now, who could create a giant petri dish that's so robust that it 
could settle a continent in the blink of a historical eye and leave 
such a foundation for the growth of population and the image and 
inspiration of faith and freedom, who could do that? Not man, but the 
entity that shaped their movements and their thoughts.
  So here we are, the recipients, God-given liberty, defined in the 
Declaration. It should be inarguable. It should be unchallengeable. I 
think it is. But we're a Nation that cannot be reverse-engineered and 
come up with a better result. We're a Nation that has components of 
American exceptionalism, pillar after pillar of American 
exceptionalism, none of which can we pull out from underneath the 
edifice of this shining city on the hill and expect that this shining 
city would not collapse. Yes, it would.
  And so what is our charge here? It is not as hard as the charge of 
our Founding Fathers. It is not as hard as those who picked up their 
muskets and marched into the Red Coats' muskets and the Revolution. It 
is not as hard as the blue and the gray that clashed all over the 
battlefields here in this country and put an end to slavery and 
reunified this country. It's not as hard as the doughboys that marched 
off to war. It's not as hard, certainly, as those 16 million Americans 
who put on uniforms to defend our country in the Second World War. It 
is certainly not as hard for us as the 450,000 who gave their lives 
during that war. It's not as hard, either, as those who marched off to 
Korea and are honored down here in their memorial, the memorial that 
says on the slab in front of them:

       Our Nation honors the men and women who answered the call 
     to defend a country they never knew and a people they never 
     met.

  None of what we are charged with right now is that hard. And yet some 
despair and some think that we can create this new America that is not 
tied to the pillars of American exceptionalism; we can sacrifice some 
of those principles and we'll still be a country okay because we've got 
some political pressure that says we should sacrifice this principle or 
we should chisel away some pieces out of this beautiful marble pillar 
of American exceptionalism. Imagine what it would be like, which if 
this Congress and this culture that directs this Congress, what if we 
decided you're going to have limited speech. Certain things you can't 
say, and we'll give you the list of words you can't utter because if 
you do that, you're going to be violating somebody's sense of political 
correctness?

  What if we said that you can assemble, but we're going to diminish 
your right to assemble because sometimes we disagree with what comes 
out of those meetings? You know, the Greeks did that. They had meetings 
in their city-states. Remember the Greek black ball system that they 
had. The demagogues would emerge, people that could step up before the 
masses in Greece and the city-state and issue a speech that was 
rhetorically so inspiring that the Greeks marched off in what turned 
out to be the wrong direction. And what would they do? They would label 
him a demagogue. They would bring the demagogue before the city-state 
and then they would excoriate him, and then they would have a vote.
  It's like the Greek system today: two gourds, two marbles, one black 
and one white one. They called them balls, of course. As each of the 
Greeks walked through, they would drop their voting ball in one gourd 
and they would drop their discard ball in another gourd, and if the 
demagogue got three black balls, he was banished from the city-state 
for 7 years. That's how they muzzled the people that led them in the 
wrong direction with emotional rhetoric.
  But can you imagine if we did that, if America would banish people 
into the hinterlands for, let's say, giving a speech that was disagreed 
with by three people? That's all it took--three. They were restrained, 
of course, because they didn't want to be the next one banished. But 
that was the system.
  We're not going to limit freedom of speech in this country, and we're 
not going to limit freedom of assembly. We're not going to say you 
cannot get together and talk about these things because we know that an 
open public discourse and dialogue, what emerges from that are--we 
believe in this reason that we have inherited from the Greeks and other 
civilizations, that what will emerge is the most logical, rational 
policy.

                              {time}  1400

  That's what I'm advocating for, Mr. Speaker. I want the most logical, 
rational policy. And I think we need a policy that's right for America.
  I have an obligation to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution 
of the United States and represent my constituents and represent my 
State and represent my country. And all of those things should be 
compatible with each other. And I believe they are. And I've not found 
myself in a conflict here between them.

[[Page H5086]]

  So I suggest that we have open dialogue, we have open debate. I 
challenge this civilization to be reasonable, have reason, be 
analytical, be a critical thinker.
  We send our kids off to school, and sometimes they're just taught a 
mantra, but they're not taught to take ideas apart and understand the 
components of them and put them back together. Well, I've just taken 
America apart and described some of its essential components, history 
apart, and put it back together, Mr. Speaker, and, hopefully, informed 
this body of some of the principal reasons why America is such a great 
Nation.
  We're a great Nation because we have God-given liberty. We would not 
be a great Nation if we didn't exercise those God-given liberties. If 
we don't have access to those rights, if we don't put our positions out 
there in front of the public and challenge the people in this country 
to analyze those alternatives--what if we went down one path?
  What if some leader from on high, let's just say King George, not 
Prince George today, but King George, what if he decided we're going to 
go down this path, and no one shall discuss anything outside of this 
line that I've described for you?
  What kind of a country would we be?
  Would we believe that one mortal individual can chart a path for this 
country superior to the collective wisdom of 316 million people?
  I don't think so, Mr. Speaker. And I don't think thinking Americans 
will either.
  But I know that this country's full of emotionalism. As I watched the 
reactions to the George Zimmerman trial and verdict, I saw a lot of 
people who simply denied the facts that had been proven in law, and 
seemed to be incapable of considering anything that didn't concur with 
their conclusion that they had drawn before they saw the facts.
  Now, I engage in this debate. I challenge people to debate with me 
because I believe one of two things: if I can't sustain myself in 
debate, I need to go get some more information. I need to get better 
informed. Or could it be that I'm wrong?
  Only two alternatives can come from not being able to sustain 
yourself in a debate, and I'll go back and get all the information that 
I can get, but I'll also reconsider, and anybody should. That's why I 
challenge people to debate. I'll take it up, and we will see who can 
sustain themselves. We may not get this all resolved in one discussion.
  In fact, in this Congress it's been a very rare thing, over the last 
10-plus years that I've been here, to see anybody stand up and admit, I 
was wrong. What you said changes my position. What I learned changes my 
position.
  No, there are too many egos involved in this Congress for that to 
happen very often. It will happen a little bit privately, it will 
happen incrementally, but it doesn't happen publicly, unless there's 
some kind of leverage brought to bear.
  So here's my point, Mr. Speaker, and that is this: Our southern 
border is porous. It's not as porous as it was 7 or 8 years ago, mainly 
because the economy has grown in Mexico at about twice the rate that 
it's grown in the United States over the last 4\1/2\ or 5 years. We 
don't have as much pressure on our border.
  But I can tell you this: 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs 
consumed in America come from or through Mexico. I can tell you that in 
Mexico they are recruiting kids to be drug smugglers. Between the ages 
of 11 and 18 they have arrested and, I believe, incarcerated, and the 
number of convictions is at least this: over 800 per year over the last 
couple of years at that ratio of those who are kids who are smuggling 
drugs into the United States.
  We pick up some on our side of the border. That adds to that number, 
the ones that we catch. Many get away. Every night some come across the 
border smuggling drugs across the border. Increasingly, the higher 
value drugs, heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine in some form or another, 
are being strapped to the bodies sometimes of young girls, teenage 
girls.
  The media is replete with this. Anybody that reads the paper should 
know, especially those that live on the border, should know that there 
are many, many young people coming across the border unlawfully who are 
smuggling drugs into the United States.
  They should also know that now, the drug cartels, and I mean 
specifically, the Mexican drug cartels, have taken over drug 
distribution in most of the major cities in America. I think intel will 
tell you every major city in America. And the numbers that I've seen go 
from a little over 200 cities in this country to 2,000.
  I don't know what population that dials it down to or what areas. I 
haven't seen the map. But it should be appalling to a country and a 
civilization to see that that's taken place.
  When you understand that, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, 
of every chain of illegal drug distribution we have in the country, 
they will tell you, at least privately, as they have to me on multiple 
occasions, that at least one link is illegal aliens that are smuggling 
drugs into the United States.
  It's important that we know that as a Congress, as a country, as a 
civilization. If we deny those facts, if we deny the information that 
comes, even out of the Obama administration that certainly supports 
those, if you deny the information that comes out through the major 
media that's there, if you deny what we're told by our law enforcement 
officers on the border of the United States that are continually 
interdicting drugs at about the same rate that they did 6 or 7 or 8 
years ago, when the population of illegals was flowing over the border 
at a faster rate than it is today, the illegal drugs coming across the 
border are roughly similar to that time.

  That says there's still a high demand in the United States. A high 
demand means drugs are likely to come in. If we are enforcing our 
borders and tightening security the price of drugs should go up. If you 
look at the price of drugs, I think you're going to find that we 
haven't been very effective interdicting drugs coming across our 
southern border.
  Part of that is they find new ways to smuggle, and some of those 
reasons are because kids are being used to smuggle drugs into the 
United States. That's appalling to me.
  The death across the Arizona border, it's still there. It happens 
through the summer. And this debate taking place now in the middle of 
the summer is going to end up with more people being found out there on 
the desert, in the brush, who have lost their lives trying to get into 
the United States of America.
  We need a secure border. We need to build a fence, a wall, and 
another fence, so we've got two patrolling zones. We need to put the 
sensory devices on top of there. We need to use our boots on the ground 
in the most effective way possible.
  No nation should have an open borders policy. No nation should have a 
blind-eye policy towards the enforcement of the laws. No nation can 
long remain a great nation if they decide to sacrifice the rule of law 
on the altar of political expediency.
  No nation like the United States of America can continue to grow and 
be a strong nation if we are going to judge people because they 
disagree with our agenda, rather than the content of their statement.
  We have to be critical thinkers. We have to be analytical. We should 
understand facts from emotion.
  And let's pull together, let's understand that we do have compassion. 
We do have compassion, for every human person deserves dignity. We need 
to treat them with that warmth, treat them with that love, as the 
American people always have, just like the Korean War veterans did when 
they gave themselves for a country they never knew and a people they 
never met.
  But we must not sacrifice the rule of law on the altar of political 
expediency.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________