[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 130 (Friday, September 27, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H5917-H5920]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HOW WE GOT HERE
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 and honor to be
recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House
of Representatives, especially at this time, as the House and the
Senate hurtle towards some type of perhaps collision and sometimes
perhaps a conclusion to the drama that's taking place over the funding
of our government. And it seems as though the focus of all this comes
down on ObamaCare.
But I'd like to first, Mr. Speaker, paint the picture on how we got
here. And it's this: the House has consistently passed a budget, and
then, the House-passed legislation, essentially, required the Senate to
finally, after over 1,000 days, pass a budget over there themselves.
Of course it was a token and, of course it was pushed off to the side
and, of course it wasn't something that could be reconciled with a
responsible, legitimate budget here in the House of Representatives.
But it met the criterion narrowly.
So the functionality of this Congress, which has been in the past, 12
or so appropriations bills passing here, starting here, being messaged
over to the Senate where, when things worked right, the Senate picked
up those appropriations bills and, through their appropriations
process, their hearings, their deliberation, their subcommittee and
their committee process, worked their will with the House bill that had
been messaged to them.
And one at a time, 12 or 13 appropriation bills would work their way
so that they had passed the House in one form and, generally, the
Senate in a different form, in which case, a conference committee would
be appointed, and House Republicans and Democrats would sit down with
Senate Republicans and Democrats, hammer out the differences in one of
12 or 13 appropriation bills, and come to an agreement, send the
conference report to the House or the Senate, for passage, in which
case it would pass both, be messaged to the President. That
appropriation, then, would be concluded and fulfilled.
A responsible government starts with hearing from our constituents,
in November, December and January, as we look forward to the end of the
fiscal year, which happens next Monday night at midnight--we're working
towards getting all of our government funded appropriately.
And in those months of January, it starts up, and then in February
and March, the intensity of hearing from constituents and their
budgetary concerns, the appropriations hearings in the Appropriations
Committee, and then here on the floor under an open rule, bill after
bill after bill, a dozen appropriation bills are debated, and the open
rule that allows amendments to be brought forward on that to adjust the
appropriations up or down, or perhaps transfer some of those
appropriations, and the House work its will, the Senate work its will.
We come together and agree on a conference report. We send it to the
President. The President signs it, and those departments of government
that are funded by that appropriation bill then are given their
budgetary responsibility and their spending authority for the upcoming
fiscal year.
That's how it has worked in the past. It does not work that way under
this dysfunctional setup that exists today.
What happens now in this Congress that we have, Mr. Speaker, is this:
the House debates the appropriations bills, 12 of them or so. We have
passed several of them at this point in the House. We've sent them over
to the Senate.
They go, messaged to the Senate, where they arrive at the Majority
Leader Harry Reid's desk. And figuratively speaking, Harry Reid then
puts that appropriation bill in his desk drawer and closes the drawer,
not to be discussed or heard from again for the balance of the fiscal
year. And another appropriation bill goes and another and another and
another.
And what you see happen is, we've seen this happen in the past, where
we have passed, I remember, under Chairman Jerry Lewis, the
Appropriations chair at the time, all of our appropriation bills by
July. Messaged them all over to the Senate, where they all would go in
Harry Reid's desk drawer.
At the end of the fiscal year, some time about now, or maybe a week
ahead of this time, Harry Reid would look around and think, oh, we're
facing a government shutdown if I don't get those bills out of my desk
drawer.
And so he pulls out a dozen appropriations bills. Each one of them is
a collective judgment of the majority of the United States House of
Representatives, constitutionally messaged to the Senate, stacks them
up and takes his little marker through there, and he draws a line
through the appropriations that he doesn't like, and he writes in all
of the line items and puts on all the Christmas tree spending that he
does like, and he puts in the wish list of the Senators that he wants
to help out, so to speak, and some are Republicans and many are
Democrats.
He creates this omnibus spending bill. Sometimes we call it omnibus
if it doesn't show up at the end of the year. Otherwise, if it's at the
expiration of our spending of our appropriations, as it is now, we call
it a continuing resolution.
We've been operating on continuing resolutions for too long. And it
isn't because of ObamaCare, necessarily, that we're at this point
today. The leverage has been created because Harry Reid didn't deal
with our appropriations bills.
And furthermore, he's not going to deal with our appropriation bills.
He is going to create this crisis so that it increases the leverage
that he has in defeating the will of the people, which is
[[Page H5918]]
to shut off all of the funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare, Mr.
Speaker, to put an end to its implementation, to not let ObamaCare
become implemented, because--
First of all, I don't agree with the decision made by the Supreme
Court. I think it's completely inconsistent to declare a bill to be a
tax as it arrives at the United States Supreme Court--excuse me--to
declare it not to be a tax as it arrives at the Supreme Court for the
purposes of considering the issue of the litigation on ObamaCare, but
then to declare it to be a tax as a decision of the Supreme Court.
It can be one or the other. Either ObamaCare is a tax or it's not a
tax, but it can't be conveniently not a tax for the purposes of whether
the Supreme Court would grant cert, and then conveniently, a tax for
the purposes of declaring that it is constitutional. But that's the
decisions that were made by the United States Supreme Court.
All of us take an oath to uphold the Constitution, everyone in the
House and the Senate and, of course, the Supreme Court as well. And we
can't be taking an oath to uphold a decision that no one that I know of
in America predicted.
You would think, Mr. Speaker, that of all the constitutional scholars
we have that had been writing and reading and thinking and analyzing
ObamaCare, that had watched as, by legislative shenanigans, hook and
crook, that patchwork of ObamaCare had been jammed through the House
and the Senate in a fashion that would not have mirrored any process we
had ever seen before, they'd seen the time that the Senate had a
filibuster-proof majority.
And I remember going into Christmas Eve, the vote that was taking
place over there on the 24th of December, on Christmas Eve, and I
remember when the Senate had the ability to delay that vote from 9 in
the morning on Christmas Eve morning, December 24, till 9 that night,
which truly would have been Christmas Eve.
And I sent the message over there to my Senator and I said, please
delay that vote as long as you can. Keep that thing delayed until the
last possible minute. If they want to jam this country and give us a
Christmas present of ObamaCare so badly that they will sit there on
Christmas Eve, keep them there then, and let them miss Christmas with
their families because the flights will be gone out of Dulles by then.
That's what I asked to happen.
There was a negotiation that took place, allowed an agreement from
Republicans that there'd be a couple of votes in January that they
wanted on some taxes or something of that nature. So they had a vote at
9:00 in the morning, December 24, that allowed for ObamaCare to move
ahead one more time.
And then I wrote back to my Senator, and I said, what do we do now?
And his answer was pray, and pray for a Republican victory in the
United States Senate race in Massachusetts, the special election
because of the passing of Senator Teddy Kennedy.
None of us thought on December 24, that year, that the following
January 18 or 19th--that's very close to the election date--that Scott
Brown would be elected as a United States Senator out of Massachusetts.
That is what happened. That was the people in Massachusetts rising up
and saying, we don't want ObamaCare. We reject ObamaCare. We'll even go
so far as that entirely blue State of Massachusetts, that had a
delegation of eight Members of Congress, every single one of them a
Democrat, and none of them known as conservative Democrats by the
measure that I know.
That's Massachusetts, and they sent us Scott Brown. And they're the
ones that had the most example with something that looked like a
preview, perhaps, of ObamaCare.
So who knew more than the Bay Staters about this?
Who had the most loaded politics that should have been electing a
Democrat in that election?
No, they said, we don't want to see anything that looks like
ObamaCare, and we're going to send you a young, fresh Republican whose
job it is to help kill ObamaCare. And he came here and began to engage
in that effort, and was significant in his role. My hat's off to former
Senator Scott Brown.
But, in the end, legislative shenanigans defeated even the voters in
Massachusetts' will, and they put legislation through back over from
the Senate under that process they call reconciliation. They carved out
some, put it into the reconciliation process to avoid the filibuster
because they no longer had a filibuster-proof majority. The people had
spoken. And then the legislative shenanigans began.
While that was going on, there was a drama here in the House. Now
that takes us to March of that year. And the drama in the House was
that there were the ``Stupak Dozen'' who said, I'm not going to vote
for an ObamaCare piece of legislation that will fund abortion.
So the President made an offer--this is what's reported in the news
at least, Mr. Speaker--that he would write an Executive order that
would nullify the Stupak amendment, or nullify the ban on funding
abortion. And that promise was made by the President before ObamaCare
was passed in order to get the votes to get ObamaCare to pass here on
the floor of the House of Representatives.
{time} 1400
The President of the United States, a former adjunct professor of
constitutional law at the University of Chicago, made a promise to a
Democrat Congressman from Michigan, who, presumably, controlled 12
votes of the unnamed ``Stupak dozen,'' who were anonymous, oddly. It's
hard to think you're going to control votes if nobody knows who they
are.
In any case, the President made a promise that he would sign an
Executive order that would nullify some of the language that's in the
law. Congressman Stupak took that promise and the former adjunct law
professor, President Obama, made a promise that said that the President
thought that he could amend law after he signed it into law. Now what
constitutional professor would take a position like that?
I dig this up for a little bit, Mr. Speaker, because I want people to
understand this piece of ObamaCare legislation is not the will of the
people. It never was the will of the people. It's the product of hook
and crook and legislative shenanigans. It's done against the will of
the people.
And furthermore, Thomas Jefferson, whom both parties revere, once
said:
Large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities.
Large initiatives need to be bipartisan initiatives, not completely
100 percent partisan initiatives, which ObamaCare is. And the slender
majority that Thomas Jefferson was talking about was a slender majority
that he presumed to be a bipartisan majority. If Jefferson had been
talking about a partisan majority, it would have been very clear, in my
opinion, what he would have said. He would have said that large
initiatives should never be advanced on partisan majorities. That's
what happened with ObamaCare.
The largest initiative that has been jammed down the throats of the
American people in its entire history is ObamaCare, advanced on a
purely partisan majority by utilization of legislative shenanigans and
hook and crook. That's what got us to this point.
People wonder, Why don't you just throw up your hands, why don't you
accept reality? ObamaCare is the law of the land. Let it be. Fund it.
Because the people have spoken.
Well, the people had spoken. They spoke when they elected Scott
Brown. And in the aftermath of the passage of ObamaCare about March 20
or 21, 2010, the people spoke again that following November. And I
remember when ObamaCare passed in the night. I had been battling this
thing for days, and I went home about 1:30 or 2 o'clock in the morning,
maybe a little later than that, but it was when the business wound down
here in the House, Mr. Speaker, and I went home and I thought, I'm
going to lay down and I'm going to sleep the sleep of the exhausted.
And I'm going to get completely rested up, and I'm going to wake up in
the morning and then I'm going to put a plan together on what we do
now. Because I knew that the bill was messaged to the White House, and
I knew the President was salivating to sign it. Well, he did that
within about 48 hours.
I woke up, though, in about 2\1/2\ hours because the wheels were
turning and I
[[Page H5919]]
couldn't take it any longer. And I drafted the language to repeal
ObamaCare. I had that formal request to get that bill handed back to me
by the draft people we have here when the door opened at 9 o'clock that
morning.
We've been doing battle with ObamaCare ever since. Not only me, but
the gentlelady from Minnesota that was down here and led an hour
Special Order earlier today has been standing in there. And she ran for
President on the issue, Michele Bachmann. No one wondered what she
would do if she were elected President. She would have repealed
ObamaCare. Louie Gohmert has been putting in hour after hour here on
the floor and around this country, doing battle with ObamaCare.
The list of people that deserve credit for stepping up to this fight
is long. And it isn't exclusive here in the House, Mr. Speaker. It
includes a group of stalwarts in the Senate, led in this latest episode
by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who stood on the floor for more than 21
hours and delivered a whole series of arguments against ObamaCare.
But I'll say here's the argument that is at the center of ObamaCare,
Mr. Speaker, and it is this: ObamaCare is, by my opinion, an
unconstitutional taking of God-given American liberty. It takes away
our right to manage our health. The most sovereign thing that we have
as an American people is our soul. And the eternal nature of our soul
is controlled by God and our will. This Federal Government hasn't
figured out how to nationalize our soul.
But the second most sovereign thing we have is our bodies, our
health, our skin, and everything inside it. It's the second most
sovereign thing that we have. And the Federal Government, under
ObamaCare, has figured out how to nationalize our skin and everything
inside it.
It's a Federal Government takeover of the management of our health
where, under ObamaCare, if you walk into a clinic, if you walk into an
emergency room, if you apply for government-approved insurance under
whatever means that might emerge, when no one really can tell us at
this point, the government decides whether you get the insurance, the
government decides whether you get a subsidy for the premium, the
government decides what kind of research gets done, what kind of
treatment one gets.
The government decides if you are worth the hip replacement or the
knee replacement or whether you get just painkillers for as long as you
can live with a broken hip. The government decides that, not us any
longer. We understand that, those of us that have a little bit of gray
hair, or maybe have lost some. We understand that. But do the children
in our grade schools and in nurseries today understand that?
Mr. Speaker, we know that answer is no. They don't understand that.
When these children grow up and they get out of school and they step
into adulthood and they have already been brought up under a system of
ObamaCare that makes these decisions for them, what happens to their
dreams, what happens to their aspirations, what happens to their
ability to think big? What happens to their ability to manage their
life?
The institutional memory will disappear of the culture and
civilization that remembers the glorious time when we could choose our
doctor, when the market demand created the insurance policies that suit
us, the consumers, when we could shop from doctor to doctor, from
clinic to clinic, when we could say, But you know, I want this care for
my mother this badly that I think even though she is 85, she needs a
hip replacement. Because I don't want to see her die in a wheelchair.
That's a different world than we have today.
Mr. Speaker, we've just gotten messaged to us on the CR--the
continuing resolution--from the United States Senate, that the vote had
concluded over on the other side, down on the other end, through the
Rotunda. The Senate has now acted to peel out the ban on funding for
ObamaCare and send us back what they would call a clean CR with their
changes and provisions, which would include a continuing resolution up
until November 15. So it is a shorter-term CR than we offered to them.
But what it says is, We as Senators are not going to let you prohibit
the funding of ObamaCare. So, again, we're back to the center and the
crux of this. Another dramatic event has taken place here in the United
States Capitol. And the drama of this now is in the lap of the House of
Representatives, where our Speaker has just received the message of
H.J. Res. 59, the CR.
Now we have a decision to make. My message, Mr. Speaker, is this: if
218 House Members hold our ground, if we say we will not fund ObamaCare
and we will not fund an appropriation that fails to cut off the funding
to ObamaCare, if we hold our ground, we will win.
This contest now that's going on in is a contest of wills. There's a
relatively narrow majority in the Senate. There's a little bit broader
majority in the House, I believe. And the strength of will is being
measured. This is like holding a gun on each other now, standing in a
burning building, and deciding who's going to blink. But we can't just
let down the hammer and stand there because the building is burning.
Somebody's got to walk away from this confrontation and say, I'm going
to give you your way.
Well, my message to this, Mr. Speaker, is that we've heard this
message over and over again: if there is a government shutdown, House
Republicans will always lose in a confrontation with the President. I
don't know that that's true. And I don't know if it was even true in
1995 and 1996, when there was a government shutdown that lasted for 21
days.
What I do know is this House sent the funding to keep our government
open over to the Senate. With it was language that said there would be
no funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare. It happens that's
language I wrote and presented here in this Congress in February of
2011.
We have said we want this government to stay open. We want to avoid a
shutdown, avoid a shutdown, avoid a shutdown. If we repeat that enough
times, it might be sending a message to the Senators that we really
don't mean it when we say that we're not going to fund ObamaCare.
I want to send the message, Mr. Speaker, that we do mean it. And I
want to send the message that we're going to hold our ground. And I'd
like to remind, Mr. Speaker, that there have been a whole series of
shutdowns throughout history. And I have a list of them printed here.
There were at least five government shutdowns when Jimmy Carter was
President. Five of them. Five incidents. One of them was over a nuclear
ship of some kind. The longest shutdown he had was 18 days. Does
anybody remember those shutdowns from the eighties? Kind of. It didn't
change my life, that I remember.
But that was Democrats in majority in the House and the Senate and a
Democrat President. Their infighting caused government shutdowns for a
total of 57 days--57 days between 1977 and 1981. And sometimes Jimmy
Carter won, sometimes the Democrats in the House and Senate prevailed
over the President of the United States. All the same party.
So if we don't remember the price paid for a government shutdown, if
the inconvenience of it doesn't linger in anybody's memory, I take you
to the era of Ronald Reagan, when there were a number of shutdowns
under Ronald Reagan--fewer and for a shorter period of time. One of
them was over a billion dollars in social spending. Of that billion
dollars, the government was shut down for about 3 days. In that period
of time, by the way, there was a Republican majority in the United
States Senate and we had a principled Republican President, Democrats
in the majority here in the House. The Democrats refused to agree with
the President and the Senate. It resulted in a government shutdown.
In that shutdown that lasted--in the end, the $1 billion in spending
that Democrats here wanted was negotiated down to $900 million dollars.
They gave up 10 percent of what they asked for and the government was
opened back up again.
So a determined majority in the House of Representatives prevailed to
the level of 90 percent of their ask against a Republican majority in
the Senate that opposed them and a President who has clearly held his
ground in case after case.
It isn't clear who prevails in an issue like this, but I'll say this:
the American people will judge our resolve and
[[Page H5920]]
our determination. And the determination on who wins and who loses, if
that actually matters, will be written by history.
But I say this, Mr. Speaker. If we hold our ground, I believe there
will not be a political price for House Republicans to pay. When House
Republicans held their ground and eventually caved in 1995 and 1996,
some say House Republicans lost that. They lost eight seats in the
following election. They did not lose the majority. Six of those eight
seats were marginal seats they were likely to lose anyway. So perhaps
they lost two congressional seats.
If we don't want to put at risk two congressional seats out of the
House Republican majority to stand on the principle that cuts off all
funding to implement and enforce ObamaCare, is our fear for our
political jobs greater than our love of principle and the people we
represent?
I would argue instead that there will not be political consequences
for standing on principle and refusing to fund ObamaCare. If there are
political consequences, they will be recovered from over time.
{time} 1415
But we, Mr. Speaker, can never recover from ObamaCare if it's
implemented and enforced. That is the bottom line.
No political consequences will be delivered to the people who stand
up for the American people. That's the House Republican stance. That's
the Senate conservative stance--that came a little short over here a
few minutes ago down the other side of the Capitol. But if we stand
together as House Republicans, as Senate Republicans, as principled
people who look back at that time and saw that Scott Brown came to the
United States Senate because the blue State Massachusetts rejected
ObamaCare.
There was a wave election in 2010 that elected 87 new House
Republicans--every one of them ran on repeal of ObamaCare. Every
Republican in the House and Senate has voted multiple times to undue,
repeal, unfund and defund ObamaCare. All of us stand together--it was
bipartisan the last time. We had two Democrats that also agreed with us
on this CR.
We must stand on principle. If there's a political price to be paid
for standing on principle, I say it's worth it. We can recover from any
political price, even though I don't believe there will be anything but
a political reward; but we can never recover if we allow ObamaCare to
be implemented or enforced.
That's my stand, Mr. Speaker. That's the stand that I ask my
colleagues to take today, tomorrow, the next day, and every day. If we
hold together and we hold strong, in the end the beneficiaries will be
the American people and God-given liberty.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________