Congressional Record, Volume 159 Issue 140 (Wednesday, October 9, 2013)

[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 140 (Wednesday, October 9, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H6443-H6450]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

CONSTITUTIONAL DUTIES

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. LaMalfa). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. DeSantis) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. DeSANTIS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss an issue of
increasing relevance to our national affairs and to constitutional
government properly understood--and that is the requirement that the
President faithfully enforce the laws of the land and the failure of
the current incumbent to satisfy that obligation.
The Constitution sets out a simple yet effective structure: the major
powers of government--legislative, executive, and judicial--are divided
into three separate branches of government. The legislative branch--the
Congress--passes laws, makes law; the executive branch--the President--
enforces law; and the judicial branch--the Supreme Court and inferior
courts--interprets laws.
Article II, section 3 of the Constitution imposes upon the President
the duty to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'' This
duty has roots in Anglo American law dating back to the Glorious
Revolution of 17th century Britain. In fact, the English Bill of Rights
of 1689 provided that:

The pretended power of suspending laws, or the execution of
laws, by regal authority, without the consent of parliament,
is illegal.

For his part, the Founder of our country, George Washington, saw the
faithful execution of the law to be one of the President's core
responsibilities. In a letter to Alexander Hamilton, then-President
Washington explained that the Constitution's ``take care'' clause
meant:

It is my duty to see the laws executed: to permit them to
be trampled with impunity would be repugnant to that duty.

The duty of the President to ``take care that the laws be faithfully
executed'' is a central component not simply of the executive branch of
government, but to the entire constitutional system.

{time} 1445

Yet the conduct of the current incumbent has evinced a disregard for
this core constitutional duty. By picking and choosing which laws to
enforce, the President has undermined the constitutional order and has
failed to keep faith with the basic idea that ours is a government of
laws, not of men.
Now the most conspicuous vehicle for the President's disregard of the
Take Care duty has been the implementation of the law that bears his
name--the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.
Now, it is interesting that of all the arguments that have been put
forward to counter those who seek to defund, delay, or repeal this law,
the one that ObamaCare supporters have embraced most frequently as of
late goes like this: ObamaCare is the law of the land and has been
upheld by the Supreme Court; therefore, it cannot be repealed,
defunded, or delayed.
Now, this is a nonsensical argument on its face. Congress has the
authority to legislate, per article I of the Constitution, and can
amend, supercede, or repeal ordinary legislation as it sees fit. But
this argument is particularly rich regarding ObamaCare. Because if this
law is somehow sacrosanct, then why is the President not enforcing it
as written? It is untenable to assert that Congress cannot change the
law through legislation but that the President can delay or waive
provisions of the law by executive fiat. Exhibit A for this, as it
relates to ObamaCare, is the President's unilateral decision for 1 year
to delay the enforcement of the so-called employer mandate, a central
provision of ObamaCare requiring most businesses to provide government-
sanctioned insurance to their employees.
Now, section 1513(d) of that law states that the employer mandate
``shall apply to the months beginning after December 31, 2013.'' Note
the statutory command of ``shall.'' This is not discretionary, and
there is no provision of the law permitting the Executive to delay it.
Incredibly, the President has not offered any coherent rationale for
his actions. He was asked in an interview with The New York Times
whether his critics were justified in asserting that he lacked
authority to delay the mandate. He responded by saying:

If Congress thinks that what I've done is inappropriate or
wrong in some fashion, they're free to make that case. But
there's not an action that I take that you don't have some
folks in Congress who say that I'm usurping my authority.
Some of those folks think I usurped my authority by having
the gall to win the Presidency. And I don't think

[[Page H6444]]

that's a secret. But ultimately, I'm not concerned about
their opinions--very few of them, by the way, are lawyers,
much less constitutional lawyers.

In other words, the President doesn't care what Congress thinks, as
elected Representatives of the people, and feels no need to justify his
official conduct.
Now, a couple weeks later he was asked again about this decision to
unilaterally delay the mandate, and he said, look, he ``didn't simply
choose to delay this on my own'' because the decision was made ``in
consultation with businesses all across the country.''
Now, I have searched the Constitution in vain for the provision
allowing the President to suspend article II, section 3 of the
Constitution so long as he consults with business, but I have not found
it.
What is even worse, though is that the President further justified
his conduct by stating:

In a normal political environment, it would have been
easier for me to simply call up the Speaker and say, you know
what, this is a tweak that doesn't go to the essence of the
law. Let's make a technical change of the law. That would be
the normal thing that I would prefer to do, but we're not in
a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to ObamaCare.

That's the end of the President's quote.
Now, this is absurd. The Constitution doesn't relieve the President
of his duty to faithfully enforce the law simply because the political
environment is difficult. Second, the President didn't, in fact, need
to call the Speaker, because a couple weeks before his comment, this
House voted 264-161--with 35 Members of the other party voting
``yes''--to delay the mandate by law for 1 year. Most of us in the
House actually think that, as a matter of policy, the employer mandate
is bad for the economy. The President responded to our request to delay
the employer mandate by threatening to veto the bill.
Now, with respect to the employer mandate, the emperor truly has no
clothes. The unilateral delay of this mandate is not consistent with
the Constitution's Take Care clause and is an abridgement of Congress'
constitutional duty to make the law. The separation of powers is
designed to ensure a government of laws, not of men. This President is
content to be a law unto himself.
Now, the employer mandate delay is not an exception that proves the
rule, unfortunately. Far from it. The entire enterprise of ObamaCare
implementation has been an exercise in the administration picking and
choosing which provisions to enforce and which provisions to delay or
waive. Rather than implement the law as written, the President is
rewriting the law as he goes along.
The following list represents a pretty impressive display of this
lawlessness:
ObamaCare contains a statutory cap on out-of-pocket health costs, yet
the President suspended this provision, most likely because he feared
it would lead to health insurance premiums rising even more than they
already are.
Second, the law requires the State-based ObamaCare health insurance
exchanges to verify whether applicants for exchange subsidies qualify
for subsidies based on their income level. Yet the President suspended
this requirement, thereby allowing taxpayer money to be handed out
based on the ``honor system''; and we know that it's going to hit the
taxpayer more than if you actually enforce the regulations.
The plain text of ObamaCare also provides that subsidies can only
flow through State-based exchanges, yet the President's IRS is
disregarding this requirement and is allowing subsidies to flow to
Federal exchanges.
So this is creating, I think, a patently unjust scenario: The law
imposes substantial burdens on society as a whole, but those with
political connections--employers, insurance companies, what have you--
are granted delays and/or waivers from the law's burdens. This is
precisely contrary to James Madison's admonition in the Federalist No.
57 that there should be ``no law which will not have its full operation
on the political class and their friends, as well as on the great mass
of society.''
The most egregious example, though, of political favoritism via
executive branch lawlessness has got to be the illicit bailout for
Members of Congress with respect to congressional health plans. Now,
when the bill was being debated several years ago, the American people
were told we have to pass the bill to find out what is in the bill. And
sure enough, the law contained all sorts of surprises, including an
interesting provision regarding health care for Members of Congress.
Now there is broad agreement among analysts who have looked at the
effects of ObamaCare that the law's structures and incentives will
cause millions of Americans to lose their employer-provided coverage
and get pushed into these health care exchanges. The only dispute
really is how many millions of Americans will suffer this fate. The
Congressional Budget Office said 7 million. Other analysts have said
it's going to be tens of millions of Americans.

Perhaps recognizing this possibility, one section of ObamaCare makes
Congress eat its own cooking. The idea behind the provision is that,
because ObamaCare will upend the health care arrangements of other
Americans, Members of Congress and other political insiders should be
placed in exactly the same position as their fellow citizens whom they
have burdened, and thus Members of Congress must go and get insurance
through these ObamaCare exchanges. No more gold-plated plans for
Washington, given Washington is having a negative effect on other
Americans.
Now, one can search the health care law in vain for any provision
providing Members of Congress taxpayer-financed subsidies for use on
these ObamaCare exchanges. It's just not there. In fact, as Politico
reported, the Office of Personnel Management initially said that
lawmakers and staffers couldn't receive subsidies once they went into
the exchange because there was no authority to give them subsidies.
This is probably also because any other American who loses their health
coverage and goes into the exchanges is prohibited from getting a tax-
excludable employer contribution.
This state of play didn't sit well with a lot of Members of Congress.
So after being lobbied by Members of both the House and Senate, the
President pledged to ``fix the issue.'' He ordered OPM to reverse
course and grant unique taxpayer subsidies to Members of Congress and
other Washington insiders--again, without having a statutory authority
to do so.
So this is a lawlessness in service of liberating Members of Congress
from having to live under the terms of the laws that they impose on
others, And this is creating all sorts of problems of fairness and
equity.
I think the Founding Fathers had it right when they said that the
President did have a duty to take care that the laws would be
faithfully executed. And that word ``faithfulness'' means something.
Yes, you have discretion as an executive to enforce laws to a certain
degree or not, depending on the situation. That is a natural aspect of
prosecutorial discretion. But the idea that you can just supercede or
delay laws by executive fiat is something that's foreign to our
constitutional tradition.
I'm going to yield in a second to the gentleman from Oklahoma, but
think about this: Had Mitt Romney won the 2012 election and he came in
and started delaying or waiving parts of ObamaCare with impunity and
with no congressional authorization, can you imagine the uproar that we
would be hearing from the press and from our friends on the other side
of the aisle? I think it would be very loud in here if that were the
case.
At this time, I thank my friend from Oklahoma for coming, and I yield
to him.
Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Well, I really appreciate it.
I would like to thank the gentleman from Florida (Mr. DeSantis), who
has been such a great leader on constitutional issues in this body. And
I'd like to say that, here you have a gentleman who went to Yale
undergraduate and he played baseball. He got a law degree from Harvard,
and then he decided to join the United States Navy. He has served
bravely in the United States Navy as a JAG officer, and now he's
serving in the United States Congress. So if there is anybody in this
body who has the credibility to discuss these constitutional issues, it
is my good friend from Florida, Ron DeSantis. And I appreciate your
leadership on these issues.

[[Page H6445]]

When you think about the constitutional process, Mr. Speaker, there
is one particular issue that is near and dear to me, that is near and
dear to my constituents, that we have seen this body go through earlier
this year, and that is the issue of gun control. I think it was back in
April. The President had an agenda and Harry Reid had an agenda, and
their agenda was to outlaw certain types of guns. These guns didn't
operate any differently than other types of guns; they just looked
scary, so they wanted to ban them.
Interestingly, that effort died in the Senate and it never came to
the House of Representatives. So then they started another effort, and
that effort was for what would eventually be a national gun registry.
They called it ``universal background checks,'' but ultimately it would
be a national gun registry, and that effort died in the Senate.
Now, the constitutional process, if the President wants his agenda
enacted, he needs to go to the United States Senate or the House of
Representatives and pass a law, in a bicameral process, and eventually
it needs to go to his White House for signing. Ultimately, this bill
did not have the will of the American people. This bill did not have
the desire of the Members in this body to pass that bill. So what the
President did recently--which I believe is egregious--is he decided to
enter the United States of America into an international treaty to
accomplish the very objectives that the House of Representatives and
the Senate had rejected, and that's the United Nations Arms Trade
Treaty.
Under this treaty, anybody who purchases a gun internationally--if a
gun comes from another country, maybe a Glock from Austria--well, then
you have to enter into an international database. You have to enter
your name and your address and your phone number. There will be an
international database of anybody who buys a gun that was ultimately
produced in a country other than the United States.
And let me be clear about this, because I've talked to a lot of gun
manufacturers. Many parts of many guns are not made in the United
States. You could have a handle that's made in China. You could have a
trigger that's made in Mexico. If you look at most of the guns that are
made in the United States, major parts of them are made elsewhere,
which means that we are going to have a national gun registry that will
have an international body overseeing our national gun registry per the
United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.
Now, for the President of the United States to have an agenda item
that doesn't get through the Senate, that doesn't get through the House
of Representatives, that never comes to his desk for signing, that he
is ideologically committed to this--which is a violation of the Second
Amendment of the United States Constitution--for him to then enter into
a treaty, an international treaty where there will be an international
body responsible for overseeing this treaty, to me, is an egregious
lack of leadership and certainly violates the intention of the
Constitution. The President knows full well that the Senate will never
ratify this treaty.
And this is another important point, I think. The President has had
other agenda items. He wanted to sign us up for other treaties--the
United Nations Convention for the Rights of Children, the United
Nations Convention for the Rights of Women, the United Nations
Convention for the Rights of the Disabled. There are all these
conventions, and they're all seemingly very good conventions; but what
I would say is this: The United States of America has laws, and those
laws are far more stringent than these treaties.

{time} 1500

For what purpose would we sign on to a treaty when our laws
themselves are stronger at adhering to the principles that these
treaties are trying to promote? Why would we sign on? Why would we turn
over our sovereignty to an international body? I personally don't
understand it.
The United States is a leader in the world. We can lead the world by
example, but signing over our sovereignty so that there will be an
international body that comes in and inspects our country because the
President has an ideology that he couldn't get through the House, that
he couldn't get through the Senate, that ultimately these treaties were
not going to be ratified by the Senate, I think it is egregious.
Certainly the Second Amendment of the United States is, quite
frankly, not up to debate by foreigners, and it is not up to debate by
foreign bodies. Foreign governments cannot come into the United States
and force us to overturn our own constitutional amendment--the Second
Amendment.
That is, I think, another example of where this President has
overreached beyond his constitutional authority in certainly passing
laws--not actually passing laws, but creating treaties because he can't
get his laws passed--that would violate our Constitution.
Mr. DeSANTIS. I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma. Thank you for
those comments, and thank you for the service that you have given to
the country, here in the Congress, but particularly as a naval aviator
flying more than one platform--the E-2D Hawkeye and then also the F-18
Super Hornet.
You have been deployed in harm's way numerous times, and you speak
with a great deal of authority, not only on these issues, but on issues
related to national security. I think it has been great that the
gentleman and I have had a mutual pact to be supporting our blue-water
Navy because there is no other weapon in the world like it when you can
move a carrier 90 miles off somebody's coast and project power.
With that, I would like to recognize another one of my colleagues,
the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Salmon), a guy who has been here
before, he has walked the walk, and one of the few guys who will tell
you what his principles are and will come here and will actually put
those principles into action. He did it in the '90s and he is doing it
again.
Mr. SALMON. Thank you very much.
First of all, I want to say what an honor it is to be sharing the
dais with two such distinguished gentlemen who have given up their
careers and sacrificed countless hours with their families to come to
this body and not, as has been done before, be willing to ``kick the
can down the road''; coming to make real change; coming to try to get
our arms around the real problems that are confronting our society and
us as a Nation.
I would like to say that it is just a debt crisis, that it is just
funding for our government. But I think we all know it is much more
than that. It is about the freedoms that we hold. It is about
everything that we hold dear--everything that every military person for
the last 240 years has fought to defend--and that is the freedoms that
our Founding Fathers envisioned when they started this great
experiment. We don't want to let that experiment die.
I am so honored to be able to serve with two gentlemen that take this
seriously and are willing to do more than be politicians and risk those
political careers to actually do what is right. What a novel idea for
Washington, D.C.
I would like to talk just a little bit about the genesis of the
President's health care law when we talk about the constitutionality.
They cooked this thing up at a time when they knew that time was
running short. A new Senator had just been elected from Massachusetts,
so they had to act very, very quickly, or they wouldn't be able to get
by the cloture vote. That is why Nancy Pelosi ended up saying, we have
to pass it before we know what is in it and then we can read it
afterwards, because virtually none of those Senators actually read it.
That is why I understand Wolf Blitzer just came on today and said:
Mr. President, why don't you postpone ObamaCare for a year?
Why? Because we have seen over the last week it is a failure. Its
roll-out has been catastrophic. We want to stop the hemorrhage and help
the American people.
How did the bill eventually become a law? It happened because they
did a ``strike all'' on a bill that was originated in the House. But
they did a ``strike all'' with language that had nothing to do with the
original language.
Why is that important? Because in the Constitution there is a
provision called the origination clause. That stipulates that any
revenue bill has to originate in the House of Representatives. It has
to. That is a requirement

[[Page H6446]]

for the Constitution, but this bill actually started in the Senate--
ObamaCare started in the Senate. So constitutionally from day one it
started out on shaky footing. They violated the Constitution right out
of the shoot.
Now, let's fast-forward to where we are today. Congressman DeSantis,
you have done a marvelous job describing some of the inconsistencies
and the breaches of the Constitution that this President has done in
actually changing his own law. We say it is his own law--it is
Congress' law. It is a law that a President can't enact in and of
itself and he can't change in and of himself. We don't have a line-item
veto anywhere. The President can only change the law if it goes through
Congress first. So like you said, Congressman DeSantis, he arbitrarily
changed the date in the law from one year to the next, and you can't do
that.
I have heard from the Democratic Party time and time again--the folks
on the other side--that they can't support this pathway that we have
been going through in the last week of putting bills up on funding
various aspects of government, like funding for NIH and kids with
cancer or funding our veterans or funding our national parks. They say
that that is a process of creating winners and losers, and they can't
have any part of that.
Well, what is President Obama doing when he is giving breaks to Big
Business and to Congress, but he is not giving them to every other
American when it comes to ObamaCare? Isn't that creating winners and
losers? I think it is a tad hypocritical of them to even raise that
specter.
But I want to talk for a little bit about what has happened in the
last week and a half. Because while the President is very willing to
exceed his constitutional authority to do certain things, when he does
have the constitutional authority to do something, he doesn't do it.
What am I talking about? I am talking about what has happened over
the last few days with the bill that we passed last Saturday before the
shutdown funding our military, the Pay Our Military Act. It was clear
in that bill, that very succinct bill, that they had the power to pay
all of our military folks, including all of our civilians, and that
they could go ahead and take care of the death benefits for these
widows who have lost their loved ones in war. That was very, very
clear. They had that ability all along.
So what does the President do? He wants to use this for political
leverage and make this as painful as he possibly can. So what do they
do? They furlough several hundred thousand civilian workers within the
military, just so they could ratchet up the pain and make it a little
bit tougher on the Republicans.

Then what happens? About a week later Chuck Hagel, the Secretary of
Defense, comes out and says, Oops, my bad. I guess we had the power all
along.
Wasn't that what we have been telling them all along? You have the
power to go ahead and keep these people at work and not disrupt, but
they did that for political gain so that he could make it as painful as
possible.
One other example: in my own State, in Arizona, we have one of the
greatest national parks, the Grand Canyon. It is not only a wonder for
the entire world, but it is also a wonder for our economy. We have
folks that are doing river raft trips, folks that do excursions and
hikes down through the Grand Canyon; but they run into a closed park.
Well, let me tell you something: I was here during 1995 when we had
that last government shutdown. And guess what? We had a Democratic
President. His name was Bill Clinton. We had a Republican Governor,
just like we do in Arizona right now. His name was Fife Symington. What
happened with the government shutdown? President Clinton worked with
our Republican Governor, Fife Symington, to allow them to use private
and State resources to keep the park open.
So our Governor, Governor Brewer, writes a letter to President Obama
thinking that he might be somewhat similar in nature to President
Clinton as far as being willing to negotiate. I mean, these are
people's lives on the line. What did they get? A big fat zero--no way,
you can't open it.
We have seen that time and time again. We have seen it on the
National Mall that when certain groups of people want to come and take
a look at the monuments or go into the National Mall that, no, the
government is shut down, you can't come in, everything is shut.
But yesterday, what happened in the National Mall? Fifteen thousand
people came for a protest on immigration reform, and they opened up the
National Mall.
It is a disturbing pattern. If you agree with the President and his
policies, we are going to do everything within our power to use
government to help you get where you need to be. If you disagree with
me, we are going to use our government to bludgeon you and use it as a
tool to further our political agenda.
That has happened with the IRS when it comes to the nonprofit status
of various organizations. It happened with our Capital Mall and our
Capital monuments.
All I am saying is that I find it so incredulous that the President
is willing to overstep his boundaries and unconstitutionally do things
through executive order, and yet when he has the power and we have
given him the power he is not willing to do it. I find those
inconsistencies extremely disturbing and a little bit Machiavellian.
I would hope that the President would look at what we are trying to
do through this process. We have a responsibility to the people that
elected us to make the laws as good as we possibly can.
The last proposal that we put on the table was that we would delay
the individual mandate so that every American--as you said, Mr.
DeSantis--every American could get the same deal that Big Business with
their great lobbyists here in Washington, D.C., got and that Members of
Congress got. They would get the same consideration.
The other part was that we would make sure that Congress lived under
the same laws everybody else has to. A pretty commonsense approach, so
much so that multiple Democrats agreed with us and voted with us to
pass that and send it to the President. But what did Harry Reid do? He
shoved it in his draw at the behest of President Obama.
It is time to stop these reckless games. Mr. President, you have
already shown that you are very willing to use your executive powers
far beyond your scope of authority given you in the Constitution. Is it
unreasonable for us to ask you to use your powers when you are given
them to do the right thing?
Mr. DeSANTIS. I thank the gentleman from Arizona for those great
comments.
I think he brings up a great point about the funding bill that was
sent the day before the fiscal year ended was not demanding that the
President fully repeal the health care law; it basically had two very
reasonable policy asks:
One, that Members of Congress live under the exact terms of the law
that they passed and not get any type of special unauthorized
treatment; and then
Two, that individuals be given the same courtesy that the President
gave to Big Business.
That was very reasonable. The press hasn't really reported that. That
is not really the way they framed it. I am not surprised at that. But
that is a vote--by standing beside the Senate majority leader, all
those Senators who did that--that is going to be a vote that is going
to reverberate into the future.
I think it is interesting because when we are talking about the
proper constitutional authority of the President, our primary means to
check the President is the power of the purse. That is basically what
we are doing in terms of we are sending the funding bill, but we are
saying, look, we cannot afford to continue going with this disparate
treatment throughout society. You have got to treat everybody the same.
Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. DeSANTIS. I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.
Mr. BRIDENSTINE. I just wanted to ask you a quick question, which is,
when you consider the fact that the media reporting is very different
from what I have perceived in this body as a Member of Congress, I am
more astonished every day at how the media reports the story. But the
very last ask that we made before the government

[[Page H6447]]

shutdown was about 1 o'clock in the morning, so I guess technically the
government had been shut down for about an hour. That very last ask was
simply a meeting. It was simply a conference so that people on their
side and people on our side could come together and discuss ObamaCare
and some of the problems that we have with it.
Now, when you talk about the Constitution and the constitutional
process that we have and you have divided government--I would like to
ask the gentleman from Florida--is that not a perfectly reasonable
adult way of handling disputes?

{time} 1515

Mr. DeSANTIS. I thank the gentleman for the question. That is not
only an adult way, that is exactly the way that the Founding Fathers
envisioned it. James Madison, when he wrote about the different
branches of separation of power, checks and balances, he said:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

So you have an executive that gets beyond their scope, he expected
the legislature to check that. So in this instance, we are saying, Wait
a minute, you can't unilaterally delay the law for business, but then
leave the rest of the American people holding the bag. You can't let
Congress, the people who are imposing this law upon others, get out
from under the exact text of the law. So in that sense, that's exactly
the way the system is supposed to work.
Now he has a different view of, basically, the Congress needs to do
what he decrees, and then he will grant Congress the courtesy of
actually discussing issues with them. That would probably not have gone
over very well with the Founding Fathers.
I want to just make another point because the gentleman from Arizona
brought up how ObamaCare was passed and kind of the genesis of it. Some
of our friends on the other side of the aisle that say, How can you
guys be talking about this, it's the law, move on, not giving any
credence to the 50 to 55 percent of Americans who are being negatively
affected by it. But if you compare how that law was passed compared to
any other major piece of legislation, I pulled some interesting
numbers. Social Security in 1935, in the House of Representatives, 96
percent of the Democrats voted for it, 81 percent of the Republicans
voted for it. The interstate highway system under Eisenhower, 93
percent in this body voted for it, 98 percent of the Republicans in
this body voted for it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, maybe the most
important piece of legislation in the 20th century, 61 percent of the
Democrats in the House voted for that piece of legislation, 80 percent
of the Republicans in the House voted for that piece of legislation.
Even 1981, the Reagan economic program, in the Senate, 78 percent of
the Democrats voted for Reaganomics, and 98 percent of Republicans
voted for Reaganomics. When the gentleman from Arizona was here when
they did welfare reform, you had a unified Republican Party joining
with a number of Democrats and a Democratic President. So when you have
this bill that never received any support from the other party and that
rests on all these broken promises about your health care is going to
decline by $2,500 a family, you can keep your plan, keep your doctor,
we know none of that is going to be true.
I just want to ask the gentleman from Oklahoma, yield to him because
he and I had been discussing the idea of the President's responsibility
to enforce border security and enforce laws related to immigration. I
yield so you can discuss that.
Mr. BRIDENSTINE. I appreciate that, and it is perfectly appropriate
that we have the gentleman from Arizona here as well. The gentleman
from Arizona, and when you serve in this body, you get to meet a lot of
very interesting people that have done amazing things in their lives.
The gentleman from Arizona who we heard from earlier had an opportunity
to serve in this body back in the 1990s, and then he left. He had a
term limit pledge. He honored his term limit pledge. And then he came
back recently as a newly elected freshman with the rest of us, and it
is an honor to serve with him. But in that hiatus when he was back in
Arizona, he ran for the governorship of Arizona, and he darn near won.
Interestingly, he ran against the person who won, who was Janet
Napolitano, who became the Secretary of Homeland Security here in the
Obama administration.
I would like to discuss some things about why it is so important for
me personally. I am a Navy pilot, as the gentleman from Florida said,
and I have flown combat. But interestingly, I have also flown
counterdrug missions in Central and South America. And I can tell you
without a doubt that the drug cartels that we fight down in Central and
South America, they don't try to get the drugs into the United States
of America anymore. Their only objective is to get the drugs to
northern Mexico, where they are vertically integrated with gangs and
other cartels who bring the drugs across the border without a hitch.
Now, because we have these drug wars in northern Mexico--and, by the
way, there are over 100,000 people who have been killed in the last 7
years in these drug wars in northern Mexico, but that exists because we
have an open border policy on the south side of the United States.
So if you were to hand a 16-year-old kid a backpack with $1 million
worth of cocaine and you say to him, Hey, go across this border and get
to that point, you're going to be very well rewarded. A 16-year-old kid
will do that in many cases in these impoverished areas in northern
Mexico. Interestingly, another 16-year-old kid will see that backpack
and want it for himself, and the next thing you know, you've got one
killing the other, and then you get a third killing the second. And
then you have these gangs form, and this is how you get to a point
where you have cartels and gangs that are killing not only each other,
100,000 people, but they are also killing judges. They are killing
police officers. They are killing politicians. And on top of it all,
they are not just transporting cocaine, they are transporting young
girls in the slave trade. And they are transporting weapons. This is
happening in northern Mexico just south of our border. Mexico is on the
brink of a failed state because of this, and it is the direct result of
an open border policy.
Now the Secretary of Homeland Security, former Secretary of Homeland
Security Janet Napolitano has been on record. What does she say? She
says that the border is secure. That's what she says. I have just got
to tell you that I know firsthand that it's not. And the people who
live in Arizona know that it's not. The people who live in Texas know
that it's not. The border is not secure.
But here's what we have done in this body. We have passed laws to
secure the border. Has the border become secure? No. Have thousands of
people died since those laws have been passed because we haven't
secured the border? Yes.
The President's job per the Constitution is to faithfully execute the
laws, not pick and choose which laws he wants to follow based on
political preference, which is what he has been doing.
So if it is all right, I would like to yield to the gentleman from
Arizona. You have been near and dear to this for a very long time. If
you have some comments, I would love to have you share them.
Mr. SALMON. I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma. Yes, it has been
something that we have been dealing with in a very up close and
personal way.
As a matter of fact, about a month and a half ago, I had the good
fortune to meet with Arizona's adjunct general. He's over the National
Guard for Arizona. He was finishing up his term in office, and I said,
Sir, what is your biggest concern when it comes to possible terrorist
activity here in Arizona? We don't have a lot of the national weather
pattern problems like they do in other parts of the country, like
hurricanes and tornadoes. We have some dust storms every now and
then, and we have had some terrible fires. But I was truly interested,
and I wasn't trying to lead him in any direction. But he said, without
a doubt, the thing that keeps me up at night, the thing that worries me
more than anything is the porousness of our border, and the fact that
about 15 percent of the people that we apprehended last year were not
from Mexico. Many of those people were from the Middle East. What I
worry about is because it is so lax and

[[Page H6448]]

so easy to get across our border, that some terrorist is going to be
able to get across the border with a suitcase bomb and detonate it and
a lot of people will be injured or killed. That was his big concern.

So then I had an opportunity to sit down with some of our ICE people
that are stationed in Arizona. They are the ones responsible for
interior enforcement. I had a long conversation with them. You know
what they told me? They said, You know, we don't need a lot more assets
to get the border secured; what we need is for this administration to
enforce the law. We need them to let us do our jobs. We are law
enforcement people. We see the law very, very clearly. We know what the
laws state, but our hands have been tied by this administration. They
won't let us do our jobs.
He then proceeded to tell me that we have done these surveys on a
regular basis to try to determine where employee morale is at, and they
said it's at an all-time low ever since they've been doing these
surveys right now within ICE, especially in Arizona because they feel
they are not empowered to do their jobs, and they wonder, what am I
doing here. Many of them want to be transferred out or just kind of,
you know, march in place and do their time and get out as soon as they
can, but the morale is terrible. These are honorable, decent people who
want to do their jobs.
The other side would have you believe that no, this is just about
some honest people who want to come across the border and get jobs in
the United States and take care of their families. It's not just about
that. As we saw with Brian Terry, with the gun smuggling, Fast and
Furious, guns are being smuggled across the border, drugs are being
smuggled across the border, and unsavory characters who have bad ideas
on what they want in the United States are coming across the border,
and one day the piper is going to have to be paid. So the border is far
from being secure. We have the ability to do it, but this
administration will not let them do their jobs.
Mr. DeSANTIS. Thank you for that. It's interesting. As you bring up
former Secretary Napolitano, that brings up the Presidential
appointment and confirmation process. The Constitution provides for
Cabinet officers and judges, that the President will nominate, the
Senate votes to advise and consent to confirm, and then at that point
they can become appointed and fill the office.
There is also another provision in article II of the Constitution, in
section 2, involving what are called recess appointments, and it says:

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies
that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting
commissions which shall expire at the end of their next
session.

This made a lot of sense at the time, especially because you'd be in
session, people lived all over the country. They'd take a horse-drawn
carriage to get to Washington and back, so the Senate may be out for
months and months. The Founders didn't want government ground to a
halt. It's been used more recently if the Senate is on a recess, the
President can kind of strategically figure that out and appoint
somebody who might not otherwise be confirmed. Well, what this
President did was a step further than that. He actually said that if
the Senate says that it's not in recess, if they are just adjourned for
say a day, a couple days and they are having pro forma session, that
that doesn't actually count as a recess in his judgment and he can go
ahead and do recess appointments, people to the National Labor
Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Board that would
not otherwise be able to be confirmed. A lot of people cried foul about
this, and it actually got tied up in the courts. Normally, we have to
check some of these things, but there was somebody who had standing to
bring a lawsuit. It has gone to two different Circuit Courts of Appeal
and they both said, Look, the President can't just unilaterally
determine when the Senate is in recess. The Senate is either in recess
or they are not. If it is just that they go to sleep at night and come
back the next morning, the President can't wait until midnight and just
thrust somebody into office. So both of those courts have said that the
President has overstepped his authority by shoving these recess
appointments in office while the Senate was not in a formal recess;
they were just adjourned within that term of service. And so I think
the Supreme Court is going to hear that this time. I think they are
definitely very likely to agree with those courts and say if the
President can determine when it is a recess, then the whole idea of
advise and consent gets swallowed up by the exception, and that's just
not something that's going to work.
The gentleman from Arizona is interesting with his history because I
listed some major pieces of legislation and how they all got broad
bipartisan support. And the last one I mentioned was the 1996 Welfare
Reform Act which Congress basically passed. It got vetoed and passed
again, and finally President Clinton signed it. And the core of that,
as I understand it, was that you would actually try and incentivize
work instead of dependency, and so it had work requirements for able-
bodied folks. I think the results of that were very, very positive. It
essentially changed the incentive structure and actually gave people
hope to get off dependency and into a productive life.
I yield to the gentleman from Arizona because the President has
basically watered down those work requirements unilaterally, and I
think that will have a negative effect.
Mr. SALMON. I thank the gentleman from Florida. Yes, I was right in
the middle of all those debates. As a matter of fact, before I came to
Congress, the Arizona Legislature, which I was part of, actually passed
a bill called Workfare, which was very similar to what we passed in
1996. It recognizes the idea, I think the truth, and there is an old
Chinese proverb: If I catch a fish for you, you'll have food for a day.
If I teach you to fish, you'll have food for your life.
That was the model we tried to employ, and that was that people have
to work. They have to give something back for the welfare payments that
they are given. It was called Workfare, and that is what we decided to
do here in the Congress.
And it did one other thing, Congressman, that no government program
can or normally does really do, and that is help instill dignity in
people. I think one of the things that has really broken our country is
that we have become this welfare state, a bunch of dependents across
the country. I think that giving somebody the opportunity to be able to
give something back actually helps preserve, I think, the human spirit.
We all want to feel like we have some worth, that we have some
relevance to society. And the old traditional welfare program is almost
like we'll pay you to stay out of society. We'll give you just barely
enough to subsist, but you stay out of society. And that's the message,
subliminally or otherwise, that it gives to those people.

{time} 1530

We don't really have much to offer you. You don't offer much value to
society, so we will pay you to stay home. We thought of a different
idea, I think a vastly more compassionate idea, and that is to have
people be able to give something back so they didn't get something for
nothing. Also, along the way, they actually got skills and abilities
that they didn't otherwise have so that they could learn how to work,
they could learn how to hold down a job.
That was one of the key components of the welfare reform that we
passed in 1996, that while we send that money out to the States, that
there are work requirements. I think that's reasonable. You don't get
something for nothing. You have got to get out and help pull the wagon
instead of having everybody cart you around. That's reasonable.
What did this President do the moment he got in office? He started
through executive orders granting waivers to each of the States,
getting rid of those work requirements. Again, that was a law that was
passed in 1996, signed by President Clinton, and the President coming
after changes the terms of those laws. To me, as far as I am concerned,
not only is that lawless, it is foolish, because it is hurting the very
people he purports to help. I believe that rather than helping them, it
is keeping them down.

[[Page H6449]]

Mr. DeSANTIS. I thank the gentleman from Arizona for that.
You mentioned just as the President came into office, and I remember
the first thing, and I wasn't here. None of us were in Congress at the
time. Just as a citizen, I was Active Duty Navy. You were probably too,
Mr. Bridenstine. But we had this stimulus bill that had been passed.
This was a huge thing. Part of that, as I've learned more about it, is
that there were actually requirements that the executive branch was
supposed to submit timely reports that would document the different
spending and what was going on. I think even the Vice President said,
Hey, I am going to be the watchdog on this. It is, in fact, the case
that most of those deadlines have just been completely disregarded,
that you haven't seen the type of reporting that was envisioned by the
law, and that's perhaps because the law wasn't successful at
engineering an economic recovery.
Shortly after that, though, one of the biggest issues that happened
in 2009 was the auto bankruptcy. This was something that was unusual
because the White House actually got very involved on the ground in
terms of refereeing the rights of the various parties, including the
creditors.
I now yield some time to the gentleman from Arizona to discuss that
because you had mentioned that was something that had bothered you at
the time. The floor is yours.
Mr. SALMON. I appreciate that.
When we talk about the rule of law, the rule of law means that it
applies equally to everyone. Of course, today, we have talked a lot
about how within ObamaCare the rule of law does not apply equally to
everyone. Some people get waivers. Depending on what kind of company
you work for, some companies get waivers. Some unions get waivers. When
it comes to individual health care policies, some people get
grandfathered and they get to keep their policy, and other people get
letters saying their policy is canceled.
We have exchanged, in this country, at this point under ObamaCare,
the rule of law for the rule of man, where you have nameless, faceless
bureaucrats that don't represent anybody and make decisions that change
the law for individuals. That's not what was intended by the Founding
Fathers.
As the gentleman from Florida said, when you think about creditor
rights and you think about the bailout for Chrysler, you have different
classes of creditors. In the case of the Chrysler bailout, you had
secured creditors. That means that in the hierarchy structure, they
were superior to the shareholders. They were superior because they were
lending the money. They weren't the owners of the company. They had
rights that were above the shareholders.
In the case of Chrysler, what happened is the President came in, like
you said, and they got very involved. In fact, they changed the rule of
law for the rule of man, where you had bureaucrats coming in and making
a decision that the secured creditors would be wiped out. In fact, they
were bullied. I think they received 30 cents on a dollar for
investment, if I remember correctly. But the secured creditors would be
bullied to give up their investment, and the people who actually came
out ahead were the unions, who were not secured creditors. This is a
violation of bankruptcy law.
Again, the President's job is to faithfully execute the law, not
change the law for political preference and not replace the rule of law
with the rule of man, which is what they did in this case. Politically,
they made a decision that the secured creditors would be wiped out, the
unions would be made whole, and at the end of the day--here is the
fallout from that: in the United States of America, all across this
country, and in the world, people are making decisions about where
they're going to invest money. If you look at the investment
opportunities in the United States of America right now, if you're
going to invest in Big Business, the whole too-big-to-fail mantra that
we have heard over and over again, if you are going to invest in Big
Business, you are going to have to take a risk, and that risk has
nothing to do with the return on investment or whether or not the
company is sound. That risk is now political risk. Because as an
investor, politically you could be wiped out, even if you have a
secured debt instrument.
When you replace the rule of law with the rule of man, especially as
it relates to business, people make decisions to invest elsewhere. And
if you look at our country right now and you look at the capital
investment in our country, we could be doing much better. Of course, if
we had a President that adhered to the law, rather than changing the
law based on political preference, we might see more investment in our
country. Of course, investment is how businesses grow. It is how they
raise money to open up a new plant or open up a new store, and capital
investment is how new firms get created and it is how jobs get created
and grow. So what we have right now is the replacement of the rule of
law for the rule of man, and it is been detrimental for our economy as
it relates to the securities industry.

Mr. DeSANTIS. I thank both the gentleman from Oklahoma and the
gentleman from Arizona for coming here today to offer their views.
Their comments are much appreciated. The great thing about these two
guys is they will stand up to people, regardless of party. They will
stand up to people in their own party. They will stand up to people in
the other party if what they're trying to do is not the right thing
because these guys want to do the right thing.
I just want to conclude by invoking two giants in American history in
terms of some of the issues that we discussed today and kind of what
they mean.
The first is the Father of the Country, George Washington. When he
took the reins as the first President of the United States, he made the
comment ``I walk on untrodden ground.'' So he had a great sense that it
wasn't just about him. He was already the biggest hero in the country.
He could have taken over the country after defeating the British. He
could have been king, but he surrendered his sword and retired to Mount
Vernon until he was called back to further service. He was very
sensitive to the idea that he was trying to establish a framework for
freedom that could last generations, and it wasn't just about his own
personal glory. What he tried to establish was the proper role of an
executive in a constitutional system. There's a lot of people that said
you either have a strong executive and it is a monarchy, or you just
can't have a strong executive. I think he laid the foundation to say,
actually, you can have a constitutionally circumscribed executive power
that was nevertheless a force of good for the country.
The other gentleman that I would like to mention is Abraham Lincoln,
who's obviously one of the greatest presidents we have ever had. His
earliest recorded speech was a speech before the Young Men's Lyceum of
Springfield, Illinois. This was in the 1830s, so he still had decades
before he was President. I don't think he had been elected to anything
even locally at the time. He was really concerned about the future of
the country because he said you had this great Revolution, you had this
great Constitution, you had these wonderful decades where people were
actually living and breathing that. Obviously, he felt that there was a
lot of work to do because he spoke out against things like slavery, but
he thought that the ball was moving in the right direction in terms of
individual freedom. But he feared that as the Founding Fathers and
their generation passed away, that people really wouldn't have
something that they could all have to organize around and be faithful
to in terms of our country. So what he told people to do was to really
embrace constitutional principles and the rule of law.
In his speech, he said:

As the patriots of '76 did to support the Declaration of
Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and laws
let every American pledge his life, his property, and his
sacred honor. Let every man remember that to violate the law
is to trample on the blood of his father and to tear the
charter of his own and his children's liberty.

He went on to say:

And, in short, let it become the political religion of the
Nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor,
the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues and colors
and conditions sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

I think what Lincoln was getting at was this idea of American

[[Page H6450]]

exceptionalism. It is not because we as Americans are anything special.
I am certainly not anything special. It is not that we are so much
better than anybody as people. The exceptional part of the country is
the origins of the country and the principles that the country is
designed to further. That, I think, is what Lincoln was talking about;
that when you embrace the Declaration, when you embarrass the
Constitution, you're embracing a framework in which individual liberty
is the paramount objective of society, and that is why things like the
separation of powers and proper lawfulness from the legislature and
executive are so important. It is not just because this is all a game
and we want to try to blow the whistle on people who are in the other
party. It is because ultimately this constitutional structure and these
protections are what make us different from all the countries that have
come before and all the countries that have been founded since.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

____________________