[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 6 (Friday, January 10, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H153-H158]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
LIBERTY AND TYRANNY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, sometimes people say, Gee, if you are back
here in Texas, you ought to be in Washington in session. I have to
remind them that when we are in session, it is often the single biggest
threat to American liberty, because when we are in session, we pass
laws; and most every law, in some way, impacts people's liberty in one
way or another, for good or for bad.
So often we think we know so much more here in Washington, that we
can do so much better than others. And, of course, that message is not
helped by ignorance in the media, particularly left-wing and so many in
the mainstream.
Mr. Speaker, I spoke a couple of days ago here about a real burden on
my heart for women who are lured into ruts by promises of money by the
Federal Government, lured into dependence, and how that is immoral for
the government to do that. The government is not supposed to encourage
or lure people into conduct that is not helpful to the individual. The
government is supposed to be about encouraging good conduct. But if you
do evil, then you should be afraid of the government because, as Romans
says, God didn't give the sword to the government in vain.
That is the point, that we should not be about encouraging or paying
people to engage in conduct that is hurtful to them. And yet ignorance
in the left wing of our media is so pervasive that you could actually
have people write stories saying I was up here blaming single moms. I
mean, it is either ignorance or just complete dishonesty of people that
want to destroy the very fabric and foundation of this country because
of their ill will for all that is good and wholesome.
{time} 1130
Why would they want to protect a system that lures people into
dependency and prevents them from reaching their God-given potential? I
realize some of them don't believe there is a God, and that is
problematic because, since the Founders believed that we were endowed
by a Creator with certain inalienable rights, among those life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness, if you don't believe there is a Creator,
it creates a problem, because then you have to think that government is
the sole source of your rights, and if that is the case, you really
have no rights.
C.S. Lewis pointed out after he went from being an atheist to being a
believer in some God, some universal authority of right and wrong, if
you don't believe that, then there can be no justice, no right and no
wrong, if there is not a universal standard. So if it is relying on
some government to establish what is right and not an innate sense
instilled in us by some Higher Power, then there's no hope for most
people of ever having rights, freedoms and liberties as we have had in
this country.
It is plain that as we become more and more secular, there become
fewer and fewer liberties and less and less privacy. Now especially,
looking at ObamaCare, the government invades every room in the house.
It used to be that our liberal friends here in the House complained
repeatedly if they thought a Republican bill might, in some way, invade
some room in the house. Yet without a single Republican vote, the
Democrats passed through a law that invades every room in the house.
[[Page H154]]
I am a big fan of Mark R. Levin, and I don't know that there is a
better synopsis or there could be a better textbook for people to learn
about our founding history than the book ``Liberty and Tyranny.'' I
guess the reason ``Liberty and Tyranny'' could never be a textbook for
some government class would be that it costs less than $20, and in
order to be a textbook, some professor normally has to make 100, 200,
$300 a book, or it is not going to be utilized; or some leftwing source
has to be the one providing the book and profiting, or it doesn't get
used. ``Liberty and Tyranny'' has so many incredible jewels, as I have
read from here on the floor numerous times.
In Mark's last book, there are things that we need to be reminded of
that this brilliant--I don't know that anybody knows more about the
history of the Supreme Court than Mark Levin, a brilliant man when it
comes to our law, our Constitution, our Supreme Court--but he mentions
in here, he draws so much from our history and throws it back in our
faces so that we can't miss it, but Mark Levin points out the Nation
has entered an age of post-constitutional, soft tyranny. Then he quotes
from French thinker, philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, as he explained
presciently:
It covers the surface of a society with a network of small,
complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most
original minds and the most energetic characters cannot
penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not
shattered but softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom
forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from
acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents
existence. It does not tyrannize, but it compresses,
enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people until each
nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid
industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
I know, because some people don't like to be beat up by the left
wing--as I apparently do--they don't want to be pointing these things
out, and so I know that apparently we have got Republican staffers
helping Senators who think that the things in this book are not worth
spreading around the country. This is our history. If you don't learn
your history, then how can you ever figure out the best way to go
forward?
I am a big fan of the comments of Satchel Paige, an incredible
baseball player. He came up with some great lines. I guess he is
baseball's answer to Will Rogers. He is often quoted for saying,
``don't look back, they may be gaining on you,'' but I have read that
later in life he had a quote that I like even better. Satchel Paige
reportedly said: ``It is okay to look back, just don't stare.''
Well, I majored in history. I think it is good to look back. As the
old adage goes, ``those who refuse to learn from history are destined
to repeat it.'' Some follow up and say that ``those who do learn from
history will find new ways to screw up,'' but that is another lesson.
Mark Levin goes on in ``The Liberty Amendments'' and said, de
Tocqueville observed further:
It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to
use men in order to make things great. I wish they would try
a little more to make great men, that they would set less
value on the work and more upon the workman, that they would
never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when
every man belonging to it is individually weak, and that no
form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to
make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous
and enfeebled citizens.
Today, Congress operates not as the Framers intended but in
the shadows, where it dreams up its most notorious and
oppressive laws, coming into the light only to trumpet the
genius and earnestness of its goings on and to enable Members
to cast their votes.
He goes on to say:
Congress also and often delegates unconstitutionally law-
making power to a gigantic, ever growing administrative state
that in turn unleashes on society myriad regulations and
rules at such a rapid rate that people cannot possibly know
of them either, and if by chance they do, they cannot
possibly comprehend them. Nonetheless, ignorance which is
widespread and deliberately so is no excuse for noncompliance
for which the citizen is heavily fined and severely punished.
This is really a great synopsis of where we are. Congress thinks we
know better, the President thinks he knows better, and some of this was
started before the last Republican President left office with TARP.
What a disaster. You can never achieve greatness if you do not have the
same opportunity to fail. If the tightrope you are walking to achieve
something extraordinary is sitting on the ground, then there is no
risk, and there is nothing great achieved. Yet, this government wants
to put such restrictions on people that they can never reach greatness.
They can never reach as high as the grass might go.
I love this part in Mark Levin's book, and I realize it may bother
not only the leftwing but some Republican Senate staffers. Mark Levin
wrote:
Having delegated broad lawmaking power to executive branch
departments and agencies of its own creation contravening the
separation of powers doctrine, Congress now watches as the
President inflates the congressional delegations even further
and proclaims repeatedly the authority to rule by executive
fiat in defiance of or over the top of the same Congress that
sanctioned a domineering executive branch in the first place.
Notwithstanding Congress' delinquency but because of it an
unquenched President in a hurry to expedite a societal
makeover has repeatedly admonished Congress that `if it won't
act soon to protect future generations, I will.'
That is, if Congress will not genuflect to his demands and
pass laws to his liking, he will act on his own. And the
President has made good on his refrain on a growing list of
matters. He has, in fact, displayed an impressive aptitude
for imperial rule with the help from a phalanx of policy
czars from immigration, the environment, labor law to health
care, welfare and energy. The President has excised his
executive discretion to create new law, abrogate existing law
and generally contrive ways to exploit legal ambiguities as a
means to his ends. He has also declared the Senate in recess
when it was not, thereby bypassing the Senate's
constitutional advice and consent role to install several
partisans in top Federal posts. Today, this is glorified and
glamorized as compassionate progressivism. The Framers called
it `despotism.'
Then here is what makes Mark's book so great. He goes right to the
source and quotes ``Federalist 48'' by James Madison. Most people give
more credit to Madison for the Constitution getting specifically
written than other people, but Madison wrote:
An elective despotism was not the government we fought for
but one which should not only be founded on free principles
but in which the powers of government should be so divided
and balanced among several bodies of magistracy as that no
one could transcend their legal limits without being
effectually checked and restrained by the others.
Mark Levin cites ``Federalist 78'' by Alexander Hamilton:
Whoever attentively considers the different departments of
power must perceive that in a government in which they are
separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of
its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the
political rights of the Constitution because it will be least
in a capacity to annoy or injure them.
I mean this is the Founders saying that the Supreme Court that we
must now all bow and scrape to as they rewrite the Constitution in
their own image like some kind of gods on Mount Olympus, the Founders
said they are the least dangerous because they are going to have the
least power to ``annoy or injure.''
Levin goes on:
Yet having seized for itself in the early years of the
Nation the final words on all matters before it, the Supreme
Court, with just five of its nine members, can impose the
most far-reaching and breathtaking rulings on the whole of
society for which there is no recourse.
My copy of Mark's book is falling apart, but it is still good stuff.
He also says in ``The Liberty Amendments'':
What was to be a relatively innocuous Federal Government
operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of
powers has become an ever-present and unaccountable force.
This is so scary, but Mark Levin puts it so well. He describes the
Federal Government as the Nation's largest creditor, debtor, lender,
employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant,
insurer, health care provider and pension guarantor. Moreover, with
aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly, it bans
or mandates by regulation.
{time} 1145
For example, the Federal Government regulates most things bathroom,
laundry room, kitchen, as well as the mortgage you hold on your house.
It designs your automobile and dictates the kind of fuel it uses. It
regulates your baby's toys, crib, and stroller, plans your children's
school curricula and lunch menu and administers their student loans in
colleges.
[[Page H155]]
At your place of employment, the Federal Government oversees
everything from the racial gender and age diversity of the workforce,
to the hours, wages, and benefits paid. Indeed, the question is not
what the Federal Government regulates, but what it does not regulate.
And it makes you wonder, how can a people, incapable of selecting their
own light bulbs and toilets, possess enough confidence to vote for
their own rulers and fill out complicated tax returns.
Mark also points out that the Federal Government consumes nearly 25
percent of all goods and services produced each year by the American
people.
That should, if people will wake up, it should begin to scare them
because if the Federal Government is the largest consumer, just on that
alone, it has the power to bankrupt companies, to make companies. And
then you start running into the horrible constitution that we rubber-
stamped and may have helped put together over in Afghanistan, where
they so centralized the power in the federal government that the
President in Afghanistan gets to appoint governors, gets to appoint
mayors, gets to appoint police chiefs, appoint the highest level of
teachers, appoints many of the slate of part of the legislature, has
tremendous power of the purse, and you wonder why that country is about
to fall as soon as we pull out, when we were complicit in a
constitution that on its face should have told people this government
under this constitution is doomed to fail and fall back into Taliban
hands, and that is exactly what is about to happen.
We should have known better than to help Afghanistan and be complicit
in a constitution that does what our Founders said should never be done
for a federal government. But when we have lost the lessons of our
founding such that Congress allows power to be totally usurped by a
Supreme Court or by an executive branch, and the American people do not
rise up and condemn the comments by a leader in the Senate who says,
What right does the House have to say how the money is spent?, that
ought to be enough to have a recall election if a leader in the Senate
doesn't even know why the House of Representatives is supposed to have
an extremely loud voice in how the money is spent.
And, in fact, any bill that raises revenue must start in the House,
which the same Senate leaders did not understand, or perhaps they
understood and tried to tap dance around, but since the Supreme Court
and Chief Justice Roberts rewrote ObamaCare, the un-Affordable Care
Act, because it is certainly not affordable, it is costing so many
people in my district, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, party
doesn't matter when it comes to ObamaCare. Seniors that I visit with at
retirement homes and communities are scared because they are realizing
and they are finding out, gee, ObamaCare cut $716 billion from
reimbursing health care providers for care we were going to get.
And they are starting to figure out even though they were assured,
you don't have to worry, you are not going to be affected, you are not
going to lose any health care because this is only cutting what we
reimburse health care providers, seniors are smart folks. They have
been around awhile, and they are figuring out, wait a minute, you cut
$700 million out of reimbursement for our health care providers with
ObamaCare, really, and you think we are not going to figure out that
that means we are not going to get the treatment we need. We are going
to be told we don't have the knee replacement we need or the hip
replacement we need because we are too old, or we get put on some list
for an exorbitant amount of time which means you are hoping that we
will die before we get the treatment we need, as often happens in
England and Canada and other places with totally government-run health
care.
Single payer, that is such a misnomer. It is government-run private
lives. Instead of single payer, it is government. It is the GRE,
government running everything. When the government can tell you what
care you can have and not have, they control your life and they control
how quickly your life will come to an end.
It is wrong. It is so against the foundation, the principles upon
which we were founded.
My brilliant friend, Mark Levin said:
What was to be a relatively innocuous Federal Government,
operating from a defined enumeration of specific agents of
power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force.
I want to reiterate that because the problem that we see repeatedly
now is when someone presides over death of people entrusted to their
care and protection, they can stand up and say, What difference at this
point does it make? So they died. What difference does it make why they
died, how they died?
A Libyan acquaintance a few weeks ago said, you guys in the United
States, Congress in Washington, are asking the wrong question. Of
course, personally, I think it is an appropriate question to ask: Who
killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, and our two former Navy
SEALs? Who killed them? Who killed Ty Woods and Glen Doherty? Who blew
off much of the leg of David Ubben?
I think it is a legitimate question, but this Libyan man I met said,
You keep asking in America who killed these people. You ought to be
asking why they were killed. Well, that is certainly an important
question. And I know our former Secretary of State said, What
difference at this point does it make? But I think this Libyan man is
right. We need to be asking why were they killed. And it certainly
wasn't about a video. And I know that we have got some newspapers that
are losing viewership or readership and so they are trying as best they
can before people completely quit reading it to help their next
candidate for President, I get that. I understand.
But the fact is these were radical Islamists, al Qaeda-related people
in the group. There was never a demonstration. It was an attack from
the very beginning, just as Chris Stevens called and Greg Hicks pointed
out: we are under attack. There was no indication of a demonstration
about some stupid video. They were under attack. It was predicted and
talked about. Some in Egypt were saying if you don't release the blind
sheikh who was implicit and in prison for the murder of New Yorkers as
they tried in 1993 to bring down the World Trade Center, they were
saying you have to start by releasing the blind sheikh or there is
going to be violence. It wasn't about a video, for goodness sake.
When the government consumes 25 percent of everything produced in
America, the government is too big. It needs to be reduced in size.
Powers need to be returned to the States from which they were usurped.
We need to give more power and control back to the local government. We
have got people screaming about the minimum wage. It is outrageous for
people in this town to tell somebody in San Augustine, Texas, what they
have to pay, that they have to go to pay $10 or $15 for minimum wage.
It is outrageous. Some places in the country, that may not be enough as
the bottom line and isn't, and people are being paid more than that.
But for teenagers, like I was when I started working, actually before I
was a teenager I started working, but I started paying into Social
Security, I guess, when I was 13 or 14, but minimum wage is a great
place to start. When I went to work as an assistant district attorney
for Titus, Camp, and Morris Counties, I was getting paid $700 a month.
It was what they could afford, and I was able to live at home and work
for that and help those counties. The closer to the facts on the ground
is the control of a government, then the better the government.
When the Federal Government here in Washington dictates school
programs, school tests, it is just wrong. And this isn't an issue of
Republican or Democrat. I had this discussion with President Bush's
Secretary of Education because she was violating the Constitution
because education is not an enumerated power within the Constitution.
Therefore, under the 10th Amendment, it is reserved to the States and
people.
She said if you liked what I was doing in Austin, you ought to love
what I am doing in Washington. I said, No, when you were in Austin, you
were acting within the confines of the Constitution. And now you are
here in Washington, you are acting beyond the Constitution. You are
mandating that people teach to a test. You got to go to
[[Page H156]]
Gladewater, Texas, with me and go to a special needs school there where
they got over 120 precious lives. And when one of them for a good day
can touch something, point to something shiny, to have a Federal
bureaucrat dictate the kind of test that needs to be given, or in Tyler
at the St. Louis School where I met a young man, a special needs young
man, and their goal for the end of the year was if he could put his
fork in a piece of food and get it to his mouth, but because the
Federal Government intervened, because they didn't know that special
needs young man and because they didn't know the kids there in
Gladewater there at that precious school, they dictate.
Now, the Secretary of Education said, Oh, but you can get an
alternative test. And I said, Yeah, and you know what kind of
alternative test got approved for that young man they were trying to
teach to feed himself. They wouldn't approve him being able to feed
himself. No, but they did approve if he would point to a sticker with
food on it, he could pass his test. Thank you so much Federal
Government. And that is what we have had with so many of these programs
that were well intended.
You want to help a single mom, I want to help a single mom with a
deadbeat dad not helping at all. But the best way to do it is not to
lure them into a rut from which they cannot extricate themselves. The
better policy is to help them get a high school diploma. They are
better off with daycare than with a handout that encourages them to
have more and more children out of wedlock. I am not blaming the single
moms. I am blaming the Federal Government for creating a system that
after 50 years has taken our nuclear homes that were the backbone of
this country and gone from between 6 and 7 percent of children being
born to a single mom in the sixties, and because of this government's
well-intentioned, but ridiculously stupid, program, we now have over 40
percent of children being born to single moms, heading toward 50
percent.
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It is wrongheaded when a government does not help.
I will tell you, I spent some precious time out at Texas College in
Tyler, one of the oldest colleges in Texas. It was started as an
African American college. I used to wonder, I am looking forward--as
Martin Luther King, Jr. said--to the day when people are judged by the
content of their character, not the color of their skin. I am looking
forward to the day when race is not on a form anybody fills out because
it doesn't matter; it doesn't make any difference. I am looking forward
to that day.
But I have learned a lot from Texas College because I have seen young
African Americans--repeatedly, I have met African Americans--who are
the first in their family to go to college. It is a great stepping off
place. It is a great place to start, to break through that ceiling that
has kept people in poverty.
I met with and visited with a combined sociology class some time ago
and talked about this issue of the Federal Government wanting to help,
but instead luring young single moms into holes they can't get out of.
Many do, but many can't. I asked them for advice. There were single
moms there. I was shocked with some of the suggestions they said. They
said you need to have a drug test on aid for dependent children; you
need to have a drug test on any kind of welfare; you need to have a
work requirement on any kind of welfare.
That was a tough group.
They said you are not doing enough to push people to reach their
potential.
Then when you meet and talk with single moms, African Americans, that
got lured into a rut, and by the grace of God they are trying to get
out of that. They are trying to get some college and improve themselves
and reach their potential, but they feel like the government lured them
into a rut now they are trying desperately to get out of. We owe them
better. We owe them a system that doesn't lure them into holes but
helps them reach for the sky.
Maybe it would have been better in the '60s to help with daycare if
somebody has a child, a single mom has a child, because we know from
study after study you've got a better chance of having a successful
life if you finish high school. So why not have that as a goal instead
of luring people into having more and more children.
The people that I had to face for felony welfare fraud, some may
think it is a racial issue, but I saw it wasn't at all. Every race,
creed, color, people got lured into this, and it was wrong. The
government should not have systems that do that.
There is another profound statement that Mark Levin has in this book,
``The Liberty Amendments.'' He points out:
The individual's liberty, inextricably linked to his
private property, is submerged in the quicksand of a
government that is aggregating authority and imploding
simultaneously.
What then is the answer? Again, Alexis de Tocqueville offers guidance
looking back at the Constitutional Convention some 50 years afterwards.
He observed that:
It is a novelty in the history of society to see a great
people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself, when
apprised by the legislature that the wheels of its government
are stopped, to see it carefully examine the extent of the
evil, and patiently wait 2 whole years until a remedy is
discovered, to which it voluntarily submitted without its
costing a tear or a drop of blood from mankind.
It is a profound book. Levin quotes Madison in Federalist 14:
In the first place, it is to be remembered, that the
general government is not to be charged with the whole power
of making and administering laws: its jurisdiction is limited
to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members
of the Republic, but which are not to be attained by the
separate provisions of any.
Then in Federalist 45, he insisted:
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the
Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to
remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.
In Federalist 46, Madison asserted that:
The powers proposed to be lodged in the Federal Government
are as little formidable to those reserved to the individual
States, as they are indispensably necessary to accomplish the
purposes of the Union; and that all those alarms which have
been sounded, of a meditated and consequential annihilation
of the State governments, must, on the most favorable
interpretation, be ascribed to the chimerical fears of the
authors of them.
This is a great book. There is just so much wonderful history from
our United States history that deserves further looking. The library
should have the book if people want to read it.
We are not thinking straight in this town, and there are negotiations
ongoing with Iran about nuclear weapons, whose leaders have called us
the ``Great Satan'' that needs to be destroyed, called Israel the
``Little Satan'' that needs to be destroyed, and they have missiles
they can put nuclear weapons on top of Israel for its destruction
creating a new holocaust, millions of lives could be lost. But as our
friend Prime Minister Netanyahu points out, they are building and they
have created intercontinental ballistic missiles.
He is trying to wake the United States up, Netanyahu is, when he is
saying that they don't need those to take out Israel. They've got
missiles to take us out. Those intercontinental ballistic missiles are
for the United States they call the Great Satan. Its leaders believe
that under their interpretation of prophecy from the Koran that the
twelfth Imam, al-Mahdi, can emerge or will emerge from chaos. They
believe that it could be nuclear chaos. So by creating nuclear bombs
and setting them off, Israel, the United States, Little Satan, Great
Satan, they can hasten the return of the twelfth Imam to rule over the
global caliphate.
When somebody thinks that kind of thought, we need to make sure they
don't get nukes, and we need to take out anything where they are
producing nukes. We have the power and ability to do it. Everybody,
including Russia and China, needs to understand, if we don't take them
out, they could be launched at Russia and China, because they are led
by infidels, to Iran's way of thinking, just like the U.S. and Israel
are to their way of thinking.
So January 7, there is an article in TheBlaze, Sharona Schwartz. It
says:
An Iranian official says that his country needs a nuclear
bomb in order to ``put Israel in its place.''
``We don't aspire to obtain a nuclear bomb, but it is
necessary so we can put Israel in its place.''
Of course there are plenty of quotes from their leaders that the
proper place for Israel is ``wiped off the map.''
[[Page H157]]
``After arriving in New York''--the article points out ``Rouhani''--
the new President--``again was contacted at his hotel by an unspecified
White House official.''
And this is from a parliament member in Iran, Muhammad Nabavian:
``I assembled the delegation accompanying me and we decided
not to meet with Obama. On Tuesday afternoon after the press
conference, they said to me, `why did you humiliate Obama in
America?' and I said there was no humiliation. Here I
recalled the words of Imam Khomeini who said that one must
humiliate the infidel leaders,'' Nabavian reported about
Rouhani's description of the events.
It is very important that the leaders in this country, including our
President, realize that to these religious fanatic nuts he is an
infidel leader, we are infidel leaders, and we are worthy of being
humiliated, and as the leaders of the Great Satan we are worthy of
being destroyed. That must be understood.
What has come about as radical Islamist--and I am very careful about
that, despite what some of the more ignorant in the left wing would say
in the left-wing media. We don't have to fear moderate Muslims. And I
am talking about the kind of moderate Muslims that I have befriended in
Egypt and Afghan, who are the enemy of my enemy, who are the enemy of
the United States' enemy, who are the enemy of Israel, our ally.
We can work with them, just as is happening in Egypt right now where
moderate Muslims were sickened by the Muslim Brotherhood's burning of
churches, killing of Christians, persecution of Christians. That is
something that former President Morsi is on trial for. And the interim
President right now is a former judge, so we had some things in common
as we spoke not long ago there in Egypt.
Yet, as the odds are getting stacked farther and higher against
Israel's existence, and as we are demanding Israel give away more of
its land as Palestinian leaders continue to say they are not agreeing
to anything, they are not agreeing to Israel's right to even exist as a
Jewish nation, as a place where Jews can avoid another holocaust like
in World War II, they are not even willing to recognize that, how can
there ever be peace? As I said personally to the Palestinian's former
prime minister, how can you expect peace when you won't even recognize
Israel's right to exist as a Jewish nation?
So they want Israel to keep giving away more and more land, and every
time--going back to the very inception of Israel, 1,000, 1,600, 1,800
years before Muhammad was born, the actual founding of Israel, going
back that early, any time Israel has given away land trying to buy
peace, that land ultimately gets used as a staging area from which to
attack it. They are about, I hope, to learn that lesson.
So what do we have going on here in the United States now? Well,
Caroline Glick has a great article called: ``Column One: The Left
Against Zion.'' This is from December 19. She says:
This week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement.
In the space of a few days, two quasi-academic
organizations--the American Studies Association and the
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association--have
launched boycotts against Israeli universities. Their
boycotts follow a similar one announced in April by the Asian
Studies Association.
These groups' actions have not taken place in isolation. They are of
a piece with ever-escalating acts of anti-Israel agitation in college
campuses throughout the United States.
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I would interject that it is sickening and incredible to me to see
anti-Semitism growing just the way it did before the 1930s and 1940s
when over 6 million Jews were mercilessly, brutally killed--and we are
seeing it arise. When I learned about the Holocaust and when I went to
Germany, through what I had learned and read and seen, I could never
have imagined. Thank God we could never have that happen during my
lifetime. Now I am watching the seeds of anti-Semitism, of anti-
Israel--of people wanting to wipe them off the map, of those who are
proposing another Holocaust.
Then we have pseudo intellectual wannabes at universities where they
no longer allow true diversity of thought and discussion that made them
originally great, which allowed them originally to have liberals there
get in charge, and now they cut off so often conservative speech. It
used to be in universities, even as conservative as Texas A&M was when
I was there, that we had many liberal speakers, and I enjoyed meeting
and debating with some of them, with some of the greats in the country.
Now, even at Texas A&M, they are careful not to invite people who are
too conservative because you don't want to tick off the Faculty Senate.
Like most universities, it has gotten very, very liberal.
In Caroline Glick's article she points out:
Every week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of
aggressive anti-Israel activism. At the University of
Michigan last week, thousands of students were sent fake
eviction notices from the university's housing office. A pro-
Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to
disseminate the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass
expulsions of Palestinians.
At Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students
who control Hillel are insisting on using Hillel's good
offices to disseminate and legitimate anti-Israel slanders;
and the left's doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root
of all evil is not limited to campuses.
At New York's 92nd Street Y, commentary editor John
Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to
explain why the ASA's just-announced boycott of Israel was an
obscene act of bigotry.
It is a great article. I don't have time to read it all, but she
points out:
This week, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz retired
after 50 years on the law faculty. His exit, the same week as
the ASA and the NAISA announced their boycotts of Israeli
universities, symbolized the marginalization of the pro-
Israel left that Dershowitz represented.
For years, Dershowitz has been a nonentity in leftist
circles. His place at the table was usurped by anti-Israel
Jews like Peter Beinart, and now Beinart is finding himself
increasingly challenged by anti-Semitic Jews like Max
Blumenthal.
The progression is unmistakable.
People need to wake up and understand that this kind of thing has all
happened before, and when people don't recognize it, it happens again
in history. God help us that it doesn't happen while our generation is
in charge, but these growing acts of anti-Semitism, anti-Israel
continue to progress by so-called ``Progressives,'' making it seem as
if this is another apartheid like in South Africa, which was so unfair,
racially so wrong in South Africa. It got corrected. This is not the
same thing at all. This is a group of people who have been persecuted
throughout their history, having a country where they have a longer
history of right to that area than any other people existing today.
Yet, as universities, the so-called ``left'' become more loud and
more vocal in their hatred and anger, I have wondered: If Iran dropped
a nuke on Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, if Iran killed a million Jews in
Israel, have those leftists--those anti-Semitic, anti-Israel folks at
universities--gotten so far from decency that they would applaud
Israelis, Jews being killed by the millions in Israel? I wonder. I
wonder if there would be any reaction like there has been in history,
like there was in Germany when Jews were being killed? They deserved
it. They were the problem in this country.
Rationalization is a great thing, and it is a dangerous thing.
People who were in Germany, who lived through the Holocaust don't
want to talk about it because they cannot believe that they got sucked
into that group dynamic that allowed them to be so inhuman and so
callous that they didn't care about the extinction of Jews in Germany.
I really don't know the answer. These anti-Israeli groups in
universities like to think they are diverse, but yet they go after and
destroy anybody who attempts to debate them. Would they cheer if Jews
and Israelis were killed by Iran?
I hope they will wake up to what is happening at these universities,
but here again, love and money can be the root of all evil, and we see
universities across this country getting more and more money from
Middle Eastern countries that say, Hey, by the way, you need to teach a
course on Islamophobia or at least have a seminar, and talk about
anybody who raises issues about radical Islam, like the author in The
Washington Times, Husain, who just lied completely about things that I
had said. He just lied. He made stuff up. He didn't do his homework.
Yet those kinds of things are being talked about and taught at
universities.
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We have got to get back to having real debate. Some people think,
when I get upset, it means I hate somebody. I don't. I come from a
family where we fuss at each other tooth and nail. We still love each
other and stand by each other. I heard that this was attributed to
Johnson, as President, but we had a pastor in Mount Pleasant, Texas, in
1953, who said it to my parents: if two people agree on everything, one
of them is unnecessary. The same is true here in Congress. If we all
agree on everything, then all but one are unnecessary. We don't need a
Congress. We don't need advisors. If one person knows everything, then
just let him make all the decisions, but that is not the case in this
fallen world. We need to hear from everybody. Debate is a good thing,
and it used to be at universities and can be again if they will allow
all voices to be heard.
I have one other story here from CNS News:
Afghanistan will resume being a terrorist haven when U.S.
troops depart.
That is going to happen. I have been talking about that for a number
of years, and it doesn't have to happen if we would simply grant the
people of Afghanistan what the Founders originally gave us. We have
messed it up, but they originally gave us a government where the States
were the most powerful entity. As my moderate Muslim friends in
Afghanistan have said, and as former Vice President Massoud has said,
and others: if you will just help us push Karzai to let us have an
amendment in our constitution that allows us to elect our governors,
elect our mayors, get our own police chiefs, govern our own regions,
our own state areas--if you will let us do that, we can keep the
Taliban out.
I mentioned it before, but when I asked, ``What makes you think we
could exert that kind of pressure?'' they informed me that out of about
a $12.5 billion government budget in Afghanistan, the Afghans only
provide about $1.5 billion. The rest is provided by foreign countries,
and most of that is the United States. Today, if this President says
you either let the states elect their own governors and mayors and pick
their own police chiefs--that is today--or we will cut off every dime
going to Afghanistan, I would bet that would be the day they would get
started and that they would get an amendment to their constitution, and
they would become more of a democratic republic like we started out as,
perhaps even more than we are now.
We need to do that for them. We don't need to let more American lives
be killed and be taken in Afghanistan. That doesn't have to happen. It
didn't have to happen. Even though Secretary Gates said that he didn't
believe the President was really convinced the surge was a good idea in
Afghanistan, he still sent more troops, and what people haven't been
talking about for a long time is that 75 percent of the people of the
American soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan--soldiers,
sailors, marines, airmen--all of them--have been killed while President
Obama has been Commander in Chief.
I did not think President Bush did the right thing by sending tens of
thousands of American troops in after the Taliban was defeated with
fewer than 500 Americans in supporting the Northern Alliance, but we
became occupiers. It was a mistake by the Bush administration, I
believe, and then a mistake that President Obama inherited, and it got
worse. We don't have to leave and have the blood of our soldiers--of
our military--cry out as we leave Afghanistan and as the Taliban takes
back over. Let us, Madam Speaker, help Afghanistan to root out the evil
in its own country. Let's help them get a constitution that let's them
root it out for themselves. That is how we should be doing foreign
policy.
May God awaken the universities that were once so diverse and so
great to understanding that they should not, cannot--I hope and pray do
not--continue to foster this anti-Semitism, this anti-Israeli
sentiment, that is growing, that might someday cheer when Israelis are
nuked.
With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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