[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 24 (Monday, February 10, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H1701-H1708]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          CONFLATING THE TERMS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Weber of Texas). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to 
address you here on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives. I have a number of things that I would like to bring 
to your attention that are on my mind and I think are on the minds of 
the American people.
  The number one topic in this Capitol Building, at least on the House 
side right now--and I believe on the Senate side, too--is the question 
of the debt ceiling that has been brought forward. A lot of us have 
some memories of how difficult that was the last time that came 
through.
  There are a good number of Members in this Congress that have pledged 
they will never vote to increase the debt ceiling. We have a President 
who used extraordinary methods the last time and stretched the debt 
ceiling out and the crunch time that was supposed to come for months. 
And it is curious that even though the Congress did backfill that debt 
ceiling for him, now he doesn't have any extraordinary means, 
evidently, and now we are up against the time line, up against the wall 
of perhaps a February 15 date. It causes this Congress to have to 
scramble.
  It is not because this government is in risk of default, Mr. Speaker. 
That is the language that emerged 2 or 3 years ago on the debt ceiling. 
Republicans and Democrats alike talked about how this country's credit 
is good and we can't allow our government to default.
  The definition of default really isn't what has been used in this 
dialogue

[[Page H1702]]

over the debt ceiling. The default would be if the United States could 
not and failed to service its debt. That would be if we didn't have the 
revenue stream to pay the interest and to roll the bonds over, then we 
would be in default. We are a long, long way from that, Mr. Speaker. We 
have, by some measurements, as much as 8 or 9 or 10 times the revenue 
necessary to pay the interest and roll the bonds over.
  So America is not in danger of default, but we are in danger of 
getting confused about the debate and losing track of the essence of it 
because we allow language to be conflated in the minds of the American 
people, the minds of the people in the House and the Senate, and in the 
press. The press allows that to happen as well. And when language gets 
conflated, we lose the center of the argument.
  To drive that point home, Mr. Speaker, I would say this. About 6 or 7 
years ago, I noticed that the language was being conflated between 
health care and health insurance. I recall our then-Governor to the 
State of Iowa came here in this very building. We had a meeting with 
the Iowa congressional delegation and the Governor, and he pressed us 
around the table, seven of us at the time--five House Members and two 
Senators--and he said, There are 40,000 kids in Iowa that don't have 
health care.
  No one said anything. I looked at him and I said, Governor, there 
can't be 40,000 kids in Iowa that don't have health care. We are taking 
care of those kids. Why have I not heard about kids without health 
care?
  He said, No, there are 40,000 kids in Iowa without health care.
  And I brought it back to him again. They all have access to health 
care. If nothing else, in the emergency room they are going to have 
access to health care. We would not turn a child away--not from a 
clinic, not from a hospital, not from an ER.
  And we went around and around five or six times with that verbiage of 
the Governor saying 40,000 kids don't have health care and me saying 
that can't be true, hoping that I could get him to be the guy that 
figured out that he really meant health insurance, not health care.
  I had to explain it to him, Mr. Speaker. There is a difference. What 
you really mean is there are 40,000 kids--at the time--in Iowa that 
didn't have their own health insurance policy, which is far different 
than not having health care.
  But you see what has happened. The language was already conflated in 
his mind and he couldn't separate them apart, even at a meeting with 
the Iowa congressional delegation where he was pitching for more 
resources to go into the program.
  And so if that happens in the mind of a Governor of the State of 
Iowa, I have to believe it happens in the minds of a lot of other 
people across the country. And then I have to wonder, did this happen 
by accident? Did the language get conflated by accident, or were there 
people that wanted to advance a policy and they decided we are going to 
conflate this language because it helps our liberal agenda?
  Well, it is the latter. It helps the liberal agenda to conflate the 
language. They did so on health insurance and health care, and that is 
just a model.

  The next piece of this would be the example that happens with 
immigration.
  Now, we know that there is a difference between illegal immigrants 
and legal immigrants. There is a tremendously different moral 
underpinning of this. I don't know anyone in this Congress that isn't 
very supportive of legal immigrants. And all of us who took an oath to 
uphold the Constitution should be for enforcing the rule of law even as 
they set about trying to change it.
  But the term ``immigrant,'' which connotes a legal immigrant, and the 
adjective ``illegal'' immigrant are entirely different. They have been 
conflated, because when you use the term ``immigrant'' interchangeably 
with ``illegal immigrant,'' it suits the argument of the people who are 
for the open borders lobby and for amnesty.
  I believe, Mr. Speaker, they have intentionally conflated the terms 
so that they can move their agenda, because it makes it harder to 
debate the distinctions if you have to stop and define the difference 
between ``immigrant'' and ``illegal immigrant.''
  And then, of course, they argue that we shouldn't use that 
terminology--even ``illegal immigrant.'' We should use ``undocumented'' 
or ``not yet granted amnesty.'' Oh, wait. That wouldn't be theirs, Mr. 
Speaker. But you get the point. You conflate the terms ``illegal 
immigrant'' and ``immigrant,'' and then you give the moral standing of 
the immigrant to the illegal immigrant; and then you can make the 
argument that you should grant them amnesty because somehow they should 
have access to American citizenship and all the benefits thereof.
  It is a similar argument that comes along with ``health care'' and 
``health insurance.'' By conflating the two terms, they convinced the 
American people--at least a significant number of them--that everybody 
has not only a right to health care, but everybody has a right to their 
own health insurance policy.
  These are a far cry from what our Founding Fathers laid out as 
rights. And, by the way, they are even a far cry from what Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt laid out as the four new freedoms. When I go down and 
look at the Roosevelt monument, it gives me a bit of a creepy feeling 
thinking how he manufactured freedoms that didn't come from God but fit 
a liberal agenda--even then.
  So we have got the terminology of ``health care'' and ``health 
insurance'' and ``immigrant'' and ``illegal immigrant'' conflated, and 
now we are in the debt ceiling debate, and people on both sides of the 
aisle are arguing that we can't allow the United States to default. 
Their definition of ``default'' is the moment that the United States 
runs out of borrowing capacity, which isn't the same, because the cash 
flow still comes flowing in, hundreds of billions of dollars a month, 
which is plenty of money to service the interest and to pay the debt.
  We are not up against a hard break here, Mr. Speaker. We are not up 
against a deadline that says that if we can't get credit at the bank, 
we are going to have the house foreclosed on. That is not it at all. It 
is a matter of where we take the money from to service our debt and 
what bills we pay.
  I do think that the inertia of the spending and the structure of the 
budget that we have pushes this Congress towards a debt ceiling 
increase at some point. But the House of Representatives has the 
majority of Republicans for a reason. It is because the American people 
rose up in 2010 and said, You are shoving too much government on us. We 
want to keep our God-given liberty. We want to reject ObamaCare. We 
want to have a smaller government with less taxes and less spending and 
less regulation, less intrusion, less nanny state, more freedom, more 
God-given liberty.
  That is what the American people said in 2010.
  They reiterated it again in 2012 with regard to the House of 
Representatives. And with the President, Mr. Speaker, they evidently 
decided that they wanted a President that would perhaps send them an 
Obama phone and maybe pick up the rent check and the heat bill and the 
grocery bill without that much responsibility.
  I don't know that the American people were looking down the line to 
see that if they push this debt off into the next generation, it is 
their children and their grandchildren that will be paying the debt in 
the next generation.
  When I go to a high school and talk to the high school students, 
invariably they will say to me, What are you going to do about the cost 
of tuition and what are you going to do about the cost of my student 
loan?
  They are planning to go to college, and I am glad they are.
  The answer to that and the answer I give them is, The best thing that 
can be done for the increasing cost of tuition is for you, the 
consumer, to make an astute choice on where you will go to school and 
the best education you can get for the tuition dollar. Calculate that. 
Go visit the schools. Don't think that you are going to pay a premium 
because you want a certain kind of sheepskin hanging in a frame on the 
wall someday and believe that you can put your feet on the desk and 
live happily ever after.
  The world doesn't work that way. Not that often, in any case, Mr. 
Speaker.
  Instead, go evaluate the tuition costs and the cost of housing and 
all of the

[[Page H1703]]

associated costs with a college education and bargain for the best buy 
that you can get, and go there and get that education.
  If you are determined that you want a degree from a prestigious 
institution, you can start a 4-year degree there. Maybe you will spend 
5 years getting that degree. Or you can go to a smaller institution 
that is maybe closer to home and a little cheaper, get a couple years 
in, maybe a third year in, and transfer to that 4-year school. You can 
achieve that degree and put it in the frame with less dollars and maybe 
get more back in return for the tuition dollar.
  Be good consumers is the piece advice that I would give to the 
students looking at going to college. That is one of the educational 
components of where we are going with this country. But the debt that 
is there for an individual is the debt of the country in its aggregate.

  When I tell the students that this is how you get the best buy for 
your dollar, they say, What are you going to do to buy down the 
interest rate on my student loan?
  My answer to that is, If we do that, we have to borrow the money here 
in Congress from maybe the Chinese, maybe the Saudis, maybe the 
American people. About half of this U.S. debt, this $17.3 trillion, is 
held in the hands of the American people in the form of Treasury bonds, 
et cetera. And so if we have to borrow the money to buy down your 
interest rate, you are going to be the one paying it back. You get your 
college education; you go off into the workforce; you start paying down 
the interest and the principal on your student loan; you are the one 
paying it back. If we borrow the interest rate down now, you still have 
to pay back your student loan, maybe at a lower interest rate, but you 
are going to be paying back the national debt as the other part of that 
bargain.
  I have a number of grandchildren, all of them tremendous gifts and 
miracles in their own right, but the most recent two are the ones that 
I happened to have actually kept the math on. My little granddaughter 
Reagan is 3 years old. When she came into the world, her share of the 
national debt was $48,000.

                              {time}  1945

  Little Wallace, the youngest, who has been here since, oh, back in 
mid-November, his share of the national debt when he came into the 
world was $54,000. Three years apart. If we are gifted with another 
grandchild, you know their share of the national debt is going to be 
greater and greater.
  This Congress needs to understand and think about our duty to the 
succeeding generations. Maybe it is an easy enough thing to pass a debt 
ceiling increase here to pacify a President who refuses to take on 
entitlement reform.
  We all know that this debt is out of control. The spending is out of 
control. The spending is on auto-pilot, and the spending is going into 
programs like Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security.
  By the way, the latter of the three is the one that is the easiest to 
fix, and if we could get our employment up, we could get Social 
Security back on track easier than any other way. The reform of 
entitlements is a necessary thing if we are ever going to get this 
country to balance.
  So the question emerges to me and others, Mr. Speaker: What would you 
attach to a debt ceiling increase, a debt ceiling increase that would 
satisfy the President which, apparently, would be an entire year, a 
credit card for an entire year at whatever limit that might be? What 
would you attach to that to send the message, to hang on to something 
that you can point to and say, I focused on fiscal restraint?
  What could be that list of items?
  Well, one would be, and my Number 1 item, Mr. Speaker, that I would 
attach, and this would get me to vote for a limited debt ceiling 
increase, would be this: a balanced budget amendment to the United 
States Constitution passed out of the House of Representatives, passed 
out of the United States Senate, messaged to the States.
  I would step up and take a real good look, depending on the terms of 
it, of course, at voting for a debt ceiling increase under those 
conditions.
  Now, the balanced budget amendment to our Constitution would have to 
include, in my view, it would need to include a cap on the GDP 
spending. I would cap it at 18 percent.
  Another would be that we would have to be able to waive that balanced 
budget requirement in the case of a declared war, and we have got some 
language, or a very serious national emergency. Those would be some 
provisions.
  No tax increases without a supermajority, another provision.
  A balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution that 
enforces fiscal responsibility from this point forward, provided that 
the States would ratify that constitutional amendment.
  Now, Congress could pass a balanced budget amendment out of here with 
a two-thirds majority, out of the House and out of the Senate and 
message it to the States. That is all that we can ask out of here. The 
States then pick the balance up from there.
  Meanwhile, a debt ceiling increase would pass, I believe, out of this 
Congress, and the 38 States required to ratify a balanced budget 
amendment, I believe they would step forward and do that, because, 
after all, they do have balanced budget requirements within their 
Constitutions, almost all of them, a balanced budget requirement, and 
we see how they live within their means.
  I worked in the State senate in Iowa for 6 years. We made our way to 
balance the budget sometimes when it was painful, but we knew we had no 
choice and, therefore, you carve that budget to match. You live within 
your means.
  Tax increases come hard. In fact, we have reduced taxes, not 
increased taxes. Now we have a surplus.
  I mentioned the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution as a 
requirement before we could vote for a debt ceiling increase. I don't 
know if that appetite exists here in this Congress.
  I make the point to you, Mr. Speaker, because I think more need to 
think about the merits of a balanced budget amendment to the 
Constitution.
  Another component that we could attach to a debt ceiling increase 
would be a requirement to audit the Fed. Now, that is something that 
has had a lot of signatures on it here in the House of Representatives. 
When Ron Paul served here in the House, he pushed that constantly. Yes, 
we have passed it out of the House of Representatives in the past, and 
they don't have an interest in taking it up in the Senate.
  We don't know what is going on in the Fed. There are trillions of 
dollars that are maneuvered around over the course of years, and we 
aren't able to take a look at those dollars, and our job is oversight.
  So when you give the Fed, essentially, an open checkbook and they can 
inject funds into the economy, and they can run the throttle on our 
economy up and down without congressional oversight, without even 
having access to that information to see what they are doing--the 
closest we get to auditing the Fed is to read The Wall Street Journal 
that picks up little tidbits and writes it into the newspaper, that 
gives us a better feel of what is going on.
  Thanks to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Speaker, but that is not 
enough. We do need to audit the Fed. It is a no-brainer from where I 
sit. Congress has an oversight responsibility. We should do so, and we 
should not be inhibited or held back.
  It is too bad that something as simple and as clear, with the kind of 
support that auditing the Fed has, you would even have to think about 
attaching it to a debt ceiling increase in order to try to get that 
done and get a Presidential signature.
  The President doesn't want Congress to know what is going on in the 
Fed, and he will resist this.
  There has been a consistent pattern, Mr. Speaker, of the Majority 
Leader in the United States Senate being a shield for the President of 
the United States.
  Each time we move an idea that is a good idea from the voice of the 
American people--by definition, when it comes out of this Congress it 
is the voice of the American people by virtue of the republican form of 
government, which is guaranteed to us in the Constitution, I might add, 
Mr. Speaker.

  But the Majority Leader in the Senate puts up the shield if the 
President doesn't want to see it on his desk. Then the debate stops 
because the President of the United States has a blocking agent, the 
Majority Leader in the United States Senate.

[[Page H1704]]

  So here we sit in the House making argument after argument, as I am 
doing tonight, Mr. Speaker, arguing for a balanced budget amendment to 
the Constitution, arguing that we should audit the Fed, arguing that 
raising the debt ceiling without restraints feeds spending and 
accelerates the accumulation of debt.
  By the way, you just heard a few minutes ago, Mr. Gohmert talk about 
the President, again, altering or amending his own bill, ObamaCare.
  Now, think of this. I came here an innocent neophyte who just simply 
studied and read this Constitution for a good number of years, and 
carried one in my pocket longer than I have been in this Congress. Each 
day that I had a jacket I kept it in my jacket pocket, and the times 
that I was in the Iowa senate, and that is getting to be a few years 
ago now, Mr. Speaker.
  When I took an oath to uphold this Constitution, and I actually 
remember where I was sitting right over there when that took place the 
first time here, and I never imagined that article I responsibilities 
that give the authority for legislation to the Congress would be so 
usurped by the President of the United States.
  Article I, section 1, all legislative powers herein granted shall be 
vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a 
Senate and a House of Representatives.
  Mr. Speaker, there is no mention in this Constitution about the 
President involved in legislation. It says all legislative powers 
herein granted.
  Well, where do these powers come from?
  They come from God, granted to the people, and we, the people of the 
United States, in order to form a more perfect union, established this 
Constitution of the United States of America, and all legislative 
powers are vested in the Congress.
  Article I, not article II or article III, this Federal Government, 
this contractual guarantee called the Constitution of the United 
States, was put together with the first respect for the people of the 
United States of America and the laws that they would ask to be passed 
through their republican form of government, their representatives here 
in the House and in the Senate.
  Yet, the President, who gave a lecture a couple of years ago, on 
March 28, I remember the date--it might have been 2011--at a school 
just here in Washington, D.C., at a high school, and he was talking 
about the Constitution.
  Now, remember, Mr. Speaker, that the President is a former adjunct 
law professor who taught constitutional law at the University of 
Chicago, a very highly respected and revered school, especially their 
law school, and their school of economics as well.
  I have great respect for the people who have gone through law school 
at the University of Chicago. I have met a good number of them, and the 
ones that I have met, they have been smart, they have been good people. 
They understood the Constitution. They had good judgment.
  Some of them were in the classroom--I circled by six or seven of them 
one evening--in the classroom of Barack Obama when he was teaching 
constitutional law, and they told me that each time that they reverted 
back to the clear letter of the Constitution, the clear meaning of the 
Constitution, that Adjunct Professor Obama would stretch it out and 
turn it over into an activist interpretation.
  It is pretty interesting to hear that, but this President knew what 
he was doing when he spoke to the high school here in this city, March 
28, I believe, 2011. He said, you are good students; you know this. The 
Congress writes the laws, and I am the executive branch, so my job is 
to see to it that the laws are enforced, and then the courts interpret 
the laws.
  Pretty clear. That is what he said. It was an accurate interpretation 
of the Constitution, of articles I, II and III of our Constitution. He 
knows the Constitution, he has taught it.
  In spite of that, Mr. Speaker, he steps forward and violates his own 
oath of office and seeks to legislate by executive edict. I don't use 
that first word, executive order, Mr. Speaker, because occasionally it 
is an executive order, but sometimes it is a press conference; 
sometimes it is the President's people, on a third-tier U.S. Treasury 
Web site, announcing that there has been some change in Federal policy 
that effectively amends Federal law.
  Now, Presidents are required to take their oath of office, it is in 
this Constitution, by the way, and inclusive within that oath is the 
Take Care Clause, that the President's obligation is to take care that 
the laws be faithfully executed. That is a component of the oath that 
he gives when he swears in out here on the west portico of the Capitol 
on January 20, every leap year. We hear that oath.
  So when the President of the United States doesn't enforce the laws 
that have been passed by the Congress, messaged to a previous 
President, signed by a previous President, and go into the Federal 
Code, when the President doesn't enforce those laws, if he says he 
disagrees with the laws that have been passed before he arrived at the 
west portico and took the oath of office, that is a constitutional 
violation. That is a violation of his oath of office. That is the 
reason that he takes it, is so we can compel him to follow the 
Constitution.
  This President not only has refused to enforce the laws that were on 
the books when he became President--and it is multiple cases. The 
President has refused to enforce the law when it comes to Welfare to 
Work. There is only one component of the 80 different means-tested 
Federal welfare programs that we have that requires work.
  That was the big deal that emerged during the mid-nineties, when we 
had Welfare to Work, and there were two or three vetoes by President 
Clinton, who finally took credit for signing Welfare to Work.

  Only one of the 80 requires work, and that one the President 
willfully, simply disregarded, and so he ended Welfare to Work. After 
all of the bare-knuckle fights here in this Congress and the vetoes and 
the Presidential positioning and the politics that went into it, 
President Obama just wiped out Welfare to Work, willy nilly, even 
though it was written carefully so that a President couldn't ignore the 
work component of Welfare to Work and the Temporary Assistance for 
Needy Families component of welfare. That is one violation.
  Then we had the President just simply set aside No Child Left Behind. 
That was Teddy Kennedy's piece that he negotiated with George W. Bush. 
President Obama decided I don't like No Child Left Behind, kicked that 
one off the table. I am going to ignore it, and you all can ignore it 
because I, essentially, direct you to.
  Then we get to the immigration component of this, and there are five 
pieces of the--we call it the Morton Memos, where the President has 
decided that he is refusing to enforce existing immigration law, and 
they argue that it is on an individual basis only.
  There were seven different references to an individual basis only by 
Janet Napolitano, who testified before the Judiciary Committee. That is 
in there, Mr. Speaker, so that they can argue that it is not creating a 
class of people that are now exempted from the law. Well, they create 
classes of people and they exempt them from the law.
  That is the immigration piece of the violations. Now it brings me to 
ObamaCare, and on ObamaCare, I can't keep track of the times that he 
has decided that he is not going to enforce ObamaCare and he is going 
to change it or amend it. The list is so full at this point I don't 
know if anyone has memorized how many violations, how many changes that 
have come to the ObamaCare law because of the President's executive 
edicts that come down.
  I would lay the foundation of this, Mr. Speaker, in the passage of 
ObamaCare itself, and in the Stupak amendment, and I would like to take 
that discussion up in a moment.

                              {time}  2000

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. All Members are reminded to refrain from 
engaging in personalities toward the President.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I am slightly mystified by that. But 
in any case, I will try to be aware of that comment.
  To take us back to ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, as I said, I would be 
happy to pick it up at this point. So we have a President who was, of 
course, involved in the negotiations with the passage of ObamaCare, and 
the question became

[[Page H1705]]

whether they could put the votes together to pass it here on the floor 
of the House of Representatives because it was clear to us that 
ObamaCare was going to fund abortions. So what emerged from that was a 
group of Democrats known at the time as the ``Stupak dozen,'' who 
conditioned their support for the bill upon a provision, which became 
the Stupak amendment, that would prohibit abortions funded under 
ObamaCare or required under ObamaCare.
  Well, as that debate ensued, the message became clear that the White 
House was negotiating that the President would simply sign an executive 
order that amended ObamaCare after it passed, after the fact, and that 
would fix the Stupak problem. That is the shorthand version, Mr. 
Speaker, of what took place.
  But in any case, it was a bit breathtaking to hear that we had a 
President in the White House who believed that he could sign an 
executive order to amend legislation after the legislation passed and 
announce that he was going to do so, which was a condition for it to 
get the votes in order for it to pass.
  Now, I know that there are people at home that are listening, Mr. 
Speaker, to whom that sounds like a lot of legalese gibberish, but it 
is the fact of what happened. The President, according to the press, 
had promised that he was going to amend ObamaCare by executive order 
after the fact; so, therefore, the Stupak language would remain in 
tact, even though it was to be stripped out in the Senate. That is 
essentially what happened, Mr. Speaker, and we ended up with ObamaCare 
that imposes funding of abortion in all but a very few cases.
  To give an example, here in the House of Representatives, we are 
compelled to sign up for ObamaCare. If there was a way out of it, I 
would have found it. And there were 112 different programs to look at. 
And of those, there were only nine that didn't fund abortion; and of 
those nine, eight of them didn't cover me. So it came down to this 
Member was compelled to sign up for ObamaCare, pay essentially the 
doubling of my contribution to the premium, and it was the tripling of 
my deductibles for the only policy that, at least reportedly, didn't 
fund abortion.
  Now, we had to dig pretty deeply. And I thank the gentleman from New 
Jersey, Chris Smith, for digging that up and giving us at least that 
much foundation, or I would have had to buy a pig in a poke, Mr. 
Speaker. I know that is going on across the country in many, many 
places.
  But my point on this is that the President cannot constitutionally 
amend legislation by executive order, edict, press conference, or a 
third-tier Web site announcement from the Department of the United 
States Treasury. None of those things are consistent with the 
Constitution. And as the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) said in his 
previous discussion, in his 1-minute about a half-hour ago now, he 
continues to make alterations not to somebody else's legislation--that 
is bad enough. I mean, it is all the same kind of constitutional 
violation, in my view.
  But when the President decides that he is going to amend ObamaCare 
that has got his name on it--that is his bill; he signed it--how can 
he, with a straight face, step up and say, I am going to change it on 
the fly; I am going to delay the employer mandate; I am going to delay 
the individual mandate; I am going to waive this; I am going to waive 
that; I am going to set different provisions for businesses that have 
50 employees and those that have 99 employees and those that are large 
businesses?
  And I remember also, when he stepped up in a press conference out at 
the White House after he had taken a couple weeks of grief for the 
conscience protection violations that were supposedly in the bill that 
Kathleen Sebelius' rules eliminated, and that was a requirement that 
religious organizations, as well, had to provide policies and insurance 
that covered contraceptives, abortifacients, sterilizations.
  Contraceptives, Mr. Speaker, people understand. Abortifacients are 
abortion-causing drugs. Sterilizations, we know what these are. These 
were requirements in the rule embodied within the rule that HHS rolled 
out. And after 2 weeks of the religious organizations making the case 
against that, the President did his press conference at noon on a 
Friday, and he stepped up to the podium, and he said, I am going to 
make an accommodation to the religious organizations, an accommodation. 
They don't want to provide these things. So now, he said, I am going to 
require the insurance companies to provide these things for free.
  The President of the United States had the audacity to step up to the 
podium and say, I am going to require the insurance companies now to 
fund contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizations for free.
  Now, that is pretty interesting because maybe it just got lost in the 
language. Maybe the President was really talking about he was going to 
agree, and he was going to ask Congress if Congress would actually 
change the law. Maybe he thought that he was going to have Kathleen 
Sebelius publish a different rule that would go out for comment, and 
once it followed the administrative procedures, it could have the force 
and effect of law if it fit within the language of the ObamaCare 
legislation. Maybe, maybe, maybe, Mr. Speaker. Maybe we could give the 
President the benefit of the doubt.
  Trust, but verify. So I went back and checked the rules, the rules 
that had been published, that compelled the religious organizations to 
follow the path of all of the others to provide for abortifacients and 
sterilizations and contraceptives, and the President's announcement 
that he was going to change things now and make an accommodation to the 
religious organizations and require that these things be provided for 
free from the insurance companies. And you would think there would have 
been a proposal for an amendment, a bill to amend ObamaCare in 
Congress. You would think there would be a change in the rules. But, 
Mr. Speaker, nothing changed in the rules. There wasn't an ``i'' dotted 
differently. There wasn't a ``t'' crossed differently. But the 
insurance companies began to line up behind the verbal edict of the 
President. That is breathtaking in scope when you think of it.

  When you read this Constitution where it says, ``all legislative 
powers.'' It doesn't say all legislative powers, except those assumed 
by the President under certain circumstances, if he so chooses. It 
says, ``all legislative powers.'' And yet the President is legislating 
by announcements on Web sites, by directing his people to change the 
rules, by verbal press conference that changed nothing, no rules. And 
he has the temerity to wave his pen at us and say, I have a cell phone, 
and I have a pen; I don't need the Congress--and to make that same 
statement from the rostrum back here, Mr. Speaker.
  So I am very concerned about our Constitution and the violations of 
it. But the President has time after time after time made changes to 
ObamaCare. It is bad law, and I don't accept the constitutional 
decision that came down from the Supreme Court. It has got a clear and 
stark contradiction in it that one day I hope goes back to the Court to 
be reviewed again.
  But in any case, we have got to adhere to this Constitution. We give 
an oath to uphold the Constitution, as does the President. It is our 
job to preserve, protect, and defend it.
  And here we are, faced with a debt ceiling increase. And the reasons 
that we might be supportive of that increase are, in the short term, it 
gets people off the hook in the short term. But I want a balanced 
budget amendment attached to it. If we don't get that, let's audit the 
Fed. If we don't get that, then I would say, here is something we all 
ought to get behind: eliminate the bailout of our insurance companies.
  Our insurance companies wrote into ObamaCare that they would be 
protected from a stop-loss, essentially protected from loss if their 
actuarial numbers and their premiums don't match up.
  Now, it would be impossible for them to figure this out because the 
President has been changing this law all along. Most all of the changes 
have been unconstitutional. I would bet the clearest one would be when 
the President of the United States decided that he was going to extend 
the employer mandate for a year.
  Now, the law that was signed by President Barack Obama says that the 
employer mandate shall commence in each month after December of 2013.

[[Page H1706]]

That means it must start January 2014. We should be in the second month 
of the employer mandate. And I am happy enough for the policy to 
change. I don't think it ever should be implemented. If they bring that 
extension to this Congress, I would vote for an extension to delay the 
employer mandate for a year because that is probably the right kind of 
policy.
  We didn't get that before this Congress. Instead, the President just 
announced he was going to extend it. And I happen to have been on a bit 
of a trip when the notice came that he was going to do some delays of 
the individual mandate, and I remember sending an email off to one of 
the top insurance companies, Is anybody there talking about the 
constitutional violations? The answer that came back was, Well, not 
very much. But, yes, he is sure they are talking about them. My answer 
was, Merry Christmas.
  This is what we get for Christmas, the President rewriting ObamaCare 
at will. It is ever-changing.
  Months ago, a search of the Congressional Record will show, Mr. 
Speaker, that I said nobody knows what the law is. Nobody knows what 
ObamaCare, the law ObamaCare is because it keeps changing. And of the 
thousands of pages of regulations that are piled on top of it, on the 
2,700 pages of legislation altogether, it has been changed over and 
over again. Insurance companies can't abide by these changes. They 
can't adjust their premiums. And yet they wrote into the bill the risk 
corridors. And they say to me, But we have to have this because, after 
all, if ObamaCare is going to be here, we can't be going broke if the 
President changes the law on us again. That has kind of compressed the 
discussion.
  And I say to them, Were you for or against ObamaCare when it passed? 
Their answer is, Well, hmm--they might check their shoe shine when they 
answer. And they will say, Well, our choice was either to be at the 
table or on the menu. So I am supposed to infer, and the proper 
inference is, they were at the table.
  The large insurance companies in the country, they weren't just at 
the table; they were at the White House. They decided they didn't want 
to be on the menu, so they got to the table at the White House and they 
negotiated their risk corridors, their bailout that protects them from 
losing money under ObamaCare--or at least losing very much money under 
ObamaCare.
  Well, if they weren't on the menu--they were at the table instead--
who was on the menu, Mr. Speaker? And I would argue that, instead of 
the insurance companies being on the menu, it was the taxpayers that 
got put on the menu. And we ended up with risk corridors, the bailout 
for the insurance companies, because they wanted to stay in the large 
insurance business. And they believe that if they can get the taxpayers 
to fund the premiums, it is a more reliable premium funding stream than 
if you have to get that from the individual ratepayers; and also, it 
was designed to put 30 million more people on the insurance roles.
  So whoever is in the business of expanding their business and trying 
to get a margin--and I have not been an anti-insurance person. I have 
paid a lot of premiums and have stepped up and done so willingly. They 
are an important component of the stability in a free enterprise 
economy. All insurance is, as a matter of fact.
  But when they drew that protection and wrote that protection in--the 
stop-loss protection called risk corridors--the bailout for the 
insurance companies into ObamaCare, somebody was going to pick up the 
tab. That is the taxpayers. It expanded their potential universe to 30 
million more insureds, 30 million more premiums. And, of course, there 
is a profit margin in that, and that is what they are in the business 
of doing.
  Well, you expand the premiums to that 30 million, and the design that 
came out of ObamaCare was that we were going to see more insured. And 
at this point, I would lay the wager down, Mr. Speaker, that there are 
fewer people insured today in this country than there were the day that 
ObamaCare was signed into law, and we are losing people continually. 
And as we see what employers are going to do as they watch this, the 
employer mandate kick in over time--delayed now--more employers are 
going to be dropping people from insurance. More employers are cutting 
hours. More employers are reducing the number of employees.
  I happen to know of an employer that had 58 employees, and he lined 
them up and said, If ObamaCare is passed into law and implemented, 
there will be 49 of you, not 58.
  That had to have happened all across the country, businesses that 
shrunk down to under the 50 mandate, businesses that decided not to 
grow into that 50 employees where they are mandated to cover their 
insurance.

                              {time}  2015

  That is the fact of this life if you have more than those in 
employees, and then the formerly 40-hour workweek, which has been used 
to measure a full-time worker, was reduced under ObamaCare to 30 
hours--30 hours, not 40. So we ended up with people that are getting 28 
hours, that are working 28 hours a week so they are underneath the 
mandate, and the employer then who can't afford the premiums often for 
the higher cost health insurance can keep his employees on.
  So here are the circumstances. There might be somebody that has got a 
job, and they could be working let's just say about 48 or 50 hours a 
week, a little overtime, time and a half overtime on that--I have done 
the math on this, Mr. Speaker--but running in at about 50 hours a week. 
The employer looks at that and says, I can't afford the health 
insurance. This Federal mandate is either going to take me out of 
business or I am going to have to lower your hours.
  So he looks at his full-time employees and says, sorry, you are part 
time. You are 28 hours, you are 28 hours, you are 28 hours. Well, he 
needs more employees to fill up the production. So he goes and hires 
more part-time workers. Well, that is a good thing for some people, but 
those who had a full-time job and were getting time and a half overtime 
and they get their hours cut, the person who was working 50 hours now 
is down to 28, they have to go get another part-time job that maybe is 
another 28 hours. Now they are up to 56 or 60 hours, but they don't 
have health insurance with two jobs. Maybe that is dad, and mom is the 
same circumstance. She has been cut. She has got to have another job.
  So now we have mom and dad trying to raise a family when each were 
working 50 hours a week with some overtime, now they are working 56 
hours a week in two jobs with transportation and the shuttle of 
schedules, four jobs for two people to raise a family.
  Those circumstances are emerging today under ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, 
and it is wrong. We need to raise that minimum, that 30-hour standard 
for full time, that mandate up to 40. That is an essential component of 
ObamaCare. I would attach that to the debt ceiling. Any one of these, 
one at a time, all together, I'm fine with, a 40-hour workweek.
  Another one, Mr. Speaker, is this, full deductibility for everyone's 
health insurance premium. It has always been wrong that a certain 
percentage of the American populace has had to buy their health 
insurance with aftertax dollars. I have done this for years. As an 
employer, I started a construction company in 1975. I provided health 
insurance for our employees, but I couldn't deduct the premium for me 
unless I incorporated, put myself on a salary and wrote off those 
wages. I wanted to stay a sole proprietor for a number of reasons, but 
I couldn't deduct my health insurance premiums.
  I would write off the business expense of premiums for my employees, 
a legitimate expense just like wages, salary, and benefits, write those 
off. But I couldn't write off my own. So Marilyn and I had to pay for 
health insurance with aftertax dollars, that piece that is left after 
you pay Uncle Sam, after you pay the Governor, the take-home pay so to 
speak. After you pay the payroll tax, the take-home pay is what I had 
to pay my health insurance with--not a deductible.
  Now, here we are in the circumstance where that is bad, and it should 
have been changed a long time ago because it is an injustice and an 
inequity, but now we have ObamaCare that mandates that individuals buy 
that health insurance. It is a Federal mandate: you shall buy this 
health insurance. Now, in my case, it isn't that I go out on the 
marketplace and shop for a health insurance policy. It is that if I am 
going

[[Page H1707]]

to comply with the law, I have got one choice and one choice only, and 
that is not competition. By the way, one of the reasons that the 
President wanted to pass ObamaCare is so that there would be more 
competition. He wanted to have a Federal health insurance company to 
compete with the private sector companies so that there would be more 
competition. I don't know if anybody has talked about this in quite 
some time here on the floor. It is the President's plan.
  Well, I had one choice, but to have the Federal Government impose 
that you buy a product that is either produced or approved by the 
Federal Government, and they take it out of your check. They commandeer 
your take-home pay to pay that premium. While that is going on, an 
employer somewhere off in a large corporation can deduct that same 
premium for all their people as a business expense. But ma and pa 
operations, the family farm, whoever it might be, they can't. It puts 
them at a significant disadvantage.
  This country needs to provide for full deductibility of everybody's 
health insurance premiums. It is immoral to compel someone to buy a 
product that is produced or approved by the Federal Government, and it 
is even more immoral, Mr. Speaker, to say to them, and the money that 
you shall pay shall be aftertax dollars, and I am going to send the IRS 
in to audit you and make sure that you are paying that premium with 
aftertax dollars, and if not, we are going to levy a tax against you. 
It was just going to be a penalty, but now it is convenient to make the 
argument before the Supreme Court that it is a tax.
  I have a whole series of things that we could do. The debt ceiling is 
in front of us. There is an increase that is being pushed at us. If the 
President's people in this Congress think a clean debt ceiling is a 
good idea, they should step up and all of them pledge to vote for it. I 
think we might find enough Republicans that would vote for a clean debt 
ceiling increase. If not, Mr. Speaker, I would suggest we put a 
balanced budget amendment on that and send it over to Harry Reid. If 
that doesn't work, then I would suggest that we resurrect Ron Paul's 
legislation to audit the Fed, attach that to the debt ceiling, and send 
it over there. If that doesn't work, then I would put the elimination 
of the bailouts for health insurance companies on there and send it 
over to the Senate. If that doesn't work, then I would take the 30-hour 
workweek, which is supposedly the standard for full time, I would 
change that to 40 so that mom and dad who were working 50 hours, and 
now they are working 56 hours or 60 hours each, can hang on to just one 
job, not two each, and they would get, instead of having their hours 
cut from 50 to 28, or maybe even 40 to 28, they can keep their full-
time job and go to work and manage their lives and their schedules.

  By the way, this argument that, according to the CBO, ObamaCare cuts 
the job equivalent of 2\1/2\ million jobs over the course of a decade, 
that is also appalling and breathtaking, Mr. Speaker. To think that 
this ObamaCare that was going to create 4 million jobs according to 
then-Speaker Pelosi now is going to reduce by 2\1/2\ million jobs, that 
is 6\1/2\ million jobs off from what was predicted compared to what we 
now have a better look at what we are likely to end up with, and I 
won't say that number is certain, it might be substantially greater 
than that--2\1/2\ million jobs.
  So how does the administration spin this? You would think that they 
would find an alternative number and argue the CBO score. Or you would 
think that they would find a way to point out that somehow these 
definitions don't quite match up just right. Oh, they looked around 
pretty hard to find a way to rebut the CBO's numbers and they came up 
empty. So they settled on the spin, the spin, Mr. Speaker, which is 
this: oh, 2\1/2\ million jobs, think of this: all of those people that 
don't have to work much because we are borrowing money from the Chinese 
to subsidize the health insurance premium that we require that they pay 
to buy the insurance under ObamaCare, and so they will understand that 
if they stay under a certain threshold, they will get a Federal premium 
subsidy to buy their ObamaCare. It won't pay for them to work as many 
hours as they did before, and when you reduce this all down and get 
people under the 30-hour workweek, which I just finished discussing, 
then they will have more time to spend with their families, more time 
to play with their children, more time to paint and more time to muse 
about the esoteric things in life. Maybe we will have more people that 
are pontificating about metaphysics for this price of losing 2\1/2\ 
million jobs. Oh, it is a good thing we have people working less in 
America.
  That is the core argument for this administration: it is a good thing 
that we have people working less in America because of ObamaCare. It 
gives them more free time. Well, if working less is a good idea, I 
guess that fits with their philosophy, because we have heard, we have 
heard from the minority whip as well as a number of other people, in 
fact, I believe it would also be the former Speaker, who say this: Food 
stamps and unemployment are the two quickest ways you get economic 
stimulus, the quickest way to grow the economy.
  Now, when I first heard that, it was shocking to me that anybody 
could say that out loud and perhaps believe it. How do food stamps 
stimulate the economy? How do unemployment checks stimulate the 
economy? An economy has to produce goods and services that have a 
marketable value here and abroad, and if you borrow money abroad to pay 
people not to produce goods and services, let alone those with a 
marketable value, you are building a nation of debt and a nation of 
people who, if they have job skills, are atrophying because they are 
not using them, and as technology increases, they get further and 
further behind by not maintaining the skills they have and not keeping 
their skills up to date with technology as it moves.
  This idea that this is only a consumer-driven economy, this Keynesian 
concept of let's just say we can't audit the Fed, but they can inject 
in QE 1, 2, and 3 trillions of dollars into this economy, and because a 
lot of the world is afraid to invest, therefore, we haven't seen 
inflation take ahold in this way yet. But the Fed can inject the money 
into QE 3, and then the Federal Government can do an economic stimulus 
plan like the President's $825 billion that went north of that, I guess 
it was $787 billion that got to 825 billion, inject this money into the 
economy, spend this money, and it is going to stimulate the economy, 
and this growth will eventually create enough tax money that you work 
your way out of debt.
  The problem with that is, Mr. Speaker, it has never succeeded. There 
is no existing model of a Keynesian experiment that has ever brought a 
country and economy out of an economic recession. We are in the fifth 
year of this recovery. I guess you can say that we are coming out of 
the economic recession of 2008. We have had this slow improvement in 
unemployment numbers that has taken place. We are down there in the 
sixes somewhere. We have watched as the number of 15 million unemployed 
has worked its way down by 1 million here, 1 million there. One year 
ago, there were 12 million unemployed. Today, according to the most 
recent report, there are 10.2 million unemployed. Actually, it has been 
a full 2 million people less on the unemployment roles. But the monthly 
job increases that we have seen, 74,000 last month, a little over 
100,000 this month, are not nearly enough to keep pace, Mr. Speaker.
  This growth has been down there to where if you look at the last 4 to 
5 years, the GDP increase in the economy has been greater in Mexico 
than it has in the United States. As I listened to some of the, let me 
say some of the self-appointed economic experts, they will explain to 
us that we need to import more people into the United States that have 
low or no skill and likely are illiterate in their own language to do 
the work that Americans don't want to do in this country, and in doing 
so will stimulate our economy and increase our fertility rate. We know 
who those people are, Mr. Speaker, that seem to think that. Much of 
this concept is just simply wrong. Keynesian economics is wrong. The 
idea of an open borders economic stimulator is wrong.
  What is right is the understanding of first principles, the 
understanding of the pillars of American exceptionalism, the 
understanding that put those parameters in place by our Founding 
Fathers well more than 200 years ago,

[[Page H1708]]

when they saw that we had to have the rule of law in America. Without 
the rule of law, we are not a lot different from Third World countries.
  We are a nation of laws and not of men, and our laws need to be 
applied equally to all of us. The problem we have today is it looks 
like those who are let's say not favored by the current administration 
have to fear the law more than those who are favored. One of those 
examples would be the IRS, Mr. Speaker. Our Founding Fathers would have 
never envisioned an IRS in the first place. It took a constitutional 
amendment to even provide for it, the 16th Amendment. I introduce a 
resolution each year to repeal the 16th Amendment, and one day I hope 
to see that done.

  In the meantime, our Founding Fathers imagined that there would be 
taxes gathered through other means and that the government would be 
limited. Our Constitution is the very description of limited 
government. The concept of Federalism, Mr. Speaker, sometimes needs to 
be defined and described, especially so young people understand. 
Federalism is the devolution of power out to the political 
subdivisions, to the States or respectively to the people, a limited 
Federal Government with enough power to protect our borders and our 
shores, to leave us as much as possible otherwise alone, and let the 
States and their political subdivisions and the people solve those 
problems so that the laboratories of the States can be where the 
experiments are taking place.
  They are to some degree. I see some of these experiments. There are 
some States that have some healthy experiments. One of them is Texas: 
no income tax, a dynamic economy, one that has shown, that has 
demonstrated to be a big chunk of the growth in our GDP and the growth 
of employment in the country because they run a free and fair 
government in Texas and no income tax. Florida is a State with no 
income tax. South Dakota is a State with no income tax. They seem to be 
destination States for people that are seeking to get out of the high-
tax States like Illinois and California, the model of the States that 
are in economic difficulty.

                              {time}  2030

  Additionally, Mr. Speaker, we have seen some cities that have been 
run by that Keynesian philosophy of borrow, tax, and spend get to the 
point of collapse and ruin, Detroit among them. Detroit, a great, 
great, American city with a tremendous legacy, a vibrant tone within 
the history of America, shuffled down into bankruptcy, and with grass 
growing in the streets of the city because they didn't take care of 
their finances. That is what is in store for entire States if they 
don't turn the corner, and that is what is in store for this entire 
country if we don't turn the corner.
  I am concerned that politics here in the House of Representatives is 
downstream from the culture. Politics in any legislative body is 
generally downstream from the culture. Yes, we have leaders here. We 
have leaders that step up and strike the right tone and chart the right 
course, but they would not be followed unless the culture provided the 
directive.
  This American experiment, this grand country that we are, is 
dependent upon the people in this country understanding what made us 
great, preserving and protecting and refurbishing those pillars of 
American exceptionalism that can sustain a greatness into the future, 
above and beyond any that we have achieved today.
  That is what is in store for us if we teach our children well, if we 
teach them the responsibility of work, if we teach them the core of our 
faith, the faith that laid the foundation for America, the faith that 
will see us through any trials, the foundation for the family, the 
ideal way to raise children, a mom and dad and a family, raising their 
children with love and setting the standard for them, and setting the 
standard of work as well as morality.
  This country can come back again. We need to teach American history, 
the pillars of American exceptionalism. We need to do it from inside 
out, from the family on out, and those young people need to emerge as 
the leaders in all walks of life from the educational to the journalism 
to the production, and we need to revere and respect all work. All work 
has honor. All work has dignity. We need to put a lot more Americans 
back to work. There are over 101 million Americans of working age who 
are simply not in the workforce. We don't need to import more people to 
do the work that Americans won't do. We need to provide the incentive 
for Americans to step up and shoulder the burden with the rest of us. 
That is more important.
  So, Mr. Speaker, we will see how the debt ceiling unfolds. I have 
offered a number of options, and I appreciate your attention.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________