[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.
____________________