[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 105 (Tuesday, July 8, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H5863-H5869]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1930
        AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM WITHIN A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
50 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 House of Representatives and to 
take up these topics that I appreciate your attention to.
  As the other Members disperse across this Hill and over to their 
offices and as their staffs are tuned in on television and for those 
who are here in person, we have got some serious issues to discuss. 
This country has been led down a path that has been, I think, in the 
end, destructive to our Republic, and it is important that we focus on 
these issues that are getting out of hand.
  We are a great country. For the Fourth of July, I sent out a tweet 
that morning to celebrate the Fourth of July: ``Happy Independence 
Day.''
  The United States of America is the unchallenged greatest nation in 
the world, and we derive our strength from Western civilization, Judeo 
Christianity, and free enterprise capitalism. There are many other 
components to those three parts that I mentioned. Of course, as I send 
out that message, there are those who disagree.
  First, they don't think of America as an exceptional nation. They 
don't believe in American exceptionalism. Our President makes the 
statement that: oh, yes, I believe in American exceptionalism in the 
way the British believe in British exceptionalism and

[[Page H5864]]

the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
  That is an entirely different concept. There are many countries out 
there that are proud of who they are, and they should be. They are 
proud of their nationalities. They are proud of the history of who they 
are. Borders, culture, and language are what tie a country together.
  The other countries that see themselves as such and are proud to be 
so, as the British and as the Greeks are, are not like the United 
States of America. They do have borders, they do have culture, they do 
have language, but none of them were formed around an ideal, an ideal 
of God-given liberty.
  None of them were formed around the idea of the rule of law. None of 
them have a bill of rights like we have a Bill of Rights, where you can 
look at the pillars of American exceptionalism and read most of them as 
you read down through the first 10 amendments, our Bill of Rights.
  Pillars of American exceptionalism: freedom of speech, religion, the 
press, and the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government 
for the redress of grievances--there are four pillars in one, in the 
First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
  The right to keep and bear arms is another pillar of American 
exceptionalism. Whatever our pain is as the result of people who are 
dying due to gun violence--and if I counted the casualties right, in 
Chicago, over the Fourth of July weekend, it was 14 murdered and 82 
wounded in gun violence. It is a product of lawless people who are 
violating gun laws.
  They don't respect their gun laws, but we have the right to keep and 
bear arms because it is an obligation to keep our society in a position 
where we can defend against tyranny; yet some don't understand that. 
They think, somehow, the Second Amendment is about having the right to 
defend ourselves or the right to hunt or the right to collect or the 
right to target shoot.
  All of those things are ancillary benefits that come along with the 
Second Amendment, and they are necessary so that we continue the 
culture of respect for arms and gun safety, but the real reason that we 
have the right to keep and bear arms is to defend against tyranny.
  So far, we haven't seen a tyrant emerge in America who has brought 
about the need to utilize our Second Amendment, to defend ourselves 
from a tyrant who would lord over us and our God-given liberty.
  Now, history moves on, and different personalities emerge, so I 
couldn't rule that out for the future, and I couldn't rule it out, 
actually, for the current either, Mr. Speaker.
  With all of these pillars of American exceptionalism--the First 
Amendment, the Second Amendment, the property rights that used to exist 
with utter clarity in the Fifth Amendment, but, because of the Kelo 
decision, have been somewhat eroded--and along through our protection 
against double jeopardy and a quick and speedy trial and a right to 
face a jury of our peers and the powers of the Federal Government that 
devolve down to the States or the people respectively in the Ninth and 
10th Amendments--we couldn't have built a country without these.
  We couldn't have built a great country, Mr. Speaker, if we didn't 
have that foundation that I mentioned in the beginning--if we didn't 
have the core of Western civilization that emerged here on this 
continent at the dawn of the industrial revolution, if we didn't have 
the age of reason that accompanied old English common law, which is a 
descendant of Roman law, which is a descendant of Mosaic law--if we 
hadn't had those pieces, America would have never been, just as if we 
were not a Judeo-Christian nation, with a sense of morality and a sense 
of justice, a sense of forgiveness, a sense of redemption--yes, and a 
sense of confession.
  If we hadn't had those pieces that are part and parcel of our culture 
and our civilization, America would have never been. We wouldn't have 
held together, and we wouldn't have been formed in the first place, so 
we wouldn't have sustained ourselves through all of these trials and 
tribulations of the centuries in the 238 years since the founding of 
our Republic.
  That is how important this country is; yet we have many who don't 
understand this, many who refuse to believe the reality of history that 
has brought us to this point, many who don't respect this reality of 
history.
  When I say that our Founding Fathers were almost universally of a 
solid faith--in fact, of a solid Christian faith--I hear from the other 
side of the aisle over here that: no, they were deists, they really had 
a different way of looking at this.
  Thomas Jefferson a deist? Go look at the memorial. You will find more 
references to God in the Jefferson Memorial than you will see as typos 
in there, and there are two typos.
  Thomas Jefferson was a moral and a religious man, and it anchored 
much of what he did as was true for all of our Founders. They were not 
atheists, they were not agnostics, they were not deists. They were 
rooted in a strong faith and a deep understanding of history, and they 
understood the flow of history.
  On one of my trips out here to Washington--before I came here, Mr. 
Speaker, to serve in this Congress--I went to the National Archives. 
There was a long line waiting to see the Declaration of Independence 
and the Bill of Rights, which are on display underneath glass at the 
Archives today--8 inches of glass in between there and 8 inches of.
  It is that Declaration of Independence in which our Founding Fathers 
pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. As I 
waited to walk through there to see the original documents--for me, it 
was the first time--I read through the display that was at the National 
Archives. This was a display of artifacts from the Greek city-state 
era.

  There, I learned with the real examples before me of how the Greek 
city-states had the purist form of democracy, at least at the time, and 
that men of age had an opportunity to speak and to have their voices 
heard with their votes in the Greek city-states, but they had a problem 
with this pure form of democracy, and our Founding Fathers understood 
this.
  They learned that, if it is just the masses, if the majority can rule 
over the minority and if there are no foundational or fundamental 
rights, then it is the tyranny of the majority that rules over the 
minority.
  There was also the tyranny of the demagogues, the demagogues that had 
perfected their artful oratory in such a way that they could move the 
masses in an emotional way, often against the best interests of the 
Greek city-states.
  When a demagogue emerged who drove the city-state in a direction that 
wasn't prudent, but was emotional and put the city-state at risk, then 
they had the Greek blackball system. The blackball system was that they 
would all line up to vote. There would be a gourd here or a piece of 
pottery here that had a little neck in it and enough room to contain 
all of the marbles, and there was a discard pottery as well.
  When the Greeks decided they were going to see if they were going to 
banish a demagogue from the city-state, each one of those in the city-
state who could vote--each one of these adult males--got a white marble 
and a black marble in his hand.
  As they walked through--one of these potteries was the voting one, 
and the other one was a discard, and no one could tell whether they 
voted to keep this demagogue in our city-state by voting white or to 
banish this demagogue from our city-state by voting black.
  It was maybe 100, maybe 1,000, or however many were there to vote in 
the Greek city-state--maybe several thousand. As they walked through, 
if three of them voted a blackball in the voting pottery--in that 
voting container--and discarded their marbles in the other one, if only 
three of them said banish this demagogue from the city-state, they 
would banish him for 7 years because he was a poisonous influence on 
their civilization, on their culture, and on their society.
  That was one of the ways they held in check this raw, pure democracy 
that existed back during the Greek era, and our Founding Fathers 
understood that.
  They understood also that these pure democracies had a way of 
essentially imploding and expiring. They understood that they had a 
limited lifespan--they thought, perhaps, a couple hundred years, so 
they didn't devise a democracy, Mr. Speaker. America was not devised to 
be a democracy.

[[Page H5865]]

  As a matter of fact, you can take a look here in this Constitution 
and read in here that it guarantees a republican form of government. 
That is a representative form of government. It is not that everybody 
goes to the city center--to the coliseum--and votes on national policy.
  We had that proposal, by the way. Let's see. We had a Presidential 
candidate from Texas who pledged that we should actually go on the 
Internet and all vote these policies, so America could become close to 
a pure democracy. I didn't like that. I thought that that was a bad 
idea.
  Our Founding Fathers had a bright idea. It was a good, solid, 
principled idea: give us a republican form of government.
  When Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention, a 
lady there asked him: What have you given us? His answer was: A 
republic, ma'am, if you can keep it.
  The Republic is a representative form of government where you elect 
Representatives to come to the House and be reelected or not every 2 
years and go to the United States Senate for 6-year terms, with the 
idea that we would be a quick reaction force here in the House and of a 
longer-term view, maybe a little cooling effect, over in the Senate, 
with the balance of these two bodies.
  In article I of our Constitution, the most powerful and influential 
component of our three branches of government is Congress--the United 
States Congress. That is why it is article I. All legislative power 
exists here between the House and the Senate.
  In article I, the legislative powers of the United States Government 
are here--here, Mr. Speaker, in this House and over at the other end of 
the Capitol building, which is through the rotunda--over to the United 
States Senate--all legislative powers, article I.
  Our Founding Fathers started, when they drafted the Constitution, 
with article I because our power comes from God, and it is granted to 
those of us who represent this government from the people--of, by, and 
for the people of the United States.
  Their powers that they derived from God are transferred here into 
this Congress, so that we can express their will and bring forth the 
policies that they believe are the best and most prudent for the United 
States of America. It isn't just our being a reactionary force--a 
barometer, a taking of the temperature of our constituents--and somehow 
come here and reflect that in national policy. That is not exactly the 
definition of our job, Mr. Speaker.
  Here is what I owe my constituents--and I would entreat all of my 
colleagues to adopt this policy and philosophy--I owe everyone whom I 
have the honor and privilege to represent my best effort and my best 
judgment.
  My best judgment includes be home; be among the people whom I have 
the privilege to represent; listen, listen, listen; take into account 
their concerns, their dreams, their aspirations, their grievances; and 
bring that back here with the best ideas that have emerged from that 
and couple with that the things that I am able to have the time to pay 
attention to on policy to analyze because I have the privilege to 
represent a lot of constituents who work for a living.
  They are busy. They turn in 50, 60, 70, 80, or more hours a week. 
They do that to take care of their families. They do that to build a 
nest egg. They do that to prepare for their futures and, perhaps, for 
their retirements. They do that to build the capital so that they can 
reinvest, which creates jobs and increases the standard of living.
  The people I have the privilege to represent are busy. They don't 
have time to spend 60, 70, 80 hours a week paying attention to public 
policy, but they do have time to pay attention to whether I am paying 
attention to public policy.
  That is my pledge: my best effort and my best judgment, including 
incorporating all of their best judgments into the things that I can do 
and all of the other things that I have the opportunity to learn.
  If I find myself at odds with the constituents in my district, it is 
time to have an eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart conversation. I should do 
what is right for God and country and State and district--in that 
order.
  I have never found a conflict between that order of priority. When my 
mother was alive, I had told her: Mom, if there is a policy that is not 
so great for you, but that is right for America, sorry, but we are 
going to do what is right for America, and we are going to find another 
way to take care of you, Mom.
  That is the way we need to do business in this country. We need to 
look to the long-term best interests of the United States of America.
  We need to look back in our rearview mirror and say: How did we get 
here? What made us this great Nation? What were the principles that our 
predecessors adhered to that became such a foundational rock that we 
could be this unchallenged, greatest nation in the world? What were 
they? What are they? What are they that exist today? What are those 
principles that are being eroded, so that America isn't as strong in 
some of these areas as we used to be?

                              {time}  1945

  Do we still have this freedom of speech?
  Well, maybe not quite, Mr. Speaker. And I say maybe not quite because 
this freedom of speech that used to compel us to utter the things that 
we believed to be true is now restrained by the political correctness, 
the political correctness where a CEO of a major corporation donated 
$1,000 to support a man or woman joined together in, hopefully, holy 
matrimony, and loses his job as a CEO because there are people that 
believe that marriage is something other than between a man and a 
woman.
  That is not what you call a free speech. That erodes us all when you 
see that happen.
  When you see the attacks that come--and I see them come primarily 
from the left. There will be people that will take issue with the tone 
of remarks or the word choices of remarks, but they aren't so much 
aggrieved by the actual function of what we are describing.
  For example, there are people that don't like the way some of us talk 
about abortion. They don't like to be reminded that I and millions of 
Americans believe that human life is sacred in all of its forms, that 
it begins at a moment, and that is the moment of conception, and it 
needs to be protected with that great reverence for that sacred unique 
human life created in God's image from every moment of its conception 
until natural death. They don't like that kind of dialogue. You will 
never see a video of an actual abortion performed because the very 
sight of it is so appalling that the other side would object to the 
freedom of speech to demonstrate such a thing.
  They don't like the idea that we call illegal immigrants ``illegal 
immigrants.'' They don't like the idea that they get labeled as 
``illegal aliens'' or ``criminal aliens,'' but never mind that this is 
actually the legal term for those who are breaking our immigration 
laws.
  Mr. Speaker, you will know that one of the top topics that we are 
faced with, as we went back to the Fourth of July, as we go across this 
country, is the immigration issue. It is in front of us now again.
  It is not a new experience for a lot of us. We were at this topic at 
this time last year. We went through this debate in 2005, 2006, and 
2007 before it finally died away and we bought a little bit more time 
to come back and revere and respect the rule of law again. But it has 
been so eroded.
  Wherever I go, the immigration topic comes up, Mr. Speaker. And we 
are watching the video now of the images of people coming across the 
border, many of them at McAllen, Texas.
  Now, I would take people back to what we have experienced in the past 
in that intense immigration debate that took place, started when 
President George W. Bush gave his amnesty speech, his comprehensive 
immigration reform speech.
  My memory says that it was January 5, 2004. It was the launch of his 
reelection campaign. It was a calculation that he needed to reach out 
to the Hispanic community and, therefore, calculated that if he would 
grant some form of amnesty and start the process of legalizing people 
that are here illegally, that somehow they would embrace him as a 
Presidential candidate.
  I think it was an overreaction to what they saw happen in the year 
2000

[[Page H5866]]

when George W. Bush and Al Gore ran against each other, and when they 
got down to the recount in Florida, with 537 votes being the deciding 
difference between who would be the President of the United States and 
who would drift off into history, that election, I believe, they looked 
at the county-by-county election returns on which counties went for 
George Bush and which counties went for Al Gore and saw, I believe, 
what I know I saw, Mr. Speaker. It was the blue, southern tip of Texas. 
South Texas went for Al Gore.
  Now, how could it be that a Presidential candidate of the stature of 
George W. Bush, a favorite son of Texas, a Governor of Texas, could 
lose such a big chunk of Texas on a county-by-county basis to Al Gore? 
I think they drew a conclusion that it was the Hispanic vote that he 
had not done very well with in Texas and decided this is how we are 
going to do better with the Hispanic vote, and so they turned it up.
  They announced, after George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, that 
George W. Bush had carried 44 percent of the Hispanic electorate. But, 
upon further analysis, by the time you slice and dice and take that 
formula apart and put it back together, it comes down to an objective 
analysis that it couldn't have been 44 percent. It had to have fallen 
between 38 and 40 percent. Whatever that real number is, I am 
convinced, Mr. Speaker, it wasn't 44.
  But we then saw John McCain, who was long known as an ``open 
borders'' John McCain, run for President, and he picked up 31 percent 
of the Hispanic vote. So 7 percent--or 8 or maybe as much as 9 
percent--of the Hispanic vote was lost between George W. Bush and John 
McCain. It never was 44. If it was, it was even a lot more. Then it was 
13. But I am going to say instead that I will pick that number at 39 
and say that John McCain watched an 8 percent drop in the Hispanic vote 
from George W. Bush's high watermark, where he reached out in a very 
positive and proactive way, down to John McCain at 31 percent.
  Four years later, for the reelect of Barack Obama, Presidential 
candidate Mitt Romney came forward and he garnered 27 percent of the 
Hispanic vote. That is really not disputed. So he dropped 4 percent 
from the 31 percent of John McCain, the ``open borders'' John McCain, 
to 27 percent for Mitt Romney.
  What happened, Mr. Speaker?
  We ended up with an autopsy report that said that somehow it was a 
calamity, a free fall, a loss of a big chunk of the Hispanic vote 
because Mitt Romney had said a couple of words that seemingly allegedly 
had offended people, those two words being ``self-deport.''
  Now, if the language is so sensitive that you can't use a term like 
``self-deport'' without losing the Presidency, how in the world, Mr. 
Speaker, are we going to enforce the law? How are we going to reinforce 
the respect for the rule of law if we can't, in a delicate way, say, 
you know, if we really do enforce the law, a lot of people will decide 
that they don't have a legal presence here and they might decide they 
are happier if they would wake up in their home country. Somehow that 
is offensive to people?
  Instead, I would say there has been a loss in the Hispanic vote, 
certainly not from 44 percent for George W. Bush but from, say, 39 
percent down to John McCain. That is an 8 percent loss--31 percent for 
John McCain, 8 percent loss. Only a 4 percent drop from that down to 
Mitt Romney. Who knows which direction that is going to go, but it 
completely disregards, Mr. Speaker, the tens of millions of dollars 
that Democrats spent calling Republicans racists and getting a return 
on their investment by watching that be an effective, however sinful 
tactic it is.
  I have watched this for a number of election cycles. I have watched 
it in my own race.
  When you pit people against each other, Mr. Speaker, when you 
identify people and say you are in one class here, you are in another 
class here, you are in a group here, you are in a group over here--and 
the Democrats know. They will sort you out. They will say, well, your 
hair is blonde and your eyes are blue, so you belong here; and yours is 
dark and your eyes are brown, you belong over here; and you have a 
melanin content in your skin, and I am going to put you there.

  We are all created in God's image, every one of us, and He has given 
us the distinction so we can tell each other apart. For us to identify 
those distinctions that are God-given identifying characteristics and 
use those to categorize people as something different than other people 
for political gain, Mr. Speaker, I believe is a sin. It is against the 
interests of this country, and we have fallen prey to those kind of 
tactics, and we have a President who falls prey to those kind of 
tactics.
  I would remind you, when you had Officer Crowley and Professor Gates 
and that instance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the President 
jumped in on what looked like was a home burglary circumstance, upon 
review, Officer Crowley conducted himself just fine; Professor Gates 
got a little bit out of control. The President jumped in on something 
he never should have weighed in on and concluded that, because the 
professor was of one skin color and the officer was of Irish descent, 
that somehow there had to be some kind of racism involved rather than 
the humanity of an officer who puts his life on the line to bring our 
safety to us and to protect and preserve the rule of law. So the 
President, to get out of that deal, had to have a beer summit at the 
White House.
  Well, that lasted a little while, until Arizona passed its S.B. 1070 
law, which is their immigration law that was designed to exactly mirror 
Federal law--not exceed it, not go beyond it, but exactly mirror 
Federal law. And what happened? The President weighs in and says, well, 
you know, if are you a mother, a Hispanic mother taking your daughter 
out for ice cream, you could potentially be pulled over and checked for 
your papers. That was a statement that brought a focus on to race and 
ethnicity, and the law specifically prohibits such a thing, but he 
brought race into this equation again.
  Now we have a President who has two of his family members who have 
received some form of amnesty, his Auntie Onyango and Uncle Omar. 
Auntie Onyango has now passed away, but she lived in public housing for 
a long time on the government dole. She was adjudicated for deportation 
at least once, perhaps more times than that. The President's presence 
in this country and hers in this country got her an amnesty.
  So did drunken Omar, President Obama's uncle, who nearly ran over a 
police officer up in that same neighborhood and received his form of 
amnesty, too, because, after all, if you send him back to Kenya and he 
happens to be related to the President, somebody will kidnap him and 
maybe he becomes held hostage for profit. So we surely couldn't send 
somebody back, no matter how many times they had been adjudicated for 
deportation, no matter how much they were on the government dole, no 
matter what kind of an unexemplary citizen--well, a resident of the 
United States. I have to retract that citizen piece. A resident of the 
United States.
  Illegal immigrants, the President's uncle, the President's aunt, they 
get asylum. They get amnesty. And the President reaches out and says, 
essentially to the world, we are not going to enforce immigration law. 
It is a progression on his part.
  It was Bill Clinton that did the most deportations. In the year 2000, 
he had more deportations than anybody in history, before or since, more 
than George W. Bush, more than Ronald Reagan, more than George H.W. 
Bush. But those high deportations that took place under Bill Clinton 
diminished substantially under this President. They diminished under 
George W. Bush. They diminished again substantially under this 
President.
  Mr. Speaker, this President has put the welcome mat out. He has 
essentially advertised to people in foreign countries: if you can get 
into America, you get to stay in America. That has been his policy. 
While they will announce that he has more deportations than anybody 
else, it wasn't true the moment they uttered that. It is not true 
today. The President has confessed that they count differently than any 
other administration.
  We have a circumstance on the southern border that adopts involuntary 
return. If someone sneaks into America and they are caught at the 
border, they are offered a couple of options.

[[Page H5867]]

  One of them is, well, today, we will take your prints and your 
picture. But if you will voluntarily return to your home country, then 
you will not be barred from coming back into the United States on 
either a 3- or a 10-year bar. That is the deal. So a lot of them take 
that voluntary return and go back to Mexico and try again.
  In fact, we checked the records down at Nogales at the border 
station, and this was several years ago. They had a single individual 
that had attempted to come into the United States and had been caught 
27 times. No penalty. Here are your prints. We will take your picture. 
We will send you back to Mexico. You can go. Sometimes they come back 
in the same day and they are caught again the same day.
  We had testimony before the Judiciary Committee in the Immigration 
Subcommittee where the Border Patrol came before us, and I asked them: 
What percentage of illegal immigrants do you interdict, do you stop at 
the border? Their testimony said, well, perhaps 25 percent. Well, 25 
percent is an abysmally low number, Mr. Speaker. Only 25 percent 
interdiction at the border.
  Now, I go down to the border and I ask them down there, the Border 
Patrol, Customs, Border Patrol and ICE: What percentage are you 
interdicting here at the border? Are you getting--are you stopping 25 
percent? They would laugh and say 10 percent has to come first. Ten 
percent was the most consistent number that I heard, sector after 
sector, agent after agent. They think they are stopping about 10 
percent. One of the ICE supervisors said: I think it is 2 to 3 percent.
  So this 25 percent number, even if we accept it, then you have to 
multiply it times four to come up with the number of people that are 
coming across our border. If we stop 25 percent, that means 25 people 
come across, there is really 100 of them. When you do the math, at the 
peak of our interdictions, which was during the Bush administration, 
that came to about 11,000 a night, 11,000 illegal aliens, criminal 
aliens coming into the United States across our southern border every 
night.
  That traffic has slowed down a little bit because there are fewer 
economic opportunities. So that 11,000 was about twice the size of 
Santa Anna's army. Now the nightly border traffic is about exactly the 
size of Santa Anna's army.
  Now, of course, they aren't all armed. In fact, very few of them are. 
But we are watching what is going on in McAllen as we are watching tens 
of thousands of unaccompanied minors come into the United States.

                              {time}  2000

  And that number was predicted more than 6 months ago by Chris Crane, 
the president of the ICE union, who has said, we are going to see more 
than 50,000--I believe the number he gave was actually 60,000--
unaccompanied minors coming into the United States in the next year. 
Well, we have already crossed over 50,000. And for this full year, we 
are going to see that number--July, August, September--and that number 
is increasing. We think in the next fiscal year, it is predicted that 
it will be 120,000, not this 50,000 that we have crossed so far.
  And, by the way, these unaccompanied minors, these are kids under the 
age of 18. These unaccompanied minors represent about 20 percent of the 
illegal aliens that are coming into America. And those are the ones 
that we catch.
  So that is 100,000. Perhaps that number, approaching 120,000 illegal 
aliens that they catch, it is a number bigger than that. We have got a 
number that goes to some 300,000 criminal aliens to be interdicted in 
this fiscal year, and I think that number will go higher. That is one 
of those snapshot estimates. I am going to predict that it is going to 
be closer to 600,000.
  But still, this President has refused to send people back. If you 
come into the United States, if you are able to set a foot in the 
United States, get into America, if you get into the interior, you are 
almost home-free. If you are not caught at the border, you are almost 
home free.
  But something less than 2 percent of those who come into the United 
States who are interdicted, who get caught, are actually sent back 
home. And now, when you slice and dice that number down, you see the 
trend: that is going down to something like 0.1 percent that are faced 
with the enforcement of the law against them.
  This is the wholesale destruction of the rule of law, Mr. Speaker. 
The wholesale destruction of the rule of law. This is a President who 
has rolled out the welcome mat and has sent the message across the 
continent, across the hemisphere and, actually, the world: if you can 
get into America, we aren't going to bother to remove you from America.
  He has prohibited local law enforcement from enforcing Federal 
immigration law. He has gone to court to enforce such a thing. They 
have canceled 287(g) agreements, which are cooperative agreements 
between political subdivisions and the Federal Government so that local 
government could help enforce immigration law. He has sent his Attorney 
General hither and yon to file lawsuits against political subdivisions 
that simply want to enforce the rule of law and reflect Federal 
immigration law.
  There is no other law that I know in this country that doesn't ask 
for, receive, and appreciate the full cooperation of all levels of law 
enforcement, whether they are city police, county sheriffs, whether 
they are State officers, criminal investigation personnel, or Federal 
officers of any kind. All levels cooperate at all levels, with the 
exception of immigration law, which has been carved out to be separate 
by this President.
  And now we have a President that a year ago last summer, in the 
middle of the summer, some time in July, introduced what we call the 
DACA language, or the Morton Memos. And those memos are written in a 
bit of a--let's say a deft, convoluted, legalistic way, signed by John 
Morton, presented by Janet Napolitano. I promised her that she would be 
sued over them, and she is.
  But these Morton Memos create four different classes of people. They 
grant an effective de facto. That is, they grant an amnesty to people 
that are in the United States. And it is the idea that if you came into 
America, and you were under the age of 18, you weren't responsible for 
your actions.
  Some people on my side of the aisle will argue that you can't form 
intent if you are young. If you are too young to form an intent, then 
you can't be held accountable for breaking the law. I would point out, 
how young is that? Because a 2-year-old who reaches their hand in the 
cookie jar in my house knows that is wrong. And if you holler at them 
and say, Johnny, they will hide that cookie behind them and act like 
they didn't do anything wrong. You can't convince me that a 17-year-old 
can't form an intent when a 2-year-old can at the cookie jar and know 
it is wrong.
  But this President somehow believes that if you came into this 
country before you were 18 years old, or at least say you did, that it 
was through no fault of your own that somehow your parents brought you 
in. And now, we have 50,000 kids from countries other than Mexico--
Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras--who are being pushed up into the 
United States of America, who are attracted to come here. Why? Because 
of the powerful magnet of no enforcement of the law, no effective 
enforcement of the law here in the United States. The magnet of family 
members that have already been beneficiaries of no enforcement of the 
law.
  We had a case that was decided in December of 2013. I introduced it 
into the Congressional Record in the Judiciary Committee a couple of 
weeks ago. An illegal alien mother in Virginia had abandoned her 10-
year-old daughter in Guatemala. She had hired a human smuggling coyote 
to smuggle her 10-year-old daughter across Mexico into the United 
States. They were supposed to deliver this child to this illegal home 
in Virginia. They were caught at the border. The human smuggler had 
charges brought against her. She had been in trouble for this same kind 
of activity in the past. So they brought charges for trafficking and 
human smuggling against the coyote, the human coyote. But the 10-year-
old girl, what did she do with her? They loaded her up--she is an 
illegal alien, too--and delivered her up to Virginia, to her illegal 
alien mother into a household full of illegal aliens. ICE completed the 
crime. Immigration and Customs Enforcement completed the crime.

[[Page H5868]]

  And when the judge rendered his decision on the prosecution of the 
human trafficker, he wrote that he had had a case like that in each 
preceding week in the previous month, at least four of those similar 
cases where ICE had completed the crime of human trafficking and had 
delivered this child--which may or may not be the daughter of the 
resident of the illegal household in Virginia--delivered this child 
into that household.
  Now, that message went out, Mr. Speaker, all over Central America: If 
you are from somewhere other than Mexico, send your children to 
America. And they are coming across. They are climbing up on trains. 
They are riding that dangerous track. Some of them are walking. All of 
them are subject to being victims of the drug cartels and the violence. 
And yes, they are leaving violent countries.
  The violent death rate in Guatemala, according to a Web site that 
tracks that, is 74.9 violent deaths per 100,000. The U.S. violent death 
rate is 6.5 per 100,000. That will tell you about the ratio of how much 
more dangerous it is in a place like Guatemala. Honduras, according to 
the United Nations report that just came out a few months ago, has the 
highest murder rate in the world, with 92 homicides per 100,000. But 
their numbers have grown in the last couple of years. They don't show 
the violent deaths rates as being that high.
  But we do know by the U.N. records that eight of the 10 most violent 
countries in the world are in the Western Hemisphere. They are in 
Central America or northern South America, not Mexico.

  America's violent death rate is 6.5 per 100,000. Mexico's violent 
death rate is 18.2 per 100,000. It is not quite three times that of the 
United States. But still, if you think of a country that has triple the 
violent death rate, and you send a lot of their young men here, there 
are going to be people in this country that die as a result of those 
decisions. And I am not picking on Mexico because it is far more 
violent south of Mexico, multiple times more violent south of Mexico.
  In Honduras, there are 92 homicides per 100,000, compared to Mexico's 
18.2. In Guatemala, the rate is 74.9 in violent deaths, not homicides. 
And in El Salvador, some years you don't get records because it is so 
violent there.
  However, when you look at those countries and the homicide rates that 
they have, only Honduras has a higher violent death rate than Detroit. 
We should put this in perspective, Mr. Speaker. If we are going to move 
kids out of Central America to the United States of America because 
they live in a violent society, we dare not send them to Detroit 
because we would be putting them in an environment that is more 
dangerous than the one they left. But if you look at the universe of 
unaccompanied minors, let alone those who are accompanied coming into 
America that are getting this Presidential de facto asylum, you will 
see a reflection of what showed up in the Guatemala newspaper here a 
couple of weeks ago, a Spanish language newspaper, interpreted to say 
thus: 80 percent of the unaccompanied minors are male; 83 percent of 
the unaccompanied minors are the ages of 15, 16, or 17. When they turn 
18, they are no longer an unaccompanied minor--15, 16, or 17.
  Mr. Speaker, I would challenge anyone to go anywhere in the world and 
identify a demographic group of people that are more likely to become 
gangbangers, to be violent, to perpetrate and prey upon innocence, than 
those that come from the most violent societies in the world. Eight of 
the 10 most violent societies in the world are south of Mexico, and 
they are coming here as OTMs, ``other than Mexicans.''
  If you pick 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds from the most violent 
societies in the world and you drop them into another society by the 
tens of thousands and perhaps substantially more than that, there isn't 
any rational person that would think that there aren't going to be 
victims in the United States as a result of this policy.
  And yet, the policy that I talked about, that had ICE completing the 
crime of hauling the 10-year-old illegal alien to Virginia to be 
rejoined with her illegal alien mother in Virginia, completing the 
crime, that has happened dozens or scores of times until now.
  So now the President has his administration that is doing this 
thousands of times. They are taking these unaccompanied minors, housing 
them, coming through McAllen, in particular, but a lot of other places 
as well, putting them in temporary warehouses, loading them on buses 
and hauling them to places where they can process them. And then 
picking them up and, if they have a phone number in their pocket, some 
of them have a phone number memorized, wherever they say a relative or 
an extended family lives, ICE, or now Health and Human Services, 
delivers them there.
  They pull up in front of a household. It might be a crack house. It 
might be a meth house. It might be a gangbanger's house. This is the 
address. They slide the door of the van open. Boom, out you go, you 17-
year-old unaccompanied minor that we don't have a provision where we 
can deport you back to your home country. Let's see if we can get you 
to be a productive member of society by dropping you in this 
environment.
  There are no checks and balances on this. There is no prudence to 
this. And, in fact, the ones younger than 14, they are not even 
printed. They don't have their fingerprints taken. They don't have 
their pictures taken. We don't know who they are. And about 50 percent 
of them were not born in a hospital so they don't have a birth 
certificate. They don't have a legal existence in their home country. 
There is not a way to track them. We don't know who we are handing them 
over to. We don't know who they are. We don't know if we pick them up 
next week or next year or 10 years from now if they actually were 
somebody that was processed through a warehouse in McAllen. These kids 
cannot be spread across this society in this fashion and infused across 
the illegal households in America. You grow more lawlessness, more 
lawlessness.
  We are not relieving the pain and suffering. It is the parents that 
have abandoned their children. It is the parents that have endangered 
their children.
  There was a little child in my district about 3 years old, a little 
girl who walked out of her house during the day. Her mother was working 
in the packing plant at night, and she needed to sleep during the day.
  Yes, I trusted her mother was an immigrant--legal or illegal, I don't 
know. But this little girl wandered down the street several blocks. And 
somebody found this little girl and picked her up. And they looked 
around and asked questions and finally found out that, well, she came 
from this house where this mother was sleeping. So our Department of 
Human Services, our Iowa HHS, sat this mother down and said, this can't 
continue. You have got to care for this child. You can't let this child 
wander off on the street. Even while you are sleeping during the day--
she needed to because she was working at night. But the child could not 
be left to wander because it is child endangerment. It is child 
abandonment. And they told this mother, you take care of your child, or 
we will take your child and put your child into foster care. And if you 
don't shape up, we will put this child into adoption so this child has 
a real chance in life.
  We do not tolerate people who abandon or endanger their children in 
Iowa, and I don't believe we do that in any other State in this Union.
  But the people who send their children across 1,000 miles of Mexico 
on the death train, exposed to drug cartels and human trafficking and 
the kind of slavery and exploitation that takes place on the victims 
that are coming up here, the parents who sent them along that path, 
they have abandoned their children. They have endangered their 
children. Over 1,000 miles of Mexico, not a few blocks down the street 
in a little safe Iowa town; 1,000 miles in Mexico.

                              {time}  2015

  And we, this great, benevolent Obama administration, will pick these 
children up and deliver them anywhere in America that they want to go 
because they have a phone number in their pocket, or an address that 
they memorized, and pull the van up in front of the crack house, open 
the sliding door and say, okay, here you are, fend for yourself? We 
should never put those children back in a household, an illegal 
household, never back into a law-violating environment.

[[Page H5869]]

  These kids need to go home. There is another solution if we can't 
send them home. But putting them in these illegal households is not the 
right thing to do.
  The President can solve this problem. Mr. Speaker, this is all in the 
President's head. The President sent out the advertisement that we are 
not going to enforce immigration law against you. He sent out the 
advertising that this government will take care of you, that we will 
make sure that you are living in a house where you have heat subsidy, 
rent subsidy, where you have food stamps, where you get an education, 
where you have health care, all paid for by somebody else, the sweat of 
somebody else's brow. And, by the way, now he wants $3.7 billion from 
Congress so he can hire every one of them a lawyer. Give them ObamaCare 
and hire them a lawyer, and now they will have everything that is the 
dream of every American--your own lawyer, your own government-issued 
health insurance policy, a rent subsidy, a heat subsidy, oh, and an 
Obama phone. Who wouldn't come to America if they believe all that is 
true? That is what this President is doing.
  If he needed a place to put these kids back to their home countries, 
we have a bill. In fact, I have a bill here, and I will include it for 
the Record, Mr. Speaker.

                                H.R. ___

       Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of 
     the United States of America in Congress assembled,

     SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

       This Act may be cited as the ``Keeping Families Together 
     Act of 2014''.

     SEC. 2. REPATRIATION OF UNACCOMPANIED ALIEN CHILDREN.

       Section 235(a) of the William Wilberforce Trafficking 
     Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (8 U.S.C. 
     1232) is amended--
       (1) in paragraph (1), by inserting before the period at the 
     end the following: ``, or in the case that a child's country 
     of nationality or of last habitual residence cannot be 
     determined, safely removed to a country described in 
     paragraph (6)''
       (2) in paragraph (2)--
       (A) by amending the heading to read as follows: ``Rules for 
     unaccompanied alien children.'';
       (B) in subparagraph (A), in the matter preceding clause 
     (i), by striking ``who is a national or habitual resident of 
     a country that is contiguous with the United States'';
       (C) in subparagraph (B)(ii), by inserting before the period 
     the following: ``, or in the case that the child's country of 
     nationality or of last habitual residence cannot be 
     determined, remove such child to another country described in 
     paragraph (6)''; and
       (D) in subparagraph (C)--
       (i) by amending the heading to read as follows: 
     ``Agreements with foreign countries'';
       (ii) in the matter preceding clause (i), by striking 
     ``countries contiguous to the United States'' and inserting 
     the following ``any foreign country that the Secretary 
     determines appropriate'';
       (iii) in clause (i), by inserting after ``last habitual 
     residence'' the following: ``or removed to a country 
     described in paragraph (6)'';
       (iv) in clause (ii)--

       (I) by inserting after ``last habitual residence'' the 
     following: ``or removed to a country described in paragraph 
     (6)'';
       (II) by striking ``and'' at the end;

       (v) by redesignating clause (iii) as clause (iv); and
       (vi) by inserting after clause (ii) the following:
       ``(iii) subject to clauses (i) and (ii), a child shall be 
     returned to the child's country of nationality or of last 
     habitual residence, or in the case that the child's country 
     of nationality or of last habitual residence cannot be 
     determined, removed to a country described in paragraph (6) 
     not later than 5 days after a determination is made under 
     paragraph (4) that the child meets the criteria listed in 
     subparagraph (A); and'';
       (3) in paragraph (4)--
       (A) in the first sentence, by striking ``48 hours'' and 
     inserting ``10 days'';
       (B) by inserting after ``last habitual residence,'' the 
     following: ``or removing the child to a country described in 
     paragraph (6),'';
       (C) by striking ``or if no determination can be made within 
     48 hours of apprehension,''; and
       (D) by inserting at the end the following: ``If no 
     determination can be made within 10 days of apprehension, the 
     child shall be treated as though the child meets the criteria 
     listed in paragraph (2)(A).''
       (4) in paragraph (5)--
       (A) in subparagraph (A), by inserting after ``last habitual 
     residence,'' the following: ``and the safe and sustainable 
     removal of unaccompanied alien children to countries 
     described in paragraph (6),'';
       (B) in subparagraph (B), by inserting after ``repatriate'' 
     the following: ``or remove'';
       (C) in subparagraph (C)(iii), by inserting after ``last 
     habitual residence,'' the following: ``or safely and humanely 
     removed to a country described in paragraph (6),''; and
       (D) in subparagraph (D)--
       (i) in the matter preceding clause (i), by striking ``, 
     except for an unaccompanied alien child from a contiguous 
     country subject to the exceptions under subsection (a),'' and 
     inserting ``who does not meet the criteria listed in 
     paragraph (2)(A)''; and
       (ii) in clause (i), by inserting before the semicolon the 
     following: ``not later than 5 days after the Secretary of 
     Homeland Security makes the determination to seek removal of 
     the child''; and
       (5) by inserting at the end the following:
       ``(6) Country to which an unaccompanied alien child may be 
     removed described.--A country is described in this paragraph 
     if--
       ``(A) the government of the country will accept an 
     unaccompanied alien child into that country; and
       ``(B) the Secretary of State, in consultation with the 
     Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, 
     determines that--
       ``(i) there is no credible evidence that the child is at 
     risk of being trafficked in the country; and
       ``(ii) there is no credible evidence that the child will be 
     persecuted in that country.''.

  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, the title of the bill is the William 
Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, an 
amendment to it, and it addresses this topic. The topic is how we reach 
an agreement with the countries that are noncontiguous like Guatemala, 
El Salvador, and Honduras; just to be able to get an agreement to send 
their children back to their home country.
  We can maybe direct this out of Congress if you get Harry Reid to go 
along with it, Mr. Speaker, but the President can do this on his own. 
All he needs to do is call up the president of any one of those three 
countries and say that you need to be on the tarmac in, say, Guatemala 
City airport; I am sending a planeload of your unaccompanied minors 
back. You repatriate them back into your country and your society. If 
you don't do that, we are going to freeze up the foreign aid, and we 
are going to freeze up the trade. We are not going to be subsidizing a 
country that won't cooperate and sends their children up here for us to 
put on the public dole.
  The President can solve this thing. It wouldn't take one day to solve 
this. It has taken him 5\1/2\ years to create this problem. It is the 
President's problem. The President refuses to solve it. He just wants 
more money to expand government and hire more lawyers and more judges, 
but he has no intention of resolving this.
  He is going to infuse tens of thousands--in the end hundreds of 
thousands--of people into America in an effort to turn Texas blue, to 
do what the Bush administration feared would happen if they didn't do 
that outreach in the first place.
  I don't believe we should do identity politics. I think we should 
reach out to everybody and say that you are created in God's image, 
that is good enough for me. You are one of us if you want to work and 
earn your way, if you want to pay some taxes and carry your share of 
the load, because when you shoulder that harness, you make the load 
lighter for everyone else, and you increase the average per capita GDP 
of our people. When that happens, we all live better. But there are 
104.1 million Americans of working age who are simply not in the 
workforce.
  That is going in the wrong direction. And the last thing we need to 
do is have tens of millions of unskilled and especially illiterate 
people who are going to compete for the lowest skills jobs. This 
country is going exactly in the wrong direction. We need a President 
who will move this country in the right direction. The President can 
fix this problem he created. He can fix it. This Congress probably 
can't force the President to fix the problem, but the bill that I have 
just filed into the Record takes us a ways along that, Mr. Speaker, and 
judging from the time, I appreciate your attention.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________