[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 111 (Wednesday, July 16, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H6342-H6345]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1730
A HISTORICAL ASSESSMENT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr.
King) for the remainder of the time as the designee of the majority
leader.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from
Arizona for that outstanding transition that he made here. I actually
came down to chide him just a little bit.
I was listening very closely to what he had to say, and it was very
valuable, the comments on energy that we need and the direction this
economy needs to go. I am going to restrain the chiding because of his
outstanding transition that he made and, let you know, Mr. Speaker,
that I came down here to address you and to talk with you a little bit
about the things that are ahead for us in this Congress, the things
that are ahead for us in this country.
When our Founding Fathers shaped this country and wrote our
declaration and filed our Constitution and got it ratified, it was an
extraordinarily accomplishment, and those documents will live for the
duration of civilization, and they will be in our memory, they will be
in our heads, they will be in our hearts for the full duration of the
time of civilization, whether it is succeeding civilizations thousands
of years from now, they will look back on what happened here.
When our Founding Fathers put together this republican form of
government, which is guaranteed to us in article IV, section 4 of the
Constitution, it also guaranteed protection from invasion.
They set up the House of Representatives to have elections every 2
years, so that we could be the quick-reaction shock force. When the
public could see that this country was going in the wrong direction,
they wanted to make sure that the House could be restored and filled
with people that came from all across the country--the Thirteen
Original Colonies or the 50 States that we are now and the territories
that send representatives here--and that we could reverse an erroneous
course that could be taken by a Congress going in the wrong direction.
That is the reason for 2 years--elections every 2 years. The Senate
was set up with elections every 6 years, so they didn't have to worry
about reelection for a longer period of time, and they could take the
longer view.
Now, that was the theory or a philosophy that was generally untested,
at least within the culture and the civilization of the time, and it
has proven to be a fairly effective approach.
We saw what happened here in 2010, when I will say an overexuberant,
very liberal Democrat majority in the House and in the Senate,
essentially a veto-proof majority in the Senate, by hook, crook, and
legislative shenanigans, crammed ObamaCare down the throats of the
American people.
I remember those dramatic times. Tens of thousands of Americans came
to Washington, D.C., from every single State, including Hawaii and
Alaska, to protest what was happening to our God-given liberty and our
right, our God-given right to manage our health, our skin, and
everything inside it.
Well, it was still crammed down the throats of the American people,
that policy called ObamaCare. The real name for it is the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act--the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act.
I know. If I would say that about six times and you are having
trouble going to sleep, Mr. Speaker, that would put you to sleep. It is
a substitute for Ambien, to say Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act.
Democrats finally recognized that, and they changed the name and
their verbiage that they use. They said, oh, it is offensive to say
ObamaCare; and then they realized that the President is the one that
coined the term ``ObamaCare.''
He did so on February 25 of 2009 at the Blair House, in that big
square seating when they had a conference on health care, and he acted
like a professor and interrupted Republicans 72 times that day, but he
used the phrase ``ObamaCare.''
Now, when we use it, they said that is pejorative. Don't use that
because it identifies what it really is, it is a health care system
that is socialized medicine. It is a government takeover of our bodies,
our skin, and everything inside it; yet when the President used
ObamaCare, then some of the Democrats decided: we will embrace the word
``ObamaCare.''
They did for a while, and they realized that they were adding fuel to
the fire of the rejection of ObamaCare, and they decided, well, let's
find another way we can name this thing.
So then they insisted that you weren't nice and you weren't polite
and it was inappropriate if we didn't use its official name, which they
would liked to have changed to the Affordable Care Act, not the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act, but the Affordable Care Act.
Now, I get to this because I am thinking about our Founding Fathers
and George Washington, who could not tell a lie. So I asked myself the
question--this policy that is going to cost over $1 trillion extra for
ObamaCare that was promised it was going to cut our premiums, per
household, by $2,500 a year, and if you like your doctor, you could
keep your doctor, if you like your policy, you get to keep your policy,
those promises weren't true.
The big promises of ObamaCare weren't true, and many things that were
not advertised as highly as that didn't come true either.
So now they want to say Affordable Care Act. George Washington could
not utter those words, Mr. Speaker, because George Washington could not
tell a lie. That is why he confessed to chopping down the cherry tree.
I am not certain that the stump exists out there at Mount Vernon yet,
but I am convinced that George Washington couldn't say the term
``affordable care act'' in reference to ObamaCare because it is not an
accurate term. It is a dishonest term. It is not affordable, and it is
less care.
Maybe it is an act, Mr. Speaker, so that is my commentary on going
down that path with our Founding Fathers.
They also had this vision and they hoped that--and they had a long-
term vision. It was a wonderful long-term vision of what kind of a
country you could build if you just laid down God-given liberties,
timeless principles, and laid out the pillars of American
exceptionalism, articulate them, sell them to the American people, get
them to support your Declaration of Independence, get them committed to
doing what they knew they had to do, fight a war against King George.
They had to go through the winter at Valley Forge, and they had to a
march up and down the coastline and in the interior part of the United
States, at least the Thirteen Colonies, and take on the redcoats
wherever they where. They won that Revolutionary War, learned some
lessons from that about how you field the Continental Army.
You have to have a Commander in Chief, and you have to have a
centralized government if you are going to defend yourself against the
global powers of the world. They set up a Constitution to do that.
They envisioned and anticipated a lot of things in this Constitution,
one of them was a means to amend it, and they believed that the
President of the United States would be a man of honor who would give
his oath of office, and they wrote his oath of office into the
Constitution, to ensure that the nobility, the integrity, the
statesmanship,
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the character that was part of the culture at the time would flow forth
forever, or as long as the United States might exist, through our
Presidents.
I noted the 210th anniversary of the duel that took place between
three-time Vice President Aaron Burr and the Secretary of the Treasury,
Alexander Hamilton. It was just last week--about a week ago.
They met on an island, and they shot it out. They fought to the
death. It turned out to be the death of Alexander Hamilton because
Hamilton had insulted the integrity of Aaron Burr.
Aaron Burr would defend his integrity, and Alexander Hamilton would
not retract his allegations, so the two of them met in a duel. Think of
that, that their word was so important, their integrity was so
important that the two of them faced each other with dueling pistols,
knowing that one of them was likely to die in that duel, all over their
word.
They had already by then written into the Constitution for the oath
of the President of the United States and ratified. I do solemnly swear
to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United,
States--later on added--and to protect against all enemies foreign and
domestic--and later on added--so help me God.
In the Constitution is--they call it the Take Care Clause in the
Constitution, and the President shall take care that the laws be
faithfully executed. It is not actually the oath, but it is a component
of the oath.
I don't want to say the word ``implied.'' It is specific in the
Constitution that the President shall take care that the laws be
faithfully executed, Mr. Speaker.
So we had men of honor, statesmen, men of dignity, men of an
attitude, that their word and their integrity was more important to
them than their very life itself.
When they wrote the oath for the President to take into the
Constitution and when they wrote in the Constitution that the President
shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, they never
imagined that we would have a President who didn't have that same
sense, didn't have that same sense of nobility, that sense of
integrity, that sense of statesmanship.
They never imagined that we would have a President that didn't think
his word was worth more than his life itself.
We come to this place in time and history, Mr. Speaker, Alexander
Hamilton went to his grave over a principle like that, and Aaron Burr
lost his political career because he sent Alexander Hamilton to his
grave over that principle of your word is your bond, and when you get
to a challenge like that, your word is more important than your life
itself.
Now, we are at a place where a President gives his oath of office to
take care that the laws be faithfully executed and, instead, simply
executes the law itself, wipes it out, ignores it, immigration law, in
particular, Mr. Speaker, where the President, with his Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals, the DACA program--DACA, which really stands for
deferred action for criminal aliens, that policy and a number of other
policies where the President has announced that he is going to ignore
the law--and he constantly hides behind this phrase: prosecutorial
discretion.
He says he has prosecutorial discretion to decide not to enforce the
law against people that are breaking it.
Now, he has a prosecutorial discretion, Mr. Speaker, but it is on an
individual basis only, and his lawyers knew that. That is why when they
wrote the DACA memos--well, we call them the Morton Memos--when they
were written, and we had Janet Napolitano, then the Secretary of
Homeland Security, testifying before the Judiciary Committee, and I
announced to her, if you go forward with this, you will be in court,
and you will be sued because the President of the United States' job is
to stick with his article II authority, and that is to take care that
the laws be faithfully executed.
He is the Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces, and he is to take
care that the laws be faithfully executed. This is a limited
government, but all legislative powers belong here in this Congress.
That is article I, all legislative powers.
The President doesn't get to write the laws. He is compelled to take
care that the laws be faithfully executed. That is his constitutional
obligation.
Instead, the President has said, well, I don't like these immigration
laws. If a law requires our immigration authorities, ICE--Immigration
and Customs Enforcement--when they encounter someone who is unlawfully
present in the United States, the law requires that they place them
into removal proceedings. That is the law.
The President has issued an order that says to ICE, thou shalt break
that law and never apply the law to remove people from the United
States who are here unlawfully, unless they have committed a felony or
three mysterious misdemeanors that are vaguely identified.
I don't know that they actually have ever executed that particular
provision, although I would say it is likely that they have, Mr.
Speaker, in all fairness.
So the President has created four different classes of people with
his Morton Memos and his DACA language, and by grouping people into
classes of people, he has got a number of those who he has exempted
from the law, some number approaching 600,000 people who came into the
United States or were in the United States illegally, who are exempted
from the very application of the law that requires our law enforcement
officers, particularly ICE, to place them into removal proceedings.
That is what the President has done.
So he sent the message out, as far as back as 3 years ago, in
midsummer--actually, June--sent the message out to everybody in the
world, if you can get into America, and you don't commit a felony--and
that is a little bit of a shorthand for the technicalities--then you
get to stay.
He has acted upon that. He has executed that all right. He has
executed his executive edict, but he hasn't taken care that the law
itself be faithfully executed. He has defied the law, and his oath is
to uphold the law, to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
Now, I have to put into the list the pillars of American
exceptionalism, so we are thinking about it, Mr. Speaker. What makes
America the unchallenged greatest nation in the world, and it is the
composition of the pillars of American exceptionalism, and you find
most of them in the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, religion and
assembly, and the right to keep and bear arms, and no double jeopardy,
the property rights in the Fifth Amendment. You get to face a jury of
your peers, quick and speedy trial.
The Ninth and 10th Amendments devolve the powers not granted
specifically in the enumeration in the Constitution to the Federal
Government devolve to the States or, respectively, to the people.
Those are many of the pillars of American exceptionalism, but there
are others. We have a free enterprise economy, the ability to invest
capital and sweat equity, and buy, sell, trade, make gain and get rich
if you can, and we like to cheer you when you do because it helps all
of us when that happens.
Free enterprise economy is another pillar of American exceptionalism,
along with the root of this culture and civilization being in Judeo-
Christianity, the work ethic that came from it, the values system that
allowed that work to be prosperous and profitable and trustworthy, so
that we could do business with people in a way that we didn't have to
always be checking up on them because we knew that God is looking over
our shoulder.
That is shorthand for one of the reasons why this is such a great
country.
{time} 1745
Another one would be when the Statue of Liberty went up. The image
and the inspiration of that statue said to the world that if you can
come here, to America legally, you can achieve all that you are capable
of achieving. All of the things that you might imagine that you are
capable of achieving anywhere in the world, you can achieve in America
because you have all of these other rights. And these rights aren't
rights that the government confers upon you.
As in every other country in the world, the government confers any
rights you might have. These are God-given rights, and God has given
them to us. And our Founding Fathers articulated that and put that down
on
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the parchment, and we have fought and defended it all of our years.
So if our rights came from government, government could take them
away. The reason that they can't take them away is because they are
God-given. And the inspiration comes from all of these pillars of
American exceptionalism, which send that message and beam it across the
world in National Geographic magazines that show up everywhere around
the world or in encyclopedias or through cyberspace today--that picture
of the Statue of Liberty, of the Washington Monument, of the Lincoln
Memorial, of the United States Capitol, the White House itself.
American success across the world and all of the places where it has
been, this record of achievement, this record of sacrifice of Americans
to expand the nobility of the human race everywhere around the world
has inspired people in every country.
And the people that came here, Mr. Speaker, were inspired by that
image and those ideas and those ideals. So we didn't just get a random
selection of people that came to America legally. We got the cream of
the crop. We got the vigor of the planet.
If there were 10 siblings in a family and only one of them had enough
inspiration to find a way to come legally to the United States of
America, we got the superachiever. We got the can-do. We got the cream
of the crop. We got the vigor of the planet from every donor nation on
the planet to come to America because they were attracted to the God-
given liberty that was established here. They came here, they achieved,
and they embraced those principles. And America embraced them.
And in each generation from that, we taught our children the same
thing. So it has descended down through the generations, and it has
brought in more, and America has gotten stronger.
But we are not a stronger nation if we erode those pillars of
American exceptionalism. We are not a stronger nation if we lose faith
with those things that have been the core of the success of this
country. And we can't be sacrificing the pillars of American
exceptionalism for the sake of having our hearts overrule our heads.
Our Founding Fathers didn't let that happen. The principles that came
through from the work that they did, the God-given rights and liberties
that are there, they are timeless. And they index into human nature,
all of human nature, but they are embodied here.
And, by the way, one of the other things I left out of that, another
reason for American exceptionalism is that all of that settlement
arrived here. And a lot of it, it arrived here on a continent with--at
the time, at least, unlimited natural resources. And at the dawn of the
industrial revolution, we settled this continent from sea to shining
sea.
And here we are today, Mr. Speaker, with a President who wouldn't
agree with what I have just said. I mean, if he had the time or took
the time, he would seek to rebut the principles that I have laid out.
And he would say, instead, well, let's see. We really don't need to
have borders in America. We don't have to have that. There is no reason
for America to be as successful as we are. We are using a
disproportionate share of the planet's resources. We are pumping
CO2 into our atmosphere. That is turning the Earth's
thermostat up, even though for 17 years there is not any evidence of
that happening.
And we have watched as he has diminished America. He has diminished
it in foreign policy. He has diminished it economically. He has
diminished it socially and culturally. And today we are watching as he
has established this policy of amnesty. He is pushing hard for the
Senate Gang of Eight bill.
The Senate Gang of Eight bill is a matter of record, Mr. Speaker. It
is instantaneous amnesty for the people that are here illegally,
whether they overstayed their visas 40 percent or whether they came
across the border illegally 60 percent. Or it is instantaneous amnesty
for them.
For anyone that would come into America in the future, it is silent,
which means it is an unspoken promise that if you can get here--we
haven't demonstrated the will to enforce the law if you came here. So
if you come here, why would anybody think that we enforce a law on
anybody that would come here after a Senate Gang of Eight bill might
potentially become law?
And, to add insult to injury, they sent an invitation out to the
people that have been sent back to their home country. It is what I
call the ``well, we really didn't mean it'' clause. And that means that
anybody that has been deported in the past is sent an invitation saying
reapply; we really didn't mean it. That is how bad this is.
And this gaping hole that we have in our border in the McAllen sector
of the Texas border, where we now have 57,000 unaccompanied children
who have come into the United States--many of them hustled across 2,500
miles or more from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala through Mexico, and
there is a significant number yet from Mexico coming into the United
States--these unaccompanied minors are hauled up here by coyotes who
may live in those communities and recruit these kids.
All of this is going on. And we have a President who says: I need
$3.7 billion to expand the bureaucracy to maybe buy a hotel to put them
in and move them across the country and infuse them into our
communities.
People that are unlawfully present in the United States simply say: I
am an unaccompanied minor, and I have been promised that if I can get
into America, I get to stay in America. 57,000 of them, Mr. Speaker.
And what percentage of the unaccompanied minors have been sent back to
their home country? 0.1 percent. One-tenth of 1 percent.
They sent Joe Biden down to Guatemala. He landed in Panama and then
went to Guatemala. He said that he went down there to send a message
which is that we are going to send your kids back. Don't send them
here. Well, if there is no record of that, then they know it is not
happening.
So think of the difference. If we would take a military airplane and
put a couple hundred unaccompanied Guatemalan minors on it, for
example, send that plane down the runway and up into the air, if the
President picked up the phone and called the President of Guatemala and
said: Be on the tarmac in 2 hours; you are going to have 200 of your
kids that are going to arrive there, and you should greet them--that is
what a leader does, sends them back. If you do that and do that and do
that, eventually they will stop coming because they will know they are
actually coming back, and they will know that their money is wasted. It
is not happening.
But this President is not going to secure this border, Mr. Speaker.
He has demonstrated that. We have got 2\1/2\ more years of this
President. And whatever we do in this Congress, we can't make him
secure the border. We can't make him do it. The Congress doesn't have
the authority to do that. There are only two constitutional provisions
that can force the President to do anything, and we have tried them
both within the last 15 years or so, and neither one of them have
proven to be effective.
Public opinion might push back hard enough. Well, they kind of are.
But we cannot allow our border--especially right now, the Texas
border--to be under invasion in the fashion that it is by the tens of
thousands of unaccompanied minors who are, by the way, only 20 percent
of the illegals coming in in that sector. And they are maybe stopping,
at best, 25 percent of those that are trying to come across. So we have
got a number that is up there over 1 million people that are attempting
to cross into the United States, and 57,000 of those that we pick up on
that are unaccompanied minor kids.
The President will not secure the border. We should come to that
conclusion. We have got 2\1/2\ years of open borders. Or we find a way
to secure it, maybe even against the will of the President of the
United States, because I don't know if he has got the will to block it
if we do this.
But who has the authority? I look around the whole country, and the
people who have the authority to do so are the Governors of the border
States.
I have a resolution, Mr. Speaker, that I would like to introduce into
the Record that says so. It calls upon the border Governors to call out
their National Guard to secure the border, and it says that this House
of Representatives will support the funding to do so. I call for that,
Mr. Speaker. I urge us to pick this up and sign it. I am going to
introduce it tomorrow. I would like to take it up real soon and send
that resolution to the world, and I would appreciate your indulgence in
doing so.
[[Page H6345]]
I yield back the balance of my time.
H. Res. ___
Whereas, the crisis on the Southwest border is of such
significance that it demands national attention and urgent
action.
Whereas, the President, the Secretary of Homeland Security,
and the Administration have enacted unconstitutional
policies, such as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
program and the Morton Memos, that have contributed
significantly to a massive increase in illegal immigration.
Whereas, the President has not secured the border.
Whereas, the President has failed to fulfill his
Constitutional obligation to protect each state against
invasion according to Article IV, Section 4.
Whereas, states have specific authorities under Article I,
Section 10 when ``actually invaded, or in such imminent
Danger as will not admit of delay.''
Whereas, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection
between October 1, 2013 and June 15, 2014, 52,193
unaccompanied children have been apprehended on the Southwest
border.
Whereas, according to a June 3, 2014 Homeland Security
Intelligence report, only 0.1% of illegal alien,
unaccompanied minor children from non-contiguous countries
were removed in FY 2013.
Whereas, the Secretary of Homeland Security expects 90,000
unaccompanied alien children to be interdicted by the U.S.
government while crossing the border in Fiscal Year 2014.
Whereas, according to the Department of Homeland Security,
only twenty percent of those interdicted are and will be
children.
Whereas, border security officials estimate the
interdiction ratio is twenty-five percent of those attempting
to cross the border.
Whereas, according to border security official's testimony
before Congress, the likely number of illegal crossing
attempts is four times the number of those interdicted.
Whereas, our Southern border is not secure, and this fact
represents an immediate danger to every citizen of the United
States of America.
Whereas, the Governor of a state is the commander in chief
of the National Guard of that state.
Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
(1) recognizes, supports and defends the Constitutional
authority of any Governor to deploy his or her state's
National Guard division to secure the border;
(2) commits to appropriating the necessary monies to
effectively support any such deployment of National Guard
troops; and
(3) calls upon the Governors of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
and California to deploy the National Guard forces under
their command to immediately gain effective control of our
southern border, to turn back anyone without legal
immigration status, and to ensure for the people of their
states and the United States a safe and free future.
____________________