[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 141 (Tuesday, November 18, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H8036-H8037]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 PRESIDENT TRUMAN USED EXECUTIVE ACTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, last week, we celebrated Veterans Day, so 
naturally, there was a lot of talk about the military, but there was 
also a lot of talk about President Obama taking executive action on 
immigration. It got me thinking about Harry Truman.
  Like me, Harry Truman was from the Midwest and a plain talker who 
didn't mince words and sometimes made his fellow Democrats 
uncomfortable. Like every Republican and Democratic President in modern 
history, including this current one, Harry Truman was not afraid to use 
his executive power to fight for justice in the United States, even 
when Congress failed to act.
  In 1946, we had just defeated fascism. We were already locked in a 
cold war. Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American troops had helped 
deliver that victory against fascism, but when the war was over, they 
faced the same segregation, discrimination, Jim Crow, and violence that 
they had before they were deployed, markers of an era from which we 
continue to feel the lasting effects to this very day.
  In response, Truman established a Committee on Civil Rights. One 
concrete step the President wanted to take was to desegregate the 
military, but President Truman knew that legislation mandating 
desegregation would not pass through the U.S. Congress, which was 
dominated by Southern segregationists who, it is worth remembering, 
were mostly just like Truman, Democrats.
  But he pushed forward, and Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 
on July 26, 1948. The last all-Black unit in the United States military 
was finally abolished years later. Congress caught up with reality and 
with the President, but it took many years.
  I am fairly confident that Democrats from North Carolina, Arkansas, 
Georgia, and Louisiana asked Harry Truman not to do a thing, but he did 
it anyway. I would venture to guess that there aren't too many Members 
of Congress today who wish that Truman did not desegregate the military 
or had waited however long it took for Congress to evolve on the issue 
of segregation. He used his pen, and we celebrate his courage today.
  Here is one big difference between what Truman did and what President 
Obama is considering: President Truman never, ever asked Congress for 
legislation to desegregate the military, but President Obama, as he 
contemplates taking executive actions to keep families together and 
spare certain immigrants from deportation,

[[Page H8037]]

knows that he did ask Congress repeatedly to act.

                              {time}  1015

  He has been judicious in his use of executive actions throughout his 
Presidency, despite facing a Congress deeply entrenched, well, in being 
deeply entrenched.
  But he did ask this Congress to act. He worked with both parties in 
the Senate to help shepherd an immigration bill through in June of 
2013, and for a year and a half, he has waited, patiently deferring the 
use of executive action as a last resort. He has held off again and 
again so that he could give the Republicans in the House of 
Representatives time to pass a bill, but they never did, never even 
considered one.
  When Republicans in the Senate said gay people can't be included 
under any circumstances, the Democrats didn't like it. It offended us. 
But we said, let's keep trying to find a compromise.
  When Republicans said they needed 30,000 more Border Patrol agents, 
the Democrats found a way to include that, too, in the Senate.
  When the House said it would not even consider a Senate bill, we 
Democrats, myself included, said, okay, let's work on a House bill.
  And when Republicans said immigrants could not get a special pathway 
to citizenship and that we would have to pass many separate bills 
piecemeal, Democrats and the President never left the negotiating 
table.
  When the Speaker of the House called the President last June to say 
that, despite all of the Speaker's efforts and all of the President's 
efforts, the House was not even going to allow a vote, the President 
said he would do what he said he was going to do all along: use his pen 
under current law to help this Nation.
  Now the Speaker says that the President is picking a fight with 
Republicans over immigration and that he is vowing to fight back, which 
is the Speaker's right. But I would advise the Speaker that his fight 
is not with the President or with Democrats; it is with the American 
people. It is a fight he will have to deport millions of U.S. citizens' 
parents; the spouses, husbands, and wives of U.S. citizens; the parents 
of DREAMers who know no other country but this one. And that is who the 
Republican Party intends to fight.
  But let's be clear: nothing the President does will keep the House 
from working with the Senate to pass an immigration bill.
  Sitting at his desk in the White House, Harry Truman said, ``The buck 
stops here.'' And he was right then, and he is just as right today 
about the current occupant of the White House. The President has a 
responsibility to act, even when Congress refuses to do so.
  And just like the 1950s and the 1960s, after Harry Truman 
desegregated the military, it will be time for this Congress to catch 
up to the executive branch and to catch up to reality.

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