[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 143 (Thursday, November 20, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H8155-H8158]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    THE PRESIDENT'S IMMIGRATION PLAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized by you 
to address you here on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives in this great deliberative body that we are.
  I come to the floor at a time when America is anxiously awaiting to 
see the specific language that will be delivered presumably tonight at 
8 o'clock in the President's press conference. He has announced as of 
yesterday that he is going to do a national message to the Nation at 8 
o'clock eastern time tonight. And that message will be, as they have 
long dangled this threat out here, that the President is prepared to 
grant some type of executive amnesty to a number of people that are 
estimated by the trial balloons that float out to be somewhere between 
maybe 3.5 million and 5 million people. It is probably not as many as 9 
million people, as has been part of the trial balloons that have been 
floated out here over the last few months.
  First, Mr. Speaker, I will assert that if the President could have 
found a constitutional way to grant executive amnesty, he would have 
done so by now. He has had 6 years to comb through this Constitution--6 
years, with an almost unlimited amount of staff and lawyers that can 
comb through history and case law and statute--and I would like to 
think they would actually read the Constitution first as the supreme 
law of the land and try to find a way to do what he wanted to do 
policywise.
  But what has happened here is that the people have spoken. The people 
of the United States go to the polls. And the President has famously 
said, ``I won the election,'' so elections have consequences. Mr. 
Speaker, I would remind the President, were I addressing him, elections 
have consequences. Yes, they do, and they have benefits as well.
  After actions in 2009 and into early 2010, ObamaCare was pushed to 
the President's desk where, about March 22 or so, the President signed 
the ObamaCare legislation. It came through this floor and it passed 
through in two different versions in the Senate; one on rescission, one 
not. But it was. And I said in this Record a number of times that they 
passed ObamaCare on to the American people by hook, by crook, and by 
legislative shenanigan. And they did it in a partisan way, without a 
single Republican vote.
  It was Thomas Jefferson that said:

       Large initiatives should not be advanced on slender 
     majorities.

  What would be the slenderest of majorities would be barely squeaking 
by with enough votes to pass it in two different versions in the 
Senate, packaged together, and this version in the House--I guess two 
different versions in the House, too--with people's arms being verbally 
twisted up behind their backs, Democrats that wanted the President to 
succeed but had reservations about the imprudence of a takeover of our 
health.
  Mr. Speaker, ObamaCare itself is a takeover of the second most 
sovereign thing we have and are. The most sovereign thing we have is 
our soul. And they haven't figured out how to nationalize our soul yet, 
but the Federal Government stepped in with ObamaCare and nationalized 
our health, our skin, and everything inside it. It is a usurpation of 
God-given liberty. It tramples on our constitutional rights. It was a 
huge initiative, and it was passed on the slenderest of majorities, 
directly against Thomas Jefferson's advice.
  And look at what happened. In the fall of 2010, there was a wave 
election and we welcomed 87 new freshmen Republicans into the House of 
Representatives, every one of whom ran on the pledge to come here and 
repeal ObamaCare, every one of whom has voted for the full, 100 
percent, rip-it-out-by-the-roots repeal of ObamaCare. And every 
Republican seated in the United States Senate has done the

[[Page H8156]]

same. That was the wave election of 2010.
  Then the President was up for reelection in 2012. The lines were not 
as distinct. The debate was, I will say, less easy to draw those lines 
between President Obama's position and those of Mitt Romney, but the 
election was decided. The President was reelected. I think that is on 
the American people. They made that decision. Of course, elections have 
consequences.
  And so we were not able to repeal ObamaCare in 2013 or 2014 as we so 
eagerly anticipated that we might. But elections have consequences. We 
abide by the inability to repeal ObamaCare, knowing that we didn't have 
the votes in the Senate and we didn't have a President that would sign 
the full repeal.
  So a lot of us stood up about 14 or 15 months ago and said, ``I'm not 
going to vote to fund ObamaCare.'' That was our pledge, Mr. Speaker. 
And we held our ground. That message came out about a year ago. It was 
late last June or July. We are going to hold our ground and we are not 
going to fund ObamaCare.
  We went to this floor time after time after time, Mr. Speaker. We 
appropriated the funds to keep the government open--actually, to dollar 
figures we had agreed to between the House and Senate--and sent those 
appropriations bills over to the Senate, but not with the funding to 
fund ObamaCare. We were elected to repeal it. We were elected to rip it 
out by the roots.
  We made a valiant effort to cut off the funding to ObamaCare, but the 
President insisted he would have his namesake piece of legislation and 
policy in the form that he wanted it. And if he couldn't get that from 
this Congress, then he would shut the government down. And that is what 
happened, Mr. Speaker.
  Time after time after time here in the House we voted to fund the 
government, and we funded the government without funding ObamaCare in 
every configuration that we could come up with that we thought could 
effectively keep those functions of the government open. The President 
resisted and Harry Reid in the Senate resisted, and it brought about 
that time when there was a shut down for 17 days.
  During that time there is a shutdown, all essential services continue 
and nonessential services cease. That is the simplest definition. When 
you run out of money, there is a shutdown. So we now have a definition 
of what essential services are. About 87 percent of the government was 
essential services and about 13 percent were nonessential services.
  We had a new essential service that had never been defined before 
that was delivered to us courtesy of, I think, a petulant Barack Obama, 
Mr. Speaker, and that was that since there had been a shutdown in 1998, 
the people in this country put their money together, pooled their 
money--private money--to build the World War II Memorial. That World 
War II Memorial is a glorious memorial that sits on The Mall. It had 
never been closed down in its history. There was no reason to. It, like 
many of the other memorials, is an open-air memorial: the World War II 
Memorial; of course, the outside of the Washington Monument--not so 
much the inside; the Lincoln Memorial, wide open at all times; the 
Vietnam Wall, wide open at all times; the Korean Memorial, wide open at 
all times.
  But the President decided that there was a new essential service, and 
that essential service was to call people off of furlough and rent 
barricades with money, theoretically borrowed from the Chinese, to 
barricade the public, including our World War II veterans coming in on 
Honor Flights, out of their Memorial, the World War II Memorial, the 
Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Wall, and the Korean Memorial. They were 
all barricaded out by rented barricades, with Park officers who were 
called off of furlough.
  A new essential service. We surely couldn't have American citizens 
and tourists walking through these memorials if 80 percent of the 
government is shut down. We would have to have a new service created. 
That is how spiteful our President was.
  But in that period of time, in that process, now we have identified 
what is essential and what is not--and the 87 percent essential 
services, the 13 percent that are not, we can go back and look through 
the records and put that list together--we presume, and I think rightly 
so, if we should be forced into that situation and if the President 
were to shut the government down again, we would be in a similar 
circumstance and we can pretty well predict.

                              {time}  1245

  So I want to fund all of those appropriations bills and departments 
save those that he is likely to direct to violate the law or the 
Constitution in his press conference tonight, his statement to the 
American people.
  And by the way, we are not going to see the language of this I don't 
believe, either, tonight. I think what we will hear is a very carefully 
crafted speech with lots of ambiguities in it, lots of nuances in it. 
There will be very little information in it, and we will have to divine 
what it is that the President has said. And some time after they have 
their meeting in the school with Harry Reid in Nevada, then I think 
there will be a document that will be released or noted that will more 
precisely define what the President is preparing to do. Then we can 
actually weigh in on the constitutionality, or lack thereof, that we 
anticipate is going to be the case tonight.
  Mr. Speaker, if this were a constitutional act, he would have done it 
by now. If he were prepared to abide by the Constitution some time in 
the last year or so, he would have repeated the things that he has said 
in the previous 5 years of his Presidency and probably many times in 
the classroom as he was teaching constitutional law at the University 
of Chicago, a stellar law school in this country.
  I think I would be wanting some of my money back if I had had any one 
of my kids that were learning Con. law from our President.
  But many times he said, and I can think of a date, March 28, 2011, 
out here at a high school in Washington, D.C., wherein he said, You 
want me to pass the DREAM Act by executive order. I don't have the 
authority to do that because, he said, my job, as President, is to take 
care that we enforce and execute the laws; and the judicial branch's 
job is to interpret them, and it is the legislature's job to write 
them.
  Congress writes the laws; the executive branch enforces the laws; the 
judicial branch interprets them. Pretty simple, pretty compact, pretty 
concise, pretty accurate.
  There is no question the President understands this. On multiple 
occasions he has made remarks that would seek to restore the separation 
of powers, but they have been missing from his dialogue for a long time 
now; and that is just about how long it is that he has been planning, 
made his decision that he is going to go forward and now try to 
rationalize, he will try to justify and he will try to rationalize an 
unconstitutional act that, put it in quotes, ``legalizes'' 3\1/2\ 
million, 5 million, 7 million, maybe as many as 9 million people.
  This Congress has, we have the enumerated power to set 
naturalization, and by a good number of case law, also immigration 
policy. No one else sets the immigration policy. The United States 
Congress does.
  There is a statute that exists that directs that when immigration 
enforcement encounters someone who is unlawfully present in the United 
States, it says they shall place them in removal proceedings.
  The President has already ordered that they not place them in removal 
proceedings. He has created four classes of people and said, under his 
prosecutorial discretion on an individual basis, only he has the 
authority to decide to waive the law against people who have broken our 
laws, most of whom are criminals by the definition of the laws that 
they have broken. That is the President of the United States.
  Seven times in the document that was actually signed by Janet 
Napolitano, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, they reference on 
an individual basis only--on an individual basis only--because they 
know that the executive branch has prosecutorial discretion.
  That is the term for how you decide which resources, how you 
prioritize your resources, where you apply those resources--and it is 
reasonable to do. If you don't have the resources to enforce

[[Page H8157]]

all of the laws, it is reasonable to apply them where the greatest 
danger to the American citizens are. I agree with that. But when you 
send out a memo that says, if you have not committed a felony and if 
you have not committed any one of these three mysterious misdemeanors--
or these three serious misdemeanors, as they would say--then we are not 
going to enforce immigration law against you.
  That says that you can break into this country and you can live in 
America as long as you want if you don't become a felon or if we don't 
catch you at it, and as long as you avoid these three serious 
misdemeanors, then you can stay in America the rest of your life and we 
are not going to bother you.
  That is directly contrary to the law, the statute that requires 
immigration enforcement officers, ICE, in particular, to place them in 
removal proceedings.
  Congress has written the laws, and that is what we do. That is 
article I. That is the opening sentence in article I of the United 
States Constitution. And yet the President believes, apparently, that 
he can write and rewrite law at will.
  This will come tonight. We will look at the language. And when we 
look at the language, there will be constitutional scholars all over 
America, most of the judges will read the statement and reflect upon 
the application of the Constitution, the restraint of it. Most of the 
lawyers will, too.
  A lot of Americans that understand this document--you don't have to 
wear a black robe to understand what this means. Our Constitution, Mr. 
Speaker, is written in plain English. It is real clear, and there is a 
lot of the language of the Constitution that comes out in the language 
on the streets of America, because it is very, very close to our heart.
  But article I of the Constitution grants the legislative power to the 
United States Congress, not the President of the United States.
  I do know a little bit about this. In a similar circumstance, at the 
State level, we had a Governor who believed that he could just simply, 
by executive order, it happened to be Executive Order No. 7, write law 
and insert language into 19(b)(2) of the civil rights section of the 
Iowa code. I read that executive order, and the smart lawyers all told 
me, No, you don't understand. This is nuanced, and its deft and it is 
carefully drafted, so it is going to be constitutional, and the 
Governor can do this.
  So I took the language and I put it into the code with strike-
throughs and underlines like we do when we write legislation to see how 
it changes, and it read clearly to me that the Governor was inserting 
language into the code. So I filed a lawsuit. I was the lead plaintiff, 
and I spent some money out of my kids' inheritance to pay the lawyers 
and came out of that on top. I have been through these arguments.
  Article I, section 1, says, ``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.''
  That is here, Mr. Speaker, and it is down through the rotunda to the 
United States Senate. We join together and write legislation. The 
President signs it, then that goes into law. That is the Federal code.
  It is the executive branch's job to enforce it. He has no authority 
to waive it, not carte blanche, not huge chunks of people. He has 
prosecutorial discretion, but that is not what he is talking about.
  What he is likely to do is to take the DACA group, the deferred 
action for childhood arrivals, which is another constitutional 
violation, those several hundred thousand that he has issued work 
permits to in another unconstitutional way, and say--and remember, they 
have our sympathy because they were brought here, according to a lot of 
people--and I agree, at least some of them--due to no fault of their 
own, little babies that are carried across the border by their mother 
or their father. They are not aware of where the border is or what is 
right and what is wrong at age 1 day. So they arrive here in the United 
States not citizens, unlawfully present in the United States. It wasn't 
their fault--that is the argument that has been made over here time and 
again--and so we shouldn't enforce the law, even the letter of the law, 
against people that were not aware that their parents were causing them 
to break it.

  Now, that is an argument that I will take some time at another time, 
Mr. Speaker, to rebut. But there has always been, then, what about the 
people that caused the DACA kids to break the law? Their parents, 
presumably. Weren't they aware when they snuck across the border with 
their children, age 1 day or 15 years and 364 days, weren't they aware 
that they were breaking the law? Of course they were. And the President 
is prepared now to reward the family members of DACA recipients.
  Why? Because he doesn't want to break up families is my presumption. 
But these are the people that are breaking up their own families. They 
put themselves in that condition. They are leaving a lawless land and 
bringing lawlessness to this land. And we have a lawless President who 
won't enforce the law, and he won't abide by his oaths to the 
Constitution.
  So we are put in this fix, Mr. Speaker. It is a fix of this Congress 
is now hopefully recessed--not adjourned--at the call of the Chair, I 
hope, expecting to go home for Thanksgiving on a calendar that we 
publish early enough that the President and his minions at the White 
House can look at the--I suppose they can look and see who owns a plane 
ticket to go where. But all you have to do is look at the flight 
schedules flying out of Dulles and out of Reagan, and you look at the 
schedule here in Congress and you will know when it is likely that 
almost everybody is gone from town and gone home for Thanksgiving. 
Well, 95 percent of us are going to be out of town tonight by the time 
the President has his conference and speaks to the American people.
  We shouldn't think that it is timed that way by accident. It is 
strategically timed, Mr. Speaker, so that Members of Congress have just 
left town, anxious to embrace our families and celebrate Thanksgiving.
  And so he drops this bomb in the middle of us that will be; it will 
tear asunder this Constitution. The President is prepared to do this, 
Mr. Speaker, take this Constitution--and I can't bring myself to 
actually do this. So, take this Constitution. Separate out article I of 
the Constitution, the legislative authority. Tear that out. That is 
what he will do tonight at 8. He will tear article I of this 
Constitution out of this document. He will probably fold it one time, 
tuck it into his shirt pocket and say, I am also the legislative branch 
of government, and don't interfere with me because I am the President.
  That is what you are going to hear at 8 tonight, Mr. Speaker. And I 
would like to tear that out and show you what it looks like, but I 
can't bring myself to do that to my Constitution.
  Also, our choices that we have, alternatives to deal with this, I 
would make this point. Not only have I said the President takes an oath 
to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, take care that the 
laws be faithfully executed, Mr. Speaker, we also here in the House of 
Representatives and in the Senate take an oath to the Constitution as 
well; 535 oaths to the Constitution, between the seated Members in the 
House and Senate that have a vote, that represent the people in this 
constitutional Republic--535 oaths. We have an oath to keep and protect 
this Constitution, as the President does.
  I expect he will violate his oath again tonight, Mr. Speaker. We have 
an obligation then, under our oath to restrain the President's extra-
constitutional activity.
  I think it is prudent for us to do the minimum necessary to restrain 
the President. I think it is prudent. And so the limitations on that, 
they go from one end to the other. It is a pretty broad list of things 
that we have the opportunity to do. But the easiest and the most gentle 
would be a resolution that would, I believe, with some level of 
comfort, pass here in the House of Representatives, that would be a 
resolution of disapproval for the President's actions.
  Now, if we bring that resolution of disapproval, we do so in language 
that, let's say, doesn't start a big debate, that it just simply lays 
out the facts. We have done that when we disagreed with the Supreme 
Court. A resolution of disapproval comes to mind on the Kelo decision 
as one of them. So we

[[Page H8158]]

could disapprove as a House. We could perhaps do a concurrent 
resolution or joint resolution--doubtful that Harry Reid would allow it 
to the come to the floor of the Senate, and doubtful that it would 
pass. But in any case, the House can act on its own with a resolution 
of disapproval.
  That may not be strong enough to cause the President to come to his 
constitutional senses, so the next step would be, in my judgment then, 
a resolution of censure for the President.
  Now, again, I will reserve the language in that and not define it 
more precisely until we get an opportunity to actually see what it is 
that he does, but nobody in this country can paint the picture on how 
the President can expand amnesty and still be restrained by the 
Constitution because of the statutes that exist and the restraints that 
he has that are built into the separation of powers.
  So a resolution of disapproval, number one; a resolution of censure, 
number two; and if, perhaps, that resolution of censure will bring the 
President to his senses and the President could look at the outrage of 
the American people, which I believe will boil over, by tomorrow 
morning I believe it will boil over, that outrage, perhaps he will 
realize that he has got to rescind his order.

                              {time}  1300

  Now, here is one of those examples.
  When we were all promised under ObamaCare that we would have 
conscience protection, a right of conscience that ObamaCare wouldn't 
compel us to fund abortions and sterilizations and abortifacients, of 
course, we found out that it did. After 2 weeks of the religious 
community's being critical of the President, the President finally 
stepped up to the podium at noon on a Friday--another finely calculated 
time of the week--and he said there have been some complaints from the 
religious communities. I am going to make an accommodation to them. Now 
I am going to require the insurance companies to provide these services 
for free.
  That is the President also legislating by press conference. It is not 
the United States Congress. I stand in the middle of the United States 
Congress right now, and I am hearing some of my colleagues say we don't 
have the tools to restrain this President. Well, after a resolution of 
disapproval, after a resolution of censure, the next tool then is to 
cut off the funding to implement or to enforce his unconstitutional 
executive amnesty edict. We can do that in this Congress. We will be 
forced to do so in this Congress if the President doesn't restrain 
himself. That is how we must restrain him.
  I don't want to go down that path, but if we do, let's appropriate 
the funds into the departments that are not relevant to this subject 
matter and send those appropriations bills down the hallway--to the 
Senate--and get them to the President's desk one at a time if we can. 
Let him pick and choose. They can all sit there on his desk, all but 
Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Those two pieces of 
legislation will be necessary for us to pass by exempting from funding 
those components of the President's edict.
  Some have said that we could always claw that money back in a 
recisions bill. The simple answer to that is, no, we would not be able 
to do that because, even if we got a recisions bill to the President's 
desk, he would veto it. Some have said that we can't cut the funding 
off to implement what we anticipate to be the President's act because 
it is fee-based under USCIS, the United States Citizenship and 
Immigration Services. So that is fees, fee for service, and that would 
be authorizing on an appropriations bill. I would remind people that 
this Congress has multiple times done just that.
  They used the rule when I wanted to cut off the funding to ObamaCare, 
and I brought it before the Rules Committee--anybody can look it up--on 
February 14, 2011. I was advised that I shouldn't have put them in that 
position. They were going to have to say ``no'' to me even though they 
agreed with me on the policy because we couldn't effect policy in an 
appropriations bill. Of course, the answer is, yes, we can. We can do 
anything we choose to do. I would start with this.
  In the Constitution, it says:

       Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings.

  We set the rules here. In the Rules resolution, we waive continually 
the provisions. Here is one:

       All points of order against consideration of the bill are 
     waived . . . All points of order against provisions in the 
     bill, as amended, are waived . . . The previous question 
     shall be considered ordered and the bill, as amended, and on 
     any further amendment thereto to final passage without 
     intervening motion.

  That is an example of a rule. The rule, itself, waives points of 
order here on the floor. We can write what we choose to write into 
legislation that would cut off the funding to implement or enforce a 
lawless and unconstitutional act. To those who say we can't do so with 
fees, I will read you the language that does so:

       None of the funds made available in this Act or any user 
     fees and other revenue may be used to finalize, implement, 
     administer, or enforce the documents described--and we 
     describe the documents.

  This is not rocket science.
  Are we going to allow a President to violate the Constitution and say 
our rules in the House won't let us restrain the President?
  I call that another red herring, red herring number two. There will 
likely be another one or two.
  This Congress, Mr. Speaker, must do its constitutional duty. It must 
adhere to our oath to the Constitution. We will be called to do that at 
8 o'clock tonight. I will be prepared and so will millions of 
Americans.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair will remind Members to refrain 
from engaging in personalities towards the President.
  Does the gentleman from Iowa seek recognition to offer a motion to 
adjourn?

                          ____________________