[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 82 (Friday, May 18, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H4236-H4240]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1245
                               FARM BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to address you here 
on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I always appreciate 
that opportunity.
  It is a right and a privilege of any Member of Congress to come down 
here and address you from this floor about whatever issues might be on 
our minds, and I have a couple of them on my mind here this afternoon, 
Mr. Speaker. One of them is the circumstance that brought about the 
loss of the farm bill here on the floor.
  I come from the Fourth Congressional District of Iowa, and I will 
make the case with anyone in this Congress, out of all 435 districts, 
that we produce more agricultural products in the Fourth District than 
any other. There are some folks in the San Joaquin Valley who we have 
an interesting discussion with, and I tip my hat to their progress but 
still stand in defense of the Fourth District of Iowa.
  The corn we raise, the soybeans we raise, the pork that we produce, 
the eggs that come out of there, all of that sets the standard for the 
rest of the country. And I am giving the credit to the producers, the 
families that raised the farmers that we have today who went off to 
school and came back with the technology in their brain and developed 
the technology to bring this kind of crop out of this ground.
  I have two ears of corn down in my man cave, Mr. Speaker, and they 
are beside each other on a nail. I would say half the people in this 
Congress would guess wrong on which was which. One of them is an open-
pollinated variety that they used to plant back in 1848, and the other 
one is a triple-stack hybrid that came out of the 2015 crop, neither 
one of them irrigated. God's rainfall raised them.
  That one ear that is just as big as the other one and actually has 
got more rows around it is the open-pollinated from 1848, and it 
yielded between 15 and 25 bushels to the acre.
  Then you look at the 2015 ear. It is roughly the same length, with 
fewer rows of kernels around it, and that yielded not 15 to 25 bushels, 
but 232 bushels to the acre, over the scales. That is how far we have 
come with agriculture technology.
  You can divide your 15 or 20 to 25 bushels into the 230. It is almost 
10 times. You might make the argument that we have got 10 times the 
yield today that we had back when the pioneers rolled across the 
prairie in their covered wagons and began to figure out how to bring 
crops out of this ground. That is an example of what has taken place.
  We have tractors running around out in the field now. No markers. The 
markers used to always--there used to be planter wire and cross-
checked. Then the markers would mark until we came back around, and you 
lined up on that mark from the last round so that all the rows were 
nice and beautiful and parallel and straight. Everybody took pride in 
having fields where they could look down those rows and see that 
wonderful crop of corn and soybeans and other crops coming out of the 
ground.
  Now there are not markers on a lot of our planters, and some of the 
planters are running around with the markers folded up because we are 
being guided by GPS. That is just some of the technology.
  We are applying fertilizer differently as the soil types change going 
across the field. We have got the ability to change and adjust the 
numbers of corn according to the soil type, too. We are using less 
fertilizer than we did. We are taking care of the water quality.
  Lots of good things are coming up out of the ground, and that means 
food for America and Americans. This farm bill is designed to stabilize 
our family farm operations so that they can stay in business. It is not 
good enough just to be in business next year, but to be in business 
next generation. This is the center and the heart and soul of America.
  This is the American Dream: the family farm on that land looking back 
through their generations and seeing

[[Page H4237]]

they are the fourth generation, the fifth generation family farm, the 
sixth, the seventh generation.
  I stood in a machine shed that has had some pretty good feedlots 
around it and a lot of good farm ground around it and talked to--well, 
I guess I saw, because the seventh generation hadn't quite learned to 
talk yet, seven generations on the family farm. I have watched them 
also as they stood there together and held hands and cried as the 
auctioneer sold off their life's work, when we didn't have a program in 
place that could stabilize their hard work, their smart work, their 
dedication.
  Nobody can do this like a family farm can. There is not a corporation 
that can go out there and hire people and be vertically integrated and 
somehow get this thing scaled up to the size that they can be more 
efficient than what is going on right now with our family farms in 
America because, when it is in your culture, when it is in your blood, 
you make hay when the Sun shines.
  In fact, the culture is so strong in my neighborhood, we had a case 
in court. I was sitting in the courtroom in Sac County a number of 
years ago, and the lawyers were bickering back and forth and the judge 
was deliberating and maybe dithering a little bit. My lawyer said: Come 
on. Let's get this done. I have got hay down.
  Well, you have got hay down. We know what that means. You have got to 
get it back up again before it rains. When the weather is there, you 
have got to move. And if the Sun goes down and you can still go, you 
keep going because you are looking at the clouds coming on the horizon.
  By the way, we have got technology to address that, too. Now we have 
got the setup with the technology, teamed up with Monsanto and with 
Google, to put together a corporation that watches the weather report 
and indexes that in and sends a message off to the farmer's cellphone 
in a text that says: You are going to get 1\1/2\ inches of rain 
tonight, and you have got 6 hours, 7 hours, or 10 or 12 hours to side-
dress 20 pounds of nitrogen.

  That is what your crop needs because we have been monitoring it for 
these years, and we have calculated the Sun days, the heat units, the 
humidity, and the growth patterns. This is a scientific, now, very 
sophisticated industry.
  And that is just crop farming. Then you have got the livestock side 
of this as well.
  We worked long and hard to put this farm bill together, Mr. Speaker, 
and all of the hearings that were held on it. The big things that we 
need to make sure that we sustain and extend are crop insurance, number 
one, because crop insurance is the number one risk management tool for 
our producers.
  If you don't have an ability to ensure your crop and go to the bank 
and be able to predict that you have got a reasonable chance of at 
least servicing your loan and paying your input costs and taking a few 
dollars out to feed the kids, if you can't do that, the bankers can't 
stand with you. So Federal crop insurance is an essential component of 
our family farm operations. It is not something that they can get along 
without, because we have seen these markets cycle.
  We have seen the markets cycle in these ways. For example, January 4, 
1980, Jimmy Carter embargoed grain sales to Russia. Excuse me. I am in 
the modern vernacular. It was the Soviet Union. All the Soviet Union, 
no U.S. grain goes in there.
  They were our number one market at the time, so that embargo shut off 
that market for our producers in the farms all across this country, and 
we saw the commodities prices on the Chicago Board of Trade go into a 
tailspin. It nose-dived down into the gutter.
  To get back out of that and get those markets put back together again 
didn't really happen in the way we might anticipate. It was not a 
bounce back. It was a struggle back. We lost family farm after family 
farm. I watched farm sale after farm sale.
  I went to those sales. We went in some of those building sites that 
the family farms were pushed off of. Some of them, the acreage was sold 
off to somebody that had a little cash, and they came in and tried to 
fix up the place a little bit and tried to live there. It worked for 
some. In fact, it worked where I live. But it didn't work for everyone.
  Some of them were burned. Some were buried. We did a lot of that. I 
can drive you around the countryside, Mr. Speaker, and I can point to 
those places now that you just see as dirt, and I can tell you who 
lived there, the kids' names who were there, where they went off to 
school--maybe Iowa State, University of Iowa, maybe UNI--also, maybe 
off to the coast somewhere.
  Too many of our children went off to get an education and didn't look 
back, and now my neighbors, if they are still neighbors, buy a plane 
ticket to see their grandchildren. That is the result of what happened 
when we had the grain embargo in 1980 that was brought to us by Jimmy 
Carter.
  We had subsidies that had to be poured into the Midwest in huge 
amounts. Even today, we would be stunned if I were to say into the 
Record the amount of money that was put in to try to bail out the 
disaster that we had in agriculture.
  And land change prices. CRP came in, in the pick year of 1983; and 
with that, land prices tumbled down to, I can say, a third of what they 
were at their peak.
  When government stepped in and put CRP in place, some of it was for 
conservation; and we preserve a significant amount of it in this farm 
bill. But, Mr. Speaker, the taxpayers paid for some of those farms a 
couple of different times as a result of what happened with the grain 
embargo in 1980.
  Well, today we have a trade circumstance. That trade circumstance 
started, I believe, not for the negotiations of NAFTA, but the tariff 
that the President put on steel and aluminum--and that was globally--
for all countries that were exporting their steel or aluminum into the 
United States, a 25 percent tariff on it.
  Then, after 2 or 3 days, the President--the Canadians--not as much 
the Mexicans, but the Mexicans, too--objected to the tariff that went 
on them. They were negotiating NAFTA. So after 2 or 3 days, the 
President lifted that tariff off of Canada and Mexico for the countries 
that are involved in NAFTA.
  That, I think, was designed to try to get the Canadians to the table 
on NAFTA. Perhaps that has been useful, and it worked; but we also knew 
that a tariff on steel and aluminum coming in out of China was going to 
bring about retaliatory trade moves on the part of the Chinese, and 
they acted in a predictable fashion. They slapped a tariff on our U.S. 
ag products going from the United States into China.
  And so here I am, Mr. Speaker, representing the Fourth Congressional 
District of Iowa, all of northwest Iowa, almost all of north-central 
Iowa, some of northeast Iowa. And when I look at the map that was put 
out by Bloomberg that showed the counties in America that went Democrat 
in blue, the counties in America that went Republican in red--and that 
would be, of course, the Trump election--and over the top of that they 
laid out a focus in, I will say, I believe they were yellow dots, that 
was the production of soybeans, the concentration of the production of 
soybeans.
  It is clear that the dead center, the center of the hub of the middle 
of the bull's eye, that those tariffs that the Chinese put on soybeans 
and pork, especially, went right into the Fourth District and right 
into Iowa. And then it spreads out: Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana.
  We all know what the corn belt looks like. The soybean belt is a 
little different, but that is where most of it is still raised. So we 
take this hit in our neighborhood, and our producers are holding 
together pretty well because they understand that our President is a 
multifaceted, multidimensional trade negotiator.
  So the trade negotiations that started with NAFTA and the tariff on 
steel and aluminum that included the Canadians and the Mexicans in the 
beginning for 2 or 3 days are part of, also, what has happened with the 
retaliatory tariffs that the Chinese put on, especially, soybeans and 
on pork.

  That brought the South Koreans to the table, too, and they said: Give 
us some relief on the tariffs on the steel. The South Koreans are the 
third largest exporter of steel to the United States.

[[Page H4238]]

  While they were there, they offered up the invitation for--they had 
it in their pocket, evidently--President Trump to sit down with Kim 
Jong Un. The President said: Yes, I will do that. Stuck his head in the 
press room and told the press: I am going to meet with Kim Jong Un.
  Now, we are pretty confident that that is going to happen in 
Singapore on June 12. All of this is wrapped up together, Mr. Speaker, 
and much more besides: national defense, national security, the 
denuclearization of the entire Korean Peninsula. It also plays into the 
Iranian nuclear agreement that was signed by, I believe, John Kerry, 
technically, but under the Obama administration.
  You put this all together, and I have just given a quick snapshot, 
Mr. Speaker, on the multiple layers of strategy and negotiations that 
are part of this President.
  Meanwhile, the message that is sent overseas to the Chinese, for 
example, who are putting pressure on the very producers that need to 
have stability, that need to have their Federal crop insurance, and 
those that need to know that we have got an EQIP program and those that 
need to be able to measure what we are going to do with our CRP 
program, for example, our conservation programs, all of this is only 20 
percent of the overall farm bill, and the other 80 percent goes to 
nutrition.
  When I came to this town, there were 19 million people on food 
stamps; and we called them food stamps then. Nineteen million. At the 
peak of the Obama administration, which would be about the seventh year 
of the Obama administration, those 19 million on food stamps had become 
47 million on SNAP; and the cost to the taxpayer grew, of course, 
proportionally and even faster because of the inflationary aspect of 
this. So we found ourselves at 2\1/2\ times more people on food stamps 
than there were when I came to this Congress in 2003.
  How do we fund that? We are watching our deficits go sky-high: $20 
trillion, on the way to $21 trillion, in deficit spending.
  And where do we get the money to pay the bills that are pushing us 
into the deficit and running up $20 trillion in national debt? Not 
deficit spending, Mr. Speaker.
  Where do we get the money to service the national debt, and where do 
we get the money to pay the bills as we watch our national debt go up 
over $20 trillion? Well, the primary places are China, Saudi Arabia. 
About half of this comes from the American people investing in bonds 
and securities.
  So we are borrowing money from China to buy people food stamps, and 
all we ask in this bill is that they work.

                              {time}  1300

  Now, why should a farmer work and watch the stability underneath him 
that is the farm bill, that is the Federal crop insurance piece, that 
is EQIP, that is a conservation program that has a MAP program on it, 
the Market Access Program, why should that farmer be out there 
sweating--sweating bullets sometimes--wondering if he can make it with 
markets that are 50 percent of what they were just a few years ago when 
other people aren't working at all? Why should the sweat of the 
farmer's brow pay for the food of the person that refuses to work?
  The American people know this, Mr. Speaker. It is not a complicated 
thing. If you poll that out there and you ask them, 80 to 90 percent of 
the American people, they say: Yes, you ought to have to work if you 
are going to eat. It is Biblical, it is John Smith's rule, and it is 
the rule within the culture of the American people. It is just a rule 
that is hard to get passed here on the floor of the House.
  We don't force anybody off of food stamps. We only look at the people 
that are able-bodied, between the ages of, I believe it is, 18 to 59. I 
know it is not any older than 59. And we say: If you want to get food 
stamps, then, fine, we will give them to you, but you have to work 20 
hours a week or go to school 20 hours a week, or some combination of 
your own improvement 20 hours a week.
  Well, 20 hours a week, is that too much to ask, Mr. Speaker, for 
someone to put in 20 hours a week in order to eat for free all the 
other hours of the week? I think it is entirely reasonable. And, 
furthermore, all work has dignity, all work has honor, all work 
enhances the character and the work ethic of the people doing it. There 
is no shame in being productive. There is honor in being productive.
  But 20 hours a week, that is only a day's work for a farmer that is 
in the field that is out there planting corn or planting soybeans or 
harvesting those beans when you see the weather coming in, or combining 
corn in the fall. When you go, you go, and there are a lot that put in 
20-hour days, and I know because I keep up with them and so do our 
crews from time to time. When we have to, you do what you need to do.
  So, here we are, a bill that has been shot down here on the floor. 
This is the second time this has happened in the last, I will say, 5 
years, a farm bill comes out here to the floor. We just need some 
Democrats that will support work, and we would have passed this bill 
here today.
  But looking at the roster of those that voted ``no,'' every Democrat 
voted ``no'' on this farm bill. And they didn't vote ``no'' because 
they didn't like what was in on the ag side. They voted ``no'' because 
there were work environments on the food stamp side.
  So when I came to this Congress, there were Democrats here that 
believed in work, and they would vote accordingly. We had about 53 Blue 
Dog Democrats, moderate Democrats that wanted to get to a balanced 
budget, and their agenda was: Let's cut some spending and let's raise 
some taxes. Let's get to balance. My agenda was: Let's cut some 
spending and get to balance, but we can do business.
  Too many of them were forced to vote for ObamaCare. When they did 
that, they essentially walked the plank. When they voted for ObamaCare, 
the American people rose up and voted them out of office and put in 
conservative Republicans instead. Some of those conservative 
Republicans decided they wanted to leverage this farm bill for a vote 
on a bill that includes at least two components of amnesty.
  I am wondering: Where have we gone, America? Where have we gone that 
we can't take care of our farmers? Where have we gone that we can't 
require a little bit of work to go along with a lot of free food? Where 
have we gone when we say that 20 hours a week to get free food--when 
you ask a farmer to work 20 hours a day when the weather let's him do 
that, and to suspend his risk management program at least--it is not 
suspended here, technically. I mean, it goes on. But the message is to 
spend it, and the doubt hangs out, and they won't sleep as well 
tonight, and they won't have as good a weekend.
  And the people that are getting food stamps without work, they are 
probably snickering a little bit. They might be sitting on the couch in 
their front lawn right now going: You know what, those Republicans 
aren't going to be able to make me work, and all those Democrats are 
going to protect me so I don't have to work.
  I regret the direction that this culture and civilization is going if 
work is so disparaged by one party that we can't have a tiny little bit 
of it plugged into a fully funded welfare program that went from 19 
million people on food stamps in 2003, on up to 47 million at its peak, 
and now down around 45 and change, as I recall.
  Forty-five million people on food stamps. And now, another one of 
these arguments is: Well, we have to bring in workers from overseas. 
That is one of the bills that some of the folks that voted against the 
farm bill today, Mr. Speaker, it's one of the bills that they want to 
bring to the floor. It brings in guest workers.
  Well, actually, initially, it won't bring them in. It will amnesty 
the ones that are here. People that are working illegally here, a lot 
of them, in fact, I will say it with confidence, with utter confidence, 
most of them operating on somebody else's Social Security number, 
guilty of the felony of document fraud, would get a pass to stay in 
America or do a touchback and come back to America.
  And, you know, the only ones that would leave to do a touchback and 
come back are the ones that will be precertified to have a free pass 
coming back into the United States, 410,000--410,000 would get that 
pass in a bill that they want to see come to the floor

[[Page H4239]]

maybe next week. And there is another 40,000 that would go into food 
processing.
  So we have not had guest workers come into food processing. That is 
low-skilled work, as a rule. Now, if you are going to fill the ranks of 
low-skilled workers, then I suggest that we put Americans to work 
at that. The highest unemployment rates, the double-digit unemployment 
that you look at are the lowest skilled workers, and people say: We 
don't have anybody in America that is willing to do the work.

  Well, why not? This is not that complicated an equation. We have 
between--disagreement here--but nobody thinks there is less than 70 
different means-tested Federal welfare programs in this country. Nobody 
thinks there is less than 70. Some people take that number all the way 
to 87. But between 70 and 87 means-tested Federal welfare programs 
exist in this country. Not one person has memorized the names of them 
yet; let alone, understands how they work, how they interact with each 
other, how they might motivate or demotivate people that we ought to be 
asking to go to work.
  So, what we are doing is we are bribing Americans. We are paying them 
not to work with welfare programs. And if we didn't have anybody out 
there to pay not to work and we didn't have that labor, then I could 
maybe understand the argument that somebody 1,500 miles away in a 
foreign country that doesn't speak English, that has a 6th grade 
education and no skills, should be coming into the United States to do 
some of that work, but that is not the case.
  We did the chart on this, Mr. Speaker, and I believe I have 
introduced it into the Congressional Record, and it works like this. It 
is a big pie chart, and it is out on the internet, but there are 326 
million Americans, according to the most recent estimate of the U.S. 
Census Bureau, and out of them, I will ask: What are they doing?
  Well, there are 153 million of them that are employed. Now, they 
might be not fully employed, but they are employed. So 153 million of 
them working. All right. I take those off to the side. Seven million of 
them, though, are on unemployment, drawing unemployment checks right 
now, right, just a hair under 7 million. They ought to be going to 
work.
  Second one is, there are 46 million Americans who are simply not in 
the workforce. They have opted not to look for a job, not to work, 
whatever the reason is. Maybe they are already wealthy enough that they 
don't need to work anymore. They could possibly be in school or 
enhancing their education, but chances are, a whole lot of them are on 
some of those 70 to 87 different welfare programs that we have.
  So they are drawing down some combination of that. Maybe they are 
working in the black market for cash somewhere, and they don't show up 
on the record, 46 million of them.
  Then there is another 14 million. They are starting to get a little 
bit older now, but some of them do want to work and can. That is those 
between the ages of 65 and 74. Walmart hires at 74, unemployment gets 
paid at 74, so we put that in there to calculate also, Mr. Speaker.
  And then there are 23 million Americans on disability. And I can't 
believe, when I see double-amputee wounded warriors roll themselves to 
work every day, that all 23 million of those that are on disability 
payment, that none of them can work. Some can, and we ought to go back 
and take another look at them.
  By the time I add all of this up--there is a couple of other lesser 
categories there--by the time I add all of this up, there are 107 
million Americans of working age who are simply not in the workforce, 
and they are in categories that we can hire from every one of those 
categories. We just can't hire everyone from any of those categories, 
but starting with unemployment, then the 46 million, and on down the 
line.
  So I say to people: If you need one worker, can you find him out of 
107 million? If you need 100 workers, can't you find them out of 107 
million? If you need 1,000 workers, can't you find them out of 107 
million? And, of course, that answer is: Yes, we can.
  But somehow we have the employment force, or the employer force in 
America that has convinced themselves that they don't want the American 
worker, and they are not willing to come to this Congress and work with 
us to tighten down this welfare system. This welfare system was created 
to be a safety net, not a hammock, and because of these additions to 
the welfare systems, going up to the 70 to 87 of them, and the benefits 
coming out of there, people that have the safety net has been ratcheted 
up and up and up till it has become a hammock. We have tens of millions 
of Americans that are lying in the hammock. They might be the third 
generation that has not worked.
  There was a study that was done, Mr. Speaker, in Milwaukee that 
carved out a 36-square-block residential area of Milwaukee, six blocks 
by six blocks, and they went in and interviewed each one of those 
residents in those households. Now, these are people that came up from 
the Gulf Coast when they lifted prohibition in the 1930s to take on the 
good brewery jobs that were formed in Milwaukee. And, by the way, the 
GDP of the beer in Wisconsin today is over $7 billion, so it is a huge 
industry. But they came up to work there three generations ago.
  The company that went in to survey those, every home in those 36 
square blocks, came to this conclusion: There wasn't a single employed 
male head of household in any of those homes in 36 square blocks in 
Milwaukee--third generation.
  Why not? They moved up there for the jobs. The story lamented that we 
couldn't bring jobs to them. I read it and thought: If their 
grandfathers could move up there for jobs, why can't they go to where 
the jobs are? There are plenty of jobs in America.
  And the reason they can't is because they are rooted in the home. The 
home may be paid for or partially paid for, and they have established 
themselves a comfort zone on a welfare system and supplemented however 
they need to to get to that place where they are in a comfort place.
  We don't need to have policies that encourage that. We don't need to 
have people that haven't worked in three generations. We need to have 
the industrious can-do American spirit driving an economy and 
free enterprise and being rewarded for the work they do.

  I don't any longer put out any statements that say: Hardworking 
Americans; hardworking Iowans. There are a lot of hardworking Americans 
and hardworking Iowans, Mr. Speaker, but it is also important to work 
smart. I want to see smart working, hardworking people all over this 
country, and our job needs to be to increase the per capita GDP, the 
average per capita GDP of our people, and that comes about by starting 
with work on food stamps and taking that philosophy, make it a success, 
and move it over into many of the other welfare programs.
  Another one is: You can take all those welfare programs, the 70 to 87 
of them that are there, converge them all into one committee here in 
Congress, and then start dropping off the ones that aren't working and 
measuring them and shake it all down to about five different programs, 
instead of 70 or 87 of them. Those things will work.
  We are here today with a farm bill that went down on this floor. It 
went down because no Democrat supports work. It went down because some 
Republicans wanted to leverage this farm bill in order to get a bill 
out on the floor to vote on that has within it two components of 
amnesty.
  And I oppose amnesty because it destroys the rule of law. When Ronald 
Reagan signed the Amnesty Act in 1986--he only let me down two times in 
8 years, and I revere that man in his legacy. But I believed that as 
the debate went on in the House and the Senate, that Ronald Reagan 
would see with utter principled clarity that if you reward lawbreakers, 
you are destroying the rule of law, and there will be another amnesty 
and another and another and more people will come for it.
  And they have, and there have been six minor amnesties since that 
period of time. But this is the big one sitting here: Amnesty for 
people that are in America illegally; amnesty for DACA recipients. They 
say they came here when they were 3 years old; their mother led them 
across the Rio Grande River.
  I actually have seen the data. I don't know of any other Member of 
Congress,

[[Page H4240]]

I don't believe, has seen the data. We have been digging it out for 
months on end, and I think I will soon be able to make it public. Some 
of them were brought here at 3 years old. Some of them were girls at 
that age. Some of them, it was their mother. But that doesn't represent 
that universe of DACA recipients.
  And what I do know is, of those large numbers, especially of males 
that came here illegally, they were 14, 15, 16, and been more years 
old, that they knew what they were doing and they were responsible for 
what they were doing. I want to restore the rule of law, pass the farm 
bill, and I want to get people back to work, and I want to have allies 
on this floor that support work, whether they are Democrats or 
Republicans.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________