[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 116 (Wednesday, July 11, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H6107-H6109]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1900
                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, there was an interesting story in Politico 
this week titled: ``The Secret Story of How America Lost the Drug War 
With the Taliban.'' It was written by Josh Meyer. It says: ``As 
Afghanistan edged ever closer to becoming a narco-state five years ago, 
a team of veteran U.S. officials in Kabul presented the Obama 
administration with a detailed plan to use U.S. courts to prosecute the 
Taliban commanders and allied drug lords who supplied more than 90 
percent of the world's heroin . . .''.
  Mr. Speaker, that is incredible. I have been hearing from DEA agents, 
local police, deputies, so many law enforcement people, about how 
incredibly abundant heroin is in America. How we had so many people 
that would get hooked on opioids, and then they would ultimately find 
heroin was cheaper and more plentiful. It destroyed a lot of lives, and 
it continues to destroy lives in America.
  To have this report come out that the Obama administration could have 
done something in a timely manner to have saved tens of thousands, if 
not hundreds of thousands of lives from being lost or being wasted in 
this opioid epidemic of addiction, it is really staggering to think 
that our United States Government, the Obama administration, with all 
of its tools, had the chance to do something that would prevent the 
massive personal destructions that we have witnessed, it runs over into 
the unconscionable area.
  This article says: ``The plan, according to its authors, was both a 
way of halting the ruinous spread of narcotics around the world and a 
new--and urgent--approach to confronting ongoing frustrations with the 
Taliban, whose drug profits were financing the growing insurgency and 
killing American troops. But the Obama administration's deputy chief of 
mission in Kabul, citing political concerns, ordered the plan to be 
shelved, according to a Politico investigation.''
  Now, I have not always been the biggest Politico fan, but this is 
extraordinary.
  ``Now, its authors--Drug Enforcement Administration agents and 
Justice Department legal advisers at the time--are expressing anger 
over the decision, and hope that the Trump administration, which has 
followed a path similar to former President Barack Obama's in 
Afghanistan, will eventually adopt the plan as part of its evolving 
strategy.
  `` `This was the most effective and sustainable tool we had for 
disrupting and dismantling Afghan drug trafficking organizations and 
separating them from the Taliban,' said Michael Marsac, the main 
architect of the plan as the DEA's regional director for Southwest Asia 
at the time. `But it lies dormant, buried in an obscure file room, all 
but forgotten.'
  ``A senior Afghan security official, M. Ashraf Haidari, also 
expressed anger at the Obama administration when told about how the 
U.S. effort to indict Taliban narcotics kingpins was stopped dead in 
its tracks 16 months after it began.
  `` `It brought us almost to the breaking point, put our elections 
into a time of crisis, and then our economy almost collapsed,' Haidari 
said of the drug money funding the Taliban. `If that operation had 
continued, we wouldn't have had this massive increase in production and 
cultivation as we do now.' ''
  This is a photograph showing scoring a poppy to extract raw opium in 
April of 2004.
  ``Afghan drug lords have pledged financial support to the Taliban in 
exchange for protection of their vast swaths of poppy and cannabis 
fields, drug processing labs, and storage facilities.

[[Page H6108]]

  ``Poppy cultivation, heroin production, terrorist attacks and 
territory controlled by the Taliban are now at or near record highs. 
President Ashraf Ghani''--who I have met. He seems like a very decent 
gentleman--``said recently that Afghanistan's military--and the 
government itself--would be in danger of imminent collapse, perhaps 
within days, if U.S. assistance stops.''
  When we heard the Obama administration condemning the opioid 
addiction epidemic, we didn't know that that administration had a 
chance to end 90 percent of the heroin coming into this country. 
Apparently, so much of that flows across our southern border.
  And I realize that the leaders in the U.S. Senate and the leaders in 
the United States House did not support the pillars of Donald Trump's 
platform that got him elected President of the United States. Every 
bill that we have brought out of the House or that has come out of the 
Senate, even a couple of times there has been a little bit of money for 
a border wall, it is not as serious as it should be that this Congress 
should be doing something about the travesty on our southern border.
  As long as it remains so open, the drug cartels will continue to make 
tens, hundreds of billions of dollars. I read that just the drug money 
across our southern border last year was around $80 billion, and I have 
also understood that the projections are that the drug cartels may be 
making more from human trafficking across our southern border than they 
are even from their drug money. That money is being used to keep our 
Mexico friend and neighbor oppressed and in bondage.
  The best thing that we could do, if we really and truly cared about 
the people of Mexico, about the people of Guadalajara, El Salvador, of 
so many countries in Central America, and even South America, that are 
caught up in human trafficking, drug trafficking, and sex trafficking 
that is going on and coming across the U.S. border is stop it. We stop 
the flow of the billions that are being spent, or made, by the drug 
cartels, then they don't have the money for the corruption that resides 
in so much of Mexico and south of Mexico.
  That is what a good neighbor should do. That is what this House 
should do. That is what the Senate should do. Tell our rich lobbyist 
friends that we are going to save American lives, and we are going to 
make Mexico one of the 10 top economies in the world by gutting their 
corruption, because we are going to enforce a secure border to our 
south, and they need to get ready and used to it. But we are going to 
have to have leadership in both the House and the Senate that will step 
up to the task.

  Enough lives have been lost, enough girls have been subjected to sex 
trafficking, enough lives have been wasted in drug addiction, enough 
lives have been lost in trying to get here, evilly lured here by the 
attraction of what might come. Fathers that would even provide birth 
control to daughters, knowing they are likely to be raped on the way to 
the United States. What kind of people are we that we would lure people 
into that kind of situation? Well, we are doing it.
  And I hear it over and over from those people that guard our border 
and from the people that are not insane, they are not crazy, they are 
not stupid, they are just ignorant about the role of ICE in America. 
ICE does not protect our borders. That is the Border Patrol. We also 
have that supplemented by others that are assisting the Border Patrol.
  ICE is really the one that sometimes has been referred to by--that 
part of Homeland Security, has been labeled by drug cartels, according 
to people on the border, as the drug cartel's logistics. Because they 
get people illegally across our border, and then Homeland Security, 
with the help of ICE--there are children involved that involves Health 
and Human Services, HHS--they ship them around the country to whatever 
address the drug cartels give the individuals and tell them that this 
is where you are going, and you can finish paying off your fee to us by 
working for us at the address where we send you, either in sex 
trafficking, drug trafficking, or whatever.

                              {time}  1915

  Yes, so we are taking United States Government money; we are prying 
it out of the hardworking hands of Americans; and we are using it to 
help the drug cartels build up their employee base all over America.
  It is time that people in the Republican Party woke up and realized 
the amount of human suffering that our failure to secure our southern 
border is causing. President Trump is doing what he can, but he could 
do a whole lot more if we gave him the tools to do it.
  How heartless can we be not to secure our southern border and allow 
the deaths, the rapes, the drug abuse that is overwhelming our country. 
We have got to stop it.
  The Obama administration had a chance to cut it off at its root 
source. They killed the program.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I think it would be a good idea--I know our friend 
Mike Pompeo is busy right at this moment, but there are others in the 
State Department, there are people in Homeland Security, Secretary 
Nielsen, others. We can do something about it. We have got to do 
something about it. It is what decent, caring people would do.
  And those, including any judge who says you have got to give these 
children back to people who may not be their parents, people who have 
convictions for human trafficking and sex trafficking or child 
molestation, ought to come up on charges themselves.
  Fortunately, one judge backed off of the deadline that had been set 
for getting certain children back to their parents, because Homeland 
Security and HHS is doing everything they can as quickly as they can to 
make sure if they give children to adults, they are not sex traffickers 
and they are not drug traffickers, there is a family relationship. And 
it appears a great deal of work has been done along those lines. So 
there are at least five or six children who have not been turned over 
to people who were not their family or people who had drug or child 
molestation offenses.
  But this is serious stuff. It is what we do. It is why our Nation, so 
many of us, became outraged when we found out that young, beautiful 
little girls competing as Olympians for the United States in the world 
were sexually molested by an adult monster.
  And then we have the wannabes, adult men who set records and won 
wrestling matches. They could take down the strongest and best in the 
country, take them down if they didn't like what they were doing. They 
could take them down if they got in a ring and the match started. They 
could take them down. And two guys like that come forward, say: Yeah. 
Okay. So I was an adult. So I could have been out in Afghanistan 
shooting and killing people. I was no match for some wimpy doctor who 
made come-on comments.
  Somebody like that would be allowed to besmirch the name of  Jim 
Jordan. It is disgusting. And any group that would glom on to something 
like that, it is disgusting.
  Assassinating an honorable character used to be a virtually 
unpardonable sin in America. But what happens when you quit teaching 
about right and wrong, you quit teaching about the Ten Commandments, 
you quit teaching that we are all accountable for our own actions, and 
you start teaching, instead, that everything is relative? There is no 
right. There is no wrong. There is only convenient and politically 
expedient. When political expedience becomes more important in America, 
like it has for some, and right and wrong goes out the window, we have 
no business maintaining the same form of governance.
  It is time to get back to teaching right and wrong, because there are 
such.
  C. S. Lewis said he used to enjoy making fun of Christians when he 
was an atheist by saying: How can you say there is a just God in the 
world when there is so much injustice in the world?
  And no matter what they would come back with as a response, these 
Christians, Lewis would say: Yes, yes, that is all well and good, but 
wouldn't it be easier just to admit there can't be a just God in the 
universe when there is so much injustice?
  And then one day he finally realized: If there is not some absolute 
source of right and wrong in the world, justice and injustice, then how 
could he ever know there is so much injustice in the world? It would be 
like a man blind from birth being unable to know what light is.

[[Page H6109]]

  But there is an absolute source of justice in the world, and that is 
why, in 1787, in Philadelphia, when our Nation's leaders struggled to 
come up with a new constitution, that Ben Franklin, who so many 
teachers across the country wrongly say was a deist, as some do about 
Washington, said:

       I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the 
     more convincing proofs I see of this truth: God governs in 
     the affairs of men, and if a sparrow cannot fall to the 
     ground without His notice, is it possible an empire could 
     rise without His aid?
       We have been assured, sir, in the Sacred Writing, that 
     unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that 
     build it.

  Franklin said:

       I firmly believe this: I also believe without His 
     concurring aid, we shall succeed in our political building no 
     better than the builders of Babel. We will be confounded by 
     our local partial interests and we, ourselves, shall become a 
     byword down through the ages.

  He went on to move that they start having prayer to start each of 
their days at Independence Hall working on the Constitution, just like 
they did throughout the Revolution. But if you go back and look at the 
debate, you find the reason that was voted down. They didn't have 
anybody who everybody else would agree would do a fair prayer for all 
the different Christian denominations.
  So during the Revolution, they hired a chaplain who always did what 
all the Christian denominations believed was a fair prayer, but as they 
explained in debate: We are not getting paid. We don't have a treasury. 
We can't hire a chaplain. We can't do that right now.
  And so next they moved to Randolph of Virginia, his motion: Okay. 
Here we are at the end of June. I move that we recess--this is not his 
exact words, but in essence:

       Let's recess, reconvene on our Nation's birthday, 
     Independence Day, at one of the local churches. Let's worship 
     God together. And after we as a group here have worshiped God 
     together, then let's come back and try this again. We are not 
     making progress.

  That passed. They went to the Reformed Calvinistic Church in 
Philadelphia. And it must have gone well. You can find prayers that the 
presiding pastor, the Reverend William Rogers, prayed. He brought that 
group together through prayer by the grace of God, and they came back 
and gave us the greatest founding document in the history of the world.
  We have got to get back to where we teach right and wrong. That is 
why John Adams in 1797, as President of the United States, said:

       This Constitution was meant for a moral and religious 
     people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any 
     other.

  And he was right. And when you fail to instill those moral 
understandings that brought C. S. Lewis around from being an atheist to 
being one of the most effective and greatest apologists for 
Christianity in its history, we have got to get back to that or the 
Constitution cannot work, and you will have administrations that commit 
heinous, reproachable acts as leaders of the Nation.
  We ask that God bless America, but there are certain things a nation 
of people are supposed to do to be blessed people and merit the 
blessings of Heaven, as our Founders often referred to them.
  Let's stand up for what is right. Let's stop the political 
vindictiveness, and the Nation will be better and be more likely to be 
blessed.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________