[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 9 (Wednesday, January 15, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H291-H295]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AMERICA IS BECOMING MORE PRO-LIFE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr.
King) for 30 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to
address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And
given that we have had some serious discussion here this evening, I
really appreciate my colleagues, Chris Smith and others, who have spent
an hour addressing the life issue here.
As we come up on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, January 22--I
believe that is a date that will live in infamy--America is becoming a
more and more pro-life country. And as we watch the transition that is
taking place in this country, that has to do with the March for Life
that comes out here every year, when thousands of people, many, many
young people ride from my neighborhood about 18 or 20 hours on a bus to
get here, and they gather on The Mall for the events and the speeches
and the rally and then march to the Supreme Court building. We often
host them here with some hot chocolate.
Each of these years that go by, I meet more and more young people
that have become part of the pro-life network. So the network that is
here, it strengthens people. They look around and they see that they
are not alone. They come from churches; they come from schools; they
come from families; they come from neighborhoods; and they understand
that they are not alone, that there is a patchwork of people that are
active across this country that is emerging into the majority in
America.
I will submit that we are now a majority pro-life nation, and that
would be consistent with polling, the Barna poll that we did about, I
suppose, a year and a half ago or a little more that showed that, just
on the Heartbeat bill alone, which I happen to be the author of, H.R.
490, that we saw 61 percent support for the Heartbeat bill, without
exceptions. Republicans were up at about 85 or 86 percent; independents
were around in the 60th percentile; and Democrats are even in support
of it, in the majority, at 59 percent of Democrats.
So it may have been that America was a little bit ignorant about the
beginning of life and the science of life and the moment that life
begins, but we all knew that in our hearts when, in 1973, it was one
thing, and it was a political agenda that was driven.
And Norma McCorvey regretted that she happened to be Jane Roe. So she
actually didn't get an abortion, and she became pro-life in her later
years and became a pro-life activist.
So it didn't serve her, and it surely didn't serve America. But some
number of over 61 million American babies have been aborted since that
period of time.
And there have been struggles in this city. There have been women
that come to this city and march for abortion, and so many women who
come and march for life.
But here is what I see. In 1976, Mr. Speaker, our firstborn child
came into the world; and, of course I anticipated that with eager and
nervous anticipation.
But when that little boy--actually, not so little. He was almost 9
pounds. When he went into my hands and my arms and I looked at him and
I held him in awe at the miracle that he was and is today, it was just
stunning to me that, from my wife, Marilyn, and I came this little
baby, this miracle.
To look at him, to look in his eyes, to see his dark hair, and he
turned out to be a blue-eyed, dark-haired little guy, and he had a lot
of hair on his head, and it was just such a miracle to see and count
the fingers and toes and look how perfectly they were formed.
{time} 1945
As he lay in his crib, I would sit and look at him, and there was an
aura about that little baby boy. There was an aura about him. And you
could have convinced me that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ,
that is how strong that was to me, that little boy miracle.
As I looked at that, I thought this little guy here, how could
anybody take his life now in these first minutes of his life or how
could someone take his life the minute before he was born or the hour
before or the day before he was born or the week or the month or the
trimester, the first, second, or third trimester?
And I just thought that through as I held that little miracle in my
hands, and I knew that this life was precious and a miracle the moment
that I could hold him and touch him and see him and feel that warmth
and smell that fresh baby smell on him. And within minutes I went back
through this process of development of this miracle from the moment of
conception until birth.
And at that moment I knew that you couldn't take that little baby's
life at any point in this stage. I knew that his life began at the
moment of conception. And from that moment on this miracle and millions
and millions of other miracles needed to be protected from that moment
on, that life begins at the moment of conception. That was 1976.
Twenty years later I went out to San Diego to the Republican National
Convention, and certainly I had all of my colors on and all the things
that are attached to your lapels and your delegation credentials that
are out there. And on a Thursday afternoon at 3:00 I see on the tri-
fold schedule there that said Christian Women for Choice are gathering
there in San Diego at a location about a block and a half away from the
convention center.
Something called me internally and said, you have to go down there
and see what is going on. I was curious. What scripture would be quoted
to me from Christian Women for Choice? I took a friend with me and we
went down and found this area. It was about an acre, I suppose, in
size, maybe a little less, chain-link fence all the way around, stage
in the middle, big old speakers up there and microphones. There were
people still milling around, but there wasn't a program going on on the
stage at that point.
I went to an individual that looked like he was at least associated
with somebody in charge and I asked him who was the leader of this and
who is the head of the Christian Women for Choice. And he said, that is
my wife, and he pointed to her and took me over and introduced me. We
ended up on the stage. And as that conversation began, it became a
debate.
And I remember there in San Diego, for every delegate--I remember the
number they told me--there was as many as 15,000 press in that city to
cover the convention.
So we had quite a lot of press in that protest zone where they would
be looking for controversy. So the leader of Christian Women for Choice
and I went at it in kind of a no-holds barred debate that just clashed
back and forth between us. And several of the others would chime in for
her, and every once in a while her husband would put his chin up over
her shoulder, and he would bark some things at me, too.
Mr. Speaker, I was far enough from home and convicted enough, having
enough conviction for those that don't understand what that means, that
I could just unload all of the things that needed to be said in the
middle of that debate.
She began to demand that we go out and collect the billions of
dollars in child support that is owed by deadbeat dads is what she
called them. And I said, I am happy to do that. I think they need to
pay their child support, and I will be working to do that--it turned
out in the Iowa Senate for starters--but you can't make that
[[Page H292]]
claim because that father doesn't have anything to say about whether
that child is going to be born or not. If the mother is the only one
that has anything to say, then when that child is born you don't have
the claim that the father needs to pay the child support. Save the
baby's life, protect this baby, and then we can hold the father to
this. I am happy to do that. You don't have any claim to that, because
you don't give the father any say in whether that baby is going to be
born or not.
And what I didn't hear anybody say here in this pro-life discussion
that we had is the pain that a father goes through when the mother
decides to abort the baby. I know people who have gone through that
pain and that agony, and they were helpless to do anything about it.
They want the baby. They say, I will raise the baby. It is mine. This
is my flesh and blood. Give birth to this baby and I will take care of
this baby for life. And when the mother says no, sometimes it is even a
spiteful act. And I have had that happen close enough to me that I know
that to be fact as well, Mr. Speaker.
But in that debate with the head of Christian Women for Choice in San
Diego in 1996 two things came out of that. Sometimes when you are
tested under fire you get to a place where the principles are tempered
to a point where they are no longer negotiable and they are as rock
solid as they can be.
Now I stand in auditoriums in schools K through 12, wherever the
situation might be, and I will say to them, ``One day in your lives you
will have this question come up around you, whether it is you asking
the question or whether it is a friend of yours, acquaintance, or a
relation, and it will be the question of abortion. Here are the two
things you need to know''--and I will ask this question first, I will
say, ``Is human life sacred in all of its forms?'' And they look a
little bit slightly confused about what does ``all of its forms'' mean.
And I say, ``Look at the person next to you. You are sitting next to
one of your friends. Is that person's life sacred?'' And they are
looking at you, Is your life sacred? And they will nod their heads and
say, ``Yes, our lives are sacred.'' I say, ``So if you believe that
human life is sacred, then is there any form of human life that is not
sacred?'' How about someone that is a paraplegic, a quadriplegic,
someone who is incapable of functioning verbally or getting up and
moving in any way; is that person's life sacred? I say, yes, and so do
they. They recognize that we have to have passion and compassion for
all human beings.
And so then once you establish that human life is sacred in all of
its forms, then I say to them: Now you only have to ask one other
question and that is, at what moment does life begin? Does it begin a
week after birth? Does it begin the day after birth? Does it begin the
minute after birth? That doesn't make sense to anybody in that
gymnasium. These are young people, but they understand some things that
seem to be confused over here some days, Mr. Speaker.
I say to them, ``What about that baby a minute before the baby is
born, is that life?'' And some of them might look a little confused,
but most of them know it is life. But I will say, But how about the
week before? How about the month before? How about if that baby is born
by cesarean, when does that baby become alive? Is it the moment the
mother is opened up by the surgeon in cesarean and that baby is brought
forward? How could that be?
We take it back to the moment of conception. We say even more
accurately, the moment of fertilization, but the moment of conception.
We get to this place where most every young person in that gathering
understands human life is sacred in all of its forms. It has to be the
highest value that we have, and that it begins at a moment and the only
moment that exists is the moment of conception. From there on out it is
a matter of continuum and continual growth and continual cell division,
continual metabolism getting to the point where that baby is in a
condition to be able to live outside the womb. And then we nurture that
baby, up on that baby's feet, we nurture that baby all the way through
until that baby is in a condition where they can take care of
themselves and eventually take care of their own parents and their own
children. That is life. It is precious.
If you sit around in a household in a family, especially when we go
through the holidays that we have gone through, Thanksgiving,
Christmas, and New Year's, where families gather together and you watch
with joy as they interact with each other, and you know there might be
in some of these homes--you know there are--there is grandpa's empty
chair over in the corner, he is gone now. He is missed. There is a
vacancy in the chair and there is a vacuum in the family because maybe
grandpa or grandma has been such a big part of that family, but they
still cherish the joy that they have shared. They don't often lay an
empty cradle there in the living room for that baby that was aborted,
but that is also the soul and the spirit that is not there to share in
that family joy as well.
This Nation has aborted 61-plus million babies. The back of the
envelope calculation says that if half of them were girls and you look
at the frequency of abortion going back to 1973 in the years that these
women would be having babies you can easily get to the place where we
are not just missing 61 million--I say that; it sounds odd even as I
say it--we are not missing 61 million, as appalling and as ghastly as
that is, we are probably missing another 61 million of the babies that
were never born because their mothers were aborted. Add it up. Call it
120 million. Round it back to 100 million.
Here we are in this country, we have aborted a workforce of 100
million. And I hear over here, well, we have to import people into
America. We have to have cheap foreign labor because, after all, the
total fertility rate is low enough in America. We are not replacing
ourselves, and we are not raising enough workers to fill the gap.
I recall in the Iowa Senate there was a bill to require each health
insurance policy to cover contraceptives and the female State Senators
made this argument--back then we were at a full employment workforce as
well, Mr. Speaker, as full as it is right now. Right now we are kind of
knocking on the door of the lowest unemployment we have had in Iowa.
Well, we had that back in about 1997 or 1998, as well. Some of the
State Senators went off to the women's State legislators gathering, and
they came back with this idea that was going to spread all over the
country: every health insurance policy has to cover contraceptives.
Here is the argument they made: They said, with this short workforce
that we have, this full employment economy we have, we can't afford to
have women missing work because they are pregnant and having babies and
taking care of babies. And back then I said, Who is going to do the
work in the next generation or two if we don't have babies being born
now? How do you fill that gap? It seemed to me to be a simple equation
that I had raised, but yet their agenda worked opposite it.
We need to remember, this Nation has sinned, and this sin of abortion
weighs on the conscience of a country, a country that could well have
100 million more American babies born here, raised here, learning our
civilization, learning our culture, learning our history, learning our
language, sharing and growing an even greater Nation than we are today.
And the recovery of that is heavy.
Even when we end this ghastly practice of aborting babies, innocent,
unborn human life, we have a long way to go to ever get back to where
nature would have had us if we hadn't interfered with abortion.
It troubles me a great deal. And one of the things I have done is
drafted and introduced the Heartbeat Protection Act. That is H.R. 490.
What it does is it protects any baby with a heartbeat. In fact, it says
this: If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. It is
really that simple. And so it requires that if an abortionist is
preparing to perform his trade, he must first do an ultrasound. If that
ultrasound produces a heartbeat, then that is the first certain
physical sign of life in the womb, a heartbeat, and that is about 6
weeks into pregnancy. We don't punish the mother. We do punish the so-
called physician, the abortionist. If a heartbeat can be detected, the
baby is protected. And in the last Congress we took it to 174
cosponsors.
Mr. Speaker, it protects every baby because it is innocent, unborn
human
[[Page H293]]
life. These sacred souls, and I believe that God places a soul in that
little baby at the moment of conception. But their sacred, little
souls, we protect all of them.
There has been some discussion here in this Congress and around the
country about exceptions for rape and incest. This bill doesn't have
exceptions for rape and incest. We had the votes to pass it off the
floor of the House in the previous Congress a little more than a year
ago, and we had the votes to sustain it going through the Judiciary
Committee in the previous Congress a little more than a year ago. We
didn't get this to the markup in Judiciary. We had a hearing, we didn't
get it to markup, and therefore, we didn't get it to the floor. I fear
that we have failed an opportunity that we could have sent a very
strong message over to the Senate, which likely would not have taken it
up.
But to the rest of America, that having exceptions for rape or incest
says that those babies are not precious. I argue that they are as
precious to God as my own grandchildren are precious to me. There
cannot be a legal distinction between a baby that is born as a result
of conception that comes from rape or that comes from incest. In fact,
they are as precious as any others.
In this legislation, H.R. 490, if we were to incorporate exceptions
for rape and incest what we would have instead would be exceptions that
the Court could look at and say, Just a minute. What about equal
protection under the law? If there is going to be equal protections for
all persons, whether born or unborn, then if there are exceptions for
unborn persons that are the result of the act of rape or incest, then
doesn't the Court look at that and conclude that we are inconsistent
and that the equal protection clause really doesn't apply and that
Congress didn't apply the equal protection clause to all of the unborn?
{time} 2000
We must protect all of them, Mr. Speaker.
From a moral standpoint, it is the right thing to do. From a legal
and analytical standpoint, and with an anticipation of a court that
would one day see this legislation--I would never sue on this, but you
know the other side will--we have to make sure that we are consistent
and that we are legally sound without exceptions for rape and incest.
Furthermore, if you have incest that is taking place in a family, if
you allow abortions for incest, that means that the family member that
is perpetrating incest on usually the innocent young girl gets a pass
each time there is an abortion because there is not evidence of his
crime.
But if you prohibit abortions for the sake of incest, you are likely
to uncover the crime of the family member that is abusing, generally,
the young lady within the family.
So I am grateful for my colleagues, that they came here and each one
of them spoke up with passion for innocent, unborn human life.
We will get there one day. Just like Dr. Martin Luther King said: I
may not get there with you, but we are going to get there.
We will be a pro-life nation by law, and we will recognize these
lives from the moment they are conceived within the womb.
Mr. Speaker, I will conclude the component of this discussion on the
life issue. Again, I thank my colleagues for the work that they do.
Correct the Congressional Record
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to make a short comment
here on another circumstance that has taken place in this Congress, and
it works out like this, that a year ago last week, an unprecedented
action took place in this Congress, and that was I did an interview
with The New York Times, and I was misquoted in The New York Times.
That quote, some people would say that, well, it was an organic,
spontaneous eruption of social media and print media. I say, instead,
no, it was an organized effort to set this up and create a railroaded
firestorm against me.
I knew that that was going to take place, and I will tell you, Mr.
Speaker, why I know that. And that is, even though there was a nearly
perfect storm created against me in the previous election, and we
emerged from that with a victory, after the election and before
Christmas of 2018, a very highly placed and respected political
operative said to me they are going to try again. They have chosen a
messenger to go to the President, and this messenger has the
President's ear.
The messenger is to convince the President to send out a negative
tweet on me, and that negative tweet is supposedly going to trigger the
worst firestorm of media assault on me that could possibly be
unleashed, and that they would make that try again in that way.
Well, I preempted that at the White House to the extent I could, and
I believe that was successful. In fact, I have no doubt that that was
successful.
Then, by January 8 of last year, I was able to get a meeting with
that messenger, who said, ``I would never do that to you, Steve,'' but
that also let the messenger know that I knew what the strategy was and
what the attempt would be. I let them know that I am going to blow this
thing wide open and tell the public what was going on if they made that
effort.
That was on January 8. That sent the message through, perhaps, to any
planners and strategists that I knew what was up.
The very next day, a State senator announced that he would challenge
me in a primary. That was at 11:23 a.m. He had no media planned. He had
no website. He had no activities or any kind of evidence that he was
planning to run that was at least on paper. Still, he announced by
Twitter that he was going to run against me.
He was also scheduled to swear in to the next General Assembly, the
Iowa General Assembly, on the following Monday, about 4 days later. The
most improbable time for anyone to announce they are going to run in a
primary against a seated Member of Congress was that day, but he did
that that day anyway.
I let the messenger know I knew what was up. The next day, I get a
primary opponent. The following day, The New York Times story came out,
and the rest is history, Mr. Speaker, The New York Times with the
misquote in it.
There is no tape. It is his word against mine. He has notes, he says.
He admits there is no tape. He has notes, he says, but he won't divulge
even the question that he would say that he asked me.
So I made the point here on the floor, that if I had uttered those
words, it would have been in repetition to a question he asked me. But
I often defend Western civilization. I never have uttered those words,
those two odious ideologies. One of them is on this chart right here.
When I gave the answer that questioned the definition here of what is
this, white nationalism, what is it, I said: It might have meant
something different 1 or 2 or 3 years ago, but today it implies racist.
Well, what did it mean before that? We went back to the year 2000,
LexisNexis, and it was virtually unused. You can see all the way along
here.
Mr. Speaker, I will describe it because you can't actually see it,
but I can.
All the way along here, you can see that it is virtually unused until
you get to 2016, and then this term was used 10,000-plus times, then
30,000. It is still up at 20,000 times, so 2016, 2017, and 2018.
I could not have been more accurate when I said: It might have meant
something different 1, 2, or 3 years ago.
This is in 2018: 1, 2, or 3 years ago. What did it mean here, when
nobody was using it? That is a hard definition to come up with because
it is not in this big dictionary over here. You can't look up two words
together and find out what they mean by looking in a dictionary.
That is the annual records, Mr. Speaker. So we looked into 2016 and
asked the question: When did this jump up? Well, it jumped up right
here in the month of November and then up there pretty high yet in
December 2016.
What happened in November? Two things: Donald Trump was elected
President and the Democrats gathered at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel
to plan a strategy and what they were going to do to prevent him from
being an effective President.
[[Page H294]]
Then we broke the month down, and here is what we have. November 14
and 15, the time that George Soros and the Democratic leaders were in
the Mandarin Occidental Hotel planning a strategy. Well, was it a
weaponization strategy of the term ``white nationalism''? You bet,
right there.
That is what happened, Mr. Speaker. So they launched that as a
weaponization, and they used it as a weapon against me.
When I stated those words here on the floor of the House of
Representatives, I said there is a pause between the two odious
ideologies and ``Western civilization.'' I made that case, and then I
demonstrated that significant pause.
Even though we have the best stenographers, I believe, in the world
here, and they have been great for me to work with, it came out with
exactly the same mispunctuation that The New York Times had.
So I have introduced the bill called H. Res. 789 to correct the
Congressional Record to at least reflect what the C-SPAN video shows
that I said.
Now, it also demonstrates that if these excellent people here can end
up with that punctuation, it is pretty easy to explain what happened to
The New York Times.
Meanwhile, there have been only four people in the history of the
United States Congress who have been removed from their committees.
Three of them are either Federal felons or confessed Federal--they have
been convicted of Federal felonies or confessed to Federal felonies,
three of them.
And me? There is not even a rule that I violated. It is just simply
the will and the whim and the bloodlust of a political lynch mob, and
that has been going on for over a year now today. And it is going to
end, and I am not going to wait until this next year goes by and have
to win another election and make a case.
Furthermore, the term ``white nationalist'' had never been
consciously even uttered on the floor of the House of Representatives
since 1789 all the way up until the time that Donald Trump was elected
President or George Soros led this situation at the Mandarin Occidental
Hotel.
So this resolution, H. Res. 789, is filed and cosponsors are signing
on to it.
Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record an article from Politico.
[From POLITICO, Nov. 14, 2016]
Soros Bands With Donors To Resist Trump, `Take Back Power'
(By Kenneth P. Vogel)
Major liberal funders huddle behind closed doors with Pelosi, Warren,
Ellison, and union bosses to lick wounds, retrench.
George Soros and other rich liberals who spent tens of
millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton are
gathering in Washington for a three-day, closed door meeting
to retool the big-money left to fight back against Donald
Trump.
The conference, which kicked off Sunday night at
Washington's pricey Mandarin Oriental hotel, is sponsored by
the influential Democracy Alliance donor club, and will
include appearances by leaders of most leading unions and
liberal groups, as well as darlings of the left such as House
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and
Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairman Keith Ellison,
according to an agenda and other documents obtained by
POLITICO.
The meeting is the first major gathering of the
institutional left since Trump's shocking victory over
Hillary Clinton in last week's presidential election, and, if
the agenda is any indication, liberals plan full-on trench
warfare against Trump from Day One. Some sessions deal with
gearing up for 2017 and 2018 elections, while others focus on
thwarting President-elect Trump's 100-day plan, which the
agenda calls ``a terrifying assault on President Obama's
achievements--and our progressive vision for an equitable and
just nation.''
Yet the meeting also comes as many liberals are reassessing
their approach to politics--and the role of the Democracy
Alliance, or DA, as the club is known in Democratic finance
circles. The DA, its donors and beneficiary groups over the
last decade have had a major hand in shaping the institutions
of the left, including by orienting some of its key
organizations around Clinton, and by basing their strategy
around the idea that minorities and women constituted a so-
called ``rising American electorate'' that could tip
elections to Democrats.
That didn't happen in the presidential election, where
Trump won largely on the strength of his support from
working-class whites. Additionally, exit polls suggested that
issues like fighting climate change and the role of money in
politics--which the DA's beneficiary groups have used to try
to turn out voters--didn't resonate as much with the voters
who carried Trump to victory.
``The DA itself should be called into question,'' said one
Democratic strategist who has been active in the group and is
attending the meeting. ``You can make a very good case it's
nothing more than a social club for a handful wealthy white
donors and labor union officials to drink wine and read
memos, as the Democratic Party burns down around them.''
Another liberal operative who has been active in the DA
since its founding rejected the notion that the group--or the
left, more generally--needed to completely retool its
approach to politics.
``We should not learn the wrong lesson from this
election,'' said the operative, pointing out that Clinton is
on track to win the popular vote and that Trump got fewer
votes than the last GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.
``We need our people to vote in greater numbers. For that to
happen, we need candidates who inspire them to go to the
polls on Election Day.''
But Gara LaMarche, the president of the DA, on Sunday
evening told donors gathered at the Mandarin for a welcome
dinner that some reassessment was in order. According to
prepared remarks he provided to POLITICO, he said, ``You
don't lose an election you were supposed to win, with so much
at stake, without making some big mistakes, in assumptions,
strategy and tactics.''
LaMarche added that the reassessment ``must take place
without recrimination and fingerpointing, whatever
frustration and anger some of us feel about our own allies in
these efforts,'' and he said ``It is a process we should not
rush, even as we gear up to resist the Trump
administration.''
LaMarche emailed the donors last week that the meeting
would begin the process of assessing ``what steps we will
take together to resist the assaults that are coming and take
back power, beginning in the states in 2017 and 2018.''
In addition to sessions focusing on protecting Obamacare
and other pillars of Obama's legacy against dismantling by
President-elect Trump, the agenda includes panels on
rethinking polling and the left's approach to winning the
working-class vote, as well as sessions stressing the
importance of channeling cash to state legislative policy
battles and races, where Republicans won big victories last
week.
Democrats need to invest more in training officials and
developing policies in the states, argued Rep. Ellison (D-
Minn.) on a Friday afternoon donor conference call, according
to someone on the call. The call was organized by a DA-
endorsed group called the State Innovation Exchange (or SiX),
which Ellison urged the donors to support.
Ellison, who is scheduled to speak on a Monday afternoon
panel at the DA meeting on the challenge Democrats face in
winning working-class votes, has been a leading liberal voice
for a form of economic populism that Trump at times channeled
more than Clinton.
As liberals look to rebuild the post-Clinton Democratic
Party on a more aggressively liberal bearing, Ellison has
emerged as a top candidate to take over the Democratic
National Committee, and he figures to be in high demand at
the DA meeting. An Ellison spokesman did not immediately
respond to a request for comment on Sunday evening. Nor did a
Trump spokesman.
Raj Goyle, a New York Democratic activist who previously
served in the Kansas state legislature and now sits on SiX's
board, argued that many liberal activists and donors are
``disconnected from working class voters' concerns'' because
they're cluster in coastal cities. ``And that hurt us this
election,'' said Goyle, who is involved in the DA, and said
its donors would do well to steer more cash to groups on the
ground in landlocked states. ``Progressive donors and
organizations need to immediately correct the lack of
investment in state and local strategies.''
The Democracy Alliance was launched after the 2004 election
by Soros, the late insurance mogul Peter Lewis, and a handful
of fellow Democratic mega-donors who had combined to spend
tens of millions trying to boost then-Sen. John Kerry's
ultimately unsuccessful challenge to then-President George W.
Bush.
The donors' goal was to seed a set of advocacy groups and
think tanks outside the Democratic Party that could push the
party and its politicians to the left while also defending
them against attack from the right.
The group requires its members--a group that now numbers
more than 100 and includes finance titans like Soros, Tom
Steyer and Donald Sussman, as well as major labor unions and
liberal foundations--to contribute a total of at least
$200,000 a year to recommended groups. Members also pay
annual dues of $30,000 to fund the DA staff and its meetings,
which include catered meals and entertainment (on Sunday,
interested donors were treated to a VIP tour of the recently
opened National Museum of African American History and
Culture).
Since its inception in 2005, the DA has steered upward of
$500 million to a range of groups, including pillars of the
political left such as the watchdog group Media Matters, the
policy advocacy outfit Center for American Progress and the
data firm Catalist--all of which are run by Clinton allies
who are expected to send representatives to the DA meeting.
The degree to which those groups will be able to adapt to
the post-Clinton Democratic Party is not entirely clear,
though some of the key DA donors have given generously to
them for years.
[[Page H295]]
That includes Soros, who, after stepping back a bit from
campaign-related giving in recent years, had committed or
donated $25 million to boosting Clinton and other Democratic
candidates and causes in 2016. During the presidential
primaries, Soros had argued that Trump and his GOP rival Ted
Cruz were ``doing the work of ISIS.''
A Soros spokesman declined to comment for this story.
But, given that the billionaire financier only periodically
attends DA meetings and is seldom a part of the formal
proceedings, his scheduled Tuesday morning appearance as a
speaker suggests that he's committed to investing in opposing
President Trump.
The agenda item for a Tuesday morning ``conversation with
George Soros'' invokes Soros' personal experience living
through the Holocaust and Soviet Communism in the context of
preparing for a Trump presidency. The agenda notes that the
billionaire currency trader, who grew up in Hungary, ``has
lived through Nazism and Communism, and has devoted his
foundations to protecting the kinds of open societies around
the world that are now threatened in the United States
itself.''
LaMarche, who for years worked for Soros's Open Society
foundations, told POLITICO that the references to Nazism and
Communism are ``part of his standard bio.''
LaMarche, who is set to moderate the discussion with Soros,
said the donor ``does not plan to compare whatever we face
under Trump to Nazism, I can tell you that.'' LaMarche he
also said, ``I don't think there is anyone who has looked at
Trump, including many respected conservatives, who doesn't
think the experience of authoritarian states would not be
important to learn from here. And to the extent that Soros
and his foundations have experience with xenophobia in
Europe, Brexit, etc., we want to learn from that as well.''
The Soros conversation was added to the agenda after
Election Day. It was just one of many changes made on the fly
to adjust for last week's jarring result and the stark new
reality facing liberals, who went from discussing ways to
push an incoming President Clinton leftward, to instead
discussing how to play defense.
A pre-election working draft of the DA's agenda, obtained
by POLITICO, featured a session on Clinton's first 100 days
and another on ``moving a progressive national policy agenda
in 2017.'' Those sessions were rebranded so that the first
instead will examine ``what happened'' on the ``cataclysm of
Election Day,'' while the second will focus on ``combating
the massive threats from Trump and Congress in 2017.''
A session that before the election had been titled ``Can
Our Elections Be Hacked,'' after the election was renamed
``Was the 2016 Election Hacked''--a theory that has
percolated without evidence on the left to explain the
surprising result.
In his post-election emails to donors and operatives,
LaMarche acknowledged the group had to ``scrap many of the
original plans for the conference,'' explaining ``while we
made no explicit assumptions about the outcome, the
conference we planned, and the agenda you have seen, made
more sense in the event of a Hillary Clinton victory.''
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I will conclude my remarks, and I
yield back the balance of my time.
____________________