[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3983-3987]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         CONTINUING RESOLUTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized 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 also 
to have listened in on the presentation over the previous hour, the 
Republican Women for Life, led by Congresswoman Schmidt, who has 
relentlessly stood up for the innocent unborn. I certainly support that 
cause and lend my voice to it, although I don't know that there's much 
to be added after the presentation that I've just heard. I'm just 
thankful that it's in the Congressional Record and that your ear has 
been tuned to it, Mr. Speaker, and that the ear of the American people 
is tuned to that message as well.
  I have a couple of subjects that I wanted to discuss here within the 
upcoming 30 minutes that's been allotted. The first one is to speak to 
the vote that we've just had here on the floor on the continuing 
resolution for extending the funding for this government for an 
additional 3 weeks. It is known as a clean CR.
  This House came together to work its will on H.R. 1. We debated that 
continuing resolution, which would be designed to fund this government 
for the balance of the fiscal year.
  Mr. Speaker, I think it's really important that you and the American 
people are reminded that we're in this condition of this debate over 
this continuing resolution because the Pelosi Congress didn't do 
business as directed and as framed under the Constitution of the United 
States.
  The Pelosi Congress continued to digress when it first opened up here 
in January of 2007, after the majority and the gavel was passed right 
behind me where you are, Mr. Speaker. This Congress functioned for the 
first few weeks pretty much the same as it had under the previous 
Speaker.
  But in that transition that took place, the rules began to get 
changed, and there were fewer and fewer opportunities for Members to 
weigh in. The committees began to function less and less. More and more 
bills were written out of the Speaker's office, and as this unfolded, 
the rules changed. They took away--one of the things was an open rule 
under the appropriations process so that Members couldn't offer their 
amendments and force a debate and a vote on an issue of their concern.
  The appropriations bills have always been the tool that allowed 
Members to work their will on the package that came from committee. 
Well, that went away. That was taken away, I just presume it was, by 
order of the Speaker, Speaker Pelosi.
  So the House was no longer able to work its will. Bills came down 
under a

[[Page 3984]]

closed rule. Appropriations bills came down under, well, modified 
closed rule, and then they didn't come down at all. Then they turned 
into omnibus spending bills or they turned into continuing resolutions, 
and this government limped along, without having the opportunity to 
gather together from across this country the collective wisdom of the 
435 Members of Congress, as informed by our constituents.

                              {time}  1730

  So the Congress became dysfunctional. One of the things that is a 
result of that is the legacy today of having to be in this business now 
of seeking to put Congress back on its tracks again in the fashion that 
the Constitution frames and the tradition of functional Congresses 
direct us. That has been the mission of Speaker Boehner, and he has 
been very clear about this to make this Congress work again. Because of 
that commitment, it brought about the debate on H.R. 1, which debated 
all the funding of the Federal Government for the balance of this 
fiscal year and allowed it under an open rule.
  There were hundreds of amendments that were offered by Members that 
had 4 years of pent-up frustration, Democrats and Republicans alike, 
that had a voice that wanted to be heard, votes that we wanted to see 
cast, and a message that helped shape, let's say, the political 
consensus of this body before a bill goes over to the United States 
Senate.
  We worked through that bill for over 90 hours of debate. Of the 
hundreds of amendments that were offered, there were a good number that 
were passed, and some of them shut off funding to certain pieces of 
policy. But it was the will of the House wrapped up in the result of 
the passage of H.R. 1 that went over to the Senate. That was the first 
offer, and it was the best offer of the House so far, and it reflects 
the will of the House of Representatives and the House of 
Representatives designed, by definition, to reflect the will of the 
American people.
  So I want to make it clear, Mr. Speaker, that we are in this debate 
and in this discussion over continuing resolutions: the continuing 
resolution that was passed in the lame duck session that carried this 
Congress until March 4 of this year and the 2-week ``clean CR'' that 
funded this government for 2 weeks that is set to expire on the night 
of March 18. They've extended now a 3-week ``clean CR'' that extends 
the funding an additional 3 weeks under similar terms, not identical 
terms, to the previous continuing resolution.
  That is the scenario that we are in, Mr. Speaker, and we are in this 
scenario because Congress wasn't doing its job from 2007 on up until we 
gaveled in here in January of 2011.
  There is a 4-year period of time where, in 2007, it wasn't too bad 
when it started. It digressed progressively until it became as close to 
completely dysfunctional as the Congress has been, at least in my 
understanding of the history. And I would say, Mr. Speaker, that I have 
lived a fair amount, and I have studied the rest of it, although I 
wouldn't present myself as being a congressional scholar and historian 
on all of the detail, but that is generally what has taken place.
  Now we have Speaker Boehner putting this Congress back on the tracks. 
And, yes, there were some growing pains going through those 90-plus 
hours of debate on the continuing resolution under an open rule. And, 
yes, some of us compromised. Many of us actually compromised to take 
our amendments down and negotiated a unanimous consent agreement that 
was negotiated in good faith. I appreciate all the effort that went 
into that. It was a very, very good exercise.
  Democrats and Republicans alike, I heard no one argue that the 
process of open rules and open debate was a bad process or that it 
wasn't fair or that it somehow should not have been done, that we 
should have engaged in a closed-rule process. No, Mr. Speaker, that was 
the right thing to do. And the subsequent continuing resolution, the 
first one for 2 weeks, was designed to buy some time for the Senate to 
digest H.R. 1. The one that passed here on this floor, over my vote 
when I voted ``no'' on it, is an extension of a similar philosophy with 
another little slice out of the cuts. So maybe, just maybe, the Senate 
will swallow this one bite at a time when the whole loaf seems to be 
too much. But, on the other hand, the leverage is diminishing as the 
pages on the calendar turn.
  Mr. Speaker, I didn't come here tonight to belabor this issue but 
just to make the point that there is a reason that we are at this 
position with debates over continuing resolutions, and it is because 
the Congress didn't function in previous years and handed over this CR 
scenario to be taken up by March 4. We are trying to resolve this with 
a Senate that has been cooperative and complicit in the downward spiral 
of the functionality of the House of Representatives. I am not speaking 
on the functionality of the Senate; although, I might not be 
complimentary of that either, should I dig into that.
  So that is the scenario that we are in. It has brought about some 
leverage points. It puts the House in the position where, if we choose 
to, we can hold our ground, and we can direct policy across to the 
Senate and through to the President of the United States.
  We should all understand that when the majority leader in the United 
States Senate speaks, he is speaking in such a way that is designed to 
be, in a way, a mouthpiece for the President, a shield to protect the 
President from public criticism and to protect the President from the 
initiatives that start here in this House.
  If Members of this House will make the argument that we can't pass 
legislation here that we believe in because Harry Reid won't take it in 
the Senate, we should be thinking in terms of: The proxy for the 
President in the Senate is resisting the Republican initiative, which 
is the will of the people that was brought about by the 87 new freshmen 
that have come here to support the incumbent Republicans. All the 
gavels in the United States House of Representatives were passed from 
the hands of one party into the hands of the other party. That is what 
has happened, the will of the people.
  Mr. Speaker, we have the obligation to carry out this will of the 
people in conformance, though, with our best efforts and our best 
judgment. And that works in consultation with Democrats, as it should. 
It hasn't always been the case working across the aisle, and there have 
been times that I have been accused of that myself. I will be a little 
more open than I have in the past, but in the end, the House should 
work its will.
  I stand on that principle, and I compliment the Speaker for laying 
that standard out. It is not going to be an easy banner to carry. He 
knows that. He understands this organism of the House of 
Representatives. And, in spite of all of the stress that is going on 
here, the House is positioning itself to work its will on the Senate. 
Working its will on the Senate is working its will through the proxy 
for the President and on towards the White House.
  If the President of the United States believes that all of the 
functions of government don't match up to his desire to protect his 
signature issue, ObamaCare, the American people need to know that that 
is his priority. My priority is to repeal it and defund it until such 
time as we can get a President to sign the repeal of ObamaCare. That 
has been my effort: to first kill the bill and then work to repeal it. 
We are about 1\1/2\ years into this effort, and I will continue my 
effort as intensively as I need to and for as long as it takes until 
the day comes when we can actually celebrate: free at last, free from 
the yoke of the socialized medicine policy called ObamaCare and free to 
exercise our liberty that I believe has been unjustly taken from us by 
the legislation. And something, too: two Federal courts have found it 
unconstitutional.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, that is my little editorial here. I haven't worked 
out a smooth transition into the next subject matter, but it occurs to 
me, as I stand here, that it has been a little while since I addressed 
you on the subject of immigration and that it has been a little bit 
quiet in the House of Representatives on the subject of immigration.
  So I want to raise this point and have this discussion, and it is 
this: We are

[[Page 3985]]

looking at numbers that show still millions of illegals here in the 
United States, about 60 percent of whom came across the border 
illegally, about 40 percent of whom overstayed their visas. And it is 
odd that the number of illegals is reported by the Department of 
Homeland Security to be less than it has been over the previous 8 years 
that I have been here in this Congress.
  When I came here, the number was 12 million illegals here in the 
United States. I have gone down to the border many times. I have sat in 
on hearings year after year, week after week, where expert witnesses 
come forward and testify, and they will testify that, of the net 
numbers of people that are interdicted coming across the border, they 
would perhaps stop one out of four of those. And it is not too hard to 
extrapolate those numbers: 3 to 5 years ago would come to 4 million 
illegal border crossings in a year, of which they contend that they 
stop about one out of four. I think they said perhaps they catch one 
out of three or one out of four. That would be the under-oath testimony 
of one of the representatives of the Border Patrol. I think that number 
may or may not be higher now.
  But I would go down to the border, and the agents down there would 
tell me, 25 percent? 10 percent has to come first, a 10 percent 
effectiveness rate.
  Now, one could argue whether 10 percent is the right number, and I 
hear numbers less than that, too, or whether 25 percent is the right 
number. What it says that, I don't think anybody contends that the 
effectiveness rate of the full list of Border Patrol officers we have 
all across our southern border is interdicting a number that would be 
approaching even half of those that attempt to cross the border. And 
those attempts to cross the border are probably down from the data that 
I have given you from 4 or 5 years ago.
  But think of 4 million illegal border crossings. Think of those 
attempts. Think of stopping perhaps 1 million, and now there are 3 
million in the United States in a year. And that 3 million number is 
going to grow. Now, some of them go back to their home country again, 
and they cross multiple times; that is true.
  But if we had 12 million illegals in 2003 and we have less than 12 
million illegals today, according to Janet Napolitano's Department of 
Homeland Security, what happened to all those people? We were 
accumulating people for all of these last 8 years. And if somehow by 
some miracle or some mystery of nature of humanity we don't accumulate 
illegals in America when we have large numbers of them coming in here, 
I suppose you could chalk it up to a death rate or a self-deportation 
rate.
  But, Mr. Speaker, we got to 12 million somehow. They came from 
somewhere. And people agree that 12 million was the illegal number--at 
least it was the floor, not the ceiling. I have always thought it was 
higher.

                              {time}  1740

  But if in the years prior to 2003 we accumulated 12 million illegals, 
and if we are watching 4 million illegal border crossings a year, that 
might even be a peak, and maybe that number is down by a third or so 
now, and a large percentage get into the United States, and a 
significant percentage of them stay here, the 12 million gets to be a 
bigger number, not a smaller number.
  How did Janet Napolitano come up with a number lower than 12 million? 
That is a question I would like to ask her, if she would stop before 
the Immigration Subcommittee so we could have that conversation. But I 
think the number is larger than 12 million. I have always thought it 
was larger than 12 million since I have been in this Congress, and I 
don't think that reduction shows the real population that is here.
  And as we look at the enforcement ratio that they show us on the 
southern border, it will show that they are stopping fewer and fewer 
illegals on the border. The Department of Homeland Security contends 
that because there is less interaction with our agents and illegals, 
that that says that there are fewer illegals. Well, that might be the 
case. But it also might be the case that there are just less arrests, 
fewer interdictions.
  But I do think that when you double the number of Border Patrol 
agents, which we have done and then some on the southern border, they 
are out there competing to be able to make those arrests and make those 
pickups. So I think the natural order of our law enforcement officers, 
they will still be doing the enforcement.
  But also it pushes people out away from those highly concentrated 
enforcement areas, those areas like El Paso, for example, and puts them 
through places in the desert that aren't watched as closely.
  So I ask the question: I used to hear testimony that would show that 
there were several hundred people that died in the desert trying to 
sneak into the United States, and as that number would grow, it would 
be 200 a year, then 250 a year, and a number that I recall that went up 
to 450 a year. Now, that is data that is more than 5 years old, and I 
haven't been able to get my hands on that old data, but I do remember.
  So if the number of deaths in the desert is going down, that would 
indicate that there are fewer people going through the desert, if the 
climate hasn't changed and other factors being all the same. But if the 
number of deaths in the desert of illegals is going up, that would 
indicate the traffic is going up.
  So in a number of the sectors we have seen those deaths go down, but 
in the Tucson sector most recently we have seen the number go up, which 
would indicate a larger number of illegals coming into the United 
States through the Arizona desert.
  As I traveled across New Mexico, the people there in a town hall 
meeting in Columbus, New Mexico, said almost unanimously that they 
believe there are more drugs coming through and more illegals coming 
through than they have seen before, and they believe that it is more 
dangerous for them than it has been before.
  That, Mr. Speaker, is the circumstance on the border. In any case, 
whether we have 11\1/2\ million illegals here or whether we have 20\1/
2\ million illegals here, I don't believe the number is shrinking. I 
think the number still grows. We know we have a significant number of 
illegal entrants into the United States. We don't have operational 
control of the whole border. We may have operational control of 
segments of the border, but there is much of it that we do not have. 
We've got a long ways to go.
  But I do believe, I believe that we can get operational control of 
the border, and I mean operational control of the border as defined in 
the Secure Fence Act that was pushed through this Congress by 
Congressman Duncan Hunter of California, whose son now serves in this 
Congress, and I am grateful that he does. I want to do honor to Duncan 
Hunter's work that passed the Secure Fence Act. I want to complete that 
project, because there are some other things I know.
  We are spending about $12 billion, let me see if I can get these 
numbers right, about $12 billion on our southern border, and that turns 
out to be about $6 million a mile; $6 million a mile.
  Mr. Speaker, I think about, what is a mile? That is four laps around 
an old track. Where I live in Iowa, it is to my west corner, or any 
other corner, for that matter. Our roads are laid out in a mile grid 
pattern, every section, a mile to the corners, and there is a survey 
pin in the center of every intersection that is a mile apart each way. 
They surveyed the old way, and they got a lot of it very, very close.
  A mile, $6 million a mile for every mile, all 2,000 miles of our 
southern border. Six million dollars a mile. And we are guarding that 
border with a 10 percent or 25 percent or maybe even a higher 
efficiency rate, but not up to 50 percent. And we think we are getting 
our money's worth in doing that? It doesn't mean that the agents aren't 
doing their job. It is, tactically, are we investing the right dollars 
into the right resources to get the best results that we can?
  So I look across my west mile, for example, and I think what if 
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano came to me and said, 
Steve, I'm going to make you an offer. I'll make you an

[[Page 3986]]

offer for a contract for you to guard a mile.
  How about a mile by my house? Guard that so that people that want to 
cross it cannot cross it unless they are authorized, and, if they are, 
direct them to a port of entry. And I'm going to pay you $6 million 
next year to see to it that no more than, say, oh, 75 percent of the 
people that try get across.
  That's what we're looking at. If it is a 25 percent efficiency rate 
at our southern border, that means that 75 percent of those that try 
are getting through. I admit, it is a little bit of old testimony, but 
not that old, Mr. Speaker, and it has changed in some of the sectors, 
but not all of them.
  So I am thinking in numbers that is the most recent congressional 
testimony that I know of, and that is a 25 percent efficiency rate, 
which was, some thought, a stretch then. So it is a 75 percent 
inefficiency rate.
  So if Janet Napolitano came to me and said, I have this offer for 
you. Here is $6 million. Guard that west mile of your house, and you 
can only let 75 percent of the people that illegally want to cross it 
go across. The other 25 percent, you've got to turn them back.
  Would I take that deal for that level of efficiency, especially if 
it's a 10-year contract? So now it's $60 million for 10 years? I would 
just hope I could live long enough to spend it all. Yes, I would take 
them up on that.
  Now, if the offer was, you're going to get your $60 million for your 
mile, $60 million over 10 years for guarding a mile of the border, 
you'll get your $60 million, but you have to provide efficiency, and 
you don't get to build empire, and you're not going to grow an empire 
that gives you political clout by hiring a lot of people and giving 
them good benefits packages and marketing it off in that fashion. 
You're going to have to make the best efficiency with it you can.
  I would look at that mile, and here is what I would do, Mr. Speaker. 
I would pick up the Duncan Hunter proposal and I would say, let's build 
a fence, a wall and a fence. Let's build a fence, a wall and a fence 
across that mile. And I would put the capital investment in it, and for 
a couple of million dollars, I would have that all done.
  For about a third of my first annual budget I would have that all 
done, and it would cut my costs on the guard and manpower costs for the 
duration of the decade and beyond, if you build a fence, a wall and a 
fence, when you amortize it and depreciate it out about for 40 years, 
and it would yield benefits every single year. They built that kind of 
a barrier in Israel, and it is 99-point-something percent effective. If 
you look around the world, there is fence after fence after fence.
  The people over on this side of the aisle as a rule will say, Don't 
you know that we don't do that? Don't you know that the Berlin Wall is 
abhorrent to us? My answer to that is, how did you get history so 
distorted in your mind that you would compare a fence to keep people 
out with a fence to keep people in? They are two opposite proposals, 
two opposite reasons.
  You can't argue that the Berlin Wall is like building a fence on our 
southern border unless you want to argue that the people that were in 
the west wanted to get over that wall into the east. They did not. 
There was no traffic sneaking in behind the Iron Curtain. It was the 
other way around.
  So we are trying to keep large masses of people out of the United 
States and force them all through the ports of entry and let them come 
in here the legal way. And there is no country in the world that is 
more generous than the United States. In fact, all of the countries in 
the world don't match up to the generosity of the United States from an 
immigration perspective.
  So we are generous. We bring in about 1.5 million people a year 
legally, and we watch as every night we have dozens and hundreds of 
people that come into the United States. One calculation showed during 
the peak of this 11,000 a night, 11,000 in a 24-hour period. Most of 
that is at night.
  Santa Anna's army was only about 5,000 to 6,000. It is nearly twice 
as large as Santa Anna's army every single night. No, they weren't in 
uniform, and a lot of them weren't carrying guns, and maybe they 
weren't a physical threat to us in a general sense. But that is a 
pretty large group of people, every night to see twice the size of 
Santa Anna's army coming into the United States illegally. And I will 
tell you, I believe it is at least the size of Santa Anna's army now, 
every night.
  And we are letting this happen day by day by day, and we turn a 
little blind eye to it, and we watch as we tragically pick up the 
bodies in the desert of those who are sneaking into the United States 
illegally that don't make it across that desert.

                              {time}  1750

  As the summer comes along, the numbers go up and up. But I asked the 
question a few years ago when they were testifying before the 
Immigration Committee about how many lives were lost in the desert 
while they were sneaking into the United States. How many Americans 
died at the hands of those who made it into the United States? How many 
times have we seen fatalities on the highway of someone who didn't have 
a driver's license? didn't have an insurance policy? that was in the 
United States illegally that didn't understand our laws? drinking and 
driving? had been picked up and had been interdicted by law 
enforcement?
  We lost a nun in Virginia last year very close to home. Corey Stewart 
knows about that, the county supervisor down there in, I believe, 
Prince William County. That's an example.
  We lost several kids in a school bus wreck in southwest Minnesota, 
north of me. That happened with an illegal that had been interdicted 
several times and turned loose into our society. And those families 
grieve for their lost children in a school bus wreck that would have 
been avoided if we'd enforced our laws at the border, if we'd enforced 
our law with local law enforcement here in the United States when we 
come across people in the United States illegally.
  This is not a big ask. A sovereign nation has to have borders. And 
what do borders mean? They mean that you control the traffic that's 
coming into those borders. And we can actually decide. You control the 
traffic going out of the United States. But we don't have to do that 
because we've developed a pretty good country here, but we're going to 
lose this country if we don't adhere to the rule of law. And the rule 
of law is that, when this Congress acts, the executive branch is bound 
to enforce the law. It's a prudent decision that reflects the will of 
the American people.
  The American people have said, We want our borders secure, and we 
don't want workers in the United States illegally taking jobs away from 
Americans or legal immigrants who become Americans. We want to have a 
tighter labor supply than that.
  If we wanted to up our 1\1/2\ million immigrants into the United 
States, we could do that. We could double this. We could triple it. We 
could go tenfold. We can say that anybody could come to the United 
States. All you have to do is sign up at the U.S. Embassy in your home 
country, and we'll give you a visa to come to the United States. We 
could say that. We could bring anybody in that wanted to come in. But 
why do we say no? Because there's a limit.
  We have asked the question here in this Congress, and a previous 
Congress has asked and answered the question: How many are too many? 
And what kind of people do we want to encourage to come here? And what 
kind of people do we want to discourage from coming here?
  These are the questions. We have all kinds of people involved in this 
debate that don't have the slightest idea how to begin to answer those 
questions. They just say, Oh, my compassion compels me to be for open 
borders. My heart bleeds for people that aren't as fortunate as 
Americans are. So, therefore, I'm just going to be for turning a blind 
eye or granting amnesty so that I don't feel guilty that everybody 
can't live the American Dream like we all do.
  Well, things have changed. Things have changed.
  There was a time when we had high levels of immigration into this 
country

[[Page 3987]]

and a zero welfare state. When my grandmother came over here in 1894, 
we weren't a welfare state. They screened people before they got on the 
boat, and they checked them out physically; they checked them out 
mentally. If they had a lot of resources, they got to ride first class 
and got unloaded in a different dock, but the rest of them went to 
Ellis Island.
  And even though they screened a good number of the people out before 
they boarded the ship--and, remember, they didn't want to haul them 
back to Europe. It was Europe primarily at this time. But even still, 
after they were screened and they arrived at Ellis Island, they gave 
them a physical. They looked in their eyes. They gave them kind of a 
quick mental test. They looked underneath their eyelids to see if they 
had a disease that put little white spots underneath there. And if they 
weren't of physical ability or mental ability to be able to take care 
of themselves, they put them back on the boat--I should say ``ship''--
and sent them back to the place where they came from. About 2 percent 
were sent back.
  Now here we are. We're interdicting 10 percent, 25 percent. We don't 
even get that many sent back because it's round robin. For a long time, 
we did catch and release, and we said, Come back and appear. Of course, 
they didn't appear. Then we did catch and return. We'd pick them up at 
downtown Nogales, take them up to the station sector location, and they 
would come in with their little Ziploc bag. We fingerprinted them, took 
the digital photograph of them, and sometimes we saw that same person 
came back. The peak one that I know of down there was in 27 times.
  We had a really good return trade going on with people that were 
coming into the United States illegally. We'd pick them up, give them a 
ride up to the headquarters, and all they had to do is just have their 
prints taken again, get their picture taken again, and then they got a 
little van ride down to the port of entry where they turned that little 
white van sideways, opened up the side door, and they'd get out and 
walk back to Mexico. The van would take off and go get another load. 
Around and around and around we went. It was round robin, and it wasn't 
accomplishing very much.
  Now we're at least bringing prosecution against most of them, which 
is providing a little more of a deterrent, Mr. Speaker. We've got to do 
a lot better. We've got to understand this mission. The mission is to 
protect our borders for this sovereign Nation. You can't have a border 
if you don't control the border.
  We need to control the border--all of it. We need to force all 
traffic through the ports of entry. We can do it if we build a fence, a 
wall and a fence. Yes, we need to put sensory devices up there and use 
some of the other technology that's there. And yes, we have to have 
Border Patrol agents that are there that are manning the fence and 
running to the locations where they need to to make the proper 
interdictions. All of that needs to take place.
  But we need to use our resources smartly, and we can. We can shut off 
all illegal traffic that's going to come across our southern border if 
we do these smart things. And I have not advocated, I will point out, 
Mr. Speaker, a 2,000-mile fence. I simply advocated that we build a 
fence, a wall and a fence, and build it until they stop going around 
the end--that's the standard--and force all the traffic through the 
ports of entry. Then we have to widen our ports of entry, beef them up 
so we can handle the increased traffic that's there so that it's not a 
significant impediment.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________