[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11255-11261]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
the remainder of the hour.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized 
here on the floor of the House of Representatives and be able to 
address you about the matters of the day and about the important issues 
that are before us here in this Congress and in this Nation.
  And I am continually impressed by the quality of the young people 
that are attracted to this city, both as visitors, vacationers, but 
also from people that will get their college degree or degrees and many 
of them with a 4.0 grade point average, active in all kinds of extra 
curriculars. The stellar cream of the American crop are magnetized to 
come to this city. I am impressed with them--their intelligence, their 
patriotism, their dedication on both sides of the aisle, Mr. Speaker.
  But I want to add something that is a perspective that I think those 
of us that have been around this planet a little bit longer have to 
offer, and that is, first, that some of us have lived a lot of history 
that others had to learn by reading the history book. And we know how 
the history books have been truncated. And there's not time to learn 
all the things that happened in history.
  Some of us learned a lot of history from the front page, from the 
radio, from the television, from the news, or from being in the middle 
of that history. And that all is part of the collective memory of this 
House of Representatives and the Senate on the other side. Some will 
say they probably remember more history in the Senate than we do here 
in the House.

                              {time}  1410

  Mr. Speaker, my point is this: You can have very smart people with 
very good principles, and the experiences of their life are supportive 
of them understanding the underpinnings of the greatness of this 
country, understanding the pillars of American exceptionalism, but 
sometimes the definitions and as it's presented is taken at face value 
because they might not have had years to see things go wrong when good 
ideas come before this Congress.
  And I look back and think of the time in 1995--actually, in 1994, 
when

[[Page 11256]]

Republicans took over the majority in the House of Representatives here 
after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness of being in the minority 
and not being able to advance legislation. There were many here on the 
Republican side of the aisle that were complacent with that, Mr. 
Speaker, but accepted the idea that the majority would maybe never 
change in their lifetimes, and they operated in the zone that had been 
delivered to them and they didn't go and charge the ramparts or the 
windmill, so to speak, because the ramparts, to them, were windmills.
  Yet there were others that were visionaries, that saw the vision, 
that realized that America was going in the wrong direction, and they 
built a coalition here in the House of Representatives that I watched 
on C-SPAN night after night after night, step down here on this floor 
at the very spot, Mr. Speaker, and make arguments to the American 
people, make arguments to me that moved me, moved me in my head and 
moved me in my heart and helped me understand that it wasn't me alone 
that was seeing that America was going in the wrong direction, that we 
were overspending and we had this massive welfare system and that we 
were expanding the dependency class in America. This spirited people 
that we are, this unique people that we are here in America were being 
diminished, were being diminished by the growth of the nanny state and 
the growth of the dependency class in America.
  So in 1994, the inspiration came from many people that were hearing 
the inspiring words that were spoken into this very microphone, Mr. 
Speaker, but also across the country. On talk radio, across the 
backyard fence, over a cup of coffee, at work, at church, at school, at 
play, at recreation, in fishing boats and golf carts across America, we 
had a national conversation about where America needed to go. And the 
result of that consensus of the national conversation was a massive 
change in the seats here in the House of Representatives and a new 
majority in the House of Representatives that came sweeping in in 
November of 1994.
  And there were big changes. The freshmen class that came in and was 
sworn in here on this floor in January of 1995 were revolutionaries, 
and they brought a difference and they forced a balanced budget here in 
the House that was not expected to ever be reached. They cut spending 
until they forced a balanced budget. And they reduced welfare and put 
more people in a position where they could earn their dignity and a 
paycheck at the same time.
  Now, as this unfolded, they brought forth, as they said they would in 
the Contract with America, that they would vote on a constitutional 
amendment to produce a balanced budget. That was a 1994 promise that 
was fulfilled in 1995. A vote on a balanced budget amendment here in 
the House of Representatives that passed the House of Representatives, 
was messaged right directly down the hallway to the United States 
Senate, Mr. Speaker, where the Senate took up the vote for the 
constitutional amendment to balance the budget, and it failed in the 
Senate in 1995 by a single vote.
  How different, how different might it have been, Mr. Speaker, if one 
more Senate seat had gone the other way, if one more United States 
Senate race had resulted in a victory for someone who believed in a 
balanced budget amendment, believed in the Constitution, itself, fiscal 
responsibility--those American exceptionalism principles that I have 
briefly mentioned--but believed in requiring a balanced budget 
constitutionally. How different it might have been if the Senate had 
voted with a two-thirds majority, as the House did in 1995, and sent a 
constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget to the States, 
the 50 States for ratification.
  Now, we know, Mr. Speaker, it takes three-quarters of the States to 
ratify an amendment to the Constitution before it becomes incorporated 
into our Constitution. We'll never know how many States would have 
ratified that amendment because they didn't get the chance to do so. 
Had that been messaged to the States in 1995, we can only ask the 
question: Would the States have ratified a balanced budget amendment? I 
think so. I believe three-quarters of the States, at a minimum, would 
have done so; and if they did not, I think it would have changed the 
politics within enough of the States so that they would have.
  Imagine if this Congress here and now, today, this week, this month 
would pass a balanced budget amendment to the United States 
Constitution out of this House with a better than two-thirds majority--
equal or better than--to the Senate where they need 67 votes in the 
Senate, if that constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget 
gets messaged to the States. Some will say look at the makeup of the 
State legislatures. Let's put it this way, Mr. Speaker: There aren't 
enough Republican majorities to pass and ratify a constitutional 
amendment to require a balanced budget. Maybe not, and not by an 
analytical judgment of this moment, Mr. Speaker.
  But think of what happens in a State like my neighboring State of 
Illinois, for example, where Democrats control the politics and they 
insist on deficit spending and running themselves into the red. It 
seems as though the right of passage in Illinois is, if you are elected 
Governor, you go off to prison. But if we have a balanced budget 
amendment sitting on the docket of the Illinois State Legislature 
today, I don't think there's much of any chance that they would ratify 
an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to do such a thing.
  But I do think, Mr. Speaker, that there will be hundreds of people 
all across Illinois that will decide that they want to step up and run 
for public office so that they can have the chance to vote to ratify a 
balanced budget to the United States Constitution in the State 
legislature. They would go out and campaign, and they would knock on 
doors, and they would talk to their friends and neighbors and say, I 
don't care if you're a Democrat. I don't care if you have some other 
interest. The best interest you can have is the long-term best 
interests of the United States of America. And it's becoming 
increasingly clear that the long-term best interests of the United 
States of America are to require that the budget be balanced by the 
Constitution because this Congress has not demonstrated--and the 
President clearly has not demonstrated--that they have enough 
discipline to crank this spending down to balance the budget.
  Part of the reason is we have elections every 2 years in the House 
and every 6 years in the Senate. So the incentive is be in a position 
to keep your job in 2 years or 6 years. There is not an incentive out 
there that tells the Members of the House and Senate that we should 
prepare the groundwork for our grandchildren, let alone children yet to 
be born. That's part of the dynamics. The other part of the dynamics is 
that this Capitol is full of bright, energetic people. A lot of them 
come to my office on a regular basis. A lot of them are honorable 
people with good intentions. But a lot of them are there because they 
want the tax dollars of the American people to go to their interests. 
And because there's a constant drumbeat of asking for more and more and 
more spending and the push for--well, I know that you are fiscally 
responsible and you want to balance the budget, but can you just make 
this exception because it's so important. It's so important issue after 
issue. You could be accused of voting against children and women and 
seniors and minorities and handicapped and combat-wounded veterans all 
together if we do anything other than increase the budget to the level 
that's hoped for and predicted by the President of the United States.
  So when I stand up for fiscal responsibility, Mr. Speaker, I often 
get this statement which is, Well, you're a Republican. You Republicans 
spent too much money. And you have to admit that you are half the 
problem. Well, no, I don't, Mr. Speaker. First, I voted against a lot 
of that spending. I've been an original cosponsor of the balanced 
budget amendment offered by Congressman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia since 
I arrived in this town. And I'm sticking with him and the principles 
that are that constitutional amendment that we passed out of the 
Judiciary Committee that hangs on the calendar of the House today.

[[Page 11257]]

  But aside from that, speaking from a party-by-party standpoint, the 
truth is this: Yes, Republicans spent too much money, and in the middle 
of the Iraq war, we came within $160 billion of balancing the budget. 
Now, that's not particularly impressive if you dial it back a 
generation or two or three, but it's very impressive when you think of 
it in terms of the President's budget, which is a $1.65 trillion 
deficit in a single year.
  So actual, real numbers come down to we came within $160 billion of 
balancing the budget at the height of the Iraq war, and had it not been 
for the Iraq war, we would have balanced the budget. If the equation is 
there, it's that simple.

                              {time}  1420

  But the President has proposed a deficit, an annual deficit spending 
budget, of $1.65 trillion. Now, I have said the deficit of Republicans 
is $160 billion and the President's deficit is $1.65 trillion, and on 
his deficit, Mr. Speaker, I am not saying that this is a 10-year 
accumulated deficit. This is 1 year, $1.65 trillion.
  Now, yes, Republicans spent too much money, but for every dollar that 
they went into deficit, the President proposes $10 of deficit spending 
into the same equation. I can't see that that's a shared 
responsibility. It looks to me like it's 10 times the overspending on 
the part of the President versus one-tenth of that on the part of the 
Republican Congress here in the middle of the Iraq war. Those are the 
facts as they are established by the Congressional Budget Office. We 
need to stand on facts here, not on emotions, and we need a level now 
of fiscal austerity.
  Mr. Speaker, we need to get to this point where we can send another 
balanced budget across to the United States Senate and ask them to pass 
it with a two-thirds majority and message it to the States. Give the 
States the chance to ratify it this time. If they had the chance to 
ratify the balanced budget amendment in 1995, I might or might not be 
standing here. I might have realized that, listen, government did its 
job, and I can go ahead and raise my family and run my business and 
live the American Dream. But it didn't happen.
  It didn't happen, and some of us, out of frustration, stood up and 
engaged in public service and public life, and we were elected to 
positions in perhaps our State legislatures and then came here to this 
Congress. I have seen this country going in the right direction. I have 
seen this country going in the wrong direction.
  I have seen the spirit of America be diminished.
  How many people today remember Jimmy Carter's malaise speech where he 
essentially said to us, You have to lower your aspirations. Yes, you 
are Americans, but it means something different in the future than it 
has in the past--that America is no longer going be a country with 
unlimited resources and prosperity and aspirations and realized dreams, 
but that we'll have to wear a sweater and turn the thermostat down and 
drive at 55 and be limited by government.
  We have some of that going on now. We have the nanny state being 
reestablished under this administration. Now, I would suggest that 
there are a number of ways to illustrate that, Mr. Speaker, but I would 
point it out this way: that the food retailers sat down, along with a 
couple of other interests--and this is something driven by the First 
Lady, I believe. They have identified that about 3 percent of the kids 
in America are obese.
  You may have seen in the news this week about some effort to go in 
and remove obese children from their parents because obese parents are 
a bad influence on the diets of their kids, and kids that are 
overweight are a health risk, and they are more likely to have 
diabetes. Statistically, that's true.
  Mr. Speaker, I don't need a nanny state that is going to go in and 
weigh my kids and weigh me and my wife or my sons and daughters-in-law 
and grandchildren and decide whether I am going to be able to manage my 
own children's lives. I need the nanny state out of my life, not in my 
life, Mr. Speaker. I don't need them deciding what my diet is going to 
be.
  But this initiative that flows from the First Lady is about cutting 
1.5 trillion calories from the diets of young people, because I guess 
that you run them across the scales and do an average and do the 
calculus that 3,550 extra calories over what you are burning amounts to 
a pound. Then they can do the math and figure out, if they can reduce 
1.5 trillion calories from all the right places, these kids are going 
to lose weight in all the right places. It doesn't work that way.
  How are you going to do this? I asked them.
  They said, Well, you know, we're going to reduce the number of 
calories in a bag of Doritos, for example.
  How do you do that?
  Take a couple of chips out.
  Okay. What do we think a kid is going to do if he's hungry and there 
are a couple of less chips in a bag of Doritos? He eats two bags.
  Then they said, Well, we've got the power bars that have 150 
calories. We're going to reduce them down to 90. That way, these kids 
aren't going to gain weight. They're going to lose weight because 
they're eating fewer calories in a power bar.
  So, if you pick up a power bar and you're hungry, you're eating that 
because you want the energy, and your appetite calls for it. If there 
are only 90 calories in there, I will suggest that these kids are going 
to eat two power bars and consume 180 calories rather than settle for 
90 when, before, they were getting 150 out of that previous power bar.
  Kids are obese for two reasons. They have voracious appetites, and 
they don't exercise enough. It's that simple.
  The former Secretary of Defense came out and said that 30 percent our 
youth that are overweight is a national security risk because they are 
too overweight. They don't quality for the military service, and we, 
therefore, can't recruit enough volunteers from the universe of people 
that are left that have a waistline that fits the standards for our 
military.
  Now, I would suggest that being obese does not destroy one's skeleton 
or muscular tissue or nervous tissue; it's just extra weight to carry 
around. And if it's a national security issue, then let's extend basic 
training, and they can just stay there and do exercises and eat the 
diet in the mess hall until they make weight.
  This is not a national security issue, and I am constantly hearing 
these arguments about national security. One of them is, well, national 
security is fresh fruits and vegetables, and if we don't have fresh 
tomatoes it is a national security issue. So, therefore, we must have 
cheap labor to pick the tomatoes. Never mind that tomatoes have been 
bred now to be picked by machine.
  I ask the question, Mr. Speaker: How long did the Eskimos get along 
without any fresh fruits or vegetables?
  They have lived for centuries on the high protein of the animal meat 
that they can harvest up along the Arctic Circle, but they don't have 
carrots or broccoli or lettuce or tomatoes or pears or apples or 
peaches. None of that grows up there in the Arctic Circle. They are 
carnivores. They have gotten along really well eating a meat diet, 
because the nutrients are in there, and they are concentrated. It's not 
a national security issue not to have guacamole even though it's a 
profitable thing to raise the avocados.
  We get way out of balance here in this Congress and overemphasize 
things with all kinds of hyperbole, which brings me back around to 
where we need to go as a Nation, Mr. Speaker. We need to go down this 
path of a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. The President 
doesn't want to balance the budget or he would have offered one.
  And the President wants to scare seniors. He did that on purpose. 
That's the statement that he made a couple of days ago when he said, if 
we hit the end of the debt ceiling limit, he can't guarantee that 
military pensions or Social Security would be paid on time. That was a 
calculated statement. It was calculated to scare the group of people 
who is the easiest to scare. That's our seniors.

[[Page 11258]]

  The reason they are is because they have worked their whole lifetimes 
to get into the position that they are in, and most of them are on a 
fixed income. That fixed income might be a pension plan, other savings, 
Social Security or a rent check or an investment of some kind. But when 
the Federal Government interferes with that and starts to send a 
message that they can't count on any component of it, yes, they get 
concerned, rightfully concerned.
  This system that we have, entitlements, cannot hold together if we 
continue down the same path we are on. We have about 40 million people 
that qualify for Medicare today. In 10 more years, it will be about 70 
million people as the baby boomers come on line.
  It isn't just that non-defense discretionary spending in this 
Congress is growing too fast. We can't solve the problem if we shut 
down the non-defense discretionary spending or if we ratchet it 
backwards. We must address entitlement. We also must guarantee to the 
seniors: You have organized your lives around Medicare--in fact, Social 
Security. We need to protect them and their interests. They are 
deserving of that. They may be getting greater benefits than they ever 
paid in, but they still have to be able to count on this Congress 
keeping its word.
  Meanwhile, as a government that's spending itself into oblivion, 
however big a Nation we are, there is no one to back us up. We don't 
get to go to the European Union and ask for a loan to bail us out. We 
don't even get to go to the Chinese or the Saudis to ask for a loan to 
bail us out. We are the last stopgap in Western civilization, the free 
enterprise world.
  Remember, there are a lot of entities outside that would like to see 
this country go down, tumble, collapse to some degree. We don't have 
friends all around the world. So we are the ones who have to hold the 
line. We don't get to go back for a backup of any kind. The Greeks 
could at least look to the European Union, and what did the European 
Union say? We will loan you some money to bridge you through this 
problem, but you have got to cut your spending to our satisfaction 
before we will loan the money.

                              {time}  1430

  Now we have a President that says he can't guarantee that military 
pensions are going to be paid or that Social Security is going to be 
paid because he wants to use that as leverage to try to get a debt-
ceiling increase by making the least amount of concessions. And he 
would like to make no concessions. That's the scenario that we're in.
  So I've introduced today, along with Michele Bachmann and Louie 
Gohmert with a growing number of cosponsors, an act called the PROMISES 
Act. What it does is it requires that our military be paid first and on 
time, every time, no exceptions, no hesitation. Whether it is a 
spending gap that is a result of the expiration of a continuing 
resolution or whether we hit the debt ceiling, the revenues in the 
United States Treasury--and there will be plenty there for this under 
all circumstances that we can envision--go first to pay the military.
  They are our number one line of defense. Their lives are on the line. 
They should never have to wonder in a foxhole or on a ship or in the 
air and their families near the barracks or at home should never have 
to wonder whether that paycheck is going to be electronically 
transferred into their bank account on time every time. That's our 
guarantee with the PROMISES Act.
  The military should never be used as a pawn in a political discussion 
here on the floor of the House of Representatives.
  The second thing is we need to take care of the full faith and credit 
of the United States Government. That means we have to pay the interest 
on the necessary principal on our debt. We can do that with incoming 
revenue. And those who say we can't are wrong, and I don't care what 
their title is. We have $200 billion in anticipated revenue per month. 
It takes $11 billion to pay our military, and it takes $20 billion to 
service our debt. That's $31 billion out of a $200 billion average 
revenue stream. That turns out to be--and I know, Mr. Speaker, you have 
calculated this in your head--15.2 percent of the overall spending of 
the revenue stream per month--15.2 percent.
  That means pay the military first, service our debt second, guarantee 
the full faith and credit of the United States of America, and there's 
still plenty of money in that funding stream left over to pay Social 
Security, pay Medicare, go on down the line and pay military pensions--
keep faith with those who have stood on the line for America--and keep 
faith with our senior citizens. And it takes the leverage out of the 
hands of the President. That's what the PROMISES Act is about.
  And some will say, well, no, you can't. The money is not there. Tell 
me where that money is, then, the $200 billion a month--$11 billion to 
pay our military, $20 billion to service our debt, and it costs $58 
billion per month for Social Security, and for Medicare it is $43 
billion per month. We can even add defense on there, and we're getting 
up to the limit. I mean all defense, not just the military pay.
  So, as you can see, Mr. Speaker, we have lots of options. I want to 
take the options off the table for the President. I don't want him to 
be scaring our seniors. I want that guarantee to be there, but I go 
just far enough in the PROMISES Act that we take care of the absolutely 
necessaries, and I'm open to the discussion on how we might add other 
priorities behind them. First priority: pay our troops first. Second 
priority: pay the interest and the principal to service the national 
debt.
  And as we move forward with this, the brinksmanship gets more and 
more intense. And as the President of the United States is looking to 
try to get us to crack, we need to understand that decisions will be 
made on August 2. The President alone holds the most power to decide 
who gets paid and who does not. I saw a presentation this morning that 
proposed that unemployment benefits get paid, but our military not get 
paid. Now if that's something that's going to be proposed out of the 
White House and not just a hypothetical scenario, I think everybody in 
this country knows about the inequity of that. We would pay people not 
to work but not pay the people to put their lives on the line for us? 
But that's an option open to the President today. That threat is 
already out there drifting through the stratosphere--I should say 
cyberspace--in discussions, serious discussions about our priorities.
  This Congress can pass priorities; and absent statutory language that 
requires the executive branch to pay our bills in a priority order, he 
has the discretion to pay them in any order, or maybe just let them go 
in no order and see what happens out of a grab bag. He could sit in the 
Oval Office and toss a coin or throw darts at a dart board and decide 
who gets paid and who doesn't right now.
  I'm calling upon this Congress to pass the PROMISES Act or pass 
another priority ``pay the bills'' act so that we keep faith with our 
military, we keep faith with our international creditors, and we keep 
faith with our senior citizens.
  Furthermore, when I hear the language that says ``pay the military 
first and pay the national debt second,'' that means pay the Chinese 
first when you're servicing the national debt. If we borrowed the money 
from the Chinese, we have to pay the money back to the Chinese, unless 
they sell our debt to somebody else. That's the facts. And if we didn't 
intend to pay them back, we shouldn't have borrowed the money in the 
first place.
  But if we're concerned about servicing 100 percent of our debt 
because the Chinese hold $1 trillion of it, they hold less than 10 
percent of our debt. So when we put $10 out to service our debt, one of 
those $10, less than one of those $10 goes to the Chinese. Half of 
those dollars go to Americans that hold U.S. debt, and some of that 
goes to the Saudis and, of course, other countries around the world. 
But this isn't ``pay the Chinese first.'' This is keep faith--keep the 
full faith and credit of the United States Government first and keep 
faith with our

[[Page 11259]]

military. We owe them more than we owe even our creditors.
  I went through some of these things during the eighties, the farm 
crisis years of the eighties. That added clarity to it. Three thousand 
banks were closed during that decade in the United States. A good 
number of banks around my neighborhood, including my bank, was closed. 
And I remember when it happened. It was April 26, 1985, Friday 
afternoon, 3 o'clock, when the FDIC showed up at my bank, put a red 
tag, a red sheet notice on the door, taped it on there, and two highway 
patrolmen stood at attention on either side of that door to guard the 
bank. And at that instant, they froze every single account, including 
mine. I had payroll to meet, and my customers' accounts were frozen 
along with mine. We had to go to a barter system to keep the business 
running right in the middle of corn planting in Iowa. You could not 
have picked a worse date or time than they did on that Friday 
afternoon.
  But, Mr. Speaker, I learned what was important. The first thing we 
did was go to a barter system. And I loaded and hauled hay to the 
auction to turn that into cash so I could pay my employees. They were 
first. I fed myself last. I paid the interest second and the necessary 
principal third. I kept full faith and credit with my creditors.
  But the first thing that--the people that were on the line every day 
making the business run were like our troops are today. Without them, 
everything stops and you live in fear; you don't have anything going. 
Pay them first, those people on the front line first; pay the interest 
second, keep your credit; pay the necessary principal third. And then 
you can look around and maybe make some tough decisions and options. 
That's where this country is today.
  I do believe we must balance this budget, and I believe we must pass 
a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget. And I believe the 
American people will support such an endeavor. And if we don't have the 
votes to pass a constitutional amendment to balance the budget among 
the States, then the people in America will rise up and elect their 
State representatives and their State senators to go to their 
statehouses and ratify the constitutional amendment to balance the 
budget.
  The American people want this. This is a national movement. Some of 
this is coming out of the Tea Party; the constitutional conservatives 
with a cause are activated. They stood up against ObamaCare, and 
they'll stand up to balance this budget, and they will still stand up 
against ObamaCare.
  And let me add to this, Mr. Speaker, that for this Congress to think 
about going down a path that would offer a balanced budget to the 
States in exchange for, let's say, some cuts in spending, increasing 
the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion and cutting our spending as a 
percentage of GDP, ratcheting it down to 19.99 percent, which is short 
of the constitutional amendment's cap, for this Congress to do this but 
still allow what we will know as $105.5 billion to go forward to 
implement and enforce ObamaCare is irresponsible.
  There are $23.6 billion sitting there right now automatically 
appropriated for these times, this year, for Kathleen Sebelius and 
others to implement ObamaCare while the President delays the case that 
should be expedited before the Supreme Court that I believe will find 
ObamaCare to be unconstitutional. It's already been rejected by the 
American people by margins of 60 percent or better. There are 87 
freshmen in this House of Representatives, all of whom ran on repeal of 
ObamaCare and all of whom voted to repeal ObamaCare. Every Republican 
in the House of Representatives voted to repeal ObamaCare, and every 
Republican in the United States Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare.
  And it's unconstitutional in my view in four different areas of the 
Constitution, and the Supreme Court will eventually rule when the 
President can no longer delay the actions of the Supreme Court. And he 
is believing that he can implement components of this and that we won't 
want to let it go if the Court finds it unconstitutional.

                              {time}  1440

  He is believing that since there is no severability clause in 
ObamaCare, that somehow the Supreme Court will look at it, maybe find a 
component of it unconstitutional, but decide at their option not to 
throw it all out and recognize a nonexistent severability clause. And 
that would be, a severability clause says if any part is found 
unconstitutional, then the other parts are still retained. If it is 
missing that clause, if any part is found unconstitutional, then all 
parts are then not retained and essentially repealed.
  The language that I have introduced, the language that Michele 
Bachmann introduced, and others, Connie Mack comes to mind, with all 
Republicans voting for it, is this. It is 40 words to repeal ObamaCare 
and it ends with these words: ``as if it had never been enacted.'' That 
is the language we must put on a President's desk who will sign it.
  In the meantime, to spend $23.6 billion to implement an 
unconstitutional piece of legislation that is 2,600 pages long, that 
kind of money in a period that must be a period of austerity is an 
absolute waste. We know it is a waste. If we are at this point where we 
are going to cut down spending, we have to do it by cutting off the 
$2.6 trillion of outlays that are ObamaCare; and $23.6 billion of that 
is sitting now in the hands mostly of Kathleen Sebelius, and they are 
seeking to send the roots of ObamaCare into our lives and expand the 
dependency in us so we decide we can't get along without ObamaCare.
  How much time do I have left, Mr. Speaker?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. West). The gentleman has 13 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  Mr. Speaker, this ObamaCare of $23.6 billion that is sitting there 
being implemented, and with Kathleen Sebelius, with the discretion to 
spend that and send the roots down and expand the dependency class, 
here is an example. One of those example is this. They advertised that 
we needed to do ObamaCare because we had so many people who had 
preexisting conditions, and they would be refused for insurance. So 
when they were refused, they didn't have any way to get health 
insurance and that it was a human tragedy.
  So these huge numbers of people who were uninsurable would be brought 
into the fold of the new ObamaCare under the preexisting conditions 
language that already is law. But a month or so ago, they discovered 
that in spite of how hard they tried to recruit people with preexisting 
conditions, and I remind you, we have 306 million people in America. 
And of those 306 million people, the numbers were supposed to be large, 
impressive, maybe not astronomical, of those who had preexisting 
conditions and could not buy insurance.
  And what they found, they could find only 18,000 people, in spite of 
them advertising preexisting insurance. All across this land, 18,000 
people only who had signed up for the preexisting conditions component, 
18,000. Divide that out across the States. Put 50 into that 18,000 and 
see what kind of a problem that is. It's a small number when you divide 
it by the 50 States. And the States could manage those kinds of numbers 
after you distribute it by population. For example, the majority of the 
States, including Iowa, have a high-risk pool that we subsidize with 
tax dollars to buy the premiums down so people with preexisting 
conditions can buy a policy. I encourage that. I think that is a good, 
responsible thing to do.
  But Obama's preexisting policy only had 18,000 people after a year of 
effort trying to get people to sign up. So Kathleen Sebelius took what 
she considers to be latitude within the law and decided to buy the 
premiums down another 40 percent, pay another 40 percent of the 
premiums out of this pot of money that she has that is automatically 
appropriated to her to a total tune of $105.5 billion, and they still 
couldn't find enough people to make it look like there was a reason to 
have preexisting conditions policy in the Federal code, and so they 
removed the condition that you have a preexisting condition.

[[Page 11260]]

  Now we have an insurance policy for people that want to signed up 
with the Federal Government that may or may not have an illness. They 
may not have been sick a day in their lives. They don't even need to 
make the case that they have been turned down for insurance by a single 
company in America. They just have to sign up, and they'll put them on 
the policy and they'll buy the premium down by at least 40 percent. 
This is what government is doing. And they are seeking to expand 
Medicaid and collapse Medicare into Medicaid.
  We saw what they were trying to do under Bill Clinton's era where--
and they started this SCHIP, which now is CHIP, Children's Health 
Insurance Program, and ObamaCare kind of does that in. But it was 
expanded within the States. It started out to be 200 percent of 
poverty. If you're at 200 percent of poverty or less, we'll help pay 
the health insurance premiums for your children. Those are low-cost 
premiums, by the way. Kids don't have a lot of problems. And on the 
upper end of this, Bill Clinton wanted to lower the Medicare 
eligibility age to 55, if you remember.
  So if you can insure kids up to the age of 26, which ObamaCare does, 
and you can lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55, now you've only 
got that little window in there of 24 years, the most productive years 
of a person's life, presumably, and often is the case, that the 
government is stepping in requiring that you stay on or mandating that 
you be able to stay on your parents' health insurance until age 26. You 
can get elected to Congress when you're 25, come down here and swear 
in, still on your mommy and daddy's health insurance and come over on 
the government plan right away. That's what that means. I wanted my 
kids to grow up.
  But if we are going to insure kids through SCHIP or CHIP or a Federal 
mandate up to age 26 and pay those premiums out of tax dollars, and 
then lower the Medicare eligibility age, as Clinton wanted to do, and 
it is impossible in this environment today, down to 55, it is only a 
24-year window. Then they would add to those at the lower end and lower 
the upper end age until they got it to collapse altogether. In the 
meantime, collapse Medicare into Medicaid, you have the formula for 
socialized medicine. That would be the great bleed of most everybody on 
this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker.
  Mr. Speaker, they want socialized medicine. John Conyers back in 1981 
introduced a socialized medicine policy that forbade anyone from doing 
health care services on a fee-for-service. They had to be on the salary 
of the national health care system.
  The Federal Government would hire and presumably fire everybody that 
worked in health care, and no one could charge a fee for it, and no one 
could be paid a fee-for-service. They would have to be working for the 
government within the health care system.
  We know what happens when government takes things over. I ask the 
American people how is the service in the place when you go into 
government offices. It is about the same as it is where you go in where 
somebody has a monopoly. I'm not picking on government workers. 
Government, often by definition, has a monopoly. If you don't have 
competition, you don't have to be nice.
  I learned that in the auto--what do I call it--the vehicle 
registration department in the county courthouse the first time I went 
in to register a vehicle at about age 16. I learned that. They had the 
market cornered. They didn't have to be nice. They could open the door 
when they wanted to and close the door when they wanted to. There was 
no motive for them to try to provide better service for me or anyone 
else. However long the line was, we stood in it. Anybody in Washington, 
D.C. who goes down to the vehicle parking department here in 
Washington, D.C., you will find the same thing.
  When my wife goes down to get her annual $10 ticket so we can park 
our car for a short period of time on the streets of Washington, D.C., 
invariably it is a 4-hour process. And I have had to send my chief of 
staff and a driver down there through a 4-hour process just to get a 
$10 permit because they have got an attitude. Their attitude is we 
don't have to service anybody; we have the market cornered. That's the 
attitude. Go down there and go buy a parking permit if you think 
ObamaCare and a national health care act are good for you, Mr. Speaker, 
or anyone else.
  I don't want to see monopolies; I want to see competition. And 
ObamaCare eliminates competition, and it prescribes a product that the 
American people have to buy for the first time in history, a product, a 
government-approved, or if they had their way, a government-created 
health insurance policy that a person has to buy unless you are of low 
enough means-tested income that they are going to pay the premium for 
you.

                              {time}  1450

  This has never happened in the history of America, how one lower 
court could come to a conclusion that the individual mandate is 
constitutional. It is appalling to me that a judge could sit on a bench 
and come to a conclusion like that--or a panel of judges, a majority of 
a panel of judges--and it was 2-1, I believe, on a three-judge panel.
  Think of this, Mr. Speaker: think of when you get your paycheck. 
Let's just say you've got--let's keep it reasonable--$500 take-home pay 
for a week's paycheck. If your health insurance premium is $100 a week 
and if the government says you must buy a health insurance policy that 
is of a value that costs you $100 a week, what they have done is 
confiscated--confiscated--20 percent of your paycheck, of your take-
home payroll, your after-tax dollars, and it is after-tax dollars.
  Let's just say the government decides you need to buy a General 
Motors or a Chrysler because we have a vested interest in that and that 
you can't drive a clunker--we're going to outlaw those, so we have to 
buy a new car every 10 years or have one that's within 10 years of new. 
They could prescribe that with the same standards that they prescribe 
ObamaCare on us. Let's say that car payment takes another $100 a week. 
Now you've got $200 of the $500 that is swallowed up by the government. 
That's 40 percent of your take-home pay commandeered by Uncle Sam.
  Then they decide that the appliance companies aren't making enough 
money and that you need to buy certain appliances--and I can go through 
this a little faster. They might decide you have to buy this diet food 
I talked about a little bit earlier. They might put a tax on the non-
diet pop. Then pretty soon your paycheck is swallowed up. Your whole 
$500 is gone because the government has told you how to spend every 
single dollar.
  If the government can commandeer a single dollar out of your paycheck 
that they direct you to spend on a product that's produced by 
government or approved by government, then they can commandeer the 
second dollar and the third dollar and 99 cents out of every dollar and 
100 cents out of every dollar. That's what we're faced with.
  That's the biggest reason why ObamaCare is unconstitutional, Mr. 
Speaker.
  The American people are not adequately outraged. We have a character 
among us. We've got a history that the product of the will of the 
people emerges out of the House and the Senate and goes to the 
President's desk for his signature or a veto and an attempt to override 
a veto. That happens once in a while. That's supposed to be the voice 
of the American people, and we expect it because of the structure of 
this republican form of government.
  I want to emphasize the Constitution guarantees us not a democracy. 
The Constitution guarantees us a republican form of government.
  That means representative.
  That means we don't go out there and take the temperature of the 
public and do a poll and decide it's the will of the people today, so 
let's race in that direction. We have an obligation to listen to the 
people and understand what they want and have a very sensitive

[[Page 11261]]

antenna to pick up on the will of the American people.
  It doesn't end there, Mr. Speaker; it starts there.
  Our job is to be full-time paying attention to all the facts and the 
figures and all of the components and to be making the best decisions 
possible because we are representatives here in a republican form of 
government. This Republic is not a democracy. It isn't two coyotes and 
a sheep taking a vote on what's for dinner.
  We have liberty. We have American liberty.
  We have rights that come from God that are guaranteed to us in the 
Constitution.
  Now, I believe that God moved the Founding Fathers around like men on 
a chessboard to shape this Nation, and I believe that for a lot of 
reasons. One of them is I can't go back on this Monday morning of 2011 
and redraw the course of history and even imagine that I could come up 
with a result that would be half of what has been produced by this 
great gift of liberty and freedom--freedom of speech, religion, and the 
press. All the people who came here to exercise their religious 
liberty, their free enterprise liberty, their property rights, to be 
protected from double jeopardy, and to have a jury of their peers and 
face their accusers, a lot of that comes from Roman law.
  The reasonable Western Civilization culture that lets us analyze our 
problems is part of who we are. They landed on a continent with 
unlimited natural resources at the dawn of the industrial revolution 
and settled it from sea to shining sea in a blink of a historical eye.
  That's America.
  We are a vigorous people.
  We've got the vigor of every donor civilization on the planet. And 
now they want to impose ObamaCare on us? They want to raise the debt 
ceiling by $2.4 trillion or $4 trillion and ask us to go further and 
deeper into debt and put that on our grandchildren and children not yet 
born?
  My youngest granddaughter, Reagan Ann King, entered this world with 
$44,000 that she owed Uncle Sam. That has got to stop, Mr. Speaker.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

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