[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8174-8178]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 COUNTRY ENVISIONED BY FOUNDING FATHERS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Walberg). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 5, 2011, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa 
(Mr. King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, as always it's my privilege and honor 
to address you here on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives and take up a series of issues that I think you should 
be considering, and I would recommend that be the case as long as the 
broader part of the body of this Congress and the public is listening 
in to this conversation that we are having, Mr. Speaker.
  I would make a series of points on where our Nation needs to focus 
our energy, where this Congress needs to focus its energy, and how we 
turn this

[[Page 8175]]

country back into the country that was envisioned by our Founding 
Fathers. I would make the point, Mr. Speaker, that we have now, coming 
on almost 4 years ago, elected a President who rode into office with a 
large majority in his party, in both the House of Representatives and 
the Senate.
  I warned then, going into the 2008 election, that if America 
elected--and I quote it this way--the ruling troika, the troika of 
President Obama, the majority leader of the United States Senate, Harry 
Reid, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, that the three of them 
could go into a phone booth and thereafter make a decision on what they 
decided to do to America without accountability that could check them 
in their very active endeavor to shape America in a way that wasn't 
envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
  Lo and behold, Mr. Speaker, that is what happened. The voters in 2008 
made that decision. They expanded the Democrat majority here in the 
House of Representatives. They also elected Barack Obama to the 
Presidency, the most liberal President America has ever seen and, of 
course, maintained a majority of Democrats in the United States Senate.
  What unfolded was an effort here in the House that passed cap-and-
trade, and we stood here on the floor, Mr. Speaker, over and over again 
and did battle with cap-and-trade. We called it cap-and-tax. Cap-and-
tax was the right way to describe the bill that would tax people who 
were burning hydrocarbons and, doing so, create a disadvantage for 
American industry and an advantage for the industries in places like 
India and China, where they care less about what goes into the 
atmosphere than we do here in this country.
  That legislation, which I will always believe we had the ability to 
kill--even in the House Republican minority at the time--if we had 
turned up all of our efforts, we had the ability to kill it, Mr. 
Speaker. We didn't get that done.

                              {time}  1410

  We came close. We didn't get that done. And the cap-and-tax 
legislation passed over to the United States Senate, where it was 
subsequently killed in the Senate. But the sentiment of the President 
of the United States; the Speaker of the House, then Nancy Pelosi; and 
the majority leader of the United States Senate was to impose cap-and-
trade or cap-and-tax on us. And they tried. They tried mightily. And 
President Obama has since said that if he can't get cap-and-tax 
passed--he would say cap-and-trade, Mr. Speaker--that he would 
implement it by rule and implement it by regulation if the Congress 
will not comply with his directive.
  Now, we haven't heard very much about that effort in the media--not 
very much from the President, not very much from Democrats in this 
Congress or Democrats in the United States Senate. But it remains that 
this executive branch is implementing rules and regulations to carry 
out the initiative of cap-and-tax, cap-and-trade, which has been so 
rejected by the American people and exposed to be at least perpetuated 
by a fraud of dated information that went back and forth between the 
United Kingdom and the United States.
  So that's one piece that has been coming at us. It's a result of that 
decision made by the voters in 2008. And as they pushed on cap-and-tax 
from that election, we saw then also that supermajority of the House 
Democrats, Senate Democrats, and the most liberal President America has 
ever seen. By the way, Mr. Speaker, I'm not making that number up. That 
is the data that shows that when they measured the votes of the United 
States Senators during the entire tenure of Barack Obama as a United 
States Senator, which I recognize wasn't long, he voted to the left of 
every Senator in the United States Senate, including Bernie Sanders, 
the Independent Senator from Vermont, who I served with in the House of 
Representatives. I personally like the gentleman. He's a self-professed 
socialist. Yet Barack Obama voted to the left of the self-professed 
socialist Senator, Bernie Sanders, and the left of every United States 
Senator.
  While he was a Senator advancing cap-and-tax, cap-and-trade, he said 
that under his proposal of cap-and-tax, cap-and-trade, that the costs 
of electricity generated by coal would ``necessarily skyrocket.'' Well, 
that's happening. They have written regulations through the EPA and 
other means of the executive branch of government to the point now 
where it's been I think clearly established that from a regulatory 
perspective it is not just virtually, Mr. Speaker, but literally 
impossible for a new coal-fired generating plant, no matter how clean 
burning that coal might be, to be constructed in the United States.
  We tried that in Iowa a year and a half or so ago, to build a coal-
fired plant in Marshalltown. It had the best combination of entities 
that you could bring together that could utilize this and the longest-
term, best vision you could put together with the engineering and the 
business model. And they finally had to, as we say on the chess board, 
tip over their king and concede that they couldn't build a new coal-
fired plant.
  Now it's become ever increasingly clear that expanding coal-fired 
generation also is regulatorily virtually impossible, perhaps literally 
impossible as well.
  So the costs of our electricity go up and the leverage that comes in 
on creating subsidized forms of energy that fit within the political 
wishes of the President seems to be pushed well out of the White House. 
In any case, Mr. Speaker, that was one of the fights that went on here 
in this Congress back in those years between 2008 and the election in 
2010.
  Of course, another one was the passage of ObamaCare. ObamaCare 
sometimes is described as the pejorative way that it should define the 
health care plan that the President advanced and that had the full 
support of then-Speaker Pelosi. I would remind people of that--then-
Speaker Pelosi.
  That legislation first came to this floor as H.R. 3200. That was the 
precursor to the final package of ObamaCare. In the end, the bill that 
they define it as--two different bills, by the way. One, a 
reconciliation package that was slid around the filibuster in the 
Senate. That's a component of ObamaCare. The other one was legislation 
that passed out of the House and Senate with a supermajority in the 
Senate--a temporary supermajority in the Senate, I might add--and that 
was only passed because there was a promise made here that the 
President would sign an executive order that in effect amended 
legislation that the House was about to pass.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, if there are any civics students listening to this 
discussion, I imagine that I have just heard their jaws drop across 
America, to think that the President of the United States, who taught 
constitutional law at the University of Chicago as an adjunct 
professor, would think that he, now as President of the United States, 
could sign an executive order that could amend legislation under the 
promise that it would amend legislation that was about to be passed on 
that condition in the House of Representatives.
  That took place right here, Mr. Speaker. That's what's happened to 
this country. That's what's happened to the constitutional constructs 
of this country when you have leftist activists in charge of this 
government and they took the bit in their teeth and they ran off the 
cliff into the left and we ended up with ObamaCare, which they call the 
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Patient Protection and 
Affordable Care Act. You can walk up and down the streets of America, 
and with the exception of right around the Capitol here in Washington, 
D.C., I would suggest that you wouldn't find two people in 100 that 
would know what that means.
  We know what ObamaCare means. That's the President's advance of the 
health care policy that takes away our constitutional right to manage 
our own health care. And I tell people often that ObamaCare needs to be 
repealed for a lot of reasons. It's unaffordable, it's unsustainable, 
and it does set up rationing. Sarah Palin was right: it reduces 
research and development. It

[[Page 8176]]

means that America will no longer be the lead in the innovation and 
health care systems in the world.
  All of those things are bad and wrong and unsustainable about it, but 
the worst thing is that ObamaCare is unconstitutional. It's a direct 
assault on Americans, on our sovereign right. Mr. Speaker, the most 
sovereign thing that any of us has in the United States or anyplace in 
the world is our own soul. We protect that. We decide. That's freedom 
of religion that's in the First Amendment in the United States 
Constitution, take care of your soul. That's sovereign.
  The second most sovereign thing we have is our health: our bodies, 
our skin, and everything inside it. And what is ObamaCare? They went in 
and nationalized Chrysler. They nationalized General Motors. For a 
time, they nationalized three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae-
Freddie Mac. The entire flood insurance program in the United States 
and the student loan program in the United States, all of that taken 
over by the Federal Government in the last few years.
  And then ObamaCare came along. And that is, Mr. Speaker, the 
nationalization of your skin and everything inside it and a 10 percent 
tax on the outside if you go to the tanning salon, just to add a little 
extra insult to injury.
  That's what ObamaCare has done. It has tapped into this vigorous 
American people, the most vigorous people the world has ever seen. 
We've skimmed the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization on 
the planet and gotten the best that any civilization had to offer 
because they were inspired by the American Dream, inspired by those 
visions that are embodied within the Statue of Liberty. Those visions 
altogether attracted people to come here to this country so they could 
live free, be free, breathe free, and do as they will in a free 
enterprise system that has a rule of law, freedom of speech, religion, 
and the press and assembly, and no double jeopardy and tried by a jury 
of your peers and states' rights that flow down to the States or the 
people respectively.
  All of that is the promise of America. And when you come to America 
and you embrace that promise, then you can work to achieve the American 
Dream. But the Federal Government taking over the nationalization of 
our bodies takes that away from us. And the 1,300 health insurance 
companies that we had 2\1/2\ years ago when the ruling troika imposed 
ObamaCare on this country are fewer now. The 100,000 possible health 
insurance policies that were out there on the marketplace that one 
could choose from are fewer now. And the government stepped in and 
reached more.
  And just yesterday, I got the news that Nemschoff Company, which is a 
subsidiary of Herman Miller, Inc., and provides 111 jobs up in Sioux 
Center, Iowa--111 jobs making furniture and other equipment, a lot of 
it that goes into medical clinics and hospitals, a specialized type of 
a production facility, 111 jobs, will close its doors, and they cited, 
Mr. Speaker, ObamaCare. The uncertainty and the cost and the burden of 
the imposition of ObamaCare upon a company that's building products for 
health care causes them to shut their doors down. They didn't give any 
other reason. I didn't talk with them. I didn't solicit this. That was 
what came out in their press release. And I learned it when I read the 
paper.

                              {time}  1420

  ObamaCare forces them into a situation where they are shutting down a 
company that has been there for years, and it has 1,100 jobs. Well, the 
profit has been taken out of it for them. That's why the plant has to 
be closed.
  We need to remember that this economy doesn't function to produce 
jobs. This economy and this free enterprise system we have functions to 
give a return on capital. When capital is invested, it needs to be 
invested with an anticipation that there will be profits. And that 
anticipation for profit is what brings about jobs. And keeping those 
jobs competitive is what is an incentive to produce the expanses in 
technology so that America can be the innovators for the world and the 
most competitive economy in the world.
  But this administration seems to believe that you can't have a 
business model unless you can have the government at the table. And the 
government will decide what kind of health insurance policy you can buy 
and that you shall buy it, and that there is an individual mandate in 
ObamaCare that takes away our constitutional rights, and that's the 
unconstitutional taking of the second most sovereign thing we have, 
which is our skin and everything inside it.
  And if the Supreme Court--and I believe, Mr. Speaker, they will make 
a prudent constitutional decision, and I anticipate that decision very 
early--well, I will say next month sometime I anticipate that decision. 
They will be deliberate on this, that the Constitution defines a 
limited government, the principle of federalism.
  The principle of federalism isn't to grow the Federal Government, it 
is to limit the size of the Federal Government and for those powers to 
be devolved down as close to the people as possible. The Federal 
Government should be the last resort, not the first option. If you can 
take care of things at the family level, take care of it at the family 
level. If you can't do that, take care of it at the friend level. If 
you can't do that, do so in your church. Do so in your neighborhood. Do 
so in your school. Do so in your community. Do so in your county. And 
if you can't do that, do so in your State. But as a last desperate 
resort, the Federal Government then maybe can step in if the cause is 
high enough and there is a constitutionally enumerated power to do so.
  But this enumerated power of the Commerce Clause is where the 
proponents of ObamaCare pointed to argue that they have the 
constitutional authority to require every American that fits within 
their defined category to a buy health insurance policy that's approved 
by Barack Obama with the mandates on it that are approved by Barack 
Obama which, by way, include by Presidential edict--legislation by not 
Executive order; not legislation from the bench as we sometimes 
complain about with an activist judicial branch. The President of the 
United States legislated by press conference when he directed Kathleen 
Sebelius to issue the order that even our faith-based organizations, 
and especially our Catholic health care providers, but it also includes 
many of the Protestant organizations, that they shall provide 
contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients, and they shall do 
so free of charge, that it should be part of every health insurance 
policy.
  So, Mr. Speaker, can you imagine if you were someone who had 
committed your life to Christ, for example, a celibate priest, a 
celibate nun, you're required to provide contraceptives for those who 
are not, and if it violates your religious convictions, whether or not 
you wear a collar? We can't discriminate in favor of someone who 
happens to be a professional reverend or pastor or a bishop or a 
cardinal. And a layperson on the street whose convictions may be as 
deep needs to have the same conscience protections from a religious 
perspective. And so for the Federal Government to step in and declare, 
You're going to provide health care services; you're going to buy this 
health insurance policy, and you will guarantee that it'll cover 
contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients, abortion-causing 
drugs for every one of your employees even if you're in the business to 
oppose the idea of abortion-causing drugs.
  The President got the political pushback on that, Mr. Speaker, and 
over a couple-weeks period of time of taking the crossfire that came 
from across this country directed at the White House for the audacity 
to make that declaration, the President held a press conference and 
said--it was at noon on a Friday several weeks ago now, and he said 
this: I'm going to make an accommodation to the religious 
organizations, and, therefore, rather than requiring Catholic Hill 
Services, for example, to provide abortion-causing drugs and 
sterilization and Cadillac contraceptives, I'm going to instead make 
that accommodation and require the insurance companies to do that for 
free.

[[Page 8177]]

  Now, you heard me say a little bit ago ``legislation by press 
conference,'' Mr. Speaker, and I say that because of this: The rule 
that was issued by Health and Human Services' Kathleen Sebelius that 
imposed this thing on religious health care providers especially, that 
rule was never changed. The language is identical to what it was. There 
is not an ``i'' dotted differently or a ``t'' crossed differently. The 
rule is the same. So the only thing that changed was the President did 
a press conference and said: Okay, I'm going to cut you some slack, 
religious organizations. I'm going to make an accommodation to you, and 
I'm now going to require the insurance companies provide it for free. 
He repeated himself: For free.
  The audacity. King George would not have the audacity to step up and 
do a press conference 230 years ago and say to America: Well, 
regardless of what the Parliament thinks, I'm just going to go ahead 
and require you to, let's say, buy tea at the rate that the British 
would like us to buy. No, there would be a tea party in Boston Harbor 
if that happened.
  Well, there's going to be a tea party in this country, too, only it's 
going to take place in November, and the American people will reflect 
on what has happened over these 3-plus, going now on 4 years, the 
imposition of ObamaCare on all of America without regard to the 
Constitution and the restraint, requiring people to buy a health 
insurance policy that's approved by the Federal Government that has 
mandates that are stuck into it by what? Not by legislative action. Not 
by a rule approved by the United States Congress. By an executive 
branch that's directed out of the White House to write up the rules 
however they see fit and a President that has the audacity--and that's 
one of his favorite words, by the way, Mr. Speaker--the audacity to 
seek to legislate by press conference. Edicts by press conference. It 
is breathtaking the extra-constitutional reach that's been taken by 
this President and this administration, and this country needs to rise 
up and get back to our constitutional underpinnings. We need to reject 
ObamaCare.
  I want to see this House vote again this summer after the Supreme 
Court decision, no matter what the Supreme Court decision is, and I'm 
optimistic about getting a constitutional decision from the Supreme 
Court. But I want to see this Congress vote again for a 100 percent 
repeal of ObamaCare so everybody's on record, everybody understands 
that it must all go. It must all be pulled out by the roots. There can 
be no vestige of ObamaCare left behind. It's an unconstitutional taking 
of American liberty. In a vigorous Nation, Mr. Speaker, we cannot reach 
our destiny if we are tied to the anchor of ObamaCare that directs and 
rules our lives and consumes about 17 or more percent of our gross 
domestic product.
  And so the difference is this: The troika of Harry Reid, Nancy 
Pelosi, and Barack Obama has been broken. It was broken in the election 
of 2010 when they saw the extra-constitutional reach of ObamaCare. They 
saw the effort on cap-and-trade. They saw Dodd-Frank pass through the 
House and the Senate and become law, an overreach. You had the people 
involved in the solution for the economic downward spiral that were 
contributing to the problem.
  There are a whole series of things that we need to put this aright, 
Mr. Speaker. One of them is to scrub out the regulations that have been 
put in place in an effort to try to implement cap-and-trade around the 
resistance of this United States Congress, the separation of powers 
that's clear in the Constitution itself between the legislative and the 
executive and the judicial branches of government. I'm just very 
confident that Barack Obama taught those separations of powers, that 
the article I component of this that says, Here, this is how we set up 
the legislature. They set the laws. They set the policy, and the 
establishment of the executive branch of government whose job it is to 
carry out the laws and take care that the laws are faithfully executed.

                              {time}  1430

  We have a President who apparently encourages someone like Eric 
Holder to disregard especially immigration laws and only enforce those 
laws that, let me say, do not make them politically vulnerable. They 
decided they had 300,000 people that were in this country illegally 
that had been already adjudicated for deportation, and they said we 
don't have the resources to enforce the law against everybody that's 
here illegally, and so they committed their resources to going back 
through the files, looking through 300,000 forms of people that had 
been adjudicated for deportation and coming up with a reason or an 
excuse to try to let them stay in America, to try to turn another blind 
eye. Those resources had already been used to enforce the law; all they 
had to do was follow through with the directive of Congress.
  The administration created this new argument that has never been 
heard before, I think, in the history of jurisprudence that Congress 
had directed the executive branch--this is in their assertion in the 
Arizona immigration case--to establish and maintain a ``careful 
balance'' between the various immigration laws because it affects the 
different interests of the executive branch.
  Enforcing immigration affects our foreign relations, so the State 
Department has an interest. It affects our homeland security, so Janet 
Napolitano has an interest. It affects, perhaps, the educational 
system, and so you have the Secretary of Education with an interest. 
And it goes on and on and on. These are not competing interests. 
Congress has directed that all of these laws be faithfully enforced, 
and the administration has refused. That's a new approach to, let me 
say, prosecutorial discretion, Mr. Speaker. It goes on and on.
  We have to repeal ObamaCare, repeal Dodd-Frank, pass a balanced-
budget amendment to the United States Constitution. It's clear this 
Congress doesn't have the will to balance the budget. Maybe a simple 
majority in the House could be convinced to do so; it would be very 
tough. You can't get it done in the United States Senate. Even if we 
could balance the budget, we can't keep that happening year after year 
and pay down and then off this national debt. We need a balanced-budget 
amendment to the United States Constitution.
  My advice, Mr. Speaker, to the next President of the United States 
would clearly be: refuse to sign a debt ceiling increase as President 
unless and until the House of Representatives and the Senate of the 
United States pass an acceptable balanced-budget amendment out of each 
Chamber that's identical in message to the States for ratification. If 
we can get that done, then there is a justification to give a short-
term extension to our debt ceiling here in this Congress. If not, we 
need to hold the line until such time as the will is brought into this 
Congress to bring forth a balanced budget and to pay down and then off 
our national debt.
  My youngest little granddaughter, Reagan Ann King, was born about 
19--or maybe now 20 months--ago. Into the world she came with her share 
of the national debt at $44,000. I looked at that little girl and I 
thought, you know, a typical student loan might be $24,000, might be 
$30,000, but she's got a $44,000 loan and a mortgage on her head with 
interest accumulating every day, and she has just drawn her first 
breath. By the time she turned 1 year old, her share of the national 
debt was $48,000. And this little blonde-haired, brightest blue-eyed 
little girl with a beautiful giggle and smile doesn't know what kind of 
responsibility has been stuck on her by people that are living today at 
her expense and the expense of all of those babies that have been born 
and those yet to be born that will be taxpayers--and only about half of 
them fit that category today.
  So, Mr. Speaker, that little girl turned 1\1/2\ years old, and now 
her $44,000 debt that was $48,000 on her first birthday, it became 
$51,000 when she's 1\1/2\ years old. She's going to be a taxpayer and a 
producer, and so you have to take that times two because only half the 
people have a Federal income tax liability.

[[Page 8178]]

  So, $102,000 on the head of every American, young and old, that's our 
national debt. And we've watched trillion-dollar deficits roll up over 
the last 3\1/2\ years. The President's budget came to this floor at 
$1.33 trillion in deficit--$1.33 trillion, Mr. Speaker--and now we're 
approaching $16 trillion in national debt and it's got to stop.
  We have to turn this country around. The American voters spoke in 
2010. They sent 87 freshmen here into this House of Representatives who 
are constitutional conservatives, and every one of them voted to repeal 
ObamaCare. They want a balanced budget; they want a balanced-budget 
amendment. They are God's gift to America.
  We need another one in November 2012, and more fresh faces and more 
vigorous people here that will adhere to repeal of ObamaCare, a 
balanced-budget amendment, an all-of-the-above energy plan. We need 
more of the same kind of people in the United States Senate and a 
President that will sign that legislation into law. I look forward to 
the privilege to work with those new faces as they arrive here and work 
to make the case before the American people every day from now until 
November, and thereafter.
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention, and I yield back the 
balance of my time.

                          ____________________