[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 14596-14599]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            HOW WE GOT HERE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege and honor to be 
recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House 
of Representatives, especially at this time, as the House and the 
Senate hurtle towards some type of perhaps collision and sometimes 
perhaps a conclusion to the drama that's taking place over the funding 
of our government. And it seems as though the focus of all this comes 
down on ObamaCare.
  But I'd like to first, Mr. Speaker, paint the picture on how we got 
here. And it's this: the House has consistently passed a budget, and 
then, the House-passed legislation, essentially, required the Senate to 
finally, after over 1,000 days, pass a budget over there themselves.
  Of course it was a token and, of course it was pushed off to the side 
and, of course it wasn't something that could be reconciled with a 
responsible, legitimate budget here in the House of Representatives. 
But it met the criterion narrowly.
  So the functionality of this Congress, which has been in the past, 12 
or so appropriations bills passing here, starting here, being messaged 
over to the Senate where, when things worked right, the Senate picked 
up those appropriations bills and, through their appropriations 
process, their hearings, their deliberation, their subcommittee and 
their committee process, worked their will with the House bill that had 
been messaged to them.
  And one at a time, 12 or 13 appropriation bills would work their way 
so that they had passed the House in one form and, generally, the 
Senate in a different form, in which case, a conference committee would 
be appointed, and House Republicans and Democrats would sit down with 
Senate Republicans and Democrats, hammer out the differences in one of 
12 or 13 appropriation bills, and come to an agreement, send the 
conference report to the House or the Senate, for passage, in which 
case it would pass both, be messaged to the President. That 
appropriation, then, would be concluded and fulfilled.
  A responsible government starts with hearing from our constituents, 
in November, December and January, as we look forward to the end of the 
fiscal year, which happens next Monday night at midnight--we're working 
towards getting all of our government funded appropriately.
  And in those months of January, it starts up, and then in February 
and March, the intensity of hearing from constituents and their 
budgetary concerns, the appropriations hearings in the Appropriations 
Committee, and then here on the floor under an open rule, bill after 
bill after bill, a dozen appropriation bills are debated, and the open 
rule that allows amendments to be brought forward on that to adjust the 
appropriations up or down, or perhaps transfer some of those 
appropriations, and the House work its will, the Senate work its will.
  We come together and agree on a conference report. We send it to the 
President. The President signs it, and those departments of government 
that are funded by that appropriation bill then are given their 
budgetary responsibility and their spending authority for the upcoming 
fiscal year.
  That's how it has worked in the past. It does not work that way under 
this dysfunctional setup that exists today.
  What happens now in this Congress that we have, Mr. Speaker, is this: 
the House debates the appropriations bills, 12 of them or so. We have 
passed several of them at this point in the House. We've sent them over 
to the Senate.
  They go, messaged to the Senate, where they arrive at the Majority 
Leader Harry Reid's desk. And figuratively speaking, Harry Reid then 
puts that appropriation bill in his desk drawer and closes the drawer, 
not to be discussed or heard from again for the balance of the fiscal 
year. And another appropriation bill goes and another and another and 
another.
  And what you see happen is, we've seen this happen in the past, where 
we have passed, I remember, under Chairman Jerry Lewis, the 
Appropriations chair at the time, all of our appropriation bills by 
July. Messaged them all over to the Senate, where they all would go in 
Harry Reid's desk drawer.
  At the end of the fiscal year, some time about now, or maybe a week 
ahead of this time, Harry Reid would look around and think, oh, we're 
facing a government shutdown if I don't get those bills out of my desk 
drawer.
  And so he pulls out a dozen appropriations bills. Each one of them is 
a collective judgment of the majority of the United States House of 
Representatives, constitutionally messaged to the Senate, stacks them 
up and takes his little marker through there, and he draws a line 
through the appropriations that he doesn't like, and he

[[Page 14597]]

writes in all of the line items and puts on all the Christmas tree 
spending that he does like, and he puts in the wish list of the 
Senators that he wants to help out, so to speak, and some are 
Republicans and many are Democrats.
  He creates this omnibus spending bill. Sometimes we call it omnibus 
if it doesn't show up at the end of the year. Otherwise, if it's at the 
expiration of our spending of our appropriations, as it is now, we call 
it a continuing resolution.
  We've been operating on continuing resolutions for too long. And it 
isn't because of ObamaCare, necessarily, that we're at this point 
today. The leverage has been created because Harry Reid didn't deal 
with our appropriations bills.
  And furthermore, he's not going to deal with our appropriation bills. 
He is going to create this crisis so that it increases the leverage 
that he has in defeating the will of the people, which is to shut off 
all of the funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, to 
put an end to its implementation, to not let ObamaCare become 
implemented, because--
  First of all, I don't agree with the decision made by the Supreme 
Court. I think it's completely inconsistent to declare a bill to be a 
tax as it arrives at the United States Supreme Court--excuse me--to 
declare it not to be a tax as it arrives at the Supreme Court for the 
purposes of considering the issue of the litigation on ObamaCare, but 
then to declare it to be a tax as a decision of the Supreme Court.
  It can be one or the other. Either ObamaCare is a tax or it's not a 
tax, but it can't be conveniently not a tax for the purposes of whether 
the Supreme Court would grant cert, and then conveniently, a tax for 
the purposes of declaring that it is constitutional. But that's the 
decisions that were made by the United States Supreme Court.
  All of us take an oath to uphold the Constitution, everyone in the 
House and the Senate and, of course, the Supreme Court as well. And we 
can't be taking an oath to uphold a decision that no one that I know of 
in America predicted.
  You would think, Mr. Speaker, that of all the constitutional scholars 
we have that had been writing and reading and thinking and analyzing 
ObamaCare, that had watched as, by legislative shenanigans, hook and 
crook, that patchwork of ObamaCare had been jammed through the House 
and the Senate in a fashion that would not have mirrored any process we 
had ever seen before, they'd seen the time that the Senate had a 
filibuster-proof majority.
  And I remember going into Christmas Eve, the vote that was taking 
place over there on the 24th of December, on Christmas Eve, and I 
remember when the Senate had the ability to delay that vote from 9 in 
the morning on Christmas Eve morning, December 24, till 9 that night, 
which truly would have been Christmas Eve.
  And I sent the message over there to my Senator and I said, please 
delay that vote as long as you can. Keep that thing delayed until the 
last possible minute. If they want to jam this country and give us a 
Christmas present of ObamaCare so badly that they will sit there on 
Christmas Eve, keep them there then, and let them miss Christmas with 
their families because the flights will be gone out of Dulles by then. 
That's what I asked to happen.
  There was a negotiation that took place, allowed an agreement from 
Republicans that there'd be a couple of votes in January that they 
wanted on some taxes or something of that nature. So they had a vote at 
9:00 in the morning, December 24, that allowed for ObamaCare to move 
ahead one more time.
  And then I wrote back to my Senator, and I said, what do we do now?
  And his answer was pray, and pray for a Republican victory in the 
United States Senate race in Massachusetts, the special election 
because of the passing of Senator Teddy Kennedy.
  None of us thought on December 24, that year, that the following 
January 18 or 19th--that's very close to the election date--that Scott 
Brown would be elected as a United States Senator out of Massachusetts.
  That is what happened. That was the people in Massachusetts rising up 
and saying, we don't want ObamaCare. We reject ObamaCare. We'll even go 
so far as that entirely blue State of Massachusetts, that had a 
delegation of eight Members of Congress, every single one of them a 
Democrat, and none of them known as conservative Democrats by the 
measure that I know.
  That's Massachusetts, and they sent us Scott Brown. And they're the 
ones that had the most example with something that looked like a 
preview, perhaps, of ObamaCare.
  So who knew more than the Bay Staters about this?
  Who had the most loaded politics that should have been electing a 
Democrat in that election?
  No, they said, we don't want to see anything that looks like 
ObamaCare, and we're going to send you a young, fresh Republican whose 
job it is to help kill ObamaCare. And he came here and began to engage 
in that effort, and was significant in his role. My hat's off to former 
Senator Scott Brown.
  But, in the end, legislative shenanigans defeated even the voters in 
Massachusetts' will, and they put legislation through back over from 
the Senate under that process they call reconciliation. They carved out 
some, put it into the reconciliation process to avoid the filibuster 
because they no longer had a filibuster-proof majority. The people had 
spoken. And then the legislative shenanigans began.
  While that was going on, there was a drama here in the House. Now 
that takes us to March of that year. And the drama in the House was 
that there were the ``Stupak Dozen'' who said, I'm not going to vote 
for an ObamaCare piece of legislation that will fund abortion.
  So the President made an offer--this is what's reported in the news 
at least, Mr. Speaker--that he would write an Executive order that 
would nullify the Stupak amendment, or nullify the ban on funding 
abortion. And that promise was made by the President before ObamaCare 
was passed in order to get the votes to get ObamaCare to pass here on 
the floor of the House of Representatives.

                              {time}  1400

  The President of the United States, a former adjunct professor of 
constitutional law at the University of Chicago, made a promise to a 
Democrat Congressman from Michigan, who, presumably, controlled 12 
votes of the unnamed ``Stupak dozen,'' who were anonymous, oddly. It's 
hard to think you're going to control votes if nobody knows who they 
are.
  In any case, the President made a promise that he would sign an 
Executive order that would nullify some of the language that's in the 
law. Congressman Stupak took that promise and the former adjunct law 
professor, President Obama, made a promise that said that the President 
thought that he could amend law after he signed it into law. Now what 
constitutional professor would take a position like that?
  I dig this up for a little bit, Mr. Speaker, because I want people to 
understand this piece of ObamaCare legislation is not the will of the 
people. It never was the will of the people. It's the product of hook 
and crook and legislative shenanigans. It's done against the will of 
the people.
  And furthermore, Thomas Jefferson, whom both parties revere, once 
said:
  Large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities.
  Large initiatives need to be bipartisan initiatives, not completely 
100 percent partisan initiatives, which ObamaCare is. And the slender 
majority that Thomas Jefferson was talking about was a slender majority 
that he presumed to be a bipartisan majority. If Jefferson had been 
talking about a partisan majority, it would have been very clear, in my 
opinion, what he would have said. He would have said that large 
initiatives should never be advanced on partisan majorities. That's 
what happened with ObamaCare.
  The largest initiative that has been jammed down the throats of the 
American people in its entire history is

[[Page 14598]]

ObamaCare, advanced on a purely partisan majority by utilization of 
legislative shenanigans and hook and crook. That's what got us to this 
point.
  People wonder, Why don't you just throw up your hands, why don't you 
accept reality? ObamaCare is the law of the land. Let it be. Fund it. 
Because the people have spoken.
  Well, the people had spoken. They spoke when they elected Scott 
Brown. And in the aftermath of the passage of ObamaCare about March 20 
or 21, 2010, the people spoke again that following November. And I 
remember when ObamaCare passed in the night. I had been battling this 
thing for days, and I went home about 1:30 or 2 o'clock in the morning, 
maybe a little later than that, but it was when the business wound down 
here in the House, Mr. Speaker, and I went home and I thought, I'm 
going to lay down and I'm going to sleep the sleep of the exhausted. 
And I'm going to get completely rested up, and I'm going to wake up in 
the morning and then I'm going to put a plan together on what we do 
now. Because I knew that the bill was messaged to the White House, and 
I knew the President was salivating to sign it. Well, he did that 
within about 48 hours.
  I woke up, though, in about 2\1/2\ hours because the wheels were 
turning and I couldn't take it any longer. And I drafted the language 
to repeal ObamaCare. I had that formal request to get that bill handed 
back to me by the draft people we have here when the door opened at 9 
o'clock that morning.
  We've been doing battle with ObamaCare ever since. Not only me, but 
the gentlelady from Minnesota that was down here and led an hour 
Special Order earlier today has been standing in there. And she ran for 
President on the issue, Michele Bachmann. No one wondered what she 
would do if she were elected President. She would have repealed 
ObamaCare. Louie Gohmert has been putting in hour after hour here on 
the floor and around this country, doing battle with ObamaCare.
  The list of people that deserve credit for stepping up to this fight 
is long. And it isn't exclusive here in the House, Mr. Speaker. It 
includes a group of stalwarts in the Senate, led in this latest episode 
by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who stood on the floor for more than 21 
hours and delivered a whole series of arguments against ObamaCare.
  But I'll say here's the argument that is at the center of ObamaCare, 
Mr. Speaker, and it is this: ObamaCare is, by my opinion, an 
unconstitutional taking of God-given American liberty. It takes away 
our right to manage our health. The most sovereign thing that we have 
as an American people is our soul. And the eternal nature of our soul 
is controlled by God and our will. This Federal Government hasn't 
figured out how to nationalize our soul.
  But the second most sovereign thing we have is our bodies, our 
health, our skin, and everything inside it. It's the second most 
sovereign thing that we have. And the Federal Government, under 
ObamaCare, has figured out how to nationalize our skin and everything 
inside it.
  It's a Federal Government takeover of the management of our health 
where, under ObamaCare, if you walk into a clinic, if you walk into an 
emergency room, if you apply for government-approved insurance under 
whatever means that might emerge, when no one really can tell us at 
this point, the government decides whether you get the insurance, the 
government decides whether you get a subsidy for the premium, the 
government decides what kind of research gets done, what kind of 
treatment one gets.
  The government decides if you are worth the hip replacement or the 
knee replacement or whether you get just painkillers for as long as you 
can live with a broken hip. The government decides that, not us any 
longer. We understand that, those of us that have a little bit of gray 
hair, or maybe have lost some. We understand that. But do the children 
in our grade schools and in nurseries today understand that?
  Mr. Speaker, we know that answer is no. They don't understand that. 
When these children grow up and they get out of school and they step 
into adulthood and they have already been brought up under a system of 
ObamaCare that makes these decisions for them, what happens to their 
dreams, what happens to their aspirations, what happens to their 
ability to think big? What happens to their ability to manage their 
life?
  The institutional memory will disappear of the culture and 
civilization that remembers the glorious time when we could choose our 
doctor, when the market demand created the insurance policies that suit 
us, the consumers, when we could shop from doctor to doctor, from 
clinic to clinic, when we could say, But you know, I want this care for 
my mother this badly that I think even though she is 85, she needs a 
hip replacement. Because I don't want to see her die in a wheelchair. 
That's a different world than we have today.
  Mr. Speaker, we've just gotten messaged to us on the CR--the 
continuing resolution--from the United States Senate, that the vote had 
concluded over on the other side, down on the other end, through the 
Rotunda. The Senate has now acted to peel out the ban on funding for 
ObamaCare and send us back what they would call a clean CR with their 
changes and provisions, which would include a continuing resolution up 
until November 15. So it is a shorter-term CR than we offered to them.
  But what it says is, We as Senators are not going to let you prohibit 
the funding of ObamaCare. So, again, we're back to the center and the 
crux of this. Another dramatic event has taken place here in the United 
States Capitol. And the drama of this now is in the lap of the House of 
Representatives, where our Speaker has just received the message of 
H.J. Res. 59, the CR.
  Now we have a decision to make. My message, Mr. Speaker, is this: if 
218 House Members hold our ground, if we say we will not fund ObamaCare 
and we will not fund an appropriation that fails to cut off the funding 
to ObamaCare, if we hold our ground, we will win.
  This contest now that's going on in is a contest of wills. There's a 
relatively narrow majority in the Senate. There's a little bit broader 
majority in the House, I believe. And the strength of will is being 
measured. This is like holding a gun on each other now, standing in a 
burning building, and deciding who's going to blink. But we can't just 
let down the hammer and stand there because the building is burning. 
Somebody's got to walk away from this confrontation and say, I'm going 
to give you your way.
  Well, my message to this, Mr. Speaker, is that we've heard this 
message over and over again: if there is a government shutdown, House 
Republicans will always lose in a confrontation with the President. I 
don't know that that's true. And I don't know if it was even true in 
1995 and 1996, when there was a government shutdown that lasted for 21 
days.
  What I do know is this House sent the funding to keep our government 
open over to the Senate. With it was language that said there would be 
no funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare. It happens that's 
language I wrote and presented here in this Congress in February of 
2011.
  We have said we want this government to stay open. We want to avoid a 
shutdown, avoid a shutdown, avoid a shutdown. If we repeat that enough 
times, it might be sending a message to the Senators that we really 
don't mean it when we say that we're not going to fund ObamaCare.
  I want to send the message, Mr. Speaker, that we do mean it. And I 
want to send the message that we're going to hold our ground. And I'd 
like to remind, Mr. Speaker, that there have been a whole series of 
shutdowns throughout history. And I have a list of them printed here. 
There were at least five government shutdowns when Jimmy Carter was 
President. Five of them. Five incidents. One of them was over a nuclear 
ship of some kind. The longest shutdown he had was 18 days. Does 
anybody remember those shutdowns from the eighties? Kind of. It didn't 
change my life, that I remember.
  But that was Democrats in majority in the House and the Senate and a 
Democrat President. Their infighting

[[Page 14599]]

caused government shutdowns for a total of 57 days--57 days between 
1977 and 1981. And sometimes Jimmy Carter won, sometimes the Democrats 
in the House and Senate prevailed over the President of the United 
States. All the same party.
  So if we don't remember the price paid for a government shutdown, if 
the inconvenience of it doesn't linger in anybody's memory, I take you 
to the era of Ronald Reagan, when there were a number of shutdowns 
under Ronald Reagan--fewer and for a shorter period of time. One of 
them was over a billion dollars in social spending. Of that billion 
dollars, the government was shut down for about 3 days. In that period 
of time, by the way, there was a Republican majority in the United 
States Senate and we had a principled Republican President, Democrats 
in the majority here in the House. The Democrats refused to agree with 
the President and the Senate. It resulted in a government shutdown.
  In that shutdown that lasted--in the end, the $1 billion in spending 
that Democrats here wanted was negotiated down to $900 million dollars. 
They gave up 10 percent of what they asked for and the government was 
opened back up again.
  So a determined majority in the House of Representatives prevailed to 
the level of 90 percent of their ask against a Republican majority in 
the Senate that opposed them and a President who has clearly held his 
ground in case after case.
  It isn't clear who prevails in an issue like this, but I'll say this: 
the American people will judge our resolve and our determination. And 
the determination on who wins and who loses, if that actually matters, 
will be written by history.
  But I say this, Mr. Speaker. If we hold our ground, I believe there 
will not be a political price for House Republicans to pay. When House 
Republicans held their ground and eventually caved in 1995 and 1996, 
some say House Republicans lost that. They lost eight seats in the 
following election. They did not lose the majority. Six of those eight 
seats were marginal seats they were likely to lose anyway. So perhaps 
they lost two congressional seats.
  If we don't want to put at risk two congressional seats out of the 
House Republican majority to stand on the principle that cuts off all 
funding to implement and enforce ObamaCare, is our fear for our 
political jobs greater than our love of principle and the people we 
represent?
  I would argue instead that there will not be political consequences 
for standing on principle and refusing to fund ObamaCare. If there are 
political consequences, they will be recovered from over time.

                              {time}  1415

  But we, Mr. Speaker, can never recover from ObamaCare if it's 
implemented and enforced. That is the bottom line.
  No political consequences will be delivered to the people who stand 
up for the American people. That's the House Republican stance. That's 
the Senate conservative stance--that came a little short over here a 
few minutes ago down the other side of the Capitol. But if we stand 
together as House Republicans, as Senate Republicans, as principled 
people who look back at that time and saw that Scott Brown came to the 
United States Senate because the blue State Massachusetts rejected 
ObamaCare.
  There was a wave election in 2010 that elected 87 new House 
Republicans--every one of them ran on repeal of ObamaCare. Every 
Republican in the House and Senate has voted multiple times to undue, 
repeal, unfund and defund ObamaCare. All of us stand together--it was 
bipartisan the last time. We had two Democrats that also agreed with us 
on this CR.
  We must stand on principle. If there's a political price to be paid 
for standing on principle, I say it's worth it. We can recover from any 
political price, even though I don't believe there will be anything but 
a political reward; but we can never recover if we allow ObamaCare to 
be implemented or enforced.
  That's my stand, Mr. Speaker. That's the stand that I ask my 
colleagues to take today, tomorrow, the next day, and every day. If we 
hold together and we hold strong, in the end the beneficiaries will be 
the American people and God-given liberty.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________