[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 15013-15016]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       TIMES THAT TRY MEN'S SOULS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, these can be the times that try men's 
souls.
  I heard my colleagues across the aisle talking earlier this hour 
about a GOP tantrum over the Affordable Care Act. I'm not aware of the 
GOP throwing a tantrum over the so-called Affordable Care Act.
  We've had word from many, many of our constituents that it is 
anything but affordable, that it is a disaster. We heard our colleagues 
across the aisle talk about ObamaCare being the law of the land. Yet 
these same people can't wait to come running in here and say, You've 
got to raise the debt ceiling. If you ask them why we have to raise the 
debt ceiling, they say, Because we've got to. We're spending too much 
money, and we've got to raise the debt ceiling.
  I guess now we know the proper answer to our friends and to the 
President when they come running in, desperate to have the credit card 
limit continuously raised and raised and raised yet again, and that is 
that actually it's the law of the land. The debt

[[Page 15014]]

ceiling is the law of the land. You just need to get over it because 
it's the law of the land.
  And I recall hearing our President say in the past few days, talking 
about the law, saying that both Houses of Congress passed it, I signed 
it, it bears my name. It's the law. It's been upheld. Therefore, they 
just need to live by it. It can't be changed. It's got to stay the way 
it is.
  So that sounds to me like if the President feels that strongly about 
it once a law is passed, then we need to force him to live within the 
debt ceiling without moving it one penny.
  The Constitution, I think, is a great document to live under, but 
some find it much too taxing--those who do not want oversight and just 
want an unlimited budget and want to spend whatever they care to spend 
and on cronies and tax those they don't care for, refuse to allow those 
they don't care for to not have the same tax advantages or tax status 
so that they can engage in nonprofit activities like the Democratic 
groups. They find that rather enjoyable. But if we're going to live 
within the Constitution, it's important that people understand laws can 
be changed. The Affordable Care Act is the law right now. But it was 
passed against the will of the majority of the American people.
  We've heard from Democrats at both the other end of the Hall, this 
end of the Hall, and down Pennsylvania Avenue, that there was an 
election in 2012 and everybody needs to understand that and that the 
elections have consequences.
  And so I'm hoping that as the President, as the leader in the Senate, 
Harry Reid, continue to say those things, that hopefully they will hear 
themselves say those things, and they will realize that there was an 
election in 2012 that resulted in the most important part of Congress, 
the House of Representatives, when it comes to issues of raising 
revenue and setting budgets and appropriating money, and people need to 
understand setting budgets and appropriating money are two separate 
things. You can create a budget, pass it in the House and Senate; but 
it doesn't appropriate a single dime.
  The Senate had gone years without ever passing a budget. And now, all 
of a sudden, the Senate finds its voice about budgets, saying, Hey, the 
House didn't send conferees to work out a budget. And actually we find 
that those who have glassy-eyed looks and don't really understand the 
Constitution or how things work here with the law, they accept what is 
said. Gee, there's the problem.
  Well, that's not the problem. We're way past the issue of budget. 
That should have been done many months ago. We're grateful that the 
President now, in the fall, recognizes the importance of doing a budget 
on time. But the President actually waited so long beyond his deadline, 
not caring about the deadline, just completely being oblivious to it, 
that it was beyond the time when the House was doing its own budget. So 
the President did his in such a way that it was so incredibly late, it 
was of no consequence, no help.
  So it's kind of tough to hear lectures about the budget from anyone 
who completely failed and refused to participate properly in the lawful 
activity of preparing a budget. Then, to come forward this fall, months 
later, after the massive abuses with regard to the budget, and start 
lecturing about the budget, again, hoping that the American people 
would not understand that the budget does not appropriate a dime.
  When you come to September 30 at midnight, when you come to October 
1, it doesn't matter whether you had a budget at that point or not 
because the budget was going to lead to appropriations. The House did 
appropriations. The Senate did none. We had four important 
appropriations bills that are still sitting down at the Senate without 
any activity whatsoever.
  So once we got to August, it was too late. Even July is too late for 
a budget. It's now time we've got to appropriate money. We're coming up 
against the hard end of the fiscal year, September 30, and we've got to 
get appropriations done.
  They can talk about budget conferees, but what the House here did, 
for those who are confused and don't understand the process we use 
here, we passed a resolution appointing conferees. That's appointing 
negotiators. The House passed a resolution appointing negotiators. I 
felt like we should have had a counterproposal of some kind that showed 
some adult was acting at the other end of the Hall by producing 
something that indicated that people in the Senate majority understood 
that there were massive amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in our 
Federal money appropriations; that we've seen the abuses--the 
Solyndras, the massive amounts of money just thrown here, there, and 
yon.
  And so I would have hoped that someone in the majority in the Senate 
would have noted, you know what, there's no such thing as a clean CR--a 
clean continuing resolution--because there are projects that have ended 
and finished being paid in the last fiscal year. Those certainly don't 
need the same funding anymore. So why should we continue with the same 
amount that we spent last year when we don't know what other projects 
there may be?
  Well, the answer is they don't want a magnifying glass looking at the 
waste, fraud, and abuse. Down on Pennsylvania Avenue, they just want 
these massive sacks, metaphorically speaking. For those in the liberal 
media who do not understand metaphors, then go back to English school. 
But they just want the sacks of cash.
  Just give us the money. Forget the Constitution. Forget the 
requirement that you actually appropriate the money and tell us what it 
shall be spent on. Just send us the cash. We've got a lot more 
Solyndras to waste it on.
  That's not how it's supposed to work. We're supposed to actually go 
through and deal with the problems, cut out as much as we can in the 
way of waste, fraud, and abuse so that we don't have to keep borrowing 
over forty cents of every dollar. We can live within our means.
  So I hope people in the future will understand a clean CR should 
provoke in your mind the most filthy, nasty, larded-up appropriations 
that someone can create. Because we are not going to look at the waste, 
fraud, and abuse that's contained therein.
  There are a lot of looks that should be taken at where all our money 
goes, how it's being spent. Because if we really bear down and look at 
that, you would begin to wonder about a department that is shut down, 
we're told, yet finds money to go rent barricades to take out to a 
farm, though it is called a Federal property. It's the Claude Moore 
Colonial Farm. The story was reported by PJ Media.
  This story says today:

       It's a perfect fall day, and yet we can't do anything, 
     Managing Director Anna Eberly told me in a phone interview. 
     Eberly has managed the Claude Moore Colonial Farm for 32 
     years. Before managing the farm, she worked for the National 
     Park Service. Visitors unaware of how the farm is run are apt 
     to conclude that the government shutdown, now 2 days old, is 
     directly responsible for the farm's closing. But Eberly sent 
     a note Wednesday morning to the park's email list. In the 
     email, Eberly says, For the first time in 40 years, the 
     National Park Service has finally succeeded in closing the 
     farm down to the public. In previous budget dramas, the farm 
     has always been exempted, since the NPS--the National Park 
     Service--provides no staff or resources to operate the farm.

                              {time}  2115

  Eberly says:

       The Claude Moore Colonial Farm has thrived even as the 
     Federal Government has treated it with ``benign neglect'' for 
     decades. That ``benign neglect'' would serve it better than 
     the barricades now surrounding it.

  Eberly writes that the National Park Service has already gone out of 
its way to disrupt an event at the farm.

       The first casualty of this arbitrary action was the McLean 
     Chamber of Commerce, who were having a large annual event at 
     the Pavilion on Tuesday evening. The National Park Service 
     sent the Park Police--

  Why couldn't they have been furloughed? Oh, here came the Park 
Police.

     over to remove the Pavilion staff and chamber volunteers from 
     the property while they were trying to set up for the event.


[[Page 15015]]


  Fortunately, the chamber has friends, and they were able to move to 
another location and salvage what was left of their party. You do have 
to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they 
don't have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that 
operates without costing them any money.
  It should be noted that the farm has not used Federal funds since 
1980, yet they found money to print a sign that said: ``Because of the 
Federal Government shutdown, this National Park Service facility is 
closed.'' It's as if somebody is sitting around saying, regardless of 
whether it cost any Federal money or not, let's find things that will 
hurt people and upset people, stick a sign on it, and blame the 
shutdown so that we can get all of the money with the waste, fraud, and 
abuse we want to keep spending.
  One other note: our former Speaker, Newt Gingrich, sent out a 
photograph of barricades that have been put out by Mount Vernon. Now, 
most people hopefully know Mount Vernon is not run by Federal money, so 
what difference does it make if the Federal Government would put 
barricades up somewhere around Mount Vernon? Well, there is a little 
part of the road where buses can turn around to make it convenient as 
they drop people off out at Mount Vernon. By closing that, even though 
it doesn't need to be patrolled--it's just a turnaround area for big 
vehicles and buses--they can make as much chaos as possible for those 
coming out to Mount Vernon, to this historical site of our Founding 
Father, George Washington, and create some chaos. So they spent money, 
took time to go create as much trouble for American tourists as they 
possibly could.
  You want to talk about fairness? There isn't any in what this 
administration and the Democrats at the other end of the hall are doing 
to the American people and blaming the so-called shutdown.
  I see my friend Mr. LaMalfa here, and I would yield to him.
  Mr. LaMALFA. I appreciate my colleague from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) and 
your heartfelt opinions and ideas you're holding up here tonight. And 
hearing you speak of what's going on, just this microcosm of the Park 
Service here and what's happened the last couple of days, it seems that 
as the negotiations--if there is any that have actually broken down--
the Federal Government, this administration has been poised to exact 
the kind of pain that we're seeing just in this area of our national 
parks.
  You mentioned Mount Vernon, arbitrarily closed down. Mount Vernon is 
a private enterprise, done with their own funds, done with support of 
private people, the public. So they find a toehold to use the parking 
lot as a way to exact a little meanness on the tourists there at a time 
where this place can't come to an agreement on some basic issues with a 
continuing resolution, as well as the very outrageous act with our open 
air monuments we have right here in town.
  The Lincoln Memorial, of course what we're seeing with the Honor 
Flights that have been coming in the last couple of days and will 
continue to come in for a while, World War II vets, Korean vets, Mr. 
Gohmert and I both had the opportunity and the pleasure and the honor 
of being able to join with some of those vets today as Members of 
Congress and others pulled back the gate and allowed them to enjoy 
their memorial, the country's memorial. These are areas that are not 
normally even staffed, at least to this extent. They had to bring in 
more staff than what is normally on hand.
  These are 24-hour memorials and exhibits, open-air, you can see any 
time of the day or night, sometimes without staff at all. Yet they did 
have to go to the trouble, as was mentioned, to rent barriers, bring 
them in, put them up, and, boom, they were up there first thing in the 
morning on Monday morning. They were poised and ready to go, taking 
political advantage of the difficulties we're having here.
  It reminds me a lot of the grievances that were brought originally 
with the Declaration of Independence. The people and Colonies, having 
had enough of the King's edicts and unfairness, listed a whole bunch of 
grievances that they thought were outrageous and caused them to 
actually break away from that long-held bond they had with England. Let 
me just recount a little bit of that from the Declaration:

       We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are 
     created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with 
     certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, 
     Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness-- That to secure these 
     Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their 
     just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

  Do you think what we see going on here is the consent of the 
governed? Leading into what a lot of this battle is about here, the 
implementation of the Affordable Care Act, as it's called, that's been 
a line in the sand for Republicans I think for good reason. If you 
recount the history of how it was passed, it was done during a window 
of time when the majority party was the Democrats in the House and the 
Senate, as well as holding the White House, during the period of late 
2009 and early 2010. A little window of time when, after all these 
years when they were looking for socialized health care, they had that 
window. They also had, I guess, the daring to do so.
  You might recall HillaryCare back in the early nineties, when it was 
called that. There wasn't the political will--certainly ever by the 
Republicans, but the Democrats at the time. We saw then that elections 
have consequences. The consequence of HillaryCare back then was a big 
portion of what scared, I think, the country into putting a 
revolutionary Republican majority into the House in that '94 election.
  We keep hearing from the other side of the aisle, 2012 had 
consequences in the Presidential. Well, let's just go back one 
election, 2010, following on the heels of what is called ObamaCare, the 
Affordable Care Act. That sent a giant red flag amongst a lot of 
freedom-loving Americans to look at how this takeover of their health 
care system by a government that can't even run the Veterans 
Administration and getting the claims processed for veterans who 
languish for years just trying to get simple claims done, we want to 
take that blueprint of the government running things and expand that to 
everyone? It shouldn't be that way for the people that are subject to 
the VA, and we want to make this an example for the entire country. I 
shutter to think what that would be like. So many people feel like 
they're being herded into this program without any choice. That's 
really the case.
  So let's talk about liberties for a minute here. Let's talk about 
those founding principles outlined in the Declaration and then later 
carried out in our Constitution that we all come here and are sworn to 
uphold. Let me list just one of the grievances you find in the 
Declaration talking about the King of England:

       He has erected a multitude of new Offices, and sent hither 
     Swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their 
     Substance.

  This doesn't just apply to the Affordable Care Act. You can name this 
with a lot of government agencies that are coming out there--swarms--to 
harass people and eat out their substance. Whether they are a small 
business or farming or timber or any one of many different endeavors in 
this country, the harassment people are feeling by a runaway government 
is huge and it's not right.
  So why do Republicans dig in? Because we feel like this is a critical 
moment in time for our liberties, but for a program that is doomed to 
fail and become so entrenched that we never have the opportunity to 
come back from it because it becomes an entitlement or, as a lot of 
people are saying around here now, a right.
  To me, the rights as laid down by the Founders are life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness, just as outlined in the Declaration. Anything 
beyond that probably came from the force of legislation--which is 
enforced by a badge, a court, or a gun; not one of the basic 
inalienable rights sent down by God, natural law.
  So we have a lot to do around here. Republicans dig in for a reason 
because this is a solid belief system. It's not even politics. Yeah, 
not politics. This

[[Page 15016]]

is an important cornerstone principle we're fighting for here--the 
basic liberties, the freedom of choice. And these are not being laid 
down 230-something years ago either by the King or by this mandate now.
  My friend, I appreciate the time that you are giving me here tonight. 
We have a lot more to do on this effort, and we are going to continue 
to fight the battle because it's for the right thing on the founding 
principles of this Nation.
  Thank you, Mr. Gohmert.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Reclaiming my time, one of the things that I greatly 
appreciate is the in-depth analysis, the careful cogitation and 
contemplation about the role we are supposed to play. I have greatly 
appreciated that.
  Another new Member of Congress is here with us. We have about 4 
minutes, and I would yield to my friend from Oklahoma (Mr. 
Bridenstine).
  Mr. BRIDENSTINE. I thank the gentleman from Texas. Thank you for your 
leadership here in the House of Representatives, and also thank you to 
my friend from California.
  I would just like to maybe have a brief dialogue with the gentleman 
from Texas if that's okay.
  It wasn't too long ago we passed a bill to fund the entire 
government. That was something that was hard for a lot of us to swallow 
because there's a whole lot of things in a continuing resolution that 
we're not, frankly, interested in funding, but we swallowed that pill 
because it defunded ObamaCare. We sent it to the Senate. Harry Reid 
stripped out the defunding, and he sent it right back to the House of 
Representatives.
  So we said, Okay, let's just take 1 year. The President has already 
delayed major provisions of ObamaCare. He saw the jobs report. People 
were shifting from full-time work to part-time work. Some people were 
losing their jobs. People were losing their health insurance. Health 
insurance premiums were spiking. Companies were trying to get down 
below 49 employees. So we said, Okay, the President wants to delay 
major provisions of ObamaCare, let's give him a year. We'll delay it 
for a year and fund the entire government. Again, I voted for that.
  I would just like to ask the gentleman from Texas, I'm new here. I've 
been here for 9 months now. We passed that at about 1 o'clock in the 
morning on a Saturday night--I guess it was a Sunday morning--and the 
next day the Democrats didn't show up. The next day after that, they 
didn't even come in until 2 in the afternoon.
  I would just, with your vast wisdom and experience, sir, maybe you 
could clarify for the American people what was going on. I mean, we're 
on the brink of a government shutdown and they just didn't show up. Was 
it maybe that they were looking for a shutdown?
  Mr. GOHMERT. There doesn't seem to be much question at all. Having 
tried many cases as a lawyer, judge, and chief justice, the evidence is 
clear. We sent four things, the last of which was saying, Okay, we're 
appointing negotiators. You don't agree with any of the compromises 
we've sent, all you have to do now is appoint negotiators, conferees, 
and we'll work it out this evening and it will all be done. They 
refused to even appoint people to negotiate and get it worked out 
during the night. That tells you pretty clearly they wanted a shutdown 
for 3 years now, since the Republicans won the House back in November 
of 2010.

                              {time}  2130

  We have heard them talking about, gee, if there is a shutdown they 
always blame the Republicans and we can get the majority back.
  But I would ask the gentleman the question that was asked to the 
Senate Democratic leader today, when a CNN reporter, Dana Bash, said: 
``But if you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn't you do 
it?'' And Mr. Reid said: ``Why would we want to do that? I have 1,100 
people at Nellis Air Force Base that are sitting home. They have a few 
problems of their own. This is--to have someone of your intelligence to 
suggest such a thing maybe means you're irresponsible and reckless.'' 
She said: ``I'm just asking a question.''
  Just asking the original question: ``You all talked about children 
with cancer unable to go to clinical trials. The House is presumably 
going to pass a bill that funds at least the NIH. Given what you've 
said, will you at least pass that? And if not, aren't you playing the 
same political games that Republicans are?''
  He talked around it and wouldn't answer it. But the ultimate answer 
is: Why would we want to do that if we could save even one child?
  Mr. BRIDENSTINE. When you think about what we did last night, we talk 
about common ground a lot in the House of Representatives. It is a 
couple of words I hear all the time: common ground, common ground, 
common ground.
  Here we had an opportunity last night in the midst of a government 
shutdown knowing that we have warriors coming back from the 
battlefield--I am one of them myself; I flew combat in Iraq and 
Afghanistan--and we wanted to pass a bill where there is strong common 
ground, we want to fund the Veterans Administration, we want to make 
sure that our veterans get the care they need.
  Yesterday, on the floor of the House, the Democrats in this body 
killed that. Maybe you could shed some light on why they would want to 
do that?
  Mr. GOHMERT. It sounds like the gentleman is basically asking a 
question like Dana Bash. Well, that would have helped veterans who are 
sick and need help and are seeking medical care and need their checks 
to finish getting the medication and things that they need.
  The question that Senator Reid asked keeps resonating back as the 
Democratic answer: Why would we want to do that?
  Mr. BRIDENSTINE. The only thing--and I have thought about this a 
lot--the only thing I can possibly think of why they would not want to 
fund the veterans is that they want to hold the veterans hostage for 
something else, namely ObamaCare. That is the only thing I can think 
of.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I thank my friend, Dr. LaMalfa, and my friend the combat 
veteran, Mr. Bridenstine.
  Mr. Speaker, we are still wondering why they would not want to help 
these people?
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________