[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8200-8203]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            RUMPELSTILTSKIN

  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. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  Again, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of 
the United States House of Representatives. I come to this floor to 
voice my concerns about the direction some in the executive and 
legislative bodies seem to be going.
  I will start it out this way, Mr. Speaker, in that, yesterday, it 
finally occurred to me how to describe the political whiplash that has 
taken place that goes against the logic and history and experience of 
myself and, I think, of a majority of the American people. I said to 
them yesterday in an immigration meeting inside the Republican Study 
Committee, which had a panel there of House and Senate to talk about 
immigration--some of them experts--that I feel like Rumpelstiltskin.
  The story of ``Rumpelstiltskin'' is that he went to sleep under a 
tree, and he was clean shaven, and when he woke up, he had this long, 
long beard that had apparently grown over a century or so. The culture 
shock that he got after having taken a little nap was what the 
narrative of the story of ``Rumpelstiltskin'' was about.
  I went to bed the night of November 6 in having finished the election 
celebration, in having succeeded in another election, but I watched as 
Mitt Romney had to concede that he had not won the Presidency from 
Barack Obama. I understood what that election was about as much as most 
anybody in this country.
  It starts in Iowa. We spent nearly 4 years sorting out and helping to 
contribute to the knowledge base of the American people as to what the 
planks in the platform would be, what the platform would look like, how 
we would select a nominee for the President of the United States. It 
starts in Iowa with the first-in-the-Nation's caucuses, and of the 
candidates who come there, many of them will go to all 99 counties. 
Rick Santorum, for example, had over 380 meetings in Iowa, and he went 
to all 99 counties. Michele Bachmann went to all 99 counties.
  That's an endorsement from the Iowa caucuses that can be earned. You 
don't have to have millions of dollars to shape a media image and buy a 
nomination, but it is important to be there and talk. So we do this. 
We're all politics all the time. I'm engaged in the Republican 
Presidential nominating process from early on, so I watch this and I 
contribute to it. I weigh in on the things that I believe in, and I've 
listened as every Presidential candidate has endorsed--let me just say 
this--my immigration ideas.
  Yet, as I listened to the debate and as Mitt Romney won the 
nomination and as he and Barack Obama had their multiple debates--three 
debates, if I remember, and there was much debate that went on 
throughout the media--I don't think anyone went to the polls on 
November 6 thinking this election is about immigration. I went to bed 
the night of November 6 in having realized that Barack Obama would be 
President for another 4 years. It was a disappointment to me and a 
crushing disappointment to many of us who had so many big plans on what 
we were going to do to put this Nation back on the right track with a 
new Republican majority anticipated in the United States Senate and a 
President Mitt Romney. It didn't work out that way, but I never 
believed on that night that the election was decided on immigration, 
Mr. Speaker. It was not. The debate was almost exclusively about jobs 
and the economy, jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy. It was 
drilled so relentlessly and so often that it put the American people to 
sleep. I said before the election multiple times that this needs to be 
more than a race about jobs and the economy. Nevertheless, that seemed 
to be what the polsters on the Republican side were advising Mitt 
Romney that needed to be continually coming out.
  So the American people went to the polls doing what they do: they 
make decisions based upon what they hear people talking about. You can 
track polling, and I have looked at it for years. The polling that is 
going to have the highest priority of the people's concerns is going to 
be the one the people are talking about, the one the media is talking 
about. National conversations are many times driven through the media. 
These conversations of a Presidential election were about jobs and the 
economy.
  I went to bed disappointed that night on November 6, perhaps even 
crushed, at the loss of opportunity that this Nation would have. I woke 
up the next morning--not with a beard that was 100 years long, but just 
a normal one from a night's sleep--not thinking that there was anything 
except jobs and the economy and the promise of the President to expand 
the dependency class and telling people, You're going to have less 
personal responsibility under Barack Obama, and you'll have more risk 
under Mitt Romney.

                              {time}  1450

  That was part of the argument: jobs in the economy, grow the 
dependency class. That was the argument.
  But when I woke up on the morning of November 7, I began to see some 
of these things come through the news, this analysis that Mitt Romney 
would be President-elect on November 7 if he just hadn't said ``self-
deport,'' or Mitt Romney would be President-elect on November 7 if he 
hadn't lost such a large percentage of the Hispanic vote. Then the 
numbers began to trickle in a little bit, and you get those numbers 
that show--and I don't dispute them--that Mitt Romney got about 27 
percent of the Hispanic vote and Barack Obama got about 71 percent of 
the Hispanic vote.
  So the people who had promised that Mitt Romney was going to win the 
Presidency, including pundits who hung in until the polls were closed 
until the last minute, still insisting that there were precincts coming 
in in Ohio that were going to turn the election needed a scapegoat. 
They needed a scapegoat to blame the election loss on

[[Page 8201]]

because they had predicted that victory and contributed to the 
engineering of the campaign and had pushed the jobs and the economy 
argument to the detriment of some of the other topics that would have 
been useful to get a better turnout among conservatives.
  So in looking for a scapegoat, they began to say on November 7, Mitt 
Romney would be President if he hadn't said these two words: self-
deport. He would be President if he had a larger percentage of the 
Hispanic vote. He lost too much of it. This is the mantra that we saw 
that came out of George W. Bush's campaign when he began to advocate 
for comprehensive immigration reform.
  I remember a document that was produced by the Republican National 
Committee chairman. It was referred to as an autopsy or postmortem 
report. It said again that Mitt Romney would be President if he had 
gotten a larger percentage of the Hispanic vote and that George W. Bush 
got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.
  That number has floated out there since the day after that election 
in 2004; but it's not true, Mr. Speaker. George W. Bush never got 44 
percent of the Hispanic vote. That number is someplace between 38 
percent and 40 percent. It was a stronger percentage than Mitt Romney 
got, but Mitt Romney was competitive with John McCain's vote on the 
Hispanic side, and it was clear that John McCain has been an open-
borders Senator all of his life. The only time he ever really was for 
border security and border control was when he had to save himself from 
a primary, and that's when he said build the ``blank'' fence.
  So what we have here is an irrational conclusion drawn on the morning 
of November 7 of last year that turns out to be a handy little 
scapegoat, excuse, change the subject matter for people who made 
predictions that didn't match what the professional opinion was. 
Another thing that takes place is if you repeat something often enough 
in the news media, you can convince people that that is the topic, that 
was the subject.
  So I will just tell you in this conference, people are now starting 
to understand the election wasn't about immigration, and there is no 
mandate for Barack Obama to sign an amnesty bill. There is a strong 
desire on the part of people that are for open borders to pass one. I 
understand why Democrats are for open borders and amnesty. They're the 
political beneficiaries of open borders and amnesty.
  Republicans are paying the price for this wedge that's being driven 
between the Republican Party, Mr. Speaker. And in political tactics, as 
well as warfare and military tactics, if you can split the line of your 
enemy, your opposition, your competition, if you can divide them, 
especially if you can pit them against each other, you have a much 
greater chance of success.
  This is a classical example of Republicans accepting an argument and, 
in fact, creating the argument, some of them joining with Democrats who 
gleefully drive the wedge in between the Republican Party to separate 
the rule of law, border security, pillar of American exceptionalism, 
constitutional conservative Republicans away from the establishment 
wing of the party that sees this world a little bit different.
  Conventional wisdom here is Romney would be President if Republicans 
had done a better job reaching out to the Hispanic community. I'm 
saying, Mr. Speaker, that's not true. There's no data that supports 
that theory. Even still, they insist on adhering to this. And when I 
ask them what is in this Gang of Eight's bill in the United States 
Senate that has passed out of committee now to be considered on the 
floor of the United States Senate, what's in that bill for Americans, 
the answer is: nothing. There is nothing in that bill for Americans.
  What's in that bill, then, for, let's say, Republicans? Well, 
political disaster is in it. There's nothing on the upside of it for 
Republicans.
  What's in it for Democrats? Millions of new voters, more political 
power, a continued expanding of the dependency class, an erosion of the 
individual responsibility and the God-given liberty and freedom that 
this country has; and that's the benefit to the Democratic side of this 
thing, Mr. Speaker.
  Then what is the effect? The effect is pretty clear. You have a study 
done by the stellar Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation who does 
multiple studies. He is the most accomplished analyst that I know on 
this Hill, and his work has been subject to public scrutiny for more 
than two decades and his work has been unassailable.
  When it was announced that he was doing an analysis of the economic 
impact of a Senate version of the bill, the amnesty bill, immediately 
his political opposition began to attack him personally and to attack a 
study they had never read. I know they never read it, Mr. Speaker, 
because it wasn't out and it wasn't released. And I got a verbal 
preview of that when Robert Rector came to speak before the 
Conservative Opportunity Society, which I've chaired for some years. 
And I knew they hadn't read the report because it wasn't released. I 
would get access to one of the first copies.
  I have read every page of the Rector report. I believe it's 102 
pages. There' a 5-page executive summary. This report boils down this, 
Mr. Speaker: if you pass the Senate Gang of Eight's comprehensive 
immigration reform/amnesty act, the net cost of the people who would be 
legalized in America, even if you use the 11.3 million, which I think 
is a very low estimate, the net cost to the taxpayer when you calculate 
the drawdown from the welfare systems and the health care and the 
education and the infrastructure--he's got it all broken down in 
detail--the net cost--and then you subtract from that the net tax 
contributions made by this group of people, you end up with a $6.3 
trillion price tag to the Senate's amnesty bill.
  And still, Republican members of the Gangs of Eight, House and 
Senate, posture themselves as conservatives. They posture themselves as 
conservatives, and they advocate for a $6.3 trillion net cost, and 
their best argument against the Rector report is that it's not 
dynamically scored.
  I heard that yesterday from the gentleman from Idaho: the Rector 
report is not dynamically scored. If you dynamically score it, then 
presumably you could get around to a purist libertarian view that 
anytime--and that's this: anytime anybody does an hour's worth of work 
and contributes a dollar to the gross domestic product, they contribute 
to the economy. That's their theory. That's a very narrow view of what 
goes on in any country.
  If you're going to call it economic growth because the GDP goes up by 
a dollar, but it costs you $2 or $3 on the other end out of tax 
recipients to fund the stimulation to get that extra dollar, that's not 
economic growth. But they argue that it is. If you dynamically score 
the Rector report, it gets more costly, not less costly. The number of 
$6.3 trillion in cost goes up, not down.
  I would suggest that these people who are attacking Robert Rector or 
the Heritage Foundation or the people that are making allegations that 
the Rector report is not dynamically scored go in there and dynamically 
score the Rector report then. Tell me, what is your number? It's not 
good enough just to criticize somebody else's data without actually 
addressing the data. What's your number, Gang of Eight? How much do you 
think the Gang of Eight bills are going to cost the taxpayers for the 
people who would be legalized instantly? How much?
  Then they say, I want more legal immigration, more legal immigration. 
You could ask them, How many are coming in here legally now? Most of 
them who make such a statement would be stumped, Mr. Speaker. They 
don't know.
  If you don't know how many people are coming in here legally, say, 
over the last decade, how can you assert whether there should be more 
or less? And if they do know the number, then I would say to them: you 
think there should be more legal immigration? How many is enough? How 
many is too many? There are two more stumping questions I've just 
asked.

[[Page 8202]]



                              {time}  1500

  They don't know how many is enough. They don't know how many is too 
many. They're making a political calculation, not a policy analysis. 
It's not good enough to change the destiny of the United States of 
America simply by wetting your finger and putting it into the air, or 
checking your political barometer and making a decision whether it's a 
plus or a minus for you politically. Can you get reelected if you're 
for amnesty or not? That's some of the questioning that's going on 
around this body. I suggest we have a higher charge and a higher 
challenge and a bigger responsibility.
  This is a constitutional Republic, and one of the essential pillars 
of American exceptionalism is the rule of law. This shining city on the 
hill sits on these pillars of American exceptionalism. And among them, 
many of them are in the Bill of Rights--freedom of speech, religion, 
the press, peaceably assemble, and petition the government for regress 
grievance. Second Amendment rights--the right to be secure in our 
persons, the property rights that used to exist before the Kelo 
decision. That is a little editorial, Mr. Speaker. I'll take that up in 
another Special Order sometime--the rights that devolve to the States 
or the people respectively under the 9th and 10th Amendments; no double 
jeopardy. All of those things.
  If you take any piece that I've mentioned out of the history of this 
country, you don't get the United States of America. You can't be the 
United States of America without the law, without the rule of law.
  Millions of people come to this country to escape lawlessness, and we 
owe it to them as well as the heritage of all Americans to ensure that 
we do not have lawlessness institutionalized in this country.
  Amnesty is. To grant amnesty is to pardon immigration law breakers 
and reward them with the objective of their crime. That's what's 
advocated by the Gangs of Eight, no matter how they want to spin it. If 
they do that, they will have provided an amnesty plan that can never be 
reversed, and they will have destroyed the rule of law at least with 
regard to immigration so that it can never be restored, destroyed so it 
could never be restored. There is no going back to this, going back to 
what was if this legislation passes.
  And, I'll take us back to 1986. Ronald Reagan signed--he was honest 
with us, he signed the Amnesty Act, Mr. Speaker. He was pressured, no 
doubt. I'll just say I know that. He was pressured by a lot of people 
who have good judgment almost all of the time, good advisers, but the 
pressure that came was this: there are a million people in America. It 
started out at about 750,000; but by the time the decision was made by 
Ronald Reagan, they said there are a million people in America who are 
here illegally, and we can't deal with all of them so we want to get a 
fresh start. We can make this deal with the Democrats in Congress that 
if you just sign, Mr. President Reagan, the Amnesty Act, we will ensure 
also in that bill that there will be border security. Shut off the 
bleeding at the border, and the trade-off will be that we'll give 
amnesty to a million people.
  And Ronald Reagan, with his compassionate heart and his good 
principles and good judgment, didn't see what was coming. What was 
coming was the intentional undermining of the enforcement. Democrats 
never intended to enforce immigration law in 1986. Ronald Reagan 
accepted their word. His word was good. He didn't have a reason to 
believe theirs was not. It was not. It was intentionally not good. But 
President Reagan signed the Amnesty Act for the purposes of the one 
sole and only Amnesty Act that was ever going to take place in the 
history of the United States. That was the promise.
  And in exchange, we all had to fill out the I-9 forms with precision 
and fear that the Federal Government would come in and catch us in a 
technicality and lock us up in jail or fine us a great deal. I still 
have I-9 forms that are in the dusty files from back then. I was sure 
the INS was going to show up and take enforcement against me. It didn't 
happen in my company, or in thousands of companies across the country. 
They didn't enforce it the way it was promised to be enforced. We got 
the amnesty all right, but we didn't get the border security.
  Now we have people that seem to have the wisdom as if they have been 
born since then and denied access to the history books, and they seem 
to think that they can write laws that are immigration laws today that 
will put this thing away and finish adapting to immigration law for all 
time. They're saying, just listen to us, pass our Gang of Eight amnesty 
bill, and we will fix the immigration problem for all time.
  It's clear to me that the lesson from 1986 didn't soak into them. 
They don't have a lot of gray hair. You don't have to pull out a 
history book and read it. In fact, just down the street just about any 
respectful Member of Congress could, I believe, get a meeting with 
Attorney General Ed Meese, who was Ronald Reagan's Attorney General in 
1986, whom I believe advised Ronald Reagan to sign the Amnesty Act. But 
Attorney General Meese, whom I greatly respect for his intellect, for 
his character, for his judgment, for his work ethic, he's still in the 
game, wrote an op-ed in 2006 to deal with George W. Bush's amnesty 
proposal, and that op-ed say Reagan would not make this mistake again. 
And then now some 2 weeks ago or so, he released another statement that 
mirrors the 2006 statement.
  So they could have the benefit of Attorney General Ed Meese and 
listen to what happened in 1986, if these Members were sincere about 
making an objective decision. They are not. They are salivating over 
putting their imprimatur on history and changing the character and the 
culture and the direction of the civilization of America.
  Now, America has always been about assimilation. And we are, yes, a 
Nation of immigrants. So is every other nation on the planet, by the 
way, so we should not overemphasize that. We're a Nation of people that 
come together, that have assimilated different cultures and 
civilizations, and we have something I call American vigor.
  American vigor comes from, these pillars of American exceptionalism 
that I listed, most of them in the Bill of Rights. You add to that free 
enterprise capitalism, you add to that the faith of Judeo-Christianity 
and Western Civilization all wrapped up together on this continent with 
essentially unlimited natural resources, the rule of law, manifest 
destiny. All of that was a magnet that attracted the vigor of every 
civilization here.
  We didn't just get a cross-section of people that came from Asia or 
Europe or South America that came to America. We got the dreamers, the 
doers, the vigorous people from every donor civilization on the planet. 
The people that came to work and contributed that had ideas. They 
wanted to be unfettered by the ropes and chains and the restraints that 
their own home country had and came to America to embrace the American 
Dream. That's why we are America. That's why we have a can-do spirit. 
We got the best of the spirits of every single country on the planet. 
We must preserve these pillars of American exceptionalism, including 
the rule of law, or this Nation will never reach its God-given and 
intended destiny.
  That's why I stand so strongly on preserving respect and adherence to 
the rule of law. That's why I reject the President's lawless activities 
to suspend immigration law that he doesn't like and advance his 
political foundation in doing so.
  The President has suspended immigration law by executive amnesty, is 
what he has done. That's what the debate was about last night with the 
King amendment. That's what the vote was about this morning with the 
King amendment that passed with strong support in a bipartisan way. 
Some people I think took a walk. But in any case, my amendment said 
they'll not use any of the funds appropriated in the bill to enforce 
the Morton memos, which are the memos commonly referred to that come 
from the President's wish to grant amnesty by executive edict.
  And in one of those memos, the most famous of which, which 
established

[[Page 8203]]

Dream Act Light, the President of the United States went out and did a 
press conference within 2 hours of the issuing of the memo that came 
from Janet Napolitano's office. And it says in that memo seven 
different times that we'll apply this on an individual basis only, on 
an individual basis only. I can repeat that five more times. That gives 
you a sense of what they put in the memo.
  They know that when you litigate something like this, the individual 
basis only is the reference to prosecutorial discretion. The executive 
branch has the prosecutorial discretion. It's well established. I agree 
with it. They can't enforce every single law, but the law also requires 
that when ICE encounters an individual that they believe to be 
unlawfully in the United States, they are obligated to place them into 
deportation proceedings. That's the law.
  The President suspended this specific law. He created four classes of 
people under the Morton memos and then has suspended the law as being 
applied against these four classes of people.

                              {time}  1510

  He's not doing it on an individual basis, only it's lip service on an 
individual basis only.
  And of 450,000 people that had already been adjudicated for 
deportation, they have now waived that on 300,000 and they're grinding 
through the rest. It looks like they're on their way to nearly half a 
million people that get administrative amnesty, and this is before the 
``Dream Act Lite'' memo came out. That's another chunk of this.
  So the President has, time after time, through the actions of his 
executives, defied his oath of office, which is to take care that the 
laws be faithfully executed. That's the President's obligation. It's 
his oath to the Constitution. He had his hand on the Bible when he gave 
that oath. And he gave an oath to our Constitution.
  He gave a lecture to some students out here at a high school on March 
28, year before last I believe it was. And they asked him, why don't 
you just pass an executive order, sign an executive order to grant 
lawful status to the Dream Act kids?
  And the President said, as a former adjunct constitutional law 
professor at the University of Chicago, accurately, he said, I don't 
have the authority to do that. The legislature passes the laws. My job 
is to carry them out. And the judicial branch is to pass judgment on 
the meaning of the technicality of the law. Pretty good response for a 
constitutional law adjunct professor.
  And about a year later, the President decided he wasn't bound by his 
oath of the Constitution. Neither was he bound by the analysis or the 
opinion that he gave the high school kids; defied his oath, and he 
defied his own judgment, publicly stated, and granted administrative 
amnesty through a whole series of six different memos known as the 
Morton memos.
  We cannot be a civilized country if we're going to have a President 
who legislates by executive edict, or by press conference, by the way.
  Mr. Speaker, you'll remember that ObamaCare was not supposed to fund 
abortion, nor was it supposed to fund contraceptives or sterilizations. 
There was an accommodation that was made in an amendment here and some 
negotiations with the President.
  But they do it anyway. They impose this on our faith communities as 
well. And our churches filed multiple lawsuits, more than I can 
actually quote into this Record today, to object on the grounds of 
religious liberty.
  This country shall not impose a violation of religious liberty on our 
faith people, and it shall not draw a distinction between an 
individual's faith, a private sector business' faith, or a church 
itself. It's all the same. No one is exempt from the protection of our 
First Amendment rights.
  Yet, this administration goes after them. And when he heard the heat 
that came back from the churches and, particularly, the Roman Catholic 
Church, the President did a press conference at noon on a Friday, and 
he said, I'm going to make an accommodation to the religious 
institution, an accommodation. Now I'm going to require the insurance 
companies to provide these things for free, abortifacients, 
contraceptives, sterilizations, and he repeated himself, ``for free.''
  The President can't do that. Even if the rule further defines the 
ObamaCare law that passed, that rule's got to be published. It's got to 
go through the administrative procedures course of action.
  The President cannot just simply, with impunity and utter arrogance, 
step up to a podium with the Great Seal of the President of the United 
States on it and say, now I'm changing things. Hugo Chavez does that. 
Barack Obama did that. He legislated by press conference.
  And now we have more lawlessness coming to undermine the rule of law: 
grant an amnesty to 11 million people that, if history shows us right, 
will be 33 million people. If you score that dynamically, you take $6.3 
trillion times 3 and you get better into the zone on what this could 
cost.
  This House is going to stand and oppose amnesty. It's going to defend 
the rule of law. It's going to protect the dignity of every human 
person, God's gift to this planet. But this country is also God's gift 
to this planet.
  And I urge, Mr. Speaker, all of those that are listening to this 
discussion that we're having, and my colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle, let's stick with our oath of office. Let's stick with our oath 
to uphold the Constitution. Let's defend the rule of law.
  Let's have a smart, legal immigration policy that rewards people that 
follow the law and can come here and contribute to this country. We 
cannot be the lifeboat for all of the poverty in the world. But we can 
be the inspiration for all of God's creatures on this planet.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________