[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9820-9827]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           IMMIGRATION REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Rothfus). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being 
recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House 
of Representatives. I won't, at this time, take up all the issues that 
were raised in the previous 45 minutes or so, Mr. Speaker. Instead, I'd 
like to talk about two topics, though, and one of those topics is the 
topic of the farm bill which historically, in a sad way, failed here on 
the floor of the House of Representatives within the last hour or so, 
hour and a half.
  The first thing I want to say about that is that the chairman of the 
Ag Committee, Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, has conducted himself in a 
fashion that is deserving of and he receives my admiration and should 
receive that of his constituents and the people of this country.
  One of the most difficult balances to achieve in any bill that we 
produce here in Congress is that 5-year--we call it the ``farm bill''--
the 5-year farm bill that has roughly 80 percent nutrition in it and 
about 20 percent agriculture in it. And each 5 years, we try to write 
the best formula and look into the crystal ball for the next 5 years as 
well as we can, and it takes the chairman of the Ag Committee, which is 
the least partisan of the committees here on the Hill, to direct the 
committee staff--which are very experienced and some of the best staff 
people we have here on the Hill--to work with the ag staff of the 
Democrat side, or the opposite party, and work with the ranking member 
to try to bring together such a variety of issues that have to do with 
sugar, dairy, crop insurance, nutrition and the qualifications for 
nutrition, piece after piece of this.
  It's like a huge accordion, and the chairman of that committee has 
got to make decisions on each component of that huge accordion to try 
to get it lined up in a way that if you go a little too far into the 
necessary reduction in the food stamp side, you lose votes over here on 
the Democrat side. If you don't take enough out of there, you lose 
votes on the Republican side. If you don't take enough money out of 
agriculture, you lose it over here on some of the conservative side. 
And on the other hand, if you don't have enough subsidy, you lose votes 
on the Democrat side.
  This is a very difficult balance, Mr. Speaker, and the marriage 
between the farm bill and the nutrition component of this, or the 
agriculture component and the nutrition component that we erroneously 
call the ``farm bill'' here because of history, that marriage was 
created out of necessity because the farm program could not be passed 
on its own. There were too many opponents to that, and the nutrition 
program had too much opposition on its own. And they married the two 
together, and each 5 years or so--and it hasn't always happened in 5 
years. I don't know when it's ever happened perfectly--it's been dialed 
together as closely as possible and cooperation was asked from 
Democrats and Republicans to finally come together and pass a bill.
  Frank Lucas put that together as perfectly as I think it could be 
done. I think, Mr. Speaker, that he was a maestro in the way he 
orchestrated all of this. And I watched as we went through the 
committee markup. We did one last year and couldn't get floor time to 
debate a bill. And so the work of the committee wasn't necessarily 
wasted because we started again this year. We began to put the pieces 
together again. We had a long markup of the bill, an extended markup of 
the bill, not as long as it was the previous year, and the pieces came 
together.
  Here's what it needed: it needed to have a strong, bipartisan support 
coming out of committee before it was going to get floor time, and it 
needed to have a prospect, a reasonable prospect, of 218 votes here on 
the floor of the House before that floor time would be granted. And as 
we have seen from the Speaker, he has consistently said that he wants 
to see the House work its will.
  Now, he let that happen on a continuing resolution in January, or 
I'll say February of 2011, and we did 92 hours of debate here on the 
floor under an open rule. And every aspect of the budget was the House 
working its will, and that was the longest and most expressive way that 
I have seen this House work its will.
  But the Rules Committee here on the farm bill that came out of the Ag 
Committee allowed a full series of amendments here on the floor. The 
chairman spoke to that number. I think he said there were over 100 
amendments here on the floor. And, yes, there was an agreement made 
under unanimous consent to pass a group of them that were not 
contentious, ``en bloc'' as we say. I think there was a real sincere 
effort to work a bill out here on the floor that would come to a 
conclusion that received 218 votes.
  Today, Mr. Speaker, we saw an example of when that didn't work, when 
an amendment or two or three went on that were more of an objection to 
that careful and delicate balance that had been put together by Frank 
Lucas. In the end, when the votes could not come together--in a very 
rare thing--a 5-year bill--that actually has been 6 years since we 
passed one--failed here on the floor of the House of Representatives.
  Mr. Speaker, I won't forget this day. I hope that this Congress, I 
hope the American people, and I hope, especially, the constituents of 
Frank Lucas remember the job that he has done. I don't ever remember 
seeing anybody in this Congress work so wisely, so honestly, so justly 
and so carefully to put together something that

[[Page 9821]]

had to be so carefully balanced to have a glass of cold water thrown in 
his face is what happened here, I think, on the floor today.

                              {time}  1520

  So I wanted to express my regret that the farm bill failed here 
today, and my appreciation for Frank Lucas, for the subcommittee chairs 
and the ranking members that worked with us on this. Those that gave 
their word and kept it, I thank all of them. And Mr. Speaker, I'm 
hopeful that the day will come that that work that has been earned is 
exonerated by a vote here on the floor of the House. In either case, I 
want the Record to reflect my opinion and my appreciation for Frank 
Lucas.
  We've had a big week here, Mr. Speaker. In this big week and this big 
day that I'll just call yesterday, I look back on it after a full day 
and I've wondered how one could actually do all of the things that were 
accomplished yesterday. I just want to run through that narrative 
because it's fresh in my mind. And that is that yesterday we did the 
longest press conference in the history of Congress. I don't know what 
competition there might have been for that--now, who would want to have 
a long press conference? Well, somebody that wanted to have a long time 
to air out a huge issue, and the issue was immigration.
  I have believed for some weeks now--in fact, 2 or 3 months--that the 
machinery of this Congress was set up to push immigration--and I'll 
call it ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' which is of course the 
euphemism for amnesty--through this Congress faster than the Congress 
could adjust to it, learn about the policy within the issues, and 
faster than the American people could learn about it and weigh in. We 
always need to move at the pace of the American people so that they 
have a chance to let us know what they think and we have a chance to 
digest that policy and make those decisions.
  This immigration issue was moving too fast. I believed, and I believe 
that it was accelerated too quickly in the United States Senate. I 
believe that today. It's moving too quickly without enough debate. It's 
too big a decision to be made. I believed, and I believe that it's 
still moving too quickly through the House of Representatives.
  I would point out that there was a Gang of Eight in the Senate--there 
remains a Gang of Eight in the Senate--that had been meeting in private 
and holding some press conferences, talking about the things that they 
were attempting to do, that finally rolled out a bill. I believe it was 
rolled out at 844 pages long.
  The debate and the markup that took place in the Judiciary Committee 
in the United States Senate was relatively long. There were a good 
number of amendments that were offered. But most of those votes--some 
might even say all of those votes--just came down the lines of whether 
they were part of the deal or whether they weren't part of the deal. So 
it looked like the Gang of Eight had a deal going into the Judiciary 
Committee markup. They certainly came out of that with their deal 
intact, and it's to the floor of the United States Senate today. That's 
fast and fast track.
  While that's going on, the attention of the American people on this 
issue has been split between the United States Senate and the House. 
There has been a working group, a bipartisan working group, in the 
House also. In the Senate, it's four Democrats and four Republicans in 
the Gang of Eight. In the House, I learned not that long ago that the 
working group was four Democrats and four Republicans. I also learned 
that the Speaker encouraged their work, and I learned that they were 
working in secret for perhaps the last 4 years.
  Well, it was in secret. I have, I believe, served more time in the 
seat, listening and hearing immigration information and reading through 
reports, probably than anybody else on my side of the aisle over the 
last decade--although there are two or three that I think have a high 
level of expertise on immigration policy.
  My antennae aren't that weak here, Mr. Speaker, that I'm not picking 
up the signals of what's going on behind closed doors. We talk, we flow 
through here to vote, we meet with each other, but I didn't know that 
there was a secret committee working here out of the House of 
Representatives that had the blessing of the Speaker. I didn't know 
that until it was announced by the press some weeks ago. And the secret 
committee that didn't admit to its existence, some of them facetiously 
spoke about it as ``that secret committee'' even though they finally 
admitted--and the press, I think, ferreted this out--that they were on 
that committee. This committee of four Republicans and four Democrats 
in the House of Representatives that was secret--now it's not a 
committee of eight any longer, it's a committee of eight minus one, at 
least as far as I know--their ability to produce a bill seems to have 
been stalled here in this Congress. I'm not sorry about that.
  About the same time that conclusion may have been drawn, I heard our 
Speaker, I believe it was 2 weeks ago on Friday at his press 
conference, say he hoped to see immigration legislation pass out of the 
Judiciary Committee in the month of June. Well, that was a surprise to 
me. And when the announcement came shortly thereafter that we should 
clear our schedules for this week and next week as members of the 
Judiciary Committee to prepare for a markup on immigration, I saw that 
as a green flag that was dropped that moves the immigration policy more 
quickly here in the House of Representatives than I'm comfortable with.
  But I do not criticize the conduct of our chairman of the Judiciary 
Committee. Bob Goodlatte is one of the more astute people on policy 
that we have in this Congress. He is a seasoned and knowledgeable and 
smart legislator, and he sees the pieces that are moving and 
understands what he needs to do to move the right pieces. And I have 
served with him on two committees now for more than 10 years.
  And yet the pace that's going through this Congress may be a wise 
one. It may be a wise one if enforcement first is what emerges here 
from the House of Representatives, and if the bill in the Senate can be 
slowed down or stopped in the Senate.
  The consensus that I hear among the Republican Conference in the 
House of Representatives is this, Mr. Speaker: Stop the bleeding at the 
border. Shut off the bleeding at the border. Close the border. Get that 
done. And when you get that done, then come back and talk about the 
other things.
  I'd make the point that when I came here a little more than 10 years 
ago, I said then let's stop the bleeding at the border. We've got to 
close the border. I came to this floor, and when people said, well, we 
can't--I've advocated long that we should build a fence, a wall and a 
fence on our southern border. And that fence, wall and fence that we 
can build on the border would be what will help to secure our border. I 
agree that we would add to that sensory devices, vibration sensors, 
motion detectors, you name it, add all that to it. But you simply 
cannot have enough border patrol agents to control 2,000 miles of 
border with the conditions that we have. They have to rotate shifts, 
they get their vacations, there's time off. It takes a lot of people on 
payroll to have enough people on the ground. And we know that there's 
bleeding through that border, a lot that's crossing through the border.
  Mr. Speaker, I went down and did a surprise visit to a point of entry 
at Sasabe, Arizona. When I walked in there--they didn't know a Member 
of Congress was showing up there--I spoke with the shift supervisor, 
and his name was Mike Kring. He has since passed away, sadly. I think 
that he was a strong enforcement officer. He was well respected by his 
men that I saw around him. But I asked him about the frequency of the 
crossing there, at the legal crossing at the point of entry which is 
pretty much a rural port of entry in Sasabe, Arizona. And he said, 
well, this crossing isn't the busiest crossing near here. There is an 
illegal crossing east of me that's far busier and an illegal crossing 
west of me that's far busier. This is just our formal crossing. That 
tells you something about what's going on on the border.

[[Page 9822]]

  We can close the border. We can do it with the resources that we 
have. I have long said that. I have not changed my position--I think 
it's stronger rather than weaker.
  I may be the only one that's actually gone back and done the work to 
calculate what we're spending to defend our southern border. These 
numbers are old, Mr. Speaker, that I'm about to quote here this 
afternoon. They come to this: there's a 50-mile area north of our 
southwest border. Within that 50 miles, you will see Border Patrol 
agents, Custom and Border Protection agents, you will see ICE agents in 
there also. The effort that's done to control our border also is the 
cost of their vehicles, their communications, their benefits package, 
all of the things that we invest in that area. When you add that all up 
and you divide it out by the 2,000 miles--which is pretty close to it, 
it's the best number to use for the length of the border, the southern 
border--you end up with this number--and this number would be adjusted 
upward, not downward, to get it more current than the roughly 3 years 
ago that I'm talking about: $6 million a mile. We're spending $6 
million a mile, at a minimum, every year to control our southern 
border. And we're getting, according to Border Patrol testimony before 
the Immigration Subcommittee, about 25 percent enforcement.

                              {time}  1530

  They think that of the 100 people that would try to cross the border 
they might be stopping about 25 percent. Now, it's probably gotten a 
little better in the last couple of years. But when I go down to the 
border, Mr. Speaker, and I ask the agents there candidly, without 
identifying themselves and without going on public record, what 
percentage of the illegal border crossers are we interdicting, the most 
consistent number I get is 10 percent, not 25. Some will smirk and 
say--or not really smirk, but they will just kind of snort and say, 
well, 3 or 4 percent. The real answer is we don't know. They know more 
than we do.
  The 10 percent number seems to me to be more likely to be an accurate 
number than the 25 percent number. But think of this. At the peak of 
the illegal border crossings, we would have about 11,000 a night. That 
comes to 4 million illegal crossing attempts a year. Eleven thousand a 
night. Twice the size of Santa Anna's army coming across our border 
every night, on average. And maybe those illegal crossings have been 
reduced by half--maybe. That's still the size of Santa Anna's army 
every night.
  We are talking about whether we should legalize the people that came 
across that border. And we're assuming by the argument of, say, Mr. 
Gutierrez of Illinois and many others that they're all innocent people 
that were brought in by their parents--maybe against their will, 
certainly without their knowledge that there was anything wrong with it 
or illegal with it, that that's the universe of all the people that are 
unlawfully present in the United States are just simply those that 
wanted to come to America for a better life.
  Mr. Speaker, I go down to the border. I sit alongside that fence at 
night. I don't have night vision, but I have ears. I can sit in the 
dark and I can hear the vehicles come down through the mesquite. In 
fact, when you hear the one with the bad muffler come back a second 
time and a third time, you know they're shuttling people to come across 
the border at night. Within, say, an hour after dark to the next 2 or 3 
or 4 hours after dark is when the highest traffic is, because they know 
they've got to walk across the desert a long ways and they want to make 
as much time as they can before it turns daylight where they might hole 
up or where they might be picked up if they can get to the highway 
north of there.
  So I listen and I hear the vehicles come through across the desert. I 
hear the mesquite scratch alongside the vehicle, and you hear the doors 
open. Maybe 70, 80, 90, 100 yards south of the border you can hear the 
doors open. You can hear people get out. First, they open the door. You 
can hear them drop their pack on the ground. Then they get out and then 
they close the door, kind of quietly, but it is still a quiet slam of 
the door. You can hear them pick up their packs, whisper. You hear them 
walk through the brush, and you can hear them cross the fence.
  When you're down there at night without night vision, you sometimes 
think you see some things you don't see. Have you ever sat around at 
night in the pitch-black dark and watched? Your mind will play tricks 
on you.
  I can't say into the Record, Mr. Speaker, that I saw good numbers of 
people walk across the border. I know I heard them. That's the only 
place they could have been going. I heard them go through the fence. I 
believe I saw the shadows, but I'm not certain of that particular 
component.
  I'm very confident that there are hundreds and hundreds of people 
that pour across that border at night. That number that I said is 
roughly half of 11,000, the size of Santa Anna's army, which was 5,000 
to 6,000, is roughly the number that we will see every night.
  Now, this border is wide open from that perspective. All of the 
people that came into America aren't those that are coming through that 
path. All of those people that are coming into America across that 
border, sometimes you will see a pack train of 75. Every one of them 
will have a pack of marijuana on their back and they're carrying it 
into the United States, smuggling it into the United States. Those 
people fit under the DREAM Act definition, too, if they came into the 
United States before they were 16 and had been here whatever the length 
of time might be. If they came here before December 31, 2011, it would 
be the Senate version of the bill.
  I've been on the border, Mr. Speaker, and seen the shadow wolves 
interdict a smuggler, a marijuana smuggler, coming through with a false 
bed in the box of a pick-up truck that was extended downward about 7 to 
9 inches. Underneath that were the bales of marijuana. I unloaded them 
myself and took them up to the scales where they were weighed. They 
weighed approximately 240 pounds.
  The reason for that, Mr. Speaker--240 pounds--is because in some 
sectors of the border they don't have the ability to prosecute drug 
smugglers and so they set a limit, the prosecutors will set a limit. 
Sometimes it's you have to have more than 500 pounds of marijuana to be 
prosecuted; sometimes you have to have more than 250 pounds of 
marijuana to be prosecuted. The smugglers know that.
  I'm going to guess that the sector that I was in that day, the limit 
was, at least anticipated by the smugglers, to be 250 pounds. So they 
dialed it under 250 to about 240 pounds and sent their guy through, and 
he was caught. What we don't know is, was that a decoy so that when all 
converged on that smuggler, that there wasn't a straight truck through 
with a couple of tons of marijuana in it. I don't know that. Those are 
tactics that we see. That's tactics of using sometimes illegal 
crossings, sometimes going through the legal crossings that we have.
  A lot of the border isn't marked. Across New Mexico, there's a 
concrete pylon from horizon to the next horizon that's just set there, 
and you would have to know what you were looking for to know where the 
border is. It's just open desert. I've flown most of that, a lot of 
that at night. I've also traveled--I'll say that I've traveled probably 
every mile of our southern border, with the exception of some of the 
miles along the Texas border, which zigzags quite a lot, and I haven't 
covered all of that.
  Mr. Speaker, we can build a fence, a wall, and a fence, and we can do 
it with less money than we're spending today on the southern border, 
over $6 million a mile on the southern border.
  To put this in perspective, to build an interstate across Iowa 
cornfield--expensive now, today, expensive Iowa cornfield--we can buy 
the right-of-way, we can pay for the engineering, we can do the grading 
and the drainage work and the paving and the shouldering and the 
painting and the signage and the seeding and the fencing, all of that, 
and open up a four-lane interstate highway for about $4 million a mile. 
We're spending $6 million on every single

[[Page 9823]]

mile of our southern border, and we're getting something like 25 
percent or less efficiency with what we have there.
  Part of it is because the President has declared, by executive edict, 
amnesty. Even though I think the Border Patrol is doing their job as 
well as they can within those limits, it's clear that ICE has been 
handcuffed. We have had the President of the ICE union, Chris Crane, 
testify before this Congress--I think he's been nine times into this 
city within the last year and a half or so--doing a stellar job of 
pointing out that the law requires the Federal immigration officers to 
place into removal proceedings those people that they encounter that 
are unlawfully present in the United States. It's their judgment on 
that that dictates.
  Well, the President has prohibited them from doing so through the 
Morton Memos, the Morton Memos that have been rejected by this Congress 
in two ways within the last 3 weeks or so. One is a full vote in the 
House on the King amendment, and the other is a vote in the Judiciary 
Committee on the King amendment. So we have, every way that we've had 
the opportunity, rejected the idea that the President can simply make 
up immigration law out of thin air, decide that he can issue work 
permits, that he can legalize people that are here illegally, that he 
can, by executive edict, destroy the rule of law--destroy the rule of 
law.
  I often talk about the pillars of American exceptionalism. We are a 
great country, Mr. Speaker. This great country that we are relies upon 
this America that Ronald Reagan described as the ``shining city on a 
hill.'' This city is built on the beautiful marble pillars of American 
exceptionalism. Many of them are within the Bill of Rights:
  Freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly, all wrapped up 
in the First Amendment to our Constitution;
  There are property rights in the Fifth Amendment;
  There is a prohibition on double jeopardy. You get to be faced by an 
accuser and a jury of your peers;
  The States' and personal rights that are reserved in the Ninth and 
Tenth Amendments.
  All of those are pillars of American exceptionalism. So is free 
enterprise capitalism.
  If we had none of that, we wouldn't have the Nation we are. If you 
build--and I want to add to that, the core of our culture is Judeo-
Christianity. We welcome people of all religions. The foundation of the 
American civilization is Judeo-Christianity. Without it, we can't be 
the America we are either.

                              {time}  1540

  So think of this beautiful shining city on the hill--which Reagan so 
eloquently described for us--sitting on the beautiful marble pillars of 
American exceptionalism, but I can't think of that city sitting there 
without also thinking of an essential pillar of exceptionalism called 
the rule of law.
  Now, if you would take a jackhammer and chisel away that marble 
pillar of American exceptionalism, which is freedom of speech, and 
destroy freedom of speech, the beautiful edifice of our shining city on 
the hill would crumble and fall. If you did the same thing to freedom 
of the press, our shining city on the hill would crumble and fall. If 
you took away our Second Amendment rights, which I didn't mention but 
which are a pillar of American exceptionalism, eventually our other 
freedoms would crumble and fall, and tyrants would take over. If you 
put people subject to double jeopardy, we wouldn't be the civilization 
we are, and the rule of law wouldn't mean what it does. It would 
crumble and fall just as it would if you destroyed the rule of law, if 
you have contempt for the rule of law, if the Supreme Court disregarded 
the rule of law, and if they ruled on interpreting their law to be 
their whim, their wish--not the very definition of the supreme law of 
the land, being our Constitution.
  It is as the President so well described on March 28, 2011, before a 
high school here in Washington, D.C., when he was asked: Why don't you 
just implement the DREAM Act by executive order?
  His answer was to the students who were listening: I don't have the 
constitutional authority to do that. You've been studying the 
Constitution. You students know that it's the job of the legislature to 
pass the laws, the job of the executive branch to enforce the laws and 
the job of the judicial branch to interpret the laws.
  Now, that is an accurate description as should aptly come from a 
former adjunct professor of constitutional law at the University of 
Chicago. That is our President. He knew what he was talking about, and 
that description was consistent with his oath of office, Mr. Speaker.
  The oath of office is defined within our Constitution. It's specific. 
It has been concluded with ``so help me God'' for a long time, but 
within that oath is also the oath to preserve and protect and defend 
the Constitution of the United States. In the Constitution, it requires 
the President of the United States--our chief executive law enforcement 
officer and Commander in Chief--``to take care that the laws be 
faithfully executed.'' That doesn't mean, Mr. Speaker, execute the law. 
That doesn't mean execute the rule of law. That doesn't mean execute 
the Constitution itself. It means you take an oath, and your job is to 
uphold the law, to take care that the law is being faithfully executed.
  The President has defied his own oath of office. He has defied the 
rule of law. He has defied the Constitution, and he said, I'm not going 
to enforce the law. I'm not going to enforce the laws that I don't 
like. I disagree with some of the immigration policy that has been 
passed by Congress and signed by one of his predecessors--in fact, 
signed by Bill Clinton. He is refusing to enforce those kinds of laws.
  That does great damage to the Constitution, and it throws the balance 
of the three branches of government out of whack. Our Founding Fathers 
imagined that there would be competition for power and influence 
between the three branches of government. They envisioned it always 
with three branches of government--the legislative branch, the 
executive branch and the judicial branch.
  This Congress is in article I. That means we are more the voice of 
the people than any other branch of government. It was the first and 
most important branch. They also knew that they had to have a strong 
chief executive--a strong President, a strong Commander in Chief. The 
experiences they went through in fighting a Revolutionary War with the 
Continental Congress told them you can't have a strong national defense 
without a strong Commander in Chief, so they established that. They 
established the balance between the legislative branch in article I and 
the executive branch in article II and also the balance--and, I think, 
to a slightly lesser degree--between the judicial branch. Think of it 
as a triangle.
  They envisioned that each branch of government would seek to expand 
its power. That's human nature. You always want more power than you 
actually have, whether you take this thing from the Pope to the 
President, right on down the line to the Senators, who have a one one-
hundredth of the power of the Senate Chamber, and to the House Members, 
who have a one four-hundred-thirty-fifth of the House Chamber. We 
always want to have a little more leverage, a little more influence--
get your hands on a gavel or maybe become the majority leader, the 
minority leader, the Speaker of the House. Actually, the former Speaker 
of the House, Speaker Pelosi, just walked across this floor, Mr. 
Speaker, and she would understand that as we all do. In a family, you 
always want to have more influence. If the patriarch of the family is 
the one who writes the rules, you always grate a little bit underneath 
that. That's a natural thing to always try to grab a little bit more 
power.
  They knew it was human nature, so they set up this balance between 
the three branches of government, but they envisioned that each branch 
of government would jealously protect its constitutional authority and 
not concede it to the usurpation of some other

[[Page 9824]]

branch of government. They envisioned that Congress would try to grow 
in its influence and authority, and they gave the President veto power 
so that he could veto the overreach, potentially, of the House and the 
Senate together.
  They balanced the House and the Senate so that this hot cup of 
coffee--or hot cup of tea, they were thinking here in the House of 
Representatives--could be a quick reaction force when things go wrong 
in America. A new crop of House Members comes in with the freshest of 
vigor that comes from the American people, and they set about changing 
things. That's a 2-year election cycle. We saw that in 2010 when 87 new 
freshmen Republicans came into the House of Representatives--every 
single one of them having run for office on the promise to repeal 
ObamaCare, every single one. Meanwhile, while the House was being 
heated up, the Senate itself--which, if all of the Senators rather than 
roughly a third of them were up for election each cycle, I think we 
would have seen the majority turn over in the United States Senate, but 
it didn't quite do that.
  So the Senate has been the cooling saucer to the hot cup of tea or 
coffee that is the House. Our Founding Fathers saw that, and they 
wanted to balance that. They wanted to have the longer view in the 
Senate. They wanted the quick reaction forces in the House. They wanted 
to blend them together, and they did. I think they did a very good job 
of that.
  They also wanted to then check an overreach of article I, the 
legislative branch, the Congress, by giving the President of the United 
States veto power. At the same time, they put constraints on the 
President because we can control the activities of the executive branch 
through the appropriations if we can actually control the 
appropriations here in the House of Representatives. So they granted 
that authority, but they expected that there would be like a tug of war 
for that power. They did not think that the President of the United 
States would take an oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the 
Constitution of the United States and be required to take care that the 
laws be faithfully executed and then go out and execute the law rather 
than enforce the law, but that's what has happened.
  The President has with impunity defied the rule of law, and has 
simply canceled immigration law that existed on the books that requires 
ICE and Federal immigration law enforcement officers to place those 
individuals unlawfully here in removal proceedings. That's the law. The 
President suspended it.
  And what has happened here in Congress?
  There was an election after he did that. On March 28, 2011, he said, 
I don't have the power to by executive order implement the DREAM Act. 
On June 15, 2012, he assumed that authority, and he simply suspended 
the rule of law and imposed his will, his wish, on America.
  And what happened?
  The people who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule 
of law decided that they were going to honor the lawlessness. They 
decided that they were going to comply with the President's order 
because, well, their jobs were on the line, for one thing, but I say 
also they have an oath of office for another.
  When that happens, when there is a dispute between the legislative 
branch and the executive branch of government, the judicial branch 
needs to step in to sort out that dispute. I know they don't like to do 
that, Mr. Speaker. In any case, I asked for a meeting and invited 
people to come to the table, which they did, and we discussed how we 
move forward to put a block on the President's unconstitutional 
assumption of legislative authority--a violation of the separation of 
powers.

                              {time}  1550

  I had been through that litigation in the past on an issue that I'll 
not take up here, but it had to do with a State issue and the State 
chief executive officer. I knew the arguments. Out of that meeting came 
the lawsuit of Crane v. Napolitano. That's Chris Crane, the president 
of the ICE union as the lead plaintiff. Of course, now Napolitano is 
the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. 
That case went before the Northern District of Texas, the Federal 
court, where Judge Reed O'Connor ruled in favor of the plaintiffs--
that's the ICE union and the list of plaintiffs that are there--ruled 
in favor of it in nine of 10 arguments and sent the other argument back 
to the executive branch to reword it in such a way--I'll just use my 
terms, Mr. Speaker--it's more intelligible so he can answer and respond 
on that particular point.
  Generally, the decision was this: Judge Reed O'Connor essentially 
wrote: shall means shall, not may. If it requires that the agents put 
people that are unlawfully present in the United States in removal 
proceedings, if it says they ``shall do so,'' then they shall do so. 
Shall means shall. It doesn't mean may. And there is no word in our 
language that is more definitive that can replace the word shall, at 
least as far as legal parlance is concerned. That's essentially the 
decision.
  So it seems to be--and I'm optimistic that it's moving in the 
direction--that we will get a final decision in a Federal court and 
perhaps the administration will appeal this all the way up the line to 
the Supreme Court.
  But in the end, I can't imagine how a judicial branch of government, 
how a Supreme Court could come down on the side of the President and 
decide that the President of the United States has the authority to 
make up law as he goes along or disregard law as he goes along.
  The President has argued--at least the President and his spokesmen 
and spokeswomen have argued--that they have prosecutorial discretion. 
Prosecutorial discretion means that they can't enforce the law against 
every person who might violate the law because they don't have the 
resources, so the resources need to be targeted where they do the most 
good. That's prosecutorial discretion.
  I agree that that exists and that it's necessary that the discretion 
of prosecution exists. But I don't agree that the President can define 
broad classes of people that include hundreds of thousands in a single 
class and then decide that he's not going to enforce the law against 
any of them. That is what he has done. He's manufactured four classes 
of people and decided he's going to waive the law on all of these 
classes of people, suspend its enforcement. That turns out to be an 
invitation to more and more people to violate the law, even ``to the 
extent of.''
  We have had illegal aliens in the halls of the congressional offices 
that have lobbied Members of Congress with impunity. And they will come 
in boldly and say, I'm exempted from the law by the President of the 
United States, so I can be here. And I demand that you agree with me 
and get me my college education. They have been inside the Judiciary 
Committee room. They have been introduced by the ranking member of the 
Judiciary Committee. That's how far this has gotten, Mr. Speaker. The 
contempt for the law, the contempt for the rule of law and the sense of 
entitlement have gone beyond the pale.
  So this rule of law, which must be reconstructed now, because the 
verbal and keyboard jackhammers of the left have chiseled away at that 
beautiful marble pillar of American exceptionalism called the rule of 
law. And because they have done that, we must reconstruct it. And if we 
can't hold the rule of law together, if we can't restore it, if we 
can't reconstruct it, then it crumbles. If the rule of law, according 
to the Gang of Eight's bill in the Senate, according to some of what 
seems to be moving here in the House, destroys the rule of law at least 
with regard to immigration, it destroys it.
  There would be no enforcement of the rule of law with regard to 
immigration unless you committed a felony. You're here unlawfully, you 
commit a felony or you commit a combination of three mysterious 
misdemeanors, that happens to qualify you for removal proceedings. 
Those are exemptions that are part of it. They claim that they will 
enforce the law on that.

[[Page 9825]]

  The balance of it is if you cross the border illegally and come into 
the United States, that is a crime, Mr. Speaker. If you overstay your 
visa, which is about, let's say, a number that approaches 40 percent of 
those who are unlawfully present in the United States, that's a civil 
misdemeanor, not a crime, at least today. If you do either one of those 
things only, they're not going to put you in removal proceedings. And 
if you come across into the United States and you defraud your employer 
and you come up with fraudulent documents and you use that in order to 
get a job, this administration isn't going to enforce document fraud, 
which is a felony against you.
  Essentially it said if you can get into the United States legally or 
illegally, if you can stay in the United States, you can cheat to get a 
job, you can lie to your employer, you can use document fraud and there 
won't be a penalty to any of these things. Essentially, nonviolent, 
peaceful crimes are not going to be a problem. But if you get engaged 
in some of the serious things like maybe drug smuggling or the crimes 
of violence that we all know about or the threat of violence even, then 
it makes the administration uncomfortable, and they might decide to 
send you back and put you in the condition that you were in before you 
broke the law.
  But peaceful people have been granted amnesty by the President of the 
United States. And this Congress has sat here almost placidly and 
accepted it as if he has that constitutional authority, and he does 
not. That's why the lawsuit of Crane v. Napolitano was filed, and it's 
a clear understanding from my standpoint. But the confusion seems to be 
that too many Members that take an oath of office to preserve, protect, 
and defend this Constitution, as well, don't have a clear enough 
understanding of the brighter line between article I and article II.
  Our job is to legislate, write the laws. The President's job is to 
enforce them. It's that simple. Yet there was an interpretation that 
came out to us on the morning of November 7. Wednesday morning, 
November 7, Mr. Speaker--and a lot of people will understand and 
remember what that date was. That was the day after the election.
  I was engaged in this election as much as I've been engaged in any 
election. And as a Member of Congress from Iowa, I was also engaged in 
the Presidential nomination and election process. I was engaged in the 
debate. And I've done events that have to do with Presidential 
candidates on a relatively regular basis. I think I understood what the 
debate was about for the election for President of the United States.
  As I listened to that, it was about jobs and the economy. If you 
would put jobs and the economy in quotes and then put Barack Obama's 
name in the search engine of Google, or if you would put jobs and the 
economy in quotes and then put Romney or Mitt there in the search 
engine of Google and send that off, you're going to get hundreds of 
thousands of hits altogether because that was the topic of the election 
last November 6, jobs and the economy. I told the Romney people I've 
heard ``jobs and the economy'' so many times it puts me to sleep. Don't 
you think you're putting the American people to sleep by beating the 
same drum over and over again?
  But remembering the mantra jobs and the economy until we were just 
drubbed into numbness with it also reminds us that the election was 
not, Mr. Speaker, about the immigration issue. I don't remember a 
debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney that went into any depth or 
substance on the immigration issue. Yet before the sun came up on 
November 7, some of the leading pundits and experts concluded that Mitt 
Romney would be President-elect by now before the sun came up on 
November 7 if he just hadn't said the two words ``self-deport,'' or if 
he had not been such a defender of the rule of law on immigration.
  That was a surprise to me. I wish he'd have talked about it more. 
Well, he didn't. The election wasn't about immigration, but talking 
heads and, let me say, erroneously pragmatic individuals in my party 
who decided that they would contribute to this argument that came from 
both parties. And they drove the argument to the point where some 
people were convinced the election really was about immigration when it 
was not. And they argued that Mitt Romney would be President-elect if 
he had just gotten a larger percentage of the Hispanic vote.
  He would not, Mr. Speaker. If he had won the majority of the Hispanic 
vote in the swing States, he still would not have won the Presidency. 
If he had won 70 percent, he might have; but that didn't happen. And no 
one really thinks that's going to happen in the near future. So they 
came to a conclusion and thought they could support it with facts. 
They've learned now that they can't support their conclusion with 
facts, but they're determined to go forward with granting amnesty to 
initially--they think--11 million people that are here in this country 
unlawfully while providing the emptiest and most vacuous of promises 
that one day they're going to get around to putting a plan together, 
and if the plan happens to be implemented they might secure the border.

                              {time}  1600

  That's what's going on. And I don't know how in the world they can 
say this to the American people with a straight face and believe that 
there's going to be border security in exchange for law enforcement. 
It's not going to happen, Mr. Speaker. It didn't happen in 1986, one of 
only two times that Ronald Reagan let me down.
  But in 1986, the promise was this:
  We had about a million people in the country illegally. Actually, it 
started at 700,000 to 800,000. That sounds like a minuscule number 
today. So roughly a million people, and debate raged in the House and 
the Senate. I believed all along that good sense would prevail. I 
believed that people who gave their oath to uphold the Constitution in 
the House and in the Senate would understand that they were undermining 
the rule of law if they granted amnesty to people who came into America 
illegally. I believed all along that they would understand that if they 
grant amnesty, they would get more lawbreakers, more illegal border 
crossers, a less manageable situation than the one that they had in 
1986.
  But the argument for clemency, for amnesty prevailed in the House and 
the Senate. But I believe that Ronald Reagan would understand the 
principles of rule of law clearly enough and the long-term implications 
of such an act of amnesty in 1986 clearly enough that he would take the 
authority that was vested in him and the United States Congress to veto 
that legislation and require the Congress to pass amnesty by a two-
thirds majority in the House and Senate and overturn his veto. I don't 
believe they could have done that in 1986.
  I believed Ronald Reagan would veto the Amnesty Act in 1986. Instead, 
to my great disappointment, he signed it. The calculation at the time 
was, if we just grant amnesty to these million people, we're going to 
get full cooperation to enforce the border and never again will there 
be another Amnesty Act--never again. This was the Amnesty Act to end 
all Amnesty Acts. It was going to be law enforcement from that point 
forward. The border was going to be secured. There would be a clear 
prohibition on hiring illegal employees. They were going to shut off 
the jobs magnet, and they created the I-9 form, the I-9 form which 
requires an employer to fill out the form, make sure that you have the 
documentation, the identification, and make sure that you have all of 
the ``I's'' dotted and the ``T's'' crossed on the I-9 form because a 
Federal agent is going to come inspect your paperwork. An INS agent 
would come and inspect your paperwork.
  I did all of those things as carefully as I could. I had a fear that 
I would slip up and not meet the standard, Mr. Speaker. And so we very 
carefully documented our job applicants in my construction company to 
make sure that we were in compliance with the law, all the while 
expecting that that INS agent was just around the corner taking a look 
at the paperwork of our

[[Page 9826]]

competition or our neighboring business. Of course, they never showed 
up to check my paperwork. I'm not disappointed by that. I'm 
disappointed that they didn't show up to check the paperwork of 
thousands of employers with millions of employees.
  The enforcement didn't really happen. It didn't happen in shutting 
off the jobs magnet. The litigation began. The ACLU began litigating, 
as did other organizations. They began to argue, You're requiring an 
employer to make a judgment call when he looks at the documents and the 
picture and the face of the person that's applying. And you cannot 
require an employer to make a judgment call because it makes them 
liable for the lawsuit that we're going to sue them with.
  So the litigation of immigration turned it into a mess, 
intentionally, I believe, so that they could provide for open borders, 
which was the intention of the Teddy Kennedys and others at the time. 
They undermined the enforcement effort politically. And they undermined 
it in the courts, and they undermined it culturally, and they began to 
convert the people who came here illegally into a victims' group.
  If you understand the politics of victimology, you understand that 
there is a certain amount of sainthood that gets attached to these 
victims, for people that are in victims' groups. That conversion has 
been taking place since probably before 1986, but I remember it from 
that point forward.
  What Ronald Reagan learned and what today his Attorney General at the 
time, Attorney General Ed Meese knows and has three times written 
about, and what another member of the Reagan administration, Gary 
Bauer, knows and has spoken openly of is that if you grant amnesty, if 
you suspend the rule of law and you tell people, We're not going to 
enforce the law against you, continue to break it, you'll get more law 
breakers.
  More law breakers means more lawlessness, and more lawlessness erodes 
the rule of law. And when they bring a bill to the Senate that 
legalizes, aside from the felons, the three mysterious misdemeanor 
committers, aside from that, it legalizes everybody here in the United 
States that's here illegally. Not only that, they send an invitation by 
the bill out to anybody that has been deported in the past that says: 
Reapply. Come back into the United States. We really didn't mean it.
  They say if you came here after December 31, 2011, you're not going 
to be exempted by this Amnesty Act that is coming through the Senate, 
so presumably they are going to enforce the law against those who came 
here after December 31, 2011.
  Mr. Speaker, they're not going to do that. If they were going to do 
that, you would see a news story about somebody who was put back and 
the condition they were in before they broke the law that came here 
after December 31, 2011. No, ICE is prohibited from enforcing the law 
against people who fit these definitions, and I asked that specific 
question of the president of the ICE union before the Judiciary 
Committee under oath. And he said, If they're in jail, I can't put them 
in removal proceedings.
  Even if they're in jail, he can't go into jail and say, Listen, I'm 
required to put you in removal proceedings. I'm going to take you back 
to the port of entry. He can't do that.
  Who's in handcuffs now? ICE, the Border Patrol, in handcuffs today. 
They can't enforce the law the way it's written in even the 1986 
Amnesty Act, let alone the 1996 Immigration Reform Act of which Lamar 
Smith of Texas had such a huge role in. Good legislation; glad they did 
it. 1986 was flawed; it should have never been passed.
  But if ICE can't enforce the law today, even if someone is in jail, 
and they are essentially handcuffed from doing their job, and there is 
a legalization of the people that came into the United States before 
December 31, 2011, and an invitation to those who have since been 
removed to come back again, and no prospect that they're going to 
enforce the law against those who come in after December 31, 2011, that 
makes it, Mr. Speaker, the always is, always was, and always will be 
Amnesty Act.
  I use a little bit of, let me say, license here to speak of it this 
way: always is, always was, and always will be. If you is in America, 
you gets to stay. If you was in America, you gets to come back. And if 
you will be in America, you also get to stay.
  This is the perpetual and retroactive Amnesty Act. It's perpetual; it 
goes on forever. You could never enforce immigration law again. You 
could never say to people, Well, you came here after our deadline; now 
we're going to enforce the law.
  Not after you flow 11 million or 22 million or 33 million people into 
this country, or a number that results from this that may perhaps be 
over 50 million people over time. Numbers USA's number is 33 million 
people that get legalized as an effect of the legislation in the 
Senate.
  Robert Rector's study at the Heritage Foundation--and both of them, 
by the way, did stellar work yesterday. His study only contemplates 
11.5 million, which is the lowest number, the reduced number, the 
boiled-down number of those we know are here that essentially reflects 
off the United States census. That's the people that admit they're here 
when you ask them, Are you here illegally? A number approaching 11 
million said, Yes, I am. I confess.
  We know that in the '86 Amnesty Act that was roughly a million people 
anticipated. It became over 3 million people. So use the three-to-one 
multiplier. That does reflect pretty close. It's not the formula used 
by Numbers USA. That formula is a careful formula that calculates 
family unification and the record we have of human activity on how they 
react to the legislative changes that take place.
  But if the formula was 1 million in '86, it became 3 million because 
of document fraud and other reasons. Those who gamed the system, those 
who came in before the Amnesty Act was signed, or even after the 
Amnesty Act was signed, to take part in that and lied about when they 
came here, the 1 million became 3 million. It doesn't stretch my 
imagination to see the 11 million become 33 million. That seems to me 
to match up in two different types of formulas.

                              {time}  1610

  So do we really want to legalize 33 million people, or even 11 
million people?
  Do we want to give them access to all of the government benefits that 
we have?
  Do we want to let them have access immediately to, I'd say, at least 
to and their children to the systems that we have, the health care 
system, the education system we have, the public security systems we 
have?
  Do we want to put them in a place where their tax return makes them 
eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, so that all of their 
children that may not live in the United States even at the time, they 
get a check from the Federal Treasury for that?
  Do we want to see this pour out to where the number that came from 
Robert Rector's study is that, on average, the people that would be 
included in this amnesty act in the Senate, over the course of the time 
they would live in the United States, the average comes in at 34 years 
old, and a 34-year old, by the time they reach that age, will live to 
the age of about 84. That's 50 years in the United States. That's a net 
cost to the taxpayer of $580,000 per person.
  Do we want to really write a check or borrow the money from the 
Chinese to fund that?
  Do we need that many more people in the United States doing the work 
they say Americans won't do, for a price of $580,000 per person?
  Do we want to rent cheap labor for the price of $12,000 a year? 
That's what the math works out to. I think it's $11,600 a year.
  Do we really want to--do the taxpayers care that much about having 
somebody to cut the grass and somebody to weed the garden and somebody 
to do all this work that they claim Americans won't do?
  By the way, I don't think anybody in this Congress can find work that 
I haven't been willing to do, and I think

[[Page 9827]]

my sons would certainly reinforce that statement. They remind me that 
they've been out in 126-degree heat index and poured concrete on these 
days, and they've been driving sheet piling across the swamp at 60 
below wind chill. They tell me that's a 186 degrees temperature change, 
and no species on the planet could survive what they went through 
growing up in our family. And I say, well, no species other than my 
sons. And I remind them that, and me too, guys.
  We did work like that in the heat, in the cold, in the rain and the 
snow. We did work underground. We do the sanitary sewer work. We do 
earth work. We do all kinds of things. We do demolition. All of the 
work that they say Americans won't do, we've done a whole lot of that 
and will do more.
  No one's too proud to do work in this country. We're just sometimes 
not willing to do work for the price that's offered. And we know that 
free enterprise capitalism takes us to this. The value of anything, 
including labor, is determined by the supply and demand in the 
marketplace.
  Corn prices go up and down, depending on how much there is, how much 
corn there is, the supply, and how many customers there are to buy it, 
the demand. That's true for gold and oil and platinum and soybeans and 
labor.
  And because we have an oversupply of unskilled labor, and 
underskilled labor is why we have such low wages and benefits at low- 
and unskilled labor. The highest unemployment's in the lowest of 
skills.
  And yet people in this Congress think you have to expand the low-
skilled labor numbers, bring people in, low- and unskilled, Senate 
version of the bill, seven unskilled people and undereducated people, 
for every one that's going to be able to pay their going rate on what 
it costs to sustain them in society.
  For every person that would come in under the Senate bill, that would 
pay as much or more in taxes as they draw down in government benefits, 
there are seven who will not be able to do that.
  The universe of those in the 11 million people cannot sustain 
themselves in this society that we have, not in a single year of their 
projected existence in this culture, in this society, in this economy. 
So why would we do that?
  Why, if we need more people to pull on the oars, would we allow 100 
million Americans, that are of working age and simply not in the work 
force, to sit up there in steerage, while we bring people on board to 
pull the oars and wait on the people sitting in steerage?
  That defies any kind of rational logic, Mr. Speaker.
  So to destroy the rule of law, to, I'll say, subsidize a non-work 
ethic, and now it turns into three generations of Americans that are 
drawing down some of the 80 different means-tested welfare programs, it 
is foolish for us to consider such a proposal. And I'm hopeful that the 
good sense of the American people can do something about the spell that 
has been cast over too many Republicans in the House and the Senate.
  And so, Mr. Speaker, I urge the American people to save this Congress 
from themselves and restore the rule of law.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________