[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12448-12451]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      DEFENDING AMERICAN LIBERTIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor and a privilege to be here 
to speak.
  At this time, I yield to my friend from Kentucky (Mr. Whitfield).
  Mr. WHITFIELD. I want to thank the gentleman very much.
  Yesterday, the President made a speech at Knox College in Illinois. 
And in that speech, he categorized Republican Members of Congress in 
three groups. He said there was a group of Republicans who agreed with 
him on his policy but were afraid to vote for it and did not have the 
courage to vote with him. He also said that another category of 
Republicans are those who, because it was his idea, are opposed to it. 
And then the third group of Republicans, he said, were those who have a 
view of the world that inequality and injustice is inevitable.
  I was a little bit offended by that categorization, and I wanted to 
take a few moments today to explain to the American people specifically 
why many in our Conference oppose the President on some of his economic 
and energy policies, particularly.
  I want to preface my remarks by saying, when the President was 
elected, the first thing that he focused on was transforming America's 
electricity policy. His number one goal was to

[[Page 12449]]

produce more green energy through solar panels and wind energy. He 
spent billions of dollars on that through the stimulus package, much of 
the money going to venture capital friends of his, wealthy supporters 
of his, like Mr. Kaiser of Oklahoma, on the Solyndra project. And, in 
addition to that, the 1603 Treasury program that gives grants to 
certain green energy projects, the 1703 and 1705 programs at the 
Department of Energy.

                              {time}  1245

  Now, that was the focus of the President. That was the part of his 
stimulus package that was going to get the economy back on track. Well, 
I would like to remind people that in June--just this past June--we 
lost, in America, 240,000 full-time jobs. The last quarter of 2012 and 
the first quarter of 2013, our growth in gross domestic product was not 
even 2 percent; it was below 2 percent. And for the last 15 quarters, 
our gross domestic product has increased only a little over 2 percent--
the weakest growth since World War II in America.
  Now, for this year, 2013, we've created 750,000 new jobs, but 557,000 
of those were part-time jobs. Now, why is that happening and why are we 
losing full-time jobs? Well, under the President's Affordable Care 
Act--or as some people call it, ``ObamaCare''--any employer that has 50 
or more employees and they work more than 30 hours a week, he is going 
to have to provide health coverage for them. If they do not do so, they 
will be penalized with a monetary penalty. So the reality is what's 
happening is that small business men and women in America are laying 
off their employees and making sure that they only work part-time. So 
the President, focusing on green energy, encouraging small business men 
and women to lay off workers, that's precisely why we have a sluggish 
economy today.
  Now, the President says that he is for an all-of-the-above energy 
policy. And I would say to you that everyone on our side of the aisle 
supports an all-of-the-above energy policy. But after spending billions 
of dollars for renewables, the President has only been successful to a 
very limited degree. As a matter of fact, today, renewables in America 
are creating only 500 million kilowatts a day; coal is producing 4.5 
billion a day; gas, 3 billion a day; nuclear, 2 billion a day. So the 
President has jeopardized and created obstacles to economic growth 
because of his sole commitment to renewable energy.
  Now, like I said, we need renewable energy; but this President says 
one thing and does another. He says he is for an all-of-the-above 
energy policy; and yet because of his actions and his administration's 
regulations, America is the only country in the world where you cannot 
build a new coal power plant. As a result of that, we're losing jobs in 
that industry as well.
  So I would just say to the President his priorities are wrong. He is 
so focused on fulfilling his political goals of changing the way 
electricity is produced in America and creating obstacles for economic 
growth that he is self-defeating our abilities to stimulate the 
economy.
  And I would just emphasize once again, we do need an all-of-the-above 
energy policy. We need wind, we need solar, we need natural gas, 
nuclear and coal; and yet we cannot build a new coal power plant in 
America.
  If we're going to get this economy growing, we have to have 
electricity at a rate that we can afford in order to compete in the 
global marketplace, in order to get people to build plants in America, 
create jobs in America, and move this country forward.
  So I would just say to the President instead of focusing on 
categorizing Republicans and who they are and what they are, he needs 
to get his priorities right and start focusing on economic growth and 
stop using stimulus funds to reward his friends in the joint venture 
capital business and his wealthy supporters and start helping us build 
an energy policy that will work for America.
  I want to thank the gentleman from Texas for giving me a few minutes 
to talk about that issue.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I thank my friend from Kentucky. I just had seen an 
article that's really an exclamation point, really, of what the 
gentleman was saying. The headline is:

       Two Americans Added to Food Stamp Rolls for Every Job the 
     Administration Says It Created.

  I mean, how tragic. What an exclamation point on those facts that 
were laid out by my friend, Mr. Whitfield. Thank you.
  There's news being reported today that Attorney General Eric Holder 
has announced the opening of a new front in the battle for voting 
rights--at least so he says, his brand--which is rather ironic because 
this administration, and particularly the Attorney General, the 
Department of Justice, had talked about, in essence, how the Supreme 
Court had eviscerated the Voting Rights Act and just rendered it 
basically nothing by its terrible decision. Yet if you look at the 
words of the Supreme Court in that decision, the Supreme Court points 
out that the factual data does not bear out the attacks by this 
administration continuing on the States that had done wrong, if you 
will, sinned back 50 years ago.
  There was racial discrimination in this country at the time of the 
Voting Rights Act, and there is racial discrimination today; but it has 
moved. The Voting Rights Act has accomplished a great deal in our 
efforts to move toward equality of opportunity around the country. And 
so it has accomplished something that is very good and very important 
to the country.
  But, amazingly, when the Voting Rights Act was extended--with support 
from people on both sides of the aisle--they decided that, gee, since 
some of us have districts where there is now racial discrimination, 
even though at least six of the States that were originally gone after 
in the South by the Department of Justice, they had better racial 
equality in voting than the average for the entire country.
  Yet this administration decided our goal is to punish those States 
that did not vote for this President--we're going after these States; 
we're going to continue to punish them; we're going to continue to be 
punitive to them. We're going to ignore areas like Massachusetts, where 
there's now more racial disparity than in at least six of the States--
maybe all of them--in the South. But as I understood it, Massachusetts, 
unfortunately, has moved into the arena of being a State that has 
significant--most significant racial disparity. And yet the Voting 
Rights Act did nothing to address those areas of the country where over 
the last 50 years discrimination has grown, it's raised its ugly head.
  Yet this administration said, no, we're too busy punishing States who 
corrected their problems and are doing so much better than the rest of 
the country. Why? Because we can. Actually, that is the reason the 
Voting Rights Act was extended without the Gohmert amendment that would 
have made sure that the Voting Rights Act applied across the country in 
any area where there was racial discrimination. But in a bipartisan 
manner, a majority forced the extension for 25 more years, which would 
mean--now, I don't even recall who all was in office back then. I was a 
little kid. I didn't know who was discriminating and who wasn't. I had 
no part in it. And people who had no part of the discrimination that 
was going on back then--the discrimination that needed to be addressed, 
the discrimination that needed to be corrected--for some reason, have 
people in a majority of places that voted to extend it, keep punishing 
areas that are no longer committing wrongs, no longer sinning.
  We want to keep punishing them because if we open it up and apply 
these same punitive things across the country and come up with a new 
formula, gee, we're not going to be able to keep punishing these areas 
for their sins of 50, 60 years ago. We may have to punish our own 
States because racial disparity has grown there.
  So the Supreme Court did the proper thing--legally, fairly. Now we 
see this administration saying, oh, it turns out we can use the Voting 
Rights Act to continue to punish Texas. Why? Because we can; because we 
want to. So they're coming after Texas, as announced today, again.

[[Page 12450]]

  At some point, I hope we get to the place that the President spoke of 
when he spoke at the Democratic Convention so eloquently, talking about 
there's not a red America and a blue America, we're just Americans. I 
loved that speech. I thought it was fantastic. It caused me to rise up 
and take notice, wow, this guy is saying the things I believe in. He's 
so right. And yet his policies have been diametrically opposed. They 
have racially divided us; continuing to go after political enemies; 
continuing to have this administration's Internal Revenue Service 
weaponized in a way that Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson could never 
have even dreamed they could have done.
  So, hopefully, the court to which the administration has gone in 
Texas will do the right thing and say, you know, Mr. Attorney General, 
we remember your comments about how you don't have the power really to 
do this anymore since the Supreme Court struck section 4 down. And so 
either we believe what you're saying now, or we believe what you said 
out there after the Supreme Court decision. And that becomes a real 
problem when you have an Attorney General that says different things to 
different people, because the highest law enforcement officer in the 
country needs to be trusted. He needs to have respect and adherence for 
and to the law.
  We have an Attorney General that's been held in contempt. He's been 
in contempt of Congress; he's been in contempt of the law; he's been in 
contempt of the actual facts--repeatedly. We need a different Attorney 
General.
  I asked President Bush to appoint a new Attorney General when there 
was a scandal over national security letters. I thought it was the 
appropriate thing to do. When someone's credibility is hurt, even if 
they didn't even know what was going on, it's time to have new 
leadership and change what's going on. And we got a new Attorney 
General.
  Yet I'm amazed at how my friends on the other side of the aisle keep 
clinging, as does the President, to an Attorney General who is in 
contempt of Congress, contempt of the law, and in contempt of facts; an 
Attorney General who would have the nerve to testify that he's never 
even heard of anyone attempting to prosecute a reporter, when he knew 
as he said it he had okayed and given his blessing to the persecution 
of James Rosen with Fox News. So he either lied to the Congress in his 
testimony, or he was a part of a fraud upon the court.

                              {time}  1300

  Because the allegations in the affidavit and the application for a 
warrant before the court going after James Rosen claimed he had 
violated the law, set out the law he had violated, that he was a flight 
risk, that he was a risk to destroy evidence; so either he believed the 
things that he approved, which means he lied to Congress, or he spoke 
truthfully to Congress and committed a fraud upon the court. Either 
way, we need the highest law enforcement officer in the land to have 
more credibility than that, and yet here he is doing the same thing, 
saying one thing one place, claiming another in another place.
  It is so critical that we be able to trust our government, which 
brings us back to the issue of NSA spying.
  Now, I was a freshman in 2005-2006 in the 109th Congress. I was on 
the Judiciary Committee, and we had some very rancorous debate between 
our own party behind closed doors, out in the committee room, here on 
the floor, over the PATRIOT Act, over the extension of power over the 
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts. I was very concerned, even 
though we had a Republican administration and a President that I liked 
and respected, George W. Bush, smarter and wittier than people gave him 
credit for, a good, decent man.
  But we have to consider the possibilities and we have to be specific 
in our laws. When we debated these changes before the Judiciary 
Committee back in the 109th Congress when I was a freshman, there were 
people, my Democratic friends across the other side of the aisle, that 
were very concerned about an abuse of power that might be occasioned if 
we don't tighten up the PATRIOT Act.
  I am just anal enough, I read the bill as it existed. I read the law 
as it existed. I was pushing for some things to be changed, and it did 
cause me some concern that the title of what basically is section 215 
of the PATRIOT Act as it was at that time before amended:

       Access to records and other items under the Foreign 
     Intelligence Surveillance Act.

  As amended, it would read:

       Access to certain business records for foreign intelligence 
     and international terrorism investigations.

  So I knew those were the titles, so it really applied to foreign 
intelligence and international terrorism investigations.
  My Democratic friends across the aisle that we would often consider 
way left had serious concerns. I understood their concerns, but I 
thought they were being way too fearful of government because the law, 
we could make it specific enough that it would not be abused by a 
Republican or Democratic administration.
  As I read through, having been a judge and a chief justice and had to 
consider from a legal standpoint what do these words mean? what does 
this word mean? can this be considered vague, ambiguous? is this 
considered arbitrary and capricious? is there room for 
misunderstanding? I actually had some concerns behind closed doors. I 
was asking people from the Bush administration, Justice Department, I'm 
a little uncomfortable about this; what does this mean?
  One of the things I asked about was, in the reference to the proposal 
for the amendment, it says, ``the Director of the Federal Bureau of 
Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no 
lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application 
for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including 
books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an 
investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning 
a United States person''--well, I was comfortable with that language. 
That seemed to protect U.S. citizens pretty well.
  And then there's this disjunctive preposition ``or,'' this 
disjunctive ``or.'' Okay. Well, it can be that or it can be this.
  The other aspect was ``to protect against international terrorism.'' 
Well, I felt like at the time I was okay if we are really seriously to 
protect ourselves from international terrorism. Again, that doesn't 
involve an American citizen unless you can establish with probable 
cause that an American citizen is involved in international terrorism.
  And then we get a second disjunctive ``or''--``or clandestine 
intelligence activities.''
  And I raised the issues behind closed doors in our Republican 
meetings and when we met with justice officials: I'm uncomfortable with 
this because it doesn't say ``international'' in that part. You have 
the disjunctive ``or,'' but you left out ``international'' there. I 
would really be more comfortable if it said, ``to protect against 
international terrorism or clandestine international intelligence 
activities.''
  I was told: Congressman, we know you're a judge and you get caught up 
in words sometimes, but look at the title of the article. The article 
says, ``Access to certain business records for foreign intelligence and 
international terrorism investigations.'' So you shouldn't have to be 
concerned. This is only about intelligence. It's only about foreign 
contacts.
  And we were assured repeatedly behind closed doors and in debate that 
this amendment to the PATRIOT Act would make it more difficult for an 
administration to abuse it--Republican or Democrat. I was still a 
little uneasy, and I know that when there is a disparity between 
language within a law and the title of the law, the language within the 
law itself takes priority over the title, I know that, but it was 
somewhat comforting.
  If you read on down--this was as we were trying to amend it and as 
the Justice Department under President Bush was pushing--it says, ``An 
investigation conducted under this section

[[Page 12451]]

shall,'' and then it has, ``(A) be conducted under guidelines . . . (B) 
not''--and there's an ``and,'' so this is important; you can't go 
without (B)--``and (B) not be conducted of a United States person 
solely upon the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment to 
the Constitution of the United States.''
  There were some concerns during this debate over amending section 215 
of the PATRIOT Act back in the 109th Congress that we don't want the 
administration gathering intel about someone if it is all having to do 
with their activity that is protected by the First Amendment to the 
Constitution of the United States.
  So, for example, if someone were burning a United States flag or 
burning a Holy Bible, the Supreme Court tells us those are protected 
activities protected by the First Amendment, and therefore you could 
not use those to go gather intelligence data about an American who was 
doing those things.
  Now, of course, we have the U.N. and former Secretary Clinton and 
President Obama and others saying, We like what the U.N. is saying.
  Basically, if we adopted what the U.N. said, it would still be true, 
our Supreme Court would allow you to burn a Bible and a flag, but you 
could never, ever do anything like that to a Koran, which then would 
allow our radical Islamist friends who want an international caliphate 
to check the box that they created and was discovered during a raid 
some years back, that one of their 10-year goals was to subjugate the 
United States Constitution to shari'a law; and as soon as we adopt a 
law that says you can destroy a Bible and a flag but not a Koran, they 
can check that box. But under the proposed amendment in 2005 to the 
PATRIOT Act, or the official title under title 50, War and National 
Defense, chapter 36, ``Foreign Intelligence Surveillance''; chapter IV, 
section 1861, so paragraph (3) after (2), that says, ``An investigation 
conducted under this section shall . . . (B) not be conducted of a 
United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by 
the First Amendment''--we get to paragraph (3). And this was an issue 
that was very contentious. There were groups boycotting and 
demonstrating and saying, Hey, this is all about library books, we 
don't want the Bush administration being able to go in and get a list 
of books we've read.
  Well, I contended then and still contend now that to do such a thing 
of an American citizen you should have to have probable cause that an 
American citizen has violated the law and get a warrant to do that. But 
this didn't require a warrant. This is allowed under the PATRIOT Act if 
it was for foreign intelligence purposes and for international 
terrorism investigations, according to the title. But unfortunately, in 
the law itself, it said, ``or to protect against international 
terrorism or clandestine terrorism activities.''
  And I told people at the time: I'm a little uncomfortable with that, 
because ``clandestine intelligence activities,'' what is that? What if 
it's just somebody going somewhere asking questions, not doing it in 
public but going privately to individuals and saying, ``I'm really 
concerned about what the administration is doing on this or that; what 
do you know about what this administration is doing? What have they 
done to you?'' Would that be considered as somebody doing clandestine 
or private intelligence activities?
  I was told: You're being paranoid here, Gohmert. Look at the title 
again. It's ``international terrorism.'' It's ``foreign intelligence.'' 
This is not about American citizens. Look at the overall context.
  But those words hanging out there after a disjunctive ``or,'' it was 
a little uneasing. But I had enough people in the Justice Department, 
on my committee, with the administration at that time that said: No, 
gosh, no. You're looking for things where there aren't any. This is not 
an issue.
  But this paragraph (3), ``In the case of an application for an order 
requiring the production of library circulation records, library patron 
lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, 
tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing 
information that would identify a person''--wow, that's kind of scary 
when you consider that entire list of things that the Justice 
Department might be going after.
  But it says, ``the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation 
may delegate the authority to make such application to either the 
Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Executive 
Assistant Director for National Security. The Deputy Director or the 
Executive Assistant Director may not further delegate such authority.''
  So they wanted to assure us that only people that were looking at 
foreign intelligence and foreign terrorism who had the big picture, not 
some low-level rogue agent, would be pursuing anything like this, and 
we were told repeatedly: But it's all tied to foreign terrorism.

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