[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 2386-2389]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            A NATION DIVIDED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to address you here on 
the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to take up 
some of the issues that I know are important to you and are important 
to Americans. I come here tonight to try to put some perspective on 
this intense debate that we have had.
  I would start with this, Mr. Speaker, that over Christmas vacation, I 
don't know of a time that this Congress hasn't taken a break over 
Christmas and gone back to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, 
Jesus Christ. That is the foundation of the core of the faith of our 
Founding Fathers that established this country, built this Capitol, and 
worshipped in the building.
  I do remember a Christmas Eve present that we got from the United 
States Senate Christmas Eve morning when they passed a version of 
ObamaCare on a Christmas Eve vote, but I don't remember a President 
ever criticizing Congress for leaving town to go visit our families 
over Christmas vacation until this year when our President of the 
United States, Mr. Speaker, made his trip to his home State of Hawaii 
and took his Christmas break out there. He took his family with him, 
and certainly most thinking Americans don't object to such a thing, but 
I remember a speech that he gave from Hawaii where he criticized 
Congress for leaving town over Christmas. He said that we should have 
stayed here in Washington and solved this myriad of problems we have in 
our Nation, that going home apparently was inappropriate.
  Well, I think when they were here, when the Senate was in voting on 
Christmas Eve morning that morning when they delivered to us ObamaCare, 
that was the time they should have gone home for Christmas vacation 
instead and listened to the American people, because the aftermath of 
that was that there was a huge wave election in 2010, and Republicans 
in the House of Representatives ended up with 87 freshman Republicans 
as a result of the American people's rejecting ObamaCare.
  Nonetheless, Mr. Speaker, I bring up the point of the President's 
criticism of Congress for taking Christmas off and point out three 
other topics that he brought up in that speech. He said he has an 
agenda for 2014--and this was a preview of his State of the Union 
address, I might add--and this agenda that the President has for 2014 
includes three things: the extension of unemployment benefits, adding 
weeks on what his number really is--but I know that they have supported 
99 weeks, almost 2 years of unemployment--and then the other piece of 
it was to increase the minimum wage. He is seeking to do that by an 
executive edict with regard to the Federal employees. And the third 
piece was he called upon Congress to pass comprehensive immigration 
reform.
  Now, when you are home with your family over Christmas and you hear a 
speech like that from the President of the United States, the first 
thing you think is why in the world would he go before the American 
people with any kind of a message, let alone one like that? Don't take 
a Christmas break, and I am going to tell Congress what they ought to 
do. They ought to pass a minimum wage increase; they should extend 
unemployment benefits; and they should pass--the President said this to 
us before--the Senate version of the Gang of 8's comprehensive 
immigration reform bill.
  I point out, also, Mr. Speaker, that America now understands that 
comprehensive immigration reform--CIR, for short--really is three words 
that encompass one word, and that is ``amnesty.''
  One would wonder why the President chose those three topics and gave 
that speech at that time. I would give this answer, Mr. Speaker: no one 
should really wonder. A President of one party that has the same party 
that rules in the United States Senate and controls the agenda over 
there, who is opposed by Republicans in the House of Representatives, 
is going to do this predictably, because tactically it is what you do 
in this business if you are not a uniter but a divider, and that is 
pick the topics that unify your party and divide the opposing party.
  So he picked three topics that just essentially and almost 
universally--I will say, virtually--unify the Democrat Party and are 
designed to split and divide the Republican Party--minimum wage, for 
example. Now, I can go back quite a ways on how far back the minimum 
wage goes. But I can say, Mr. Speaker, that every time that Congress 
has raised the minimum wage, somebody has lost a job. It has cost jobs 
every time. We lose more and more of those entry-level job 
opportunities when the minimum wage goes up because the employers can't 
afford to train unskilled workers and put them in the workforce and 
take on all of the risk, the regulation, the recordkeeping, the 
liability, and sometimes the benefits package that is required. They 
can't afford to pay all of that and bring somebody into the workforce 
that has maybe no skills.
  The reason that there are entry-level wages is so that people can get 
started in a job and you can afford as an employer to hire them and 
keep them there and upgrade their job skills, and hopefully in the same 
company you can move them right on up through the chain and bring them 
up through the system, and their wages and their benefit package, or at 
least their wages, go up with that consistently.
  I happen to know how that works. We have never--I founded and have 
operated a construction company for 28 years. In those 28 years, we 
have never paid minimum wage. We have always paid over that. But when 
we brought somebody in at a skill level, we identified their skills, 
paid them what we thought we could afford to pay them, trained them, 
watched to see how they developed, and gave them raises in proportion 
to the skill level and the production that they gave because, after 
all, when they come to work, they would say, What is my job? And I 
said,

[[Page 2387]]

Well, your job is to help me make money. If you do that, then I want 
you to stay here, and we are going to do our best to take care of you.
  Mr. Speaker, I recall walking into my construction office in one of 
those years, perhaps in the early nineties, and my secretary had 
decorated the Christmas tree in the entryway of our office. I looked at 
the tree. It looked nice, and it had decorations on it. I don't usually 
pay much attention to those things, and I walked on.
  She said to me, Well, did you notice the tree? And I said, Yes, I 
did.
  And isn't it pretty? was her question. Sure, the tree was pretty. She 
said, Go back and look at it a little more closely.
  I went back and looked at that tree more closely, and it was 
symmetrical, symmetrically decorated. It didn't have any lights on it, 
and it didn't have any tinsel on it. All it had on it for decorations 
were gold Christmas emblems that were a thin piece of something thicker 
than foil but that kind of a texture, gold. And it would be, oh, a 
snowflake, a star, a baby Jesus and different pieces from the nativity 
scene all over that tree. Then I looked at that, and I said, Yeah, 
those are nice. She said, Look a little closer. She turned one of the 
decorations around on the back side, and on the back side there was 
engraved the name of one of our employees. And you look at another, and 
it would be their spouse. And you look at another, it would be one of 
our employees' children.
  By the time I had looked at those decorations on that tree, it 
occurred to me that the decisions that I was making that were designed 
to help the company make money also impacted the lives of not just the 
people that we were writing the paycheck to, but their spouse, their 
children, and their family members, and that the responsibility of 
those decisions impacted all of the names on that tree directly.
  It is quite a thing to walk in and understand that, Mr. Speaker, and 
see how that is. But all of those people on that tree benefited from 
the decisions I made, hopefully; and we benefited, all of us together, 
from the work we did together.
  That is the way companies are supposed to be--good companies 
especially. Small companies operate like families. Good companies 
today, large companies, talk about the culture of the workplace. They 
want that culture to be a culture that brings people back again, people 
that look forward to going to work every day. They want people to look 
forward to working with their colleagues and their coworkers, and they 
compete for good labor.
  So we don't need a Federal Government that gets in between an 
employer and an employee. This system of entry-level wages that gets 
people started in a job where they can learn a skill, learn customer 
relations, learn responsibility, learn to look people in the eye, learn 
to provide service, learn to smile and hustle and act like you like it, 
if you can do that, you are not going to be working for minimum wage 
very long.
  But the President and the Democrats want to divide that and put that 
minimum wage out of reach of a lot of employers, which means a lot of 
especially young people with no skills aren't going to get the 
opportunity. Divide, unify--virtually unify the Democrats--and divide 
the Republicans with minimum wage.
  The next thing, extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, Mr. 
Speaker? How can we possibly afford paying people not to work for 99 
weeks? The long tradition in this country has been 26 weeks, a half a 
year.
  Now, a lot of times it is not people's fault when they get laid off. 
It might be seasonal; it might be the company folds; it might be the 
company downsizes. But that unemployment that is there is to give them 
a bridge to find another job, whatever they need to do to find that 
other job. And if this government decides, this Congress decides that 
we are going to borrow money, borrow money from the American people to 
run this government, borrow money from the Saudis, borrow money from 
the Chinese--$1.3 trillion borrowed from the Chinese--so that we can 
extend unemployment benefits and sometimes provide early retirement for 
people that decide, ``Well, I can qualify for 99 weeks of unemployment. 
I will be 65 by then. I can qualify then for Medicare, Social Security, 
and my pension plan. There is no reason for me to find a job at age 63 
because this Federal Government has managed to add on to 99 weeks of 
unemployment,'' it is not a wise thing to do. It is a bad policy for 
our economy, and it causes our workforce skills to atrophy, Mr. 
Speaker.

                              {time}  2130

  So, having dispatched minimum wage and having dispatched extending 
unemployment benefits, now we are down to the third thing. In each 
case, unemployment benefits and extending unemployment benefits also, 
it is borrowed money to fund those projects that unify Democrats and 
divide Republicans. Part of the Republicans are going to say I am going 
to go along with that because I don't want to take the political heat, 
and inside they are going to think it is not a good thing for this 
country. They do the same thing on the minimum wage, increasing the 
minimum wage. So the President is dividing Republicans and he is 
unifying Democrats against Republicans.
  The third thing is this: the proposal that this Congress pass 
comprehensive immigration reform, CIR/amnesty, that is the big one of 
the three divisive agenda items that the President rolled out after he 
criticized Congress for taking Christmas off to visit our families.
  Some of the result has been the pressure felt by some of the 
leadership in this Congress to produce a document that is called 
``Standards for Immigration Reform.'' So I received this document 
Thursday afternoon about 4:15 and I looked through this. These are 
principles on immigration, Mr. Speaker. I looked through this, and it 
has a preamble that starts out: ``Our Nation's immigration system is 
broken.'' Well, that is the first half of the first sentence, and 
already I disagree.
  Mr. Speaker, our immigration system is not broken. We have a system 
of laws and a system set up for enforcement. It is not the system that 
is broken; it is the President of the United States who has prohibited 
his law enforcement officers from actually following the law. When the 
law expressly dictates that when encountered, they need to place people 
who are unlawfully in the United States in removal proceedings, and the 
President has prohibited ICE, for example, and the Border Patrol, from 
carrying out the law, it is not the system that is broken; it is the 
President who has taken an oath of office that includes that he take 
care that the laws be faithfully executed, and I would close quote 
there, and that includes that the President is instead taking care that 
the law is not being faithfully executed, and there are at least five 
different violations of his constitutional limitations with regard to 
immigration. There are multiple others, Mr. Speaker.
  The Constitution is at great risk because of the--I wanted to say 
``cavalier,'' but instead I would say because of the willful--disregard 
and disrespect for the Constitution that we have seen as the President 
has gone down the line and violated this Constitution multiple times.
  For example, the President has suspended Welfare to Work. When that 
legislation was written back in the middle 1990s, and I know the author 
of that legislation, it was carefully and specifically written so that 
the President couldn't waive the work component of TANF, Temporary 
Assistance to Needy Families. Even though the language is specific and 
the language is as tight as they could think to write it at the time, 
the President has decided we are going to provide TANF benefits, but 
there is not going to be a work component.
  Of the 80 different means-tested welfare programs we have in the 
United States, at least 80 of them, only one required work. All of the 
hubbub on the floor of the House of Representatives in the 1990s about 
Welfare to Work, there was going to be welfare reform and people were 
going to be transitioning from welfare to work, all of that hubbub 
resulted in one policy, one program that

[[Page 2388]]

required work: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The President 
suspended the work component.
  The President suspended No Child Left Behind. The President supported 
and his minions carried out the Morton memos, which reversed 
immigration law, made up new immigration law, and ordered that they not 
enforce immigration law against people that apparently didn't make the 
President feel politically vulnerable.
  So that is just part of this. That takes us also, Mr. Speaker, down 
to ObamaCare. In ObamaCare there have been multiple times that the 
President has violated the law that carries his name and his signature. 
The first and the most egregious--excuse me, not the first, the most 
egregious, was when the President announced some time last year that he 
was going to delay the implementation of the employer mandate.
  Now, the law, Mr. Speaker, the ObamaCare law says that the employer 
mandate shall commence in each month after December of 2013. That means 
it starts in January, a month ago. We are into February now. The 
President has announced he is going to delay it for a year. He has no 
authority, he has no constitutional authority to delay the 
implementation of ObamaCare. None. Yet, he extended the individual 
mandate, delayed the employer mandate.
  When the conscience protection was being violated in the rules that 
were written by the Department of Human Services, he decided every 
large employer, large employers had to provide contraceptives, 
abortifacients, and sterilizations as part of their health insurance 
policies, and religious organizations and individuals objected. They 
said I am not going to be violating my conscience. The law cannot 
compel me, because of my religious beliefs, to violate my religious 
beliefs. That is a First Amendment right, the protection of the freedom 
of religion. But the President insisted even the Catholic Church would 
have to comply.
  For 2 weeks of national hubbub, the President held his ground. Until 
noon on a Friday, and a lot of these things happen, Mr. Speaker, around 
noon on a Friday, the President stepped out to the podium and said, I 
have heard this discussion that religious organizations don't want to 
provide contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizations--and 
abortifacients, Mr. Speaker, are abortion-causing pills. The religious 
organizations don't want to do this, and so now I am going to make an 
accommodation to the religious organizations. An accommodation, and the 
accommodation he made is, he said, I am now going to require the 
insurance companies to provide these things for free, and he repeated 
himself, provide these things for free.
  So I thought okay, if there is going to be a change in policy, I bet 
I will see it come back before the floor of the House of 
Representatives, and I will have an opportunity to debate, perhaps 
offer an amendment, and vote on this change. Well, Mr. Speaker, I 
didn't really think that, I just knew that is what the Constitution 
would require before there could be a change in the law, but there 
actually was a rule. So I checked the rule. Did they propose a rule 
change? Did they publish it? Did they go through the administrative 
procedures requirements in order to get a rule change?
  The first thing you do is you go back and read the rule. Did anything 
change in the rule that compelled the churches to provide 
contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizations, as compared to the 
insurance companies, as the President said in his press conference. No, 
Mr. Speaker, there was no change in the regulations. The only thing 
that changed was the President gave a speech, and in that speech, he 
said religious organizations, you don't have to do this any more. 
Insurance companies, you have to do this now.
  What a reach. What a constitutional overreach for a President to 
believe that because he spoke, millions would line up and swoon at the 
very words of a President of the United States who again is going 
beyond the bounds of the authority vested in him, limited by the 
Constitution of the United States. That just gives a sample of some of 
some of the things that are going on, Mr. Speaker.
  I bring this up because the President said to Congress: Pass 
comprehensive immigration reform. He also said if he is not satisfied 
with the results, if Congress doesn't move fast enough, he has an ink 
pen and he has a cell phone, and he will just run the government by 
signing executive orders. That was part of the promise that he made 
behind me, Mr. Speaker, in his State of the Union address last week.
  Well, so some in this Congress think if we try to catch up with the 
President, we can get along with him, and that's why you see this 
language here in the preamble of the Standards for Immigration Reform 
that says our immigration system is broken. Well, it is not broken. 
What is broken is the trust between the American people and the bond 
that is required when the President gives his oath of office to take 
care that the laws be faithfully executed, to preserve, protect, and 
defend the Constitution of the United States, not take it apart by 
executive action that we can't catch up with through litigation.
  If the President doesn't respect his oath to the Constitution, and if 
the President doesn't respect the legitimate congressional authority 
under article 1 that the Congress has, why would he then respect a 
decision made by a court, especially a lower court, a circuit court. 
Maybe, just maybe, public opinion would force him to respect a Supreme 
Court, but, Mr. Speaker, it is unlikely that we will see a case get to 
the Supreme Court before this President is finally signing off in his 
last year of office.
  I look at the points on this Standards for Immigration Reform, and 
there are four different provisions. One is border security and 
interior enforcement. It says that must come first. Of course we know 
that they would legalize everybody first, and then they are going to 
try to secure our borders. It says secure our borders and verify they 
are secure. The difficulty with that is, who is going to decide when 
they are secure? I would hand it over to the Texas border sheriffs, 
along with New Mexico, Arizona, and California. I would hand it over to 
the local government people and let them decide. If the States would 
certify the borders are secure, if the sheriffs would certify that the 
borders are secure, and if the county supervisors would certify that 
they are secure, we would have a pretty good answer as to whether they 
are secure, but we have heard those promises before. Janet Napolitano 
made it clear that she thought the borders were secure. Of course, I 
don't believe that.
  When I mentioned earlier in a media program that just the children, 
the unaccompanied children that are being picked up along our southern 
border are running up to the numbers where for this year it is going to 
tally 50,000; 50,000 children, some of them little kids, tiny little 
kids who are being handed over to coyotes to be brought into the United 
States so they can qualify for the promise of the DREAM Act--50,000 
kids. That is not out of me; that is from the president of the 
Immigration and Customs Enforcement union, Chris Crane, who is a 
plaintiff in a lawsuit, by the way, that is stalled and sidetracked 
over to Eric Holder and other places.
  Next point is Implement an Exit/Entry Visa Tracking System. 
Supposedly these are the broken parts of the immigration system. They 
are going to enforce the border because something is broken and they 
need to pass a new law. We have the resources to enforce the law. We 
are spending over $12 billion on the southern border, and for about $8 
billion, we could build a four-lane interstate all of the way from the 
Pacific Ocean clear down to Brownsville. But then the Entry-Exit Visa 
System was passed into law. That is the law. It was passed into law in 
1996. We have an entry system but not an exit system, so there is no 
balance of who is here. By the way, if you get that working, who is 
going to keep track who is here, at least theoretically, and how are 
you possibly going to enforce that given that you have sanctuary cities 
and you have the equivalent of sanctuary States and you have an 
administration that refuses to

[[Page 2389]]

allow their own people who are hired to do so to enforce the law? I 
don't know why this is a new piece; it has been the law since 1996. If 
we can't get that law enforced, why would a new one be enforced if this 
one is not?
  Item number three, Employer Verification and Workplace Enforcement. 
That is actually pretty good. That is the E-Verify program, and the 
language defines it. It says they need a workable electronic employment 
verification system. Now, if you make that mandatory, you wonder about 
the freedom of the American people that now have to prove that they are 
an American before they can go to work. That is a new burden of proof 
that we haven't had before. I don't want to speak too strongly against 
that, Mr. Speaker. I would just say instead that my new IDEA Act is a 
better idea. What it does is it clarifies that wages and benefits paid 
to illegals are not deductible for Federal income tax purposes. It 
allows the IRS to come in and do an audit. In that audit, they can run 
the names of the employees through E-Verify, and if the employer uses 
E-Verify, they get safe harbor on any violations of hiring people who 
can't lawfully work in the United States. The IRS can look at that and 
say you had a chance for safe harbor, you didn't use E-Verify. These 
employees can't lawfully work in the United States, and you can't 
lawfully deduct the wages and benefits you paid to them. It is not a 
business expense to break the law. So the IRS would deny those business 
expenses for salary and benefits, and they can attach interest and 
penalty. So your $10-an-hour illegal becomes about a $16-an-hour 
illegal, and you have voluntary compliance with E-Verify. It is a much 
better situation. Point number three isn't so bad.
  Reforms to the legal immigration system. That is, they want to 
accelerate legal immigration, Mr. Speaker, and the needs of employers 
and the desire for those exceptional individuals to help our economy. 
Well, there is some truth in that, but we are bringing in 1.2 million 
legal immigrants a year and giving them an opportunity, a path to 
citizenship; 1.2 million. Now, those folks who want to change all this 
policy and grant amnesty for everybody that is here, and then open the 
doors up for an accelerated legal immigration to go on after that, to 
the tens of millions, and we are not talking about 11 million; we are 
talking about 11 million times some multiplying factor that is probably 
closer to three times or more than that say over the next 20 years.

                              {time}  2145

  We need to come to a conclusion as to what is an appropriate number 
of legal immigrants to come into America. I think 1.2 million is plenty 
generous. I think then we should start to upgrade those applicants so 
that they are young, they have education, they have language skills, 
they have learning capacity, they have an ability to simulate into the 
American culture and the American civilization and contribute and pay 
taxes so that they carry their share of the load because the day is 
going to come that they are not.
  Then, Mr. Speaker, I take us down to the lower end of this. First, 
the DREAM Act gets addressed, and it pretty much embraces Dick Durbin's 
DREAM Act. Of course, I reject that for the sake of this, that, again, 
it rewards lawbreakers.
  But in the final paragraph, the concluding paragraph, it says: 
``individuals living outside the rule of law.'' It says, Mr. Speaker: 
``There will be no special path to citizenship for individuals who 
broke our Nation's immigration laws.'' There would be no special path 
to citizenship.
  Well, let me just say that if you put people on a path to citizenship 
who are in this country illegally while you have 5 million people 
waiting outside the United States who do respect our laws, then you 
have given a special path to citizenship. The nonspecial path is for 
those folks to go back into their home country and line up behind the 5 
million who are lined up in their home country today waiting, 
respecting our laws to come into the United States; otherwise, it is a 
special path to citizenship.
  But they go on and they say: ``that would be unfair to those 
immigrants who have played by the rules and harmful to promoting the 
rule of law.'' That is breathtaking in its concept. We are going to 
provide a special path to citizenship because it would be harmful to 
promoting the rule of law, except we are going to legalize all of those 
people that have broken the law. And we are not going to ask them to go 
back to their home country and get in the back of the line; we are 
going to let them stay here and it won't matter whether they are in a 
line or not. They were satisfied to live in the shadows of America--
that is what they came here to do--or else they came here on the 
promise of amnesty like those kids that are coming across our southern 
border now to line up for the DREAM Act, 50,000 strong in a year.
  ``Harmful to promoting the rule of law.'' No. What they are proposing 
here is destructive to the rule of law.
  It goes on further and it says: ``from here on, our immigration laws 
will indeed be enforced.'' There is another breathtaking statement, Mr. 
Speaker. Immigration laws from here on would indeed be enforced.
  I am very confident, and I have not looked, but I am very confident 
that I can go into this Congressional Record in the House and in the 
Senate and go back to 1986 and pull the debate out of the Congressional 
Record and point to you where time after time a Member of Congress, 
House and Senate, said, We are going to pass this amnesty act, and from 
here on, indeed, our laws will be enforced; we will restore the rule of 
law from this point forward, but first we must grant amnesty.
  Those are the words from 1986. Those are the words from this document 
that was released just last Thursday. And those have always been the 
myopic words of people who believe in open borders more so than they 
believe and have reverence for our rule of law, which we still have the 
opportunity to restore, even from the 86th Amnesty Act, the rule of 
law.
  If we fail to do so here and now, if this amnesty is granted, the 
rule of law will not be restored within the lifetime of this Republic, 
Mr. Speaker.
  I yield back the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to refrain from 
engaging in personalities with regard to the President.

                          ____________________