[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5414-5417]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM

  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, I appreciate very much the honor and 
privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House 
of Representatives and to follow my good friend, the gentleman from 
Texas, Judge Gohmert, in this presentation here tonight.
  I have been watching forward with increasing concern about some of 
the potential decisions that might be made here in this House of 
Representatives. We have been through some long immigration debates in 
this saga of what happens to the future and the destiny of the United 
States of America. It is something that goes back, I will say, in the 
modern era, to sometime January 5, 2004, when then-President George 
Bush gave his speech that launched their effort to advance 
``comprehensive immigration reform.''
  Mr. Speaker, I had my discussion with the President's west wing at 
that time, meaning west wing of the White House. I advised them--I 
should say, I advised him that what you have described here is amnesty. 
However you want to redefine it, however you want to try to call it 
comprehensive immigration reform, in the end, amnesty is amnesty. The 
American people will know what amnesty is, and they will reject amnesty 
because it is bad policy for our country.
  Well, since that time, I will say that that has proven to be true in 
each one of these national debates that we have had and these waves of 
national debates that we have had.
  That debate that took place in 2005--excuse me, 2004 into 2005 and 
beyond, when there were, at times, tens of thousands of people, often 
coming in on buses wearing identical white T-shirts, pressing Congress 
to suspend the rule of law and give them a special path to citizenship. 
Through that, this discussion has pivoted on what I called, at the 
time, the scarlet letter A, called amnesty.
  The definition of ``amnesty,'' it comes in different forms. Black's 
Law has one. There are a couple of other definitions for ``amnesty.'' 
But the practical definition that applies in this political arena that 
we are in, this cultural American arena that we are in, Mr. Speaker, is 
this: to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward 
them with the objective of their crime.
  Now, the objective of their crime--and in most cases it is a crime. 
It is not necessarily someone who is unlawfully present in the United 
States or necessarily guilty of committing a crime, but it is true in 
most cases. In any case, we don't always know the objective of their 
crime, whether it is to come into the United States to get a job and 
seek a better life and take care of their family. If they cross the 
border illegally, that is a crime. If they come in legally and overstay 
their visa, then that is a violation, a civil misdemeanor. And yet, if 
they go to work in this country, they have to fraudulently misrepresent 
themselves in order to legally work, then in that case, it is often 
document fraud, and that is also a crime.
  So the objective of their crime may have been a job; it may have been 
a home; it may have been what is planned to be and often is a better 
life; and it might be someone coming in here with a different kind of 
intention. We know that coming across our southern border we have had, 
I will say, scores of people, at a minimum, who are persons of interest 
from nations of interest.
  Now, that is the verbiage that gets used in our security personnel. 
If they are from a nation of interest, that is a nation that is in the 
list, having been a nation that spawns terrorists. If they are a person 
of interest, they are a person from that nation that is a nation of 
interest that spawns terrorists.
  So you have got kind of a double marker here. Somebody shows up 
coming across our southern border and they are from Yemen, for example, 
they are going to be a person of interest from a nation of interest, 
which means we should pay more attention to that because they are a 
risk to the security of United States because that is a place that 
terrorists come from in the records that we have and the data that we 
know. It doesn't mean that everybody that might come across our 
southern border from Yemen is a terrorist. It means, though, just what 
the definition is. This happens on a regular basis.
  When anyone is interdicted, apprehended, coming across our border who 
is a person of interest from a nation of interest, they are turned 
over, as soon as possible, to the FBI. That act immediately closes the 
case as far as public discussion is concerned because now it is 
classified. So, if they are continually classifying the reports and any 
prosecutions and how we handle persons of interest from nations of 
interest, that means, Mr. Speaker, that we don't know how many people 
have been caught coming into the United States with ill will towards us 
or suspicion of ill will towards us. That is classified.
  What I know is I know of seven cases where we have interdicted a 
person of interest from a nation of interest. And the reason I know 
about them is because, having spent time on the border, been down there 
when a person of that definition is interdicted and I gain knowledge of 
that circumstance, same business day, early enough in the day and close 
enough to the incident that they can tell me about it before that 
individual or individuals are handed over to the FBI where the case 
becomes classified.
  This Congress doesn't seem to be aware that this circumstance exists 
at all, so they whistle through the graveyard. And it may be a more 
appropriate explanation than I had actually thought when I started to 
say it, whistling through the graveyard here on what could be going on 
inside the United States when people come across the border who are 
from sources that we normally identify as sources for terrorism. That 
is one piece.
  Another is, 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America 
come from or through Mexico. It isn't all their fault. One is that some 
of those drugs are produced and smuggled into Mexico and then into the 
United States. Another is there is a huge demand in the United States 
for illegal drugs. The value of that marketplace in this country could 
well be over $60 billion. That is 60 billion with a b. But even the 
Drug Enforcement doesn't know that number, and they aren't comfortable 
producing that number. That number actually comes from a media report.

[[Page 5415]]

  In any case, so we have persons of interest from nations of interest. 
We have 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs coming from or through to 
Mexico. It is a threat to our country, a threat to our society.
  And on top of that, we have a border that remains porous. We have a 
President whose administration has been announcing that he has been 
deporting record numbers of people, but when you look at the numbers, 
you find out that he is double counting and he has changed the 
definition of ``removals.''

                              {time}  1815

  He is counting those who are turned back at the border, those who are 
caught crossing the border that do a voluntary return to avoid it going 
on their record so that they can avoiding being subject to the 3- or 
10-year bar and double-counting some of those that are turned back.
  So here are the real numbers, and it is this: That the lead 
deportations that actually took place in our modern era under--not the 
George Bush administration, Mr. Speaker--but they took place under the 
Bill Clinton administration in the year 2000 when there was some number 
above 1.8 million removals from the country. And we have a President 
now, under Barack Obama, down around 450,000 removals from the country, 
a long, long ways from being what they sometimes accept the definition 
of him as being the Deporter-in-Chief.
  No President has taken the position that this President has, that he 
picks and chooses the laws that he wants to enforce and ignores the 
rest. No President has so broadly gone out there and violated the 
limitations in article two of the Constitution.
  Just within immigration itself, when the Morton Memos came out--and 
those are the memos that created DACA, which is the executive amnesty 
that was produced and signed by Janet Napolitano, then the Secretary of 
Homeland Security, who came before the Judiciary Committee, Mr. 
Speaker, and alleged repeatedly that they had prosecutorial discretion, 
that they don't have the resources to enforce every law, therefore, 
they have to enforce with the best effect of the resources that they 
have, and stated: We have prosecutorial discretion, and it is on an 
individual basis only, an individual basis only. She repeated it in her 
testimony under oath before the Judiciary Committee, and I had in front 
of me at the time the document that describes this, and in a page and 
about a third of single-spaced 12-point type, it said, used the term 
``on an individual basis only,'' by my count, in memory, seven times.
  Now why would this administration remind Members of Congress, 
especially members of the Judiciary Committee, that they were executing 
prosecutorial discretion by waiving the application of the law to 
hundreds of thousands of people altogether under this definition of 
``on an individual basis only''? We know they didn't deal with them on 
an individual basis only.
  When you read that report and you go through and draw a couple of x's 
and o's, you come to this conclusion: that Homeland Security, under the 
Morton Memos of ICE, created four different classes of people, and they 
are broadly exempted from the law by the definitions of the classes of 
people created in the very memo that says, seven times ``on an 
individual basis only.''
  This was what I thought was a lame effort to try to cloak themselves 
in prosecutorial discretion when there is no such thing. Mr. Speaker, I 
want to emphasize this. There is no such thing as prosecutorial 
discretion outside of an individual basis only. It only can be applied 
on an individual basis. It cannot be applied to classes or groups of 
people because everyone that is paying attention to law, the structure 
of law, knows that the law defines classes and groups of people, and 
the exemptions under prosecutorial discretion have to be justified, 
justifiable, and on an individual basis only. This administration 
didn't adhere to that, and they know it. And, Mr. Speaker, they 
strategized around it so that they could grant what is the equivalent 
of executive amnesty to hundreds of thousands of people.
  Now Senator Jeff Sessions has released a report a little over a week 
ago, and I want to thank him and his staff for the work that they have 
done to dig the details out of this network of regulations and rules 
and executive edicts to come down to this point: that the application 
of the law almost completely exempts the law, itself, which requires 
those encountered by immigration officials who are unlawfully present 
in the United States to be placed into removal proceedings. That is the 
law.
  It is real clear that the DACA documents, the Morton Memos, direct 
ICE to violate the very law that they have taken an oath to uphold, and 
that is the requirement that they place into removal proceedings those 
whom they may encounter who are unlawfully present in the United 
States.
  The President has ordered that they not do so, which violates their 
oath to the Constitution, their fidelity to the law, and their fidelity 
to the rule of law, and it usurps the directive from Congress, which 
sets up immigration law here in the United States of America.
  This is an appalling assault on our Constitution and on the rule of 
law and on the separation of powers, and the administration knows it. 
And I am not drawing this as an assumption, Mr. Speaker. I am drawing 
this from this understanding.
  The President has told us on a number of occasions that he taught 
constitutional law as an adjunct professor at the University of 
Chicago's School of Law for 10 years. Ten years of teaching the 
Constitution means you can't avoid coming across these constitutional 
requirements, and you can't avoid addressing the separation of powers 
that are distinct between articles one, two, and three of our 
Constitution. And if we wondered if somehow the President could have 
taught con law for a decade and not run across the separation of powers 
concept, or the authority that is granted to the Congress: All 
legislative powers shall be vested in the body of the United States 
Congress, the legislative body in article one. All powers, all 
legislative powers. The President had to have taught that for 10 years. 
I don't think you can take con law and not encounter that principle. 
And he didn't.
  He didn't avoid that principle. In fact, he was teaching it as 
recently as March 28, 2011, when he was speaking to a high school class 
at a high school here in Washington, D.C., when he said to them: You 
want me to enact the DREAM Act by executive order. But I am here to 
tell you that you have studied this, and you know that the Congress 
doesn't allow that. I don't have the authority to implement the DREAM 
Act by executive order because--and he said this this way--Congress 
writes the laws; the judicial branch interprets the laws; and my job is 
to enforce them. It is a very compact and succinct and, I think, a 
clear understanding of the three branches of government embodied in 
articles one, two, and three.
  So it is clear not only did the President teach this very principle 
for a decade, but he--and I don't want to say ``lectured,'' but he gave 
a speech on it to a high school class and said, I cannot implement this 
by an executive order or fiat; it is exclusively reserved for Congress. 
Some months later, though, apparently the idea was stuck in the head of 
the President of the United States, and by executive fiat, he did do 
just what had he said publicly he didn't have the authority to do. That 
is just on the immigration piece.
  We could go on through ObamaCare--the 38, 39, or more different 
changes that have been applied to ObamaCare. Now, I don't assert, Mr. 
Speaker, that they are all unconstitutional moves on the part of the 
President, but some of them are so clearly unconstitutional that it 
cannot be argued with a straight face if you know anything about the 
Constitution whatsoever.
  The clearest, the starkest was, the directive in ObamaCare that the 
employer mandate shall be implemented in each month after December of 
2013. That is real clear. But the President announced months ago, we 
are going to

[[Page 5416]]

delay the employer mandate for another year. They are going to add 
another year to the implementation date. So it is as if the President--
you know he said he had a pen and a cell phone. It was as if the 
President took his pen, went to page whatever it is in the 2,700 pages 
of ObamaCare, and went in there--it would be a red pen, not a blue 
one--and drew a line through the number that said 2013, and in each 
month after December of 2013, drew a line through that and just changed 
the number 13 to the number 2014.
  Now, the President does not have the authority to do that. If he 
does, then the work of this Congress is meaningless, and it would never 
have a relation to anything, except we would be a debate body here. So 
we could be in the business of deciding whether we side for or against 
the President without any power whatsoever. If the President continues 
to exert this authority--it is unconstitutional, it is a violation of 
his constitutional authorities and the separation of power. There are 
multiple lawsuits that are working their way through the courts, and I 
think that the administration has done a calculation of, they are not 
going to catch up with us before the President's term is over and he 
goes off into his happy perpetual golfing land, that he might.
  But this immigration issue sets the destiny for America. It is not a 
policy like ObamaCare, which is the largest social movement in my adult 
lifetime, social piece of legislation, social engineering piece of 
legislation. It is a takeover of a huge percentage of our economy, some 
say as much as 17 percent of our economy. It is a directive that orders 
American citizens, for the first time, to buy a product that is 
produced and specified by the Federal Government or be fined and 
punished by the Internal Revenue Service.
  That is where we are with ObamaCare. That is what it does to this 
God-given liberty and says, You shall be a subject of the State, and 
you will buy a product that is approved by the Federal Government. And 
if you fail to do what we have told you to do, ordered you to do, then 
we are going to fine you and punish you, and we are going to use the 
Internal Revenue Service to chase you down and dun you for that money.
  Now, that is an appalling thing to a free people. But we should think 
of that in the context of, first of all, if the Federal Government can 
order you to buy an insurance policy, they can order you to buy an 
automobile, they can order you to buy a washing machine, they can order 
you to go to the grocery store and buy broccoli. They can forbid you 
from buying--let's just say butter, or whatever it is that the First 
Lady might think is not the healthy diet for the American people. By 
the way, they are already dictating the calorie limitations to our kids 
in school.
  This country has become not so much the land of the free any longer. 
It has become a land where they seek to micromanage every aspect of our 
lives. It has started. It is going down that way.
  But if the White House can configure a bill and pass it through this 
Congress by hook, crook, and legislative shenanigans, and, in the 
process of making the deal to get the votes to get it passed, promise a 
Member of Congress--let's just say a Member of Congress from Michigan--
that, never fear if the language that you would like to have doesn't 
become part of the law, the President will sign an executive order to 
amend ObamaCare after the bill is signed if the agreement that they 
make here doesn't follow through in the final piece of legislation that 
comes from the Senate.
  Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, the very idea that the President would 
promise to amend a bill? He has no authority to amend any bill 
whatsoever. He has no authority to amend any legislation whatsoever. He 
has no authority to amend existing U.S. Code of any kind whatsoever.
  Now he can influence the executive branch to pass a rule, to publish 
that rule and take it out for comments. And through the authority 
granted to the executive branch through the Administrative Procedures 
Act, they can have the force and effect of law. But they can't change 
law. They can't amend law. And they cannot write a rule that changes 
the directive language that is part of the law. The law is the law. The 
Constitution is the foundation for this Republic, and the laws that are 
passed by it are supreme, not the President.
  So we have this usurpation of congressional authority from the 
President. We have an ObamaCare piece of legislation that is a taking 
of American liberty. And we have a President that changes it willy-
nilly at will. And not an ability in this Congress to put the brakes on 
that. But maybe, just maybe the American people will go to the polls in 
November and bring it around the other way. In 2016, there will be a 
new President elected. That President must run on adhering to, 
respecting, and reverting our country back to this Constitution.
  But this country, the bedrock underneath our Constitution is free and 
fair elections, confidence that they are free and fair and legitimate. 
The foundation is the Constitution. The Declaration is the promise; the 
Constitution is the fulfillment.
  As we sit here in this most blessed country in the history of the 
world, Mr. Speaker, we are watching it be taken apart by executive fiat 
and executive edict piece by piece. ObamaCare changed 30-some times. 
Immigration changed five or six times. And a President who threatens to 
go out and do that again, one who suspended Welfare to Work when it was 
written specifically to tighten up, that a President couldn't suspend 
the work component of Welfare to Work. And No Child Left Behind, 
suspended by the application of waivers that go on because he didn't 
agree with the policy and he thought he had a better policy, but he 
didn't want to come to Congress because Congress might not think it is 
a better policy.
  This President doesn't negotiate with this Congress. He doesn't work 
in a cooperative fashion. He imposes the whim of the White House on the 
American people.

                              {time}  1830

  This Congress went through a government shutdown to assert its will 
and came in to second place on that because not enough Members of this 
Congress had the will. We watched the Constitution be eroded because of 
that lack of will.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, what I see coming is an effort to grant more 
amnesty through the legislative process instead of, this time, the 
executive fiat or executive edict or executive overreach process, and 
the President threatens to use his pen more to grant more amnesty if we 
don't pass it here in the House.
  We have some misguided people on my side of the aisle that ought to 
be better thinkers than they are. I understand why Democrats are for 
amnesty almost universally because they get the big political benefit 
from it.
  They have been discouraging me for years from bringing up this topic, 
that Democrats have long known, Mr. Speaker, that a significant 
majority, 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 5 to 1--there are even statistics out there 
of 8 to 1--that newly arriving immigrants, if given an opportunity to 
vote, are going to vote in those kind of statistics at least 2 to 1 for 
Democrats.
  Here is a King axiom, Mr. Speaker, that newly arriving immigrants 
will assimilate into the politics of the locale where they arrive 
because they don't know what party they are when they get here.
  They will simply associate with their neighbors, their friends, and 
their family. When they go to political events, if they go, they will 
go with them, encouraged by them, and when they go to the polls, they 
are going to take their first advice.
  I look down through my neighborhood. We have fourth generation FDR 
Democrats that by heritage are Democrats, by philosophy are 
Republicans, but they don't change, necessarily, their voting stripes.
  If someone thinks I am wrong about this, they could go to Boston, and 
they could find me an Irish Catholic Republican. I am sure one of them 
exists. I understand there are two. But the heritage of inheriting the 
politics of the

[[Page 5417]]

locale where you arrive as a newly arriving immigrant is a big part of 
this.
  That is what drives Democrats. It is not about truth, justice, and 
the American way. It is not about justice and equity. It is not about 
fairness. It is about political power, and it is about Democrats 
seeking to expand the dependency class in America because that expands 
their political class and their political leverage at the expense of 
the Constitution, the rule of law, safety in the streets of America, 
and at the expense of the destiny of our country.
  We need to think this through much more deeply. We need to look 
ahead, Mr. Speaker. We need to see that, if we make an immigration 
decision in this Congress, we are going to live with that decision and 
our children and our grandchildren. Every succeeding generation lives 
with the decisions that we make here on immigration.
  It is different than ObamaCare. ObamaCare is bad. It is a horrible 
usurpation of God-given American liberty. It can be repealed. It can 
even be, in components, diminished in its negative effects by some 
tweaks that we could do, and I have got some on the books that I will 
be advancing here in the upcoming week; but we could repeal ObamaCare.
  We could undo it. We could recover. We could even somehow struggle 
through a massive amendment of it and come out with a product that the 
American people could live with and still have a measure of freedom; 
but if we get the immigration question wrong, there is no going back to 
repeal. There is no going back to change. There is no going back to 
undo what would be done by the colossal mistake of amnesty.
  Whatever you think about demographics, whatever you think about 
political power, and whatever you think about economics, there is an 
essential pillar of American exceptionalism that we can't do without 
and still be a great country. It is called the rule of law.
  The rule of law means that the law has to treat everyone equally. 
Justice must be blind. Lady Justice stands there with the scales in her 
hands, balanced, and most of the time, you will see her with a 
blindfold on because Justice needs to be blind and treat everyone 
equally. If we lose the rule of law, we will never be able to restore 
it again.
  If we sacrifice the rule of law in a misguided idea that, somehow, 
our sympathy for people that want a better life--and by the way, there 
are some 6 billion of them on the planet that want a better life--if 
our idea that our sympathy for people that want a better life is more 
important than our fidelity to the rule of law, then we have sacrificed 
the core of the greatness of America because our hearts overruled our 
heads.
  I am not surprised when Democrats do that. That is what they are in 
business to do, is have their hearts overrule their heads; but we can't 
let that happen on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, not even--not 
even--for someone who came into the United States illegally, 
misrepresented themselves to get into the United States military, put 
on a uniform, took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the 
Constitution of the United States and maybe, just maybe, risked their 
life in a performance of that duty.
  They have already violated our laws, they have already misrepresented 
themselves, and they have already defrauded the Department of Defense.
  Any bill that might be attached to a National Defense Authorization 
Act or comes to this floor in any form that rewards someone who has 
defrauded the Department of Defense or the United States--whether or 
not they have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, it is a false 
oath because they have given their false word--any bill like that needs 
to be met with the full rejection of the full vigor of the rule of law 
here in the floor of the United States Congress.
  That includes those things that are coming out now in the press 
today. We don't need to have an intense fight over immigration. We have 
an election coming up in November.
  We have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution and have defended 
it, generally, from this side of the aisle and not exclusively, Mr. 
Speaker.
  We have an obligation to defend that rule of law, preserve the 
sovereignty of America, and refuse to reward lawbreakers. If we reward 
lawbreakers, we get more lawbreakers. We need fewer lawbreakers, not 
more.
  I will defend my oath to this Constitution and the rule of law, and I 
will encourage and challenge all of my colleagues to do the same.

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