[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17946-17951]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            WORKING TOGETHER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2015, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Woodall) is recognized 
for the remainder of the hour as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. WOODALL. Mr. Speaker, everyone has gone back to their offices but 
you and me, and I appreciate you sticking around to get this hour in. 
It is not going to be an exciting hour. Ordinarily, I bring down charts 
and graphs and try to share something in a visual way that folks might 
not have seen before. Today, it is just words, because words matter.
  Mr. Speaker, we have just finished in this Chamber this fantastic--
you have heard me say it--it was a festival of democracy. Every Member 
who had an amendment, they brought them to the Rules Committee. We made 
over a hundred of them in order. It has been 3 days, Mr. Speaker, and 
we passed in a very bipartisan way Federal transportation policy for 
the first time in more than a decade. Democrats had failed to get it 
done. Republicans had failed to get it done.

[[Page 17947]]

  We, as 435 individual Members representing diverse constituencies 
across the Nation, came together today and we got it done. They said it 
wouldn't be done. Chairman Bill Shuster said it could be done. Ranking 
Member Pete DeFazio of Oregon said it could be done, and we did it.
  Something has happened, Mr. Speaker, in this town that has people 
identifying as Democrats or Republicans first and as Members of this 
body, of the Article I legislature, second. It is bad. It is bad for 
the country, and it is bad for the people we represent. It is a bad 
process.
  Mr. Speaker, that is what I want to talk about today. You can't see 
the chart that I have here, but it is a quote from President Obama--you 
will remember it--back in August of 2013.
  You will remember we worked together with the President. Nine 
different times, we repealed portions of the President's healthcare 
bill. We repealed them. They were unworkable. He knew it. We knew it. 
We came together nine times. He signed legislation into law that 
repealed parts of the President's healthcare bill.
  It was the summer of 2013 and we were talking about how to come 
together on some of the bigger problems in the President's healthcare 
bill. You remember the mandates were getting ready to go into effect--
the business mandates, the individual mandates--and the country wasn't 
ready. The country was not ready. We all knew it. Every Member, from 
left to right, Mr. Speaker, knew it.
  The President held a press conference and he said this:

       In a normal, political environment, it would have been 
     easier for me to simply call up the Speaker and say: You know 
     what? This is a tweak that doesn't go to the essence of the 
     law. It has to do with, for example, are we able to simplify 
     the attestation of employers to whether they are already 
     providing health insurance or not. It looks like there may be 
     some better ways to do this. Let's make a technical change to 
     the law.

  The President goes on to say, Mr. Speaker:

       That would have been the normal thing that I would prefer 
     to do, but we are not in a normal atmosphere around here when 
     it comes to ObamaCare.

  The President says:

       We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did 
     so.

  Mr. Speaker, this was from that very contentious time trying to solve 
problems for the American people, again, problems the White House knew 
existed and problems the Congress knew existed.
  The President says:

       You know what? If it was ordinary times like any time in 
     the past 225 years, I would have called the United States 
     Congress and I would have said: ``Listen, the Constitution 
     gives you Article I powers to legislate, and I need a 
     legislative change made because the law is not working.''

  He didn't, and he said he didn't, and he said he wasn't going to. He 
said he was going to go it alone. The disappointment in that decision, 
in this body, was very partisan, Mr. Speaker. It was very partisan.
  I don't know how we get past the allegiance to the President because 
he is from our party. Republicans did this when George Bush was in 
office. Democrats are doing this when President Obama is in office. It 
is not about who the President is. It is about what the President does.
  What the President does is implement the laws that we pass. He 
doesn't change the laws. And every time we fail on behalf of our 
constituents to stand together as 435 Representatives of the people and 
instead become Representatives of the Republican Party or the 
Democratic Party, we fail America.
  Mr. Speaker, what I have here is the chart of the Supreme Court 
decision in the NLRB v. Noel Canning case. You may remember that one. I 
had just gotten to Congress, Mr. Speaker. I had just gotten to 
Congress.
  The President was talking about making appointments. As you know, the 
Advice and Consent Clause of the Constitution says the President can 
make appointments, but he needs to get the consent of the Senate to do 
so. Well, the Senate wouldn't give him consent.
  So while the Senate was away for a day, the President went into the 
Recess Appointments Clause of the Constitution. In fact, we got a big 
letter from the legal department there at the White House that said he 
had the powers to pretend that the Senate had adjourned for the session 
and to go ahead and make appointments anyway.

                              {time}  1245

  The protest, Mr. Speaker, of the President usurping congressional 
authority was partisan. Republicans said no. Democrats said: Ah, he 
probably has the right to do it anyway.
  We didn't stand up for the people we represent. We didn't stand up 
for the Constitution we swore to uphold, Mr. Speaker. We divided 
ourselves by party instead of uniting ourselves on principle.
  We had to go to the Supreme Court, Mr. Speaker. The Supreme Court 
can't decide on anything unanimously, Mr. Speaker. If the question is: 
What time are we going to meet today to talk about cases?, it is a 5-4 
decision. You know this to be true.
  But the Supreme Court came together in Noel Canning and said: That's 
crazy. That's crazy. The President of the United States can't just 
pretend he is king. He is not the king.
  I am paraphrasing when I say that, Mr. Speaker, but to quote the 
Supreme Court decision, they said this:
  Regardless, the recess appointments clause is not designed to 
overcome serious institutional friction. It provides a subsidiary 
method for appointing officials when the Senate is away during a 
recess. Here, as in other contexts, friction between the branches is an 
inevitable consequence of our constitutional structure.
  Friction between the branches, Mr. Speaker, is an inevitable 
consequence of our constitutional structure. That makes me feel good. 
It makes me feel good because, Mr. Speaker, I go back home all the time 
and constituents say: Rob, why can't you get more done? Why can't you 
get more done?
  Well, it turns out it is because of this. It is because of this 
Constitution that says, listen, if Congress is at work, your liberties 
and your freedoms may be under attack. Right?
  What we do here isn't generally to give freedoms back to people. 
Generally what we do is to restrict freedoms a little bit here. We want 
it to be slow. Here in the House, we are a little faster. There in the 
Senate, they are supposed to be a little slower, Mr. Speaker. But it is 
supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be the inevitable consequence of 
our constitutional structure.
  But, Mr. Speaker, this body--not Republicans in this body, not 
Democrats in this body--collectively was silent as power flowed down 
Pennsylvania Avenue, away from the Article I legislature down to the 
Article II executive. It took the Article III courts, Mr. Speaker, to 
right our constitutional framework. Shame on us. Shame on us, 
collectively, for not standing up.
  Mr. Speaker, my constituents are frustrated by the pace of progress 
in this town. They are frustrated by what looks like the politics that 
are being played here, Mr. Speaker, when policy should be our focus.
  I think it is up to us to educate folks, to proudly say it is the 
inevitable consequence of our constitutional structure, but when we 
stand together--as we have this week on this transportation bill--there 
is still more that unites us as a country than that divides us.
  Environmental leadership, Mr. Speaker, is one of those areas of 
overreach that this particular White House is aggressively engaged in. 
Again, the pushback has been partisan pushback. It has not been Article 
I legislative pushback, as it should.
  I want to go back to some prior Presidents, Mr. Speaker. I will look 
at Republican Presidents. I am a Republican. I will look at what it 
looked like when Republicans were running the show in the White House.
  The EPA was signed into law by Richard Nixon, Mr. Speaker. On the 
creation of the EPA, President Nixon said this:

       The reorganizations which I am here proposing afford both 
     the Congress and the executive branch an opportunity to 
     reevaluate

[[Page 17948]]

     the adequacy of the existing program authorities involved in 
     these consolidations. I look forward to working with the 
     Congress in this task. The Congress, the administration, and 
     the public all share a profound commitment to the rescue of 
     our natural environment.

  Richard Nixon had a calling when it comes to the environment, Mr. 
Speaker. He had a calling. He didn't say:

       I am the President of the United States. I am just going to 
     rewrite the entire environmental code and dictate that it is 
     the law of the land.

  He came to Congress and said:

       Protecting our natural resources is a shared American 
     value. It is a shared American value. I am going to go to 
     Congress. I am going to win the votes. We are going to change 
     the law, and we are going to make it so.

  The Clean Air Act, Mr. Speaker, was signed into law in 1990 by 
President George H.W. Bush. He said this:

       Today I am signing S. 1630, a bill to amend the Clean Air 
     Act. I take great pleasure in signing it as a demonstration 
     to the American people of my determination that each and 
     every American shall breathe clean air. Passage of this bill 
     is an indication that the Congress shares my commitment to a 
     strong Clean Air Act.

  How do you know, Mr. Speaker, if Congress shares your commitment if 
you don't bring the language to Congress to have Congress ratify it? 
The President can propose all the legislation he wants to. We still 
have to pass it. If our frustration about results allows us to let 
folks shortcut the constitutional process, we will all--330 million of 
us--suffer.
  I remember when President Reagan was trying to raise the gas tax, Mr. 
Speaker. I talk about that because we were talking about the 
transportation bill this week and transportation funding this week. He 
stood on the lawn, Mr. Speaker, there beside the Rose Garden, and he 
says:

       We deserve a world class infrastructure in America, and I 
     propose that we double the gas tax.

  Yes, this is conservative Ronald Reagan talking about doubling taxes 
in order to build America. America didn't agree with him; yet, he went 
out there and sold it.
  How did we get fundamental tax reform in this country, Mr. Speaker, 
in 1986? The country wasn't ready for fundamental tax reform. The 
Congress couldn't agree on fundamental tax reform. Ronald Reagan took 
it out there and sold it every single day until he got it done. That is 
what is supposed to happen. We work together to accomplish these 
priorities. Past Presidents have done exactly that.
  Mr. Speaker, it hasn't been 2 weeks ago we were in here talking about 
the President's overreach on the Department of Labor fiduciary rule. 
You remember that bill. We had it here on the floor of the House, Mr. 
Speaker, where the President just decided, through the Department of 
Labor, that longstanding investment law, as determined by the SEC, was 
no longer going to be the law of the land, that the Department of Labor 
was going to take on some new rulemaking authorities in this area.
  The President wanted to make some changes. Congress didn't want to 
make changes. The President said this:

       What I won't accept is the notion that there is nothing we 
     can do. So we are going to keep pushing for this rule.

  Keep pushing, Mr. Speaker, didn't mean come to Congress to sell you 
and to sell me. Pushing didn't mean go to the United States Senate to 
build a coalition. Pushing meant ignoring the Congress and going 
straightaway.
  Now, I point this out as a success, Mr. Speaker. I point this out as 
a success because our opposition to this wasn't partisan. Our 
opposition to this, Mr. Speaker, was bipartisan.
  I have here a letter from September, Mr. Speaker, signed by 90 
Democrats that said:

       Mr. President, don't do this. Don't do this. This is not 
     the proper path forward.

  The plurality of the Democratic Caucus here said:

       Mr. President, don't go forward. The President drove 
     forward anyway.

  Mr. Speaker, the times that I have seen the President change his mind 
in my 4\1/2\ years in Congress have not been because of my persuasive 
oratory or even by the strength of this institution. It has been 
because the American people have spoken.
  When the American people speak, the President is a good listener. 
What the President is hearing today is the ends justify the means. I 
need results. And so however you get those results, Mr. President, I 
will be behind you.
  We are starting to turn that corner, Mr. Speaker, because I promise 
you, whatever is good for Democrats today is going to be bad for 
Democrats tomorrow. Whatever is bad for Republicans today is going to 
be good for Republicans tomorrow.
  The parties will change. The political environment will change. But 
when you short-circuit the process, the short-circuiting lasts forever. 
We change expectations of the American people. We change expectations 
of what the Constitution means, Mr. Speaker. I applaud 90 of my 
Democratic colleagues standing with this Congress saying:

       Mr. President, don't go it alone.

  Mr. Speaker, this isn't something that I am just coming up with out 
of thin air. When the President wasn't President Obama, when he was 
Senator Obama, he had these same concerns.
  He spoke out time and time again about overreaches of President 
George Bush. Oftentimes he spoke out alone. Republicans weren't 
standing with him to speak out because it was a Republican President.
  Republicans said:

       You know what. I want to support my President. So even if 
     he is coloring outside the lines a little bit, it is probably 
     important to the country that he do so. That is a failure. 
     That is a failure because our primary job here is not to be 
     Republicans and Democrats. Our primary job here is to be 
     Article I Representatives of the American people.

  The President said this on immigration. He's talking at a Univision 
townhall meeting in 2011, Mr. Speaker. He said:

       This does not mean, though, we can't make decisions, for 
     example, to emphasize enforcement on those who have engaged 
     in criminal activity.

  This was the beginning of his program.
  But he goes on to say:

       It also doesn't mean that we can't strongly advocate and 
     propose legislation that would change the law.

  Time and time again, folks would ask him to do what he could as the 
executive to change immigration law, and he would say:

       Listen, I'm not the king. I am the President. The Congress 
     has to change the laws. I can only enforce the laws.

  He was right. He was right each and every time that he said that. The 
administration can propose, but we have to implement.
  Fast-forward to about this time last year, Mr. Speaker, and the 
President says this:

       And to those Members of Congress who question my authority 
     to make our immigration system work better or question the 
     wisdom of my acting where Congress has failed, I have but one 
     answer: Pass a bill.

  Pass a bill, he says.

       In the meantime, I am just going to do things the way I 
     want to do things.

  That is the opposite of the ``I am just a bill sitting here on 
Capitol Hill'' song that we all learned as children, Mr. Speaker. The 
bill comes first. The law change comes last. After the President signs 
the bill, it becomes the law. We have to propose it first.
  How many meetings have you had with the President, Mr. Speaker, where 
he is pushing his immigration agenda, trying to get you to buy in to 
his bill? The answer is zero because he doesn't have a bill and he 
hasn't been knocking on any of our doors. And my Democratic friends 
would say the same.
  How many meetings with the President have you had, Mr. Speaker, where 
the President is trying to persuade you about his fiduciary rule and 
why that change is important for America and why we should move that 
bill forward? The answer is zero because he has never come to Capitol 
Hill to make that pitch. He is not making it to Democrats, and he is 
not making it to Republicans. He is going it alone.
  How many times has the President come and knocked on your door, Mr. 
Speaker, to try to sell you on his ozone regulations or his clean 
energy plan

[[Page 17949]]

and on and on and on? And the answer is he hasn't. And we have been 
complicit in allowing that unilateral action. It is bad for America. It 
is not the process that our Framers envisioned.
  This is what the President said on immigration. It is that same 
Univision townhall meeting. The question was:

       Mr. President, my question will be as follows. With an 
     executive order, could you be able to stop deportations of 
     students?

  Mr. Speaker, I am not down here talking about immigration policy 
today. I am not. Our immigration system is broken. I represent 
constituents, Mr. Speaker, who have had family members on the list not 
for 5 years, not for 10 years, not for 15 years, but for 20 years, and 
more are standing in line waiting for their chance to come to America. 
Our system is broken.
  I have employers who want to build in our district. They can't get 
the people they need from their home countries to come and manage those 
operations. Our system is broken. We all know it. We have a chance to 
fix it.
  But when the President goes around the Congress, he doesn't fix it. 
He breaks it further. He says this:

       With respect to the notion that I can just suspend 
     deportations through executive order, that is just not the 
     case because there are laws on the books that Congress has 
     passed. And I know that everybody here at Bell is studying 
     hard. So you know that we have got three branches of 
     government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch's 
     job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the 
     judiciary has to interpret the laws.

                              {time}  1300

  The President says:

       There are enough laws on the books by Congress, the 
     President says, ``that are very clear in terms of how we have 
     to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply 
     through executive order ignore those congressional mandates 
     would not conform with my appropriate role as President.

  Mr. Speaker, the words of President Obama:

       There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are 
     very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration 
     system that for me to simply through executive order ignore 
     those constitutional mandates would not conform with my 
     appropriate role as President.

  That was March 2011. You wouldn't know that is what he believed in 
November of 2015.
  Mr. Speaker, what happened in those 4 years? I will tell you. What 
has happened is we have been silent as a body. We have been vocal as 
Republicans, we have been vocal as Democrats, but we have been silent 
as a representative body.
  Article I of the Constitution says it is our job to legislate and it 
is our job to rein in those Presidents who would legislate on our 
behalf.
  What our Framers feared, Mr. Speaker, was an all-powerful executive. 
That is what they had come from. That is what we should fear today, not 
a Republican President, not a Democratic President, but an all-powerful 
President. Congress passes the law. The President enforces them.
  Mr. Speaker, if you want to know the outcome of that overreach, if 
you want to know where Congress is, again, the President is not on 
Capitol Hill selling those priorities. He is simply down in the 
executive branch with a phone and a pen implementing those priorities. 
But if you want to know what the other two branches of government 
think, the judiciary said no and the Congress said no.
  There is no confusion about where the different branches of 
government are. We have one branch that is saying yes. That is the 
executive, who has no lawmaking authority whatsoever. We have two 
branches saying no, the branch that makes the law, which is the 
legislative branch, and the branch that interprets the law, which is 
the judiciary branch.
  We are united in the noes, but what we are not united on is the 
yeses.
  We talk about bipartisan in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker. It is always 
striking to me that what is bipartisan is the opposition to the 
Presidential overreach. That is what is bipartisan.
  Sometimes the support for it is partisan, with a minority of folks 
supporting the President on that. It is bipartisan in its--disdain is 
too strong of a word, Mr. Speaker, but in some ways, it is not strong 
enough. It is that we owe our constituents better. It is that we owe 
them better.
  My voting card has my name on it, Mr. Speaker, but it is not mine. It 
is borrowed from the Seventh District of Georgia. It doesn't belong to 
me. It belongs to 700,000 folks back home who didn't send me here to 
satisfy my priorities. They sent me here to satisfy their priorities.
  I don't believe that, as a Nation, Mr. Speaker, we believe the ends 
justify the means. I hope that we don't. I hope that we have not fallen 
so far, Mr. Speaker, that we now believe the Constitution, the rule 
book for America, is less important than what the results are.
  Anybody involved in manufacturing, Mr. Speaker, knows that, if you 
have a flawed process, you are going to produce a flawed product. Only 
with a good process can you produce a good product. The Constitution 
gives us a good process. When we ignore it, we have a flawed process 
and a flawed product.
  I will go to the President's environmental policies, Mr. Speaker.
  I want to make it clear: I represent a district that plays outside, I 
would argue, more than any other district in the country. If you want 
folks that love clean air and clean water, come down to my part of the 
world. If you want folks who are stewards of Mother Earth, come down to 
my part of the world. If want folks who love green space, who love 
parks, national trailways and bikeways, come down to my part of the 
world. We love being outside. We will ride a bike. We will push a 
stroller. We don't care. We just want to be outside.
  And so, if the President came to me and said: ``Rob, Mother Earth is 
in peril. I need you to work with me to solve that problem,'' I would 
be the best listener you could imagine. But that is not the way the 
process is working in the 4\1/2\ years I have been in Congress, Mr. 
Speaker.
  The President's Clean Power Plan is shutting down power plants in the 
great State of Georgia, Mr. Speaker. It is the position of the 
administration to protect Mother Earth. We are going to close down the 
power plants that we have just spent billions of dollars improving to 
meet the last round of environmental regulation. And then, with those 
power plants closed down, we are now going to spend billions more to 
build brand-new facilities to generate electricity.
  I promise you that is not going to result in fewer emissions in the 
atmosphere than if we let these plants run out their useful life with 
all of the improvements that have gone upon them. But we didn't get to 
vote on that, Mr. Speaker. We didn't get to vote on that. That was an 
executive decree.
  We have the Waters of the U.S., Mr. Speaker. Well, when it was a 
bill, we rejected it. It is the initiative from the White House that 
said the framework we have had in this country for 100 years of the 
Federal Government controlling navigable waterways and the State 
governments controlling the other waterways is gone.
  If a drop of water falls, it is now the Federal Government's 
responsibility to regulate. Why? Because, apparently, we can't be 
trusted back in Georgia to take good care of our natural resources. 
Nonsense.
  Mr. Speaker, my district sits on a continental divide. We have built 
a billion-dollar water treatment plant where we are putting the water 
back into our local lake cleaner than we took it out. While half the 
district's on the other side of the continental divide, we know that 
the Chattahoochee River Basin is in a water deficit. So we spend 
beaucoup money pumping the water back up from one side of the 
continental divide so that we can let it go in the basin that needs the 
water so badly.
  We are stewards, Mr. Speaker. We are not stewards with your money. We 
are not spending somebody else's money on these projects. We are 
spending our money on these projects because we believe in taking care 
of America's natural resources.
  The President, not through selling it to Congress, not through 
selling it to

[[Page 17950]]

the American people, but with a pen and the phone federalized water 
across the board. Where was the bipartisan outcry? It was lacking.
  And, finally, the revised Ozone Air Quality Standards, Mr. Speaker. 
If you are confused, it is that we never got the last round of ozone 
standards implemented. Those still haven't gone into effect yet. The 
President has dropped a new round of ozone standards on America not 
because Congress worked on it--we didn't--not because Congress passed 
something--we didn't--but because the President thought it was 
important and he wrote the law for himself.
  How does Congress feel about this? Well, it turns out Members of this 
body said:

       If this is the direction the President wants it to go, let 
     me make this pitch to Congress and see if the Congress agrees 
     with the President.

  Carbon emissions, cap-and-trade, Clean Power Plan: Rejected. Waters 
of the U.S.: Rejected. Ozone standards: Rejected.
  It is not that Congress hasn't spoken on these issues. We have, Mr. 
Speaker. We have. It is not that the President doesn't know what the 
Article I Congress wants. He does.
  He just doesn't like what the Article I Congress decided. And so he 
has decided to do it himself. And we have been complicit in allowing 
that to happen. It is not even we, the 435 of us, Mr. Speaker. It is 
we, the 320 million of us. And there is going to be a price to pay for 
that.
  Mr. Speaker, Congress is active on these issues. It is not as if 
folks in this body don't care. They care deeply.
  We passed the REINS Act, Mr. Speaker, to say:

       Listen, if the President is going to start doing some rules 
     on his own, we need to come back and review those after the 
     fact in Congress.

  It passed 243-165.
  We had the Regulatory Integrity Protection Act for those 
jurisdictions like mine where the local governments are taking such 
good care of our natural resources, trying to protect their right to 
continue to protect our local natural resources. It passed 261-155.
  The Ratepayer Protection Act said:

       For Pete's sake, it hasn't been 5 years since you told us 
     to spend billions to make these power plants workable for the 
     next generation. Now you are telling us we have to close 
     these power plants.

  That can't possibly be the right way for America to get clean energy. 
It can't possibly be the right way to be stewards of taxpayer dollars. 
We passed that bill 247-180.
  The EPA Science Advisory Board Act said:

       We have got to get together on the science. If we can't 
     figure out what the facts are, we are never going to agree on 
     what the solution is. So let's have a standard for what good 
     science looks like that we can all rally together around.

  It passed here in the House.
  Mr. Speaker, folks aren't confused about where the Congress is on 
this issue. The President is not confused about where the Congress is 
on this issue. The President believes the ends justify the means.
  Article I: Congress passes the law. Article II: The White House 
enforces the law. Article II: The judiciary interprets the law.
  Well, the judiciary had a chance to do a little interpreting. It had 
a chance to look at the Waters of the U.S. and the clean water issue, 
and the court said this. This is the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals:

       What is of greater concern to us in balancing the harms is 
     the burden potentially visited nationwide on governmental 
     bodies, State and Federal, as well as on private parties, and 
     the impact on the public in general implicated by the rule's 
     redrawing of jurisdictional lines over certain of the 
     Nation's waters.

  The court says:

       Wait a minute. We are worried about the impact on America.

  I don't want the court to be worried about the impact on America. I 
want the court to be worried about what the law of the land is. I want 
the Congress to be worried about the impact on America. I want the 
President to be listening to Congress and enforcing the laws that 
Congress passed.
  It has taken the courts to say:

       Mr. President, you have gone a bit to too far.

  The court goes on and says:

       The sheer breadth of the ripple effect caused by this 
     rule's definitional changes counsel strongly in favor of 
     maintaining the status quo for the time being.

  It is still being litigated. The court says the detrimental impact of 
this new rule that Congress has never seen, except in the form that we 
rejected it, the damage to America is so severe, we are going to issue 
an injunction to prevent the President from going forward.
  Mr. Speaker, it gives me no pride to have nine Justices in robes 
running the United States of America. Americans elected a President to 
implement the law and they elected a Congress to write the law. We 
should be doing that together. We found ourselves powerless in doing 
that, asking the courts to solve that issue instead.
  The courts go on:

       But neither is there any indication that the integrity of 
     the Nation's waters will suffer imminent injury if a new 
     scheme is not immediately implemented.

  They said:

       I don't know what it is the President is trying to solve 
     here, but there is no harm coming. There is time to sort this 
     out.

  Now, they mean time to sort it out in the courts. What about time to 
sort it out in the Congress, Mr. Speaker?
  Who is it who loves the Waters of the U.S. bill? If they do, they 
should come and make their pitch. The President should come and make 
his pitch. When was the last time you saw him on the TV selling the 
Waters of the U.S. bill, Mr. Speaker? The answer is that you haven't 
seen him on TV selling it. He is not selling it. He is just doing it.
  When have you seen him selling the ozone standards? The answer is 
that he is not selling it. He is just doing it. And the list goes on.
  Mr. Speaker, we have to ask him to get out there and sell it. Your 
job as President isn't just to do it. Your job as President is to get 
the Congress to allow you to do it, to sell the American people, who 
will sell the Congress, who will change the law of the land.
  Mr. Speaker, I don't know if you know Laurence Tribe. He is a Harvard 
law professor. In fact, he was President Obama's constitutional law 
professor. I would not call him a conservative by any stretch of the 
word, at least not in political terms, but perhaps constitutionally.
  Laurence Tribe says this about the President's Clean Power Plan. He 
says:

       To justify the Clean Power Plan, the EPA has brazenly 
     rewritten the history of an obscure section of the 1970 Clean 
     Air Act. Frustration with congressional inaction cannot 
     justify throwing the Constitution overboard to rescue this 
     lawless EPA proposal.

  Mr. Speaker, I want you to follow that rationale. This isn't 
something that has snuck up on us here in the past few weeks, here in 
the past few months, here in the past few years.
  The President dug deep into a 45-year-old law and said:

       It appears to me we have misunderstood this law for the 
     past 45 years.

                              {time}  1315

  We have misunderstood it. And apparently, 45 years ago, we absolutely 
made an effort, through Congress and the White House, to give the 
President the authority, in fact, the obligation, to rewrite America's 
energy laws in this fashion.
  Nonsense. Nonsense. The President is a constitutional law professor. 
Frustration with congressional inaction cannot justify throwing the 
Constitution overboard to rescue this lawless EPA proposal.
  I get the frustration with congressional inaction. Mr. Speaker, I get 
it. If we had frustration meters around here, mine would be ticking up 
near the top. But my experience is, the way to address that frustration 
isn't to take my toys and go home. The way to address that frustration 
is to find somebody on the other side of the aisle who I think I can 
trust, who I think I can talk to, who I think I can listen to, and to 
work together to find an answer, to work together to find a solution.
  What is absent in all of these proposals that I have listed, Mr. 
Speaker, is anyone working together to make this proposal the law of 
the land. The

[[Page 17951]]

only working together that is happening, Mr. Speaker, are folks working 
together to prevent these proposals from being the law of the land.
  Process matters. Process matters.
  Mr. Speaker, I am going to finish close to where I began. I was a new 
Congressman, had just been elected, 700,000 people in the great State 
of Georgia counting on me to be their voice, counting on me to succeed 
on their priorities.
  Right out of the gate, the President says:

       You know what? I have been trying to get the people I want 
     appointed to a board, and the Senate won't do what I want 
     them to do; and because the Senate won't do what I want them 
     to do, I am going to do it by myself.

  When did that become okay, Mr. Speaker?
  We suffer from a little of that here. The House won't do what I want 
it to do, so I am going to take my toys and go home. The House won't do 
what I want it to do, so I am going to gum up the works and shut down 
the process. The House won't do what I want it to.
  Well, guess what? In a representative democracy, nobody does what you 
want him to do, Mr. Speaker. You have got to go out and find 51 percent 
of America to agree with you, and that is when you get things done.
  I do not fault the President for his policies, though I disagree with 
him on them. I fault him for implementing those policies unilaterally, 
unconstitutionally, instead of going out and selling America on them.
  That is what is so great about this institution, Mr. Speaker. If you 
have the votes, you don't have to fuss about it.
  Folks come down to the House floor, gnashing of teeth, tearing of 
clothes, self-flagellation going on here on the floor on a regular 
basis. If you have the votes, you don't have to make a scene. You have 
just got to go out and win the votes. You just have to go out and win 
the argument. If you win the argument, the law will change.
  Mr. Speaker, America works. America works. The Constitution works. 
You just have to follow it. You just have to believe in it. You have to 
believe in the Constitution. You have to believe in the American people 
that it governs.
  So, 9-0, the Supreme Court told the White House and its entire legal 
team that crafted a too-cute-by-half explanation of why this was all 
going to be okay and roses and sunshine, hunky-dory, 9-0 the Court said 
no. No, that is not what the President does. That is not what the White 
House does. That is not what you are allowed to do in America. 
Regardless, the Supreme Court says the Recess Appointments Clause is 
not designed to overcome serious institutional friction.
  Mr. Speaker, we have serious institutional friction. I don't bemoan 
this. I celebrate it. I think friction was part of the process. It 
turns out the Court agrees with me.
  They go on to say it simply provides a subsidiary method for 
appointing officials when the Senate is away during a recess; hence, 
the term ``Recess Appointments Clause.''
  Here, as in other contexts--in other contexts, Mr. Speaker--are all 
of these other issues the Court now has on their plate from executive 
overreach. Here, as in another context, friction between the branches 
is an inevitable consequence of our constitutional structure.
  Mr. Speaker, I am just one vote in a 435-Member institution, but my 
constituents would place that one vote on the side of being the Article 
I legislature rather than on the side of being the best Republican 
America has ever seen. My constituents would ask me to place that vote 
on the side of being the legislative branch, that institution from 
which the ideas percolate, that part of the U.S. House that is closest 
to the American people. They would ask me to pledge to be a part of 
this institution, not the Republican National Committee, not the 
National Republican Congressional Committee, not the Democratic 
Congressional Campaign Committee, not the Democratic National 
Committee.
  Mr. Speaker, we have an amazing opportunity and a solemn obligation 
in this institution. My commitment is to be a good listener to all the 
policy concerns my colleagues have on the other side of the aisle.
  Mr. Speaker, I will be a good listener. I may not agree with you, but 
I will give you a chance to sell me.
  But we have to be united on behalf of all of our constituents back 
home in saying that the Constitution gives only one branch the ability 
to write the law, and that is the Article I legislature.
  When we ignore the President, Mr. Speaker, we do so at our own peril, 
at our institutional peril. When the President ignores the Congress, he 
does so at his own peril, at executive branch institutional peril.
  I was on the elevator with one of the great leaders of this 
institution, Mr. Speaker, Mr. John Dingell out of Michigan, and he was 
on the elevator. A young Democrat climbed on the elevator with him. The 
young Democrat was complaining that he didn't have a personal 
relationship with the President. He said: I don't get to see enough of 
the President. The President is not on Capitol Hill enough.
  Mr. Dingell said: Well, son, be careful what you wish for. Remember 
LBJ. We had LBJ over at the Library of Congress, a book study just this 
week.
  Different Presidents handle their relationship with Congress in 
different ways. Some are involved too much, some are involved not 
enough, but everyone is involved.
  Mr. Speaker, this is supposed to be a battle of ideas, not a battle 
of ideologies. This is supposed to be a battle of policy, not a battle 
of partisans.
  This is supposed to be an opportunity to succeed on behalf of folks 
back home; and I will tell you, it is an opportunity that we are losing 
when we unite ourselves based on red and blue as opposed to uniting 
ourselves based on Article I and Article II.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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