[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5484-5488]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      DEMOCRACY IS IN GREAT DANGER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2015, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California 
(Mr. Rohrabacher) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, let us note in this great hall of 
freedom that this is the culmination of over 200 years of sacrifice and 
hard work and commitment by generations of Americans who started back 
in the 1700s to

[[Page 5485]]

build a country that was based on freedom, liberty, and a democratic 
ideal of which all people's rights are respected and laws are made by 
the consent of the governed and that, indeed, we could have established 
a government at the Federal level which had its areas of authority but 
where other authority was vested in the States and in the people, 
themselves. This great, wondrous experiment of democracy is in great 
danger today from a number of areas.
  Overseas, of course, we see radical Islam on the rise, and they would 
like to terrorize the population of Western civilization, especially 
those of us in America. We also have people who fear forces within our 
own society. Ironically, one of the things most our people fear is that 
our own government is out of control and that we have a government 
today that in no way matches the model that our Founding Fathers had in 
mind for the United States of America and for the people of this 
country at this time.
  They looked forward to a shining city on a hill, and what we have 
instead is an evermore control-centered government that is not 
democratically oriented but is, instead, run for special interests, run 
by crony capitalists, run by bureaucrats in the Nation's Capital 
themselves, run by rogue elements within our own government, run by a 
too decentralized system that has emerged over these last several 
decades.
  The United States was created by individuals who proclaimed a 
commitment to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness and life. Even as 
the Declaration of Independence declared our independence from Great 
Britain, we declared we were, instead, not just a country that was free 
of Great Britain but that we were going to be a special country in 
which people's rights were respected.
  Even as we did declare our independence in that same document, what 
did we do?
  We listed the horror stories that were going on of the great 
oppression that our Founding Fathers were experiencing by the British, 
who were trying to suppress their desire for liberty and independence--
many of those items that were declared in our own Declaration of 
Independence that were reason enough for us to declare independence and 
to declare ourselves revolutionaries and patriots. Instead, we see many 
of those same items now being part and parcel of our own government. 
Our own bureaucracy claims the right to do some of the things that our 
Founding Fathers felt should have been left to the people and should 
not be permitted by any government.
  Today, I would like to mention two significant issues that are at 
play in Washington, D.C., that will play a prominent role in the degree 
of freedom that is enjoyed by our people. The second issue that I will 
mention gets a lot more publicity than the first, but the first issue 
that I would like to talk about today, which is a dramatic diminishing 
of the freedom and liberty of our people, is a bill that is designed to 
dramatically change our patent system. All of a sudden, there are 
yawns. ``Oh, the patent system. Who can understand that?'' No. It is 
very easy to understand.

                              {time}  1430

  Our Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that Americans would 
have the right to own and control the product of their own creative 
genius for a period of time, that way we would encourage people to 
innovate, to come up with new ideas. And, in fact, that patent concept 
was so revolutionary that it was what catapulted America into a major 
power in the world.
  It was a power in which the security and the prosperity of the 
average person and the rights of the average person were respected. 
Much of this can be traced back, yes, to the Constitution, to rights, 
and especially the patent rights because people had a right to own for 
a period of time the product of their own creative genius.
  We developed the technology that uplifted America's middle class. We 
have a working group in this country who have always had a higher 
standard of living than other countries in the world. Now, why is that? 
People all over the world and in the United States work very hard. 
There are hard-working people all over the world, but it was here where 
hard-working people were able to prosper; people were able to live in 
dignity, to have families, to look forward to owning things of their 
own that they could then possess and enrich their own lives. There was 
nothing wrong with that, and, in fact, it was our technology that 
permitted that to happen.
  Well, that technology was based on a legal foundation, as I say, in 
our own Constitution. Benjamin Franklin saw to it, that wise man, and 
our other Founding Fathers who listened to him and were captured by the 
idea. Thomas Jefferson, another man who believed in technology, 
Benjamin Franklin, these were people who knew that with freedom and 
technology there is no limit to what America can accomplish, and they 
set out to build the most creative, the freest, the most prosperous 
land of all, and they succeeded.
  But today they are taking elements away from our freedom every day. 
This attack on the patent system, while it is stealth and not many 
people are seeing it, is a huge attack on the well-being, the 
prosperity, the security of the American people.
  Now, what we have got--and who is trying to bring about these changes 
in our patent law that will hurt the little guys, hurt the individual 
inventors, make sure that the American people don't see this as an 
individual right but look at it as something that corporations do? No, 
no. What we have are huge multinational corporations that are trying to 
do their best to undermine the patent rights that we have enjoyed as 
Americans for over 200 years.
  Yes, it is a sinister attack on the rights of the American people, 
and we are talking about crony capitalism at its worst in that these 
are huge corporations having their say in the Nation's Capital and in 
Congress because they have influence here.
  Now, I am not saying that people are being bought off in their votes. 
I am not saying that at all. But as this system works, every Member of 
Congress and every person here, just like most Americans, is busy with 
their lives and busy with specific responsibilities; and what we have 
are these huge multinational corporations that have basically given 
campaign donations, not to buy a vote, but to buy someone's attention.
  So only about 10 percent of the people here know anything about these 
patent proposals that are now working their way to the floor of the 
House. These 10 percent, unfortunately, they know. Over the years, they 
have been given donations by major multinational corporations who 
explained their point of view. It is just that the other side has never 
gotten explained, and nobody knows about the other side.
  So, thus, what we have is coming to the floor a bill, H.R. 9, that 
will greatly diminish the patent rights of average Americans, of the 
little guy in a way that it will help these great multinational 
corporations steal the technology that they did not create. This is the 
big guys versus the little guys; and I will tell you that the little 
guys don't always win, and the big guys don't always win. But if the 
little guys become active and they make sure that their Representative 
in Washington knows what is going on and knows that they stand for a 
strong patent protection of the American citizens, of patent rights for 
the American people, the little guys will win; otherwise, the crony 
capitalists, these major, huge multinational corporations who don't 
care about the American people. They care about their profit at the end 
of the year, which may or may not go into America's warehouse or 
America's banks. It may go overseas, because these are multinational 
corporations who know no allegiance to the United States.
  So what we have got is a bill coming before the House, H.R. 9. Every 
one of the provisions in this bill has been designed to weaken the 
ability of American inventors to be able to defend their patent rights 
in court against major corporations that are trying to steal from them.
  Now, how did it get this way? How did we get to this point where a 
bill

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may come to the floor--and it passed last year. We stopped it in the 
Senate. But how is that possible? Well, it is possible not because 
these multinational corporations said: Oh, we want to weaken the patent 
protection of America's inventors. No. They said: We have got a problem 
with trolls.
  Trolls, yes. ``Trolls,'' what a sinister-sounding word.
  By the way, when I came here 20 years ago, they weren't talking about 
trolls. They were talking about submarine patents. There is always some 
sinister-sounding threat that is being used in order to try to diminish 
the actual patent protection of our average inventor. Today it is 
``trolls.''
  Now, by the way, what does a troll mean? A troll, according to these 
corporations, is someone who did not invent something but has purchased 
the patent rights from the inventor mainly because that inventor maybe 
doesn't have the money to actually go and to enforce his or her own 
patent rights upon some huge corporation. So you have some people who 
come along who have got resources and say, ``I will be your partner;'' 
or, ``Hey, I will just buy these rights from you.''
  This has played an important part in our whole process. You take that 
away--which is what these big corporations want to say: Unless you 
invented it, you can't make a profit from it. No, no, no. This is a 
property right, and if they take that away, individual inventors will 
never be able to raise the money for their own research, individual 
inventors won't be able to sell their product. Thus, the number of 
people who can buy it from them will be so greatly diminished that the 
value of their patents will be dramatically cut by this bill.
  But of course these huge corporations don't care. They just want to 
use other people's ideas and creations for their own profit. They don't 
care what happens to these little guys; although we know that it is the 
small inventor that comes up with the genius that changes the lives of 
people. But of course these huge multinational corporations are only 
interested in a profit at the end of the fiscal year.
  Well, this is a huge threat, and people are being told that the 
trolls--these are people who didn't invent, and thus, again, they are 
going to benefit anyway by bringing the lawsuit. Well, what they 
describe and try to claim are that the lawsuits brought on are mainly 
frivolous lawsuits. Well, let me just note, we have a problem with 
frivolous lawsuits throughout our system.
  Throughout our government, we have frivolous lawsuits in every area 
of our economy. Yes, there are frivolous lawsuits, but this is the 
equivalent of saying, because some lawyers have frivolous lawsuits, we 
are going to totally decimate the rights of the American people to sue 
anyone who has caused them damage. No, no. We don't want to eliminate 
the rights of the American people because someone has frivolous 
lawsuits.
  Let me note that the frivolous lawsuit end of this equation has 
already been corrected in the courts, but they continue to press for 
H.R. 9 because their real goal is to diminish the rights of American 
inventors to sue huge multinational corporations who are stealing their 
technology.
  Let's just note the trolls. The trolls, where did this come from? To 
show how cynical this debate is, the word ``troll'' has actually been 
created as a PR device to trick the American people into believing that 
the changes they are bringing about are going to hurt some scurrilous 
person, a troll, when in fact every provision we are talking about 
hurts the honest little guy who is struggling to develop new technology 
or the fact that, if he develops something important but doesn't have 
the ability to enforce it, he can at least enforce it by selling it to 
someone who will give him a price for his property. By the way, it is 
only for about 15 years or so that someone is going to own that, but he 
has a right to do that. But we are going to eliminate that right for 
the little guy so that he and nobody else can sue a multinational 
corporation that is stealing from him.
  Well, how did that word ``troll'' come about? I talked to a business 
executive who was in the room with various business executives from 
major corporations trying to decide: How will we deceive the American 
people? What we can do is build up a straw man and make it sound like, 
oh, this is a horrible person, this straw man; thus, we are going to 
pass laws against that straw man when, in reality, they are trying to 
get the little inventor over here.
  So what were the names? They went around: What really scurrilous name 
can we think of? My friend told me: Well, I actually put into the 
hopper that we should call them patent pirates. Well, that wasn't 
scurrilous enough. That wasn't sinister enough because one of them came 
up with trolls, patent trolls. Well, okay, patent trolls. That is just 
how cynical this is, that we have businessmen who are sitting in a room 
trying to decide what word can be used to fool the American people into 
acquiescence into letting their inventors have their patent rights 
decimated.
  One big problem is it is not just the small inventors that are hurt 
by this change of patent law. Our universities, which now have many 
patents, our laboratories, which come up with so many new innovations, 
they are hit dramatically by this. This would probably decrease the 
value of our patents and people who have whole collections of patents 
as part of their economic package; it decreases their value perhaps by 
50 percent.
  The major universities stepped forward and stopped it in the Senate, 
this bill, last time. Well, H.R. 9 is coming up again. We need to stop 
it here, and we need to stop it in the Senate. Whether you are someone 
who depends on a job that is a technology-related job, whether you work 
at a university or a technology laboratory, we need to make sure that 
the freedom of technology development is maintained in our country. 
This is necessary for my colleagues and the American people to become 
active. The little guys can win as long as we are active. We can beat 
the crony capitalists who try to diminish our freedom.
  The second bill I would like to mention today is H.R. 1940. H.R. 1940 
was submitted by me yesterday. Basically, I would like to call the 
attention of my colleagues and the American people to the importance of 
H.R. 1940. What it does is sets a policy concerning the Federal 
Government that if a State government has legalized the medical use of 
marijuana last year--now, we are going to include whatever marijuana 
laws are on the books of various States--that the State law should be 
what is respected and not the Federal Government coming in to States 
and local communities where people have decided that they don't believe 
that the police and Federal action and court action should be used 
against people who use marijuana.
  Last year I had a bill that became part of our appropriations process 
and for DOJ and basically said, for medical marijuana, if a State has a 
law that legalizes medical marijuana, the Federal Government cannot 
come in and supersede that State law. In H.R. 1940 I extend that. It 
will be the same as it was before, only this will also include States 
that have basically made marijuana for personal use legal.
  What this bill says is let's respect the 10th Amendment to the 
Constitution. Let's respect states' rights. Let's respect local 
communities' rights to control what is going on in their communities. 
Let us not have an aggressive Federal law enforcement bureaucracy 
making decisions for us and superseding what local people want to do 
with criminal justice in their own neighborhoods.

                              {time}  1445

  H.R. 1940 has been submitted. I would hope my colleagues read this 
and take this into consideration, perhaps coming on board to support 
this effort.
  Last year, we passed a bill just for medical marijuana and put it in 
as an amendment that said that the Federal Government can't use any of 
those resources to supersede State law. We got that in last year. And 
there were 50 Republicans that signed onto the argument that the States 
have a right to make their determination on these types of things.

[[Page 5487]]

  Our Founding Fathers didn't mean the Federal Government to have 
criminal justice control over this country. That was supposed to be 
left at the local level and at the State level. Our Founding Fathers 
did not want there to be a Federal police force.
  But yet what we have done is create a militaristic Federal police 
force that comes into people's neighborhood and now is insisting that 
even if a State and local community doesn't want something illegal, we 
are going to enforce a Federal law on them that is a criminal justice 
law that the local people don't even want.
  That is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. Our Founding 
Fathers wanted local people to control their communities and wanted 
criminal justice to be a State issue. They didn't want to have the 
Federal Government to have such control over our lives.
  And to show you how heinous this is, we passed that law here in this 
Congress--it won by a solid majority--that we would not supersede State 
law when it came to medical marijuana. Yet we have prosecutors in the 
United States who are still moving forward, filing charges, bringing 
people to court, even though the States in which they are in have 
agreed to legalize the medical use of marijuana. These rogue 
prosecutors are thumbing their noses at the law.
  This is what happens when government gets out of line, gets away from 
the Constitution. The Constitution want us to control our lives at the 
local level and the State level. They want the Federal Government to 
handle things that are international and across State borders and are 
important for trade, et cetera, and our national security. They did not 
have in mind that we would have Federal prosecutors coming in and 
stepping on local authority and stepping on local prosecutors and 
insisting on people being prosecuted, even when the United States 
Congress is telling them not to do it.
  To say that this is arrogance and a threat to our freedom is an 
understatement. We need to pay attention to this because we have built 
up in the name of protecting people from themselves a law enforcement 
drug policy that is a dramatic threat to the freedom and well-being of 
the American people.
  We don't need a militarized police force. Policemen used to be known 
as peace officers. When I was a kid, they were peace officers. ``I am a 
peace officer.'' That means they were there to protect us from each 
other.
  Now, we have over the years evolved into the police being called law 
enforcers. Well, think about what that does. You change the 
relationship between the law, between the police, and between the 
citizenry. We have created animosity, we have created fear, we have 
created violence where there wasn't violence.
  When someone breaks into a home because they have a baggy of 
marijuana, that is unconscionable. Breaking into their home with guns 
drawn--and this happened. And, of course, we have an Attorney General 
who is insisting not only are we going to supersede states' rights, but 
we are going to have asset forfeiture. So if someone is providing 
medical marijuana for one of our veterans or for some people who are 
suffering, we are not going to give the parents the choice, or someone 
whose older father or mother is in agony, the chance to try medical 
marijuana. No, no. What we are going to do if somebody does that is 
seize their property. We are going to seize the property of the person 
that sold them the marijuana to alleviate their suffering.
  This is contrary to everything our Founding Fathers had in mind. This 
is contrary to the ideal of American freedom and respect for individual 
rights.
  I was one of Ronald Reagan's speech writers, as everyone knows, and I 
have been a Republican all my life, and here I am with my fellow 
Republicans, and we talk about getting the government off our backs. We 
talk about states' rights. We talk about individual responsibility all 
the time. And we talked lately about the doctor-patient relationship as 
being so important to us.
  And then we turn around and a majority of my colleagues on the 
Republican side vote to have the Federal Government come in and step 
all over state's rights, step all over the rights of the individual to 
control his life and consume for himself, make his own determinations.
  Individual freedom, limited government--these are things that we 
supposedly believe in, but when it comes to the drug issue, no, no; we 
think the Federal Government has to come in and make that determination 
for people in their own lives.
  This is a threat to our freedom. My legislation will take a long step 
forward to making this a public issue. We should be debating this.
  I have been sponsoring legislation. My first legislation that was 
successful was last term in Congress, the one that these arrogant 
prosecutors are ignoring now that has actually been put into law that 
they can't use their own resources, meaning their pay, their time, and 
their office in order to prosecute medical marijuana, but yet several 
of them are doing exactly that. That shows you how the law and how our 
constitutional rights are being threatened.
  I didn't know what reaction my friends who are more conservative 
would have. I did not know that. I didn't know that maybe some of them 
would just say: Well, that is a lot of baloney, and just go on using 
the cliches about the states' rights and individual freedom and not 
really confront my argument. That is what I thought most of them would 
do.
  But I asked a conservative friend of mine just to see what he would 
say. He is a retired naval officer--a pilot--and he is a typical 
conservative voter in my district, or in our area in southern 
California.
  I asked him: What is your reaction to the fact that the guy you 
supported these years is now the point person in legalizing medical 
marijuana? And this officer said to me: You know, you don't know me 
very well, do you?
  I said: Well, I know you supported me. You are a retired military 
officer, and you are now engaged in the aviation business. And he said: 
Yes, but what you don't know is I have three sons. The day after 9/11, 
they all enlisted.
  I said: Yeah. And he said: Let me tell you what happened. Two of my 
sons came home whole. One son came home having seizure after seizure 
after seizure every day.
  Think of that. Your child, your hero marches off to war, and there he 
is, and you can't control the situation. He is having seizures.
  They took him to the veterans hospital, and the veterans hospital 
couldn't do anything to help him. And then one veterans doctor pulled 
him aside and said: Come and see me off campus. I have got to tell you 
something. He said: Here is a prescription for medical marijuana. That 
is what your son needs. I am not permitted to tell you that at the VA 
hospital.
  They did it. And this supporter of mine said: My son hasn't had a 
seizure since. I saw him just a while ago, and he said: It has been 4 
years, and my son is still not having seizures. How do I feel about you 
being the point man on legalizing medical marijuana? I want to give you 
a big hug.
  Well, guess what? There are people whose parents are dying or their 
family, their children, are going through seizures. My child recently 
had a problem with leukemia. Why would I think that, if she was having 
a seizure and that would help stop it, that the Federal Government 
should step in and prevent that?
  That is what we are doing. The American people need to wake up. My 
bill will take us a step in the right direction.
  I am asking my colleagues to support H.R. 1940. Do it because we 
believe in freedom. Do it because we believe in the well-being of the 
American people, and we believe in the system that our Founding Fathers 
decided of ultimate individual responsibility and freedom. That is what 
we are deciding, as well as the issue of whether or not some poor 
suffering soul shall be prevented from getting something that might 
alleviate their suffering.
  That is not the job of the Federal Government. We need to stand tall 
on

[[Page 5488]]

this. My colleagues need to be honest and open with their own 
constituents, and they will find that they are more supportive than 
they think.
  With that said, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________