[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 177-182]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1700
                            DOUBLE STANDARDS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Arrington). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority 
leader.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to get to come into this 
hallowed Hall and to have a chance to address our peers.
  It was a rather enjoyable day yesterday, even with all the vitriol, 
but I was reminded and couldn't help but reminisce a bit and walk a bit 
down memory lane yesterday as we heard from Members of the House on the 
other side of the aisle expressing repeatedly a desire to have open 
debate and not shut off debate.
  The reminiscing took me back to a time last year when, as far as we 
could find, the only time in American history one party in the United 
States Congress physically prevented another party from coming to the 
floor and going into session and trying to begin debate and trying to 
discuss the business of the day. We can't find that any party ever 
staged such a sit-in.
  We know there are House rules about not eating on the House floor and 
about not having things to drink on the House floor other than water, 
and yet our friends across the aisle were eating and drinking. It is 
actually a violation of the House rules to sing on the House floor. 
Every now and then, people look the other way from the violation, but 
certainly not to take pictures and broadcast.
  I approached the Sergeant at Arms and asked him why this wasn't 
stopped.
  I was told: Well, they won't stop; we have told them repeatedly.
  I said: Well, you won't let Republicans get away with this kind of 
conduct. They are preventing debate. They are preventing a session from 
starting timely. This has been going on for hours.
  I was told: Well, Congressman, when we tell you Republicans that you 
are violating a rule, you stop and you follow the rules. We have told 
them repeatedly, and they will not stop violating the rules. They will 
not stop preventing you from going into session, so we don't know what 
else to do.
  Mr. Speaker, I had issues like that when I was a felony judge, and 
they didn't last long because we had bailiffs who would drag people out 
to stop such inappropriate conduct. It just seemed that, in this 
potentially last bastion of civility where we can use words and debate 
issues, it is rather ironic, to say the least, to be preached to 
repeatedly about the desire for open debate and the desire to not be 
shut down from speaking when that is exactly what happened last year by 
the very people who were standing up, and some of them were reading a 
script pointing out how offended they were by being prevented by the 
rules under which we have been proceeding from going forward and 
debating. So it is rather ironic and rather incredible actually.
  I also recall back when we were debating ObamaCare and some of us 
wanted to get amendments into ObamaCare. Of course, some of us remember 
the fact that John Dingell was chairman of the Committee on Energy and 
Commerce that had jurisdiction over the healthcare debate and the 
healthcare bill. He has been working for a healthcare bill, something 
like what passed, for all of his time, as I am aware of, in the House.
  I was told by someone that his father may have worked for the same 
bill for years. So that was something that was going to be a crowning 
glory for an incredibly honorable man. We see differently on many 
issues, but I know him to be an honest and honorable man. His word has 
always been good. When he has given it, it was always the way it is. I 
have great respect for him.
  Anyway, he understood that the cap-and-trade bill that was being 
pushed here in the House by then-Speaker Pelosi was going to unduly 
harm the Nation's poor more than anybody else in the country. If you 
are very rich, if you are on Wall Street, you are friends of the Obama 
administration, and you have gotten $656 million in grants to open a 
non-carbon-based energy facility, you are not worried about the price 
of anything because your friends in the Obama administration were 
giving you millions and billions of dollars that you could fritter away 
as you wished.
  But for our Nation's middle class, lower middle class, and poor that 
don't have the ability to absorb increasing energy costs, the cap-and-
trade bill would have been devastating. That is why, when John Dingell 
was asked about the cap-and-trade bill, he responded something to the 
effect that it is not only a tax, it is a great big tax,

[[Page 178]]

it will unfairly hit the poor, and he was not going to bring that bill 
out of committee. So Speaker Pelosi, at that time, took whatever 
actions were required to remove him as chair and replace him with Henry 
Waxman.
  Chairman Waxman made clear: We don't need your votes; we don't want 
your input; so we don't care what you want in the healthcare bill.
  Joe Barton, the longest serving Texan in the House right now, had 
indicated, as a former chair of that same committee, that it is 
interesting if John Dingell--the consummate professional and honorable 
man that he is--had been allowed to remain as chairman of that 
committee, he would have instinctively gotten Republican input into 
that bill and included things in the bill that Republicans would have 
had a hard time voting against. If he had been allowed to remain as 
chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, John Dingell would have 
probably been able to get a bill through that would not even be taken 
up by this body to be repealed and ripped out by its roots.
  Hopefully that is what we are going to be able to do with the 
extremely partisan bill. There were groups that were telling 
Republicans: Look, of course we are negotiating with the Obama 
administration. We have got to have a seat at the table.
  I would tell them: Not when you are on the menu.
  But there were groups like the Big Pharma, like the American Hospital 
Association, the AMA, and some of the health insurance businesses that 
ended up getting behind it. Of course, AARP totally sold out retired 
folks because they were going to make hundreds of millions--billions 
perhaps--more than they would have without ObamaCare being passed. They 
had no interest in supporting a bill like I proposed that would have 
ended any need for a senior citizen to ever have to pay for 
supplemental insurance on top of Medicare; they would have been totally 
covered.
  But I didn't realize, at the time I asked them to support it in 2009, 
that the year before they had made, I think, over $400 million or so in 
profit as a nonprofit organization on getting their members to buy 
their insurance that they had sponsored and put their mark of approval 
on.
  So anyway, there were people that were going to make a lot of money. 
But I could see that in the end it would probably spell the doom of the 
pharmaceutical industry. Yes, it would be years down the road; yes, 
there would be executives at pharmaceutical companies who would see 
massive billions of dollars come in more than would have otherwise; 
and, yes, they would likely take their golden parachutes and their 
millions in severance in retirement and be gone before they were 
relegated to perhaps producing medications without getting 
reimbursement for research and development. This is the way this whole 
ObamaCare thing would have eventually played out, and still they got on 
board with ObamaCare because they were going to make short-term extra 
billions of dollars.
  So having all of that in mind, as it has all appeared to me, it had 
just been astounding to be here yesterday and hear all the comments 
about the inability to have open debate.
  I have talked to numerous friends across the aisle who were greatly 
troubled over the last 6 years. Actually, the Office of Congressional 
Ethics was started by Speaker Pelosi. You are allowed to file 
complaints without anybody knowing who filed the complaint. The OCE is 
then able to go after a Member of Congress and start demanding things 
that they could not possibly be entitled to under the Constitution if a 
Member of Congress were getting due process.
  I haven't been run through the ringer like so many have. But when you 
set up a process like that, and you have the Office of Congressional 
Ethics set up, they have no one at all to whom they are accountable--no 
one--and they are encouraged, even if they filed the complaints 
themselves, to enable them to continue to grow from the little office 
they had over here in the Longworth Building. I am told they have a 
massive amount of space in one of the big Federal buildings now, and 
they continue to grow. So apparently, they were offended that their 
budget was cut and they were put under the Ethics Committee so that 
they would have some accountability. There were an awful lot of great 
people--good friends--across the country that did not know about how 
unconstitutionally they had been acting--I mean more abusive even than 
the IRS at times from the reports of some of my colleagues to me of 
what they have been through.
  I stand here, Mr. Speaker, as a judge who has had to look people in 
the eye and sentence them to death--something that is never taken 
lightly. I may be the only person here in Congress who has ever looked 
someone in the eye and sentenced them to death and been appointed as 
counsel against my wishes to represent an indigent defendant on appeal 
from a capital murder conviction under sentence of death and was able, 
appropriately, to have his case reversed and to save his life as the 
law should have been. So I feel rather strongly that, yes, people 
should be accountable, but they must have due process, and that is not 
what is provided for by the OCE.

                              {time}  1715

  Wonderful people, including our incoming President, were not aware of 
just how crazy the abuses have been. One of the Members was telling me 
yesterday that he was out about half a million dollars in attorney's 
fees responding to ridiculous demands and still never got to know who 
the accuser was. You don't get to necessarily even see what the 
specific complaint is.
  So we didn't do a good job of educating people of how grossly unfair 
the OCE process was, could be, but everybody in Congress, the 
judiciary, and executive branch needs someone to whom they are 
accountable, and that would include the OCE.
  We have got to do something about this, but we do need to go about it 
in an appropriate way to make sure that, once again, justice is done. 
But when you hear ``ethics watchdog group,'' then immediately you 
think, Gee, they are going to stop an ethics watchdog group? That is 
outrageous. That is what I would think if I didn't know all the 
background.
  So it made for an interesting day yesterday, but I have been amazed, 
though, that some who have told me that they wanted to eliminate the 
OCE who stand up on the other side of the aisle and preach about 
ethics, apparently referring to the effort to place OCE and make them 
accountable under somebody for a change--in this case, under the Ethics 
Committee--and would demagogue the issue, in essence, when they have 
been mistreated by the OCE, according to what I have been told by them 
in the past.
  So I think if we can just set the politics aside and work together 
for appropriate due process, we can have a bipartisan group that could 
work out something that would create due process and would make people 
accountable so that when you have somebody with $90,000 of cold, hard 
cash in their freezer, there is accountability. In that case, it was a 
crime and it needed to be addressed. So there does need to be 
accountability.
  I know we have friends here. I saw my friend, Steve King, at the back 
just a moment ago. We feel strongly that when a Federal judge 
intentionally refuses to go along with what they know the Constitution 
says, that ought to be an impeachable offense. They are not keeping 
their oath, and that is as offensive as anything is when it comes from 
a judge. They ought to be able to impeach a judge like that.
  I don't think we have done enough removal, impeachment of judges who 
have violated their oath. Yes, we were removing a judge who had 
committed sexual assault. Well, that should have been a no-brainer, but 
that took literally an act of Congress to eventually get that done.
  For another judge, it was not until we actually impeached him for his 
terribly inappropriate actions of suppressing information when he was 
being investigated for being a Federal judge, but from his days as a 
State judge. Apparently, as a State judge, he

[[Page 179]]

didn't have a problem, if tuition was due for his son, to just send the 
secretary or somebody to one of the law offices which he often appoints 
and then have them fill up the envelope with a bunch of cash and use 
that to pay his son's tuition. That didn't seem to be a problem for 
that judge. Those are all things that should have been appropriately 
taken into account before he was ever made a Federal judge.
  I see my friend here on the floor. I yield to the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa).
  Mr. LaMALFA. I was listening to the gentleman's remarks on a couple 
of these topics here that are very important.
  He led off with the situation that occurred with the sit-in that 
occurred here on this House floor last year, some months ago, and I 
found that to be very appalling for the decorum, for the honor, for the 
history, for all the things that are important about conducting 
ourselves in a society where order is needed in order to conduct 
business.
  This House floor was not treated with that respect that is necessary 
to have order, to have an honest debate, and a debate that is 
constructive when you have a sit-in like that where basically the folks 
on the other side of the aisle--some of them--decided to take over the 
entire building outside of session, outside of the rules. As Mr. 
Gohmert mentioned, many rules were violated.
  I had the appalling experience of walking on the floor just a few 
minutes after they concluded their sit-in and, honestly, the garbage 
that was laying on the floor. I saw food crumbs, old newspapers, 
magazines, a couple of blankets. They didn't even pick up after 
themselves. They expected the staff of the building to pick it up and 
haul it off for them because their Occupy Wall Street moment was over 
with. This is not the sixties. This is not the hippy era. This is the 
United States House of Representatives.
  This week, rules were proposed that say, when you violate rules in 
such a fashion where videotaping or Periscoping, as they call it, is 
occurring--sending these speeches during a nonofficial, non-session 
time, basically bootlegging them to the American public via C-SPAN; and 
I am a little annoyed with C-SPAN actually playing along with the 
violation of House rules of piping this out the way they did.
  If you want to have a protest out on the front lawn, fine. That is 
within the rights of free speech, the First Amendment, and all that. 
You don't do it in violation of the rules of a fairly, some might say, 
sacred place--this House floor--the way that happened then. For them to 
be piping it out live that way, I found it to be completely wrong.
  There are those folks that might say: Well, this is all First 
Amendment rights, not in violation of the decorum of the House rules. 
So I am glad Mr. Gohmert brought that up. Rules are put in place this 
week to address people that are going to violate the very House rules 
that help us keep order and do business of the American public. We lost 
part of, I think, three session days that we could have been grinding 
out the important business that the people expect of this country.
  We lost that session time and, indeed, had to come in here and the 
Speaker or whoever was introducing legislation that day had to yell 
over the process here to do things in order for the House. I find that 
appalling. It isn't very mature. I think with some of the penalties 
that are put in place by the rules this week, there will be a little 
more accountability for that.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I recall being told when that was going on and after it 
happened that Republicans should not respond, and that we were assured 
that people who violated the rules back then would be punished. Well, 
adopting rules now, specific penalties, don't really punish people that 
violated those very rules last year.
  So I am surprised that there is any complaint at all since basically 
it means people who violated the rule with such abandon would complain 
about inserting a specific penalty now, meaning they got a free one. 
They didn't even get probation. They got nothing. They got pardoned, 
basically.
  Perhaps it is not too late for those that feel like putting a penalty 
in place now is unfair. I don't think it is too late. It is not unusual 
to have punishment assessed in a felony case 6 months or more after an 
event. Perhaps if they think it is unfair, then we ought to have ethics 
hearings on what happened back then.
  I haven't heard of the OCE, by the way, taking any action on such 
widespread abuse that didn't require investigation. All you needed was 
footage that was being streamed out from the very violators of the 
rules. So it should have been an easy thing to pursue, if OCE were 
really that interested in making sure our rules were not violated.
  I yield to my friend.
  Mr. LaMALFA. It wouldn't be inappropriate since OCE is a hot topic 
this week.
  The accountability goes both directions. So we have heard our 
colleagues talk about unjust charges that can be brought from anywhere, 
out of the blue, against a Member of the House without justification, 
without even a due process for that Member to have a chance to address 
directly what that charge is, and then have their name run through the 
newspaper, giant headlines, and maybe a year's worth of investigation.
  When you see it, Congressman being investigated, well, that is an 
ugly headline. It can be used to manipulate it for political purpose 
when it might be a trumped-up charge, something that has no merit, and 
many times talking to my colleagues that have faced this, hundreds of 
thousands of dollars of cost to them for attorney's fees, their 
reputation besmirched by this, when, really, there is an investigative 
process that is open, with oversight.
  Now we didn't have the perfect piece of legislation in the rule this 
week. No. We probably need a little more time for it to be aired out 
and a little more widely. It was withdrawn after at least getting the 
idea out on the table.
  So I am proud of my colleagues who are going to take this up and work 
in a bipartisan fashion and get the input to make some needed reforms 
to the OCE so that we have an ethics process that is fair to the 
Members, but obviously enforces ethics for this House that are needed 
and clearly demanded by the public and us.
  We are talking here tonight about a decorum, a code, a process that 
our House is to be conducted by. So that sit-in is one extreme. The 
other one is charges that are, in many cases, absolved months later 
without giant headlines but are not even sometimes an oops or I am 
sorry for trumped-up charges being brought up against somebody that 
would affect them negatively in their ability to serve their districts 
or to fend off the huge costs of legal matters that they have to go 
through.
  So many of my colleagues here strongly care and want to have a strong 
ethical process in this place, but there needs to be accountability and 
balance to it. That is what we are all looking forward to, is 
accountability with OCE and our Ethics Committee who, in a bipartisan 
fashion, can weed through all these processes.
  I think we will get to that. For those that are concerned around this 
country that some here want to get rid of that ethics process, that 
absolutely couldn't be further from the truth. We all demand that with 
the code of conduct of this House, on the floor and off, of our 
Members.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I thank my friend, Mr. LaMalfa for great insights. Such 
truth.
  I also was just advised this afternoon that the EPA, apparently in 
accordance with some frenzied effort to have this administration put as 
problematic regulations in place to stifle the economy, stifle and 
skyrocket further costs of energy, has apparently given notice to all 
gas operators that they have 60 days to comply.
  One such operator in Texas was saying the date on the notice says it 
was received December 15, but he was out of the country. Somebody in 
the building accepted it. The date for the 60-day compliance kicks in 
January 18, 2 days before President-elect Donald Trump

[[Page 180]]

would be able to strike such an arbitrary and capricious regulation 
down.

                              {time}  1730

  Apparently, they must have backdated the 60-day compliance before 
they ever got notice saying you have got until January 18 to comply. So 
what we have heard from so many small-business owners, they get notices 
like this: You have all of a sudden got to comply. You have got to give 
us all these records, those records.
  It has cost them a fortune. It has stifled their ability to expand 
their business and hire more people and give more people opportunity 
and give more people opportunity to make more money than they had been 
making. Those have been so completely stifled by this administration. I 
understand there was a political article glorifying the great efforts 
of the Obama administration in helping the economy, and to justify 
that, took one quarter out of, I guess--four times eight--32 quarters 
and said, ``Look what they did in this one quarter,'' when actually, as 
I understood, if you take the whole term that we have numbers on and 
adjust the growth for inflation, President Obama's administration, his 
policies, his crony capitalism, helping people with no-bid contracts 
like IBM, giving $1.6 billion to this company to create mirrors to heat 
water and however much it was, hundreds of millions for Solyndra--there 
are just so many companies. They have squandered so much money. And 
yet, with all the money squandered, the economy grew, when adjusted for 
inflation, at about half the growth rate during the Jimmy Carter 
administration.
  Now, I understand this administration is extremely proud of what they 
accomplished, but I would humbly submit, Mr. Speaker, if your policies 
cause the economy to grow at half the rate of the Jimmy Carter 
administration, you have done more damage to the American people and 
the American economy than you have done good, and that is for sure. And 
that is at a time when, scientifically, we were having such 
breakthroughs that we found out we could actually be totally energy 
independent if this administration had not been spending so much money 
on too expensive of sources of energy and all the other things this 
administration supported.
  We had a hearing in Chairman Rob Bishop's Committee on Natural 
Resources in our Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, a 
hearing on some of the abuses. I know there are legitimate groups and 
businesses that have invested in this idea of having this fantastic 
carbon-free energy production out in California, and, yes, it took a 
massive amount of acreage. I believe it was Federal land that they were 
allowed to use. I believe. I am not certain.
  I was intrigued, they were going to create all these mirrors that 
would reflect the Sun's light in concentrated amounts towards three 
different towers, and the towers would then be superheated, superheat 
the water, turn the water to steam. The steam would turn turbines that 
would produce electricity. If I recall correctly, they got $1.6 billion 
in government loan; and to help them make their loan payment, they got 
over $600 million in grants.
  When I asked over this period of time that they have been operating 
how much of their $1.6 billion in government loan was paid back, I 
believe he said $6 million had been paid back from, it may have been, 
$656 million that they had given to them by this administration.
  But we also came to find out that apparently there have been 
problems. One of the towers got super-superheated and was totaled, was 
destroyed because of the massive sunlight reflected and damaged to 
where it wouldn't function. Because, apparently, they had squandered so 
much of their money, they had to find a cheap source, an extremely 
cheap source of energy because they had contracts to supply a certain 
amount of electricity. With the third tower not in operation, they were 
not able to supply over 30 percent of the energy they had contracted to 
provide. They very quickly, cheaply, efficiently built a natural gas 
electricity production plant, and, wow, apparently it is working great. 
Of course, anybody that studies natural gas understands, if they know 
what they are doing, that natural gas is an amazingly clean form of 
energy.
  Anyway, now about a third of the energy is being produced using 
natural gas, when the whole purpose of the massive $1.6 billion in the 
government-backed loan and the $656 million or so that was given to 
them was because it was not going to be carbon based at all.
  But it is not just the one problem, apparently, of the tower. This is 
out in an arid area where there is not much water. Well, they didn't 
need much water other than what they had in the towers, really; but 
what they didn't anticipate was something that I am told operators, 
others in the area refer to as flamers.
  Flamers, as I was given to understand, those are birds, perhaps some 
of them endangered species, that make the mistake of flying through the 
superheated beam of sunlight and immediately explode or burst into 
flame. Apparently, if you are a bird that gets superheated and 
explodes, bursts into flame, then masses of fluid keep covering the 
mirrors, which need to be kept clean.
  Normally, you would figure out in a desert or an arid area, you are 
not going to need to clean those mirrors very often, so you are not 
going to need much water. But then when it turns out you have got all 
these flamers that supercoat the mirrors so they are constantly having 
to be recleaned, those poor birds that our nature-loving friends are 
exploding, it is running up the water bill as well because, gee, it is 
just not healthy to be exploding birds that fly through this 
superheated beam of sunlight.
  So 8 years of misguided policies have made, probably, a lot of 
Democratic millionaires, but the American public has suffered; and when 
adjusted for inflation, the American people are, on average, worse off.
  I was surprised to see a video where the President actually admitted, 
he had actually acknowledged, that in his administration, for the first 
time we are aware of in the history of the United States, 95 percent of 
the income in America went to the top 1 percent of the income earners. 
I have read articles since then about, actually, even that 1 percent 
that was making 95 percent of the Nation's income, they still weren't 
making, many of them, quite as much as they had before, because that is 
what happens when you hurt and throttle down an economy, as has 
happened. We haven't really adjusted.
  Of course, we have had the Fed that has had interest rates down to 
basically nothing, and it was clear they were doing everything they 
could to try to help the Obama administration's economy look better 
than it was. Now that people have started having hope because we have 
President-elect Trump and the policies are going to change 
dramatically, we are going to hopefully be completely rid of, or as 
completely as possible, the crony capitalism. I know my colleagues here 
in the House, actually on both sides of the aisle, have made clear we 
want to stop crony capitalism, and I am looking forward to that 
stopping once we get out from under this administration.
  So the economy is showing great signs. I have got people back home 
telling me they are starting to hire again just based on the hope and 
the promise. President Obama was supposed to bring hope and change, but 
all my constituents tell me so many of them are left with, after he has 
been President, a little change left from what they had when he took 
office.
  But there is real hope, and people are gearing up to grow, and the 
economy should take off, and we should get energy independent. I expect 
President-elect Trump to keep his promises. He assured me personally he 
was going to. So I am expecting great things. But just on that, the 
economy has started going up, on the assurance that President Obama 
would not be around any longer than January 20, and as a result now, 
the Fed finally has started increasing interest rates because they 
don't have to artificially try to protect President Obama's reputation 
and his poor economy.

[[Page 181]]

  So just the fact that the EPA would send out regulations in such a 
capricious manner as they have, demanding that well operators start 
monitoring all their emissions, something to that effect, I am looking 
forward to getting into it and just seeing how abusive the EPA has been 
as these oligarchs. Not to give a chance for true input into an 
arbitrary and capricious rule, not to give businesses a chance to get 
ready and to adjust, I mean, this is the kind of thing that has stifled 
so much growth and has sent so many high school and college graduates 
to their parents' home.
  I think there are a lot of people who voted for President Obama and 
were excited. I think it is unfortunate that so many people expressed 
that they voted for a President because of his skin color--and I am not 
talking about Donald Trump--that they made a racist vote to vote for a 
man who was not White so they could feel good about voting for someone 
who was not White, where some of us--and it is one of the things for 
which I love Alveda King, Martin Luther King's niece. I mean, she 
believes in his dream, and the Americans that voted for Donald Trump, 
they believe that skin color should not matter. It is racist to vote 
for a candidate because of what his race is.
  Let's look at the character. Let's look at the qualifications. What 
have you built that you actually built that someone else didn't build 
for you? Let's look at those things and then make a determination 
rather than voting for someone just because of his race. Let's do as 
Martin Luther King, Jr., was so profound in saying in looking forward 
to the day when people were judged by the content of their character 
rather than the color of their skin. I am looking forward to that day. 
That day has been set back tremendously.
  It was a highlight for me back at the end of the fall to go back to 
my hometown of Mount Pleasant, Texas. I had mentioned to a reporter 
sometime back, though I didn't vote for President Obama, I had hopes 
that he would do for America what Coach Willie Williams did for our 
football team. Actually, I didn't say ``football team.'' I said ``our 
team.''

                              {time}  1745

  Liberals immediately put up an article saying that I said my 
basketball coach, my favorite coach, was African American. Apparently, 
liberals think, if you are African American, you must be a coach of 
basketball because of your race. When actually, it was the year before 
I went to the varsity, I was on the junior varsity, and I enjoyed 
playing for Coach Williams more than any coach I had ever played for.
  And unfortunately, Coach Williams' memory is still intact. I haven't 
seen him in decades. But I was asked to come give a motivational talk 
for the team I played for--the Mount Pleasant Tigers. It was such a 
treat being with those players that morning. It had a rough year to 
that point. I got to be with them on the field during the game. It was 
such a treat. Those young people were just inspirational. They fought 
hard, and some say it was the best game of the year. They won 
singlehandedly against a team from a bigger town than Mount Pleasant. 
They even gave me the game ball.
  And as much as that meant to me, the real highlight was, as we went 
into halftime, somebody told me that my old coach, back from over 40 
years ago, was up in the press box, and I got to go up. I was so 
thrilled to see him. We hugged and smiled big as ever. I was so elated 
in seeing him and talking to him. Somebody said when I got back here--
when I said: I finally got to see Coach Williams after all these years. 
It was wonderful.
  Well, did you get a picture?
  I didn't even think about a picture. That is not a very good 
politician. But I didn't think about a picture. But it is a shame.
  His memory is so good because he remembered. We didn't have a lot of 
talent on that team. We didn't. He made us so cohesive. We played well 
together. We didn't have any outstanding talent, but we had a winning 
season. And it was a fun season because Coach Williams made it that 
way. He inspired us together. Everybody got treated just the same. 
Nobody got special treatment. Nobody got treated more harshly than 
anybody else. And we came together as a team.
  He remembered. He said: Yeah, you guys didn't have much talent on 
your team, but you played so well together. Well, that was because of 
him. He brought us together.
  And I so hoped that President Obama would do that for America. I 
didn't vote for him, but I thought it will be awesome if he can bring 
us even closer together. And now at the end of his administration, it 
is so grievous that America seems more divided than ever.
  I see an article here about more police officers again being shot in 
our U.S. cities. I heard the former police chief, I believe, in Chicago 
this week saying that Black Lives Matter was supposedly organized to 
try to stop killings of Black, especially young, men. And yet, what 
Black Lives Matter has done is actually increase the number of people 
being shot.
  I was absolutely astounded to hear a quote from the President. A 
speech, apparently, he was making. I heard it on the radio. Maybe he 
was giving an interview. But he was saying that we know that cities 
that have more gun control laws just have less violence. That is called 
gaslighting. That is called creating a fiction and trying to push it 
across and make somebody who knows the truth think that they are crazy 
and that this alternate truth is really what is going on.
  The fact is that cities with the most gun control laws, like Chicago, 
for heaven's sakes--I mean, the hundreds of precious Black lives that 
have been taken, been killed, the massive gun control laws have not 
helped Chicago. They have got a massive number of gun control laws 
there than we do in any city in east Texas, and yet nowhere in east 
Texas has that kind of violence at that percentage rate. It is insane.
  It is time to quit trying to gaslight the American people, convince 
them they are going crazy, and that what they know to be true is 
fiction. It is time to just have a truthful assessment of where we are. 
We need to follow the law. We need to have enforcement of our borders.
  We will continue to be the most generous Nation in the world, not 
just in giving funds to help others, not just in giving lives of our 
citizens to help freedom for other countries like nowhere else in 
history, but also most generous in the number of visas and the number 
of people that we allow to come into the United States and visit. Yet, 
that generosity has been abused. As the border patrol has said, every 
time we hear somebody in the government in Washington say anything 
about legalizing anything, or anybody that is here illegally, it is 
like a shiny object that draws even greater numbers illegally through 
our borders.
  And what is our border patrol ordered to do? Don't turn them back and 
prevent them from entering the United States. Oh, no. Let them step 
foot on American soil, then in-process them, and we will ship them 
around different places. Although, I saw an article last week where 
there were some aliens illegally here who were just dropped off at a 
bus stop.
  I have an article from Julia Edwards Ainsley, January 3, from 
Reuters: ``Trump Team Seeks Agency Records on Border Barriers 
Surveillance.'' It is fantastic. I mean, here they are trying to gear 
up, yet they want to know information. They don't want to be 
gaslighted. They want to know what is the truth so that they can start 
making hard preparations for taking office on January 20.
  An article, December 30, from Paul Bedard from the Washington 
Examiner says that the Department of Homeland Security says 94 percent 
of deportations are people illegally here, terror threats, or gang 
bangers. The CBP--border patrol--reports assaults on border agents have 
skyrocketed 231 percent in 2017.
  So not only has this President's rules of engagement gotten about 
four times more Americans killed, our military members killed in 
Afghanistan, in the same amount of time as Commander in Chief George W. 
Bush had, in addition

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to the rules of engagement getting our people killed four times faster 
than under Commander in Chief Bush, but also the assaults on our own 
agents have gone up 231 percent just in this year--in 1 year. We are 
getting our border patrol harmed.
  Another article by Chris Tomlinson in Breitbart: ``600 `Underage' 
Migrants Turn Out to Be Adults.'' I mean, I have seen that in the 
middle of the night down on the border. People coming in, switching off 
Xeroxed indications they were going to use for their identification: 
This is who I am. For whatever reason, they would look at their thing 
and switch out as to who was going to be who. They weren't able to vet 
those people, but they were still ordered to in-process them anyway.
  This article from Michael Patrick Leahy, December 7, reported that 
Somalia refugees were arriving in the United States at the highest rate 
ever in the first two months of fiscal year 2017, which would be 
October and November. So just astounding when America was making very 
clear we need to protect American citizens. It is not just the people 
in this room, as we did yesterday, who take that oath, but the 
President takes that oath. You have got cabinet members that take the 
oath, yet they are not doing their jobs. People are getting killed. 
85,000 refugees under Obama, but less than 10 to the District of 
Columbia. So, apparently, let's put those refugees in your backyard. We 
certainly don't want them in Washington, D.C.'s backyard, apparently, 
according to this administration.
  Then it is pretty amazing, but just 10 States resettled more than 
half of recent refugees to the United States. Naturally, way more than 
anywhere else was California and Texas. The Daily Caller reported that 
the ``State Department claims no one used sham visas from fake 
embassy.'' Yet, we have seen hundreds and hundreds of people that--the 
report showed--had been given citizenship by mistake when they were 
supposed to have been deported. It doesn't seem like a very innocent 
mistake when it is that egregious.
  Back in December, The Washington Times reported that the ``Obama 
administration fails to check immigrants against FBI databases, 
approves citizenship'' anyway.
  The Afghan refugee program has not been totally successful. A report 
here, Afghan refugee in December was arrested for rape and murder of a 
top EU official's daughter. So, apparently, that was not working out so 
well. But that was in the country of Germany where you have a like-
minded leader in Angela Merkel, who wants to defeat terrorism, as our 
President does, with love and compassion. Well, love is a stronger 
emotion than hate. Love can overcome evil.
  But when people are religiously dedicated to wiping another group of 
people off the planet for what they deem to be their holy god, those 
are people that have to be defeated. They are at war with you. You 
defeat them militarily. That puts radical Islam back in a box until 
some other well-meaning fool like former President Carter--a fine man, 
just a foolish President--not demeaning his character, but he was just 
very foolish--in citing the Ayatollah Khomeini as a man of peace, as he 
was so welcoming in the Ayatollah Khomeini taking over Iran. That 
released radical Islam out of the box, gave them control of a major 
country, major country military, and thousands and thousands and 
thousands of people continue to die because of that mistake.
  We know going back to the early days of the United States when so 
much of the Federal Treasury was used to pay ransom to get our sailors 
back who were being captured by radical Islamists in North Africa, and 
Jefferson couldn't understand why they kept attacking American boats.

                              {time}  1800

  He asked the Islamist whom he was negotiating with why they kept 
attacking American ships. We are not a threat to you. We don't even 
have a Navy.
  Reportedly, the response was, in essence: Look, if we die, in 
attacking someone like you, we go straight to paradise.
  Jefferson was amazed. He couldn't believe there was a world 
religion--or even people's interpretation of a world religion--that 
advocated that you could go to paradise for killing innocent people. Of 
course, they maintained they are not innocent because they don't 
believe exactly like the radical Islamists believe.
  President Obama basically did the same thing with Libya. Qadhafi was 
not a good man; but, since 2003, the reports were clear, as others in 
North Africa and the Middle East reported, that he was about the best 
friend that the United States had in helping to fight terrorism in that 
area; yet this administration took him out. There were times on this 
floor that I and others were begging the administration not to take out 
Qadhafi, not to keep helping the rebels, not to keep bombing Qadhafi's 
troops until we knew how extensive al Qaeda was. We knew that at least 
a part of the people fighting were radical Islamists, but the 
administration went on and turned the country into chaos.
  Thank God America is going to have a new administration before we 
completely go to chaos ourselves.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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