[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15823-15826]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Norman). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my good friend, Mr. Higgins from 
Louisiana.


  The Plight of the Citizens of Louisiana Impacted by Hurricane Harvey

  Mr. HIGGINS of Louisiana. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for 
yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise unscripted to bring to the attention of the 
entire Nation the plight of the good citizens of Louisiana who were 
impacted by Hurricane Harvey last month. Beside me at this graph shows 
the rainfall, the water event of Hurricane Harvey as it impacted Texas 
and Louisiana.

                              {time}  1830

  As anyone can see, it was a tremendous water event, unprecedented 
rainfall, that overwhelmed any water management system. And, as anyone 
can see, the parishes of southwest Louisiana were impacted, as well as 
many counties in Texas, yet, as we discuss disaster relief, Louisiana 
is absent from our conversation. I point out, to all who would choose 
to witness, the State line of Louisiana, as defined by the Sabine 
River, and the impact of Hurricane Harvey.
  Mr. Speaker, Hurricane Harvey did not recognize the artificial State 
boundaries that we have created as a Republic, nor should we as we 
provide disaster relief for our citizens. Just after Hurricane Harvey 
had impacted Texas and Louisiana, my office drafted a letter to the 
executive branch to a President that I admire and respect, advising him 
of the impact, and begging his expedited approval of the disaster 
status once the formal request had been submitted by our Governor.
  Sometime later, just 2 weeks ago, that formal request was submitted 
by the Governor of our State. Just after that submission, my office 
drafted and submitted a second letter requesting expedited approval of 
disaster status for these citizens of Louisiana, who were clearly just 
as impacted by this storm as many citizens in Texas.
  Tomorrow, we shall send a third letter, this time signed by the 
entire Louisiana delegation. I ask that the Nation recognize the plight 
of the people I represent. The good and patriotic citizens of southwest 
Louisiana are suffering.
  I respect and admire my President, I support him, I have supported 
him since day one, and I support him still. But it is important that 
we, as representatives of we the people, communicate clearly our intent 
and our service.
  I beg that the leaders of the executive branch level would witness 
this clear evidence of the need for disaster declaration of the 
parishes of southwest Louisiana. And I beg that this message is 
received with the spirit with which it is delivered, which is 
respectful, yet in determined service of the citizens whom I have sworn 
to represent.

[[Page 15824]]

  Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding these precious moments 
to me.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, we had some interesting days here, but, 
over the weekend, being back in Texas, I am hearing the cries from 
people all over east Texas. There is a small number that say: Hey, I am 
not making much, and I am getting a subsidy from the government, so I 
am okay on my healthcare, I am young, I have no health problems, and 
that is fine.
  But over and over, there is a cry going out around America that says: 
We elected Republicans in the majority in the House and the majority in 
the Senate to help us with our healthcare--with really health 
insurance. Everybody can get healthcare. You can just go to the 
emergency room, whether you have money or not.
  This is really more about health insurance. Some of us have not 
wanted health insurance to make our major decisions for us on our own 
healthcare. We haven't wanted the government to make major decisions on 
our healthcare, but both are making those decisions for people across 
the country today.
  Unfortunately, there are people telling me they are paying $8,000, 
$10,000, $12,000. I heard one for $20,000 yesterday from Texas, $20,000 
for the family's insurance, and they have a $12,000 deductible, and 
they can't afford either one. They expected help.
  President Trump is not the Congress. He has pushed, shoved, cajoled, 
done everything he could to try to get Congress moving in the House 
after a back and forth, wailing, gnashing of teeth. We got a bill. It 
wasn't perfect by any stretch. But at least it would have given people 
relief from high premiums, most Americans. Hopefully, Republicans won't 
misrepresent the truth, as some did.
  Actually, we know some people just flat lied about ObamaCare. People 
who said, ``If you like your insurance, you can keep it,'' they knew it 
was a lie. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. They knew 
that was a lie.
  And now the people are suffering the consequences of trusting people 
in government who lied to them. They were deceived. But even with all 
the deception, most of the time it appeared that a clear majority of 
Americans did not want what was fraudulently called the Affordable Care 
Act. There was nothing affordable about it, unless you didn't have any 
healthcare problems at all.
  People who are carrying the weight of the taxes in this country have 
needed help. They counted on us to provide legislative changes, repeal 
of ObamaCare, let's put a system in place where people can make their 
own healthcare decisions, and we sent the bill to the Senate, and I 
still believe we should have been demanding more of the Senate every 
day.
  I know there are a lot of people who say: Well, Republicans can't 
lose the majority in the Senate because there are a bunch more 
Democrats whose seats are up this time instead of Republicans. Yes, we 
can lose the majority, even when there are more Democratic seats up for 
election.
  That is what happens when people are sorely disappointed. Many stay 
home, and the wrong people will get elected when too many people stay 
home.
  But the adage is, still true, democracy ensures people are governed 
no better than they deserve. So whether anybody liked or disliked 
President Obama as our President--and, by the way, for those who like 
to throw out the term ``hater,'' I don't hate anybody, but I can 
certainly disapprove of conduct.
  For 8 years, America deserved Barack Hussein Obama. Before that, 
whether you like him or not, I like him, America deserved George W. 
Bush. Before that, America deserved 8 years of William Clinton--I 
forget his middle name. Before that, 4 years of George H. W. Bush. 
Before that, 8 years of Ronald Reagan. And I am very pleased that 
America deserved Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton last November.
  It is interesting, though, being in hearings today and hear people 
clambering that they demand action from this department, that 
department, it is taking too long, while, at that very moment, 
Democratic Senators at the other end of this building are doing 
everything they can to prevent confirmation of President Trump's 
appointees to those departments so they can start getting things done.
  It is amazing when one party like that can hold the ability, because 
of the filibuster rule, because of the requirement for 60 votes, 
apparently, they are able to hold up these appointees. To me, that is 
all the reason to go ahead and say: Do you know what, you are demanding 
action from people who you have not confirmed yet, so we are not going 
to let you play that game anymore. You have people saying, ``Oh, my 
goodness, these departments aren't getting decisions made, aren't 
getting their work done,'' and all the while you are holding them back 
from being able to do it by not confirming the people who need to be 
doing that work.
  The Senate ought to just say: We are not playing that game, we are 
not letting you play that game, we are going to call the game off, we 
are going to get serious about America's problems, and we are going to 
confirm President Trump's nominees with 51 votes, not just judges, we 
are going to confirm his nominees with 51 votes. We cannot tolerate 
people--really it is fraudulent activity to hold back the nominees from 
being confirmed and then vilify the administration for not getting the 
work done that those nominees who hadn't been confirmed will have to 
do.
  The Senate needs to respond. The Senate did not respond to the bill 
we sent to them. That was quite interesting. In my 12 years here, I 
have never seen a situation like that, Mr. Speaker, where some of us 
got calls from people in the Senate who don't normally get calls, and 
that included people from the Tuesday Group, the Freedom Caucus, the 
Republican Study Committee, and the Republican leadership. They all 
were asking the same question: Okay, would you please promise us that 
if we pass this healthcare bill in the Senate that you will not take it 
up and pass it in the House? Because it is only if you guys promise us, 
the Republicans promise us, you won't pass the bill that we have down 
here--apparently, it was so bad--that we will let it go to committee, 
or you will amend it, but you just promise us you won't pass the bill 
if we pass it.
  Well, as far as I know, everybody I talked to gave reassurance to the 
Senators who called them and said: No, we promise, we won't pass your 
bill, it is terrible, we won't, we can assure you.
  Even with those assurances, just the effort to get something passed 
so that we can come together in a conference between House conferees 
and Senate conferees, just to come together for the chance--this bill 
that the Senate was taking up to have some skinny repeal, they called 
it, of ObamaCare, and at least some measure of change to the suffering 
that people are enduring right now, and they still couldn't get 51 
votes, which is all they needed under the reconciliation process.
  Even when they were assured: We promise you, we won't pass this bill, 
you will get another chance to vote, just help the process, let's get 
it to conference, so we can get some relief to the American people who 
are suffering, suffering so much that they would go so far as to give 
us the majority in the Senate after they have given us the majority in 
the House, and give us the White House as a Republican Party--
incredible.
  But the American people are still suffering. And the budget 
apparently does not provide for ObamaCare to be repealed and replaced 
under reconciliation for the next 12 months. So unless the Senate feels 
enough heat from the American people--the Republicans that is--they are 
not going to do anything about ObamaCare that they promise to repeal 
and replace.

                              {time}  1845

  Apparently, it is going to have to get pretty hot in the kitchen down 
in the Senate to get people down there worked up enough to finally give 
the American people the relief that the Senate Republicans promised.
  Now, I don't like talking about this, despite what some may think. It 
is

[[Page 15825]]

much nicer to get along and go along, but people are suffering because 
we haven't kept our promise. The Senate couldn't pass anything that 
would get the American people some relief from all the suffering from 
ObamaCare.
  For those who are not aware, yes, there were bailouts for the 
monopoly insurance companies. Some made record profits, and yet they 
are still, under ObamaCare, the way it was written, supposed to get 
bailouts.
  So it appears pretty clear the design of ObamaCare was to make it 
fail. Apparently, people at the top of some of these insurance 
companies have not been smart enough to figure out that they signed 
their own death warrants when they embraced ObamaCare, but it appears 
it was designed to make people angry at the greedy, allegedly corrupt 
health insurance companies.
  I don't think they are corrupt, but there sure was a lot of greed 
there between some of the pharmaceutical companies and the health 
insurance companies signing on. Some of them tried to say: Well, oh, 
but we needed to be at the table.
  We are going: Not if you are on the menu you didn't want to be at the 
table.
  I am sure the executives that have their golden parachutes leave the 
health insurance companies after 5, 6, 7 years with their incomes.
  The design was the health insurance companies make a fortune, 
people's premiums kept going through the roof, deductibles kept going 
through the roof, bailouts were provided to insurance companies that 
had record profits, and then the design ultimately would be the 
American people getting so angry that they would lash out and say: 
Enough already. I never thought I would say this, but anything has got 
to be better than these insurance companies, the handful that are left, 
so let's just let the government take care of everything.
  Then we get a system that is twice as bad as the VA for all 
Americans, so all Americans can suffer fairly, equally, instead of 
getting what used to be some of the best healthcare ever in the history 
of the world.
  We have another issue I want to touch on. Our Taxed Enough Already 
Caucus had a meeting yesterday and heard from Luke Rosiak, who has done 
more investigation on the IT scandal here on Capitol Hill, apparently 
done more investigation than anybody at the FBI. We keep hearing rumors 
that the FBI is reporting there is nothing to this, kind of like the 
Clinton scandal, the money that the Clinton Foundation got from the 
stockholders of Uranium One--she approves the sale of 20, 25 percent of 
America's uranium production; it ends up going to the Russians--the 
email scandal, that obviously there were efforts to destroy and 
obfuscate evidence that was being sought, and Comey went out of his way 
to protect Ms. Clinton. There is just so much there that needs to be 
investigated.
  The Attorney General apparently can't investigate because of his own 
recusal. Mr. Rosenstein is sure not going to investigate it and thinks 
Mueller will do it.
  Mueller is disqualified from doing it. Although he is such a problem, 
he will not disqualify himself. Comey is a material witness--should 
be--in the investigation.
  As the Washingtonian reported back in 2013 in this long expose they 
did on glorifying Mr. Comey and Mr. Mueller's relationship, that Comey 
knows that basically, in essence, if the world were on fire, the one 
person who would be there with him, protecting him, standing with him, 
would be Mr. Mueller. Mueller cannot investigate anything in which 
Comey is a witness. He can't.
  So what does he do? Comey goes and hires more lawyers. He has already 
had more lawyers than anybody I am aware of--ever. He is already 
exceeding the very general charge he got, going back years before he 
needed to. I mean, this is just incredible.
  They were a problem 10 years ago. The Obama administration had 8 
years to get into it. Mueller, as FBI Director, had plenty of time to 
get into it.
  So there is only one thing we can be looking at, and that is a 
vendetta by Robert Mueller after some people. He is clearly 
disqualified. Comey is in it up to his eyeballs. We have got to have a 
special prosecutor that will look into the matters that should be 
investigated.
  Then we have this issue on Capitol Hill. We need to know how 
compromised our computer system, our IT system on the Hill has been.
  We had a guy named Imran Awan working on Capitol Hill, started 
working with Democrats' computer systems 12 years or so ago. He was not 
even an American citizen at the time.
  Apparently, if there has ever been a background check on Imran Awan, 
it certainly was not adequate, because in the Imran Awan family and 
cohorts, you have got bankruptcy; you have got massive indebtedness; 
there was money received by one of the team, $100,000 or so, from a 
known consort with Hezbollah.
  Then we find out yesterday--or I did; I had not heard of this 
before--that Imran Awan, for parts of the year, would not even be here 
in Washington. He would be in Pakistan servicing up to dozens of our 
Democratic colleagues' computer systems from Pakistan, making the 
maximum that somebody working on Capitol Hill could by working for 
different Members of Congress, and then you add the partial salaries 
together until you get around $160,000.
  We heard yesterday that as he would get one person up to $160,000 
working for different offices, then they would add another to the 
payroll and get them up to $160,000. One of the group owed another 
individual $100,000. So with no indication that that individual who was 
owed $100,000 ever even came to Capitol Hill or did any work here, he 
got put on the House payroll and made a couple hundred thousand dollars 
in return for the hundred thousand that he had loaned to one of the 
Awan team.
  It is just almost inconceivable that we would have someone working 
with some of the highest privileged material. It seems to me the courts 
made it clear the speech or debate privilege to protect constituent 
information, information that people provide to us as whistleblowers, 
that that is probably more constitutionally protected than the 
attorney-client privilege. It is that important.
  Yet knowing there are countries, there are companies that would pay 
large amounts of money to know some Members of Congress' schedule, have 
access to all their emails, see what they are saying about different 
bills, what they want to do, that is some valuable stuff. And yet, in 
some years, we were told yesterday, that Imran Awan was servicing 
Capitol Hill computers from Pakistan.
  Now, I don't know how secure the Pakistani internet systems are, but 
it is kind of hard to believe that the American interests would be as 
protected in Pakistan and the Capitol congressional computer system 
would be protected as it is going through the Pakistani internet to be 
serviced.
  We also heard that Imran Awan, from some of the emails that WikiLeaks 
put out--we don't know if he worked for the Democratic National 
Committee when they were hacked, but we know there were emails where 
someone was saying: We need to get into the chairwoman's laptop. We 
need her password.
  Oh, well, Imran Awan has all of her passwords, so check with him.
  So we don't know the extent that he could have compromised things, 
with all the indebtedness he had and the car dealership that he never 
reported. Anybody that makes over $120,000 from Capitol Hill has to 
report any outside income. He never reported those things.
  In fact, it appears to be a crime when he failed to even report that 
he had his wife on the payroll making money on Capitol Hill in those 
financial disclosures he filed.
  We also know that he had some history of violence complaints. His 
step-mother complained of being kidnapped by him and forced to sign 
documents that would turn over money and property that Imran's father 
supposedly had coming.
  We know that he has now been indicted simply on a bank fraud charge 
for lying in order to get a bank loan, the money from which was sent 
overseas.

[[Page 15826]]

  We also learned that they were sending technological equipment over 
to Pakistan. They were fraudulently filing vouchers showing that $800 
iPads only cost under $500 so they wouldn't have to be listed on 
inventory. That obviously makes things more easy to steal.
  There were reports, in fact, by the person who rented his house when 
he and his wife appeared to flee--he was trying to flee when he was 
stopped at the airport. There were hard drives, all kinds of things.
  We know that he and possibly some of those working--maybe they didn't 
work. We don't know. But $6 million to $7 million was paid to him and 
his family and his cohorts during the time they were working here, and 
yet he was downloading from Members of Congress' clouds or from their 
own servers all of their information into a spot where people who 
weren't authorized could access those Members of Congress' accounts.
  This has got to be investigated more thoroughly than it has been.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________